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Interview Transcript

Kevin: November 20th, 2009. The team assembles to discuss Patrick’s Blog World and New Media Expo panel on the dark side of online communities. This is the SitePoint Podcast #37: Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly.

Kevin: And welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. It’s a bit of a special one this week. Normally, in between our new shows we have interviews and one-on-one type things but we’ve got all the troops with us, the usual suspects, we’ve got Brad Williams, Patrick O’Keefe, and Stephan Segraves, and we’ve come together today to talk about—Patrick, you chaired a panel at the Blog World and New Media Expo a few weeks back called Social Media: The Bad and the Ugly and you had a great suggestion that we should go through it here because it’s very relevant to our audience.

Patrick: Right, sounds great. That’s a great setup! Basically, the premise of the panel is to discuss trends in social media that concerned us as far as the growth of the medium as a whole – and “us” being myself and Amber Nusland who is Director of Community at Radian6, Wayne Sutton who is a partner of OurHashtag in blog, SocialWayne.com and also Robert Scoble who is the Managing Director of Building43.com at RackSpace – and basically, trends in social media that we feel are maybe a detriment to the growth of the medium as a whole.

Kevin: Yeah. So I suppose you said there were six things that you covered in the panel?

Patrick: Six specific trends, yes.

Kevin: Alright. Well, maybe we should just dive right in with number one.

Patrick: Okay, and the first one we talked about was the unforgiving nature of the loud minority. So basically, what this means is it seems like there’s always a group of people online who are waiting for someone else to make a mistake and it’s almost like you can never make a mistake anymore because it’s going to be saved online, archived forever, talked about, trending topic, shared with everyone. It’s like an expectation to be perfect. Otherwise, it’s boycott or petition or fail and that’s dangerous to me because, well, I look at it as a user. That was the perspective of the panel. So as a user, why don’t you want to do this? For me, I think you want your words to have meaning. Boycotts and petitions these days are really so cheap. I mean, it’s as cheap as table salt. There are boycotts and petitions at any second on Twitter and everything is a fail – but not all of those things are meaningless, and you want to be someone who, when they boycott something or when there’s a petition, you want people to view it as being truly meaningful. But if everything is a fail, like I said, then your words are going to be discounted and you’ll become the boy who cried, “Fail”.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely. There’s that old saying, “Oh, oh, someone is wrong on the internet.”

Patrick: It never happens. So I guess the answer to the question is how can you be better than that? How can you not allow yourself to fall into that trap?

Kevin: Well, sometimes, we can definitely talk about trying to avoid making mistakes but as often as not, I think it’s as much about how you deal with the mistake you’ve made after the fact. If you own up to it and if you take ownership of your mistake and you go out of your way to do the right thing by the people who’ve been, in most cases, simply inconvenienced by the mistake you’ve made, often, you end up better than when you started if the exercise had gone perfectly.

Patrick: None of us here have ever made mistake. So this is all simply a scientific discussion, right?

Kevin: I know. It’s all talking hypothetically.

Patrick: Yeah, totally hypothetical.

Kevin: I know definitely SitePoint has made one or two mistakes. It’s inevitable as a publisher that a typo will slip through or the shopping cart setup will be not quite right when we launch a new book and we’ve had cases of people being unable to open the PDF files that they have paid for. Things like that happen every now and then and we find that if we’re diligent in owning up to it and apologizing and doing a little extra something to make it up to our customers, they become our biggest advocates.

Patrick: And just on the other side of that just as a user, so how do you not become that person who’s waiting for someone else to fail? I think it starts with giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming good faith and treating people as you’d want to be treated. That says we all – but we don’t – but we all make mistakes. So everyone makes mistakes. So how do you want to be treated when you make one? I mean, do you want …

Kevin: Right, people in glass houses and all that.

Stephan: Sink ships.

Brad: I almost like it is human nature at this point but to kind of want people to fail, just like in entertainment in general, I mean, look at the whole bubble boy story. Everybody was fascinated by it and as soon as the first word hoax came out, they were wanting to burn them at the stake – whether they knew it was a hoax or not. So it’s almost like people are more fascinated by watching someone fail than they are by watching someone succeed.

Kevin: That’s definitely true. I have a double life. In my spare time I do a lot of Improv comedy and Improv is all about failure. People don’t come along to see you make up on the spot a seamless, perfect piece of theatre. They come to see those glitches when you’re sweating because you can’t think of the right words. That’s what people come along to see Improv comedy for. They want to see you take the risks and every once in a while slip off the balance beam and do terrible damage to yourself. So yeah, there is this, I don’t know, it’s like the traffic slowing down as a road accident happens to rubber neck. There is this culture on the internet – that we’re all watching for the people making asses out of themselves.

Patrick: And we try to take this from a company perspective, right? That’s a scary thing. I mean, as a company getting into the Internet or making some strides in social media – that you can’t make a mistake or someone’s going to pounce on you. That’s why I think it’s a bad thing and I think the perception is that there are a lot of people out there waiting to fail but personally, I think those people are just more vocal than others. I mean I think most people are well meaning people that are not looking to triumph your failures, so to speak. I think we can probably move on at the second point, which is related, which is the mob mentality. So where does this differ? This is more about the spreading and I guess dissemination of information. So a mob mentality, a mob in this light is basically a group of people who is just passing something along for the sake of passing it along, people that are piling on when they don’t really know the full story or taking the time to understand the full story. You could apply this at Twitter with re-tweets, when you’re just like re-tweeting something without looking at it, and then that thing becomes trending and maybe it’s a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing, maybe it’s true or untrue. You can apply to a lot of other different things as well but what can happen is, and this is a bad thing for, again, social media and the Internet because it’s sort of has its reputation of being unreliable with some things and there’s this phrase that I don’t like, ‘the blogs’. When you hear it in mainstream media, you hear people say, “Oh, the blogs are talking.” There’s really no such thing but there’s just this perception of this nasty mob that’ll just pass along false information.

Stephan: Okay, I’ll be the first to admit to this – when this Northwest thing …

Patrick: Really?

Stephan: Yeah, I’ve done it once. I’ve done it once, once. I’ll give you an example. When this Northwest Airlines thing happened with the pilots that everybody thought went to sleep, there was a tweet out there that these guys were actually twittering on the flight and that’s why they were distracted and they had this whole conversation. Well, then it just seemed like great cannon fodder to re-tweet it and come to find out that it’s fake. I did my best to go back and say this was fake, don’t read this, this is a joke so, but I fell into the trap. I saw something out there that was really interesting. I read it. It actually looked real and re-tweeted it, and it was fake.

Patrick: So the question I think is what did you learn from that as far as next time?

Stephan: Wait a little while and see if it gets…

Brad: Don’t trust what Stephan tweets.

Stephan: Yeah, don’t trust me.

Patrick: That’s not what I learned.

Brad: I actually saw you tweet that. I scrolled down to the very—like they have a bunch of tweets from the pilots and one of the very last one said, “Oops, missed the airport, I guess we’ll turn around,” or something – and as soon as I read that I was like this is fake.

Stephan: Yeah, it just didn’t click with me. It just didn’t click. Yeah, yeah, I’m an idiot, I know.

Kevin: But it’s true. Sometimes the fake news is so much more tantalizing and interesting than the correction that comes after the fact and because of the mob mentality, as you put it, Patrick, the fake news gets more exposure and so many people read it and pass it along and many of those people never get to see the correction, the correct information.

Stephan: What I thought was interesting people actually re-tweeted when I said this was fake.

Kevin: Oh, that’s good.

Stephan: That was good. I was glad to see that because I felt stupid for doing it but it was good to know that other people were like, “Oh, he wasn’t just jerking us around.”

Kevin: There’s a great blog I follow called Bad Astronomy by Phil Plait and every August, it seems like a hoax email makes the rounds about how Mars for the next week or so is going to be at its largest in the sky for a decade – and I’m quoting from the email here – “It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide at a modest,” blah, blah, blah. It goes on to say Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Now, anyone who knows anything about astronomy knows that that is completely impossible and that Mars will – to the naked eye – never be more than a particularly bright star, and yet every single year he has to debunk this email. It’s gotten to the point where he goes, “Yep, it’s August again, you can read my last three annual posts about this to find out why it’s a bunch of bunk.” But what used to be the unreliable nature of news arriving passed along as a chain letter in your email, that problem has spread to social media in all of its forms and will we ever reach the point where we can trust news that is spread by the mob?

Patrick: I don’t know the answer to that but I think another question – I’ll answer the question with a question – so how can we, as individuals, take responsibility and not be a part of it and then maybe one day from that, there’ll be more trustworthiness available in passing news along through this medium. And I think the way that you’ll do that is it’s going to – on us as individuals – not to trust everyone in the world implicitly and do your own research when something seems odd or maybe oddly sensational and of course, people will pass along the juiciest stories. That’s been happening since the beginning of time – cavemen passed on the juiciest stories but us as individuals…

Stephan: Fire!

Patrick: Exactly. That’s a vicious rumor. So I think we all have to decide how we want to be taken and that responsibility will then dictate our voice in what we pass on.

Brad: I think another service out there that’s kind of fueled this mob mentality is social news sites like Digg and Reddit and these are very popular sites, and literally, people are up-voting articles based on one sentence or maybe two sentences of the title and they’re not actually not reading the articles but they’re making their decisions based on that. So something may hit the front page at Digg that’s completely false but most people that see it aren’t going to read the full article and they’ll probably automatically assume it’s true or it’s accurate because it’s made the front page and a lot of times that’s not the case.

Kevin: So Patrick is right. We do need to think about how we can do better. The thing about social media is that it makes us all responsible for the news that we choose to pass along and before you hit that re-tweet button, maybe you owe it to all of the people who follow you to do a quick Google and make sure that this absolutely spectacular news that just arrived in your Twitter stream is actually something that is legit and worth passing along.

Patrick: That sounds like a good closing point for that section.

Kevin: Then what’s number 3, Patrick?

Patrick: So the third one is finally something a little bit different – unreasonable time expectations. There’s a couple of immediate examples of this. One would be something like, “Why haven’t you replied to the friend request that I sent you seven minutes ago?” I think we maybe all had those people who email us or maybe it’s not a friend request, maybe it’s a Twitter DM or maybe it’s a voicemail or an email or a forum post where someone says, “It’s been 10 minutes, where are you?” And I think that’s a side effect of social media because I know a lot of us are viewed as being always online or always connected from your cell phone, from computer, from a laptop. You’re always in front of a screen and people then place an expectation upon your time and expect you to respond within what, to you, maybe an unfair amount of time.

During the panel, I actually passed this question over to Robert Scoble because he’s a great example of that because he is someone who is connected all the time and he is someone who has a family, has a job, has other things to do, but he’s always viewed as this always connected person. I’ve seen him say things before in public about how this person wanted his time here or his time here, and it’s just not possible to accommodate every one when you have so many people latching onto you for a moment of your time or sending you a product to review or whatever it may be.

Those time expectations again apply to like a company trying to even the space and if they can’t respond in 10 minutes, then they’ll have someone who liked them now be angry at them, and that scares people away from the space.

Kevin: Something that I’ve had experience with on this and it’s something we’ve had to deal with in the SitePoint Support Team – is that your response time isn’t always consistent either. If you send something at 6 p.m. Australian time, everyone at SitePoint has gone home and you’re going to be first on the list when we get to the office in the morning, but nevertheless, that means you’re going to be waiting 8 or 9 hours for response. And then someone who sends an email maybe 4:30 p.m. Australia time – our support staff by that point have cleared the day’s backlog and they may be replying to stuff in real time.

Depending on when you send it, you get a very different support experience and if you get an immediate response one day, you may come to expect that the following day when you send something after we’ve all gone home. I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts on how that expectation can be managed.

Patrick: Well, I’ll say that I think one thing that comes to mind is – I guess – communicating expectations. One way you could do that, I guess, is through response email to their email, it’s probably some sort of ticket system and communicate, “We respond to tickets during this time for our reply time to be between x and x hours, and we will respond as soon as possible.” I think with a community support perspective or a support ticket perspective like a host support for example or in SitePoint’s case, the support of the books and products and whatever, it’s very feasible to post operating hours on your site or to send that because it is a business and it is seen that way. I don’t now if that’s something that businesses enjoy over individuals, but it’s interesting to consider.

Brad: In my own experience, sometimes I’ll work on client work on the weekend or maybe in the evenings just to kind of catch up and get ahead. Then you’re right, you do send out some emails maybe late at night or on the weekends and a lot of times, once you do that once then they just assume, oh, he’s working all weekend, so I can call him and send him emails and this and that. Always – I’m very upfront about it as well. I’ll say, “Look, I may email you on a Saturday night because I’m working on something. That doesn’t mean next Saturday night I’m going to be working and you can just pick up the phone and call me.” I’m always pretty upfront about that too, and I think most people understand as long as you tell them.

Kevin: Getting away from support email for a second and getting back to these social networks, more and more of us are carrying around phones that let us access things like Facebook on the go, and that creates an even more real time expectation – “Hey, my poke to you on Facebook – you could have picked out your phone out of your pocket at any time and seen it and poked me back, why didn’t you?” Maybe it’s as simple as your batteries died that day and you just were offline when normally people do expect you to be checking your phone every 5 minutes for a Facebook message.

Patrick: Right. It’s something that I think people need to work on to have that expectation on other people. So, with you, just be reasonable, be fair with people if they can’t get back to you within a specific amount of time.

I know there was another example that Wayne talked about and I was actually with him at the time, so it was funny. We were in Orlando at another conference and it was like 10 p.m. at night. We’re kind of getting into a social event for the conference and he says someone actually left a message on his Facebook wall about some information that they wanted him to send them that he had already taken care of – he thought. It was a request for information posted actually on his Facebook wall, like “Why haven’t you done this, why haven’t you done this yet, I’m waiting on you.”

So it’s in front of everyone where this person could just as easily send their message through Facebook or, if you know Wayne, you know he’s available everywhere; you can Google his name and you get his phone number and all this kind of information. So to actually take it and post it publicly at 10 p.m. at night – publicly at all really is the issue, but not having the proper respect for boundaries of time – it’s always a dangerous thing.

Kevin: Yeah, and this kind of comes back to the first point of how you choose to point out when people – whether you’re right or not, when you feel like someone has failed you online, whether they’ve made a mistake or whether they’ve not gotten back to you in a timely fashion. If you choose to point that out in a public forum, that’s a strong thing you’re doing and you really need to think that through. Whereas in many cases, a private message can do just as well and you need not draw attention to the temporary failings of the people that you are dealing with online.

What’s number four?

Patrick: So the fourth point is self-entitlement and this is against many forums. “Only the A-listeners get attention” is the popular one online, whatever it be the Twitter A list or A-list bloggers or people on Techmeme, or in the technology field anyway. Whatever it is, there’s a sense of entitlement to Twitter followers, to RSS subscribers. This is related to our appeal of course and web developers and technology people; and a good example is this celebrity getting on Twitter and having a lot of followers all of the sudden.

I’ve heard people tweet and I’m sure probably all of us have heard people tweet “This person just got on Twitter, they got all these followers and they don’t deserve those followers, gosh dang it! I’ve been here since day 1 and I have 1,000 followers.”

It’s just this entitlement online where it seems like it’s almost a disease with some people where if someone has more than them, then they don’t deserve it. I don’t know how you’re experience has been with that?

Kevin: What does it mean to deserve followers?

Patrick: Right. I mean, that’s the question, what does it mean to deserve followers, subscribers, whatever it is because to me, there’s not really such a thing as that, and if we talk about celebrities for example – Oprah got on Twitter, that caused kind of a stir. She’s got a lot of Twitter followers all of a sudden, yet she rarely tweets or at least she did at the start, I haven’t checked her account now – but the thing about Oprah and the thing I think people don’t understand or they forget about Twitter and about any of these services is that your work you do everywhere gets you more following, everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Twitter or you’re on some other site. If you are creating media and you’re getting in front of people and you’re getting exposure, that’s obviously going to help you everywhere – and that includes your Twitter followers.

We could say like I released a book – Kevin released a book – that wasn’t about Twitter or anything, but, because we put out a book, people bought it, they searched for our names so they went into our sites and they found us on Twitter and they followed us. The book is not about Twitter, but the book helps us gain a larger audience and that translates into more Twitter followers if you want to look at that metric or more web traffic, or whatever it may be. I go speak at a conference – I’m not doing that for Twitter followers – but yet everyone in the room might follow me on Twitter.

I think the key is that you have your work everywhere and you could use Oprah as a great example as probably one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time especially on television in the entertainment field. She has this huge audience and she brought that to Twitter or people who are already on Twitter know her and followed her – so just everything that you’re doing is contributing to your overall success.

Stephan: See, I have 300 followers on Twitter.

Patrick: You deserve every single one, I tell you!

Stephan: I worked really hard for those 300, but it doesn’t bother me. I have less than all of you guys, and it doesn’t bother. Who cares, right? I mean… For people who follow me, I try to make good tweets. Sometimes, I fail – Balloon Boy stuff.

Patrick: It can only be you.

Stephan: Exactly, and I think people who see me set low expectations themselves when it comes to followers.

Patrick: I mean, followers – that’s just one example. And maybe it’s not the best example, but it is one that gets put out there a lot because people are always talking about the number of followers.

Kevin: So, when you are judging someone’s worthiness for the followers they receive on Twitter, it isn’t just about Twitter. The biggest Twitter star – if all they do is Twitter – they’re only going to reach a certain amount of people whereas the Oprah and the other celebrities of the world who have made their bones in other media, of course they’re going to come on and capture a lot of eyeballs.

Stephan: You see, that’s the thing too. I don’t contribute to WordPress. I’m not a WordPress developer, Brad.

Brad: Loser.

Stephan: I don’t write a book, I don’t have a network of sites, Patrick, and I don’t work for SitePoint. I don’t have the means out there for me to have a bunch of Twitter followers right now. In that case, even blog readers. I don’t even know what my numbers are, but my numbers aren’t that high and I don’t have a huge expectation of getting a lot of readers. I’m just writing. I guess, I’m really confused by this one because I don’t really understand people’s obsession with it.

Kevin: I think there’s a certain enviable aspect to having a small, focused number of followers. I mean, I don’t have – by Twitter rockstar standards, I think all of us here are pretty C- if not D-list, to be honest.

Patrick: Well I never!

Kevin: And I don’t mind that at all. I like that the people who are following me, most of them have met me personally and those who haven’t are genuinely interested in the stuff that I write about, that I speak about, that I find interesting day to day. I never, as I’m writing a tweet, need to check myself and think, is this interesting enough to my follower base or is it only going to be interesting to 25 percent and I’m going to annoy the other 75 percent, so I better just keep my mouth shut? It’s nice not to have to check yourself.

Patrick: I kind of had this conversation with someone I know who’s in the music industry because I caught them using something that generates followers – and the power of your following is in what they will do and what they will share. So, if you have 10,000 followers but they don’t read what you write, that doesn’t really mean a whole lot. If you have a thousand followers and they read every word, that’s very powerful.

I think that’s the difference and I don’t know what that translates to or how you measure it in numbers. We can’t lie, right, and numbers are important and numbers are what you get judged on. When you sell ads, you get judged on traffic, you get judged on click-throughs and that’s kind of the balancing bar is the actual traffic that converts. But, numbers are still important and you need to work for those numbers. You are entitled to one reader, one sale, one follower, one anything – you’re entitled to nothing. You have to work for #1 and then you work for #2, so you shouldn’t fall into the trap of self-entitlement.

Kevin: Number five?

Patrick: Point number five is trying to force everyone to use a tool or community the very same way. So we’ve all seen this, I would assume, on various platforms whether it be Facebook, social networking, Twitter, microblogging, forums, whatever – someone who is basically saying we use it this manner and you should use it in this manner too.

Kevin: The World Series has highlighted this for a lot of people on Twitter over the past week. I myself am not really a baseball fan and yet so many of the people in the technology world that I follow on Twitter seem to be huge baseball fans because that’s all they have tweeted about for the past week. Understandably, there has been a bit of a backlash – people going, “Man, I wish I could just filter out the baseball tweets and there have been calls for people to get a new Twitter account if they want to Twitter about baseball and keep their normal Twitter feed about technology the way it always is. Obviously, this prompts a lot more negative responses than constructive ones – people saying, “Well, if you’re not interested in my baseball tweets, there is a big Un-follow button right over there – go ahead and click it.

You don’t want to click it. You want to follow the person’s stream and so – but yeah, you need to accept the fact that you’re not going to be able to dictate the way people publish to these networks just to suit you. The best you can do is to look for a better tool for yourself.

Patrick: I think at our core – and I don’t know if you guys agree or disagree with this but – at our core we want people that use them differently I think – or a lot of us do – because here’s the thing. We didn’t see all the uses for Twitter when it first came out. We don’t see all the uses for any tool when it first comes out, and if we’re all doing the same thing then none of these tools ever grow. They never become any better. It always takes someone to use it differently. The first person to use a tag, let’s say; the first person to use Twitter to track their location. You always have to be the first person to do something to determine whether or not it’s good or not. So I think that instead of complaining about people doing it differently – and you can let people experiment and to try new things without being there to judge them because even if it’s not a good idea. Again, if we never try anything new, the medium would never grow.

Kevin: And if you’re in the business of creating these social networking tools, it’s probably best to be open-minded about how your users are going to use it. If Twitter were quick to implement things like a re-tweet feature or as we’ve spoken about on this podcast before, taking URLs out of the character count for Twitter. If Twitter made quick decisions on those and changed the service to tighten the way people use it, it wouldn’t be the big success it is now because as you say, Patrick, the users wouldn’t be free to experiment and play with it and find interesting, unexpected ways to use it.

Patrick: When Twitter first came out no one ever – they didn’t see it as someone tweeting from jail saying, “Arrested” right? I mean, they didn’t really see it as that sort of thing and that’s just one of the great things about the service is it has evolved and it becomes what you want and I would never say, “You know what, there’s an Un-follow button. Hit it.” But I would say that that is the power of Twitter. You know, we all can follow whoever we want to follow and rather than complaining what someone else is doing, you can – it’s true, you can always un-follow.

Kevin: Social networking in general gives every user the power to vote with their eyeballs as the case may be for the types of publishing that they appreciate.

Patrick: Exactly, and you know there’s a bunch of people out there that don’t like automation in Twitter feeds and I can understand that. But I would say also, and this is something I’ve said many times to people is, “You and I know what RSS is. Guess what, most people don’t” and most people want to subscribe to their favorite publication in one way or another and a lot of the people like to do it on Twitter. I hate to break it to you but some people do follow their favorite blog or CNN, or whoever, because they want to see the new entries on Twitter. That’s just how they receive information. And guess what, it’s not really hurting you or me for publications that do that because we don’t have to follow them. So just let them breathe I guess is the point.

Kevin: Yeah, I’ve seen you can get traffic alerts on Twitter for your particular area – if the traffic authority offers updates in that particular form – and sometimes even volunteers will automate the scraping of the traffic authority’s web site in posting new updates to Twitter. I know when we had the big bushfires last year here in Australia the fire association opened up a Twitter account and were posting updates as to where the fire fronts where and where evacuations were being considered, and all that sort of stuff was coming through Twitter. It was really quite useful.

Patrick: So the sixth and the final trend that we highlighted was being a sock puppet and just to elaborate on that. Basically, it’s pretending not to be affiliated with something that you are in fact affiliated with. I have a really great example of this and that’s a poker tournament that was promoting itself on MyCommunities. And they came to my site and first they asked me if I wanted to work with them, I said no. So they came to my site anyway and posted an advertisement. I removed it. A little while later they posted again but this time they acted like they were an interested consumer and they asked, “I’m looking for a destination to go with my fiancée” and then a member on our site replied helpfully. I replied and said I didn’t have any thoughts but good luck. And then that person replied and said, “Oh, thanks for the replies but have you heard about this tournament?” So you know that’s a really good example of it and they had done a lot of other things as well but basically it’s posting promotional comments where they’re not welcome or more specifically where you’re hiding your affiliation with whatever it is that you’re promoting. So you’re acting just as a third party when really you’re not.

Kevin: So we can all agree this, from a user perspective, is undesirable.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: Having fake users out there shilling for products. But how do we avoid it? It seems like there will always be – as long as there will be social networks there will be companies interested in getting their message out there by any means. Does it pay off when people do this?

Kevin: Yeah, I mean the perspective of the panel is basically why you don’t want to do this, right. So why wouldn’t you want to do this? It’s clear I think why users don’t want it because it’s lying – which is a bad thing, but you know I think the problem is – and again, it’s funny because we mentioned Oprah. She had a quote about doing things in the light and not doing things in the light and how it will all come out in the end and I can’t remember the quote, but the point is that if you’re hiding something there’s a pretty good chance it’ll come out. It came out with this tournament, I exposed it and you know people will find out and when they do, they can’t trust you and that trust irreparable for a lot of companies. There are some times you can come back but I wouldn’t bet on your side, if you’re caught to be doing this sort of thing, that you can regain some of the public’s trust. So I would hope with most people they would know this is a bad thing but I think a lot of people would be surprised about how many people think it’s okay. How many businesspeople either don’t have a concept for it or the Internet or how it all works, or people who were just totally results driven and they don’t care because they think the Internet’s anonymous and they’ll never be found out. But I mean the reality is that people can be tied to organizations and to companies. Their IP addresses can be helpful. People can tie names, email addresses. The odds are that you’ll slip up rather than that you’ll be able to hold the façade up. So from the start you always want to disclose who you are and who you work for when posting comments that relate to your company because when you do so, you’re fostering trust.

Kevin: And because if you don’t and you do slip up, that’s going to do way more damage to your brand than whatever message you were trying to get out there would benefit you.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: Is there any way to do this – if you do it out in the open is it okay, necessarily? Is it beneficial? I’m thinking right now it’s November, for people interested in writing it’s – what do they call it? NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and the idea is that people who are interested in writing as a hobby will try and hunker down in November and write an entire novel during the month of November. Now I can imagine that – I’ve already seen a lot of ads and sales for software for creative writers, things like Scrivener for the Mac. They’re out there trying to push their products obviously during this month when people are going to be thinking, “Oh, I could really use a better software tool to help me get my novel written in November”. If these companies wanted to get it out there in these National Novel Writing Month forums where people are discussing their creative writing and saying things like, “Well you know there’s a great feature in Scrivener that let’s you lay out a timeline to plan your writing.” Is that okay? Is that going to work for you if you put, “By the way I work for Scrivener” at the bottom?

Patrick: You know it’s… I did it though from my background is forums so that’s a good example. Thank you, Kevin, for the softball.

But no, I don’t think it will work because there’s more to it than that and I think it varies by the medium. If you go on Twitter and you sign and that you identify who you are. Also community discussions lead to Twitter, if that wasn’t already clear. And so if you go out on there and you disclose who you are in your little description, your little bio, and you discriminately contact people that you think might be interested in your services, that’ll be one thing, but forums are a whole different beast. They’re really a structured community and most of them have guidelines or moderation of some sort. Most of the active ones, most of the ones that you would care to reach do have some sort of moderation. Before you enter any community, whether it be Twitter – which is a community to some, not to others – or forums or any other site, you need to check the ground rules and observe before you jump in so you see how other people are using the service. You see what the guidelines say if they mention that you can’t mention your company or if there’s even any doubt in your mind, you should never jump in and just start posting. You should always ask the staff and make sure it’s okay just because the damage that can be done – like you said – far outweighs the potential benefit if in fact they don’t like what you’re doing or what you’re doing is not allowed. So I think with forums and structured communities like that in particular, you definitely need to check the guidelines, check the staff and always err in the side of caution.

Kevin: Alright. Those are the six points you covered in your panel at Blog World and New Media Expo. So how was it received?

Patrick: It was received really well. It was interesting to hear all the feedback in person, on Twitter. Very positive stuff from a lot of different people. There was a lot of people that were there that I know and know that they’re very savvy, smart, and that the panel was – not necessarily their area but they still showed up to support and be a part of it like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, like Mari Smith who knows a lot about Facebook, and afterward it was very well received. So it was really good. I think that the overwhelming – how we closed the panel was why do people care? Why should you care if social media grows because that was the theme of the panel and I think the thing is the growth of social media is good for everyone who’s in it legitimately – and everyone who wants to benefit from it in some way – professionally, personally, business-wise. If it grows and you’re doing it right then we all win, and if you are part of the problem then you know it’ll be reflected on you very badly and your company and so on, and you won’t benefit. But with proper consideration you can benefit from the space greatly.

Kevin: So think twice before you join the loud minority when someone makes a mistake. The mob, if you’re going to be a member of the mob you should try and be a thoughtful one. Before you pass things along you check them out. Be reasonable about your expectations about people’s time. Try not to think less of people who get many followers on Twitter because often they’ve earned it in some other medium. Be flexible about how people choose to use these tools because that’s what enables them to evolve in exciting ways. And finally if you’re trying to get a commercial message out there, do it openly and be sensitive to how people are going to take it in any given forum or environment. That was a great talk, guys. And yeah, I think that the more people can take those pieces of advice to heart, the better a future that we can see in social networks. Guys, let’s go around the table.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from WebDevStudios and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the of the iFroggy network ifroggy.com and you can find me on Twitter @iFroggy.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and my blog is badice.com.

Kevin: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @ssegraves. I though we’d just throw you a few extra followers there Stephan.

Stephan: And add them to a list too.

Kevin: You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom and you can follow me on Twitter @sentience. You can visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast for the latest episode and email us at podcast@sitepoint.com.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

The SitePoint Podcast’s One Year Anniversary!

• SitePoint Podcast #1: The Economy (SitePoint)

Farewell Dan Schulz

• Dan Schulz RIP – We Will Miss You (SitePoint)

Five Years of Firefox

• Happy 5th Birthday Firefox! (SitePoint)
• Five Years of Firefox (Spread Firefox)
• The First-to-Market Myth (37signals)
• SitePoint Podcast #18: Internet Explorer 8 … Percent? (SitePoint)
• What is a Browser? Google Explains (SitePoint)

Google Closure Tools

• Google Releases its JavaScript Closure Tools (SitePoint)
• Introducing Closure Tools (Google)
• Your JavaScript Library (Dmitry Baranovskiy)
• Google Closure: How Not to Write JavaScript (SitePoint)

Dealing with Trolls

• How to Deal with Trolls on Your Blog (SitePoint)
• Patrick’s comment on “You decide: how do you deal with that vicious commenter on your site?” (The Guardian)
• Wisdom of Community: Four Kinds of Crazy (Derek Powazek)

WebKit Enhances Safari’s Developer Tools

• Web Inspector Updates (Surfin’ Safari)

Installing PHP on Windows with Web PI

• Installing PHP on Windows Just Got Easier (SitePoint)
• Web Platform Installer (Microsoft)

Host Spotlights:

• Brad: WordCamp New York
• Patrick: CollegeHumor Live: NYC – Kumail Nanjiani
• Kevin: Video: CSS Frameworks – Make the Right Choice

Show Transcript

Kevin: November 13th, 2009. Firefox turns five, Google releases some questionable JavaScript code, and Microsoft courts open-source developers. This is the SitePoint Podcast #36: Don’t Feed the Trolls.

Kevin: And it’s the SitePoint podcast again. Welcome back. Guys, can you believe it has been a year since we’ve started doing this?

Brad: Time flies and we’re having fun.

Kevin: Yeah.

Patrick: Kind of.

Kevin: Thirty-six is a weird number to celebrate our one year anniversary on but we only started going weekly about halfway through the past year…

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: …but yeah, just a year ago we sat down to record the first episode.

Patrick: Thirty-six is a big number, still though.

Kevin: Listener, I am going to suggest that you go back and listen to that very first episode now and tell us how much we’ve improved.

Brad: I hope we have.

Kevin: Hopefully we’ve improved, yeah.

Patrick: You can only get to a certain level and then you stop improving, right?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, it seems fair to say we’ve plateaued by this point. I hate to start off on a sad note but I want to pay tribute and in fact dedicate this episode to a long time member of the SitePoint Forums community, Dan Schulz who sadly passed away in the past week. He joined the SitePoint community in 2006 and in that short time, so just over three years, he posted 15,648 times—and you can think of it, he was just some kind of forum addict and just posted a lot, but he was one of, if not, the most valuable member of the SitePoint community. He was Member of the Year in 2007, he became an advisor within the design team, I think it’s fair to say anyone who spent any time in the SitePoint Forums would have communicated with Dan on some level, and it wasn’t just the SitePoint Forums that he was active in. He was active on other web developer and design forums and also a big member of the WordPress community, right, Brad?

Brad: Yeah. I actually met Dan earlier in the year at WordCamp Chicago. It was the first time meeting him in person. We actually sat together and talked quite a bit throughout the day. He was just very knowledgeable guy and extremely helpful and just really enjoyed helping other people along, not just in web development, but in WordPress and other areas and just overall. He really liked to kind of share his knowledge and he had a lot of it. And I think you’re right, just about anyone who’s been on SitePoint the last few years at some point or another probably come across come across a post of Dan’s that have helped them or he’s helped them directly. So it’s definitely a huge loss for the community and it was kind of a shock to all of us, so we’re definitely keeping his family and friends in our thoughts.

Kevin: I understand a lot of listeners to this podcast may not be active members of the SitePoint Forums and therefore this may not mean a whole lot to you, but yeah, in the SitePoint forums there’s a thread of people sending their condolences and sharing their thoughts about Dan. There’s 117 posts on that thread already and counting, so that’s just some measure of how much his contribution to the community was valued and I know everyone of us here at SitePoint headquarters will miss him a lot.

So on that sad note, let’s move on to something a little more upbeat and that’s the 5th anniversary of Firefox. Firefox is celebrating its 5th birthday. I almost said selling there. Brad?

Brad: Yeah, Firefox 1.0 is actually released November 9th, 2004, so just a few days ago, and it has marked its 5th birthday. And I actually went back and looked to some stats—because I wasn’t on the Firefox train when version 1.0 came out. I think I stumbled across it around version 2. So I was curious to see how the browsers stats compared at the time it was released. So in 2004, I found browser usage stats for the 4th quarter, and IE actually owned 90.98% of the market at the time when Firefox 1.0 was released, which is pretty astonishing when you think about it that they came in to a market knowing that their major competitor is Microsoft and they own 90% of the market and they still decided to do it and look how successful it’s been five years later. So it’s truly a great story and really amazing.

Kevin: It’s pretty daunting. I mean, at the time, I remember we discussed the fact that Firefox, upon its release, it was actually a pretty, stable mature browser. I’d been using it for a while under its earlier names, Phoenix and Firebird, which is the names that it had during its beta phase and eventually, they had to change the name for legal reasons. I had been using it for a while by the time Firefox 1.0 came out and I remember discussing that this deserves to be a browser on regular users’ desktops. But at that time we were resigned to the fact that Internet Explorer would always be the browser of the masses. I wasn’t contributing to the Firefox team and maybe those people who were had a grander vision but for myself, I don’t think I ever envisioned a world where Firefox would be on a regular user’s computer. Let alone over 30% of the market now I think it is. It’s amazing.

Brad: Even when you talk to people that aren’t developers or designers—most people still heard of Firefox; even if they don’t use it, they understand that it’s another browser and it’s possibly an alternative to Internet Explorer. So it’s really gotten out there spread virally and through their marketing campaigns and things like that, but you’re right, it’s amazing how much it’s grown just in a few short years.

Kevin: The Spread Firefox site—this is this grassroots evangelism group who tries to spread the word about Firefox—and I think we can thank them at least in part for the popularity of this browser today. They’ve put a special page called ‘Five Years of Firefox’ where they have quite an inspiring video about Firefox, the vision behind it, and where they hope it will go. I’m just going to play that now.

“By 2004, the internet had become a part of everyday life. It was a place for connecting, learning, sharing, and collaborating. But something wasn’t right. Web users wanted to explore without being spied on, preyed on, or ripped off, but viruses, spyware, pop-ups and adware were everywhere. The only thing personalized about the experience was the information being gathered about users without their knowledge. It was time to take back the Web so it can serve its original purpose—enriching the lives of individuals. From this simple, powerful desire came Firefox, specifically built to make the web better more of an open system where the design of the software could be shared, customized, and improved upon by anyone, anywhere, anytime. As word and code spread, Firefox inspired a community that sees the web as a living thing that must be nurtured, grow, and thrive. People worldwide are embracing this ecology of ideas and supporting a system that’s all about their needs and interests, and in keeping the internet a vibrant, exciting place. Designed by everyone, it’s for everyone. Over 1 billion downloads later; it shows no signs of slowing down. With Firefox, life online can reflect who users really are—from how they see it, connect with it, share it, to how they grow with it. Firefox is here to help them find their own way, moving at the speed of their imagination. We’ve come so far in just five years. Imagine what we can do together in the next five. Let’s keep the internet healthy, open and the creative fires burning bright. Light the world, with Firefox.”

Well, you guys, I’m a little choked up after that, I have to say.

Patrick: You would be. We’ve been using Firefox before anybody knew about it, ever!

Kevin: [laughter]

Patrick: Since when it was Safari or Firebird or Mustang or something… no, I’m just kidding. But they’ve come a long way and it’s interesting to chart the numbers and they definitely made headway into the market and you talk about daunting numbers. I think it’s the same thing with online communities in some way because there are these communities that are sort of dominant in their fields and there’s always people who say, “Well, I have this idea too. I’d like to do it, but they’re just so big, I can’t do anything.” The thing is the biggest thing in life is starting. There’s always room for someone else to come in and do something better or differently or better for someone, and I think Firefox is maybe a good example of that as well.

Kevin: Oh, absolutely. I think 37signals, I think, had a blog post just in his past week. I’ll look it up and try to find it for the show notes but it was a blog post about how you don’t have to be the— “The First-to-Market Myth” I think they call it. That you think you have to be the first one in the space to be the successful one. It’s not true. In fact, if you come second, you often have the benefit of your competitor’s hindsight.

Brad: Yep, definitely.

Kevin: So, yeah.

Brad: And if that was case, there’d be no Google. The Yahoo! had the search market dominated and nobody really want to touch them at the time and Google popped up—and look at them now.

Kevin: I’m just looking for that blog post that we covered on the SitePoint Podcast before about where Google did the man-on-the-street interviews in Times Square and asked people if they knew what a browser was, and I think the one person who said they were using Firefox said they were using it because their friend came over and installed it and said, “Now, you’re using Firefox.”

Patrick: So it’s dictatorship, in other words.

Kevin: Yeah. It looks like Google followed that video up with another video. It’s kind of a cartoon called ‘What is a Browser?’ So they’re doing their part to try and explain. They said that when they did the man-on-the-street interviews, only 8% of people knew what a browser was at that time. So they’ve got a nice little video called ‘What is a Browser?’ that’s worth checking out and I’ll mention that as well. But I guess it goes to show that you don’t need to know what a browser is in order to switch to Firefox, because if Firefox is up to 30% but only 8% know what a browser is, why are all those people switching to Firefox?

Patrick: Firefox is a team of elite hackers that hack into your house at night and they install the browser on your computer and switch it around and the thing is you don’t know what a browser is so you never know the difference. So that’s how it happened.

Kevin: Right and they assign the blue E icon to the Firefox program just to avoid confusion.

So Firefox turns 5. Congratulations Mozilla team and for the volunteers and the Mozilla staff behind Spread Firefox who put that video together. Yeah, great work guys and gals.

Our next story is Google open sourcing its set of JavaScript tools under the name Closure. The Google Code Blog has a post in the past week called ‘Introducing Closure Tools’ and it talks about the fact that they’ve written so much JavaScript code for products like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps that they’ve decided to open source a bunch of this stuff and make it available for the rest of the web developers out there, you and I, to use the same JavaScript tools that they do. They’ve released the Closure Compiler, which will shrink down your JavaScript code so that it is as small as possible and will load quicker; they released the Closure Library, which is a set of reusable software components that use Google’s code instead of having to reinvent the wheel yourself for common tasks; and Closure Templates, which I still can’t quite figure out what it is. Just as when you’re building a reusable page template in PHP, the page that will display all the articles on your site, well, Closure Templates is a way of doing that with JavaScript. It’s a templating language that is meant to be parsed by JavaScript on the client side or Java on the server side. So using the same template language, you can write templates that will be built into web pages on both sides of that client-server divide. I think you’d have to be doing something pretty special to find a use for Closure Templates, but if you’re building the next Gmail competitor, there you have it—Google has saved you a bit of work.

Guys, have you taken a look at this at all? Brad, I know you’re the developer mind here besides myself.

Brad: No, I skimmed through it. I don’t do a lot of advanced JavaScripts. My JavaScript, typically, if I have a JavaScript what I do is put drop a cursor into a form field or something like that when you load a page, very basic stuff. I did go through it. Hats off to Google for releasing some open source, I love open source, so the more open source the better in my opinion. And I’m sure some people are going to get some good use out of it but since I’m not really an advanced JavaScript developer, it’s hard for me to pinpoint how great it’s going to actually be.

Kevin: Well, I was just in the past week at the Edge of the Web Conference in Perth where Dmitry Baranovskiy was speaking. And Dmitry, for those who don’t know the name, is the guy behind the Raphaël JavaScript Library for doing graphics, for doing SVG-style vector graphics across all browsers, and it’s a really nice library. And needless to say, Dmitry has spent a lot of time writing JavaScript code making sure that it works well across browsers and, importantly, optimizing it for performance and small size of code because the most important thing his library does is bring vector graphics to Internet Explorer, which doesn’t support these open standards for vector graphics. And Internet Explorer is well-known as being one of the slowest JavaScript or the slowest JavaScript engine out there right now. So the most important thing this library does is try to get decent performance out of the Internet Explorer engine, and he gave a talk at the conference about writing your own JavaScript library and a whole bunch of do’s and don’ts if you’re going to release your own JavaScript library. And it was funny because the very next day, Google released its Closure tools and I caught up with Dmitry that day and he was ranting about the horrible JavaScript code that was in this library. He said it was like they were taking notes in his ‘10 things not to do when you release a JavaScript library’ session and did them all. He’s actually sent me a list of code snippets and snarky comments pulled from the Closure Library and I’m going to be spending this afternoon turning that into a blog post for SitePoint. So it should be up by the time you’re hearing this podcast and a link to it in the show notes.

But really, the overall trend that he spots here is that this is like a JavaScript library that has clearly been written by Java developers, people who don’t know the JavaScript language very well, and the code is incredibly inefficient in places and does things that you do have to do in Java to get something to work right–but in JavaScript, all it does is slow the code down for no useful purpose. And he’s pointed out things like memory leaks and places where they’ve converted things from one type to another for no reason and it’s just going to slow the code down. In short, Dmitry is not impressed by the code here and he’s actually worried that just the Google name is so— We assume that Google knows what it’s doing especially when it comes to rich internet applications and performance, things like that. People are going to assume that this is a best-of-breed library and they’re going to switch from more established JavaScript libraries like jQuery, which Dmitry really likes a lot. He’s a big fan of that library and holds it up as a shining example of JavaScript written the JavaScript way for maximum performance and efficiency. And he would hate to think that someone would switch from jQuery to Google just because of the Google name.

Does Google have a responsibility that other companies don’t when releasing code to make sure that it really is the best that the Web has to offer?

Brad: I guess there are two sides of this. Yes, they do have responsibility because they have a huge name attached to it, but anything it releases is never going to be perfect. Nothing is ever perfect, and I think the fact that they are releasing it as open source and allowing the world to kind of take a look at this and see how it works and what they can do to improve upon it will help them eventually get that much better over time. It doesn’t look like they’re allowing public collaboration, though, on the open source tools. It’s just out there to download and run yourself but you can’t actually contribute to it as far as I can tell. So I guess that’s the other big question. Will they allow public contributions or will they just take like these points that he’s pointing out and may or may not use them? I guess it depends on that.

Kevin: And even if they do release it I don’t know if people like Dmitry would go out of their way to fix the problems. I mean, he would argue that the world has plenty of JavaScript libraries out there and the last thing that talented JavaScript developer should be doing is fixing Google’s code for them because they decided to write their own rather than adopt some of the really great solutions that are already out there. I don’t know, it’s a hard one to answer. Like it’s hard to begrudge Google releasing free code out there into the wild, but yeah, if they’re going to make the Web worse as a result, I’m not so sure it’s a good thing.

We won’t solve that one on this podcast anyway, so let’s move on. The next one is a post on the SitePoint Blogs called ‘How to Deal with Trolls on your Blog?’ and Patrick, you know a thing or two about this.

Patrick: Yes. It’s time for me to speak. Hello, everyone. Yeah, the post is called ‘How to Deal with Trolls in your Blogs’ by Alyssa Gregory and she runs through, basically, how to deal with the trolls. So I guess we all know what trolls are. Basically, they’re on your site forums, blog, comments, whatever—trying to get a reaction, trying to anger people, trying to degrade the conversation. She hits on a few bullet points. First, don’t feed the trolls, which is pretty well known, not to give them attention; find out what they’re all about, which is maybe a little less uncommon, may or may not be a good idea to spend time thinking about why they’re a troll; and then finally, how to deal with them. There’s three ways that she talks about: kill them with kindness, block them, or report them. Reporting them basically would mean taking some sort of legal action, reporting them through their ISP, reporting them to authorities, and so on. And that’s kind of tied in to another article I saw recently on the Guardian web site, Guardian.co.uk by Charles Arthur, and he wrote—it was basically like a poll for the blog community they have over there, “You decide: How do you deal with the vicious commenter on your site,” and he gave an example of basically a troll and asked people how they should deal with them. And he got a bunch of comments and I was one of those comments but you know, I don’t know. Let’s give this over to someone else for a moment. How do you guys deal with trolls on your sites?

Brad: Well I think bbPress actually does it the best that I’ve ever seen and if you’re not familiar—bbPress is the open source message board software created by the some people who did WordPress. BbPress actually ships with a plug-in called the ‘Bozo’ plug-in and essentially what it does, if you get a troll on your web site or in your forum in this case—you can flag that person as ‘Bozo’. And all that does is whenever that person posts on your message board, they see their post just like it’s normal but nobody else on the entire site can see it. So they have no idea that they’re blocked, they’re just sitting there wasting their own time, replying to everybody, you know starting flame wars or trying to start flame wars or whatever it is they’re doing—but the whole time nobody else even knows that they’re doing anything. So really at the end of the day, you’re just wasting the troll’s time which I think is genius.

Kevin: That’s a great trick.

Patrick: Right. In vBulletin that’s called ‘Tachy Goes to Coventry’, I think. And it’s also maybe more widely known as ‘Global Ignore’ but it’s like I said, it’s also very effective.

Kevin: I was, again, at this conference in Perth— Wow! It was a great conference—I’m getting some mileage out of it on this show today. I got to see the closing keynote by Derek Powazek—who some people may know from the Fray indie magazine or possibly from JPG magazine. Anyway, he has a lot of experience building communities online and he gave a talk about the different kinds of crazy you’ll encounter when you build an online community. And the last one he touched on was trolls and he talked about this – thing called the Green Hair Theory which I wish I could remember the citation but apparently a psychology student of some kind conducted this experiment and was interviewed by a professional reporter and said to the reporter in the interview, “Wow, you’ve got green hair!” And the reporter said, “No, I don’t.” And he said, “Oh, that’s interesting, you’re a terrible reporter.” And the reporter went, “Oh! But I went to school here and I’ve worked in all these places,” and immediately went on the defensive. And the point here was that when it was something about like green hair that was clearly right or wrong and there was no sense of ego about whether it was right or wrong; you could just respond calmly. But as soon as you draw the person’s qualifications into question, you elicit an emotional response, they immediately go on a defensive and make the wrong move. And that’s really the reaction that trolls are counting on.

Derek said the biggest mistake people make when dealing with trolls is thinking that you can reason with them or that they actually disagree with you. Most of the time, they don’t. They just are looking for that response and that making them invisible to everyone but themselves trick is something he kind of mentioned sort of in passing that there are some big communities out there, the names of which we would recognize, that actively use this technique but they don’t want the public to know. And so he didn’t want to use their names. But I certainly had my own guesses about who they might be.

His last point was that you really need to not be afraid to call the authorities on these people, that we sort of have this sense as site owners that the Web is the Wild West and we have to deal with our own problems, but that there are actually are legal bodies out there, certainly in the United States, who’s job it is to deal with these kinds of—what are really internet crimes. There are laws against sabotage online of certain types and so if your site is being attacked by trolls, definitely don’t hesitate to pick up the phone because there are people out there whose job is to help you.

He also mentioned the fact that you can actually… usually a troll attack will often be conducted by people creating new accounts and so often the way to shut down an attack of trolls is to temporarily switch off new signups to your community, or automatically make those people go into that ‘Global invisible’ box. So yeah, there’s a lot of ways to deal with this.

Patrick: Yeah, it sounds like it was a great presentation. Another part of that presentation—because I read through the SlideShare link because you had mentioned it—and one of the things he said was that someone who doesn’t agree with you isn’t a troll necessarily, and I think that the kind of larger point there is to be careful about the classification of a troll. We have these tools like Global Ignore, I used a Troll Hack on my site— basically it’s simulated downtime. I use those on my communities where it’s like a site simulated downtime—the site acts like sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—they’re never able to post but they get close, and that sort of thing. The thing with both of those tools is that they really should be reserved for obvious cases of trolls so I have someone who I banned then that—even if they’re a troll, I don’t bring that thing out on the first time. I don’t break that out whenever someone gets banned. I wait and if they have—if they return or if they come back, if it’s someone who is obviously causing trouble, I mean obviously some trolls might post like 15, 20 comments and say all these nasty things and it’s so obvious to you. Maybe they’re saying things that are so off the wall or racist or just highly inappropriate, pornography, whatever—that’s a different case. But I find that most people don’t fall into those categories. You have people who are just kind of nasty by nature, not to invoke the rap group Naughty by Nature.

But yeah, I think that the key to it is to just have guidelines first and foremost that speak to what your community is about, which you allow, which you don’t allow, and then enforce those guidelines fairly and evenly. And if it continues, then you have to ban them or block them in some way and if they come back, then bring out those big guns and use them—and don’t give them more attention. I’ve had people who have come back to my sites for years, who have signed for dozen accounts or more, the same person coming back over and over again. The key is that every time they came back, they got blocked again. No one spoke to them, no one knew they existed, and eventually they gave up. So you just have to keep it going, keep it moving, and stay focused on your goals and don’t let them affect you.

Kevin: The WebKit team have been hard at work again. Their developer tools—I think they’re widely recognized as the prettiest ones in browsers. So if you’ve used Safari for your development and you’ve ever opened the Web Inspector in Safari, I think you can agree. It’s got the glossiest user interface of any of these things in the browsers presently, but it’s always been a little less capable than things like Firebug. I’ve said on this podcast before that I use Firefox as my development browser, because it has things like Firebug in it, and I use Safari as my getting around the web day-to-day browser. But the WebKit team who work on WebKit Nightlies and you can download these effectively early versions of Safari, pre-release versions, and the latest one has some amazing enhancements to the developer tools. Did you take a look at this, Brad?

Brad: Yeah, absolutely. It looks like they’re adding some really cool features and I went through the list. A couple that caught my eye—I think the resources timeline which essentially breaks down all the different elements of your web site and charts you on this nice little graph that you can see how many milliseconds each little item and image and piece of JavaScript it took to load—is real clever and I think that would extremely useful when you’re trying to speed up your web site.

Kevin: It’s a lot of… Yeah, it’s some gorgeous eye candy too but some of the things that they’ve added that I have not seen anywhere else are things like the event listeners list. You can select an element in your document and it will show you all of the JavaScript event listeners that are attached to it. That’s something that I’ve never been ever been able to do in a point-and-click way in a browser before and it’s vitally important if you’re doing any kind of JavaScript interaction on your site. They’ve improved things like editing attributes and editing CSS. You can even create new selectors on the fly whereas previously you could just fiddle with the property values in your existing CSS rules. You can actually create entire new rules now. It’s really very nice. You can browse through the cookie storage of the browser and the local storage if you’re doing some advanced JavaScript stuff that stores data locally. It’s really incredible. I think at this rate, Safari is going to become the development browser of choice which will be quite a change. What does this mean for Firefox?

Brad: They’ll have to play catch up—it’s just the back and forth game.

Kevin: Mm! Does anyone else get the sense; the Firebug has kind of been resting on its laurels?

Brad: Yeah, they haven’t really changed… I mean there’s been some minor updates here and there but I haven’t noticed any major features added and I don’t know how long.

Kevin: Yeah, it seems like it’s… “And here’s the latest compatibility update”, is mainly what I’ve seen from Firebug. Firebug has kind of been— It was originally developed by one guy, Joe Hewitt, who has since moved on to other things and it is now, as far as I understand, maintained by largely a group of volunteers and perhaps one or two Mozilla staffers, but I’m not sure it’s a priority for anyone who’s working on it. And I also hear by the grapevine that it has some really ugly code in it that it basically forces Firefox to do some things that Firefox was not designed to do. And as a result the code is not especially pretty. We’ve got a PDF on SitePoint, we’ve developed a couple of our own Firebug add-ons and we published a little free e-book about how to write your own Firefox add-ons and it’s not a pretty process. We wrote the book because we were constantly hearing people saying, “Ah, I tried to read the documentation on how to extend Firefox and it’s really hard.” And you wouldn’t think it would be because Firefox has its reputation for being built on web technologies. You think it’ll just be JavaScript and HTML and the stuff that you’re used to do doing, but it’s not easy. So Firebug, It probably is stalling a bit just because it’s not a whole lot of fun to work on as project, I imagine.

And speaking of things that are not fun to do, our last story is about installing PHP and other open source development environments on Windows. I have to say, I’ve written four editions of my PHP/MySQL book, and updating the installation section for Windows is the worst part of having to do an update of that book. And Microsoft it seems realizes this because they’ve released the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, also known as Web PI. They’ve gone to the trouble— They contacted us and wanted to sponsor on SitePoint an article covering how to use Microsoft Web PI. So this is a disclosure of sorts—that this article was sponsored by Microsoft, but it’s an article by SitePoint’s Louis Simoneau who basically goes through the process of using this web platform installer and shows it off.

It’s really just a wizard installer that lets you install IIS, Microsoft Internet Information Services, a set of web platforms so you could get to pick and choose if you want PHP, if you want a MySQL database, those kind of things. And then actual web applications so you can say I want WordPress installed, I want SugarCRM installed, and there’s a whole gallery of web applications that will be automatically installed for you just by going through this wizard. And then it drops you off with a nice, perfectly configured development web server on your Windows machine. This has been around for a little while and there’s a reason Microsoft is going to the trouble of sponsoring an article on SitePoint, it’s because it’s not getting a lot of attraction. People seem to be not wanting to use this. I guess clearly the open source developers of the world are suspicious of anything Microsoft.

Brad: I think a lot of that has to do with how well these applications work on Microsoft and it’s not the actual application’s fault, it’s usually the plug-ins and modules that load into the applications that people don’t test on Windows because they don’t use Windows. And so you know I actually had a WAMP stack I set up earlier in the year, manually, so I installed everything separate PHP, MySQL, Apache. Well I wasn’t using IIS, I was using Apache, but it was all on a Windows box. And I got WordPress working, everything worked fine, and we run a lot of sites that way for a long period of time, and we actually noticed over time there’s a lot of plug-ins that are just not compatible on a Windows server, and some pretty major plug-ins at that. Like the main Super Cache plug-in does not work on Windows very well. And I think a lot of people know that or they’ve tried it and they’ve coming to terms with the fact that, sure, they can install WordPress and out of the box it works great, but as soon as you start extending that, that these other add-ins and modules are not—they’re not thinking that when they’re building them so they’re not going to work exactly how they should on Windows.

Kevin: The third edition of my book actually used IIS. It guided the user through setting up PHP on IIS if that’s what the user wanted to do. And in the fourth edition, I decided that was just too much trouble and I threw away the IIS section and focused on Apache. If anything, what this installer does is makes it easy to set up IIS as a development environment for PHP which has been really painful in the past. IIS looks a lot better in Vista and Windows 7 than it has previously. It looks a lot better, but if anything it’s even more confusing than it used to be. There are almost more icons that you can click on in IIS’s configuration than there are in the control panel of a default Windows installation. And it’s no wonder that beginner developers would look at this and throw their hands up, especially since PHP is rarely deployed in production on IIS. Have you ever worked at a place, Brad, or ever worked for a client who wanted their PHP application setup on a Microsoft stack?

Brad: Well no, not other than maybe a Windows server, but I’ve always pretty much said you can go Windows, but you need Apache just because it’s…

Kevin: So you’ve talked them out of it.

Brad: Yeah, just for the fact that—just tell them there’s going to be some overhead, there’s going to be a little more headache if you go the IIS route. Now this again was you know a little while ago so it looks like they’re starting to clear some of this up. I mean, I was looking at the screenshots and the installer for this is amazing. You just go through, kind of check what you want and hit ‘Go’ and it does. It downloads the packages directly from the software provider so WordPress comes from wordpress.org, so you make sure you’re getting the latest version, you’re not getting something…

Kevin: Yeah, it’s not a crafty sort of version that you get from Microsoft.

Brad: I don’t know what else Microsoft can do because… this is… It’s awesome that they provide this and this is something I’ll probably definitely use down the road but you’re right. It’s a matter of kind of getting the word out there and getting people more comfortable with running PHP applications and things like that on Windows which is going to be the biggest bullet to bite.

Kevin: I think if a developer were just wanting to learn PHP and they were going to deploy something to a server that someone else managed and they wanted to develop on Windows, I think I would recommend that they use this software to set up their development environment, at least initially. But if they were going to go down the path of administering their own server, then I would probably recommend that they set up Apache on their Windows box so that their development environment matched the deployment environment as closely as possible. I mean heck, at that point I would probably recommending they set up a virtual machine running on their Windows computer. A Linux virtual machine that matched the deployment environment exactly would be ideal. But yeah, for developers who just need to casually work on an open source technology stack on Windows, this is not a bad solution and I wish Microsoft the best of luck in winning a few developer hearts and minds with this.

Patrick: Just like we said, you can’t be afraid of a big market share someone else’s favor right?

Kevin: There you go.

Kevin: So let’s finish up with our host spotlights here. Brad, what’s your spotlight this week?

Brad: My spotlight this week is WordCamp New York City which actually starts Saturday, this Saturday. So it will be tomorrow when the podcast is released, November 14th and 15th in New York City. I’ll be there. I’m actually speaking on WordPress security so if anyone’s in the New York City area and looking for something to do, I think tickets are $40, relatively inexpensive. You get a t-shirt and some other cool schwag, so definitely check that out.

Kevin: Patrick?

Patrick: So I like to keep things light generally so this is totally off topic but at CollegeHumor there is a video called CH Live NYC Kumail Nanjiani and it’s just a comedy routine and I laughed so hard at it and he’s talking about the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island. I’m sure Brad is probably familiar with this because it’s not too far I don’t think from where he is at least within a driving distance and it’s just really, really funny what he says and how he says it. And you know, I think you have to watch it and then you’ll appreciate that I sent you the link. So check it out.

Kevin: And my spotlight is actually a bit self-serving. It’s something I did myself at the conference I mentioned. I gave a talk called ‘CSS Frameworks: Make the Right Choice’ and I have posted a video version of this talk. I screen-captured the animated versions of my slides and synchronized them up to the audio that was captured when I gave the talk at Web Directions South last month. So you can view my talk, listen in, and see the fully animated slides. I hope you’ll check it out on the SitePoint JavaScript in CSS blog.

And that brings us to the end of another show. Let’s go around the table guys.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.com and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network, ifroggy.com. You can find me on Twitter @iFroggy.

Kevin: And you can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show and to subscribe to get every show automatically, email podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions and feedback. We’d love to receive them.

This episode of the SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening and we’ll miss you, Dan. Bye-bye.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Interview Transcript

Matt: This is Matt Magain from SitePoint. I’m at the Web Directions South conference and I’m speaking with Mark Boulton.

Mark: Hello.

Matt: Mark thanks for coming to Australia. When we spoke earlier, you mentioned that you love the place and that you contemplated moving here occasionally?

Mark: Yes.

Matt: Don’t you think you’d miss the British weather?

Mark: Judging by this week, no. You have your own blend of British weather here. Yeah, every time we come back… this is our third trip now – my wife and I used to live in Manly about 10 years ago for about six months and we came back for a wedding three years ago. Every time we come back, we have the same discussions about should we move here? It’s so beautiful. I think we’d miss a good cup of tea though, to be honest. The tea’s not great.

Matt: But the coffee’s excellent.

Mark: But the coffee’s excellent but I don’t drink coffee. So there you go.

Matt: It could be the deal breaker.

Mark: Yeah, it could be.

Matt: So you’re quite well known for being a typographic designer. Can you tell our listeners what you think that term means?

Mark: Yeah. In short, it is designing with type primarily. It means… which is more than just the typeface. So it means all elements of typographic design from grids and hierarchy and typesetting, all that kind of stuff. It means focusing on that. So the difference between a typographic designer and a graphic designer is that a graphic designer does typographic design but it’s not their main focus. They’re often focused on imagery, photography, art direction, that kind of thing as well.

Matt: Right. So many of the readers and the listeners probably think of typography as being one aspect of design but you were saying in your talk that really you consider imagery and layout and color and that kind of stuff to be one aspect of typography.

Mark: Yes, I do. I think that any image you use on a design should really fit into a grid and the grid is a typographic grid. It should be created and designed with the typography in mind as the primary thing. So yeah, they’re all related to type really and on the web, 99% of what we do as designers is typographic design. So you got the interaction layer on there as well making sure it’s usable and all the rest of it, but I think all of that is typographic design. I really do. So consider a designer like I did in university, designing an encyclopedia, you have to worry about navigation, you have to think about access structure, you have to think about hierarchy and flow because an encyclopedia is not read cover-to-cover, it’s a reference book. So it has to be navigated in the same way that a web site is. The similarities are pretty evident, in my view.

Matt: The key slide in your presentation that stood out was the 9 factors of that typographic structure. It quite resonated for me but would you mind sharing how you came up with that structure and how you use it in your workflow?

Mark: Yeah, yeah. It’s taken a while to get to that point. This is the third kind of model I’ve used to explain my thoughts about typography and what I think typography is. So it’s nine squares – and I don’t think I can remember all of them off the top of my head.

Ah, here we are. Now, we have function on the bottom, language, typesetting, and rhythm; and then above that we have three which represent form, grids, fonts, and hierarchy; and above that we have attributes which are layout, color, and content. All of those have to work together to create a strong typographic structure. You can remove a couple of those and still retain a strong structure.

So on the Web, we’ve had a very, very limited font choice to the point of actually most designers not considering the typeface that much. But we’ve got a really good, strong structure with all the other pieces in that to create really good strong typographic design on the Web. And just because we can’t choose our font, it doesn’t necessarily matter; we’re still doing pretty good typographic design.

Matt: I have to confess that one thing that came to mind when I saw you omit font from the structure was “but the center doesn’t hold!” Is having on the horizon this whole range of new fonts available for use as simple as dropping font into the equation or are we going to have to relearn the structure for every font?

Mark: Yeah, it’s not as simple as dropping it in which is one of my concerns about @font-face is that the barriers to entry for doing that are as simple as choosing Comic Sans from a drop-down. It requires no thought whatsoever. And choosing the font, you replace that bit in the middle with a different font and it has an effect on all the surroundings. So yeah, any font that does get dropped in there will affect the typesetting, will affect the layout, will affect the content, will affect the rhythm. So yeah, it’s going to have an effect.

Matt: You mentioned Comic Sans and you mentioned in your presentation that you had perhaps mistakenly been held up as a defender of the font. Do you want to talk about, maybe clarify for some people what your stance is on Comic Sans and where it fits in the big picture?

Mark: Yeah, I can almost hear that people are listening to this. I can almost hear the fury building in some designers’ minds. Yeah, I don’t think Comic Sans is a bad typeface. I think it’s been used by bad designers or it’s been used by people who aren’t designers at all but are trying to make a design decision without having the right tools available to them.

My mum and dad, whatever, for their church might create a newsletter. They want it to be friendly so they use Comic Sans. And we see that all over the place and it’s not a bad typeface but it’s just been used in the wrong context so many times because the barrier to entry is so low and we don’t have to have any typographic schooling whatsoever to be able to choose it from a drop-down. But it’s not a bad font. People berate it for no good reason, I see. It’s a font that’s been overused. It’s not a font that is inherently bad.

Matt: So, talking about bad fonts, someone at the end of your session asked about free fonts and your response was that you thought the majority of them were rather crappy.

Mark: Yes.

Matt: So what’s the difference between a bad font and a font like Comic Sans which people conceive to be bad?

Mark: There are a few things. So the actual quality of the software, so how does it render on different platforms and in different browsers. The biggest thing that I see quite a lot with free fonts is bad kerning, the distance between letters are kerning pairs. So if you have a capital T with a lowercase r next to it, the r has to go underneath the crossbar of the T. And all of those kinds of things, the spacing for all of those has to be generated by a typographer at some stage in the production of the font and with free fonts, because they’re free and because there’s no commercial weight behind them or backing, then perhaps that time is reduced and as a result, the kerning is not as good. Also, free fonts don’t generally have the breadth of weights available which makes it quite counterproductive to be used commercially. Quite a lot of designers will choose a typeface in the print world and will want a full family of fonts to be able to use throughout the design so that they can use just one typeface and get away with it right across many applications. Free fonts, generally, are only available in single weights. They’re very rarely available in multiple weights. So that’s another issue and they take a long time. I’m not having a go at free fonts whatsoever.

Type design is a completely different discipline. My hat goes off to type designers because it’s hard work, it takes a long, long time to do, and it’s no wonder that foundries are being very protective of normally years and years of work.

Matt: I have a question about fixed and fluid layouts. It’s obviously one of those topics that generates almost religious fervor in debate and discussion. The concept of a grid and the concept of vertical rhythm, they’re all things that seem to work quite well for a fixed layout. Is it possible to apply those concepts to a fluid layout as well?

Mark: Yes, it is. It’s just your base unit of measurement needs to be relative rather than fixed. So you can use percentages or ems. Quite often using ems for any of that kind of layout stuff is actually preferable to using pixels because an em is related to your type so that there’s an inherent relationship between the layout and the typeface that you’re using.

Matt: What about incorporating IAB ad units, which are pixels and which won’t change as text size increases or decreases?

Mark: Yeah. Well, I think that comes down to control. I keep mentioning this over the past couple of days and people like Khoi Vinh had been talking about this for years and I’m only coming around to his way of thinking, I guess. Designers on the Web have to lose control and that’s difficult for designers to do. It’s not because we’re being difficult, it’s because the way we’re schooled and the way that we are; it’s part of our kind of DNA is to control the message and control the design and asking us to lose control is actually quite hard to do. I think that’s why a lot of designers end up going fixed because they can control it to a degree.

Matt: Maybe it’s their clients that can’t give up the control?

Mark: Maybe it is. That’s a big thing as well. It’s clients’ expectations as well but clients’ expectations work in reverse as well. I’ve had clients who expect full-width, expect fluid layouts and ask generally why is there a lot of white space over here on the screen? So it works both ways.

I don’t know whether I even answered your question though.

Matt: Well, let’s move on. In your talk, you cited the definition of typography that you agreed with was a mechanical notation and arrangement of language.

Mark: Yes.

Matt: My question is, does the word ‘mechanical’ imply that the art of typography is more of a science than an art?

Mark: Yes, I think it is. I think type design, so the design of the letterforms, that’s more akin to art. There’s a lot of art craft in that process.

To design a certain typeface to convey a certain feeling or idea for a large body of text is very, very challenging. That’s more kind of art and craft.

Typographic design, the stuff that I’m talking about, is more science, really. There are rules, there are ways of doing things and it’s less about art than type design, absolutely.

Matt: And my final question, I thought your presentation was fantastic, but I couldn’t work out whether you were pessimistic or optimistic about the imminent arming of hobbyists and everyone with a whole stack of new fonts to choose from.

Mark: Yes, I was being a bit of both, I think. I’m a little bit pessimistic at the moment because I feel like we’re giving hand grenades to kids. I think without the right tools in place such as Comic Sans in drop downs, we’re not giving people the right tools to make good design decisions. For designers, I think that it’s exciting and it’s a good place to be. However, I don’t think we’ve got the right fonts to use yet on the Web. The difference between web fonts and fonts designed for prints is huge. Not only technically but in the actual design of the typefaces themselves and I just don’t think we’re there yet with the right typefaces available. I’d love to see, I mentioned at the end of my talk, I’d love to see browser vendors or big corporations step up to the plate like Microsoft did and invest in getting some web fonts designed and then distributed on whatever platform whether it’s something like TypeKit or if it’s the foundries themselves, getting some way of getting the right typefaces into the right hands because at the moment, putting Garamond or Bodoni on the Web is not great.

Matt: Thank you very much for your time, Mark. I appreciate it.

Mark: Thank you very much.

Matt: Enjoy the rest of your time in Australia.

Mark: Thank you.

Kevin: This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Download this Episode

You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:

• SitePoint Podcast #34: Sorry About the Slashes (MP3, 46.1MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

Tim Berners-Lee says “Sorry about the slashes!”

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Sorry About the Slashes (SitePoint)
• Which URL is Right? (SitePoint)
• no-www.org
• www.yes-www.org
• www.www.extra-www.org

GeoCities is dead

• GeoCities
• SitePoint Podcast #14: The Cyberdyne Bill (SitePoint)
• Saving a Historical Record of Geocities (Web Archive)
• Memory Lane: XKCD Pays Tribute to GeoCities (Mashable)
• Geocities redesign discussion (XKCD forum)
• Tears in the Rain [language warning] (Jeremy Keith)
• Angry Mac Podcast [language warning]
• Geostupid (Jason Scott)

Tim O’Reilly on the Whitehouse.gov Switch to Drupal

• Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal (O’Reilly Radar)
• Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen (Slate)

Ballmer: The Internet Isn’t Made For The iPhone

• With Windows 7 and new designs, PCs looking better (Associated Press)

Host Spotlights:

• Stephan: Where Goldfish Come From
• Kevin: Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)
• Patrick: What it takes to be an overnight success

Show Transcript

Kevin: October 30th, 2009. The creator of the Web shares his regrets, Yahoo! shuts down GeoCities, and Steve Ballmer doesn’t get the Mobile Web. This is the SitePoint Podcast #34: Sorry About the Slashes.

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for another SitePoint podcast. I’m Kevin Yank and I’m joined by Stephan Segraves and Patrick O’Keefe today. Brad is off but he’ll rejoin us next week, I’m sure.

Guys, welcome to the show again.

Stephan: Good to be back.

Patrick: It’s good to be here.

Kevin: Patrick, you’ve been… The two of you were at Blog World Expo, isn’t that right?

Stephan: Yeah.

Patrick: It is. It is. I made a little pit stop at a smaller conference too…

Kevin: I can’t believe I missed that.

Patrick: …and then I kind of got sick during that but I’m good now.

Kevin: Back on deck.

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: Good to hear. Alright. Well let’s dive right in. Our first story is Sir Tim Berners-Lee from the SitePoint Blog… well he didn’t write on the SitePoint Blog but we have him on the SitePoint Blog quoted saying if there’s one thing he could go back and change about the Web, one mistake he thinks he’s made, it’s the two slashes at the end of ‘http://’.

Stephan: This is funny.

Kevin: He says “Really if you think about it, it doesn’t need the double slash. I could have designed it not to have the double slash. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Patrick: Yeah, I mean what’s ‘http:’, did they need the colon? Did they need …? I guess they do but you know it’s…

Kevin: They need something separating…

Patrick: The whole thing is like, you know, to the average person, it doesn’t make any sense. Even ‘.com’ isn’t quite something that is translated for a lot of people.

Kevin: Right. So I’m curious, do either of you guys actually type the ‘http://’ when you’re typing out an address by hand?

Patrick: Guilty. Guilty.

Kevin: Guilty? Really?

Patrick: Yeah.

Kevin: Is it just… I don’t know.

Patrick: It’s a habit.

Kevin: A habit?

Patrick: Yeah, really force of habit. I force myself to type everything ‘http://www.’ and I don’t know, it just… It’s part of my DNA now.

Kevin: It’s kind of satisfying, I have to say…

Patrick: Like, “I do this right!” “Who cares?”

Kevin: Like once your hands are trained to do that, it’s satisfying to do that kind of repetitive motion.

Patrick: Right. Yeah, it’s something… you have to take personal pride in it for it to mean anything, right?

Kevin: There are times I catch myself doing stuff like that that… In a programming task or something, I’ve got to type five lines that are almost identical and I’m halfway through it and I’m realizing I really could have used the clipboard for this. But I’m halfway through it. I’m committed and I just start… I use it as an excuse to think of something else as I just let my fingers do the typing.

Patrick: It’s relax time, right? I mean, in this day and age…

Kevin: It is.

Patrick: …we’re all busy and hyper-aware of everything, so those mindless moments are a vacation.

Kevin: So this brings me to something else that I’ve mentioned in the SitePoint Tech Times a couple of times, it’s the old debate of whether the ‘www’ should be done away with.

Stephan: Do away with it. I don’t need it.

Kevin: Do away with it. And Patrick?

Patrick: Well, I think we’re at a stage right now where it’s too late. I mean, I’ve thought about that because you know you can force with .htaccess, you can force to go with a ‘www’ or not.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: And I think that’s a decision you need to make when the domain first starts obviously.

Kevin: Yeah.

Patrick: Now I think we’re locked in.

Kevin: Oh, I don’t know. Well, it goes without saying that if whether or not you decide when launching a new site to have a ‘www.’ at the start of your address or not, whether or not you do, you need to configure your server to redirect to the other one.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: There are still a few high profile sites out there. Last time I looked, Flickr still supported both forms and it didn’t redirect you back and forth. I’m bamboozled that a company as big as Yahoo! can get that wrong. It makes me question the advice I’ve been giving, which is that it’s really important to have that canonical address for your search engine rankings. Maybe Flickr doesn’t care about search engine rankings.

Patrick: Yeah, and sometimes… I don’t know, I’m not a big SEO guy so I don’t know if there’s ways you can redirect it in a search engine’s eyes or whatever… I don’t know but there was another case of something that came up related to this where Borders Australia, borders.com.au, launched… I don’t think it’s that long ago because it’s still in Beta. And when they did, I always pointed over there and of course, I checked out to see if my book was on it and it was. And I checked www.… And for some reason I checked without and what happened was I got a blank page. It didn’t lead to anything. It had some text on it, I think, like testing or some just random placeholder text in there where ‘www’ worked fine. So it’s like you don’t want that to happen either.

Kevin: Yeah, I’ve got that right now. You might be thinking of Dymocks. Dymocks is the Australian online bookstore. And yeah, if you go www.dymocks.com.au, you get their site. If you don’t, you get a very… It’s a Microsoft IIS ‘under construction’ page.

Patrick: No, no, this was definitely Borders. But what’s up with the bookstores in Australia then?

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Try this yourself, listener, ‘dymocks.com.au’, you get an ‘under construction’. “The site you’re trying to view does not currently have a default page.”

Patrick: Going there now.

Kevin: It’s insane.

Patrick: I’m a listener.

Kevin: It’s clearly theirs. It’s not someone else that’s grabbed that site from them.

Patrick: Oh, yeah. “You are not authorized to view this page”, huh.

Kevin: Yeah. Well anyway…

Patrick: I’m going to hack in by adding the ‘www.’… I’m in.

Kevin: Yeah. And I’ve tried to buy a couple of books from them in the past week and both times— I’ve clearly gotten into the habit of not typing the ‘www’ and trusting that they’ll redirect me if it needs it. So whether you do or not, you got to have that redirecting place but I don’t know it’s… For a while there, it seemed like it was the Web 2.0 thing to do if you were launching a new startup, you wanted the shortest address possible and it was just stylish not to have the ‘www’.

Patrick: Delicious.

Kevin: Yeah, I’m looking at vimeo.com right now for my spotlight later and they don’t have ‘www’.

Patrick: Bit.ly.

Kevin: But yeah, it’s personal preference I suppose. But yeah, ‘http://www.’, how many letters is that? Eleven.

So you’re Tim Berners-Lee, the first thing you do when you’re designing the Web is go, “Okay, every address is gonna start with 11 characters that will be the same no matter which address…” I think he does have some apologizing to do about that.

Patrick: Well you know, we could just give the whole internet back. I mean if we don’t want it so it’s…

Stephan: But the thing with the ‘www’ is that, you know, when you think about it, like online marketing stuff, you don’t want to hear, “Well go to our web site wwww.whateverwhatever.com…” I just want to hear whatever.com. That’s what I want to hear. It’s too much gibberish.

Kevin: I haven’t heard Dymocks do an online – like a radio ad but I wonder what it would sound like. I wonder if they would mention the ‘www’.

Patrick: And I think that’s part of it. I think that makes sense. Most of the marketing I see anyway tends to have just the ‘.com’. I’m talking about like mass marketing, TV and newspapers ad. I mean, I think that it then falls to the people, whoever, to redirect it properly and you know, I think that’s pretty much a given these days. I think that the fact that we can point out examples where, okay, it doesn’t work, is probably more an aberration then it is you know, a norm, because most sites that I find, they tend to do both well, I guess. And so it’s not really much of a skill but I don’t know, they do…

Stephan: Well I think I just said four w’s so I apologize to the listeners.

Patrick: And you’ve got to redirect that as well!

Kevin: All due credit to… I have to give credit to Flickr, they have fixed their problem. Flickr does redirect to the version with ‘www’s’ now so they used to support both.

Patrick: Do they redirect the version that has an ‘e’ on the name? Flick-er?

Kevin: Yeah, I don’t know. I doubt they have that domain.

In this story on the SitePoint blog by Craig Buckler, he lists the problems that Tim Berners-Lee admits to have been caused by these slashes. He said “it looks too technical to novice web users,” and that’s probably true, but I guess like you guys said… I don’t know, the marketing heads have kind of solved us for us; you never see really a web address in an advertisement or in a consumer context with that prefix. The browsers add it for you. I think it’s been phased out pretty well so I think we’ve overcome that particular issue.

This one is a pet peeve of mine. “Many users mistakenly refer to it as backslash-backslash” and I have to admit that there are definitely people in my immediate family who don’t know the difference between a forward slash and a backslash and maybe they shouldn’t have to. I’m just going to try this, now what happens if you type ‘http:\\’?

Patrick: We’re going into uncharted territory! Hold on, listener!

Kevin: I’ve never done this before. Oh, it broke! Safari 4 does not like ‘http:\\’. It adds the slashes for you in front of the backlashes and it just all goes wrong…

Patrick: You learn something new everyday on the SitePoint Podcast.

Stephan: What I want to know is how many listeners out there actually use the other transfer protocols like gopher through their browser.

Patrick: How many even know there are some?

Kevin: FTP seems to be other big one.

Stephan: But do people still use it through their browser?

Kevin: I doubt they type it but certainly there are probably links to – you can go here and down… You know, the open source sites when they’re…

Patrick: I mean really, I could do the total accident one day. I was like, “Hey, I don’t need an FTP client? What is this?”

Kevin: Yeah. I know when you know, if I’m going to download and this is not a good consumer example, but if I’m going to download the latest version of Ubuntu Linux or something like that, they’ll redirect me to the mirror and usually it’s an FTP address and it’s on a list of files.

Stephan: Yeah, but you’re a nerd.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah.

Moving on. “It’s one of the biggest causes of URL syntax errors,” it says? Ah, I guess, yeah. Yeah, I just, this morning, read a blog post by TomTom. They’re announcing that they finally got their iPhone mount for the in-car iPhone mount available on their online store and in their blog post the link, the writer of the link forgot to put ‘http://’ in front of it…

Patrick: It’s a folder.

Kevin: …and so it just goes to www.tomtom.com in the current folder. Yeah. So it’s broken. So yeah, good point. There is plenty of broken links out there because of this kind of thing, I’m sure.

“An unimaginable quantity of printer ink, and paper has been wasted on the unnecessary characters.”

Stephan: Really? … Really.

Kevin: Ahh, that’s going a bit far.

Patrick: You mean that URL on the bottom of the page that when you print from a browser. I mean…

Kevin: Yeah, I guess.

Patrick: We could have fed a starving nation with all that ink.

Stephan: Hopefully, you weren’t sending them the ink.

Kevin: Taking a step back to the ‘www’ or no ‘www’ people who actually care about this kind of thing will be familiar with the two big sites out there, the no-www.org and yes-www.org. Man, that’s hard to say. It’s explaining why you should or should not have the ‘www’. I recommend also checking out www.www.extra-www.org, which is the site which advocates adding an extra ‘www’ to all of your addresses.

Patrick: You lost me.

Kevin: Check it out, it’s hilarious.

I think we’ve killed this story.

Stephan: Dead.

Kevin: Speaking of killing things, GeoCities is dead. It’s official. It’s gone.

Patrick: Want to say a few words? GeoCities, you were a great friend. We grew up with you, in a way. We learned on you and we will miss you.

Kevin: That’s touching.

Patrick: Thank you. Thank you.

Kevin: We spoke about GeoCities last in SitePoint podcast #14 and at that time it was just announced that Yahoo!, the owner of GeoCities these days, had decided to shut it down and just remove the hosting for all of these sites that people threw up there for free.

Patrick: It’s funny how that was a really quick point.

Kevin: And the date has come. The day has come. This past Monday, I think, the site came down, October 26, 2009. And this was Yahoo!’s last and only at this time free web hosting service. So Yahoo! is no longer in the business of free web hosting unless you count hosting your Flickr photos for free but actually putting up web sites, Yahoo! doesn’t provide that for free anymore.

And when we last talked about it, we, like many other people out there were kind of hopeful that some of the efforts underway to encourage Yahoo! to save this piece of web legacy was going to pay off. That someone would be able to convince Yahoo! to hand over the keys to the hosting and preserve this piece of web history but it hasn’t… it’s gone down and there is no one place that you can access the GeoCities content anymore. A lot of people went through processes of backing up their own GeoCities site, the Web Archive had… They had a form up saying that “We’ve been working extra hard to spider GeoCities’ content and keep a record of it but if you look in our archive and you find that your GeoCities site is not in there yet, fill in this form with your address and we will move it to the front of the queue.”

So hopefully, anyone who wanted their site preserved was able to do so but those people who have forgotten about their sites and go back there one day. It’s gone is the sad truth of it and if you go to geocities.yahoo.com now it says, “Sorry, GeoCities has closed” and suggests “visiting one of these popular Yahoo! sites, like Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Sports.”

Patrick: I actually checked to see if my old GeoCities site was archived and it was by archive.org and the thing about it is though is my site was so old that they crawled it back in 2001 and they never needed to do it again.

Kevin: Wow.

Patrick: Not that I could get in because I simply could not but it’s always there for me should I ever want people to actually see it.

Kevin: There were a few things that happened on Monday to commemorate the event, xkcd, a popular web comic redesigned their site for one day and man, was it an eyesore.

Did you guys get a chance to check that out while it was up?

Patrick: Unfortunately, I did not.

Stephan: It was funny.

Patrick: I saw a screenshot, though, and it was on point.

Kevin: Yeah, it was best experienced in its animated glory but mashable.com has a screenshot and we’ll link to that in the show notes. It was, as you’d expect, black background, thick borders, lots of gratuitous animated GIFs and plenty of broken images as well. Yeah, they had these standard broken image icons for Netscape and Internet Explorer all through there.

Stephan: This was the golden age for iconography.

Kevin: [laughter] Oh, it was great. Plenty of Comic Sans in there, and if you were a real geek, you could view the source of the page and they had all sorts of tidbits in there. I’m not sure how much of it actually was functional but that nice, on the HTML tag for the page that WEB="2.0". It’s a nice QBasic code in there which at least in theory a properly configured version of Internet Explorer back in the day probably could have executed. <font face="Comic Sans MS">, oh man. Great stuff and again, I’ll put a link in the show notes to thread on the xkcd forms that sort of dissects the contents of that page.

But there was a darker side to the reaction and we had a lot of people out there just condemning Yahoo!’s handling of the shutdown saying that “Yahoo!, even though you had people with their hands extended in friendship, ready to take on the burden of responsibility of keeping GeoCities live” they didn’t do anything about it. They didn’t accept any of those efforts. In fact, they were silent on it, on the issue entirely and were more than happy just to throw the switch on the servers when the day came.

Jeremy Keith was a loud voice in this story and he has a blog post up on his site called “Tears in the Rain” and I can’t actually read out parts of this because the language in it would get us a rating on iTunes that we would like to avoid.

Patrick, you were telling me earlier that you thought that this tone was irresponsible.

Patrick: Hi Jeremy, love you. No. [laughter]

Kevin: I have to say we are all fans of Jeremy Keith.

Patrick: No I mean, you see the problem I have with it is when you… there’s a couple of problem with this. The first problem is the vulgarity. There’s words in here, name-calling that are not just like what I would call low-level vulgarity but stuff that is pretty crude, pretty nasty, that a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate. And I think that when you… and maybe it’s emotion, maybe it’s his emotion and that’s fine, I respect that this is how he wants to come across, it’s his blog, cool, but I think it makes it easy for people to dismiss you when you’re – I don’t want to say, belligerent, but when you’re communicating in this manner and I think it’s irresponsible to do so, makes it easy for people to dismiss your point and the point gets lost because you turn people off when they’re just reading the post.

And the other part of it is, of course, I guess assumptions about who made the decision to close GeoCities. I mean, sure there’s an outside perception that it’s probably some stuffy executive, who knows what what, but at the same time Yahoo! is a company staffed with techy people, with geeky people, with people who know the space and it’s feasible that someone who knows the Web pretty well made this decision, not just some old white businessman in a suit in a boardroom somewhere.

I think, like, no assumptions and then maybe changing the tone of the message helps more people to reach it and helps people to take it seriously. That’s just my point. No disrespect.

Kevin: It’s an interesting debate. I’ve listened to a podcast called – I’m not even sure I can say the name of it but it’s the Angry Mac … podcast, we’ll call it. I’ll be sure to post the link to it for people who want to check it out. But it is a few geeks who get together and swear a blue trail about idiots covering the Mac scene every week. And in a recent episode they were saying that they couldn’t understand why people didn’t take their message seriously just because of its tone. The fact that they choose to communicate in that tone, that angry, swear-filled way, should not prejudice people’s reactions to the content of their message. And while perhaps logically that argument is sound, I have to agree with you, Patrick, I do switch off as soon as someone starts yelling at me when they’re trying to make a point that I’m legitimately interested in. I just cannot take it in.

Patrick: Yeah, I think that if we’re all… if you’re talking to a machine, I think that’s a reasonable conclusion that okay, don’t take my point. But you know, there’s a couple of different things here. First of all is, it’s not just – what you say is as important as how you say it because that determines whether or not people understand it, whether or not they can receive it. And if you take the average business person who’s held to a standard let’s say in communication, if the CEO of Yahoo! goes off in a rant like this, you know, I think it’s Carol Bartz, I’m not sure though – that person gets fired. So you have to look at it in that light too, like there’s a certain standard of communication that respectful people require of one another.

It’s not just cursing for me because you know, that’ll turn off some people, sure, but it’s also the object of cursing – name calling. And that’s sort of stuff that adds to it for me as well. I can put up with a couple of swear words and I’m sure a lot of people can but if you want your message to reach as many people as possible, you need to make it accessible to as many as possible. They need to feel comfortable reading it from work or from anywhere and they need to be able to present to someone else. Now if you’re at Yahoo!, do you print out this post and take it to your boss where they are called all sorts of names? Probably not.

Kevin: So in the spirit of taking this message that I think we agree is important… I mean, Jeremy links to Jason Scott who is one of the leaders of the effort to try and preserve the material on GeoCities and Jason Scott’s most recent post about this opens with “You’re stupid and I hate you.” Case in point… but I think Jeremy’s post, although maybe one-third inflammatory and impossible to read out on this show; I think there is some great stuff in there.

He says, “We’re losing a piece of internet history. We are losing the destinations of millions of inbound links but most importantly we’re losing people’s dreams and memories. GeoCities dies today. This is a bad day for the internet. It’s a bad day for our collective culture. In my opinion this is also a bad day for Yahoo! I for one will find it a lot harder to trust a company that finds this to be acceptable behavior despite the very cool and powerful APIs produced by the very smart and passionate developers within the same company. I hope that my friends who work at Yahoo! understand that when I pour vitriol upon their company, I am not aiming at them. Yahoo! has no shortage of clever people but clearly they are down in the trenches doing development, not in the upper echelons making the decision to butcher GeoCities.”

I have to leave it there because any further and it gets into some language.

Stephan: So they’re smart but they’re stupid at the same time, is what he’s saying.

Patrick: You know there’s two trains of thought here. The first train of thought is that Yahoo! is destroying a portion of the Web, a portion of its history and that’s a bad move. The other train of thought that I think people have also is that you know, GeoCities gave a fair amount of notice. The sites have been online for a long time and it’s a business and if it’s not carrying its weight then it needs to go.

I think there’s a balance somewhere between idealism and realistic expectations and I think that that intersection is where we need to get to, at least for me.

Kevin: And I think the intersection there is where when the idealists extended their hands and were willing to do whatever it took to protect and preserve that piece of history. When Yahoo! ignored them and turn them down, I think that’s the crucial mistake that was made. I can’t blame them for not being able to sustain the expenses associated with hosting, however significant or insignificant they may have been. As you say, they are a business but when the Internet is willing to help you preserve a piece of itself and you don’t take them up on the offer, I can’t defend that.

Patrick: There’s separate questions there as well though, such as who permits these people to archive their content? Most people don’t have a voice in this. You have people who want to save content that for the most part isn’t theirs and that’s a separate debate, I guess, what entitlement they have to content created by other people? But yeah, I mean, that’s a separate point.

Kevin: Alright. Well let’s move to something a little… I was going to say a little less inflammatory but it’s politics and politics always, always brings that out in people. The whitehouse.gov site has re-launched itself yet again. This time it’s a behind the scenes change and Tim O’Reilly writes extensively about whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal, which is an open source PHP content management system and that it’s running on Red Hat Linux Apache, MySQL technology stack. And there’s a nice story here worth reading about how it was undertaken and the different parties involved, there’s at least four different companies involved in bringing this to fruition but it’s a great story for open source and possibly a great story for the US government as well.

Guys, I’m not American, you guys are. What do you think?

Patrick: We count you as one of us.

Kevin: Thank you.

Stephan: I think it’s pretty cool. I’m all for open source being used. If people on the show don’t know it, I work in the public sector so I try to push open source when I can and so I think this is a good venture. I think there’s also an opposing viewpoint. There’s an interesting article on Slate written by Chris Wilson and there’s a little bit of a political slant.

Kevin: It’s not the Chris Wilson, is it?

Stephan: No, he’s just a Slate writer. I’ve looked him up, I can’t find anything linking him to the other Chris Wilson.

Kevin: It would be really weird if Microsoft’s Chris Wilson was writing on Slate about the whitehouse.gov site.

Stephan: Yeah, I don’t think it’s him.

Patrick: No, it’s not. This is a separate Twitter account.

Stephan: Yeah. So this guy, if you can get past the political slant of the article, it’s pretty interesting because he points out some Drupal fall points where Drupal is struggling, such as upgrading and the fact that the structure is somewhat disorganized in the file system. There’s some interesting points and I think his best point that he makes, counter to what Tim O’Reilly is saying, he’s saying that recovery.gov actually used Drupal for a while and it was dropped and they decided to go with a private contractor at a reported cost of $18 million dollars to rework the site. So it’ll be interesting to see what the White House does with this and if it stays, the central piece of software there.

Kevin: The fact that this was a purely behind the scenes change, that the site itself to its visitors has not changed at all, does that feel like a waste of resources to you guys?

Patrick: Without seeing the past backend, I don’t know. Right? Because that’s probably what this is aimed at, I would say in large part is the behind the scene stuff and obviously they didn’t like what they saw, right?

Kevin: Tim O’Reilly seems to like the move because he says that by switching to Drupal, at least initially, it makes no change to the site but it opens them up to taking advantage of the entire ecosystem around Drupal and it’ll make it easier for them to engage with social media and things like that in the future because they won’t have to write that into their own technology stack from scratch; they can just use plug-ins for Drupal that are developed by the open source community.

Does that ring true to you guys?

Stephan: I mean, yeah. I think it’s great that the government’s using open source stuff and maybe will contribute back to the open source project itself if you know… because you know they had to make some changes to the code to get it to work and I think it’s good that they’re moving away from a proprietary system that is probably costing us a lot of money and hopefully this is cheaper. I’d like to see a breakdown of it and if it’s true, it would be a great case study to see if it’s actually saving taxpayers money.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean, Mr. O’Reilly touts this as a “big win for open source” but the flipside of that is it better work. Right? Because anything… And it’s almost an unfair standard I think that it might be held to by some because if there is a problem security wise, once, twice, or ever, then you know, it’s going to reflect very badly on open source and very badly on Drupal because it’s just a different level of exposure. I mean, how much bigger do you get than the White House. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of probably brighter lights or more scrutinized web sites probably. So if it succeeds, it’ll be a big boon for Drupal and our friend Brad Williams, but if it doesn’t, then obviously they’ll be open to a great deal of criticism. 

Kevin: Yeah. I wish Brad was here this week because he does do a fair bit of work with Drupal and he’d know a lot more of the technical side then we can speak to on this show.

But Tim O’Reilly’s story ends up – and you brush on this Stephan – that he is hoping that this will end up with up the government contributing back to open source. You know right now they’ve just taken Drupal and perhaps done some modifications to it to suit their purposes and no one knows what those modifications are and that if the government is embracing open source in all of its forms, they should be contributing whatever changes they make back to the community, and he suggests that just as the US government has launched a data.gov to open up government data to third party use, that they should release code.gov to release whatever open source code they may have written.

Stephan: I’m a little torn on that because do we really want people knowing what went into to make the White House site secure maybe… I mean, is that one thing we want hacked? I don’t know.

Kevin: The purist view is that security by obscurity is no security at all and if they’re confident in the work that they’ve done then they should be able to release that code with no qualms whatsoever. I’m skeptical about just what amount of modifications they’ve done. Call me on this if you don’t think it’s right but my impression of government contracts for web technology like this is either it gets through or it doesn’t, either the proposal to switch to Drupal slips through all of the political cracks and then someone installs a pretty vanilla installation of Drupal and they do the work to make it look nice and that’s the end of the story. This theory that the US government has some sort of special team of hackers who will modify Drupal in extra secure ways that the open source community could never conceive of on their own, it seems like a pleasant fiction to me. I would be very surprised if there’s anything that’s been done to that Drupal code base that’s worth contributing back.

Patrick: I detect a hint of jealousy as far as our lead hackers here. No, I’m just kidding.

Kevin: [laughing] Jealousy, no. I would say skepticism.

Patrick: I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. I think it’s a fair point and I share kind of Stephan’s skepticism about it. That’s the key, we don’t know what they did, and I think that’s maybe a good thing. I understand the point about obscurity and I guess that was Dr. Seuss who came up with that but you know, I think that… No, I’m just kidding but I think it’s true. I don’t see a reason for them to release like what they did security wise. If they make a new photo gallery thing, cool, distribute it. But the security stuff, I don’t really know if they need to be putting that out, if there’s a really great benefit to them doing so.

Stephan: Here’s the point. Here’s the great point and I think this comes from the WordPress community, right. It doesn’t matter what you’re using as long as it gets the job done. Right? Because WordPress has always touted that “we’re here to let people write,” and it doesn’t matter what it looks like, right? It doesn’t…Wait, that’s the wrong word. It doesn’t matter what the framework is behind it as long as the content is being produced for the people, right. So we shouldn’t really care that it’s Drupal. It shouldn’t matter, right? I mean, yeah, it’s great that it is open source but at the end of the day, it’s just software to put some text on the internet, really, and some pictures. Really, I mean…

Patrick: Of course, you can’t really compare the White House web site to other government web sites. I mean, obviously, there’s probably some special consideration goes into that. It’s probably not your average everyday government contract either. I speak with no experience of course, but I would hope that there would be extra considerations. So I think hopefully it works out well, it reflects great on the open source community, everyone walks away happy and open source continues to grow.

Kevin: Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, in an interview with the Associated Press has said that the internet was not made for the iPhone, which I suppose you can’t fault him on that but… I don’t know. This is a story from the Associated Press about how Windows 7 has revitalized the PC market and that the PC market is sprung into this variety of options, all of which are taking hardware design a lot more seriously than the PC world has in the past. We’ve moved from a world of beige boxes into slick and colorful machines that are suited to the individual tastes and needs of various users and that Windows 7 provides a flexible platform that suits everything from the smallest netbook to the biggest professional workstation and that competitors like Apple just can’t compete with that. What all that has to do with the internet and the iPhone is difficult to fathom but at the very end of this story, right down the bottom, I’ll just read it out here.

“Microsoft has more to contend with than computers running other operating systems. People have begun to use such gadgets as the iPhone as tiny mobile computers. But Ballmer scorns the idea that smart phones could unseat PCs as the technology of choice for on the go consumers. “Let’s face it. The internet was designed…” this is quoting Ballmer… “Let’s face it, the internet was designed for the PC. The internet is not designed for the iPhone,” Ballmer said. “That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications. They’re all trying to make the internet look decent on the iPhone.”

Patrick: Um, I think what happened is he was asked about it. I mean, that’s how… If someone probably asked him, “So how do you compete with cell phones?”

Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

Patrick: Knowing how reporters go about their business. I think it’s probably true but I think what it is… Obviously, the internet is not designed for mobile phones (throw aside the iPhone). That’s why we have development now being led in the mobile direction. There are people creating mobile versions of their web sites so can they tap into that audience. Obviously, most web sites are designed first and foremost for the desktop or the laptop, normal computer, but then there is this whole new audience that really maybe doesn’t use the computer very much and there’s some money to be made for that audience. So that’s why people are tapping into it. So I don’t look at it as an either/or scenario. I look at it as here’s a way we can make more money and get more traffic so you know, people are now developing their sites for mobile devices or creating apps to make their sites easier to access or their data more easier to access, from booking flights to any kind of service that you purchase; it’s a new audience to tap into.

Kevin: Yeah. If we trying to squint through Ballmer’s typically glib quote here. I think that’s my biggest annoyance with him is he always tries to distill serious issues down to something that he can laugh off to Microsoft’s advantage. But the core question here is whether the mobile internet will take the form of a browser or whether it will take the form of applications which access internet-based services. So conventional wisdom or at least what I’ve been hearing in a few years up to this point is that, especially in developing countries, people aren’t buying PCs; they’re buying mobile phones and in those countries a lot of people’s first experience of the Web is on a mobile phone handset screen. And that user base is growing a lot more quickly than the desktop PC or laptop computer market is growing in the rest of the world. And so in the next decade or so, we can expect the mobile internet user base to outstrip the people sitting in front of a computer and a keyboard.

Patrick: Relating to this, I was at a panel at Blog World Expo about reaching multicultural audiences and my friend Wayne Sutton was on it and a member in the audience, said “how do I reach…” I think he was saying inner city… “How do we reach inner city kids that maybe don’t use or care about a computer or laptop as much?” And one of the panelists answered, “Well, they may not care about that but I bet you if they don’t already, they’ll soon have a mobile phone that will be accessing the Web and that’s how you reach them.” So it is a separate audience that can be reached and I think that plays into your point.

Kevin: So right now when you’re designing a new site, typically you design the desktop experience and then if you’ve got money left over or if your demographics justify it, you’ll develop a mobile phone version of your site. But I think the day is coming soon when your market research will tell you to develop the mobile version of the site first, depending on your audience. So there, Steve Ballmer. [laugh]

I think the idea that the desktop browser experience is somehow special and will forever define the web experience, provide the primary one, the one that people most associate with the Web. I think that’s very naïve.

Stephan: My biggest hangup with what he’s saying is that most people don’t walk around with a netbook and pull it out and get on the internet.

What I’m saying is just that even people with other phones, Android, whatever, the G1, when they go out, they’re not pulling out their netbook to get on the internet when they’re walking down the street or to check their email or something; they’re pulling out their phone. So the idea that it was designed for the PC and not for what people are doing now I think is a fallacy. I think that it’s changing, it’s shifting. Sure, it may not have been designed initially for the PC but that’s changing now. And I’m sorry, Ballmer, times change. People are moving away from the normal idea of a computer.

Kevin: I’m hesitant to even bring up the fact that Microsoft has a mobile phone platform of their own because it almost feels like a cheap shot to bring it up. But in the past two weeks Microsoft has released Windows Mobile 6.5, which has a whole series of phones from different manufacturers running that operating system and, of course, it’s got a web browser on it.

Stephan: Oh, it shouldn’t. They should take that off; it’s not designed for it.

Kevin: [laughs]

Patrick: I don’t think he’s saying that mobile phones are going to disappear; I think he’s saying that the Internet is going to be primarily driven by desktop use for the foreseeable future and I think whether or not you agree with that is the discussion.

Kevin: So what does that say about the company’s priorities when the CEO on the week that they’re launching a new mobile phone operating system with a browser in it is saying “the internet wasn’t designed for mobile phones.”

Patrick: It’s also because they’re launching their new operating system. Windows 7 is probably the priority.

Kevin: Right.

Stephan: It comes back to Kevin’s point about the developing countries because you’ve got China, you got India, you’ve got a lot of South American countries that are all developing and all getting a large number of cell phone users because it’s easy to have a cell phone. It is not easy to have a landline to the internet in your house.

Patrick: I mean these points are going to be business driven too. I mean let’s not forget in a way, I mean, Microsoft has a foothold in a desktop market so, of course, they’re going to have vested interest in desktops. Apple has obviously this huge, huge foothold in the mobile industry with the iPhone and its massive sales so they’re going to be interested in that side of the Web and pushing that. There’s always a business side to it.

Kevin: Alright. Guys, it’s been a chockablock episode but let’s get to our spotlights before we sign off here.

Stephan, what have you got for our listeners?

Stephan: I actually have an interesting video, kind of funny, kind of irrelevant to everything that we’ve talked about.

Kevin: That’s how spotlights are best.

Stephan: Yes. It is a video about where goldfish come from and it’s Leelefever of Common Craft. They make the little paper animations that explain things. Paperworks, yes. Thank you, Patrick. And it’s a really interesting 5-minute video at Ignite Seattle and Where Goldfish Come From… Apparently, he grew up on a fish farm, grew up the son of a goldfish farmer in North Carolina and he shares his story. It’s really interesting, kind of funny, and just a fun watch.

Kevin: I haven’t seen this video. Is this like the birds and bees for fish? Or is there some deep message in this video that we can look forward to? Or is it really just, here’s what you may not know about how goldfish farming happens.

Stephan: It’s just about how goldfish farming, you know, what his experience has been in goldfish farming, growing up in that industry and what his dad’s dream of doing this and stuff. It’s a good story.

Patrick: Yes, it is. It does have some insight to it, I think. I’ve watched it.

Kevin: My spotlight this week is a pair of videos by Merlin Mann who many people may know from the site 43folders.com. They may know his Inbox Zero video from a talk he gave at Google a while back but he occasionally does video blogging on Vimeo and he in the past week released a couple of videos. The first was a little concerning to some people. It’s called “Merlin Labs! 5 Surprising House Hacks” and he basically goes on a rant about how… It’s really hard to explain. He explains how common household objects that you may have been using for Web 2.0 social media purposes can actually be used for common household tasks.

For example, the idea bulb that you hold above your head every time you have an idea, you can actually screw it in to a light fixture and use it to light a room of your house. That’s the first one of his five surprising house hacks and they get crazier from there. And the reaction to this video—which I have to say may not be entirely safe for work, there is a bit of language in that video—there were some people worrying that Merlin had lost his marbles and so the very next day, he followed it up with a much longer, something like 45-minute long video called “Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now),” and in that video he kind of explains the point he was trying to make with his insane House Hacks video. He explains first of all, that the straw that broke the camel’s back that led him to make that video was a post on lifehacker explaining that when you have food caked on to pots and pans in your kitchen, a good hack to get them clean is to soak them overnight in your sink with dish detergent.

Patrick: Is that a hack?

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. So his…

Stephan: It sounds like washing the dishes to me.

Kevin: [laugh] So his overriding point here is that there are people out there who are in the business of wasting your time by drowning you in productivity hacks and that the real key to being productive is knowing when to turn off those streams of noise and actually put your head down and be productive. And as creative people online, we do need to expose ourselves to that noise as a source of inspiration and ideas but we also need to be very good at knowing when to switch it off and when to do the hard work and that these sites like lifehacker.com, it’s not in their interest to ever tell you, “Okay, it’s time to close your RSS reader and get some work done now.” Rather, they are in the business of leading you on to the next ridiculous hack. And so if this interests you at all, this is a really… The first video, once you know what he’s on about is absolutely hysterically hilarious and the second video, if this is meaningful stuff to you, is really inspiring and it’s kind of a preview of what is coming in the book that Merlin is working on.

Patrick: That sounds great.

Kevin: Yeah. Patrick, what’s your spotlight?

Patrick: My spotlight is a post from Chris Brogan at chrisbrogan.com. It’s “What It Takes To Be An Overnight Success” and it’s a short post with a nice little video. It’s a minute long, you can digest it in a couple of minutes, and basically, you know, he gets people to look at him and say that he’s an overnight success or he gets something because he’s Chris Brogan. And it’s silly because of all the work that goes into what he does. And in the video he shows that he got to bed at 12, fell asleep at 3, up at 5:30, flying to another conference. And basically the story is the work that goes into the success that you see in other people. So I definitely recommend checking it out and giving the video a watch for a bit of perspective about success.

Kevin: Alright. Well that’s the end of an episode. To all our listeners in countries where Halloween is a thing, Happy Halloween for this weekend.

Patrick: Boo!

Kevin: Let’s go around the table, guys.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, ifroggy.com and on Twitter @ifroggy.

Stephan: This is Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves.

Kevin: You can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint is on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show and subscribe to get every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com if you have something to tell us or something to ask us, we’d love to hear from you.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Interview Transcript

Kevin: October 23rd, 2009. On today’s show, a collection of interviews recorded at Web Directions South 2009 in Sydney. This is the SitePoint Podcast #33: Team Opera at WDS09.

Kevin: This is Kevin Yank for the SitePoint Podcast. I’m at Web Directions South 2009 in Sydney, and I thought I’d talk to a few of the attendees to see what they’re excited about.

Male 1: The old microformats stuff finally starting to tick … maps going mainstream.

Kevin: So location-aware stuff actually becoming useful.

Male 1: Yeah.

Kevin: Yeah, cool.

Male 2: I’m on a big location-aware binge at the moment, but it’s really nice how everything is sort of starting to get beyond it’s own little individual applications and everything is tying in together.

Male 3: Yeah, I’m really quite excited about just the mainstreaming of the social web, you know, and how Twitter has just really taken off. I’m also quite excited about the implications of the mobile web and what that means about being able to serve applications on a small device, like an iPhone. So that pretty much is exciting me at the moment.

Kevin: Alright. Have you picked your favorite talk that you’re planning to not miss so far?

Male 3: Cameron Adams, always Cameron Adams.

Kevin: Cameron Adams … Google Wave!

Male 3: Yep.

Kevin: Alright. Well, I’ll be sure to catch up with him. Thanks guys.

Kevin: So what are you excited about?

Male 4: Adobe announced two days ago that they would have an export function for Flash to iPhone applications, so this sounds really cool because as of now, I’m not able to write iPhone applications, but I know how to write Flash. So it’s like just because of that announcement, I could write iPhone applications.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s something Ben Galbraith mentioned in his talk as well. He talked about a framework that let you export from JavaScript to an iPhone application.

Male 4: The phone gap.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, PhoneGap.

Male 4: That’s what I’m suggesting as well, I haven’t heard of it before.

Kevin: Yeah, so the ability to take the Web to these platforms that would be closed otherwise.

Male 4: Yes, and the ability that I, as a web developer, are able to write real applications.

Kevin: What are you excited about?

Male 5: RDFa.

Kevin: Alright, tell us what that is.

Male 5: It’s something that excites me. I’m really excited. [laughter] So we could go around in circles.

Kevin: What’s exciting about it?

Male 5: I’ll be serious. It’s a number of things. It allows you to make the information that you publish more precise, or allows machines to interpret the information that you publish. So often, we have web pages that contain a lot of useful content, like addresses or book reviews, or whatever. Humans can interpret that very easily; you look at the page, you can read it. By marking it up more precisely with RDFa, we can help search engines, we can help applications, we can help user interfaces to deal with the information more precisely.

Kevin: Alright, so the million dollar question – do you think RDFa is going to get more traction than microformats?

Male 5: I would say in many ways, it already has. If you look at things like Google’s recent announcement to process RDFa that marks up licensing information about images or formatting information about videos, there is a new initiative called GoodRelations, which is a complete vocabulary that allows you to mark up products for sale, opening hours of shops, you know, all this kind of thing – all uses RDFa and Yahoo! are processing map format and Google looks like they will, as well.

I think microformat is a very different thing though, and I think – I hope – that some of the things that people have done with microformats is going to move over into the RDFa world. Microformats is a great way of saying to people look, here’s a set of terms, if you use these terms, there will be a benefit, and I think that’s, in some ways, what RDFa needs to do. Here’s the syntax, fine; but here’s a bunch of terms that if you mark – like Google have said about a review – if you use these terms to mark up a review, we can do something clever with it.

Kevin: Thank you.

Kevin: Guys, James Beatie, what are you excited about on the web at the moment?

James: The canvas element. I just think it’s an interesting progression of the Web, you know, being able to do all this graphical stuff with markup and in the browser rather than pre-making and pre-compiling image files and graphics files.

Kevin: Yeah, have you played with it much, or is it something you’re looking forward to?

James: No, I’ve seen demos of it, but I’m hoping today I’ll get enough to be able to then start working on it myself.

Kevin: Great. It’s incredible. Guys?

Male 6: Probably IE9.

Kevin: IE9.

Male 6: Oh yeah, I’m forward thinking. [laughter]

Kevin: I haven’t heard anything about IE9!

Male 6: No, well, not many people have but that’s what I’m excited about.

Kevin: Did you go over to the Microsoft booth and get the inside track?

Male 6: I don’t want to talk to those guys just yet. [laughter]

Kevin: This is Kevin Yank at Web Directions South 2009 in Sydney for the SitePoint Podcast. I’m here with Lachlan Hunt, Chris Mills and Daniel Davis, all joining us from the Opera Developer Relations Team, is that right guys?

Lachlan: Not quite, I’m in Core, but they send me along anyway.

Kevin: Core. What’s Core?

Lachlan: This is the core technology, like on the actual rendering engine in the browser and JavaScript engine and stuff like that.

Kevin: Alright, and Lachlan Hunt, you do a lot of standards work, you work on the HTML5 working group and that sort of stuff.

Lachlan: Yeah, I do HTML5 and I’m in the Web Apps working group group, I work on the Selectors API…

Kevin: Alright, and Chris and Daniel, is your focus the same, or is there something different between your two focuses?

Chris: So the difference in focus really, Daniel and I are both in the Developer Relations Team. I hate to use the word marketing, but we kind of do marketing but specifically aimed at developers and people who actually know what we’re talking about. So we form a feedback loop and a bridge, really, between the ultra-technical guys at Opera and the developers and end users. It’s mainly to develop a focus, but we talk a lot to end users as well. It’s important to keep that going and to help people to learn how to use our new technologies as much as possible but also focus on open web standards, which is a very big part of our remit.

Daniel: Doing this is a growing trend as well, because we’ve just increased our developer relations team rapidly over the past year and Palm now have got a sort of fledgling developer relations team. So I think we’re seeing more of this sort of non-marketing; it’s indirect marketing where we’re not promoting use— Well, we are saying “use Opera”, but we’re doing it in a way whereby if you build on standards, if you build for the Open Web, then indirectly, you’re benefiting Opera, as well as benefiting the web world at large.

Kevin: Okay, so that’s what I’m really interested in talking about is Opera’s choice to approach the developer community so directly. I mean you don’t really see that as much from the other browser vendors. Firefox is kind of – these days, it’s a bit of a browser by developers for developers, so they are around a fair bit if only because the people building the browser tend to be web developers themselves. But, you know, you don’t see… you could accuse Apple and Microsoft of being quite quiet on the developer scene; when they have stuff to say, it’s usually because they have a new browser just out that they want you to take a look at and the other three years of the development cycle, they’re pretty silent. Whereas Opera, you guys, this is at least the second year that you’ve had a significant contingent at this conference – this great conference – but it’s a little conference in Sydney, really.

So why is it such a priority for Opera to communicate with developers?

Chris: It’s because really I think the developers are the most important kind of audience to look at getting into using our browser. And like a lot of the other browser vendors who have all started to release decent developer tools, you know—obviously you have Firebug started that trend off, but all of us are looking to go down that path now as well and all of us are starting to form these – well, most of us, there is a couple that aren’t – but most of us are starting to do these strong developer relations teams that are teaching people how to use the standards and teaching people how to employ better practices in their development, for example. As well as just the kind of the standard developer relations stuff, ee also do a lot of in terms of education. As well as high level and articles, tutorials, and talks at conferences on advanced development techniques and future standards, such as canvas and the other HTML5 stuff and CSS3, we’re also going back to basics and producing things like the Opera Web Standards curriculum that helps students and hobbyists, anybody that wants to just get into doing web development properly to start off on the right foot, as well.

There is a hell of a lot of work to do and we’re almost trying to do a kind of cover-all approach really.

Lachlan: We need developers to understand that we’re there to help them. We want them to test their web sites in Opera and make sure they use standards and stuff. That’s why we’re focused on the curriculum as he said.

Kevin: Daniel, I hear you’re the man in Japan. So are you all on your own there, or does Opera have a presence in Japan besides yourself?

Daniel: Yeah, we have about nearly 50 people, I think, in the Tokyo office now, which is bigger than a lot of people expect, but then we have big contract with Nintendo, we supply the browser for the Wii and the DSi, and also for internal telephone companies, KDDI is a big one. So we have a lot of engineers who take what Lachlan’s team do and then customize it and personalize it for the Japanese partners.

Kevin: Especially a lot of the SitePoint audience is in North America and in North America, Opera continues to be a very niche browser but in the European market, we hear that Opera has a much bigger presence. How is Opera in Asia?

Lachlan: We’re huge in Russia. Massive market there.

Daniel: Yes, it depends on which parts of Russia – I’m sorry, which parts of Asia, just like it depends on which parts of Europe. Russia and Eastern Europe are very big. And in Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, we’re very, very big. In Japan, unfortunately, not so but that’s my job now to increase that.

Kevin: The Opera browser on Wii used to be a paid product and it just became free, is that right?

Daniel: That’s correct, yes. It used to be 500 points, but they’ve made it free, I think, from this month, they’re going to pay back people who have paid 500 credits in the form of giving them a free game worth 500 credits.

Kevin: Oh geez, I’ve gotta get my 500 free credits back then.

Speaking of reaching the developers, Lachlan, I used to know you as a standards geek who would never, never choose one browser over another, never pledge allegiance to one browser or another because it would ruin your credibility in the standards community. You’ve thrown in with Opera – what got you over that line? Was it this engagement with the developer community?

Lachlan: Well, yes, it’s their involvements with standards, which was my major reason for going there. I was involved with HTML5 before I went there, and I was working with a lot of the Opera team on that and then I was looking for a job, and they said come and work for us. So I did that, I’m still doing what I like to do and I’m still very vendor neutral when it comes to developing websites for standards and stuff. I work with Opera because of what they’re interested in.

Kevin: Right, and Opera understands that about you.

Lachlan: Uh yes.

Kevin: [laughter] That’s good to hear. Opera 10 obviously is out, but you guys are already talking about what’s coming next in your rendering engine. Clearly, you guys are thinking at least a version ahead. What are some of the things that developers can be looking forward to?

Chris: We’re aiming to, you know, keep competitive and keep up with a lot of the stuff that the other browsers are doing, so we’ve got the CSS3 features, such as box-shadow and Transitions and Transforms and all of this stuff is being worked on, if not already, in at least a public released version. It was interesting to hear Ben Galbraith from formerly Mozilla, now with Palm, talk a few times this week about future things, such as really fast JavaScript engines, like in Opera, we’ve got Carakan coming out relatively soon. He actually gave an amazing amount of plugs for Opera in his talks, it was very noble of him. But then again, you know, like a lot of the people in Opera, he’s another guy that really just cares about open standards more than anything else.

Going back to a previous point actually, I think it’s absolutely right of Lachy to talk about, kind of vendor neutrality almost, because it’s a much more convincing story to give to people that we’re supporting open standards, rather than just trying to say “support Opera”. It’s like a lot of the “open the web” activities that we do, which basically involves going around to companies and saying well you know, you’ve got this kind of stupid browser sniffing stuff that really sucks because it makes your browser not work in Opera and Safari usually, but sometimes it’s Opera, Safari, and Firefox – it’s sort of the really bad old IE-only sniffing stuff. But it’s not just about getting into support Opera, it’s about getting into support standards properly. At the end of the day, that rings true with at least all of the developers at conferences like these. But of course, we’re also trying to get into the minds and hearts of these more kind of – how do I describe it – Stuart Langridge once called them “dark matter developers” – these guys that are just, you know, don’t come to the conferences and they’re just sort of toiling away in dark rooms and don’t have to bother to do standards properly. But I think there’s conferences for those guys as well, the “Future of…” conferences seem to have a lot of those kind of guys there. It’s interesting to start reaching into some of their heads as well.

Kevin: Alright, well thank you for taking the time guys.

Chris: Thanks for having us, Kevin.

Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch.

You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.

The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Download this Episode

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• SitePoint Podcast #32: Everything in the Cloud (MP3, 33.9MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

TypePad Motion picks up where Pownce left off

• Six Apart Opens Up TypePad APIs, Relaunches Pownce As TypePad Motion (TechCrunch)
• TypePad Motion (Six Apart)
• Brad’s WordPress Logo post
• TypePad Platform (Six Apart)

Microsoft to blame for SideKick data outage, loss

• Sidekick outage: How can Microsoft save face? (seattle pi)
• What Caused the Microsoft/Danger Disaster? (Hiptop3)

WebKit dominating mobile browser market

• There Is No WebKit on Mobile (QuirksBlog)
• WebKit Mobile and Progress (Alex Russell)

Mozilla Slams Chrome Frame

• Mozilla Join Microsoft in Slamming Google Chrome Frame (SitePoint)

Host Spotlights:

• Brad: Woopra
• Patrick: Social Media, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Kevin: Dropbox LAN Sync beta

Show Transcript

Kevin: October 16th, 2009. Pownce rises from the ashes as TypePad Motion, Microsoft endangers cloud-hosted data, and WebKit takes over the mobile browser market. This is the SitePoint Podcast #32: Everything in the Cloud.

And hello, hello. Welcome to another SitePoint podcast. I’ve been away for a couple of episodes, but I have to say, guys, you did a great job in my absence. I might just sit back and listen again this time. It was fun to actually listen to an episode and I didn’t know what was going to happen next.

Brad: It was all Patrick.

Patrick: Well thank you. It was a team effort.

Kevin: We’ve got Brad Williams from WebDevStudios here today and Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network. Stephan is off today. He’s suffering the effects of some flight delays, so blame the airlines I say, but we’ll try and make do without him.

Our first story today is to do with Pownce and this is revisiting a story that we talked about really early in the life of this podcast. Pownce closed its doors a while ago when they were acquired by Six Apart.

Am I remembering that right, Brad?

Brad: Yes. Six Apart essentially bought Pownce not to keep it going, but as it was reported, to kind of gain their talent that was working behind the scenes on Pownce and now we know exactly what they planned to do with it. They actually released what they have titled TypePad Motion, which is essentially Pownce open sourced, so you can literally download the open source application and set up your own microblogging platform anywhere that you’d like.

Kevin: Now I was just looking at TypePad Motion and on my homepage is a giant WordPress logo posted by someone named Brad.

Is that you, Brad?

Brad: Ahh … maybe.

Patrick: As your counsel, I advise you not to answer any questions from this man.

Brad: It may or may not have been testing the new service.

Kevin: That’s bordering on sabotage, I have to say.

Brad: It’s just that it’s the first picture I found on my computer.

Patrick: What do you got on there, a bunch of WordPress logos?

Brad: Yeah, pretty much.

Patrick: It’s a sad life, isn’t it? Gosh.

Kevin: When this acquisition first happened, they kind of hinted that there would be something like this – that Pownce would be returning, that they were shutting down now, but they had big plans to use the technology of Pownce in a new way and you’re right, I guess this is the outcome of that. It has been several months, at least.

But this TypePad Mobile (sic) is kind of showcasing a new platform that Six Apart is launching as well ‑ the Typekit (sic.) platform, which as far as I can figure is an API for people to build their own blogging platforms out of.

So rather than getting something like WordPress that has a fully integrated solution, Typekit (sic.) platform gives you bits and pieces like posts and comments and user accounts and you can plug them together like LEGO bricks however you want and build your own blogging platform out of the pieces that you want.

I’m not really convinced that this is solving a real problem; it’s kind of a solution to a non-problem in my view at this point.

Brad, do you have any sense for what this would be good for?

Brad: I mean, I guess launching your own microblogging site, that’s kind of what they’re pushing the features for using it, kind of having your own brand and maintaining your own brand rather than promoting another social network’s brand, you can kind of launch your own.

Kevin: Right, because the world doesn’t have enough social networking sites.

Brad: That seemed to be kind of their big push behind it.

The thing, like you mentioned, this is part of TypePad platform and part of that means your data is actually stored on TypePad servers, even on the open source side. So if you download the actual application and set it up on your own server, your data is not going to save locally in your own database; it’s still going to save in TypePad’s database in their infrastructure. It’s definitely something you want to think about whether you still want to kind of hand over your content and data to TypePad.

Patrick: That’s an interesting point. That’s kind of a moment for pause for me, but from looking at the TypePad Motion site, it’s somewhat clear that they’re branding it as like a community platform. I don’t see why they couldn’t make some headway in there similar to Ning. I mean, you can look at Ning and obviously no one hosts Ning data but Ning, so you have a lot of celebrities who are using Ning for sites from 50 Cent, Fabulous, various celebrities are using Ning sites because they’re easy to set up, there’s really not a whole lot of mess or cost or effort that has to go into it because you’re not hosting it.

I think the same thing could apply to TypePad Motion. It’s sort of maybe somewhere between Ning and Twitter, and that will appeal to certain celebrities or music artists and they’ll prefer it and they’ll give it a shot. That’s how I kind of view it as sort of a Ning-like platform, but obviously close to the Twitter.

Kevin: That really is a… yeah, it’s a strange one because WordPress gives you the option of hosting your blog at WordPress.com and everything’s done on their end, or you can download the WordPress software and run it entirely on your servers. I wonder if WordPress would be as popular as it is today if that download still stored your data on their servers in the cloud.

That brings us to our next story, which is this huge failure of the cloud in the past week for Sidekick users. Sidekick handheld Windows mobile phone – but much more than a phone, it’s one of these smartphones with a slide out keyboard, really a pocket computer for those people who use it ‑ and in the past week, the servers that sit behind this device and store all the user data when that device is switched off have failed.

It looks like the rumors are swirling and so no one’s really quite sure what happened except that the data services associated with this device went down and Microsoft – or rather Danger, which is a subsidiary of Microsoft that hosts all of this data – was saying, “Do not turn off your phone, do not take the battery out or your data is going to go away.” A lot of users, when their phone stopped working that was the first thing they tried ‑ they turned it off and on again. We’re in the computer age – that’s what we do and just like that – their calendar, their contacts, even their photos in some cases disappeared because apparently there was no backup for this cloud-hosted data.

Guys, what would you do if this happened?

Brad: When I first read the story, what kind of struck me as interesting is that I had no idea there were any cell phones out there that actually stored your personal data like contacts in the cloud. I just assumed they’re all locally stored on your phone.

Kevin: Yeah, we’re talking about it giving us pause that a blogging platform stores stuff in the cloud. Imagine something as personal as your mobile phone.

Brad: Yeah, that’s the first thing that caught my attention and you’ve got to wonder, how many Sidekick owners actually knew that? Is that something they tell you right up front, “Hey, your data is actually stored on a server off your phone and if our servers are affected so will your personal data.” I mean, that’s something that I would want to know about my phone.

Patrick: I’m sure it’s in the agreement you sign before they give it to you. [laughter]

Kevin: [laughter]

Brad: I’m sure it’s in the fine print.

Patrick: I’m sure it’s there.

Kevin: They save money building memory into the phone by just transferring everything over to the cloud.

Brad: Yeah, it just blows my mind, especially something like the Sidekick, which is a smartphone essentially. So it’s not like just some cheap little free phone they give you, it’s a smartphone, it does a lot of smartphone functionality and for it not to be stored locally is wild, I have no idea.

Kevin: I mentioned there were a lot of rumors swirling and I want to stress that this story that I’m about to relate is pure rumor at this point, but the best information we can get about exactly what happened here is that Danger, the company that hosts these servers, wanted to do an upgrade of their Storage Area Network (which is SAN), and they brought in some contractors to do that work. Normally, when you would get that kind of work done, you would make sure that there was a backup in place of this data in case anything went wrong, but for one reason or another, there was no working backup. When the contractor flicked the wrong switch or typed the wrong command, this Storage Area Network was destroyed and there was no backup in place.

They’re exploring all their data recovery options as the story goes, but they’re not that hopeful. Microsoft continues to post occasional updates saying, “there’s a bit more hope… we’re not really sure,” but they immediately started advising their customers not to turn off their phones because what they’re going to try and do is bring these services back up and then ask the phones to sink back to the now empty servers and recover all of the data that way.

But for customers who have lost their data, they’re promising— T‑Mobile, which is the mobile phone carrier which carriers this device, is promising customers who have experienced data loss a $100 “customer appreciation card” in addition to the free month of data service that is already being handed out to all Sidekick data customers.

So there you go guys, that’s the price on your irreplaceable data ‑ $100.

That sounds like they’re getting off cheap.

Patrick: Well, it’s clear there was a server outage from the reports, I mean that’s a fact. I guess the speculation is why there was an outage and what happened with the backup system because there are reports, and everyone came up and said “there was a server outage, we lost the data, please don’t turn off your phone.”

They released a statement – T-Mobile released a statement saying that “recent efforts indicate that the process of recovering some lost content may now be possible.”

They’re still developing, they’re still working on it. I think that $100 – it’s better than nothing. I mean, at this point, what are we going to do, right? Let’s say the data is lost, so what are we going to do? Obviously we can’t bring it back if it’s gone so obviously, you can offer a freebie, you can offer a credit. I mean I understand some people may take offense to that – “It’s a $100, that’s what my life is worth to you? My life is my phone.”

Brad: You should give everybody a free out from the contract.

Patrick: But you can leave the service, and that may be something that’s going to happen.

Kevin: I think of $100 in terms of how long on the plan that’s worth. A heavy data user like that is going to be getting through $100 a month. That’s almost saying to me like, “Okay, we screwed up this month, so you get this month for free. We’ll try and do better next month.”

Is one failure like this a month really the best that they’re hoping for and otherwise they refund you for that month.

Yeah, I’m with Brad; the right thing to do is to give them an out from their contract, but failing that, obviously, they’re going to be holding onto their customers for dear life. They need to at least be really open about how they communicate and I would offer a year refund if you want to stay in your contract.

Patrick: You need to give away money that’s not yours. [laughter]

Brad: I think really Microsoft needs to step up and say something. Microsoft really hasn’t said anything about this, so of course, there’s all these different rumors going around and nobody really knows what happened, except for Microsoft. They need to come out and at least make some type of official statement.

Patrick: It’s Danger. It’s a subsidiary of Microsoft and Danger has been releasing statements, T-Mobile has been releasing statements. There is statements coming out. It’s a trifecta of three companies that are essentially involved in this, whether or not they like, Danger, Microsoft, and Mobile. Danger and Microsoft, obviously the same company but, you know, I think the reason we bring this discussion up – obviously, we’re not a cell phone podcast, it’s more to do with the reliability of the cloud because there’s more chatter around this story than just the story, basically calling into question the reliability of cloud-based services offered by different companies, not just Microsoft but Google, Amazon and so on. There have been blips with the cloud-hosted services and very visible occurrences of these problems cause people – and business customers are what people are concerned about – to question the viability of these cloud-based services.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. I suppose it’s in the name though, you know. I would think twice about trusting my data to a company named Danger.

Patrick: Call it Smoke hosting … Wispy Smoke hosting. I mean, I think people need to be educated about what this stuff is and the cloud hosting. I mean, we all have to have to do our due diligence about just what checks are in place and I think that’s going to come with education over time and maybe some people are going to have to lose some data the same way we learned to back up our computers, a lot of us. You know that first time our hard drive crashed; obviously it was a bad feeling but then we figured out okay, well we need to back up this stuff ourself. And I think you can’t trust a cloud-hosted service, just like you can’t trust any hosted service. I mean there’s always got to be a data backup that’s separate, so I think people are going to have to come to that realization with cloud hosting and then everyone will better off; that clouding hosting isn’t the holy grail, so to speak.

Kevin: Yeah, that is an interesting point though that users need to be aware of the choices they’re making. It’s almost like a food additive, you know. If your phone hosts its data in the cloud, maybe there’s a regulation that should exist that says that needs to be on a label on the phone, just like food has to have ‘contains aspartame,’ so you can make an informed decision about your sweetener choices; the phone needs to have a ‘contains cloud hosting’ sticker on it.

Patrick: I don’t know if you’ve seen the commercials from IBM that explain cloud hosting; I know they’re running over here in the US, I don’t know if they’re running internationally or not but…

Kevin: No.

Patrick: So they have this IBM’ers or whatever, they’re talking about cloud hosing and first, they start with a technical description like “It’s an integrated network of systems…” blah blah blah blah blah, you know… whatever. And it’s for the effect of saying it’s technical. And then they get all these people, they’re saying like, I don’t know, fluffy words is what I would say but you know – basically saying “my data is in the cloud and I can get it wherever I am” and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t really speak to what it actually is and obviously, it’s marketing.

But it’s tough. I don’t know if it’s on the services to inform or on the customers to do their own due diligence; I think we as people have to be responsible for ourselves.

Kevin: Well from one mobile phone story to another, Peter Paul Koch who’s widely known as PPK has been doing some really intensive testing of the mobile phone browsers out there that are based on the WebKit platform. WebKit, of course, is the rendering engine at the heart of the Safari browser as well as several others, Google Chrome among others, but it’s also catching on in a big way on mobile devices. Mobile Safari on the iPhone, of course, is powered by WebKit but a lot of other phones from the major manufacturers are now adopting WebKit as their rendering engine.

The problem is, according to Peter Paul Koch, that these implementations vary widely in their support, especially of newer standards. His testing, which among other things tests the scores of these different phones on the Acid 3 test, has revealed that on these phones, all of which are WebKit-based, they achieve scores everywhere from 0 to near 100% and it varies all the way along the spectrum.

And so he’s saying on the surface it may look like we’re achieving greater consistency but in fact, WebKit is not WebKit and you can’t say I’m going to write a site that works in WebKit mobile because WebKit mobile is not a single browser; it’s a whole spectrum, a whole world of browsers, and that this is just going to cost a lot of headaches for designers.

Guys, what phones do you have? How do you browse the Web on the go?

Brad: I’m on an iPhone.

Patrick: [laughter] I’m on a prepaid pay-as-you-go phone. If you ever go to a conference with me then you’ll see, I’ll whip it out. I don’t browse the Web on it.

Kevin: Oh right, okay. So you’re on an iPhone, Brad, I’m on an iPhone as well. So we’re pretty much consistent but have you seen some of these other phones that are using WebKit?

Brad: I haven’t exactly used them personally but I’ve seen based on these charts and how well they perform, it’s almost overwhelming looking at this from a developer’s standpoint and how we’re supposed to actually program something to standards or something of how we know it will function. How are we supposed to actually trust our code, that’s it’s going to look right when there’s so many different… like you said, so many different WebKits that we have to program for and think about.

Kevin: Yeah. The situation isn’t entirely different on the desktop. We’ve got Safari, we’ve got Chrome, we’ve got Konqueror; those are the three major browsers on the desktop that rely on the WebKit platform and they all achieve pretty different results as well. Safari 4 is 204 out of 216, Chrome 3 is 192 out of 216, and Konqueror 357 is the latest one I can see a score for, only achieves 103 out of 216 but I think there are newer releases of that.

So WebKit isn’t WebKit on the desktop as well but we’re not used to thinking of it that way. We think of it as Safari, Chrome, Konqueror. We test those things separately. On the mobile, of course, there’s the iPhone but there’s browsers called Ozone, Iris, Bolt, the Android G2 browser, the Palm Pre browser, and the Series 60 over several versions. There’s Version 3 and Version 5 at least that are tested in PPK’s grid here. And so, like, Series 60 Version 3 scores 45, whereas the Ozone browser scores 185.

Alex Russell, who is best known for his work on the Dojo Toolkit, has broken down these results in a different order. He’s saying that what PPK misses here is that the mobile marketplace turns over so much more quickly than the desktop browser marketplace. On the mobile side, you can almost assume that a user is going to be getting a new phone every two years unless maybe you’re Patrick O’Keefe.

Patrick, how old is your phone?

Patrick: My phone’s actually about probably a year or so old. It’s not that old, but it is cheap.

Kevin: Okay. So it’s not fancy but it’s not old.

Patrick: But it is cheap.

Kevin: So you follow that pattern too though that pretty much everyone replaces their phone every couple of years and as a result, if you look at this grid of results and sort them by what’s released most recently, the results don’t actually look that bad. The only two browsers in his list that are clearly released in 2009 are Ozone and iPhone 3.1, and they’re both over 172 out of 216 which is right up there with the best that we have on the desktop. Safari 4 and Chrome 3 and Chrome 2 are the only browsers on the desktop that do better than that.

Alex Russell’s point here is that what we’ve got, although we do have this range of many different browser platforms, that’s a symptom of the rapid progress that’s being made on the mobile phone browser. And that if we hang on tight, you know, there are a lot of things to test against but the baseline is moving a lot more quickly than we have seen in the past on the desktop.

Do you guys agree with that assessment?

Brad: Yeah. I think Alex’s point is spot on; most people are going to get a new phone every two years and these are normal users, not necessarily developers or designers but these are just your normal cell phone users, internet users. They’re going to get a new phone when they get a new plan most likely. And you’re right, when they do, it will have the most recent browser, whatever that may be. So they’re more likely to do than they are probably to upgrade from IE 6 or IE 7.

Kevin: Well, yeah. And that’s a great reminder, IE 6. When it took such dominance in the marketplace on the desktop, what we had not as we’re seeing on the mobile, a great period of innovation and advancement, we had stagnation on the desktop. It’s really interesting how that one factor that people are nearly forced to upgrade their phone every two years is preserving that advancement, that continual improvement in the browser platform even though we’re seeing a single player, WebKit, really taking hold as a monopoly position in the browser rendering space.

Brad: Now if we can just force users to upgrade their desktops every two years, then we’ll be great.

Kevin: There you go. Well, that’s not a terrible idea, especially as these cloud services become more and more popular, I would not be surprised.

You know the Google Chrome OS that has been promised sometime in the next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if the computers running Chrome OS were sold on a contract, on a two year contract. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Brad: It would be.

Patrick: And we just finished talking about how great the cloud computing was, just a minute ago.

Brad: And now we’ve sold everybody on it again.

Patrick: Let’s segue. We want everything to be in the cloud, our operating system, our documents, our email, everything should be in the cloud and nothing should be …

Kevin: Everything in the cloud. Well we definitely found the theme for our episode.

And continuing on that, this Google Chrome cloudy atmosphere we’ve got going here, we return to something that you guys talked about in our last episode, the Chrome Frame Plug-in for earlier versions of Internet Explorer, and I think you guys all pretty much agreed that it was – with some reservations, a good thing, last episode. But there’s been some debate since then. Microsoft predictably came out and said that “This isn’t something we wouldn’t recommend because” – and I’m paraphrasing here – but they said “it doubled the space for security attacks on the browser because it basically created a browser within the browser and so it was twice as potentially vulnerable as a browser by itself.” But in the past week, the big surprise is that Mozilla is coming on the same side as Microsoft here. Mozilla is saying that Chrome Frame is a bad idea.

Patrick: Mozilla would rather everybody just switch off Internet Explorer.

Brad: Yeah, this was kind of surprising when I first read about it. I mean, I definitely didn’t think Mozilla would be taking IE’s side but apparently they are. I don’t really know if there’s some kind of meaning behind it. If maybe they’re hoping people rather than install Chrome Frame would actually upgrade to something like FireFox or if they’re just generally against it. I just have a hard time understanding that argument.

Patrick: Well I think that it may not be them going on IE’s side as much as it’s them saying, “You know what, we don’t want people using IE, we want their market share to drop,” because if you read this quote, basically they want people to move away from IE, not stay in IE and use Chrome. So they’d rather have people move to Chrome than stay in IE. And you know, I guess, they talk about the reasons here but, you know, I don’t know if I put them as saying the same thing as IE exactly; I think and every one has their perspective and what will be beneficial to them.

Kevin: Yeah, I agree, they definitely seem to have their own reasons for condemning Chrome Frame but it’s difficult to read through the PR speak here and figure what their real reason is. They’ve got two quotes – one from Mitchell Baker, chairman of Mozilla Foundation, and former Mozilla CEO, and the other for Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, and they seem to be giving a bunch of reasons and some of them seem to be a bit FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). They seem to be saying that if we embrace Chrome Frame we are taking the first step down a slippery slope which would see different sites creating their own site-specific plug ins and running their sites entirely within those plug-ins. So they’re talking about sites like Facebook or sites based on the Facebook Connect platform running within a Facebook browser plug-in inside every browser and saying that yeah, if we embrace this sort of thing, pretty soon there is going to be no web platform. Everyone is just going to build their own browser plug in to run their sites.

I’m not sure I buy that. It’s much easier to develop a site than it is to develop a browser plug-in, let alone when it will work across al browsers and subvert the browser marketplace. I really don’t buy that one at all. It’s clear that Chrome Frame is an answer to a very specific problem which is legacy versions of Internet Explorer. I doubt even Google would suggest running Chrome Frame in the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Patrick: Though they offer it.

Kevin: They do offer it. Yeah, absolutely. But Microsoft sure seemed to be doing a lot better with their browser development these days. I would be very surprised if they cannot keep up with the requirements of Google’s HTML5 applications within Internet Explorer.

And the Mozilla spokespeople go on to compare Chrome Frame to things like Silverlight, Flash and Java. It’s clear they’re making their pitch for their open web platform. You don’t need plug-ins, yadda, yadda, yadda. So this is where their stories definitely diverge from Microsoft because, you’re not going to hear Microsoft telling you not to install Silverlight, which is what I found most funny about Microsoft’s point saying that it increased your security risk by installing it. Well so does installing Silverlight.

Silverlight is just as much as browser within a browser as Google Chrome is. It renders HTML, it’s got it’s whole own set of rendering technologies with their own risks associated with them. So, I’m not sure I buy anyone’s story are here. I still think Chrome Frame is a good idea.

What do you guys think?

Brad: I love it. I think I said that five times on the last podcast. I think it’s awesome.

Patrick: You’re a developer, of course you would. (No, just kidding.) I think it’s a fine thing. I mean it makes sense, I think. If people want to install it, if it enhances IE 6, then I think it’s an interesting – it creates a new layer of responsibility for Google, though, because if some thing should go wrong with Chrome Frame, then everyone’s comments will be justified and they’ll be catching flack for it.

Obviously with any browser, if you look at it like a browser inside a browser, it’s another layer of responsibility for them. So I think if they take that seriously, then it will work out well.

Kevin: Yeah. One of the points that the Mozilla people make is that the Chrome Frame plug-in takes away some of the control from the user. It becomes the developer’s choice which browser engine is used to display a page, not the users’ choice although it’s still the user’s choice to install the plug-in to give that control to the developer. It then becomes the developer’s choice what pages render in IE and what pages render in Chrome Frame.

And they’re saying that really is a step backwards. We really need to preserve that user choice and that maybe even if you use something like Chrome Frame, it should be behind a button that says this page will render a lot better in Google Chrome, either download Google Chrome or click here to install Chrome Frame if you can’t download another browser.

Do you think that’s right? Do you think that we should still give users the choice of running in the old IE 6 engine if that’s what they want to do?

Brad: I think if you’re still running IE 6 that you forfeited your choice at this point.

Kevin: [laughter]

Brad: If nothing else, for functionality because there’s a lot of stuff that’s coming out, especially in HTML5 that is never going to work in IE 6. So they’re going to start losing a good, sizable chunk of the internet as HTML5 becomes more popular over the coming years.

Patrick: Who knows how fast that will be, but I think that, it’s easy to set. It’s an easy setting in the Google Chrome Frame. You have the little thing that pops up, do you want to apply for this site? Apply for all sites? Check here. Boom. You know, it’s done. I’m sure they can build that in without much hassle.

Kevin: So that probably is the right thing to do. I’ll make than one concession to Mozilla’s PR people. But yeah, I think what they’d really like you to do is upgrade to Firefox.

So that’s our new stories for this week, guys. Let’s take a look at some of our host spotlights.

Brad, what’s your spotlight for this week?

Brad: My spotlight this week is Woopra, the beta analytics package, live tracking analytics has removed their beta tag and they are now open to the public. Essentially Woopra is like I said, live tracking and analytics service and they’re big push is you can literally people as they are kind of traveling through your site. You can watch it in real time. There is no delay. They’ve been in beta for, I believe, over a year. And they finally removed the tag which means, if you create a paid account today, you can join right away. If you want to use a free account, which they do allow, unfortunately, you still have to have an invite but if you are going for a paid account, it’s available today. That’s woopra.com.

Kevin: Do you sacrifice any… Their focus on the real-time viewing of users: does that mean that you sacrifice any of the tools for viewing the accumulated statistics over time or would you say it’s just as good as something like Google Analytics?

Brad: Well, it doesn’t go as far back as analytics. And I’m trying to remember exactly how far back it goes. I want to say it’s either two months or six months. So, no, it’s definitely not something that would replace like your long term analytics, Google Analytics, or whatever it may be but it’s something you kind of lay on top of it and you kind of see real-time stats of exactly what’s going on through your sites. So maybe you launch a new feature, a new section, you want to see exactly how popular it is at the moment, you can fire up Woopra and watch it. But, yeah, over time it’s not something that you would want to actually replace with your normal analytics package.

Kevin: All right. I dig that. It’s a complimentary service.

Patrick: Right. Kind of like crazy egg.

Kevin: Crazy egg.

Patrick: Not the same but complimentary. Anyway, my host spotlight is a video blog by Jason Keath (jasonkeath.com) and it’s Social Media, the Bad and the Ugly. It’s actually responding to the panel that I’ll be doing at Blog World Expo, the day after… actually the day this podcast comes out.

He talks about the knee-jerk responses within social media, knee-jerk attack responses to people that are new to the space and how it’s damaging to the space as a whole, and I thought it was a really good piece and a really good video. So I would say to check it out if you’re interested in social media at all and we’ll have a link in the show notes, of course.

Kevin: My spotlight is actually revisiting Brad’s spotlight from last episode. Brad talked about the iPhone client for Dropbox and recommended that.

I’ve actually been a long time Dropbox user and one of the things that I’ve really been looking forward to is the new version of their desktop client that would sync over the LAN. We used Dropbox a lot for sharing files between the SitePoint online publishing team. The problem we find is that whenever someone within the team drops a sizable file into the shared folder, everyone’s computers in the office immediately start working on downloading that file from the Dropbox servers.

Not only does it drain our bandwidth but it’s actually a pretty significant load on the office network when you’ve got, you know, a dozen people sharing the same large file on Dropbox.

Dropbox have long promised a new version that would intelligently detect when people sharing a file were on the same network and transfer that data locally. And although the latest released version of Dropbox still doesn’t do that yet, if you go to the Dropbox forums at forums.getdropbox.com, right there at the top of the latest discussions, you’ll see a thread called Latest Forum Build, and it’s version 0.7.32 as we record this, and that’s the version with the LAN syncing in it.

In the past week, I finally got up the courage to install it. Dropbox is a pretty vital piece of our workflow at SitePoint and using a beta version was a little scary so I made sure I had a proper backup strategy in place for those folders before I did this. But having tested it, it works great. Once a new file goes into Dropbox, just as before, the source computer where that file was created still uploads it to the Dropbox servers before the other computers see it but as soon as it’s uploaded to the Dropbox service, the other computers get notified of that new file and then immediately start transferring it over the LAN, over the local network. It’s much faster and much easier on our bandwidth bill.

So if you’re a new Dropbox user, an old Dropbox user, and especially if you’re sharing files between multiple computers on the same network, I recommend the latest beta version, it’s working great for me.

And that brings us to the end of our show. Let’s go around the table, guys.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe f the IFroggy Network, ifroggy.com. You can find me on Twitter @ifroggy.

Kevin: And you can follow me on Twitter @sentience, and you can follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom.

Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. You can email us at podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions and comments; we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Interview Transcript

Kevin: October 9th, 2009. This is the SitePoint Podcast #31: Interview with SitePoint Cofounders Mark Harbottle & Matt Mickiewicz.

Kevin: And this is Kevin Yank coming to you from SitePoint Headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve had the rare pleasure of having our two cofounders in the same place at the same time, so an interview seemed a must. We’ve gathered from questions from the SitePoint forums community and I am joined by Mark Harbottle…

Mark: Hi, Kevin.

Kevin: …and Matt Mickiewicz.

Matt: Hi guys.

Kevin: We’re going to go through these questions. We’ve got plenty to keep you busy. The community has come up with some great questions. So let’s just dive right in here.

I want to give you guys an opportunity to tell in brief the story of SitePoint. BPartch on the forum asks, “When you started Webmaster Resources,”—and I guess this is a question for you, Matt—“did you ever imagine that it would blossom into such a large entity? Is it ever overwhelming?”

Matt: It’s definitely been a wild ride and I never anticipated that we would be at the point where we are today. I always took it day by day, month by month and just rolled with the punches.

Kevin: Tell the story. Like, you started Webmaster Resources—for those who have never seen that, what was it?

Matt: Webmaster Resources was basically a directory of useful resources and tools and services an online references for people who were starting out and building their first web site. I started compiling it for my personal use at the very beginning, but it evolved and became something that became publicly available and grew to become very, very popular with time.

Kevin: How did it become SitePoint?

Mark: I was working an internet company based in Melbourne, Australia, and I was doing some work with Matt at Webmaster Resources. We were promoting some products which were targeted at web professionals through his web site. I got chatting to Matt offline and found that he had quite a popular web site and some great knowledge in this space but he didn’t really have the capacity beyond that to kind of grow that out and continue to expand the business or the web site, which it was at that point.

It made sense at the time for Matt and I to team up and just to kind of take some ideas that I had for helping to grow that web site and turn it into a business. We formed SitePoint off the back of Webmaster Resources. I believe that was in 1999; so 10 years ago just last September. We’ve proceeded to grow that out into the business that you see today from the small site that Matt founded all those years ago.

Kevin: Matt, that deal must have been like the worst deal of your life, right?

All: [laughter]

Kevin: Any regrets?

Matt: No, absolutely no regrets. Before I decided to team up with Mark, I actually had an offer on the table to sell Webmaster Resources for, what was at the time, to me, a decent amount of money, but I really thought we could make it much bigger and much better than what it was. I wanted to remain, at least, partially in control of the business and decided to have a gamble and see what turned out. I’m very happy I did.

Kevin: BPartch, on the forum still, continues, she says, “Putting any financial gain to the side, is it rewarding to know that over the years your efforts have helped web developers to learn more and help others at the same time?”

Obviously, she’s a fan, but why don’t you talk about what you’ve achieved, besides the business goals.

Matt: It’s really cool when I’m out about at conferences and events, when I run into people who learn, for example, PHP or HTML based on SitePoint content or even your book, Kevin, and then they move on to bigger and greater positions in life. They grow in their careers, their roles.

Mark: I think for Matt and I, obviously, there is a financial benefit for being in your own business but when you consider that we’ve been at this for 10 years and the amount of hours that we’ve put into this business, it’s probably—if you worked it out on a per hour basis, it’s probably quite low in terms of what we’re doing. So obviously, you’ve got to take other benefits and other things out of running the business.

The help that we’ve provided webmasters and obviously, with the other businesses that we have now, 99designs, which is obviously a marketplace for designers and providing opportunities for those guys and Flippa.com which is helping people to get an exit from their smaller web sites. That’s what we take it out of it every day, helping those people, not just the financial gain.

Matt: I’m also really proud about how SitePoint has played a leadership position in terms of promoting web accessibility, web standards, cross browser compliance, and all these other factors, which still have a long ways to go in terms of a widespread adoption among web developers and web professionals.

Mark: The other thing that we’re quite big on across all three companies is giving back to the community. You might have seen last year, we raised $315,000 for the bushfire appeal which was something close to us here in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and that’s something that we’ve been doing for 10 years.

I’m not sure that many people know, but we give proceeds from every single book sold through SitePoint to charity and that’s something that we’ve been doing and will continue to do, and we look to doing the same thing across the other businesses, giving back.

Kevin: I want to jump in with a pointier your question here. hairybob says, “How much of your current success has been the result of sharp strategic planning versus natural evolution and opportunistic exploitation?”

Really, he wants to know how much is luck.

Mark: A lot of it’s luck, definitely. There is a famous quote by Woody Allen which says that 80% of success is showing up, and I think that that’s true and how that applies to us is that that by having a popular site in sitepoint.com and having all the traffic and a large community that we have, we get the privilege of seeing a lot of things that is going on in the web community. We see a lot of opportunities go past our eyes everyday and so certainly, I guess, that’s the luck, part of it that we’ve been able to grow to that position to have a view on the overall market and what’s happening.

I guess the other 20% I’d put down to sharp strategic planning. There’s a lot of opportunities that we see go past our desk and obviously we can’t act on every single one of them. The most recent two, which I mentioned before—99designs and Flippa—are hugely successful now in their own right and obviously, we had to make a decision to execute on those two particular opportunities so I put it down to 80% luck and 20% great planning.

Kevin: You agree with that, Matt?

Matt: There’s been a fair amount of trial and error along the way as well and certainly everything we’ve tried has not been successful. For example, before we ever ventured into print publishing we decided to put out an ebook, which was a terrifically massive failure at the time [laughs] but we persevered, we took onboard the feedback from the customers and the users of the site and what they really wanted was something that they could hold and put next to their keyboard and follow along while they were learning to program and develop web sites.

Kevin: So, here’s another question for you Matt, this is from Cameron Todd on our Facebook group. He wants to know how you make the step to become self-employed or to live off the income of your own site. What do you suggest are some good first steps?

Mark: I think good first steps are not giving up your day job until you’re sure that you’ve got a steady income. So I’ll let Matt speak on the tips for web site owners but just in business terms in general, I think if you can do some things, perhaps start with your hobby; so if you can do some things in your own time that bring in some extra income and you actually enjoy doing it, it’s not so much a chore and you can kind of build that up over time in your own time to the point where it does become profitable enough to give up your day job and then start a business. That’s what I would recommend for kind of anyone out there that’s thinking about starting their own business, SitePoint employees aside, of course.

Matt: I definitely agree with those starts, one of the things that people may not know is that when I started Webmaster Resources, I was still in high school. So I was going to school 9 to 3 o’clock everyday, coming home working and running a web site that was turning over six figures a year, so it’s definitely very possible to do some of these internet things on a part-time basis, get some traction, promote the concept only when you’re confident that you have something that’s a viable business, go ahead and pursue the idea on a full-time basis.

Kevin: Alright, well you guys sound like you’re very much on the same page but molona asks if there’s ever any differences of opinion between you. Do you ever discuss when a particular decision needs to be taken with you both in agreement?

What she means is, if you have kind of a system to sort out when this happens; she says she’s sure you don’t agree all the time. Matt here is making rock, scissors, paper moves with his hands.

Matt: Yeah, it’s probably—we don’t really have a documented system or system to making decisions that we’ve discussed but I guess kind of the way it works is that if it’s a big decision, so if it’s a what we call a below the water line decision, meaning that if we get it wrong we’re going to sink the ship, definitely we’ll both have to be in agreeance before we would execute to make that decision. If it’s kind of a small to medium thing, I guess what we do is whoever has the most information or the most knowledge or the most experience will probably win.

So for example, I tend to kind of manage more on gut feel, whereas Matt’s a numbers cruncher, so if Matt has data to prove out that his decision is the right one then generally he wins; if he doesn’t, then I win because we go on gut feel and I tend to be better at that. [laughs]

Kevin: [laughs] So speaking of keeping the ship afloat, she also asks how the world financial crisis has affected the business and how you’ve dealt with that.

Matt: Because we’re a diversified business and we do have multiple revenue streams, we haven’t been as affected as other companies may have been. Certainly, we’ve seen some evidence of downward trends in some parts of the business, particularly in the kind of publishing area but we are noticing things starting to pick up now and we are able to kind of sustain that growth through the other areas of the business that I mentioned earlier.

Kevin: So Matt, you’re the numbers cruncher. Do you agree?

Matt: I think diversification has definitely been very good to SitePoint, 99designs and Flippa. While one part of the business may be in the rut or static, others are growing quickly making up for the difference.

Kevin: Alright, so diversified revenue streams it is. AlexDawson wants to know what he can look forward to in the future from SitePoint. Are there any new services coming up, can you hint at what we’ve got coming in the pipeline?

Mark: That’s a good question and one of the things that we’re looking at with sitepoint.com at the moment is getting back to the core business and getting focus back to what sitepoint.com is all about.

So obviously, Flippa and 99designs have been spun out of that business in the last two years and in a way that was kind of holding SitePoint back, and so what we’re doing now is going back to the drawing board and really speaking to our customers and our users of SitePoint and seeing where they’re at and what knowledge that they would like to gain, what they would like to learn about so we can start to develop future books and even other products in that area that will help them out and that’s going to be something that we’re doing over the next 12 months.

The other thing is that we just appointed a community caretaker manager whose full time job it is to kind of get involved with the community a bit more, get everybody’s feedback in terms of where they’re at and what they would like to see on SitePoint and basically be the conduit between head office, so to speak, and the community, and we think that that’s going to play out over the next year in terms of you’ll see a lot of growth in the community that you probably haven’t seen in the last couple of years. Obviously, we’ve got limited resources, so we have to really decide where we put our focus and the community is the focus for the next 12 months.

Matt: Now that we’ve spun off 99designs and Flippa, I think we can really get back to the three Cs which have historically been the driver of SitePoint. Those three being content (the blogs and tutorials that we publish), the community (we have appointed the community manager whose full time role is to look after that aspect of the business, as Mark mentioned), and commerce, which is getting better at selling our products online, developing those products and creating new ones as well.

Kevin: SpacePhoenix wants to know if we’ve ever thought of publishing a print magazine?

Matt: We’ve definitely discussed the idea a few times in the past, but as mobile devices and smart phones have become more prominent, we think that it’s more practical for people to simply consume our content online. For example, in the past few months, we’ve launched a mobile version of SitePoint which makes our content much more accessible if you’re using an iPhone, a Blackberry or a Palm Pre device.

Kevin: I don’t want to talk out of school, here, but there were definitely some mock ups done once upon a time for a magazine called Soft, and I think you have to be an old school SitePoint employee to have access to that file. That’s all I’ll say.

So you mentioned that we’re focusing back on the community, and I know that in the past, Matt, whenever something was going on in the forums, you were the one who emailed me to say, “could you go check out this thread. I think they need an answer from SitePoint headquarters.”

RyanReese asks if we get into the forum a lot. And I know we’re all getting into the forum a lot more now.

Matt: Haven’t we banned this Ryan Reese guy? [laughing]

Mark: [laughing]

Kevin: Have we? [laughing] Really?

Matt: Ryan, if you’re listening, we really need you to stop registering new accounts. [laughing] What was the question?

Kevin: Well we’re getting into the forums a lot more now.

Matt: Now that we’ve appointed our community manager for the forums and SitePoint at large, I think people are much more willing and excited about going back into the forums and participating. I’ve definitely seen that among the staff here in the office who have SitePoint forums loaded up on the screen at least once or twice a day, in many instances.

Kevin: Yes. I know, I’ve definitely gotten back into the CSS and PHP areas in the forum, especially since I’ve published a couple of books in that area lately, suddenly, I’m back in the conversation and it’s great.

Matt: I still visit the forums two or three times a week as well, particularly the advertising and business and legal sections to participate in discussions and answer questions that come up.

Kevin: But we don’t spend all our spare time in the forums and molona asks, “If you were forced to leave behind SitePoint and everything related to it—that’s Flippa, 99designs, all of that—what would you do? Would you create a different business? Would you even be associates and colleagues again?” Is there something about SitePoint that makes this partnership work or would you guys be business partners, no matter what?

Mark: I think one of the things that Matt and I do that we have built up over 10 years is implicit trust in each other. So, on that front, definitely if our interests took us in a similar area, I think that there would be and I’ll let Matt speak for himself after this, but from my point of view, I’d definitely work with Matt again on another business.

Matt: I think the partnership between Australia and Canada makes a lot of logical sense as well. And I’d definitely will work with Mark again on another business after this.

Kevin: That’s something that people might not realize is that Mark works here in the office in Melbourne. And Matt, you’re in Vancouver. So why is that? Why does that make sense?

Matt: It makes sense because a lot of business is done in the US and it makes sense to have someone in the US time zone to take customer calls, resolve issues, deal with some of the clients that we have, such as Microsoft and Adobe who advertise with us, as well as taking PR opportunities, attending conferences and events.

Kevin: But Mark, it makes sense to have a head office in Melbourne as well. I mean, there’s a reason we haven’t all moved over there, right?

Mark: Definitely, I guess, again, this is kind of a luck thing. Obviously, I was based in Melbourne. So when we were starting up, it kind of made sense to hire people in Melbourne but over time, it’s actually proved to be quite a strategic advantage in that we’re able to sell our products in US dollars and pay our main expenses, which is obviously staff in Australian dollars and we’re able to use that extra income to hire better people based in here, in Australia. So what we’ve got now is essentially a development arm of the business in Australia and we’re doing more of the sales and marketing out of our office in San Francisco, which we recently set up.

But I guess on the other level back to why the partnership between Matt and I works, being in Canada and in Australia, I think that one of the common issues that two founders have when they’re working in the same office is that they tend to step on each other’s toes a lot and they tend to kind of have to refer to each other for every single decision, and I think in a lot of ways that slows them down. So Matt and I have clear core strengths and clear areas of the businesses that we focus on and that kind of keeps us focused on those areas and we catch up probably once every week or once every two weeks to discuss what we’re doing but we don’t get in each other’s way.

Kevin: So if you did have to start a new business together, would it still be web or is there some other area that you guys would love to tackle?

Mark: For me personally obviously my skill set is in the Web so most likely it would be in the Web, but down the track I would like to do something more in the kind of consumer brand space, something that perhaps is not just an internet business. But that’s just a personal interest thing, and I’d like to see whether my skills kind of apply in a kind of parallel universe, if you like, if you can take those skills online and use them in the real world.

Matt: I really like the internet for its scalability, ability to get started at a low cost, and ability to test concepts and ideas really quickly. In the retail space, it’s much harder and much more expensive to make a mistake. Whereby if we a mistake on SitePoint, we can usually fix it in less than half an hour.

Kevin: But speaking of taking things off the Web, what do you guys do when you’re not behind a monitor? What are your hobbies?

Mark: My hobbies outside of work are probably more centered around my family. I have three kids and a lovely wife, who I hope is listening. So I spend a lot of time on the weekends obviously with my family and of a night. I also like to get away a few times a year and I tend to go to… we have a lot of great beaches over here in Australia, so I tend to head north and I find myself on the beach for a couple of weeks a few times a year and I really love that. I’m very much into water sports as well, water skiing, anything that involves water, I’m into.

Kevin: Definitely Australia for the beach lifestyle. What does Vancouver give you on your off hours, Matt?

Matt: I’ve been known to travel a bit as well to sunny destinations. I’m definitely a beach over a snow person. While I’ve snowboarded a few times in the past, I prefer to sit on a beach sipping a margarita.

Kevin: Some like minds there. I guess that gives you a good reason to come down to Melbourne every year to visit us down here.

Matt: Definitely, and with Canada I can travel to Mexico or the Dominican Republic quite easily as well. So it’s a great location.

Kevin: Alright. We’re coming to the end of this thing, guys, and kohoutek wants to know, “With having such a large company, what do you find to be the single hardest thing in your business? Is there anything you find yourself struggling with even today and if so, how do you combat and resolve it?”

Matt: Remembering everyone’s names? [laughing]

Kevin: Matt comes down here about every year and every time it seems like we’ve hired a few more people that he’s never met. And definitely in the past year with Flippa and 99designs starting up, there’s a lot of new faces around, Matt.

Matt: Definitely, I think we had 15 new people on this trip. I’ve learned everyone’s name so far but it’s definitely been a challenge keeping track of all the new people that we’ve been adding from overseas. The other big challenge I guess is keeping track of all the numbers and vital statistics across all three businesses. There’s a lot to digest, a lot going on, a lot of customers, and things to look after.

Kevin: I know, Dax, you worry a lot about company culture.

Mark: Yeah, definitely. Company culture is a big thing for me and it’s kind of something that we talk about a lot now but it kind of came naturally in the beginning. It’s just kind of treating staff how’d you like to be treated yourself. We like to hire the best people and that’s not always easy. So it’s a challenge to find the best people. It’s a challenge to find people that kind of fit with the company culture so we’re always on the lookout for good people.

Matt: The thing to keep in mind too is Australia is a really small country. We only have 22 million people here so when it comes to recruiting a new community manager, someone to edit our books or a kick ass PHP developer, we only want the best and that takes a long time to find.

Kevin: Alright, and that’s it, guys. You’ve survived the grilling from our community. Good work.

Listeners out there, if you have any lingering questions feel free to leave some comments on the episode. I know Matt and Mark will be watching closely, so feel free to follow up with some tougher questions if you’ve got any, and thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast.

If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show and to subscribe to get every show automatically.

We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.

The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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• SitePoint Podcast #30: Google Infects IE (MP3, 32MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

Ma.gnolia Returns

• Ma.gnolia is reborn
• Larry Halff interviewed on CrunchGear

Microsoft WebsiteSpark

• Microsoft Launch WebsiteSpark: Free Software For Web Developers (TechCrunch)

Opera Mini Hits 30 Million Users

• Opera Mini Tops 30 Million Users, But Is It The World’s Most Popular Mobile Browser? (TechCrunch)
• Top 9 Mobile Browsers in Belgium from Aug 08 to Sep 09 (StatCounter.com)

Google Sidewiki

• Google Force Feeds Social Media on the World with Google Sidewiki (Social Media Explorer)

Google Chrome Frame

• Google Fixes IE6 with Chrome Frame (SitePoint)
• Google releases Google Chrome Frame, a plugin for IE to enable HTML5 (Chromium blog)
• Microsoft fires back at Google Chrome Frame (Ars Technica)
• Google responds to Microsoft’s claims (TechWorld)
• IE8 runs ten times faster with Chrome Frame (TechWorld)

Host Spotlights:

• Brad: DropBox iPhone App Released
• Stephan: Foreign Airlines Ahead of U.S. on Cellphone Use
• Patrick: Break an Arm, Blow up a Head and… Batman? (via Digg)

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Show Transcript

October 2, 2009, Ma.gnolia returns, Google Sidewiki opens for comments, and Google Chrome Frame attempts to modernize IE6. This is the SitePoint Podcast #30: Google Infects IE.

Patrick: Hello, and welcome again to the SitePoint podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe filling in for our usual lead host, Kevin Yank, who is on vacation, hopefully having safe natural fun. I’m joined today by my usual co-hosts, Stephan Segraves and Brad Williams. This is our first show without Kevin as lead host, I think, as a group. Right guys?

Stephan: That it is.

Brad: He wasn’t the lead host for, the first couple, I think, but it’s been a while.

Patrick: I think we were testing it out. It has been a while. This is a purely US-based show today; there is no Australian influence, so we’ll see how it works but I’m sure we’ll survive. Without any further discussion, let’s get into the stories.

Our first story is an update. In episode 8, we discussed the — I guess you would call it — the catastrophe that happened to Ma.gnolia, which was a popular social bookmarking service. They lost their data and this led to a lot of discussion on our show over multiple episodes about data safety and how to back up your data and the importance of doing so.

Well, Ma.gnolia is back now. They’ve relaunched their service. This comes in a blog post from Larry Halff, who is the founder of the company, he founded it about four years ago. And he says that “With Ma.gnolia’s relaunch comes lessons learned and changes and among the most obvious and important is that it is no longer a doors-wide-open public service. I’m currently inviting old Ma.gnolia members to return, along with others who might be interested. Soon, those Ma.gnolia members will be able to send out their own invitations.”

He also writes “this version of Ma.gnolia is tested versioned, nightly database backups to AWS S3 and those are all an integral part and working part of the relaunch of Ma.gnolia.”

Now, among the hosts, Stephan was the only one who was a Ma.gnolia user. So what’s your take on this Stephan? Have you got back into the service yet?

Stephan: No, I haven’t been invited back, so I’ll have to give it a few more days before I pass judgment. Hopefully I get invited back. I’m a delicious user now, and I was a delicious when I used Ma.gnolia, and I was just testing the two out and that’s when Ma.gnolia died.

Patrick: Talk about bad timing.

Stephan: It sounds like an interesting product. He’s going more on the lines of connecting with people and stuff, and I think that’s a good idea. So we’ll see.

Brad: I wish I had a few more details on what exactly has changed because they’re not … I mean it really just says it’s kind of more member-focused sharing of links but there is not a lot of details of what exactly has changed or what’s different from the way Ma.gnolia used to work.

Stephan: Yeah, I don’t know. There is an interview on Crunchgear. Larry Halff mentions that he wants to make it more like what you see on Facebook where people archive stories … not really archive stories but share stories. He sees delicious as an archiving tool to just hold things you want to remember and he likes the idea of more of the Facebook way of doing things.

Patrick: I don’t know if that’s really different from delicious.

Stephan: Yeah, I don’t know either. But the thing is, is I really don’t share links on delicious. I do share links on Facebook. I use delicious as a bookmarking tool.

Patrick: So you need something like delici-book.

Stephan: delici-book, exactly. I like that.

Brad: It kind of raises an interesting question and how can you actually trust a company that’s shut down and then a few months later has come back and said hey, we’re back, come join again. I don’t know how much stock I would put into that.

Stephan: Do you use delicious, Brad?

Brad: I do, yeah, I like delicious.

Stephan: Like if delicious died tomorrow and they didn’t have any of my bookmarks, I probably would never use them again.

Brad: Yeah, I mean, it’s like giving a two weeks’ notice at a job, and then right before you leave saying you know what, never mind — I’m gonna stay. And then even if they allow you to stay, you’re kind of like always that guy that tried to leave and didn’t, or changed his mind, or whatever it is … you’re probably always going to be labeled as the person who tried to quit. Maybe they’ll overcome that, maybe they won’t, but it’s definitely too early to tell.

Patrick: Yeah, and as we talked about it, I mean it’s a reminder to backup your data. There are services out there that allow you to backup your social networking screen, like LifestreamBackup.com, you can back up your Twitter and your Gmail and Flickr and delicious and Facebook and everything. So it’s just a reminder, and I think he took the right approach in the blog post. I think it was a humble post and obviously, the biggest thing about Ma.gnolia is: “Are you guys gonna die again?” He said it’s backed up. So we’ll see.

Brad: Next up, Microsoft just announced a new service called WebsiteSpark, which might sound familiar. We actually discussed BizSpark, which is another program under this whole Spark platform that Microsoft has really been pushing lately.

WebsiteSpark is a program that any web site development or design company can join and it’s for smaller companies, not larger corporations. So you still have to have 10 or less employees or members at your organization. But essentially, you can join up for free and once you’re accepted, you have access to a lot of the Microsoft developer programs, like Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Expression Engine 2 or 3, Windows Web Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 … these are some pretty expensive apps and programs that Microsoft will essentially give you for free once you’ve been accepted and again, it’s for smaller companies that are really just kind of either getting into the scene or have been around for a little while.

Some of the requirements to join, like I said, you have to have 10 or less members and exactly as Microsoft states, that you have to be a professional services firm whose primary business is providing web development and design services for its clients. So as long as you kind of fit into that bucket, you can apply and once you get accepted, you have access to download these great programs and use them legally.

So it’s a pretty cool program, you should definitely check it out.

Patrick: Yes, I mean, you get three licenses to Expression Studio 2008, Expression Studio, Expression Web, Windows Web Server, SQL Server and dot net panel – some of those I have no idea what they are but, I mean, free is not a bad thing. At the end of the day, of course, Microsoft is looking for buy in and looking for you to stick around and once you reach a certain level but, you know, free is never a bad thing, right?

Brad: Yeah, and actually because we talk about BizSpark. I’m not sure what episode it was but earlier in the year. And if you remember BizSpark is for startups whereas this is for web design companies. And then there’s also a third Spark program called DreamSpark which is for students. I actually found some stats. I guess on a 10-month period since launching BizSpark, they had 28,000 companies enrolled. So, you know, you can see that this has been pretty widely adopted. A lot of people are getting involved and joining up and using these Microsoft programs. So they’re definitely extending their reach out there and trying to hit some of the smaller companies.

Brad: Actually reading through some of the finer print in their requirements … one of the stipulations, it says to be eligible to continue in the program, a company must deploy a new public and internet-accessible web site developed using program software within six months from program enrollment and report it to their web site portal.

There are not a whole lot of specifics on what that web site has to do or what technologies it needs to be developed in. I mean, I’m assuming Microsoft assumes that you’re going to use .NET, but it doesn’t specifically state that. So it would be funny to see if anyone actually developed, say, a PHP web site using Visual Studio as their primary editor and then submitted that, if Microsoft would accept that or not. So it does prove that you have to actually what you’re using this for. So within six months, if you don’t have anything to show, no web sites, you can say that you’ve used their programs to build, you might get kicked out of the program. So just keep that in mind.

Patrick: So next, we’re speaking about the Mobile Web. Opera Mini has topped 30 million users according to a report at TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld. He asked the question, is it the world’s most popular browser? Opera says that nearly 32 million people used their browser in August of this year. That’s 147% increase over the year before. Page view wise, they’re up 235% annually. That means that each person is loading 436 pages a month on their cell phones or 14 a day. A year ago, it was 10 a day.

Opera has claimed to be the world’s most popular mobile browser but Schonfeld analyzes the numbers provided by StatCounter.com. and they do show that Opera has a 26% share of the mobile browser market share worldwide but iPhone has 21.8% and the iPod Touch has 9.7%. If you put those two together, Apple’s market share tops 31%. And now on top of that, he mentions that, of course, the iPhone and iPod Touch aren’t really browsers, they’re devices, and what should really be compared is Opera versus WebKit. And if you added the WebKit’s market share up, it would be even higher. What do you think, Brad?

Brad: It’s definitely some interesting data. I’ve read about Opera Mini. I’ve seen it mentioned as being a great browser but unfortunately, I have an iPhone so I’m stuck on Safari. So, it would be nice to kind of be able to install some alternative browsers on my phone and try them out. Actually, about a year ago, I had a Blackjack and I had Opera installed on my Windows Mobile but I really didn’t use web browsing too much back then.

I’m surprised by these numbers. I wouldn’t have expected Opera to be that high up for mobile browsing. I would have expected iPhone to dominate the market and looking at these StatCounter stats, and we’ll definitely put the link in the show notes, it’s kind of surprising that with some of these stats and what market share they have on mobile browsing. I mean, even the PSP has like 1.75%, which, who knew? I guess you’ve really got to think about this when you’re designing mobile web sites that people are using all sorts of different things, but Opera is obviously popular.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean looking at the list, you have Opera at the top with 26.4% and then you have the iPhone, Nokia takes about 20%. The iPod Touch, Blackberry is right there with the Touch. There’s a lot of devices. It’s definitely a little more spread out than the desktop browser market share.

Stephan: Is the Wii using (Opera) mobile, or does it use the full-blown browser?

Patrick: I thought about that too but it’s not on this list so I guess they don’t count it. I’m sure it’s going to count as the full-blown browser since you’re looking at it on your TV, and the Wii console isn’t inherently mobile.

Brad: But you know, even if Opera is #2 behind iPhone and Safari, I mean, still they’re #2, which is a great feat. I mean what’s Opera’s market share in a normal browser? Like a couple of percent? So I mean, I think it’s a great feat and it speaks highly of what they’ve been able to do there.

Stephan: And it’s a good mobile browser, I like it. I don’t have it but every time I see people using it, I’m like “that’s nice.” I use Mobile Safari on the iPhone but I do like the way it looks. If I had a Blackberry or something, I’d probably use it.

Patrick: Google this week has force fed social media on the world. This is according to Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer. Google launched Google Sidewiki. Basically, Falls writes, “Anyone who downloads a browser toolbar for Firefox or for Internet Explorer,” but not Chrome yet, it’s on the way. Even though this is a product from Google, they don’t really have a Chrome plugin for it just yet, but what it does is it allows people to add comments and notes to a sidebar, a frame if you will, to the left of any web site. This includes certainly, your web site and this is done without any sort of opt in or opt out, anyone can simply visit a site and add a note to it.

Falls, rightfully points out that one of the things Google does best is that they serve up relevant advertisement so it’s not without some foundation to think that Google could monetize these comments in the future and place ads on this sidebar that’s on your web site and your competitors could advertise there as well. Again, he calls this ‘force feeding’ and links to the Google Sidewiki video its called “Introducing Sidewiki” and we’re going to have a link to this in the show notes certainly.

Basically the video says that Sidewiki could help people to find expert insights on important issues, helpful tips as you browse, back information for more history, or added perspective on new technology. This paints kind of a rosy picture of the product. But on the other hand, those of us who manage forums or have a blog know that comments are not always in that realm. Oftentimes, we get insults or spam or some sort of other unsavory behavior that’s posted on our web site that we like to remove but this Sidewiki is not something we will have control over. There is an element to report the comment but again, it’s not something that you, as a web site owner control. Of course, not everyone is going to download this extension; some people won’t, and even less will add comments but Jason says that at the end of the day, in this space, in this small set of the population, you’ll need more brand fans than brand detractors.

What do we think?

Brad: I’m on the fence between “really scary” and “really cool.” Like you said, it could really go either way. As history has thought us, anytime there is a way to have a public Wiki where anyone can add comments, there’s going to be bad stuff along with the good stuff. You would hope that most comments are going to be good but you never quite know, especially from say like an ecommerce standpoint, if you have a web store, your public opinion on the internet is a big part of your business. So if a couple of people go around saying that you have an awful store or awful customer service, that can really affect you. If it’s right on your web site, that’s really going to affect you because they’re going to see it right when they’re looking at whatever that product is they’re getting ready to purchase. And if the top post on there says, “This web store is awful” then you might have just lost a customer because of what somebody else wrote.

On the flipside, I do think its kind of a cool idea at the same time because then you can write legitimate entries about a web site right on it where other people are going to see it in real time rather than just maybe a review on some third-party web site.

I think it’s so early that it’s really hard to see how well it’s going to be adopted. I think the major factor here is how many people are going to use this. If it’s all just internet tech geeks, then I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Now, if this becomes something that our parents start using, then it might be something to look at a little closer.

Stephan: I don’t know, I see it turning into the massive online version of news-web-site-comment. I just see it turning into people just arguing on a web site everywhere you go. I really have no interest in looking at it. I don’t read the comments when I go to a news web site. I don’t care. I’m there for something else. I kind of see it as a distraction from the main point. If you’re running a blog and you have a comments section, then people should just comment there and not on some Wiki page that Google puts out.

Patrick: I kind of sympathize more or I fit more with the scary side of this because I think on some level, this kind of strikes me as irresponsible and just in the moderation of it. Consider YouTube comments — they’ve become a joke. The YouTube comment is basically a euphemism for nasty comment, it’s just the way it is right now because people receive this comments in their videos that are so off the wall and so crazy that the comments, kind of like Digg comments, have adopted that sort of persona. Do you really want to Google moderating comments that are on your web site? It’s cool when it’s on YouTube, because they own YouTube, but then when you extend that to other web sites along the web, I don’t know if that’s something that you really want.

One of the things that has to be kept in mind with this is it’s not even limited to having the toolbar necessarily or having a plugin installed. Someone can give you a link it can be linked to where the frame will automatically popup even if you don’t have the toolbar and you’ll be able to see a comment on there just like it is. I can definitely see people falling in the “scary” category and maybe in those, people will be shouted they’re not transparent or whatever but I can definitely sympathize with that.

Brad: I was looking at a few sites that actually had comments, or Wiki entries, and below it had a little clip saying “Was this helpful: Yes or No?” I guess it will be interesting to see as there is some cutoff like if it get 3 Nos or 10 Nos or … is there is some cut off where it drops off or is it there forever? What’s the moderation, or is there any for this?

Patrick: Jason, in the post, said that it’s purely community-based — basically what you said, is it helpful or not and also, supposedly there is a report mechanism for it for the comment as well and then, of course, it’s in Google’s hands. But beyond that, I mean, no, it’s moderated kind of like comments in other Google web sites, I think.

Brad: Yeah, I mean one nice thing about this, and it’s kind of just about every service that Google is releasing now, is that it releases with an API, a fully functional API, that you can build tools around, which I think is really cool because, right away, I could build an app that could basically scour all of my site URL’s and check for any kind of Wiki entries. So rather than going through all of my pages and seeing if anyone’s written anything about it, I can just make a quick script that does it for me with their API which I think is really cool. So at least they’re giving everyone the tools they need to start thinking about this and getting ready for it because people are going to start using it. It’s a Google product. Google can get the word out. So, definitely, start thinking about it.

Patrick: One other thing that really jumped out at me about this is, like I said, there have been other services like this but I can’t really recall that there were many … or I can’t recall one but there might have been one where it was in frames. I know you can add comments onto a page or add sticky notes or something that other people can see from different bookmarking services and so on, but let’s relate it back to a popular topic on this show the, Digg Bar. How far off is this frame from that if Google goes ahead and puts ads on this? If it’s a page frame that pops up automatically with a link that’s shared; I mean, how different is that from a Digg short link if you can get a Google Sidewiki link to a site and have that automatically pop up to the left and then if there are ads, I mean, you consider the lawsuits, the lawsuits that have been executed in the past and how those have worked out. I wouldn’t be shocked if this ended up being a legal issue should they put advertisements on it, and even if they don’t, through maybe the liability of the comments I guess you could say there’d be some unhappy businesses but especially if they put ads on it, I don’t see a huge difference between this and the Digg Bar.

Brad: I wouldn’t worry too much. I mean, Google is not allowed to be evil, right?

Patrick: Well, I don’t know if it’s evil or not, nothing wrong with money, but …

Brad: Yeah, there’s definitely a growing trend in doing things, like this like you said, and it is a little bit scary but I think, again, it’s so new. It’ll be interesting to see where it’s at in four, six months from now to see how many people are actually using it. You know it would be nice if they hooked this into Alerts so you could actually be alerted if somebody leaves a Wiki post on your web site rather than build a script into it.

Stephan: One more thing to interrupt my day.

Patrick:I don’t know. I mean, if I could subscribe to it, I guess that’s okay, but I just don’t like the idea of it and people in the comments on the blog post at Social Media Explorer basically are saying “What about foreign people who get banned?” I mean, that’s like an automatic given that they’re going to show up in this area and start leaving comments and it’s just an annoyance, it’s one more thing.

Brad: And with comments and forums, you have that level of moderation, you’re right, with this, you don’t. It’s completely out of your hands. So hopefully, there’s some way that you could report bad posts or really explicit posts or whatever it may be. I can easily go to all my competitors and put something horrible on there but, I mean, is there a way they’re going to be able to remove it? Who knows? Not that I would do that.

Patrick: Well, speaking of Google doing good, some web developers are happy with the release of Google Chrome Frame and it’s designed as an add-on for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 that allows IE to take advantage of what Google calls recent JavaScript performance improvements in the emergence of HTML5 enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. This is at the Chromium blog, and Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome.

Basically, it’s built as an enhancement really aimed at developers who can’t afford to ignore IE because most people use some version of IE, they admit, so they end up spending lots of time implementing work around or limiting the functionality of their apps.

I’m not really a developer, so let’s kick this over to the developers for some thoughts.

Brad: This is awesome, in my opinion. I mean it’s not as awesome in the IE 7 and 8 arena. It is cool. But for IE 6, I mean, this is a huge, huge announcement. The fact that you can install a simple plugin, and a site administrator … because a lot of the users using IE 6 aren’t home users. There are still some, obviously, but a lot of them are in the corporate world where they can’t upgrade because they have certain applications that will only work in IE 6. This gives them an option because they can install this plug-in. It will not affect the apps they’re using in IE 6 but they can view sites that require HTML5 and still get them to work just like they would in Chrome.

I actually installed this on the IE 6 browser earlier today and was running some tests on it and it’s great. It definitely speeds up how IE 6 runs. I took IE 6 and ran it through the Acid3 Test, I did it once with Chrome Frame off, and I got a 4 out of a 100. I did it after I enabled Google Chrome Frame and I got a 100 out of a 100. So just seeing that Acid3 Test passing inside IE 6 is something I never thought would happen.

This is a great idea, hats off to the whole team at Google that worked on this. I’m sure to Microsoft it felt like a slap in the face but this is really what IE 6 needs. It needs kind of an alternative without forcing them to upgrade or to switch browsers. They need some way to view these sites and this is it.

Patrick: And from looking at how it works and how it can work, I mean you’re prompted to install it. It kind of feels like, from reading the documentation just a little bit, it’s kind of like when you didn’t have Flash and you get prompted to install the Flash player. It seems like it might be that kind of setup and if it’s that easy, then I mean, you can see it being widely adopted.

Brad: Yeah, it really is. I mean, you go to it, you click Install, you have to click OK once I think, just to grant permission to do the install and it took about a minute and that was it and then it was done. That was on older machine too, so it would probably be quicker on a much newer machine, but you can turn it on from within your own web site … so if I wanted to force a user to run in Google Chrome Frame if they are in IE6, I can drop one line of code into head of my web site – and that essentially will, if Google Chrome Frame is effective, it will force it to render your web site using that. So you can use all the HTML5 components that you like, which is great.

Then you can also, I believe using JavaScript, if they don’t have Google Frame installed, you can detect that and you can ask them if they would like to install it. So now, all of us as webmasters and web developers, we can actually kind of help spread Google Chrome Frame in the IE world and ask the users if they like to install the plugin. Once they install it, refresh your site, and everything will look great.

Patrick: You mentioned that Microsoft may have taken in a slap in the face and, sure enough, they came out shortly after it was released with the Microsoft spokesperson telling Ars Technica that “With IE8, we made significant advancements and updates to make the browser safer for our customers. Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.”

Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica gives Microsoft, I guess you could say, a nod to the plugin and add-on security issue because sometimes plugins and add-ons can be security problems certainly, but dismisses the idea of IE plus Chrome equaling double the potential for damage to a browser, meaning that would be open to both Google Chrome and IE because it wouldn’t degrade the security options that IE8 already has in place. Again, it’s not just for IE8 or IE7. It’s also for IE6, which obviously is, much less secure. Google responded to that claim and they basically said, “No, Microsoft, that’s not the case.” They said that using this Google Chrome Frame brings Google Chrome security features to IE users and it provides strong fishing and malware protection, which doesn’t exist in IE6 and robust sandboxing technology and defences from emerging online threats that are available in days, rather than months (that’s a little subtle slap there you could say).

Both IE7 and IE8 have a sandbox defence-type of feature called Protected Mode, but it only works when the browsers are run in Vista or Windows 7, and the Google Chrome Frame plugin provides protection for malicious code on Windows XP as well. Microsoft also claimed that Google Frame broke the privacy model, and users weren’t able to use IE’s privacy features, a spokesperson told Techworld.com. Google shout right back again, saying that it was designed with security in mind — again, a little slap here” “While we encourage users to use a more modern and standards-compliant browser, such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome rather than a plugin; for those who don’t, Google Chrome Frame is designed to provide better performance, strong security features, and more choice across all versions of Internet Explorer.” The company – that’s Google – is reviewing bugs filed with the Chrome Team by Microsoft developers to address any privacy feature-related issues.

Is security something you’re concerned about when you use this?

Brad: I’m not. Anyone listening to the show knows that I use Chrome pretty much all day long – that’s my primary browser. I’m no more worried about security with this plug-in than I am using Chrome as my primary browser. I think it just adds that extra layer of security. Obviously, it makes less sense on something like, say, IE8 versus IE6 where obviously there’s a huge gap and what changes have happened, but I mean, I don’t really think security is too much of an issue.

Obviously, Microsoft had to say something about why people shouldn’t use this, and I think security was the most obvious one for them to attack Google with. They can’t just sit by and not actually make a statement about it.

But one of the other major benefits of using Chrome Frame is the speed, and actually, Computerworld ran some benchmark tests with Chrome Frame installed in IE8 and found out that IE8 runs 9.6 times faster with Chrome Frame running rather than without, which boggles my mind. So basically, even if you install this on IE8, you can install it just for the sake of the fact that you’re going to speed up your web browsing almost ten times by using Chrome’s WebKit renderer and their JavaScript engine.

So between security and speed and HTML5, I mean it’s really a no brainer in my opinion especially if you’re running 6. If you’re doing 7 and 8, feel free to do it if you want. But if you’re running 6, definitely install Google Chrome Frame right away. If you’re a webmaster and web developer, definitely get that meta tag in your head to force users, to render your site in Chrome Frame if it’s installed.

Patrick: I was thinking about this issue and when the browser makers compete, they’re generally competing to make a better browser, often make a better browser than IE because that who leads in market share and even IE, of course, is focused on making a better browser than everyone else especially now. So I guess my question is this seems to be a case of making another browser better. So why is Google doing this when we talked about “do no evil,” why is Google making IE8 better, which will presumably keep people in IE8. I mean, it’s a make-nice with developers, I guess you could say. I mean it doesn’t change the user strength to make it look like Chrome is visiting the page does it?

What is Google’s motivation here?

Stephan: It gets the Google name out there, for sure. That seems like a motivation to me. If you’re still driving people and saying “We make Chrome, but we also make this,” it’s still getting the Google name in front of people, which is a good thing.

Brad: Yeah, I mean it definitely gets the name out there. I also read in one of the articles researching this topic that one of the reasons behind it might have been with Google Wave that’s coming out soon (within the next couple of days, I believe), that it would not function in IE. It needs certain parts of HTML5 to function in its entirety. And so by getting this plugin into IE, it’s going to open up that many more people who can use Google Wave. Whether it’s true or not, may or may not be, but it holds true for YouTube … any other site that Google owns that they are going to start migrating in some HTML5 elements, would not function properly without this. I think that might be part of their motivation as well.

Patrick: So if you’ve used Google Chrome Frame, let us know what you think in the comments on this podcast blog entry on sitepoint.com/podcast.

It’s time for our group podcast regular: the host spotlight. Brad, why don’t you go first:

Brad: My spotlight is actually on iPhone app and it’s by the popular web service Dropbox. They just got their iPhone app approved. I believe they submitted it weeks ago but, you know, Apple likes to take their time and review everything thoroughly. So they finally got approved, and it’s in the App Store.

For those of you not familiar, Dropbox is quite simply kind of file sharing; it makes a mapped drive on your computer which you can drag files into and then you can share those files easily with other Dropbox members. So you can drag a file into a folder and it will pop up on your buddy’s desktop instantly.

Some of the cool features that it includes through the iPhone, you can actually open up all your files that are within Dropbox and then from within those files, you can easily send a link to those files to any of your contacts or through email. If it’s a secure file, Dropbox will make a temporary URL that will expire after a certain amount of time and send them a direct link to it.

It’s a great easy way to kind of share files. I highly recommend Dropbox if you’re not currently using it and if you have an iPhone, definitely go download the Dropbox iPhone app, which is free.

Stephan: My spotlight is this: I was reading this article in the New York Times about how foreign airlines are ahead of the US on cell phone use in flight. I just kind of want to put that out there and just see what you guys think. I fly a lot and, to me, I really don’t want cell phone use on an airplane. I don’t want the guy talking on his phone next to me. Some people really want this and some of the interviews that they did with people in the New York Times article in Dubai, in the Middle East and in Europe, these people use their cell phones a lot on airplanes, especially to text message.

I think that if this is going to become something that happens in the United States, they’re going to have to change the roaming rules and the data plans because I was just out of the country and the roaming charge was $19 for a megabyte or something. I’m not willing to pay that. In other countries, it’s much cheaper.

I just wanted to get your thoughts and if you have guys have comments out there in the audience, leave them on the podcast page; I’m interested to hear what y’all think.

Patrick: Are we going to have to have the pilots watch that violent anti-texting PSA that’s been floating around?

Stephan: The British one.

Patrick: I think you go by the complaints, if you launch it and then people complain like crazy, then I guess it won’t work.

Stephan: And the thing is like WiFi is the big thing right now on US flights and everybody wants that but we don’t have cell phone connectivity and everyone is saying we should have that first and I’m kind of like – I like being disconnected when I’m on a plane. That’s the beauty of it.

Patrick: My host spotlight, I’m going to call “Batman Asks Wal-Mart To Open Up More Lanes.”" The video is actually called Break An Arm, Blow Up A Head and Batman? It’s from Film Riot, which is on Revision3.com (there will be in a link in the show notes, of course). Basically, it’s a short clip where Batman is asking Wal-Mart to open up more lanes. There is not much to it beyond that. I just found it really funny. Found it on Digg.

Check it out and hopefully, have a laugh.

Why don’t we pass it around the table, guys, and tell everybody where they can find us.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and you can find me on Twitter, @williamsba.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas, and you can find me on Twitter at @ssegraves.

Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network. You can find me on Twitter as @iFroggy.

You can follow our usual lead host, Kevin Yank at @sentience, and you can follow SitePoint at @sitepointdotccom. Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email us at podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions, and we’d love to read them on the show and give you our advice.

The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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Show Notes

• Official Magento Site
• Magento UserVoice page

Show Transcript

Brad: Welcome to another episode of the SitePoint podcast. I’m your host, Brad Williams, and today, I’m joined by Roy Rubin who is the founder of the popular open source eCommerce software Magento.

Welcome to the show, Roy.

Roy: Hey Brad, good to be here.

Brad: It’s great to have you. I know there is a lot of buzz about Magento. It really is kind of the hot eCommerce open source package at the moment. So I’m definitely excited you to have you on because I have a ton of questions of my own, and we have a lot of questions from the community, so we can all kind of learn about Magento together.

So let’s jump right to it because we have quite a bit to cover. I want to start kind of at the beginning and actually, the first question I have comes from a SitePoint member, IceMan90 and IceMan would like to know since Zen Cart and OScommerce kind of dominated the open source shopping cart market for many years, what made you decide that it was time for another major player in that market space?

Roy: When we started Magento back in early 2007, we were working at the time with OScommerce; I think less Zen Cart but more OScommerce, as a service agency for a good number of years. As our business grew and our clients had much more sophisticated type of expectations from us and the Internet continued to evolve, we understood very well that the age of OScommerce and Zen Cart and their many forks has really come to an end, and it was a time for a more mature, more up to date platform to really come to the market and address the needs of merchants as technology continues to evolve, as the market continues to evolve, and I hope we did that with Magento.

A lot of the features that you see today in Magento comes from the years of experience that we’ve had with OScommerce and Zen Cart, etc. So this is really the next evolution of that. I think our background really helped to put together a product that can really speak to that.

Brad: You mentioned OScommerce; originally I read that you had planned to fork OScommerce, but you actually abandoned that plan and decided just to start from scratch, is that how it went down?

Roy: No, that’s actually not the story.

Brad: Good ole Wiki.

Roy: Yeah, you know, it would have been a good story. But no, we never really thought to use the OScommerce code base. I think when we started to really put together the vision for the project, we knew that the architecture was just going to be completely different. There is just no way that we could have worked with what OScommerce offered, and still offers, today. So really from the get go, we knew that we were going to have to put together something different.

Brad: Would you say that it was harder than you anticipated? In my mind, when I think eCommerce, there is just so much involved with eCommerce. So starting an eCommerce website from the ground up just blows my mind with the amount that would be involved with that. Was it easier than you thought, harder than you thought? How did that work out?

Roy: I think it’s completely more involved than any of us have ever imagined. From a feature set perspective, I think where we are today and where we thought we would be just two years ago, you know, is a completely different world. This is a monstrous of a project. We’ve put in an incredible amount of hours by an incredibly passionate and dedicated team.

Looking back in hindsight, this is something that was not expected, to say the least.

Brad: When you initially started, how big was the actual team that was working on Magento, the development team?

Roy: We started in early 2007, as I said. We had about – I think at minimum, it was three or four guys kind of starting to think about what the architecture would look like. That was really sort of the core team that we worked on for about 5-6 months. And then after that, we started to grow the team. Before the 1.0 release, the team grew to about 35 people. It ended up being a very, very large project here internally where we shifted basically every single body that we had towards Magento and made sure that the package we offered wasn’t just a technology one, but really created the right experience for the users, the site really provided the information that they needed to make an informed decision and our entire company rallied around that, and the team got significantly larger, obviously, as we got closer to the 1.0.

Brad: Just to clarify, your company that you’re speaking of is Varien, which is a software development company; is that correct?

Roy: Yeah, historically, that’s what it’s been. I founded the company in 2001. Today, you know, we’re obviously focused on Magento; that is our core offering and that’s really what we’re focused on. Until I would say late 2007-early 2008, we were a classical consultancy web development shop that did a lot of different things.

Brad: It’s awesome that in that short of time, it’s gone from being, like you said, a kind of a classic dev shop to now you have this software package that you’ve developed, Magento, which is all the buzz and it’s really pretty inspiring. I actually run a software development company as well, so I would probably put myself into that classic bucket. We do classic development work. So it is pretty neat to see what you’ve done in just a short amount of time. Two and a half years Magento has been around, and you’re over a million downloads, is it?

Roy: Yeah, it’s over 1.1 million downloads now, and we’re getting a tremendous uptake of downloads and growth. So it’s been very positive, the growth continues. We’re quite excited.

Maybe I could just touch on the sort of the transition from a consultancy to a product company and it’s never an easy transition, I can tell you that. It’s something that we’re still having to deal with. I think we’re on the tail end of that. It’s something that I think a lot of consultancies aspire for, to have a product of their own and to build on that. I highly encourage it; I think there is a lot of … there is a lot of rewarding times when you see a product like this, a product of yours, really hit the market and begin to get some adoption. It’s very exciting.

Brad: It’s great. I really respect the fact that not only did you create this great product, but you also release it as open source, where you could have easily kept it proprietary and charged a licensing fee, but you didn’t. You went ahead and released it under the open source license version 3. I was wondering if you could speak – was it always from day one, did you plan on releasing this open source, or it just kind of evolved into that?

Roy: Since day one, we knew very well when we started the project that that was going to be the strategy. We come from the open source roots and that’s what we knew well. We very much believed, and still believe, in the model. We saw other players and other verticals continue to do well. We saw MySQL, we saw SugarCRM, Alfresco and other commercial open source players and we understood that there was a true opportunity in the eCommerce space and that’s really what motivated us to believe that there is a business model around distributing free software. I think to date, two years after, we’re still very much believers of the model.

Brad: That’s great. Now as far as requirements, Magento runs on a Linux platform, correct?

Roy: Indeed, yep.

Brad: I was looking at the requirements and Windows wasn’t listed. Can it run on Windows, or is it absolutely just does not work on Windows?

Roy: You know, it can run on Windows; I think the configuration is a little bit tricky. We’ve been working with Zend, the PHP company, and actually if you run Magento on top of the Zend server product that they have now, it makes that much easier. And that’s been a big priority for us, so we hope to continue working with Zend to make Magento accessible to those organizations that would prefer Windows as opposed to a mixed type of environment. So hopefully, that answers that question.

Brad: Are there any plans to actually break out so it can be installed directly into Windows and run on like a WAMP stack, or would it always require that Zend?

Roy: Again, I think today, you can actually run it on a WAMP stack. There is nothing in Magento that prohibits you from doing that. We’re trying to make that a little bit easier of a process. The idea is that with a Zend server (and there is a free community version of the Zend server) that will be almost seamless in terms of installation in Windows.

It’s just a little bit tricky today, but we hope to simplify that ongoing.

Brad: I want to talk about the license a little bit behind Magento, and I mentioned it earlier that it’s licensed under the open source license (OSL 3.0). I’m wondering why you chose that license over, say, a more traditional license, like GPL or the LGPL?

Roy: The OSL license is actually the open software license, and the open software license is a license that closes what’s called the ASP loophole. The ASP loophole is basically – there is this big debate in the open source community about what distribution is, and with Magento, we treat distribution over a network, same as a classical distribution that’s covered under the GPL.

What does that mean? It means that if you create derivative work of Magento and you put up the work just on a website and distribute it digitally, via the web, that is still considered a distribution and as such, since the OSL license is a reciprocal license, your work has to be licensed under the OSL license and made public.

Why did we choose that? We chose that because we felt that the work that we put into Magento was significant and we had hoped that the community reciprocates so that if are derivative works, the rest of the Magento community can benefit from that.

At the time that we chose the OSL license, it was the only OSI (Open Source Initiative) group which certifies the open source licenses, was the only OSI approved license that closed the ASP loophole. Since then, the LGPL license came to the market, and now those two licenses, and perhaps others, are available but at the time that we chose the OSL, it was the only OSI-approved open source license that closed the ASP loophole.

Brad: Open source licensing can get … it’s kind of an interesting topic. It’s kind of a hard one to follow as well, especially when you get into actual case examples of what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. So it can be a little confusing for people, but it is nice that it’s released under it. What did I say? Open source license… I meant open software license (OSL). So it’s not actually GPL, which is what a lot of people probably would have expected.

Roy: Sure, it’s not GPL and there is a big difference between the two. We’ve tried to educate the market about that. There is probably a lot more work for us to do in that front. But it’s a very, very different licensing than the GPL and it’s done for a lot of good reasons.

Brad: Let’s talk about Magento features. Obviously Magento comes with a ton of features. If you go to MagentoCommerce.com (which is the official Magento site), right under products, you can go to features, and there is a nice long list of all the different features.

What are some of the features in Magento? Is it what most people expect from an eCommerce store, are there additional features that you wouldn’t normally see that you think are pretty cool?

Roy: I think first and foremost what sets Magento apart, I think not only from the open source packages on the market, but from a lot of proprietary, even enterprise class packages, is its ability to do multi-store retailing. Again, that’s something that we kind of picked up as a trend in early 2007 and it definitely proved, I think, to be right, where retailers are looking to have multiple online shops, multiple online businesses running from a central administrative instance of Magento.

So that’s something that’s built into the core product, something that we’ve got a lot of interest for, and it’s been very, very well received.

What else? I think our pricing rules and our discounting engine is something that is very, very strong, as well. The ability to create really sophisticated types of discounts is something that’s been very well received. Maybe one more thing that I think gets a lot of attention is our catalog management. We’ve given merchants a real flexible capability to manage quite a different array of catalog types. If you have virtual products, if you have physical products, if you’re doing business in multiple disciplines, chances are Magento’s catalog structure and Magento’s processes for setting up your catalog will be supportive of that.

So we’ve tried to stay, as a software product, out of the way of retailers and not tell them how to run their business but give them a platform and a product that allows them to really set up everything as they see fit.

Brad: The site manager, that is kind of a really cool feature, and I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. If I understand it correctly, I can have multiple stores under one installation of Magento. Does this allow me to have multiple domains for those stores, or are they still all mapped like a sub-domain or sub-directories of the primary website?

Roy: You were breaking up, but I think I got the gist of that. You’re absolutely right, you can actually run Magento stores under different domains; there is absolutely no problem with that. You can run it under sub-domains if that’s a better fit for you, or under different domains, or on the same domain, we’ve give you that complete flexibility.

Brad: And it actually keeps everything separate, so separate product bases, separate customers, or does it group everything together?

Roy: You could actually share the customers between the stores or set it up to require different customer accounts. You could share the shopping cart between the stores or not. That’s a configurable option for you. Again, you can run your stores in different domains.

We have companies that have multiple brands and are running one Magento instants for many, many brands of theirs. And you can’t even tell that it’s the same instants; it’s a completely different user experience across all the brands. It requires a separate registration and customer login for each of the brands, yet, it’s all centrally managed through one Magento admin.

Brad: That’s awesome. Honestly, I didn’t know Magento did that, but that’s really cool because just from my own experience, I know when we set up eCommerce stores for clients, more likely than not, a few months down the road after we finish, they come back and want another store. So then we build another store. But in this case, we could use a site management and just create another store in their existing install, which is awesome.

Roy: Right. And you’re not restricted. If you want to have a completely custom user experience, completely custom set of functionality between each of these stores, that’s something that you could do. Again, we really stay out of the way and let you run the business and provided the platform that was strong enough to really manage that for you without dictating the business rules and logic for you.

Brad: That’s great. I tried to pull up the roadmap for Magento to see what we could expect in the coming months and years and there is a post there that kind of explains that the roadmap has been – control has been passed over to the community advisory board. I was wondering if you could kind of explain what is the community advisory board, what does that mean for the future of Magento and new features to come?

Roy: Sure. First, maybe I’ll set the scene for that. There is really two products today. One is the Magento community edition, and that’s a product that we first went to market with in March of 2008, the 1.0 came out. And we’ve since, about a year later, released our enterprise edition product.

The enterprise edition product is controlled by Varien. We continue to add features for it. We consult very heavily with our partners and our customers and are really gearing that product towards merchants that do a little bit of a larger volume of business online than perhaps the community edition users do at this point.

What we’re trying to do with the community edition product is open that up to the community as much as we can. So there is initiatives on a number of levels.

One is that we’ve started the community advisory board, and the community advisory board is led here by one of our employees, Koby, and we’ve rallied a number of different folks from the community from across the world, and these are the guys that make the product decisions for the enterprise edition, they make the product decisions when it comes to MagentoCommerce.com, and they’re the ones that are in touch with their local communities and get the feedback and really kind of filter that to the community advisory board meetings in which we make decisions.

One of the first things that we did with the community advisory board is set up a user voice account in which the community communicates to us what they feel is the most urgent things on the plate for the community edition.

We’re also, this month, opening up our code base to external contributions for the first time. Right now, we’ve developed basically 99.9% of the Magento core code base and we’d like to slowly open that up and bring in third party contributors. Much of the community has expressed interest in really helping us with that. And that’s what we’re doing.

In the future, in a year, two or three down the line, we’d love to see a community product that’s driven by the community with leadership from Varien that takes core contributions from the community and Varien, in assistance with the community, will continue to evolve the community edition product.

The enterprise edition product will continue to have a path of its own that’s very much led by us as well but again, just focus on a different customer base.

Brad: And once that roadmap has kind of been decided upon, that will be released publicly again, correct?

Roy: Yes, yes. The real reason for not releasing the community edition roadmap is because we don’t want folks to make any business decisions from information that may not be finalized and no matter how many times we ask that folks just be patient, it’s important not to mislead and provide any wrong information. As soon as we have final confirmation in accordance with our community advisory board, we will make that information public.

We do also have that information public for the enterprise product, but that’s on a separate level, of course.

Brad: If you could explain what Magento extensions are and what exactly they can do?

Roy: Sure. We set up something called Magento Connect, which is the Magento extension marketplace, and today there’s over, I believe, 1200 extensions, a good number of commercial extensions, a good number of open source extensions, and these range from payment gateways; and we have now support for over 200 payment gateways in the product, shipping integrations, language fax, themes, functionality enhancements, backend functionality enhancements, front end functionality enhancements, and various other odds and ends.

So, we see Magento today as the platform, a platform which we very much encourage to be extended, and we wish nothing but success for our extension developers and have a lot of plans to continue to help them be successful and, hopefully, get the word out about the work that they’ve done.

Brad: Yeah, that’s one thing that definitely caught my eye on Magento Connect is not only do you have community submitted plug ins, but you also list commercial plug ins, along with the price and a link right to where someone could purchase those.

And I know that’s in the open source community there’s, kind of, half the people hate that and half the people love that so I thought it was definitely interesting that you guys apparently love it so you have commercial plug ins on there. Did that come out of launch, or was that something added in at a later date?

Roy: No, that was at launch. We are very much from the open source community. Again, that’s been our roots and our heritage for the last few years and we very much believe in it. But that doesn’t mean that we feel like we can tell others how to run their business and as we started to put out Magento and really think about what an extension framework would look like, we very much understood that we wanted, first and foremost, the best quality extensions by the best quality developers. And to do that, there really needs to be an appropriate incentive mechanism for those developers to continue to contribute and continue to build really quality extensions. And the way to do that is you encourage them and you provide to them a facility in which they can charge for their work. Over the long run, we hope that there’s going to be open source extensions and we very much push for that.

In fact, all of our extensions today have been open source; we haven’t charged for a single extension. And that’s just how we run our business. But we understand very well the need of compensation for third party developers that develop quality work and expect to pay the bills. And that’s something that, for us, is very much part of open source. We just don’t see the price tag of zero as something that is viable in the long run and this is the project that we hope will be with us for a very long time.

Brad: Is there any fear or concern over all extensions being commercial and therefore there’s nothing kind of free that I can download and use, everything I have to pay for?

Roy: You know, that’s a concern of course. We work very, very hard to set the precedent and to remain as vocal of the leadership toward open source as we can. And we work very closely, both with community open source extension developers, and commercial extension developers. Just today I had a talk and someone was asking me “should I charge, should I give it for free?” and I made the case for giving it back to the community. There is going to be some great extensions that are going to be available for free for the community.

So, I think at times it makes sense for folks to release those works of theirs for free, and sometimes they want to make sure that they can pay for their ongoing efforts, and we’ve been supportive of both, and we hope to continue to set the example and hopefully others will follow.

Brad: Excellent. I want to talk about the Magento developers real quick. I know you mentioned earlier that currently you don’t take community core contributions, is that correct?

Roy: Correct. Today, we basically asked for the contributions to come in the form of an extension as opposed to a patch that will make its way into the core code.

Brad: I also went on your website and you have bug tracking, which it looks like… I was trying to figure out what software you’re running… is that all a part of… because I believe Magento’s running on EE and that’s actually what one of our members pointed out is that… is that what MagentoCommerce.com is running on?

Roy: Again, you broke off, but I think you were mentioning ExpressionEngine, Brad?

Brad: Yeah, ExpressionEngine. I noticed… that’s what we’re running and one of our members actually wanted to know the decision behind using EE instead of something like WordPress.

Roy: For portions of our site, we do use ExpressionEngine, unfortunately, not the bug tracking portion, and the bug tracking portion is just custom code and the back end of that is actually Mantis, I think. So, that’s what’s running in the background.

ExpressionEngine is a great product. We love it. We use it for the bulk of the website. I think some of the creative elements that you see on magentocommerce.com are primarily our own codes. So, groups, Magento Connect, the bug tracking, the job board, of course the store, is Magento and some of our own work.

We’ve put in thousands of hours of work in ExpressionEngine to really get it to be where we feel it is right now. It’s not like it was quick and painless, it takes work to get it to be at that level. And we’re continuing to spend a lot of time making sure that the community site can scale and can really adapt to the different needs as the project continues to grow.

Brad: Question from another community member, Joaquin Win would like to know, and I know you mentioned earlier that when 1.0 came out, you had about 50 developers working. How many developers are currently are actively working on Magento now?

Roy: Yeah, so the core team, I think, today is about, if I’m not mistaken, it’s about 14, 16 people. So these include from product managers to of course, developers and architects and QA staff and user interface so it’s a pretty broad team. There’s a lot of folks involved that specialize in different areas.

Brad: Is the team distributed or does everybody work in one big office there with you?

Roy: The team is distributed. We have folks from all over the world really get involved.

Brad: Great. Quick, wrapping up here towards the end, but I want to kind of talk about the future of Magento and what we can expect and I have a couple questions from our members.

Alex Dawson would like to know – What innovative new functionality are they planning on adding to keep ahead of the competition?

Roy: Great question, and I think the best answer for that is to really look at the user voice site that we’ve set up. And just to see the very broad list of features that our community expects, and there’s no shortage of that, I can tell you that.

Brad: And is that listed on MagentoCommerce.com or is that a separate site?

Roy: Yeah, I think it’s magento.uservoice.com or something like that.

Brad: I’ll dig up the link and we put it in the show notes.

Roy: Perfect. One thing that we’re coming out with, hopefully, in the next community release, is a concept around widgets that are going to make, I think, a lot of people happy. So you’ll be able to, basically, embed different types of widgets across the Magento sites. It’s a pretty powerful functionality. So, that’s something that the team, here has been putting a lot of effort around and that’s something, I think, that’s going to have a good uptake.

Brad: And are these widgets similar to like a widget in WordPress or like a block in Drupal or is it like just a little block you can kind of move around in your store?

Roy: We have the concepts of blocks now. A widget, for us is one that also includes a lot of functionality. You’ll be able to move products around, display products in different pages, whether it’s landing pages, whether it’s category pages. It’s a lot more flexible than what the current methodology of really moving products around now. So, maybe what I’ll do is I’ll ask my team to put together a quick screen cast and we’ll try to share that ahead of the release, just so people know what’s coming.

Brad: Yeah, sounds exciting. Another quick question from a user named Reggae, and basically they say – Magento in its current form is trying to be all things to all people, and it can overwhelm kind of these one man shops. Has there been any talk or ideas to kind of create a Magento Lite or a lightweight version that’s really very simplistic?

Roy: Yeah, that’s actually been a topic that came up here a few times. Magento is a very sophisticated product. There’s absolutely no doubt, and I think that the person who wrote that is absolutely correct, it definitely can overwhelm. You know, that’s something that, I guess, in one sense concerns us, in another sense is probably something that obviously speaks a lot about the sophisticated level Magento is today.

We’ll see how things play out, but I think there’s an interesting opportunity to tackle an even smaller market base than what we’ve been able to tackle so far by creating a product that’s very slim and kind of light. Yeah, absolutely.

Brad: Great. So, you have the whole SitePoint audience listening and it’s full of great designers, developers, bloggers, writers, everything you can imagine. How can they get involved? How can people get involved with Magento and really help out?

Roy: Sure. You can do that on many levels. First of all, for the developers and the enthusiasts, I think Magento Connect is a great place to really get the extensions out and start to build a community and a name, and really get a lot of market feedback.

From a blogging perspective, if you have something to write, something to contribute, whether it’s video, it’s podcasts, it’s audio, we’re always looking for content and we’d be happy to feature you in our blog as a guest post or anything else along those lines you can think of.

If you want to be part of the community advisory board or you want to be considered and get involved in that, there’s obviously opportunities for that as well, and you can email me directly at roy@varien.com; I’m always available to the community, and always available to talk. And if I’m not available, then I can definitely introduce you to the person that best fits. But talk to us and let us know what you’ve got in mind, we’d love to continue working together.

Brad: That’s great, and there’s also a very active Magento chat room on Freenode. So if anyone is in IRC, just look for the Magento room, it’s pretty active. I sit in there and watch the discussions, so it’s also a good way to get some information.

Roy, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. It’s been informative. I’ve learned a lot. I’m sure our listeners have learned a lot. Magento is a great product, it’s really great what you’ve done in just a short amount of time.

Again, thanks for coming on. Do you have a blog or a Twitter or something you want to plug to throw out there?

Roy: Magento… twitter.com/magento… follow us. Continue to read the Magento blog, there’s a lot of great information. We try to post daily on the Magento blog. But that’s about it.

I want to thank you, Brad, and SitePoint, which has been a big inspiration for me and for us for a very long time. Keep up the great work and you guys have built a tremendous community, which is, as I said, an inspiration.

Brad: Great. Thanks, Roy. And that concludes another episode of the SitePoint podcast.

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

RSS Goes Real Time with RSS Cloud

• RSS Cloud
• WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-time with RSSCloud (ReadWriteWeb)
• RSS in the Clouds (WordPress.com)

Should you host your own blog or forum?

• How to Keep WordPress Secure (WordPress.com)
• Blogs and Baked Goods (John August)

Host Spotlights:

• Patrick: The 5 Big Myths Of Social Media (Influential Marketing Blog)
• Stephan: NES Ringtone Pack (Charles Williams)
• Kevin: Blueprint’s compress.rb: A Walkthrough (Joshua Clayton)

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Show Transcript

Kevin: September 18th, 2009. RSS goes real time with RSS Cloud, and the pros and cons of hosting your own blog. This is the SitePoint Podcast #28: Artisanal Bread.

Kevin: Hello, hello, and welcome to another SitePoint podcast. Just three of us today. It’s me and Stephan Segraves and Patrick O’Keefe. Brad is away speaking about WordPress and it turns out, by coincidence, that’s a lot of what we’ll be speaking about today. Brad should be back next episode but I think Patrick, you’ve got some travel coming up, is that right?

Patrick: Yes it is. Good guess. October 1st and 4th I’ll be at iZEAFest at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. From October 15th to 17th I’ll be at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ll be speaking and doing a book signing there and then on October 23rd in Durham, North Carolina, I’ll be speaking at Social Media Business Forum. So if you’re within range for any of those events, definitely, let me know; blog comments, Twitter, whatever and I’ll be glad to meet up.

Kevin: Yeah. It would be great to get some face-to-face time with our listeners. What was that first one, Izea Fest did you say?

Patrick: I-Z-E-A-F-E-S-T.

Kevin: What is that about?

Patrick: Well, it’s a conference that’s put on by the company iZEA which has some word of mouth marketing products, you could say. They’ve been somewhat controversial in the past but mainly I’m going because there is good quality of speakers, because I won a pass (that’s a big one)…

Kevin: That will do it.

Patrick: Yeah and because it’s at SeaWorld and it will be an interesting experience. Plus, it’s a very economical conference for the speakers involved and the quality of the programming. Even if I had to buy a pass which I again I probably wouldn’t have gone if I didn’t win it, but the pass itself you can get a 50% off. It’s only like $112. It includes a pass to SeaWorld, two conference days. It’s just really good value.

Kevin: Yes, especially if you live in the neighborhood that would be great. Without further ado, let’s dive into the show today. As I mentioned, we’re going to be talking a bit about some of the WordPress security issues and some of the lessons and questions that came out of it over the past few weeks. But first, let’s talk about RSS Cloud. Everyone’s really excited about RSS Cloud which is, as far as I can tell, it’s sort of an extension to the RSS 2.0 protocol that Dave Winer has come up with. And in fact, reading his notes about it, the idea and at least initial implementations of it have been around for almost as long as RSS has been around. But, he’s sort of getting back into it in the light of the popularity of services like Twitter. Now it looks like he’s trying to prove that the right way to run a service like Twitter is not to have a centralized service that’s going to go down every couple of days and that everyone relies on and everyone has clients constantly pinging to find out if there’s new content available but rather to change the model and 1) not have a centralized service. Rather, empower every publisher to run their own content syndication service and then rather than have interested subscribers constantly pinging to check for new content, have a subscribe/publish model where the interested party can just register. They’re interested in receiving new updates and then the publishing server will contact everyone who has subscribed when there is content available, pushing it out proactively.

What seems to have everyone really excited is that WordPress.com has gone and added support for this RSS Cloud extension to all of its RSS feeds. Many blogs all of a sudden are publishing in this RSS Cloud format. So the race is on for RSS feed readers. Things like NetNewsWire that I use and Google Reader that a lot of people use online. The race is on for these to begin supporting RSS Cloud. So guys, are you dying to get real time updates to your RSS feeds? That’s my question.

Patrick: Yes and no. I think that there are some times where I get frustrated with the feeds that seem to not show up for a period and all of a sudden there is 50 posts. I don’t know what that issue is. Sometimes it could be a site issue I guess. Sometimes it’s a feed reader issue. I don’t really know and I don’t really care. I just want it work. If this could help with that with better reporting then I like it. But to be honest, just from my usage now, I’m not totally interested in real live of the RSS updates. I check my RSS feed a couple of times a day. I’m not of those people who sits in there and refreshes it. So for those people, I think it’s a boon but for the rest, I don’t know if we’ll notice that much of a difference.

Stephan: I like it in theory but I just don’t see it being a competitive tool that we’re all going to use. I think there is going to be a set of people that use it and those that still stick to Twitter and things like that. I just don’t see it catching on with people who don’t have blogs.

Kevin: I guess the idea here would be that services like Twitter could spring up each with their own RSS Cloud server and then you could have a single client that would be able to subscribe to content updates from multiple services like these; all using the same protocol. So the person developing this client wouldn’t have to support lots of different APIs to talk to all these different services. They would all just speak RSS cloud which is kind of nice. The stumbling block for me is that you have to run your own server if you want to run RSS Cloud. WordPress has done this work for all of its users. Everyone who has a WordPress.com blog hosted by the folks at Automattic get these for free because Automattic went to the trouble of building their own RSS Cloud server that runs and accepts subscriptions to people interested in WordPress.com blogs and will send out these pings about new content being available. But if you’re running your own blog, and this is something that will be talking about later in the show, that’s one more that you need to set up now. Ideally, it would be part of whatever blogging software you were using but if you were writing your own thing, this is one more thing that you would have to write and host. I don’t know if people are going to go to that trouble. It seems to me that the polling model we have now is—its one of those cases where it’s not technically ideal but it might just be good enough. I’m not sure the benefit is so big that people are going to make this big leap.

Patrick: Right now there is a plug-in available for WordPress, RSS Cloud. A plug-in— I don’t know how easy that makes her or how hard that makes it. I would hope it would be easy but I think its only—the biggest shot at adoption is going to be through plug-ins. I think if you care about RSS Cloud getting spread then you need to write a plug-in for the top 5 blogging applications and more to help it spread.

Stephan: It seems clear that is going to happen.

Patrick: Do you think Kevin that this is kind of starting to bloat RSS, in what RSS was meant for?

Kevin: I think it’s quite a nice addition. It’s a single tag that all it does is adds your RSS feed, a single tag that says, “If you want to get real-time updates to this blog. If you want to be notified when this feed changes, here is how you do it” and it will say, either you need to contact me with an HTTP POST request on this URL” or whatever. It’s nice and simple in that way. I don’t think it’s a bloat issue at all.

Stephan: It’s vague to me on what the purpose is besides getting push, you know, versus checking your email. There are ups and downs to both of those.

Kevin: I don’t think this is solving the biggest problem with RSS. I think that’s clear. People aren’t screaming for this in relation to RSS. In fact, that’s why this feature has been proposed for RSS since the beginning has never really caught on. But Dave Winer who is working on this with renewed vigor seems to believe that this is a good answer to the problems with microblogging services like Twitter. It would be interesting to see if that catches on. It’s certainly not the only game in town. We have things like Identi.ca which they’ve gone and built their solution on top of the Jabber protocol, with federated servers and all this sort of— it’s a lot more heavyweight solution. Whereas RSS Cloud is much simpler. Well, let’s take something that works, something that there is a lot of good software out therefore are ready RSS and add one little thing to it. And maybe that is just as good a solution. We’ll see.

But speaking of hosting your own WordPress blog and the benefits and pitfalls that come with that, that’s the main thing we want to talk about this episode. Over the past few weeks, there have been some security scares for anyone with a WordPress blog but this isn’t an issue that is limited to just WordPress. I know for long time everyone who ran a bulletin board using software like phpBB was constantly living under the threat of a security hole in their open source, third party software being discovered and the hackers taking advantage of it before they could get around to updating their software. In the wake of these fresh attacks on WordPress blogs that have affected some pretty high profile sites, a lot of people are justifiably asking the question, should everyone be running their own WordPress blog? Or are there really good reasons to avoid it? Patrick, do you run your own software by and large?

Patrick: I do run my own software pretty much in totality. I don’t know that I use any remotely hosted services. I do use phpBB, WordPress, Nucleus CMS. I’ve run phpbbhacks.com which is the largest unofficial phpBB resource for about 8-1/2 years. It’s something that I’ve definitely I had to contend with for almost a decade.

Kevin: Especially with these WordPress attacks, WordPress has done a good job of making it really easy to update WordPress. When it comes to a PHP script that can be installed on just about any web host out there, you couldn’t ask for much better than the one-click upgrade that works on most hosts. Back when we were talking about phpBB which hasn’t seem much in the way of security holes lately. It seems like they’ve done a pretty good job of locking down that code. When you had to upgrade phpBB, you were sometimes making— hand-coding that changes for the updates because you had applied hacks and you couldn’t just drop the new code into place. It was a real pain and yet if you were serious about running a site with phpBB powering it, that’s what you had to do, right?

Patrick: It was, and at phpbbhacks.com, we had code changes and they were released by actually an author at one point who wasn’t part of phpBB but a hack author who had released code changes for each release and we’d have those at our site and they were a popular resource because you had to do that. I remember being on vacation and being passed with the latest version and there was a time where it was insecure and it wasn’t that they weren’t working on it necessarily but I was on vacation and the site was getting hacked and this included the database being wiped clean. Those are scary moments especially at that time when it’s mostly a dial-up connection situation. There is no high speed. You’re messing with these huge SQL files. You’re trying to make sure you have backups in place. And luckily I did, thankfully, to my host. But it’s a scary thing. phpBB 2 got better and phpBB 3 has been very solid. There really hasn’t been any major security issue.

Kevin: We have a blog post by John August here who compares running your own WordPress installation to baking your own bread. He says, “Yeah, you can go and you can get the flour and you can knead it up in your kitchen and most people, if they follow the instructions, can get a perfectly edible loaf of bread but you could also just go down to the corner store and buy a loaf of bread and for 90% of the people, that’s all they want out of their bread and that’s all they need out of their bread. So why go to the trouble of making your own?” He compares this to these software like forums and blogs and if you are in the 90% of people who only need what a hosted solution will give you, you should really avoid setting it up on your own hosting environment where you have to maintain it and stay on top of security updates and so on and so forth. As apt as this comparison is, it seems obvious that a lot of people aren’t taking this advice right now. Stephan, what do you think the attraction is to running your own installation of something like WordPress versus using a hosted solution?

Stephan: Going back to my history in blogging. I kind of wrote my own back in 2000-2001 and that was fun. It was like a little experiment and I think I still have it somewhere out on the Web Archive. And as time went on, I realized it was no longer a learning tool for me. It was more of—where I put my thoughts. So for the hosted solution for me, makes sense but then again having my own WordPress installation means I can do whatever I want to it without having—I can change code, I can change behind the scenes stuff because that’s my background. But then there are people that they don’t have any background in coding and they don’t need ever to look at the code. I think for the hacker, the guy who likes to get down and dirty and play in the code, I think that that’s the real attraction of hosting your own.

Patrick: There are a lot of advantages to hosting your own site. Just to name a few; advertising is one with a lot of these hosted solutions; you’re limited in your advertising. Now that doesn’t affect you if you’re just setting up a personal blog, but for anyone who wants to turn this into a business, obviously, that’s a consideration. Customization is a big thing as well. WordPress.com allows you a lot of plug-ins I know but there are restrictions on that. It’s a situation where if you wanted to do whatever you want to your site, you have to host it. Sometimes you want to do all of these things but you don’t have the knowledge and that’s a situation that I was in way back when where I just had to learn. I started doing things and I started messing with code and installing hacks. There was a time when I couldn’t install phpBB. I had to be walked through it three or four times. I figured it out from there and it takes some experience and some time to get to know the software and you need to have someone there who can take care of it. I think in this day and age, especially, you need to understand the full commitment but there are clear benefits to installing the software yourself. And also you shouldn’t take remotely hosted solutions lightly. You really need to investigate them and look into what they offer you and their access to your data and so on and so forth as well. So there are good and bad sides to both.

Kevin: At SitePoint we use WordPress. We host it ourselves in a couple of places. The sitepoint.com blogs, most people can’t realize because it is such a customized installation but it is WordPress running behind the scenes. We have developed our own plug-ins that integrate with the user database for our forums so you can use the same login to comment on our blogs as you do to participate in the SitePoint Forums. When this latest spate of attacks came out, we had a close look at it and although technically our code was vulnerable for a short time until we got the upgrade installed, the degree of customization that we had done to our site meant that the tools that hackers were using to take advantage of these security holes were protecting us to some extent. And that makes me think if you’re going to host it yourself, maybe you should avoid the really popular solutions like if you’re going to host your own blog, maybe there is something to be said for avoiding WordPress because it’s the popular one that’s going to get attacked and chose something a little more obscure.

Patrick: The problem with that is, you want something as good as WordPress and that’s not to say the other options out there aren’t as good. But I’ve used different things I came to WordPress. I didn’t start with WordPress. I started with Nucleus CMS which is a very good piece of software. I enjoyed it. I don’t think I was hacked once. Actually, I think I was hacked once at some point but I had a good experience with it. But I went to WordPress because there are benefits as far as the plug-in community which is tremendous, as far as the SEO benefits of the software which out of the box is solid. Just the entire support community around this software is excellent. That’s what drives people towards it. It is the quality of the software and then the quality of the community. It’s hard to find those two things in any other piece of software. I’m not saying anything bad about this offerings that Six Apart has has I’m sure they’re very good. Plenty of good, really great sites run them. But from my experience, from my time and money I put writing on my network, at this time, I chose WordPress and it’s hard to say, “Choose a solution that you don’t think is as good just because it’s not as widely used and it won’t be hacked.” That’s something that could be applied to a lot of technology yet you want to use the best piece of software.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely. Speaking about WordPress.com the hosted solution, I had a close look at what they offer and what the limitations are. If you are tossing up right now between hosting your own blog and hosting it in WordPress.com or even if you’re thinking about making the move one way or the other, what WordPress.com gives you is the WordPress software and a certain amount of customization that you can do depending on how much you pay them. So the free account you can chose from a selection of themes that they’ve set up in their system. You can’t install custom themes. You can’t install custom WordPress plug-ins either. What you can do is put widgets into your site. So the themes that they provide have these spots in them, usually in the sidebar, where you can add in your own selection of widgets. So you can have pieces of text. You can have your Twitter feed or your Flickr photos—whatever the case maybe. And they have a nice collection of widgets. And I know services like Blogger from Google offer the same sort of functionality—pick a theme and then add your own collection of widgets. With WordPress.com if you pay for a certain commercial level of support, you can then customize the CSS that’s applied to the theme and they have a particular theme called the Sandbox theme which is really for people who know what they’re doing with CSS. It provides a lot of styling hooks in the HTML code which still you are not able to modify but the HTML code is so rich with these styling hooks that you can then use your custom CSS abilities to make it look pretty much any way you want. If you need more than that, you are looking at hosting it yourself. How does that compare with the world of hosted forums, Patrick?

Patrick: With forums, it’s something that I get asked a lot is what software to use and what about these for mostly hosted sites. You can throw Ning into that category, Lefora, and there are tons of small ones and they all have their pluses and minuses but the two main things that I always tell people is first of all, make sure you can get your data out in a way that you can actually use. In my experience, the majority of remotely hosted forum solutions do not give you your data in a way you can use. So for example, if you give me a CSV file or a text database of my posts on your individual software like Ning. Ning isn’t something you can download. Ning is its own software. If you give me that, I have no idea what to do with that. I have to hire a programmer to put that into some database that I can use with another piece of software. Most people fall into that category. You want your data in something you can use like phpBB. From phpBB, you can convert to pretty much everything because phpBB is so popular that all the software has converters.

So being able to get your data out first and foremost is important because so many solutions don’t offer that and you think of leaving your posts in one solution forever. It’s just in this day and age, that’s not acceptable yet that’s how a lot of people jump into these solutions. They say, “Okay, it takes two seconds to get started. Let’s go.” They accumulate hundreds of thousands of posts, millions of posts, one day and they want to move off it but they can’t. So that’s the big thing. I think the other thing is for most people who want to control their online presence; you want a service that allows you to have a domain name. WordPress does that with their hosted solution if you pay a little extra. And many forum solutions do as well. But the importance of that is simply controlling the URL because if you are something.hosted-solution.com they own that forever. You cannot take that with you. Where if you own your own domain name, you can always take that with you in some form and can redirect those old links even with a catchall redirect rather than losing all the traffic.

Stephan: Well I think one other thing about hosting your own solution versus having a hosted solution somewhere is security is it’s a false thing with the hosted solution somewhere off site with Tumblr or someone else. It’s false security because they’re just as vulnerable to a hacking attack as someone that’s hosting their own solution. And it just depends on how on their toes they are. If they’re kind of slacking back and not really paying attention, someone comes in and just wipes out all the Tumblr accounts, well, you just lost your blog. And there is no recourse. What are you going to do? If someone hacks my blog because I wasn’t paying attention to the updates, then I really can’t blame anybody but myself, right?

Kevin: You can assume pretty much that a reputable service is going to be doing a certain level of backups. So that in the worst case, like one that you had described, Tumblr would be able to recover from a backup that it might be 24 hours old but your content is coming back. Whereas, if you host it yourself, people get lazy and maybe you don’t keep backups for a month or so and you assume that your web host is doing that for you but when things go wrong, they point to the clause in the contract that said, “We’ll make a best effort but we can’t guarantee it.” And, they’ll say, “Actually, yeah, your backup stopped working two months ago because of something funky in the way that you set up your site being incompatible with our automated backup systems.”

Stephan: The great example against that is Ma.gnolia. Because everyone expected that to be an easily retrievable set of links, “Oh, we have your backups.” No, they didn’t have anybody’s backups and those people were screwed. It’s not fair to the people that are putting their stuff up there and expecting a service.

Patrick: I would say that no service is immune to this.

Stephan: No, I’m not trying to single out different people. I see that the security that people feel when they’re on a hosted service because they expect other people to be watching over it but at the same time, they’re just as vulnerable as I am to a WordPress…

Patrick: Yeah, and that speaks to having access to your data. Not trusting someone to back it up for you. If you’re paying a remote host, even if you’re paying a host, it’s still no guarantee. A lot of the remotely hosted solutions probably don’t guarantee backups either. So, it’s just as important to have access to your data and to be able to back it up yourself and something I feel like I should say or we should say is that, it’s not as scary as it seems. There is always a breakout of this sort of thing. A popular piece of software gets hacked and a lot of people didn’t upgrade probably when they should have. And then the whole quality of open source software or of installing your own software gets called into question. It happens every four, six months or more but if you take the time to learn the software and don’t hack it up like crazy. Don’t modify it to insanity where you’re not comfortable with it. Use the basic software. Figure out how to install it and upgrade it and how to monitor upgrade notifications through the software, through RSS, through email, wherever. Go ahead and install those upgrades. Most of the time, you are going to be perfectly fine. This rash of WordPress hackings at least when it caught news it was September 4th or 5th. According to Matt Mullenweg, it didn’t affect version 2.8.3 which was released on August 3rd. So you’re talking about a month in between a release and all this rash of hackings, supposedly. Even if it was a few weeks after. If you want to run your own site, just monitor those upgrades and make sure they get installed and you’ll be fine.

Stephan: WordPress lets you know when you log in, so I don’t know.

Patrick: In WordPress nothing is easier. I’ve used a lot of different software and WordPress is the easiest to upgrade of any of them. And I never even use the automatic upgrade because I only need to have a copy of the files on my computer. I always download it and upload it. So call me old school or whatever but its still is very quick and easy to do. Coming from that phpBB system we’re used to have to install code changes for it to take two minutes literally is a joy first and foremost. So it’s just something where you take the time to invest in your site if you want it to be around.

Kevin: The irony for me is that the thing that as you say for vanilla WordPress installation that you setup yourself upgrading it is a one-click affair and you’re reminded every time you login and it’s a no-brainer. But the reason you choose to run your own WordPress installation is because you want to customize it. You want to write your own plug-ins or you want to install third party plug-ins and inevitably what happens is that WordPress will tell you, you need to upgrade for security reasons but your plug-ins are not compatible with that new version or the plug-ins you’ve written yourself won’t work in the new version and you need to take the time to upgrade them. So it’s ironic to me that the thing that you need to do most, keep your own WordPress installation up-to-date, is often going to be hampered by this competing priority you want to keep your custom WordPress installation customized. Is there a solution?

Patrick: That’s a good point and here is what I do. If an upgrade comes out and they say something about security in it, I install that upgrade as soon as I can. What I do is I make sure all my plug-ins are up-to-date and then what you can do is you can easily disable all of them and enable them one by one. I have really not run into many plug-in issues. I know some have. I think by and large, it has turned out okay for me. I think you can disable the plug-ins and re-enable them one by one. When security pops up, security is always the priority. If they say, it’s a security upgrade, you need to install it. If they don’t, you can wait a week or two and let plug-ins be upgraded because oftentimes that’s when new plug-in versions will be released, right after a new release of WordPress or right around that time. So you install those new versions. You disable the plug-ins and you just enable them one by one and I think for the most part, it will go well. Yes, that’s the benefit of having WordPress is customization but at the same there is obviously a security responsibility as well. So you have to balance those two things but I find that the WordPress plug-in community tends to be pretty strong.

Kevin: I guess the more you can stick to these well supported plug-ins that are actively maintained the better. But a lot of these plug-ins, they’re left alone after a while. The author loses interest or goes on a holiday and suddenly you’re faced between the choice of running an insecure blog or running a blog where your blog is all about polling people, posting polls and suddenly the polling plug-in that you rely on is not compatible with the new WordPress version…

Stephan: And its kind of like what I was—I was running a blog and I was using the AsideShop plug-in which gives you the little asides, just a single link or whatever and if you click on it, it lets people comment on the link. I like the functionality because I didn’t always have time to post a full post but I had a little short blurb and link. That’s what I wanted to post. That plug-in after the 2.8.1, I think, update just stopped working. In fact if you activated it, it killed WordPress. So, I had to disable it and I lost the biggest functionality of my blog that I used and now, I stopped blogging for a little while and I’m trying to get back into it because my method of blogging was taken away because someone doesn’t update their plug-in.

Patrick: But here is what you have got to weigh that against I think. If you want WordPress.com do they have the asides plug-in, could you do that?

Kevin: No. No.

Patrick: So here is the question then. You probably used customizations or you might. Maybe you only used that one plug-in but a lot of people use more than one where not all the plug-ins are going to be incompatible that’s why you do them one by one. So you’re still taking advantage of those customizations. But like I said, weigh it against the hosted solution, would you be using this on WordPress? Would you have access to this on WordPress? Yes, you may have to do without it for a period but security always takes precedent. So if you have to disable that for a little while. You say, “I’m sorry, we have disable this.” You get on your hustle. You get on the WordPress forums. You ask for a poll plug-in that works and you make it work. If you’re not a programmer like I am, you have to hustle and you have to make it work and that’s just what running a web site is about, especially if you’re not a programmer.

Kevin: Going back to the bread analogy. Once upon a time, most people did make their own bread because we didn’t have supermarkets yet or the bread that you could get that other people would make for you was just nowhere near as good as the stuff that you could make yourself. And over time, mass-produced bread has gotten better. We’ve seen the same thing happening in the progress that we’ve made from the days of phpBB where you would have to hack files by hand to keep your customized site up-to-date, to today, where WordPress even heavily customized with tons of third-party plug-ins still supports a one-click upgrade that often and most often will not break anything. So over time, I think these automated solutions for keeping your site up-to-date, whether it’s the one click upgrade in your customized solution or whether it’s the types of widgets and level of customization that you can get in a hosted solution like WordPress.com, these things are getting better and better and so requiring us less and less to bake our own bread. Is that fair to say?

Patrick: Wow, analogy crazy.

So my mom’s bread is always better than store bread. That’s just saying that, that’s just the way it is and it will always be but I think everything will continually get better. I think both solutions are there for the audience they serve. I think WordPress.com is a very good solution for probably most people but it all comes back to I guess that same analogy where you need to weigh your benefits and if you understand what it means to keep software up-to-date and everything that that entails and you want what you can receive benefits-wise by hosting your own site then go for it. It’s all about effort and commitment. Nothing can be done by flying by the seat of your pants; not managing a community, not managing the software. If you don’t have a tech guy then guess what? You are the tech guy and that’s a role that I had to jump right into because I have nobody. I don’t have money for anybody. So, I learned what I needed to do to get by. I can’t write any code, no. But I can fix the occasional PHP error and I can mess with plug-ins a little bit. And I can upgrade software and I can run a backup system. It’s all about learning what you need to get the job done and if you can’t do that, then yeah, go with a hosted solution.

Kevin: Sounds like your mom makes artisanal bread which is what this blog post calls it. Like the extra special bread that its worth going to the trouble to get.

Patrick: Well, it’s made with love so come on Kevin.

Kevin: There you go. And if you want to run an artisanal blog that’s made with love then maybe you just have to put up with the headaches that come with it.

Let’s close off the show with out host spotlights, guys. Patrick what’s your host spotlight?

Patrick: Well my host spotlight is an article by Rohit Bhargava who is an author, all around social media—I don’t want to say expert guru—but a very smart guy. I met him at Blog World last year actually so that’s another reason to come out. But he wrote an article called the 5 Big Myths of Social Media published on September 15th. It’s on his blog, Influential Marketing blog and he discusses five of the myths he encounters the most in his practice and he works at Ogilvy. The five are: you need give up control; two, it is all about going viral; three, someone needs to be managing it fulltime; four, everything has be to open, transparent and public; and five, measurements just include soft metrics. And he goes into the details as far as what those five mean. But it’s definitely a well worth reading article for anyone who is into social media especially anybody from a corporate perspective.

Kevin: Stephan what’s yours?

Stephan: Well, I have a little tool for all you phone, ringtone junkies. Charles Williams, a blogger web junkie kind of guy released a set of NES ringtones including Duck Hunt, Super Mario Brothers, and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. Its 99 ringtones from those six NES games. There is a list of them. It’s pretty sweet and it works with the iPhone and they have other phones as well. I’m not sure if it’s legal or what not. It hadn’t been taken out. It’s been up for a few weeks.

Kevin: Wow, our new community manager, Raena at SitePoint was in a meeting with us yesterday and she had customized her instant messaging program, Adium. She had found a pack of sounds for it with Super Mario Brothers sounds in it. It was hilarious. I definitely am going to show this to her because I think she may just want to change her ringtone.

My host spotlight, I’ve been researching a topic that I’m giving it Web Direction South in a few weeks. And it’s all about CSS frameworks. The granddaddy of CSS frameworks one might argue is Blueprint. Blueprint CSS is what most people call it. It’s a library of CSS styles that you build on top of or assemble together to build a web site. It can save time over building your own CSS styles from scratch. A lot of people have complained about Blueprint CSS’s code because it forces you or has in the past forced you to use class names that were presentational. So you had to use CSS class names like "span-17" and things like that. That people who cared about the class names in their HTML code really didn’t like. But they’ve actually listened to this feedback and this is something that a lot of people don’t know yet but Blueprint CSS these days comes with a Ruby script. You feed it a little configuration file. You tell it, my class names that I want to use are this; and this is what they should mean in terms of the grid that Blueprint sets up for them and it spits out a customized, compressed version of the Blueprint stylesheets using your own custom class names. So you can use things like header, footer, sidebar, things like that and Blueprint will apply the appropriate styles to those class names instead of forcing you to use the ones that people hate so much. There is a great walkthrough about this that I’ll point to you in the show notes. It’s by Joshua Clayton the lead author of Blueprint. It’s called Blueprint’s compress.rb: A Walkthrough. It sounds scary running a Ruby script to customize your CSS code but if you’re using Blueprint at all, this is a set of instructions that really anyone can follow. I think it makes Blueprint a lot more relevant in the face of a lot of the criticism that has been leveled against it in the past.

So that brings our show to an end. Let’s go on the table guys.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network. You can find me on Twitter @iFroggy.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Seagraves and you can find me on Twitter @sseagraves.

Kevin: And you can follow me on Twitter @sentience and follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom.

The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank.

Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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