SitePoint Podcast

SitePoint Podcast #163: Man Down

Karn Broad — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:47:43 +0000

Episode 163 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of 3 of our 4 our regular hosts, Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy), Kevin Dees (@kevindees) and Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves).

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Download this Episode

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SitePoint Podcast #163: Man Down (MP3, 28:24, 27.3MB)

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Episode Summary

The panel discuss Google’s Chrome briefly taking the number one browser spot, Youtube’s 7th birthday, the thoughts on different possible responsive image standards HTML5 could use and more.

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/163.

Host Spotlights

Interview Transcript

Transcript to follow.

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.

SitePoint Podcast #162: Taking Google For A Drive

Karn Broad — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:15:45 +0000

Episode 162 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of 3 of our 4 our regular hosts, Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy), Kevin Dees (@kevindees) and Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves).

Listen in Your Browser

Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below:

Download this Episode

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

SitePoint Podcast #162: Taking Google For A Drive (MP3, 44:50, 43.0MB)

Subscribe to the Podcast

The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.

Episode Summary

The panel discuss Adobe launching a host of Cloud services to go with CS 6 and also kicks off a new website dedicated to the open web. We also take a moment to remember web design pioneer Hillman Curtis and talk about the future of advertising on the Web.

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/162.

Host Spotlights

Patrick: BlameSociety Videos
Stephan: Reviews In Depth | Why Everyone Should Learn to Program
Kevin: 20 Inspiring Examples of Big Backgrounds in Web Design | Inspiration

Interview Transcript

Patrick: Hello and welcome to another edition of the SitePoint Podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe and I’m joined today by my usual co-hosts Kevin Dees and Stephan Segraves; hey guys, how’s it going?

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Stephan: Hi.

Patrick: As you may notice we are without our other usual fourth co-host, he usually introduces the show, Louis Simoneau, he’s off with important business-like errands to attend to, or something along those lines, and we’ll be holding the fort down today in his absence. So I guess let’s go ahead and jump into the stories.
I’ll take the first story today, on TechCrunch there was a story by Ingrid Lunden that caught my eye, it is about mobile hardware and operating system market share for the three months ending in March, this is according to ComScore and I found this story through Revenues. So the story has essentially three main numbers, like I said, hardware, software and then also usage through mobile, like use a downloaded app, use the browser, etcetera. So here are some of the numbers: for hardware you have Samsung in the lead with 26% of the market, that is a gain of .7% from the three months ending in December, in other words the previous three-month period. LG second with 19.3% with a small loss, Apple is third at 14% with a 1.6% gain, then you have Motorola fourth and HTC 5th, Motorola with 12.8% of the market and HTC with 6.0%, and that represents small losses for both of those brands.
As far as our branding systems go, Google remains in the lead by a healthy margin with 51% of the market, that is a 3.7% change, and then you have Apple at 30.7%, a gain for them as well of just over a percentage point. And then you have a big loss from Blackberry from Research in Motion moving down to 12.3%, losing 3.7 percentage points. Microsoft is in at 3.9, a loss for them, and then Symbian, finally, maintains its ground at 1.4%.
I don’t know, I guess Symbian is what I have, right? I don’t know what’s in this small, little, cheap pay-as-you-go phone.

Kevin: So, looking at these numbers for the platform specifically, not the hardware but the platform side, it comes to my attention that when you think about like jQuery plugins and CSS tricks and all this stuff, it’s like people tend to move towards the iPhone, and yet Android has continued, or Google, has continued to be the platform of choice, and I understand why, people like the iPhone in development for the reason that it’s fairly consistent across their browser space, whereas Android you have different screen sizes per phone, and all this other stuff that really makes it hard to develop for. But, I think it is worth drawing attention towards.

Stephan: Along those lines, why is the environment so much different then, because you see a lot of development for iPhone apps and very little for Android apps, and not very little in the sense that no one’s developing anything, but because you don’t really hear a lot about Android apps, right, the Instagram app was a big deal. But I think it comes down to Android users aren’t necessarily willing to pay for apps, right.

Patrick: There have been a bunch of different articles suggesting just that, and the numbers bear it out that Apple customers, Apple users, IOS mobile users are just more likely to pay for apps, they’re in Apple’s ecosystem. Whereas the Android is — the Android platform is a little more, well, it’s more open, but I mean I guess the downside of that some would say that it’s more disjointed; you know, there are different versions, there are different app market places, you know I’m a Kindle user, Kindle Fire, it’s Android, you know it’s not the current version, it’s the version that Amazon took and made to fit their tablet, and they have their own app marketplace that sells both to the Android platform, in the latest version, but also with a particular focus on the Kindle Fire. And I download a number of apps, and I downloaded probably hundreds of apps by this point, eh, I would say over a hundred, to be conservative, and I’ve paid for — I want to say I’ve paid for about 30 apps or so, most of which were on sale or half off or some kind of discount is what prompted me and pushed me to buy them then, you get a lot of the free app of the day and other free apps, but yeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting dilemma, but as a developer it feels like it’s silly to ignore Android.

Kevin: Right, I would agree with you there. I mean and I guess it’s sort of the point I’m trying to make, but more than that, you know I was focusing a little more towards the Web, the Web side of thing, because that’s what I deal with on a daily basis.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: And that part of it is with the iPhone your screen size is always going to be the same, right, and I think that’s really — I’m harping on this because it is kind of a big deal in that when you create an iPhone app you have a set number of pixels, I believe it’s 320 pixels for the low resolution, and 640, this is Portrait mode I believe, yeah, Portrait mode that you would be in, and so like with Android I mean the array is just massive. And so I’m mostly referring to things like jQuery mobile and that kind of stuff, which do support Android platforms and that kind of thing, but it’s just interesting for me to like look at these numbers and then see the reflection in like when you see the community talking, right, it’s mostly about the iPhone, you rarely see anything about Android when it comes to Web stuff.
I think that’s a little bit of sort of the culture of the web design community, right, because everybody that makes websites needs to have ‘The Mac’, you know, you can’t use Windows, kind of thing.

Patrick: You can’t be like Patrick.

Kevin: But it’s true, though, right?

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: You do have that little bit of this hatred towards anything other than Apple because in design, right, you want it to be beautiful and to be honest a lot of Windows stuff isn’t just breathtaking.

Patrick: Right. Or at least they have that reputation that continues to follow them.

Kevin: Right. And I think it’s good to look at the numbers and see numbers like this to kind of bring you back to reality because you can get lost in this Apple world.

Patrick: And they also said that they are — was data on the mobile content usage, and there are six categories; send a text message to a phone, that number stays steady, 74.3% of Smart Phone and non-Smart Phone, hello, users sent a text to another phone, 50% used downloaded apps, that’s a 2.4 percentage point change, 49.3% used a browser, that’s a gain also of almost two percentage point, 36.1% access a social networking site or blog, which is just a weird categorization to me; you access a social networking site, or any blog, 36.1%, a gain, played games 32.6%, listened to music on a mobile phone 25.3%, both of those gains of 1.2 and 1.5. So all actions gained moreorless, but still only less than 50% of the Smart Phone and non-Smart Phone of mobile users age 13 and up in the U.S. used a web browser, so not even 50%.
Is that surprising? Is that meaningful in any way?

Kevin: Yeah, I think like when you look at these numbers I mean it’s growing, right, and I think that’s the key to pull out of this is that mobile is continuing to grow as statistics have shown, and it will only continue to do that in the future. And the reason that this even pulls at it even more is these are competitor brands and things like that that we’re talking about, right, so it is a saturated space in that companies are taking it seriously and not just because there’s money in it but because there’s like — there’s brand awareness in it as well because so many people are using it, I mean Microsoft jumped in the game, right.

Patrick: Right. And you know technically speaking back in November I actually accessed the web browser on my cheap pay-as-you-go phone because someone actually — Chris Cochran, Christopher Cochran who works for webdevestudios.com, which is the company of Brad Williams who was one of the original four hosts on the SitePoint Podcast here, he had developed a website and it was spitting out what mobile browser you were on and adjusting for that, and so he’s like will it even recognize this? So we pulled it up and sure enough it recognized it; I forget as what, and it took some time, but I did get to Chris’ website, so –

Kevin: That’s awesome.

Patrick: I do have a browser.

Kevin: Did he reimburse you for the data usage?

Patrick: (Laughs) no, he didn’t. I don’t know what it cost me, probably — I don’t know, it probably cost me, hmm, I don’t know, fifty cents or something like that.

Kevin: To load a web page?

Patrick: (Laughs) well spent.

Kevin: That’s a soda out of the soda machine, Patrick.

Patrick: Yeah.

Stephan: I think this breakdown of mobile content usage it would be interesting if they broke it down even more and said which platforms did what more.

Patrick: Right, that’s a good point.

Stephan: I think that would be cool to see like if — are Android users using downloaded apps more than web browser stuff? And I think that may give us more of a look at how people are actually using the phones and whether we should be developing more and more web apps for Android than say regular native apps. It’s just interesting to me; I think maybe this all brings us back to developing just responsive web applications that aren’t specific to a platform, right, I don’t know.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely. Especially like when you think about the development of just the desktop platform, right, where a lot of stuff you do would be in apps, but since bandwidth has become increasing like web apps aren’t that uncommon and they’ve become quite popular when you think about 37 Signals and companies like that that are built on it, Twitter, social networks, you know.

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: And that goes into the Smart Phone industry as well, right. So now with 4G LTE, I believe that’s correct, right; I don’t have LTE here or 4G or anything like that.

Patrick: Right, sounds right.

Kevin: But that’s high, high speed Internet right there, and with that kind of capability there’s no reason, like you were saying, Stephan, that we can’t come to a place where web apps take over the mobile space above built-in apps, and I’m not saying that that’s actually 100% true because, you know, the phone makers are pushing their marketplaces on the phone, and it’s so easy to buy an app, you know.

Stephan: Yeah, yeah, but I think you’re absolutely right, there are certain things now that are easier to do on the phone, and you can make it cross-platform available to everyone without having to distribute the application, right, the websites, the distribution point. So I think the possibilities there are great, and I hope to see more companies push a web application via the actual web interface and not necessarily through an application, a native application.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: On a related note, I just saw a story on The Next Web that was reported today, they are recording May 7th, by Anna Heim, it says that Twitter has updated its mobile web version, mobile.twitter.com, and according to their announcement the purpose of the update was to improve the Twitter experience for users who access the platform from feature phone, low bandwidth networks and older browser, so there you go. It’s a market they want to tap into.

Stephan: Cool. Speaking of web apps and phone apps, Foursquare today launched a new history page so you can search all of your past check-ins, this is being reported on The Next Web, the writer is Drew Olanoff, and he’s just reporting on the feature, and you can search, it shows a map of all your check-ins, and it basically lets you access all your old history data on Foursquare. A pretty neat little feature, I’ve played with it a little bit, it doesn’t look like you can actually share it with anybody, which is kind of a feature to me; I don’t know if I want everybody stalking my history.

Patrick: Yeah, I was curious about that myself, is that something that you can enable or disable, or is it just something that’s out there for the public?

Stephan: I don’t see an option to do it, but what’s odd when I go look at my history I can see old comments on my check-ins and the friends that were at the same locations of those check-ins, so that’s kind of cool.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m looking actually — we must be friends so I’m just going to see. No, we’re not friends, what the heck?

Stephan: Man, Patrick!

Patrick: Stephan, man, add me now.

Kevin: Tsk, tsk.

Patrick: Foursquare.com/ifroggy, I have nine total check-ins, so with my non-Smart Phone, or is it called a feature phone, is that kind of the cool name for it, feature phone? I don’t really check-in, so, I check in from a browser whenever I check-in; last time I did so was last — I guess that’s October, the Westin Bonaventure Suites and Hotel in Los Angeles. I don’t know why that’s funny, but, yeah, that’s the last time I checked in, it was October, or September, I’m sorry, September 2011.

Kevin: So, Patrick, you’re looking for –

Patrick: I’m looking at my history now.

Stephan: What’s cool about all this, to me at least, is that now a simple check-in allows me to build a map of my travels and things, rather than me having to write something down or take a note in my phone or, you know, I’m kind of anal retentive about all this kind of stuff, just remembering where I was and things, so this is useful to me and it gives me another reason to use Foursquare even if I make it private.

Patrick: Right. And I looked at your profile, I can see the last five history and that’s all.

Stephan: Yeah, which is cool, I’m glad, I don’t want you going and stalking my last year’s check-ins; if I want to share that information with you I will.

Kevin: So if you show up at a Starbucks at five o’clock in the morning you’ll always run into Patrick, right, according to this history.

Patrick: Yeah, you’ll run into me if I’m sleepwalking.

Kevin: (Laughs) yeah, it’s an interesting story, it reminds me of Google’s Latitude that they put out a while back where you could track your location and kind of your most common places of interest.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s neat, it’s neat, so it’s a step in the right direction, I’m sure people won’t like it or they’ll have some complaint about it, but I think it’s a good step.

Kevin: Alright, so I have a story on silent browser upgrades, since Mozilla has released version 12 of their browser it’s now silent upgrading time. And so this has kind of created a little bit of a stir in the web community, but it’s kind of a new thing but not really since Chrome has been doing it for quite a while, but it’s new for Mozilla and Internet Explorer plans to trail them on this, so it’s becoming the trend of the Web now, for desktop browser specifically here, in that the browsers want their latest version on your computer as soon as possible, and I can’t say I disagree with that.
So this article kind of goes through step-by-step parts of the reasons why it’s a good thing for this to happen, and I like the story in short because it is short, and because it covers some of the practical things and thoughts behind browser silently upgrading themselves. Some of the points I like are the Internet Explorer example that it has which basically says that because of Internet Explorer 6 sitting stagnant for so long there’s no way to get that upgraded to Internet Explorer 8 even if you’re on XP because you can’t silently upgrade, and so if they had had that everyone, you know, we would have gotten rid of this Internet Explorer 6 issue a lot sooner.
And so things like user agent sniffing is gone now in replace of feature detection, things like that that you can do, and that UA detection isn’t as good because like if the browser’s upgrading itself then you have to update your script, and so the best way to really detect what version is through the feature detection. And there are other things, he points out some things, but those two points I think are the biggest for me which is the Internet Explorer.
And also, thirdly, he makes his first point which is you have to see past your expertise, right, because we’re all kind of webbies, but the normal person they just say well I just click on the blue E and it takes me to the Internet, right, that’s the Internet, the blue E, like they don’t even know that it’s Internet Explorer, and so like that even furthers the point of, you know what, these people aren’t gonna upgrade their browsers because they don’t even know what it is to begin with, like unless there’s a popup on their screen, which people are already wary of, right, because of viruses, especially if you’re a Windows user, you know, it’s like it’s just one of those things where it’s like it’s about time, it’s a breath of fresh air in my opinion.

Patrick: I mean the tricky thing here, and of course the kind of other side of this is that, you know, talking about Microsoft, Google, some might think of them as Big Brother in a way, you know, pushing things down at their leisure into your computer, right, and I guess there are cases where — this isn’t something we want to see proliferate into every application, right, this isn’t something we want, we don’t necessarily want silent upgrades in every piece of software that we have installed on our machine.

Kevin: Correct.

Patrick: Web browsers are kind of a special case just because they are used to access the wild, wild, Web, right, the wilderness that could be full of who knows; not only do you have the nefarious things like viruses or malware, and they may exploit an outdated browser, but then you have certainly for our audience, the developer concerns, having as much of a consistent experience as possible for a majority of your visitors regardless of the browser that they are using. And so ensure that you need people to be using similar standards and adhering to similar practices where the browsers will read a certain piece of code the same way, whether the wide variance that exists between say Internet Explorer 6 and even Internet Explorer 10 or Firefox or Chrome. You know, but there is that concern there, and like I said, this isn’t something you want to see in everything, is it?

Kevin: No, not at all, to be honest there’s not much you can do to get around the malicious type of software that they’re just gonna do this anyways, right, I mean they put themselves on your computer just by visiting a website, you don’t even have to click a button sometimes.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: And so there are things that the browsers are doing like, for example, Firefox allows you to stop the automatic updates if you want to, so, you know, for example in the comments there’s one fellow here who uses a CMS but he can’t get it to work on many browsers except for Firefox 3, so what does he do, he turns those off and he’s okay.
You know something I thought was very interesting is I was using Firefox one day and then all of a sudden it just updated without me asking it to, and so I don’t know what happened there.

Patrick: You’re like, oh, Firefox you sly devil.

Kevin: Yeah. So like it would have been interesting to have had like a box to select or something, like maybe I did check it and I just didn’t realize it, sort of like Windows XP had before where you would get automatic updates with I believe service pack 2.

Patrick: Yeah, and it’s true what you say about popups, because I can say I use my computer and every time I see a popup to upgrade something oftentimes it is Adobe, something Adobe, Adobe Air or –

Kevin: Flash.

Patrick: Flash, right, even Acrobat; and sometimes there’s a prompt for Java, to upgrade to the latest version of Java, since I have those notifications on, and then you have a few other things here and there, I use a program called Malware Bites, and once in a while that’ll prompt me for a new version. But then I go use the computer that my family has that they use, and that’s my brother and my parents, and they’ll just ignore those popups forever (laughs), they will not touch those things until I get there and see the pile-up of, well, everything needs to be updated outside of Windows because Windows will restart, you know, will say we’re gonna do this, you have four hours if you want, but we really need to do this.
And so, yeah, I mean it’s funny how that is the case. So it’s a tricky era that we live in where we’re concerned about so many different areas of privacy and control, certainly Facebook is constantly in the news regarding those issues, you have legislation, SOPA, PIPA, SYSA, SYSPA, and anything else that ends with an A. And then you have those issues and people are going to have concern about their privacy, and yet, they want to allow some of these major companies that are parties to these legislations, sometimes pro, sometimes against, but just to install things onto the computer. And, on the other hand, you have people like my family who won’t upgrade anything and might be vulnerable, so I don’t know what the — I guess it is we have to go down this road, and if any company abuses it, and I don’t think any reasonable company will, but there’s always that chance that there’s that one person who does something, you know, it’s gonna be a major news story, and then we’re gonna have CNN talking about, well, Mozilla, Google, they were pushing updates to your computer without your permission, find out more at 11:00.

Kevin: Yeah, and they were stealing your data and all your documents and finding out what you wrote to your ex-wife, kind of thing.

Patrick: Right, because it’s an issue that once it’s in the mainstream it’s much like the legislation really, a lot of people will talk about it but very few people will understand it. And that’s exactly the kind of issue that that would be, you know, the news will grab onto it as a headline and it is newsworthy, and if I a company does abuse it, it deserves to be put out there. But then you create this fear, and 99%, similar to what Mr. Wall says in this blog post, 99% of users don’t care what browsers they’re using, well, that’s the same 99% that won’t understand this issue if it goes wrong.
But I don’t know, I don’t see any other way, so actually I’m interested to see the browsers kind of widely adopting this practice, and I have to say I like the logo on this blog; have you put your mouse over it?

Kevin: I have not, let me try, ooh.

Patrick: Put your mouse over that thing.

Kevin: Oh my gosh, that’s kind of rockin’ right there, literally.

Patrick: It’s kind of like a vinyl record. It’s like “wiki wiki wiki”.

Kevin: I’m a DJ on this website; check it out, what’s up. Yeah, I think it’s an interesting story and one to watch for, you know, because part of this also is with the silent update thing, right, what happens when, for example, like silent updates maybe for Internet Explorer 8 versus 9, like you can’t get Internet Explorer 9 on Windows XP. Now there’s good reason for that, but you know situations like that where it’s more than just them trying to update your computer, it’s like a physical limitation of the device you have, and like the conflicts that that creates.

Patrick: Yeah, and I was just looking at operating system percentages for the visitors on one of the communities that I manage, and someone asked other members what they were using, and so I posted the, first of all, the operating system itself, and then they wanted a breakdown of Microsoft and the Windows Operating Systems, and I have 57.54% on 7, 28.60% on XP, 13.3% on Vista, and then small percentages beneath that; Windows server 2003 was .37% and then it kind of went down, and we had one visit from Windows ME, this year.
So, yeah, I mean you have 28.60% of Windows visitors, which represent a majority, and those people won’t be able to get those newer versions of IE, and you still have to, you know, there’s still a sizable part of the website. So even with automatic upgrades eventually if they don’t upgrade the operating system it seems like the upgrades will come to an end.
So, speaking of Google, we have a post here from the Google official blog announcing that Google+ Hangouts on Air is now available worldwide, and previously this was a feature that was in Beta. Basically it allows you to put a live broadcast out there on the Web in Google+ and on your YouTube channel, if you so desire, hangouts have been around for a while, of course, they are kind of one of the Google+ killer features, if you will, get together with a group of people that you know and talk and have a nice video chat; I’ve actually done that with you Kevin.

Kevin: Yes, and we also did Turntable that day I believe.

Patrick: Yeah, we actually were on, we just kind of shut down the Internet, we broke the tubes. So, yeah, we were on Google Hangouts and playing around with turntable.fm listening to music as well, so that was fun and I’ve done a few hangouts, I did one actually for Dell in I believe it was February on Community Manager Appreciation Day they did a community manager kind of one-hour event where we did some presentations for ten minutes each, and I participated in that, and Dell has done a bunch of stuff on their Google+ page. But so the Google Hangouts on Air take you to a different level allowing you to be live to the world. And if you have a popular YouTube channel that’s another way to engage with your audience, to have a live stream and to have people actually participating with you and talking with you as you’re doing it, and there’s a million different uses for that, obviously, but the thing that struck me about this is there are entire companies that are built to satisfy this need, UStream comes to mind immediately, there’s one that we use for my other podcast, Copyright 2.0 show called SPRAYcast.
And they have other features, right, you can display questions on the video player, they record the videos, which Google is doing with Google Hangouts on Air, and you can have two people on the screen at one time, you can have four people on at one time on the same kind of screen looking at all four people, there are a lot of different things that you can do with it; Google+ Hangouts allows you to have people on the screen but only one person gets the main camera. Those are really small differences, and to me if you can be on YouTube live, no offense to UStream or anyone else, but why would you want to be on UStream live? Is that a fair thought or what do you think about competition in that kind of live streaming space now that Google is essentially saying we are definitely in?

Stephan: So my question is when do we do a live stream of the show on this and try it out.

Patrick: I don’t know. I was thinking about that.

Stephan: We should give a test drive; if we’re gonna talk about it we should at least try it out.

Patrick: Right, well, you know, I haven’t done Google Hangouts on Air, and that’s an interesting point, and if you’re listening to this and you’d be interested in us doing this show live leave a comment at sitepoint.com/podcast on this episode and let us know if that’s something that you’d like to watch. But, yeah, that’d be fun, but yeah, I mean I don’t know, it’s interesting, I’m planning on doing more video stuff this summer, and I think there’s a great opportunity there for a lot of popular YouTubers to kind of take their channel to another level rather than having to, you know, previously it was kind of weird, you have this kind of divide, right, and I think some might argue that YouTube and Google were kind of slow to it, but maybe they were just waiting for the right time, right, the right network, the right bandwidth to kick this feature out, because it does take a lot of bandwidth, and so you had this divide of services that host video, like YouTube, Blip.tv, and so on, and then you have services that hosted live video, you know, you weren’t uploading videos to them, that live video was all that they do, and we did live SitePoint podcasts at WordCamp Raleigh two years in a row and used UStream in both cases to stream that show out, but you know if we were to do it now I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t use Google+ instead since they are essentially matching the video hosting, the great functionality they have at YouTube, you know all the little things they do whether it be captioning or links in videos or all the great user features with the functionality that these other dedicated startups already had.

Stephan: I think one key thing that will increase the YouTube usage, or increase this feature usage, is I think a lot of people were hesitant to go to websites called blip.tv or UStream, or whatever, without knowing what it was and understanding what a live stream was, and they’ll be much more willing to click on something that says YouTube, watch the YouTube video.

Kevin: Yes.

Stephan: I think that that’s a big selling point for people, it’s known, it’s in their brains, they’ve used it before and so they’re comfortable. I think that the other services will struggle to fight that with YouTube and with Google.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s hard to create that trust that Google has created with its users over the years, in sites like Blip and that kind of thing, and so you’re exactly right, Stephan, right?

Stephan: I hope so (laughter).

Patrick: You’re all just so right, but here’s the thing, that’s a good point, it’s brand equity, right, it’s brand capital they’ve built up by being in business for so long and having a generally good reputation, and that’s something that Google brings to any industry, right, when they jump in Smart Phones this is Google Smart Phone, this is Google Android, even though it’s branded as Android and it’s open source and there’s that — I would say that comfortable division that they create to make people feel comfortable with engaging with that operating system, but it’s Google, and you know when Google jumps in a new industry or a new platform they instantly have that, and that’s true right across the board, and that includes Google Drive which just recently launched. I mean you have established players who are both super well known companies and not so well known companies, you can think of Amazon as one of the really well known ones with their Cloud drive servers, and then you have a lot of Cloud storage services that are out there, Dropbox is pretty well known, but like I used the example of my family earlier, they don’t know Dropbox, you know my parents don’t know what Dropbox is, but they know Google, they do know what Google is, so even in that case Google Drive has that sort of leg up.
Have you guys had any opportunity to look at Google Drive?

Kevin: So I signed up for the service but I have not used it yet, so now instead of Google Documents whenever I go in the browser it says Drive, and that’s about the extent I have used Google Drive.

Patrick: A re-branding.

Kevin: Right. So like it would be fun to try out, but to be honest I’m using Dropbox and I’m happy, and I think this is a good thing to talk about here, because not just about Google Drive but also for Dropbox, right, because Dropbox is fulfilling my needs and I’m very happy with Dropbox, so my incentive to even look at Google Drive like is zero because I’m completely, I’m 100% satisfied with Dropbox, Dropbox does everything that it says it will, and so I have absolutely no need maybe outside of price to look at somewhere else.

Patrick: That’s the reason I always give people when they say why do you still use that web browser, and they did that when I used IE for many years, why are you still using that instead of Firefox? Well, because I have no reason. And I went over to Firefox and people are like why aren’t you on Chrome? Well, I have no reason, and I’m still on Firefox, but that’s an interesting point. So I haven’t really used Google Drive either, but their feature page makes it pretty clear what they are doing, it’s not just a stored service, like you said, it ties into Google Docs seamlessly, and it incorporates Google’s very powerful search technology, so that’s a benefit to be able to search those archive files. You can view things in the browser, they say you can view and open over 30 file types right in your browser, including HD video, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, even if you don’t have the program installed on your computer, that’s interesting. And Google Drive also interacts with a number of different apps and has a very powerful sharing interface where you can share files with just the right files that you want to put them out there with, and there’s some discussion element to files and collaborative documents that might remind some, I don’t know, it looks a little like Google Wave to me, though I haven’t really played around with it too much, that might be an erroneous statement, and also Google Drive tracks the changes that you made to your file, so when you hit a save button a newer version was saved, and that was already true for Google Documents and it seems like it might also be true for files that you put up, but I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but that would be interesting if that was an actual feature. But Google Drive has been talked about for a long time, and it’s interesting to see them finally get it out the door.
Do you use — you know you mentioned Dropbox, do you use anything beyond that for Cloud storage or do you backup to the Cloud, Stephan?

Stephan: I use Amazon.

Patrick: Cloud Drive.

Stephan: The Cloud Drive, yeah, to backup some stuff, and I use a service called Crash Plan.

Patrick: Okay, Crash Plan, my brother has that also; I got him hooked up on that when he went to college.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s a good service. The coolest thing I saw on here, on this Google Drive features list, was the photo storage and the search by, it can recognize objects. So that technology right there is unbelievable, so if you upload a picture of a mountain and it’s Everest, and you do a search and it can tell that it’s Everest, that’s amazing.

Kevin: That’s a little too personal for me (laughter). Hey, look, it’s Kevin in 12 of these photos, don’t you know that guy? Like Google you shouldn’t know my face, that scares me (laughter).

Patrick: The thing is it’s gonna be real scary when they notice just parts of your body, like you search Kevin’s arm, oh, Kevin’s arm appeared in 27 photos (laughter), how many photos are Kevin’s fingerprints visible in, oh, 3,627, oh, we won’t do anything with that information.

Stephan: Did you mean to look for the arrest record of Kevin.

Kevin: Wow. No, ‘did you mean’ in Google Docs (laughter)

Patrick: That’s very funny.

Stephan: So I think that’s really cool, and I think one of the scary parts for me and the reason I’m kind of hesitant to try this out is does it index your drive and where does that information go? And I can’t find anything on all that information yet, I’ve been looking through the privacy while we’ve been on the call by privacy features, but I haven’t seen anything, so if anyone knows out there, any of the listeners, I would love to know what you found regarding what they do with the indexed data on your computer.

Patrick: Kevin, I asked Stephan if he used any similar services, he mentioned Crash Plan and then Amazon Cloud Drive, what about yourself?

Kevin: Well, since we’re advertising for people, I use Carbonite, and I use Dropbox, and then I use Google Docs, and then I will soon be using the Adobe Cloud, Creative Cloud.

Patrick: I just don’t have the bandwidth to use Carbonite and Back Blaze and Crash Plan; I mean it would take decades to get my stuff up.

Kevin: You just leave it running overnight.

Patrick: Yeah, I know, overnight for a few decades and we’ll be there, you know literally I’m not kidding.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean I’m sitting on about a terabyte of data, and I send it to and offsite hard drive, like I don’t use their actual Cloud storage, I just use their service, so it goes to a friend’s computer, which I’m sure he loves when I like upload a bunch of photos, I’m sure his bandwidth really takes a beating (laughs), but I used to have it at my work, I used to have a hard drive sitting at work and I just left it plugged in.

Kevin: What’s to be said, I don’t mean to extend this conversation, but what’s to be said for things like photos and music? When you think about like the iTunes Cloud or Apple Cloud, whatever, the iCloud I guess it’s called.

Patrick: A lot of Clouds.

Kevin: Amazon mp3 player and their instant video, do you not think that this is where people are going to store their valuables? Like why put this equity in something that you really can’t protect, and why not put it in the hands of someone that can, even if you don’t physically own a copy, like that’s what I’ve started doing, like all of my music is in Amazon Cloud, so like I don’t need to backup my music, I don’t really backup much of anything other than my documents folder because everything that’s important to me is backed up online within site services, not necessarily on site drives.

Patrick: This is interesting because on the Copyright 2.0 show, the other podcast that I host, the mega upload cases is a big story we talk about every week the different updates and developments, and one of the things that came up recently was people wanting access to the files that were on the service, people who used it as a backup service, as a file locker for their files and their documents. And it’s an interesting question of exactly what you are entitled to legally and what’s fair for you to be entitled to, right, I mean if you sign up with Crash Plan are you entitled to those files forever, are you entitled to the access for those files for how long, I mean companies go out of business as we know, they have financial trouble, they file for Chapter 11, etcetera. So obviously best practices you get some notice of that happening, but if the service is run poorly, as may have been the case with Mega Upload, then what happens when they get seized or they get shut down. Me personally I always think you should have something other than the Cloud service for your important documents, I mean that’s just my thinking about it, and the terms of service for any of these services will probably back that up in saying what you are entitled to and what you’re not entitled to. So there’s this danger and, you know, Brad and Stephan we used to joke with Kevin about the Cloud and how I wouldn’t use Open ID and I wouldn’t trust Cloud Services 100% with all my data, but that’s true for me here as well; I’d love to have it as kind of a backup backup, but putting all your eggs into that basket it’s not without it’s risks. And truth be told, Amazon and Google aren’t probably going anywhere, but still the same principle applies.

Kevin: But with those services you can still download what you have on them to your computer at a moment’s notice.

Patrick: Right, but if they get seized tomorrow by the government I mean it’s gonna be too late.

Kevin: I would say my laptop has as much chance of being seized by not just the government but by somebody that walks by me in the coffee shop and wants to just snatch my computer away, right.

Patrick: Right. But at the same time there’s a difference between Google and Amazon and Crash Plan and Back Blaze and then Mega Upload and Rapid Share, right, there’s difference, Google and Amazon may have a stronger legal team, right, and they may be doing things a little more appropriately, but then if you’re using these other services that don’t have the same resources or might not be run the same way, you know, it’s just always important to be aware of what you’re getting into and who you’re placing all those files in with.

Kevin: We trust banks, right, we trust banks with our money and our, you know, where we deposit at.

Stephan: Yeah, for $100,000.00, $250,000.00, yeah.

Patrick: Right. Part of the reason that we trust banks is because they’re backed by the FDIC up to $100,000.00 or $250,000.00, and there’s that insurance plan; that doesn’t exist with Cloud Hosting, you know, and probably won’t.

Kevin: Right.

Stephan: I guess I’m a little different, I think it depends on what your workflow is, right, or what your use case is; I don’t backup my music, I have a hard drive with the music on it, if it goes out then so be it, I honestly don’t have that much music, and now with web services — and this comes back to — we’re coming full circle back to where we were at the beginning of the show, right, I have an app, it’s called Pandora, I can play random music that I want to listen to, I can use RDIO, I could use Spotify, I could use any of these services that are out there to play music without actually having my hard drive. To me what’s important to backup is my personal stuff, my photographs, my personal documents, and that’s about it really, that’s the only thing I need to backup and make sure it’s anywhere. But my photographs library is huge, so for me it’s different than what you guys are using it for or not using it for, and I think for everyone it’s going to be the same way and what’s important to them and how they want to back that stuff up and how they want to ensure they have that information when they need it. Just my two cents.

Kevin: Yeah, I agree with you and Patrick, I mean you both used the same keyword which was ‘important’, right, it’s all defining what’s important to that person; if it’s really, really important you’re going to want a physical copy of it, I mean that’s just the brass tacks I guess.

Stephan: Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick: And Google Drive, if you’re interested, the pricing is as follows: you can get five gigabyte of Google Drive free, and then on top of that they say 10 gigabyte of Gmail and one gigabyte of Picasa, and then for $2.49 a month you can go 25 gigabytes for drive and Picasa, and Gmail is upgraded to 25 gigabytes. For $4.99 a month you go to 100 gigabytes, that’s 100 gigabytes for Drive and Picasa, and once again your Gmail is upgraded to 25 gigabytes, and beyond that 200 gigabytes up until 16 terabytes you can upgrade your plan, and that ranges from $9.99 a month up to $799.99 a month for a 16 terabytes, so, yes, Google has plans for everyone.

Kevin: That sounds a little creepy, Patrick, “Google has plans for everyone,” mwuhahaha (evil laugh).

Patrick: And their data.

Kevin: Yes, and everything you own.

Patrick: Alright, so with that said I think we’ve come to the end of our story segment, and let’s do host spotlights. Kevin, why don’t you go first.

Kevin: So my spotlight comes from webdesignledger.com, it’s 20 inspiring examples of big backgrounds in web design, and it’s just really a fun post of pretty inspiring, of course, website screenshots and links to those sites, so check it out, it’s pretty cool. I mean some of this stuff is pretty neat, but I mean it’s all big background, so.
big background, so.

Patrick: Cool, yeah, you can see kind of a consistent theme, there’s a lot of visual obviously, but not as much text, right, the text is kind of sparse, selective with how the text and what the copy on the page contains.

Kevin: Hmm-mm. It feels very much like an ad in a magazine with navigation.

Patrick: Cool. Stephan what do you have?

Stephan: I have a blog post by a man named Dan Haggard, he writes for a website called Reviews in Depth, and his post is called Why Everyone Should Learn to Program. And Mr. Haggard works at a university, he’s an administrator, and it’s just a nice, long blog post on him writing an application and then showing this application to one of his co-workers and getting them excited to program. And he just kind of talks and touches on a few things that I think resonate with people who aren’t programmers. My wife is a math major and I shared this with her and she really enjoyed it because I think it kind of made sense to her, you know, we use a lot of interfaces in our day-to-day lives, the stove you use to cook your dinner, the knife you use to cut your food, the car, the anything, and this kind of touches on how that can be translated into programming and how it’s just an interface for getting things done.
So, it’s one of those articles that you can use to show someone who’s kind of skeptical on you writing an application, and have them read this and I think they’ll get it a little bit better.

Patrick: Very cool. I myself am not a programmer but I sometimes wish I was.
And my spotlight is a web video series called Beer and Board Games, it’s by Blame Society Films, and you can find them at youtube.com/blamesocietyfilms. Basically it is — Blame Society Films is led by Max Sloane and Aaron Yonda, maybe more popularly known as the guys behind Chad Vader, which is a popular web video series, but they’ve done a bunch of other series as well, and one of my favorites is Beer and Board Games, I watch it regularly with my brother Sean, and they tackle board games popular and obscure. They’ve done Risk, they’ve done Sex Maniacs, the card game (laughs), so, you know, there are a lot of crazy board games out there, and the shows are just hilarious, they’re kind of — you know, they’re not three minute YouTube videos, they’re usually about 10 minutes or so, but just great humor, very hilarious and there’s a lot of fun stuff on there channel as well.

Stephan: I’ll have to find the Settlers of Catan one; I need to watch that one.

Patrick: They haven’t done that one yet, have they? I’ve never even played that game, I have heard of it.

Stephan: (Laughs) it’s a good game.

Kevin: Have you heard of Carcassonne?

Patrick: Uh, no.

Kevin: Ah, man, what’s wrong with you?

Patrick: I guess if I come to where you guys are located one day then we can play those games.

Kevin: We shall.

Patrick: Before we go around the table I’d like to shout out a listener of the show, Chris Trynkiewicz, who is a very literal listener, always commenting on my Google+ posts about the show, so Chris thank you for listening, we really appreciate it. Chris actually left me a really long comment about something we should talk about on the show, but I didn’t have enough time to review it before we recorded. So thanks again, Chris, and thank you to everyone that listens to the show.
Let’s go ahead and go around the table.

Kevin: Okay, so you can find me @kevindees on Twitter and kevindees.cc on the Interwebs.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and I blog at badice.com

Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, I blog at managingcommunities.com; find me on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.
You can follow our usual co-host, Louis Simoneau, @rssaddict, and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m. You can check out the podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast and leave comments on this show or any show, and also subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email us at podcast@sitepoint.com with your comments and your questions, we’d love to give you our thoughts or read them out on the show.
The SitePoint podcast is produced by Karn Broad, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

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.

SitePoint Podcast #161: The Return of the Yank with Kevin Yank

Karn Broad — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:14:01 +0000

Episode 161 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews long-term podcast host, Kevin Yank (@sentience) who now works at Learnable and is releasing the fifth edition of his book on PHP and MySQL now called PHP and MySQL: Novice To Ninja (formerly Build Your Own Database Driven Website using PHP and MySQL).

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SitePoint Podcast #161: The Return of the Yank with Kevin Yank (MP3, 43:37, 41.9MB)

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Episode Summary

Louis and Kevin talk about how the changes in PHP over the 10 years since the launch of the book’s first version have driven the need for the different versions, and how the latests version differs to the previous editions. They also talk about how PHP still makes a great choice for getting beginners into server-side coding.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/161.

Interview Transcript

TLouis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. We are kicking it old school today on the podcast, we have an alum from the SitePoint Podcast joining us, and also the author of a new book from SitePoint, if you haven’t guessed yet it’s Kevin Yank; hi, Kevin.

Kevin: Hello! Hi, I’m here, I’m back!

Louis: Welcome back, it’s good to have you back.

Kevin: Thank you. Yeah, it feels weird to be introduced still on this show.

Louis: I was toying with the idea of letting you do the introduction and playing it all backwards and surreal.

Kevin: It’s the lost episode.

Louis: So, yeah, lately you’ve been hard at work cranking out the latest edition of SitePoint’s most venerable title.

Kevin: Yeah.

Louis: It used to be not only SitePoint’s most venerable title, but also SitePoint’s longest title in terms of the title.

Kevin: Oh, yeah, it was really long! I think we’ve had others, it used to be called Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL, and I’ve gotten really used to saying it that way over the years, and now I can’t even call it that, that’s not the title of my book anymore; it’s now PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja, but even though it’s a different title it’s still the fifth edition. It blows your mind.

Louis: My mind is blown, I have no reaction.

Kevin: (Laughs)

Louis: So, yeah, this is sort of our, as the title now says, Novice to Ninja, so beginner title for PHP and MySQL.

Kevin: Yep. It was the first-ever book that SitePoint published way back in I want to say 2001, I think the book might have actually been published in 2002 for the first time. But, yeah, back when SitePoint wasn’t even a book publishing company someone said “You know these articles we have on PHP and MySQL are really popular, we should put them out as a book that we can sell.” And I said, “You’re crazy, these articles are available for free online, why would anyone pay for them?” And it turned out a lot of people wanted them in a book format, and it’s just a whole lot nicer to read that way. These days you can’t get the whole thing for free online, I’m afraid, sorry dear listener, you’ll have to buy a copy of the book (laughs). This is the fifth edition; it’s had five whole editions over the years.

Louis: Why don’t we just talk a little bit about what’s changed in the world of PHP since the good olden days.

Kevin: Well, since the first edition a lot has changed, and basically until this one every previous edition of the book was necessary because PHP had changed so much that the advice that was in the previous edition was no longer good advice, the world of PHP had moved on so, you know, by the time the second edition came out the first edition was really old because it was all about PHP3, and now PHP4 was out and there were new ways of doing things, the installation instructions were broken, so on and so forth. The third edition was that PHP got rid of registered globals, register globals was no longer a good thing. And the old-school PHP-ers in the audience are going, “oh, yeah, register global, that was ridiculous!”

Louis: That’s all well before my time.

Kevin: If you don’t know what register globals is, basically the old way PHP used to work is that anytime the web browser made a request if it submitted a form or had a query string in the URL then all of the variables from that, be they from the query string or from the form, would be created as PHP variables automatically for your script; when your script fired up to start processing the page request it already had all of these variables for whatever was submitted from the browser.

Louis: Wow, that’s a terrible idea (laughs).

Kevin: It’s super convenient, super convenient, but, yeah, it means that if you’re a scripted something like ‘if the user is logged in’ — or ‘if the user is an administrator allow them to see the administration pages’, and if you weren’t really careful the user could just submit a variable called the user is an administrator and they would be granted full access. So it meant on the one hand the language was really easy to learn, really easy to use, on the other hand really easy to make horrible security bugs with. So the PHP community as a whole thought better of that decision, ripped that feature out, it’s still in PHP to this day; I think with PHP 6 it’s finally going to be completely removed once and for all, at the moment it’s just turned off by default.

Anyway, we’re getting way off track.

Louis: That was a significant sidetrack for this entertaining trip down the history of web programming languages for the history buffs in the audience.

Kevin: I think we’ll come back to that because it’s choices like that that have made PHP the successful thing it is today, but at the same time there are things that have had to be thrown away. But, anyway, that’s what generated the third edition of the book. The fourth edition of the book was PHP 5, and again a refresh of installation instructions, but more importantly it was a reorganization of the code; it was rewriting the code in this model view controller approach that seems to have become the new standard, the new defacto way of writing web applications in a maintainable and manageable way. You keep the PHP logic that controls how a request will be handled separate from the HTML templates that control what your website looks like and what the menu structure is, and things like that.

So, yeah, that was the fourth edition of the book was really revamping the entire code base to be a lot more modern in that sense. And I had a brain fart coming into the fifth edition because I had forgotten that I had done those updates to the book.

Louis: (Laughs)

Kevin: SitePoint came to me and said, look, it’s been a few years since we’ve done an edition of this book, can you think of things to make it better that would make it worth doing a fifth edition? I went, oh, absolutely! I’ve got all these ideas for reorganizing the code, it’s gonna be great! And they said great we’ll sign you up. And so then I sat down to start writing and I looked at the fourth edition and I went, oh no, I did all of that in the fourth edition; all of my ideas for making the fifth edition better were already in the fourth edition, I had forgotten that I did it.
And so I was faced with the fifth edition, I had signed the contract, I was ready to start writing, and I had to come up with new ways to make this book better.

So, on the one hand this fifth edition is the first version of this book that I think didn’t have to be written; PHP has not changed a whole lot in the last three years, certainly not from a beginner’s standpoint. There’s been plenty changing in the advanced areas of PHP, there have been new frameworks, new ways of working with advanced PHP, and that is where PHP continues to progress and continued to change quite rapidly. But as a beginner learning PHP as your first web programming language it hasn’t changed a lot in the last three years, so you could have just picked up the fourth edition and learned, but I thought you know what, I’ve made all this time to write a new edition, I might as well try and do something better. And I think it’s resulted in a book that I’m more proud of than I have been in the 10 years that it has existed, because I basically chapter-by-chapter went and had a really honest look at the book that is now 10 years old and gone, look, way back in 2001 when I wrote the first edition of this I said myself, look, I probably can’t expect a beginner to do X, and so I’m going to teach them something that’s simpler, something that’s easier to teach; I took a lot of shortcuts in order to get a beginner to a point with PHP that they feel confident. They feel confident but there are some interesting and useful parts of the language that I simply didn’t teach because I thought, you know what, this is a beginner’s book, I’ve only got a certain amount of time to write it and that thing would be really hard to explain. For this fifth edition I did challenge myself wherever possible to go, alright, I’m going to take the time to find a way to explain this the right way.

So there is a bunch of new stuff in this book that is quite advanced for a beginner book, if that makes sense. You’re not going to find, for example, coverage of object oriented programming and exception handling in most beginner PHP books. The way you interact with the database is no longer the simple old-fashioned way that most PHP tutorials out there will teach you, it’s modern what we call PDO, which is the PHP Data Objects API, and it’s object oriented, it’s significantly more complicated for a beginner to learn, but it is exactly what they expect you to do if you’re going to go out there and work as a professional PHP developer today.

So if you’re picking up this book telling yourself, a) you might want to become a freelancer who works for themselves building PHP projects for clients, your clients are going to be so much happier with the work you produce after reading this book. B) if you’re thinking of becoming a professional web developer and you want to go out there and interview for a PHP developer job, even if you’re going for an entry-level position, a junior web developer role, the people who interview you are going to be so impressed that you’ve only been working in PHP for a year or so and yet you’re doing things the right way, you’re doing things the way the advanced people choose to do it.

So I think that’s what I’ve achieved in this book, in this new edition, I hope that’s what I’ve achieved; I can’t wait for people to get a hold of the book and start telling me, hey, that worked for me, that didn’t work for me because hey there’s always a sixth edition around the corner.

Louis: Yeah, we’ll talk more about that in a little bit. One of the things that that kind of brings to mind, though, is this seemingly ongoing trend in web development in general that things are getting more advanced, I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but even on the front-end side whereas it used to be a front-end web developer is someone who could write HTML –

Kevin: Yeah.

Louis: — and sort of hack JavaScript. Now if you don’t know sort of more complex JavaScript frameworks like Backbone or something, you’re working with a lot of command line tools for pre-compiling CoffeeScript or Assassin to CSS; even on the front-end the bar of entry for even a beginner has gone up a lot, and as you seem to be saying, even on the backend whereas before you’d sort of hack together a script and just pass MySQL directly into your database, now you’re extracting that away with PDO. Yeah, on a lot of levels it seems like the stuff that we came up with we were learning native web development it seems like it’s harder now.

Kevin: Yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking about this, I’m glad you brought it up; I’m also a little depressed you brought it up (laughter). I had a blog post in my head that I’ve been trying to write about this stuff for about a year now, and I’ve never written it down because I’m afraid it would be too much of a bummer. I think a lot of us who’ve been working on the Web for say a decade on average at the moment, since it got really popular probably 10 years under the bridge, and a lot of us who got into the Web at the “beginning” got into it because it was this medium for expression that anyone could get into; you could sit almost anyone down, anyone who’s fairly confident using a computer could sit down on a weekend and learn to build websites, and by Monday they could have their first website up and running. And sure it probably wouldn’t — it wouldn’t look super refined, but it would stand up there with the websites of the big players, you know, my personal website and the Microsoft website; my personal website and the Apple website, there wouldn’t be a world of difference between how those felt to a user. And this ability to level the playing field so that me as a person I could express myself in pretty much the same way as giant corporations expressed themselves, on this level playing field, was really attractive to me as someone just getting out of university deciding what I wanted to do as a career. I wanted to work on this platform that allowed personal expression on a whole new — to a whole new scale.

And I start to wonder if we’re losing that on the Web, because if I tried to sit someone down and teach them how to build websites on a weekend I’m not sure I could do it anymore. Certainly they could get up a ramshackle looking webpage that said, “Hi, my name is Kevin and my cat’s name is Oreo,” you know, but this website that you put out would stick out like a sore thumb as an amateur hour effort these days.

And when you start talking about what’s the right way to build a website, oh my gosh, how much time have you got, we’ve got these sites like HTML5 Boilerplate, a great website, a project by Paul Irish and a bunch of other stars of the web development world, but the site is basically a gigantic code base that you download and it builds a blank website; it’s like here is the one thousand lines of code to create a blank canvas for your website if you want to do everything the right way.
Louis: Yeah, there are some interesting points to make about that. I’m not sure that I think a lot of those things are things that if you’re working professionally there are shortcuts and stuff that you wind up using in every project, but they’re not necessarily all, I think, best practice. I don’t know if you saw Rachel Andrew wrote a blog post I think last month sort of talking about –

Kevin: The keep it simple argument.

Louis: Yeah, and you know I really like that approach.

Kevin: But you see my point, though, a beginner getting into this, oh, my gosh, you’re barraged with advice and this is the right way to do it, not this way, okay, the first thing you need to learn is this list of 100 things to get started.

Louis: Yeah, and coming back to it, even some of the basic stuff now with CSS 3 and more advanced JavaScript stuff taking place on the client side there’s just more stuff I’ll admit. But, to make a counter argument though, in fairness, when we started like one of the first things we messed around learning is spending six hours of that first weekend trying to get — trying to chop up an image in Photoshop to make rounded corners.

Kevin: (Laughs)

Louis: You know, writing all this markup and styles to make that work in the, um, I don’t want to talk about the browsers of that day without using any pejorative terms (laughter).

Kevin: Rounded corners, drop shadows, these are things you can just do now.

Louis: Yeah. So, I mean and moreover we have these thoughts of things are getting much more difficult and much more complicated, and it’s a higher bar to entry, but the kids are still doing it and they’re doing it really well.

Kevin: Yes.

Louis: And if you look at the kind of projects that are coming out, and even though back in the day building a website basically was something you did in a graphical editor and dragged filed around and FTP-ed them to things, nowadays a lot of people use command line tools and Git and post projects on GitHub, but it’s all still there and it’s still happening, and if anything there’s more innovation and more experimentation. So it might feel or appear like something that should be a bummer, but it doesn’t look like that’s actually what’s happening.

Kevin: Yeah. And this is — I’ve been thinking about this a lot, like I said, recently because I’ve been working on a book about PHP. And I suppose the elephant in the room here is where does PHP stand in the — the elephant; there’s an elephant on the front cover of my book (laughter), and PHP itself, the mascot of PHP is an elephant, I didn’t even think of that. But the elephant in the room here, so to speak –

Louis: You should’ve just made that sound like it was planned, it would’ve been so smooth, it was slick. I see what you did there, but you didn’t see what you did there.

Kevin: (Laughs) No, but the thought that occurs is where does PHP stand in relation to the other languages that let you do the same sort of stuff that PHP does these days. Ruby and Ruby on Rails, really popular, Python is also a great language, and you compare these and the other ones that are out there to PHP, and PHP has been around a lot longer, it’s got maybe a few more years on it and maybe even lacks some of the shiny new features, and certainly a lot of hype and enthusiasm that you’ll get from some of these other languages. So as I’m sitting there writing the 10 year anniversary of this book, if you will, I’m thinking who’s this book for and what is the place for PHP in the world of web development? And coming back to this point of I’m a beginner, want to learn to build my first website, what should I learn first; I still think PHP is a really strong choice.

Louis: Yeah, I still think that even though I personally don’t code in PHP, and if I was starting a new project I wouldn’t use PHP, I work in Ruby at my job and I would work in Ruby if I was starting a new project that I wanted to build, but if I wanted to teach someone server side web development I would probably still start with PHP because you can have — it’s that thing where you can have file that is requested, I point my browser at this file, the server executes the script and gives me the result directly, there’s not all this infrastructure around it; I can learn the idea of server side processing and then gradually add on bits and pieces like, oh, you can connect to a database by doing this, oh, and you can connect to an external service by doing this.

Kevin: Yep. And, look, just last week my boss came to me and said, alright, we’ve got this crazy idea, we want to build a website in a day to try this idea out, go. I had two minutes to think what am I gonna build this thing in, and I chose PHP because, well, a) I’ve been working in it for 10 years and I’m more confident in it than anything else, but, b) I didn’t have to think what server are we gonna host this on, what platform is this gonna have to run on, what are the other developers who are going to have to work on this project going forward gonna have to learn? All of those things are answers that you can come up with convincing arguments for other platforms for, but they’re things that you don’t even have to think about with PHP; every web host to a significant digit out there supports PHP and MySQL, both of which are covered in this book. Any developer who’s been working in any language can learn PHP in an afternoon, at least to the point where they can be dangerous with it (laughter). So I went, you know what, I’ve got a day to work on this thing, if it sees a lot of success we might rebuild it in something else if it makes more sense to, but as I throw something together in an afternoon, get it online, and be able to get other developers, be they junior or senior, productive with this code base, PHP was a great choice, and that’s the one that I made. So, I think when I made that choice I sat back and I went you know what I actually still do feel good about writing a beginner’s book about PHP today, because if you’re not a programmer, if you’re someone who you know HTML and CSS and learning “real programming” really scares you, PHP is the best place to start because it is a) a real programming language that you actually can get anything done in, but b) it isn’t full of tricky features that make advanced programmers lives easier. If I’m an advanced programmer, yeah, I love playing in Rails and I love playing in Python because those languages are full of convenience features and flexibility and means of expression that allow me to fly as an advanced developer, but those same things that make my life great as an advanced developer really bog down a beginner, and I think the fact that PHP doesn’t have those standing in your way makes it the best first language to learn still as a web developer.

Louis: Yeah and just coming back to what I was saying earlier, that a big thing when you’re starting to learn is to be able to get a result really quickly.

Kevin: Yeah, end of the first chapter, and you’ve got your first –

Louis: The thing is up there and it’s running and I can see a result and I can tweak my code a little bit, upload it, run it again and see that result change. I mean that’s that first moment when programming makes sense and then you’re off, right; if it takes five hours to get there instead of ten minutes you’re probably gonna lose a lot of people.

Kevin: Yes.

Louis: So, like I said, it’s still what I would choose to teach someone if I had to teach basic server side programming, and moreover, there’s so much — you know, if what you want to do with it is start to hack it at WordPress or Drupal there’s so many big projects out there get you a website with all the features and then you can go and tweak things that you need to tweak.

Kevin: WordPress as an example of a PHP project, it’s a big scary pile of code, and it’s not a super-beginner piece of code either; if you were to pick a random PHP file in WordPress and try to read it the first day that you’re learning PHP you’d be pretty lost. But, as someone who has just learned PHP, look, here’s what I think is a common path these days, I need a website, I download WordPress and I set it up using the installation instructions, and now I can publish my website; but now I want to tweak my website, I want to add some unique feature to it, or I want to customize it to make it look different than all the other WordPress sites out there, now I need to learn PHP. You pick up this book, you learn PHP and then working on WordPress, even though you might not understand all of it, you now have the confidence to work on a WordPress theme or just add something to the sidebar, and it’s great for that.

My point here, I think, if I have one, (laughter) –

Louis: I wasn’t sure there was one there.

Kevin: My point if I have one is the fact that things like WordPress are written in PHP is a deceptively great choice, because WordPress needs to do some quite advanced things as a web application, and it would be tempting for the developers at WordPress to go let’s throw away PHP and use something like Ruby on Rails that allows us to work more powerfully as advanced developers. But then those beginners who are actually creating their websites with WordPress and want to make little customizations, they would have to learn something quite difficult in order to make that possible; the fact that WordPress is written in PHP makes it great for someone who’s setting up their first website to be able to do some customization on it. And so the fact that it’s written in PHP is almost extra work that the developers at WordPress have done in order to keep it beginner friendly and beginner customizable, and that makes me happier about it.

Louis: I’m sure none of them have thought about it that way.

Kevin: No, no, it’s kind of something they’ve gotten by accident, because when WordPress was first written it was a blog engine called B2, and way back then PHP was the best, most powerful choice. But the fact that they’ve stuck with it has kept WordPress in the position that it is, this dominant position as a blog hack form.

Louis: Yeah, and as you were talking about earlier, the ease of deployment means that anyone can grab WordPress and chuck it on some cheap shared hosting, and a lot of these other shared platforms don’t really do shared hosting as well as PHP does. So, I mean I think that’s one of the big reasons we haven’t seen any Python or Ruby blogging engines that you can just download and chuck up on your system, because there’s just a little bit more server configuration required if you want to use one of those platforms.

Kevin: Coming back to the front-end stuff I think we see similar things going on with the ongoing efforts to add features to things like CSS, you know there’s this draft spec for CSS variables that is out there, and these days any developer who works enough in CSS that they would miss having CSS variables, they’ve chosen a tool, or at least if you haven’t you should, they’ve chosen a great tool for writing CSS and then — well, writing a more advanced version of CSS and compiling it down to CSS; we’re talking about LESS, we’re talking about SASS, we’re talking about the other players in this space here.

And similarly in JavaScript this is happening with tools like CoffeeScript. But these are all add-on tools for the advanced developer; the fact that CSS today, despite this draft that is being considered, CSS today remains a very simple language that you don’t have to understand programming concepts in order to learn I think is one of the things that I still really love about the Web; if I’m building my first website I can learn CSS in an afternoon and it’ll make sense to me even though I don’t know anything about programming. And if we start adding variables and nested statements and inheritance and things like that to CSS, something of that will be lost, something of the Web’s approachability for a beginner will be lost. And the way we have it now that we build advanced tools on top of this platform might just be the reason for the Web’s success, and I think we’re at risk for losing that.

Louis: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Kevin: By the same token I think this was the downfall of the Java world, Java web development; if there are any people here who today were –

Louis: This was the downfall of Java, Java’s dead, you heard it here first people, Kevin Yank proclaims the death of Java.

Kevin: Java’s dead as something I would recommend to someone wanting to get into web development to learn as their first language, it’s not the right place to go. And at its peak the Java web development space was this onion of at the center you have the Java language, and then you have a very thin layer on top of that which is Java servlets, which is just you can write Java code that will generate a web page and a web server can send that to a browser. And then on top of that you have JSP, a templating language that compiles down to Java servlets that compiles down to Java that can build a website. And at its height the Java web development world was about ten layers deep of that, of the thing that you actually want to work in is on the surface of this onion, but you have to learn every one of those ten layers all the way down to the core of the onion in order to feel like you understand what’s going on. And if we let the Web get that complicated, if you have to learn not just CSS but SASS on top of CSS, not just SASS on top of CSS but something else on top of SASS, not just something else on top of SASS but something else on top of something else on top of SASS, it’s gonna get out of control and the Web is not gonna be approachable, maintainable, it’s not gonna be able to evolve at the speed that the world demands, and the Web will be replaced by something just like Java is in the process of being replaced by things.

So there is a balance to be struck here, I think it’s good to have advanced tools sitting on top of basic platforms, but as soon as you see things getting two or three layers deep it’s time for something to be added, something to evolve.

Yeah, and I don’t think this is a problem. Look, I think the Web is doing well on these fronts, I’m just kind of describing the patterns that I see, but I think it’s still good, I mean you’re still a web developer, right?

Louis: I am still a web developer (laughter), last time I checked, I don’t know, I haven’t opened up my editor this morning yet because I just got in to record the podcast, so maybe when I open it up I’ll find out that I’m no longer a web developer (laughter).

Kevin: Well, hopefully there’s still a few thousand people listening to this that are still web developers as well. And I’m still passionate about the Web, it’s still the main thing that I choose to work on day-to-day, and I think it’s because we’ve got this great balance that the community is taking care of. So, yeah, buy my PHP book (laughter).

Louis: Wow, that was probably the most philosophical sales pitch ever uttered.

Kevin: But to bring it back to something more tangible, look, if you get this book take a close look at the cover image because I didn’t even realize; I’m sitting in the SitePoint HQ office with Louis at the moment, and I’m visiting for the first time in a month since the cover of my book was designed, and I walked over to Alex Walker’s desk, Alex Walker’s the talented designer who designs all of the book covers for SitePoint books, and I saw on his desk the purple elephant that is on the cover of my book. When I saw the cover of my book I went, oh yeah, that’s pretty cool, they got a purple elephant because PHP’s about purple and about elephants, that’s really cute; I just assumed he found that purple elephant in some stock image library somewhere and I thought it was just a great coincidence and it’s a great image. Alex molded this elephant by hand out of platiscine, it is sitting on his desk at the moment and I kind of want to steal it.

Louis: (Laughs) it is. Yeah, Alex for the last several book covers has actually been trolling through curio shops and finding these objects like the kite for Rachel Andrew’s last book was something that he brought in. Yeah, so he’s recently really taken a shine to find these little things.

Kevin: And he’s building a little circus of these characters on his desk, like you go over to his desk; someone should post a photo of this, or if they haven’t already, and just like every time he does another book cover there’s a couple of new editions to the population of his desk, and it looks like a little village of crazy characters sitting there.

Louis: I’ll definitely take a picture and post it in the show notes for this episode (laughter). But I just want to do a couple more things, first of all, because you’re a returning host of the SitePoint podcast.

Kevin: Yeah, how’s it going?

Louis: It’s going great; we’re having a lot of fun.

Kevin: I heard you guys mention me the other day when you were talking about alcohol in web development.

Louis: Yes, well, like I said, you’re my reference point for alcohol-free web development.

Kevin: It’s hard being a non-drinker in Australia of all places, let me tell you.

Louis: So, yeah, did you have any — I was about to close off and go into some other stuff, but we got some time so do you have some thoughts that you wanted to contribute to that discussion? Did you read that blog post when it came out of the culture of exclusion?

Kevin: No, I didn’t, I’m not sure why I didn’t, but it was kind of like because it’s about me I kind of feel like, yeah, I know what that is. It’s definitely real. It sparked some debate around is this an artificial argument, is it just something this guy is making up or is it real, and I think it’s real to some extent. Look, I’ve only worked as a web developer in Australia, and Australia particularly has quite an alcohol-positive culture, like it’s part of what you do when you go out with friends on a weekend. And to some extent that was true of Canada where I’m from as well, where you’re from as well, but it’s even moreso here, and it’s also very true of the work culture. So as a non-drinker I did kind of stick out; on a Friday everyone got up from their computers and went out to a bar, and I’d certainly go along and chat and have a good time with everyone, but I think my ability to fit into that crowd was despite the fact that I wasn’t drinking. So the fact that I wasn’t drinking probably put me at a disadvantage, and I had to work a little harder to fit in and stay in that conversation. It’s not something insurmountable, but it’s something you feel for sure.

Louis: And how do you feel about like one of the things that Ryan in this original blog post was raising was sort of the organization of conferences where a big part of many conference schedules is the party after the talks, and on a Sunday morning let’s just say that everyone’s operating at about 25% of nominal capacity.

Kevin: Yeah, for sure, look, I think that’s a case where there are pros and cons, the con of course is, yes, everyone’s out partying and having a drink, and after the conference everyone has great stories about the crazy times that were had the night afterwards, and Kev was there too (laughter). But, as you say, like I’ve been to many a conference that are two days long and there are people who didn’t make it in to the second day. I don’t want to name any names, but there are people here at SitePoint that came along to conferences who had to bow out of the morning talk and go, you know what, it was a bad idea for me to get up, I’m going back to bed.

Louis: Although I’ve definitely had some moments, like when I went to Web Directions I did power through those morning talks, but me and Matt Evans were kind of, you know.

Kevin: So I would say it’s a different experience for someone like me going to a conference like that, but on the bright side typically the speakers, especially the speakers who are speaking the second day, they have to take it easy as well because they’ve got a talk to deliver. And so on that second day there are people like me who had a iced tea and then went home to a hotel and had a great night’s sleep, and there are the speakers who probably were feeling like they couldn’t participate in the party as well. And I don’t know about you, but when I go to a conference like that my ambition is to connect with as many of those big speakers as possible and have a good chat with them and go, look, your talk connected with me in this way and can we talk some more about that.

Louis: Right.

Kevin: The more of those kinds of conversations I can have the better I feel about my conference experience coming home, and I feel like I can have more of those chats at a conference because I’m one of the non-drinkers. And so it’s how you choose to spend your time, and I think it can hold back your career if you’re not good at fitting into a crowd.

Louis: But I think that’s true of any industry, and it’s not necessarily related to drinking like your ability to socialize and to put yourself in contact with people.

Kevin: Oh, absolutely. But, yeah, it’s how well can you go without that social lubricant, and that’s exactly what it is, is it’s a lubricant. And so, you know, if you’re going without that assist you’ve just got to take it upon yourself to go, look, okay, if I’m gonna be friends with these people, if I’m going to forge a relationship with these people it’s up to me to make that happen, it’s not gonna happen automatically.

Louis: (Laughs) or with the assistance of a ladle of Jameson’s.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

Louis: Fantastic. So what I was coming up to before this was that as an alum of the SitePoint podcast, ex-host, I thought we could for old times sake have you do a little bit of a spotlight.

Kevin: Oh, right!

Louis: Just to bring you back.

Kevin: Okay. Yes, I have prepared something.

Louis: (Laughs) I wanted to make it sound like I was springing this on you.

Kevin: Well, you did spring it on me. Just before we started recording Louis said, “Hey, and for old times’ sake you might as well do a spotlight,” and I went, “I completely forgot we did spotlights!” So I’ve gotten something together, this is something that, I don’t know if my boss is listening but, accidentally occupied my afternoon the other day (laughter). You know when you click the wrong link and suddenly it’s 5:00p.m.

Louis: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin: I had one of those. But it’s good because it’s a tool I discovered and it’s gonna really improve my working life going forward. Look, this is a nerdy one, but I’ve got to bring it up because –

Louis: That’s what we’re all about here at the SitePoint Podcast.

Kevin: If I feel like I’ve left anything in leaving the SitePoint Podcast is that I’ve allowed the nerdiness level to dip slightly, so I’m bringing it here with an alternative terminal shell called Z Shell or ZSH for short. If you’re a Mac user this is something that’s really easy to try out, but it’s really only gonna matter to you if you’re the kind of person who lives in the terminal. These days a lot of web developers are living in the terminal, maybe not living in the terminal but they have a terminal window open for doing things like Git commits, and stuff like that. And the out of the box program that runs inside that terminal is a shell called Bash, and it’s been around forever, and everyone who works on Linux systems knows how to use Bash; this is the thing that shows your prompt and then you can type a command and press enter, and then if you got the command slightly wrong you can press the up arrow and you get the previous command and you can edit it and press enter again. This is what your shell is doing for you; it’s a lot more besides that, but as a web developer that’s typically the kind of stuff that a shell is doing for you. Bash is good, Z Shell is better. And it’s built into Mac OS 10 as well, so you don’t even have to download anything to try out Z Shell.

On your Mac you just open system preferences, and then you go into your Users and Groups panel of system preferences. Now usually this panel is locked, there’s a little padlock down in the bottom-left of the window, you hit that and type in your account password, assuming you’re in an administrator account that’ll unlock it, then you can right-click on your username in the list of users and you get this secret popup menu called advanced options, and when you hit that you can edit some really low-level scary options about your user account on Mac OS 10, and you don’t want to touch any of those except for this one dropdown called login shell, and by default it’s set to /bin/bash, if you just go down and choose /bin/zsh instead, hit ok and close out all these windows, bam, you are now configured to use Z Shell. Now the next time you open up terminal it might look a little different, you’ll have a percent sign instead of an angle bracket for your shell, but it pretty much works the same way except when you start using it you’re going to notice some nice conveniences. A lot of the commands, for example, have built-in help, so if I type LS, which is like the command to get a directory listing, and I type dash, which is if you want to add options to LS you do LS-A to show all files, I can do LS- and then hit tab and I get a list, sort of help list of all of the options that LA supports with like descriptions next to each one of them. And it shows it below your current command prompt, so you can then keep typing the command and then when you hit enter that help is replaced by the results, so you’re not full of ugly help documentation in your shell history, it just shows while you need it and then disappears.

Similarly for directory completion you can type LS, for example, and then the fist letter of a filename, and if you hit tab in Bash it’ll kind of guess which file you meant, well, in ZSH it’ll show you below it a list of all of the files you could’ve meant, and then, again, you can keep typing and get more specific. This is just the surface of what ZSH can do for you, but right out of the box it’s a lot more convenient. The other big thing is that you can filter your history, so you know when you press up arrow you get to scroll through all of the previous commands you’ve typed at your shell, well if you know you want to change directories and you’ve typed it recently, you can just type CD and then start pressing up arrow, and it has filtered your history so you’re only looking at the previous CD commands that you typed. There are ways to do this sort of stuff in Bash with like control R and searching through, but I find ZSH’s way of doing it is way more convenient and it’s really worth learning, but even if you don’t spend time any time learning it just switching to it some of these features are gonna jump out at you and you’re gonna go, oh, that’s nice!

There’s this great project called oh-my-zsh, which is hosted on GitHub, we’ll put the link in the show notes, but it’s github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh. And it’s kind of this set of configuration files for ZSH, and you just kind of follow the instructions to install it and suddenly ZSH is really smart about things like Git, so if you go into a Git working copy it’ll show you what branch you’re on and whether it’s been committed or whether there are uncommitted changes; those kind of details show up in your command prompt.

So, oh-my-zsh has all these plugins that you can turn on and off, and it has a bunch of themes that you can play with to make your prompt look different ways, it’s a great way to get a head start. And there’s also a video podcast on railscast.com, it’s episode 308, it’s like a 10 minute introduction to oh-my-zsh and ZSH, so if you just want a little more detail, if you just want to kind of have a sneak preview of what all this looks like it’s worth checking out that episode of Rails Cast.
So there you go, I think I’ve spoken enough for all of the episodes that I’ve missed.

Louis: That really brought the thunder.

Kevin: I’m caught up on my spotlights.

Louis: Awesome. So the last thing I wanted to do, we do have a few digital copies of your new book to give away.

Kevin: Alright, we’ve got giveaways!

Louis: We’ve got giveaways.

Kevin: For those who stuck around and listened all the way to the end.

Louis: We have five copies to give away, so what you should do is email podcast@sitepoint.com with a PHP: Novice to Ninja in the subject line, and the first five people to email after the show goes live I will reply with a free discount code that entitles you to 100% off the price of a digital edition of Kevin’s new book.

Kevin: Great. So these are gonna go fast, I suppose if it’s past the second week of May it’s probably not worth writing in.

Louis: Uh, that’s probably true (laughter).

Kevin: May 2012.

Louis: Yeah, if anyone’s hearing about this in the future, I forget these things just stick around; I don’t want to keep getting these emails for the rest of my natural life. Yeah, so if you want a free digital copy, so that includes the pdf, the e-pub and the Moby versions, and I will be happy to send those along to you.

So, thanks so much, Kev, for taking the time to drop by the office and visit not only Alex’s menagerie, but also us here on the SitePoint Podcast.

Kevin: It was a privilege, thank you.

Louis: And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to download or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict.
The show this week was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #160: Adobe and HTML Sitting in a Tree

Karn Broad — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:07:18 +0000

Episode 160 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of our regular host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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Download this Episode

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SitePoint Podcast #160: Adobe and HTML Sitting in a Tree (MP3, 35:15, 33.9MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/160.

Host Spotlights

Patrick: JimGaffigan.com and Jim Gaffigan’s Trailer
Louis: VIM Adventures
Stephan: Noah Stokes | Es Bueno / How We Operate – The Potential Client
Kevin: Impact – HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript Game Engine

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast, it’s a full panel show this week to talk about the news and happenings in the world of the Internet; hi guys.

Kevin: Howdy.

Patrick: Hey!

Stephan: Hello, hello.

Louis: Very dynamic intro, I felt really energetic about that one.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, you sound — you’re a pro; you’re an old pro now.

Louis: Ha, ha, seasoned hand (laughs).

Patrick: You are.

Louis: How you all doing?

Patrick: Pretty good, pretty good. I actually got an email this week that was pretty short and to the point.

Louis: Congratulations (laughter).

Kevin: A whole email, Patrick.

Patrick: Yeah, I got an email (laughter) through my contact form, and I’ll tell you the email, it was from Sam, Sam at sam.com, I doubt that’s the real address, but it was just one sentence and it was, “So, if you are a web designer do you think your website looks good? It looks like crab.” (Laughter) And that is “crab” with a b.

Louis: I think I saw that on your Facebook or your Twitter or something.

Patrick: Yeah, I like that.

Louis: (Laughing) pretty classy. So many things wrong with that.

Patrick: Right. I’m not a web designer, I don’t think my website looks good necessarily; I’m not that high on myself.

Louis: It definitely doesn’t look like a crab.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m not — it looks like crab; it’s not even red. Anyway.

Louis: Alright, so with that out of the way let’s talk about people who are web designers, or who were web designers.

Patrick: Yeah, so I picked up a story through Nathan R. King on Twitter that Hillman Curtis had passed away, and I’ll just read from the New York Times story about it by Paul Vitello, the title is: Hillman Curtis, A Pioneer in Web Design, Dies at 51. It says that “Hillman Curtis was an art director of a San Francisco software company, in ’96 he designed the first website for a new technology called Flash Player, a browser plugin that could be used to turn out high quality animated imagery quickly, before then the process would take hundreds of hours. His mastery of the technology which had been developed for several years before but never fully deployed in a way that unveiled its creative potential made Mr. Curtis a revered figure in the emerging world of web design. His Flash Player design technique set the groundwork for a format that later evolved exponentially to accommodate online advertisements, Facebook applications and video sites like YouTube.” And Mr. Curtis, again, was 51 and is survived by a wife and two kids, so it’s just kind of a noteworthy story.

I think it’s funny for me because I’ve been playing around with the Web since, uh, late 90’s let’s say, and for some reason one of the web designers that I had heard of first, or one of the web designers that stood out to me name-wise that had a name that was being bandied about, or whatever, was Hillman Curtis, and it’s a name that’s kind of stuck with me over the years even as he retired from that field specifically and moved into music, definitely one of those names in web design that you know like Zeldman and like some others.

Louis: Yeah, looking at this actually the name did not ring a bell to me, but I’m perhaps a bit later to the Web than the rest of you so maybe I wasn’t around it then, but I have seen a copy of his first book, Flash Web Design, I’ve definitely seen that around when I was first learning web design.

Patrick: Yeah, and it says here it sold over a hundred thousand copies, I mean you don’t know how hard it is to sell a book called — with ‘web design’ in it over a hundred thousand copies, that in itself is a massive milestone.

Louis: Definitely, at SitePoint a big successful book, I don’t think I can talk about numbers, but 100,000 let’s just say is out of the ballpark.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: And you know like obviously this was a different time, and you can say what you want about Flash web design and sites made in Flash, but at the time it’s state-of-the-art and really exploring a new medium, an interactive medium that no one had really had the opportunity to play with before and turn it into something that was both beautiful and expressive. So, yeah, I mean definitely too soon, right, at 51.

Patrick: Yeah, and the article says he died from colon cancer.

And it made me think about web design as an industry and I guess as a popular industry, so for me I guess that goes back to the 90’s, early 90’s, mid-90’s really, even though the Internet existed earlier than that obviously, but that sort of hot profession and all of these companies and agencies that were born out of that era and some of the big people in web design, the big names, and how as an industry we’re coming up on 20 years, or may have already passed it or whatever, and the icons in this field are starting to get older. So I think it’s always a reminder, death is always a reminder to take advantage of the people that you have while they’re still here, and to appreciate the people that have done a lot of work in your space.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean to me Hillman Curtis was kind of a baseball star, I don’t know if I can use baseball as an example, but when I was learning web design like Hillman Curtis was The Man, right, Jeffery Zeldman, right up there with that same type of aura, so, he’ll be missed and it kind of makes you think about I am getting older now that I think about it, so.

Patrick: You said it.

Kevin: Yeah, speaking of Hillman Curtis and his relation to Flash and how that kind of helped change and shape the industry, Adobe, though they bought Flash they didn’t really come out with Flash, they’re doing something new, they’re changing up their business model and they’re doing this thing called the Creative Cloud, and they’re launching it with the Creative Suite 6; have you guys heard about this?

Patrick: Yeah, a little bit, I saw Rachel Luxemberg who is the group manager at Community Adobe tweeting about it today; I guess the hashtag CS 6 and Creative Cloud were both trending on Twitter.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: I definitely saw it float across my radar; I maybe didn’t pay a huge amount of attention.

Kevin: Well, basically this is kind of — it’s actually kind of a big thing. Adobe is now subscribing out their software, and they’ve been doing this for a while but they have this package now where it’s included in this Creative Cloud, and you have online services and all kinds of apps in this, but basically for $50.00 a month with an annual subscription you can get access to the master collection, so for close to $600.00 you can have the entire master collection at your fingertips. The thing that excites me about this, and if you signup for the annual subscription I believe it’s still month-to-month that you pay, you don’t have to pay it in a lump sum, but the thing that excites me about this is a shift in the way Adobe thinks about its products; it’s no longer this wrapware, it’s now literally Cloud as a service, and I think this is a really good direction for Adobe to be taking, especially when you think about their premium products like Master Collection where you’d have to pay close to $3,000.00 for this software, and to see that price come down to an accessible rate is really nice, not only from a professional perspective but also from the perspective of a student, right, because if you’re going to take a semester or you want to try something you don’t necessarily have to go out and buy this entire suite of software, you can subscribe for just a month, their month-to-month rate it’s only $80.00 to try out all their software, and it’s not packaged in the same sort of way where you would have I believe it’s, and you guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but they have like the Production Suite and like the Web Suite and the Creative Suite and the Creative Premium, like it’s no longer kind of boxed in these little separate sections.

So, I don’t know, I’m excited about this, I subscribed to the service last night, of course this came out yesterday which would have been the 22nd.

Patrick: Yeah, and the thing that I wanted to point out about this, and this may be just one of those stupid things I point out that is obvious to most people, but when you hear the name Creative Cloud you think ‘In the Cloud’, the apps may be in The Cloud, but you do actually download the applications to your desktop and run them like you normally would the Creative Suite, according the FAQ on the Creative Cloud website.

Kevin: That’s correct.

Patrick: So just kind of a point of terminology there. You are downloading software, you are installing software on your computer, you’re just paying that monthly subscription, and the subscription pricing is something we’ve talked about before on the show, and I don’t know how long ago it was, but Adobe going to that model. So I don’t know if you recall that; is this sort of an evolution of that? Is that service maturing? Are they offering extras beyond just the software now?

Kevin: So right, Patrick, you’re correct. I watched some of the videos that they had provided, and I read a little bit on this, so the information I have is not complete, but from what I understand basically it’s more than just the software suite, the Adobe Suite, it’s also inclusive of their online products which they released a while back, which also includes Typekit. And so that’s part of also what makes it exciting. And basically the pitch that they’re making is the Creative Cloud is this way to work within The Cloud, you don’t necessarily have to use Creative products from within another server or on The Cloud, you download them to your machine, but you’re subscribed to those services so you can access them anywhere. So it’s this kind of idea that the world of web design and design in general, no matter what industry you’re in, has changed completely because you’re using different devices like the iPad, the iPhone, your computer.

So this is kind of the direction that Adobe has decided to go, and I only see it growing and going further and further in this direction.

Patrick: Yeah, just to add on to what you said I’m reading through the post at TechCrunch and it says, like you said, “It’s not just a subscription to Adobe’s tools,” this storage and sharing component they call “The hub for making sharing and delivering creative work,” so you can sync your files to the cloud and edit them with mobile tools and anywhere else, so not just having the applications but being able to sync that work and then edit it from anywhere, and because I assume you can use the software on different devices and machines to edit the work and you’ll have about 20 gigabytes of online storage and also access the Typekit which provides about 700 fonts, so those are sort of the value-added services beyond just the software itself.

Kevin: That’s correct.

Louis: Yeah, it’s some interesting product. You know I haven’t used any of the Creative Suite products in some time just because I don’t really spend a lot of time doing any design work but, yeah, it looks definitely a bit more accessible and with some improved toolkits.

Patrick: Now, I mean it comes across as a bargain for what you get; $49.99 a month timed by 12 is $599.88, so $600.00 a year for all of these applications.

Kevin: Right, and the Creative Cloud.

Patrick: Is there a reason why you wouldn’t want to do this?

Kevin: I see no reason why you would not want to do it. I’ve already subscribed and it came out yesterday, in fact, I subscribed as soon I heard about it.

Patrick: Like is there a reason to purchase the Master Collection for $2599?

Louis: Well, in our case like on Australian broadband downloading the Master Collection over the Internet would probably take the full year, so that’s $600.00, you’d have to multiply it by two if you wanted to actually use the things.

Kevin: Right, and then the updates on top of that.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: Right, that’s a good point, yes.

Louis: But, yeah, no, it definitely makes more sense for designers, and I think that a lot of people who might have been off put by the $1,300.00 pricing even for the basic editions of the software in the past, or nearly $2,000.00 for Design Web Premium editions of the suite, this is a lot more accessible, and if it so happens that there’s a period of time when you’re not doing as much design, you know, if you use it for a year but then you move on to do something else then you don’t have to keep paying for it.

Kevin: So to point out one last thing to wrap this up, it’s also that you can download each package of software from the Creative Suite separately, so you don’t have to download the whole thing at once, which is nice if you have limited space or bandwidth.

Patrick: Right. So if you just need Flash you can download Flash, if you just need Photoshop extended you can get that and you don’t have to download the whole thing and have that suck down all your bandwidth for a few years.

Kevin: Correct.

Louis: Man, you actually for a second there when you said that I had to go back and look at the thing, I’m like oh is Flash still in this, is that still a thing that they’re doing.

Patrick: Yes, yes it is, Flash Professional and Flash Builder they’re both a part of the Creative Cloud membership.

Louis: Um, yeah, speaking of Adobe, another thing that they launched yesterday as part of this whole announcement that’s really interesting, at least to me, is they launched a website called Adobe and HTML, which is a kind of awkwardly named site, but it’s at html.adobe.com. There’s a blog post on the Adobe Web Platform Team Blog sort of announcing this new webpage, and it’s just sort of a collection of the work that Adobe is doing with regards to sort of web standards and the open web platform which is really great to see from Adobe, which obviously has had to move away a little bit from its previous focus on Flash for the Web.

So if you go to html.adobe.com you’ll see it’s divided into three sections, one of them is web standards, they’re talking about a few of the standards that they’re working with the W3C to finalize, and also they’re doing implementation work on WebKit to get these CSS features implemented, so there’s CSS regions, shaders and exclusions, I won’t go into huge detail about what those things are, you can go and check it out if you’re interested, but yeah, just sort of highlighting the work that they’re doing on standards and open source. There’s another tab of open source projects covering some of the stuff they’re working on, and that includes Apache Cordova which is actually PhoneGap, I don’t know if you remember we did talk about this on a previous episode of the show, right.

Patrick: Yeah, episode 134.

Louis: That Adobe had purchased PhoneGap and was going to open source the code, and so that’s been — I think they donated the code to the Apache Foundation, am I correct in remembering that?

Patrick: It looks to be the case because the project page is at the Apache Foundation website, so, and it’s Apache Cordova now, so either way Apache is all over it.

Louis: Right, so Apache Cordova, which is the open source base of PhoneGap, and then PhoneGap I guess is Adobe’s distribution of that software, they’ve also contributed heavily to jQuery Mobile, and the work that they’re doing on WebKit like I said, when you look at the web standards, have been finalized, they’ve got a tools and service tab which is just sort of highlighting some of the tools that they provide, and that includes some new stuff like Adobe Edge which is their CSS3 and JavaScript animation tool, so similar to Flash in that you can build animations in a graphical environment, but the output rather than being a Flash file is HTML5 and CSS3 and JavaScript, a few other tools like that.

So, yeah, definitely some cool stuff, like it’s a little bit light on content at the moment, I get the feeling it’s something they just launched, but if they really do go ahead and update this and are looking to participate more actively in web standards and open source then that’s awesome, you know, it’s a little shift of direction for Adobe and one that I think will be very welcomed by the web community. And I just want to highlight one other thing, if you go to the tools and services page it’s got all their tools split into five categories: design, produce, code, inspect and publish, and under code all it says is “We think there’s a need for a different type of code editor. We’re working on something and we’ll have more to share soon.” So that could be — I’m excited by that, by the potential of — it’s definitely a wait and see kind of thing, I’m a big fan of a very lightweight code editor, and very little of Adobe’s software at the moment is lightweight, but I am excited to see what they’re working on.

Stephan: I guess all I can add is good for them, like I think it’s a good step in the right direction.

Patrick: And this website’s pretty slick also I have to say.

Stephan: Yeah, it is.

Kevin: Yep, it’s nice and responsive.

Louis: (Laughs) have you been doing the thing where you drag the window around?

Patrick: I didn’t even play around with that. Oh my gosh.

Kevin: The whole time you were talking, Louis, I was over here –

Louis: Dragging the window (laughs).

Kevin: — going back and forth, back and forth, exactly (laughs). Like a small child.

Patrick: Welcome to our lives folks.

Louis: Ah, man, now I’m gonna be dragging this thing back and forth all day. No, it’s a cool site and some cool initiatives, and it’s good to see Adobe taking a step in this direction and contributing this stuff to WebKit. Yeah, and with them working on WebKit and all the work that Microsoft is doing on IE10 it’s really invigorating to see all these big companies that previously we would’ve thought of as the worst enemies of web standards and the open web suddenly taking kind of a leading role in that space.

Patrick: And our last story of the day is a — well, it’s a press release from the IAB, the Internet Advertising Bureau.

Louis: Boo ads.

Patrick: And they –

Louis: (Laughs) sorry.

Patrick: Well, it’s a part of what we do.

Louis: Obviously I’m kidding.

Patrick: So — please advertise on the SitePoint Podcast! Please! Email sitepoint.com, there’s a contact page, just go there and email them, we need your money! no. So it’s kind of on the state of Internet advertising and the numbers and where ad revenue went in 2011 versus 2010. So I’ll read some of the high-level numbers here and we can then talk about them. So, ad revenue as a whole was up 22% to 31 billion dollars in 2011, mobile had the fastest growth of any category, it was up 149%, digital video was up 29%, search revenues were up 27%, and display ads, the revenue generated from display ads, was up 15%. And they also break it down a little further to talk about how these categories fit into the overall online advertising figure, like what percentage of that 31 billion is search, for example, or display ads. And so you can see where some units are maybe trending down or trending up. Search ads were up about 2% as far as the overall total, but what I found interesting was that display ads were actually down a little bit as far as the percent of that total, so they were 37% of the ads spent in 2010 there were 34.8% in 2011, so display ads and the revenue they contributed to the overall pile was down. Mobile was up a lot, as we discussed, email was flat, lead generation was about the same, classified ads and directories were down a little bit, and search as I said was up. So display ads was down and that was kind of picked up by search. And then they also break it down to revenue models, impression based ads, performance based ads; impression based ad revenue as far as that overall pile was actually down from 33% to 31.3%, where performance based ads were up by about that same amount.

So, I mean overall they’re not huge trends, but display ads were down, impression based ads were down, performance based up, and other types of ads, especially mobile, were up. So it’s a lot of info; thoughts?

Louis: I actually — I came off with ‘boo ads’ but I’m going to take this as good news, I think that one of the reasons we have this visceral reaction to ads in the online space is that kind of focus that’s existed in the past that came over from print and focus on impression based performance metrics, and the focus on display ads which were generally speaking annoying banners, and furthermore, because they’re impression based they kind of gave flawed incentives to content producers to either paginate content when it wasn’t necessary to paginate it just to drive up impressions or to publish link bait, and also irrelevant ads could do well in terms of performance but not be helpful to us as the reader or the consumer of content. So I think a focus more on performance metrics where you want people who are actually interested in the product that you’re advertising, and a focus on contextual advertising, which is more the case in terms of search and maybe less the case on mobile, but mobile I think that growth just comes from the fact of the growth of the platform, not so much of a shift in the mentality of advertisers. But I think apart from that this move to performance metrics and the move more towards search, and therefore contextual advertising versus impression based display ads, I think is a good direction for the Web as a whole.

Patrick: Yeah, I found the story via Revenues, via TechCrunch, and to add to what you said though, and part of the motivation for serving ads, they break down the display category just a little farther to digital video commercials, ad banners/display ads, sponsorships and rich media, and in those four categories ad banners and display ads were down as far as an overall percentage of the revenue, and rich media ads were down as far as their take in the revenue. Actually revenue generated from rich media display ads, the dollar amount was actually down itself about 220 million dollars to about 1.3 billion. And then to make up for that, sponsorships were up and digital video commercials were up, so sponsorships, you know, generally would lend themselves to not being as impression based, people who are sponsoring this content, this page, this website, they’re paying more for a time allotment than they are for an impression, so that goes to your point.

Louis: Yeah, and I think sponsorships is another one of those things that is a little bit more palatable to media consumers because it implies a bit of trust, it implies a recommendation on the part of both parties that are involved in a sponsorship deal, which in a traditional banner advertisement isn’t necessarily the case; I can see an ad for something and I don’t necessarily think that there’s any endorsement implied on behalf of the site that I’m visiting, whereas if I see this site probably sponsored by that implies a bit more of an association, and I tend to carry along some of the trust that I have in either of the two parties onto the other party, so I think it can be mutually beneficial.

Patrick: And it’s worth pointing out as much as you put it in kind of that light where it’s kind of better for visitors, which I agree with, it’s also important to just point out that the dollar amount kind of dwarfs these other figures, like the ad banner display ads were 6.8 billion, sponsorships were 1.1 billion, so it’s going up and it was up quite a bit, but it’s still much smaller in the overall ads spent.

Louis: Yeah, that’s true, but if you look at search, however, which was 11.6 billion in 2010 went to 14.7 billion in 2011, so huge growth in search advertisement, which as I said because it can be a little bit more targeted and a little bit more contextual I think it’s a lot less intrusive.

Patrick: That’s a great point.

Louis: It’s interesting to see mobile jump up, I mean obviously I don’t know how proportional that is to the growth of the platform and the gross of mobile users, but it is interesting to see, and it would be interesting to see a further breakdown of how much of that comes into mobile website advertising versus advertising in mobile applications, for example.

Patrick: That’s actually a good question as well; it isn’t broken down that far, but like you said, it was up from 641 million in 2010 to 1.59 billion in 2011, so obviously that’s something people are exploiting. And, I don’t know, I found it was interesting an email was included here, I don’t know what I found that so interesting, it’s just because I don’t do much with email ads and I wouldn’t think about it, but that it’s tracked and it’s 213 million versus 195 last year, kind of flat, it’s email is always heralded as sort of a great thing for getting the word out there about something, like a new product announcement or something new that you were offering, but advertising-wise it’s obviously just not as accepted.

Overall good news for advertising and people who just plain old advertising I guess, revenue is up and you should probably get into mobile.

Louis: Yeah, alright, you guys want to do some spotlights, I think it’s that time of the week.

Patrick: Why don’t you go first so I don’t have the opportunity to snipe you.

Louis: Alright, let’s do it, I’m gonna go first; either the likelihood of you sniping this snapshot is so abysmally low — so my snapshot is a browser game that aims to teach you how to use the VIM code editor.

Kevin: Ooh, this sounds fun.

Louis: Was that where you were going, Patrick?

Patrick: Well, if Kevin says it sounds fun probably not (laughs).

Louis: Alright, so the URL is vim-adventures.com, that’s vim hyphen adventures.com, so for anyone who doesn’t know VIM is a console based text editor which takes place entirely in your terminal, your command line terminal, and it’s an extremely powerful editor, it’s what I use at work, and the main advantages of it is all the navigation and moving around and selecting text and cutting and pasting text is all done via keyboard combos, so via the home row, so you almost never use the mouse when you’re working with Vim, and it can be a really fast way of editing code, however, the learning curve is notoriously steep because obviously you have to learn what all these different keys do and it’s not obvious.

So this guy’s put together this little — it’s almost like I don’t know what I can describe it as, it’s like a kind of a Zelda-like look to it, it’s sort of this isometric thing where you’re wandering around, you’re just basically a flashing cursor but in this graphical environment, and you wander around via the same keys that you would use in VIM to navigate a text file. So there are only a few levels that are online so far, so far it’s still in an early stage of development, but it’s really cool and if you’re looking for a little fun way to learn even just the basics right now, like I said, it only has sort of how to navigate the cursor, either one space at a time or by entire or jump across words, and that’s all you can learn now, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how it develops further with respect to like cutting and pasting and searching for things. So, yeah, that’s my spotlight.

Patrick: I didn’t mean Kevin liking it was a bad thing, I just meant he’s a developer type more; I probably need this very much (laughs).

Stephan: Well, I know what I’m playing tonight (laughter).

Patrick: Everyone’s gonna be crowded around the computer playing some old VIM adventures.

Louis: The only thing, like I said, the two levels that exist at the moment, or the two or three levels that exist at the moment they’ll probably take you maybe ten minutes to play through, so there’s not a lot of game content there at the moment, but I think it is a really interesting approach to learning a tricky technology, and it’s also an impressive — it’s a good-looking game and nice and fun.

Patrick: Yippee, that’s from the game, sorry. So my spotlight this week is Jim Gaffigan’s new comedy special Mr. Universe, I’m incapable of suggesting something that’s web development related. And I’m a big huge fan of Jim Gaffigan, as far as comedians go I think he’s probably my favorite comedian bar none, and I’m going to see him live in July, always love his stuff, and he actually put this one out direct online, similar to what Louis CK did; for five dollars, you pay five dollars you can download it, there’s no DRM, you can do what you want with it, and so it’s only five bucks, It’s certainly I’m sure well worth the money, and he’s a very funny guy and we’ll have a link to the trailer in the show notes.

Louis: Yeah, that’s great. I think I’m really, really happy that this business model has sort of taken off, and happy that it was so successful for Louis CK and that therefore a lot of other people are considering it, because it really just is the best deal for consumers, right, and it’s the best deal for the content producer as well, everybody wins; we get what we want at a reasonable price, easily accessible and in a way that we can use, and then they get a lot of money.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting to follow. There haven’t been any, as far as I know because I’ve kind of looked, results, articles as far as how many he sold or how much money was made, so it will be interesting to see how it compares to the Louis CK special. And another comedian that did this actually that I heard about was –

Louis: Aziz Ansari

Patrick: Aziz Ansari, yeah, and I didn’t pick up his, but –

Louis: Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see how Jim Gaffigan goes because a lot of people who were trying to sort of naysay the success of Louis CK’s alternate business model adventure were saying it works for you because you’re on television, you’ve got a show, everyone knows who you are, you’ve already got this massive audience. And I think Jim Gaffigan’s a slightly less well-known comedian, and so it’ll be interesting to see how well that translates across if you don’t have a million followers on Twitter or whatever.

Patrick: Yeah, actually I was just looking at the follower count because I was curious to see what the difference was between Gaffigan and CK and Ansari, Aziz Ansari actually has the most of the three with 1.84 million followers, and he’s on TV and whatnot, so he’s a popular comedian also, and Louis CK has 1.172 million, and Jim Gaffigan bringing up the rear of the three with 1.01 million followers, so just crossed that barrier, in your face Louis, just crossed it (laughter)!

Louis: Alright, so scratch what I just said about that.

Kevin: No, I’m curious, Patrick, this is the Hot Pocket guy, right?

Patrick: This is, this is the one and only. And he tours, I went to one of his shows in Baltimore, my whole family was sick, it was terrible, like bad sick, but we still went, it was the day before my birthday actually, and it was a great show, he packed the house there, and yeah, I mean he’s — it’s interesting to see because I don’t know but I wonder what like the touring numbers are for these guys versus what they sell online and whatnot. But it’s definitely exciting to see and I think it’s, I don’t know, it seems like it’s all part of this moment in time, it’s all related, like one story we cut from the show was about Kickstarter and how much money they’ve helped people make, obviously super popular, and there’s other services like that, I think indiegogo is one, am I saying that right, and so this sort of direct to consumer kind of cutting out the middle man, not saying the middle man has no value, but it all seems to be shifting to self-something.

Louis: Well, yeah, not that the middle man has no value, but if the middle man wants to have value they have to provide value, right, providing just a network or providing just a conduit between a producer and a consumer isn’t worth anything anymore because that conduit is available for free, and any content producer can be their own conduit, but there’s definitely space for that middle man role if it’s, for example, curation role or a role that actually does add value and provides a consumer with some extra stuff, or provides the producer with better reach.

Stephan: Louis’ talking about you MPAA.

Patrick: Yeah, not SitePoint, SitePoint’s book publishing business provides great value as a middle man, ding. So what’s your spotlight Stephan?

Stephan: I have a blog post by Noah Stokes, and he runs a web development company called Bold, and the blog post is about courting the potential client and how they handle potential clients, and I just think it’s interesting because a lot of people are just really eager to jump on the first client that comes in the door, and he kind of talks about why that’s not necessarily the case, and one time out of ten it’s clear that they should say no to a project, and they do, so I think sometimes you have to say no. So it’s just an interesting read on how they handle an influx of clients, so I like that kind of stuff, I hope our listeners do as well.

Louis: Good stuff; I’ll give this a read. And Kevin?

Kevin: Okay, excellent. So I have been developing games for the last two months, some for leisure, some for clients, and I’ve been using ImpactJS, you can go to impactjs.com and check this out if you haven’t heard of it, basically it’s a Canvass drawing platform framework that you can use to build games for websites. There’s a whole community been built around this over the last I think year and a half, maybe two years now, but basically you can use this framework to build games for any kind of browser, Internet Explorer 9, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, even the iPhone; now if you want to use it on the new iPhone because of the number of pixels it’s a little bit harder, but that’s not a problem because you can export from ImpactJS to the IOS and build apps that way, so you can take advantage of I believe it’s OpenGL, not WebGL, which you can also take advantage of in this framework, but OpenGL in that you can port from the native browser into the iPhone’s OpenGL to basically draw pixels faster.

So it’s really cool, I’ve been using it and I love it, it’s really fun, and you can get started building a game really quickly; I built my first game with this in a matter of maybe an hour, a little Pong game.

Louis: Right. And this is all JavaScript based.

Kevin: Correct, it’s JavaScript based.

Louis: Which makes it a little bit more accessible for web designers who might — I always feel like when I start looking at game stuff and thinking I’m not gonna learn C and even the iPhone languages maybe not something I feel like diving into, but if you take languages you already know and a good framework of stuff — so this is not a free product.

Kevin: No, it’s not.

Louis: Is what I’m seeing here.

Kevin: Correct, it is a hundred dollars to get five licenses, basically five games for a year. Now, once you get your license you obviously have access to the files; it does require a PHP backend to run, so you need to have at least PHP installed on your computer and Apache to get that up and running, but some really cool things. Some notes I’d like to make about the framework itself is that it uses this model of everything is an entity, meaning when things bump into each other they’re all kind of the same, and so anytime you create an enemy or your own character you’re creating and using the same model, so it’s not very hard to get something up and running very quickly.

Some of the other things I’d like to note in it is that is uses, like you were saying, JavaScript, but it’s very easy to write this code, it uses literal notation, basically JavaScript objects and basically JSON format to write your methods, and I don’t know if they call them properties or attributes in JavaScript, but it’s really easy to get started that’s all I’m trying to say, so check it out.

Patrick: Yeah, and you know what I want, Kevin, this looks really cool, so what we need to have is a SitePoint podcast RPG with four playable characters, okay, and I think you know who the four are, and maybe Brad and Kevin Yank can be unlockables, you know, and kind of down the road, so yeah, I think I want that, the budget is zero, but I can help with the script (laughter).

Kevin: Give me a month, give me one month and in my free time I’ll make this game for you, and if you’ll allow me I’ll put it on the podcast for everybody to check out.

Louis: Oh, absolutely.

Patrick: Oh my gosh, that would be awesome.

Louis: Be super excited.

Kevin: I just need avatars; I need you guys to send me some pictures of yourselves so I can build this game for you.

Louis: Alright, we’re all in.

Patrick: I’m actually excited about the podcast.

Louis: What are you trying to say, Patrick, what are you trying to say?

Patrick: Oh gosh, I love you guys.

Stephan: Getting himself into more trouble!

Louis: I think that’s as good a time as any to wrap things up for this week, so what do you say we do a quick run around the table.

Kevin: Excellent. So you can find me, Kevin Dees, at kevindees.cc and on Twitter as @kevindees.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe, I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and I blog at badice.com.

Louis: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, sitetpoint d-o-t-c-o-m, you can email the podcast at podcast@sitepoint.com, and if you go to sitepoint.com/podcast best place on the Web to find our previous episodes, leave a comment on this show or subscribe to the RSS. And you can find me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #159: PHP Master with Tim Boronczyk

Karn Broad — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:23:37 +0000

Episode 159 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Tim Boronczyk (@zaemis), the Managing Editor of phpmaster.com about the new features in PHP5.4, PHP’s strengths and weaknesses, and the DIY approach of the PHP community.

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SitePoint Podcast #159: PHP Master with Tim Boronczyk (MP3, 20:27, 19.6MB)

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Episode Summary

Louis and Tim Boronczyk talk about the starting up of phpmaster.com, about the new features in PHP5.4 including traits and the Session Upload Progress Indicator, PHP’s strengths and weaknesses including an exhaustive blog post made recently on the topic, and the DIY approach of the PHP community.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/159.

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. We’ve got a bit of an interview show this week, with me on the show is Timothy Boronczyk, or Tim, do I call you Tim?

Tim: You can call me Tim, Tim is fine.

Louis: Alright, let’s go with Tim. Tim Boronczyk is the managing editor of phpmaster.com which is one of SitePoint’s latest ventures, so it’s a blog that’s all about the wonderful world of PHP. So, hi Tim, and welcome to the show.

Tim: Hi, thanks for having me, it’s exciting.

Louis: It’s great to have you. Have you been managing PHP Master from the get-go, or pretty much from the get-go?

Tim: Yeah, right from its beginning, probably I want to say about eight months, six, seven, eight months, thereabouts.

Louis: Alright. So do you want to just maybe for anyone listening who’s not familiar with PHP Master, or who hasn’t had a chance to see the site, what kind of things do you tend to publish about, how are things going, what’s the pitch?

Tim: Well, it’s a little bit of everything, we publish three times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so fire up your RSS readers if you haven’t already. We try to have a little bit of everything for everybody. We have some beginner level articles on there to help new programmers improve their skills and become a PHP master, we have some intermediate for those who have done their time in PHP apprenticeship land and are looking to improve their skills, and we have some really in-depth nitty-gritty articles for those who already consider themselves PHP masters.

Louis: Right. So I figured given that I got a chance to have you on the show we could talk a little bit about just PHP in general, where it’s at and where it’s heading, so, first and foremost, the latest version of PHP is version 5.4 and that’s a relatively new release, right?

Tim: Yes, it’s out probably a couple months now.

Louis: I’ve only been superficially aware of PHP in version 5.4, I work a little bit with PHP but mostly with Ruby and Rails, so maybe can you talk a bit about what the really cool features are in PHP 5.4.

Tim: There’s a lot of new features in 5.4 that you can be excited about, for me there are probably three or four that I personally think are pretty neat, the first one being the Session Upload Progress Indicator; the PHP developers have stuck information into the session while you’re doing a file upload so you don’t have to do any weird, hacky, flash, weird — just dirty code things; you can submit your form to post your file to the server and spin off an Ajax request behind the scenes that would just use the session variables to monitor the progress, the amount of file that has been transferred for you.

Louis: Alright, so that just kind of makes it easier to show a valid progress meter to the user showing how far along uploading that file they are?

Tim: Yep, exactly, and it’s a baked-in solution into PHP, you don’t have to use a third party library or some weird hacky workaround.

Louis: Yeah.

Tim: Another one is traits; if you’re a big OOP programmer, and traits are interesting, you may be familiar with them, I believe they have them in Ruby as well, they’re sets of functionality that you would use in a class, but they’re not in a class they’re just sitting off on the sidelines by themselves, and you can import this set of functionality into the class, so it makes code reuse easier, you don’t have weird convoluted class hierarchies trying not to repeat your code.

Louis: Yeah, that’s definitely something that’s really, really useful that I enjoy in Ruby is the ability to sort of mix in little snippets of functionality that don’t necessarily fit into an inheritance hierarchy; I don’t need everything to descend from a descendant of this master class in order to have this piece of functionality, I can just put it in a little module, in Ruby they’re called modules, and pull it in when I need it where I need it, so it’s great to see that kind of functionality in PHP as well.

Tim: Yep, that’s exactly right. Also, we have a built-in web server now in 5.4 which some people are really excited and they love it, or they’re kind of apathetic about it, but I think it’s kind of cool, it’s nice to have.

Louis: So is this mostly just for development; if I’m just playing around with some PHP scripts on my local machine I can dropdown to the command line and fire off this little development server that can serve those files without having to have Apache installed with MOD PHP and all that setup taken care of.

Tim: Yep, it makes it really easy for beginners to get up-to-speed on PHP without having to worry about configuring an Apache or an Nginex server. And now that you have SQLite as part of PHP as of version 5.0, I believe, you really don’t need the MySQL; if you’re doing just a bare basic web app you can have everything built into PHP now, just startup the built-in server and away you go. Some of the concern though is that it was a response to the Ruby community because this built-in server seems to be only good for local testing, I haven’t seen anyone do any real cool things with it yet, I’m sure someone will; I just haven’t seen it. But the criticism is PHP and MySQL and Apache is so prolific everyone has this already installed on their hosting environments; why have a built-in server for testing which doesn’t match the configuration in what you would be using in deployment.

Louis: Yeah. I mean I think it’s a valid point when you say this is something that looks like it was borrowed from Rails at least, because Rails has a very similar way of just firing up a quick little server for testing, but in Rails that’s almost a requirement because there are a lot more barriers to getting a real testing environment set up because the server setup isn’t as straightforward as just a few app get installs; in the case of PHP if you’ve got MySQL and Apace it pretty much sets itself up.

Tim: And that’s true, and I think that has to do with the driving force behind the language itself, PHP really was born as a web language, so it was tightly integrated into Apache from its beginning. All of your post and Git variables are exposed as functionality in the language, and like I had just talked about checking a session key to monitor your file transfer, again, that’s baked into the language, where if you have a general purpose programming language like Python, Perl and Ruby, you have to have the frameworks that provide the network interaction, the accepting of input data and flushing of output.

Louis: Yeah. Anyway, I mean I think it’s definitely a fun little thing, and especially as potentially people move to deploying PHP in environments other than Apache, you mentioned Nginx, that are perhaps a little bit trickier to set up, I can see how it would be valuable to have the ability to just run a really quick and dirty development server so that I can play around with your scripts and then worry about deploying them after once you’ve got them developed.

Tim: And I think my personal favorite is the new short array syntax. I had seen a few years ago when someone had first proposed it to the internals list, then it was voted up and down and all around, and I’m happy to see it finally made it into 5.4

Louis: Right. So this is basically PHP has always had this kind of idiosyncratic way of declaring arrays, where if you want to assign a new array to a variable you use the keyword array with parenthesis and then the contents of the array inside the parentheses.

Tim: Yeah, it’s just nice to be able to type an open square brace and close square brace and call it a day.

Louis: Yeah, so it’s more of a literal representation of the array similar to what you do in Ruby or JavaScript.

Tim: And you’re using square braces to access the array element anyway, so there’s no strange conceptual leap.

Louis: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that’s something especially when I’m working back and forth between Ruby and PHP code on the same day, for example, declaring arrays is the one that always trips me up where suddenly I’ll be typing array in my Ruby code or trying to do this in PHP; I guess now this will work in PHP, so at least one of my two mistakes will be avoided.

Tim: Yes, your Ruby code will now work in PHP (laughter).

Louis: So, yeah, those are some cool new features. So is there much work done in terms of performance, I know that past PHP — well, I mean PHP’s pretty fast as it is, so.

Tim: Yeah, I genuinely do not know, I haven’t had a chance to look at any benchmarks.

Louis: Cool. Yeah, so really exciting, so have you started working with 5.4 in your day-to-day work already?

Tim: No, actually I’m in an interesting situation in my 9 to 5 job where we are currently maintaining a 10 year old code base, so we’re not really in a position to use 5.4 features in our code yet, we’re slowly using some native name spaces that came in the last version, 5.3, slowly rolling that in.

Louis: So another thing that a lot of people may have seen come up in the past few weeks referring to PHP is this person on their blog posted this really, really long rant about PHP, and the title of the post is “PHP: a Fractal of Bad Design.”

Tim: Yeah, I saw that.

Louis: Which I assume it means that’s it’s bad design embedded within bad design, so, yeah, and obviously I’ve seen a number of responses to this on other blogs, on Hacker News, and people explaining why they use PHP, why a lot of these features, or a lot of these complaints that this blogger’s raising are not actually real complaints, but yeah, I know we talked a little bit before the show and you haven’t read through the entire thing, but I did want to get sort of your quick read on this because it’s been circulating so much of late.

Tim: Yeah, I saw it when it first came out, and I saw the first paragraph and I’m like okay this is — alright, where’s he going with this, and I started scrolling down and down and kept scrolling down and down and down, and he just kept going point by point by point, and some of the points that he raised was the array issue that we had just spoken about, but PHP 5.4 solves by using array literals now. It also brought up that there was no true Unicode support, there are plans to do Unicode in PHP I believe in 6, but a lot of this has been known or rehashed over the years, inconsistent naming conventions for functions, and some of it has changed, some of it will be changing, some of it may never change, but I have to commend him for the length and for his passion.

For me I think it really proved Sturgeon’s Law in an ironic sense, but one of the comments down at the end said he did an excellent job, it was a very thorough write-up, which indeed it was, and suggested that he do one similar for Python and for Ruby, and I would really like to see those as well because PHP has a reputation of being beaten up, he’s a little kid in the schoolyard, and I don’t know if I really want to use that analogy because some of PHP’s issues are deserving of criticism, but overall in the industry PHP is not always the favorable choice where languages like Python and Ruby seem to have a lot more positive perception, so I would love to see someone take an honest look at those languages as well.

Louis: Yeah. I mean there’s tons to complain about in any language or framework, obviously this is a very, very exhaustive cataloging of one person’s gripes with this particular language, and as has been pointed out both by you and in other criticisms of this that I’ve seen, some of these gripes are either no longer valid or referring to problems that existed in PHP in the past but no longer do. But, yeah, obviously PHP has its strengths and one of those strengths as you’ve already referred to is just how easy it is for beginners to get to work on it. As a first language to learn for programming for the Web, and especially for people who start in front-end web design and want to start to building and accessing databases, that step of just creating a file putting it in your web directly and more or less you’re in business because you’ve already got Apache with Mod PHP.

Tim: Yeah, you honestly just have to write a file and if it has the right extension it works, you know, from a beginner’s standpoint; you don’t have to set up a magic framework, or you don’t have to set up a magic server.

Louis: Yeah. Not only that, obviously PHP having been around for so long is incredibly well-tested and stable and fast, and then of course obviously there are all these major projects out there that benefit from that ease of use and that ease of installation, you know, Drupal and WordPress and other similar projects, Magento, that because you can just grab those files put them on a server and shared hosting and they’re up and running as long as you’ve got a database to connect to is also incredibly powerful, and that’s why I think even with all that favorable perception of maybe Ruby and Python we still haven’t seen any kind of WordPress killer or Drupal killer come out of the Ruby community or the Python community or any other language really.

Another thing, given I’ve got you on the show I might want to ask is, are there any cool either scripts or libraries or frameworks that you’ve been playing with in PHP that you’d like to share or point listeners to?

Tim: Oh, I wish there were. I have to preface this with saying sometimes I wonder if I’m a professional programmer, with professional in quotes; certainly I do it as my day job and I’m paid for it, so I’m a professional, but there’s a feeling in the community that a professional programmer’s going to strive for code reuse, is going to use these libraries that are available to us to reduce the time spent in development and to ensure code that is tested and such. But every time I try to use these something always happens that frustrates, you know, I use what I have to use for work, and for my own projects I would just rather roll with my own, it’s more fun and I’m just now pulling my hair out trying to maneuver around someone’s library that is an API that’s written that suits them and their needs and not necessarily mine, or is so generic that it ends up being very bloated.

Louis: Yeah.

Tim: You know, I’m using WordPress in a particular project right now, and it’s just for a blogging site it’s excellent, there’s so much functionality that it provides, and plugins, if you’re using it as a very basic content management system, even if you strip out most of the functionality it’s still a very heavyweight solution to offer a client.

Louis: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot in there, and I can definitely sympathize with your point of view about libraries, you do often find yourself spending a lot of time fidgeting and figuring out how to make something work for your needs that wasn’t necessarily designed for them, I guess it’s always sort of a judgment call of whether you’ll spend more time and aggravation in doing that or writing it yourself; writing it yourself might take more time but less aggravation.

Tim: Yeah, and that comes part and parcel of being a programmer, we’re supposed to strive on finding problems and finding solutions to them, and that’s where I question my own professionalism sometimes because I just want to get something done and have it work and move on to the next thing.

Louis: Yeah.

Tim: Because I don’t have time to fiddle with things, and I don’t think I’m alone in the PHP community as a whole, I know — I think Ed Finkler did a blog post saying “I’m a PHP developer not a framework developer, “ you know, there’s a lot of fracturing in the PHP community, Perl has cpan and Ruby has Gems, and PHP has tried to do PHP classes, pair and peckle, and the community just never truly seems to accept it like the other communities have, everyone wants to try and roll their own solution for better or worse.

Louis: Yeah, like you said, for better or worse it seems like it’s one of the great strengths of the PHP community, and maybe one of its weaknesses is that extremely DIY approach to code. But it does mean that most PHP developers have spent a lot of time playing with things and figuring out solutions to all these problems, so it is really interesting in that respect.

Closing off, coming back a little bit to PHP Master, because that’s obviously the site that you manage, what are say a couple of your favorite pieces on PHP Master that we could maybe point listeners to if they want to check out some of the stuff that you guys have been doing over there?

Tim: That’s like asking a parent which child is their favorite (laughter), you should never do that.

Louis: I know it’s a cruel question but I’ll ask it anyway.

Tim: We have a lot of good content up there, and a lot that’s coming down the pipe. We had just done a two-part series, Continuous Integration, focusing on Jenkins. For those who do not know what Continuous Integration is it’s using automated processes to test and build your code so that you can guarantee the integrity of your code base as you develop.

Louis: Right, so it’s things that will run your test suite for you automatically when you commit new code to your master branch, and in some cases also take care of deploying that when and if the tests all pass, right?

Tim: Yes, yes. And we had some articles discussing many of the PHP 5.4 features such as the upload information in the session variable and the built-in server.

Louis: Right, and traits as well, I think I saw something on PHP Master.

Tim: Yes, we have a traits article as well.

Louis: Yeah, so there’s some stuff on traits and, as you said, the file uploads and these new features in PHP 5.4, so anyone listening who’s curiosity was piqued by our earlier discussion of these new features can head over to phpmaster.com and have a look, some in-depth information on how to make use of these new features.

Alright, well thanks so much, Tim, for making the time to get on the show, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Tim: Well, you’re welcome, and thank you so much for having me.

Louis: Absolutely. So other than phpmaster.com, if people want to follow you are you on the Internet on your own blog or on Twitter?

Tim: Yep, I do have a blog, zaemis.blogspot.com is my blog, and I’m on Twitter as @zaemis.

Louis: Alright, so yeah, listeners can find Tim there and also of course on phpmaster.com. So thanks again, Tim, and best of luck with PHP Master, look forward to seeing what’s going to come out of that in the next few months.

Tim: Well, thank you. Just a quick plug at the end if anyone’s interested in writing for PHP Master if they have a unique project that they’re working on and would like to share it with the world, or their unique perspective on PHP, shoot me an email.

Louis: Alright, absolutely, and they can find contact information in phpmaster.com?

Tim: Yes.

Louis: Right, in the footer there’s a link that says ‘write for us’, so if you want to write for phpmaster.com just click on that link and send it on through to Tim. Alright, thanks again Tim.

Tim: Alright, thank you.

Louis: Bye.

And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to Sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to download or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #158: Drinking and Technology

Karn Broad — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:52:45 +0000

Episode 158 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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SitePoint Podcast #158: Drinking and Technology (MP3, 37:55, 34.8MB)

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Episode Summary

The panel discuss the UK Government’s new Design Principle site, the ongoing debate about the role of alcohol in the tech community, and a cool new HTML5 music video project put out by Microsoft to promote Internet Explorer 10.

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/158.

Host Spotlights

Patrick and Louis: ZeFrank – A Show
Stephan: Instagram Engineering • Keeping Instagram up with over a million new users in twelve hours
Kevin: Snipt | Share and store code or command snippets.

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the SitePoint Podcast, I’m back after a brief hiatus, last week Kevin interviewed Paul Boag for the show, but this week we’re back with a full panel; hi guys.

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Stephan: Howdy, howdy.

Patrick: Hello.

Louis: How you guys doing? Don’t answer all at once!

Stephan: It’s a Monday (laughter).

Patrick: Full of Easter candy.

Louis: Yeah, so you guys have got the day off today, right, is it a holiday there?

Stephan: No, we only got Friday off.

Louis: Only Friday, alright.

Patrick: When you work for yourself you don’t get days off, so, um, no; I didn’t have Easter off.

Louis: Alright, well, hey, it’s good to have you all back on the show, so let’s just kick into it, who wants to go first with the first story? I’m going to nominate Kevin.

Kevin: Okay, yes! Sweet, I like being the nominee, it’s a pleasure.

Patrick: But will you win? (Laughter)

Kevin: Yes, I will. My link, or story for today, comes from the gov.uk, they’re working on a new project for the government to use, and basically what I want to talk about is a portion of that. The design team has released some design principles that they’ve been using throughout their website, and so this isn’t necessarily a set of principles for “the designing world,” but they did craft this for this specific site, so these are kind of guidelines that they’re using within their project, but I believe that these could definitely be used throughout the web design community as well; I think these are really good principles, and I’ll just go through them quickly here. The first, there are ten of these, the first is Starting with Needs, and they talk about user needs there, and they talk about doing less than designing with the data that you have, doing the hard work to make things simple basically make things usable. And then Iterate, and then Iterate Again, is the 5th one; 6th we have Build for Inclusion, so they talk about accessibility in this section, and we’ll discuss all these in a second, or at least some of the highlighted points. And then Understanding Context, Build Digital Service, Not Websites, Be Consistent, Not Uniform, and Make Things Open, It Makes Things Better. And the 10th one is kind of the flavor of this post in itself because they talk about making things open, that’s why they’ve kind of released this ten principles, just to kind of go along with that.

I’ll kick it off with 10, I think this is an interesting one, but they basically say that we should share what we’re doing whenever we can with colleagues, with users and with the world, and they’re talking about just sharing code, sharing designs, sharing ideas, and everything like this. And I think it’s an important point, I mean it’s kind of what we’re doing with the podcast, right, we’re trying to get information out there to share the information that we have to help make the web designer world a better community.

Let’s see, they also have a Be Consistent, But Not Necessarily Uniform. And basically in this section, design principle number 9, they’re saying that you should use the same kind of language, or voice, within your site, and also have the same types of design patterns. So design patterns being something like a horizontal menu across the top of your page; you don’t want that moving around.

Louis: Man, I just got to say this thing is gorgeous.

Kevin: Yes.

Louis: It’s a really, really beautiful site, incredibly well laid out, it’s incredibly well written.

Kevin: Hmm-mm.

Louis: I love the typography; I’m a big fan of correct use of em dashes instead of hyphens when you want to use a dash, and they’ve done a really good job of that (laughter), it’s a really nit-picky thing to highlight on but I love it, and just great, incredibly well written, and incredibly insightful. We usually think of government web design as this really stodgy, terrible bureaucratic thing that ends up producing horrible, unusable sites; I’m generalizing here, but is it fair to say that that’s your impression of government web design as well?

Kevin: Yes, definitely, I mean if you — the United States government web sites, I think thewhitehouse.org is the one that was redone in Drupal, and that one, it’s pretty good. But like in general whenever you go to a government website, maybe you’re looking up some tax information like how much tax do I owe the government for this specific thing, it can be a real mess to get into. In fact, that’s actually one of the first points they make in this site, of course this is part of the UK so the standards and things and laws are going to be a little bit different, but they talk about starting with the needs, right, and that in the design process building the site around users.

Louis: Speaking of taxes, that’s a great point, the example they give in the context of the user needs thing is this VAT page, the VAT is the Value Added Tax in the UK, so it’s a sales tax on goods with value added, and if you look at that gov.uk/vatrates, it’s just got in giant letters at the top of the screen The Standard VAT Rate is 20%, and then it’s got all the other stuff lower, right, but that one answer that most people are going to want is put really front and center. Yeah, and throughout this whole — even like the design of the Design Principle’s document has had so much care put into it, it’s lovely.

Kevin: Yeah, you know, you brought up that there’s an example in here, and there’s an example I believe for every one of these points, and I think that’s really nice; so you can get like a physical representation of what they’re talking about, you don’t just have to make believe for yourself what some of these things mean.

Another one, The Designing with Data, they have some examples for that I think are really good, they’re basically being aware of AB testing and they go through that in the examples. But there’s a lot of really good stuff here, I know I probably could go on for ages about this, but it’s worth looking at for sure.

Louis: I’m also a big fan of point number 2 which is Do Less, I just want to read that one out because I really like it: Government should only do what government can do, if someone else is doing it link to it, if we can provide resources like API’s that will help other people build things, do that, we should concentrate on the irreducible core. And I think that’s one of those things that’s super-applicable for anyone building any website; there’s not point re-implementing a service that someone else is doing and you can just link to, and at the same time, if you’ve got data that you think other people might be able to do stuff with that you don’t have time to do, then making that available via something like an API is going to give your users the best deal.

Kevin: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

Patrick: Yeah, and in the example for that I think they kind of callout another part of the government; if you hit the example they link to a page from direct.gov.uk about keeping bees, and they say that, “While it’s right we should provide information about that, it’s not necessary for us to provide information about keeping bees.” (Laughter)

Louis: Yeah, right.

Patrick: And they link to the government website with information about keeping bees.

Kevin: Right. Now, this gov.uk is actually from what I’ve read supposed to be the future replacement for direct.gov, and so it makes since that they use this as an example.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: Yeah. I’m reading this page about how to keep bees, but yeah it’s a good point, like obviously there are probably entire websites and forums and communities on the Internet dedicated to teaching you how to keep bees, so if they government wants to provide you with a link to that that’d be great, but like maintaining this is all this work that could be better spent elsewhere, right.

Patrick: Yeah. I mean it has to be updated as the information about keeping bees changes.

Louis: Well, it does change. There was this thing, did you guys see this, it was the news just this past week that this colony collapse disorder was caused by a couple of common pesticides, so I’m sure the beekeeping world is abuzz with new information; did you see what I did there, you see?

Patrick: Right you are.

Louis: Did you get it?

Patrick: You’re a clever gentleman.

Louis: Was abuzz with new — alright.

Stephan: Can I just say one thing and it’ll be quick and it’s completely off topic, but this actual page is awesome, I love the font, so there’s that (laughter).

Louis: It’s really nice, I mean I literally love the design of this page, I’m like, yeah, I want to make a page just like it.

Stephan: It’s really clean, it made me want to read it, my hat is off to them.

Louis: And the content design as well, just putting this very short paragraph up in a giant font and then a little bit more detail in a smaller font just makes it engaging and, yeah, hats off, a hat tip. I will tip my top-hat to the designers of this site.

Patrick: So that seems like a good place to close it out. Who wants to go next? (Laughter) no, that was good, that was a good conversation, don’t beat each other up, I’ll do that for you.

Louis: Alright, cool, what are we doing next? Patrick, you want to take one?

Patrick: So I wanted to talk about the music video for Just A Friend, by Jasmine V, and this isn’t my spotlight (laughter), this is a website for a music video, it’s justafriend.ie, and it’s sponsored by Internet Explorer and Microsoft so just to get that out of the way, I do own stock in Microsoft and whatever, so, it’s not necessarily about that, it’s not even about the music video, if you like the music, or whatever, but what struck me about this was that as I watched it it’s an interactive music video, it uses HTML5, specifically Canvass and HTML5, and also Facebook Connect, so you have the opportunity in the video to do different things with the mouse or with your keyboard, and you see content from your Facebook page integrated into the video.

But beyond that what really struck me about this and why I wanted to talk about today was that there’s a link on it in the bottom right to Behind the Tech, and if you go to this page you’ll see that basically they talk about in detail how it was put together, they include a behind the scenes video of the development of the HTML5 interactive music video, they talk about different code snippets, there’s code from Internet Explorer posted on GitHub that’s in use to create this, you can download the asset manager, and it’s kind of a funny thing because I’ve never seen this in a music video for a recording artist on a major label where essentially the developers, the web developers who put this together, are the stars in a way of this music video because they created this interactive environment and used these cutting edge technologies, web technologies, to put together this video. And not only that, but they’re putting it front and center on this website talking about how they did it and showing examples of the code they used.

Louis: Yeah, it’s really nice stuff. I think it’s so cool to see the IE team especially pushing forward into IE10 and taking on board so much of this new cool stuff from HTML5 and CSS3. They came late to the party but, you know, they brought a lot of booze, so.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean I’ve never seen this sort of thing, like I said, before, I mean I’ve seen uses of Canvass and whatnot, but just this, and obviously I’m not really a programmer or web developer, but it’s you guys that know how to do that, you’re the stars now, I mean it’s that tipping point where it is such a big part of what we do in the entertainment industry, some labels, some companies are embracing that, and this is probably a good example of that. But to me it was funny to see right there, you know, here’s the guys at the agency who made this, that’s the behind the scenes video, it’s not the singer, it’s not Jasmine V., it’s these guys at the agency who talk about how they made this video.

So did any of you guys have an opportunity to take a look at the code on this page or anything like that; does any of it pique your interest?

Louis: I’m looking at it now, it’s actually some stuff that I have worked with a little bit before for the HTML5 book for SitePoint actually, we did something kind of similar where you can — because with HTML5 video you can actually access the video via the API and take a snapshot of it and then use that and manipulate the frame in Canvass, and so apply some live effects on top of the video in Canvass.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: And I guess that’s what they’re doing here except they’re putting in stuff from your Facebook, is that what’s happening here?

Patrick: Basically, yeah. Part of it is the Facebook content like your pictures, your photo on her phone, and then the other element is sort of — it’s almost like you know the old choose your storyline books, you know, you take a, b or c and you go to a different page of the book and you get that story, I mean that’s kind of in a way how it works, you can push this boyfriend into the pool and — I don’t know how relevant this storyline’s gonna be to all of us, but the technology is the point. So you can use your mouse to follow this movement, and then there’s like different reactions, there’s different things that can happen within the video, so it’s sort of a dual — kind of two-part approach with the content and then with the interactive elements. And in addition they used, I’m not familiar with this but I guess Tropo API, and then you can enter your phone number at the end, enter your phone, and you’ll get a call from her and receive one of six random messages as well, so they tied in that API too.

Louis: Yeah, I think this stuff is really cool and what we’re going to see increasingly, I think, with HTML5 becoming the medium for video and audio on the Web is how much more closely you can integrate that video and audio with the rest of the website, and because you can access it directly from your JavaScript and you can put stuff into a Canvass and hit out API’s and bring that stuff into the video, the video can become a lot more tightly integrated into the website content then just being this embedded Flash thing that plays and is separate from the rest of the website.

Patrick: Yeah, definitely.

Louis: So this is maybe one of those first exploratory ventures in that direction, but it’s going to be really cool to see how that develops as more developers come on board with the HTML bandwagon.

Patrick: So justafriend.ie is not Biz Markie’s new website (laughs), it’s a music video by Jasmine V.

Louis: When I saw you sent me the link that is what I thought it was.

Patrick: Got what I ne-ed (singing).

Louis: No, don’t do that! Now we’re going to get a DMCA takedown for the show.

Patrick: No, not for that. I co-host the Copyright 2.0 show (laughter), they know who I am. I’m just kidding.

Louis: And do you sing Biz Markie in your show?

Patrick: I don’t sing Biz Markie normally on any show, you’ve just witnessed something rare, and I didn’t drink at all, I don’t drink.

Louis: Speaking of not drinking, and not drinking at all, beautiful thing for the setup there, Patrick, I appreciate it. So something that I saw floating around the Web a lot these past few weeks was this blog post written by, and I’m going to get the name wrong because I’m not sure if the URL is actually his name, but his URL is Ryan Funduk, ryanfunduk.com.

Patrick: You are correct.

Louis: Although that — it looks like from his Twitter that’s actually his name, so Ryan Funduk has written this extensive blog post about what he calls the culture of exclusion in the web development community, specifically conferences, and specifically related to alcohol. So at a lot of web development conferences you know you spend the day seeing talks by experts in various fields, and then sort of immediately after that everyone goes out to the pub, or, you know, even into the conference rooms, and starts drinking and sort of partying it up and getting to know people at the conference. And his point is that he doesn’t drink and that he feels excluded by this, he doesn’t want to be hanging around in loud environments with people who are being incoherent, what he wants to do is actually talk about technology with likeminded people, and he feels that this culture of booze gets in the way of that.

I was interested by this for a bunch of reasons, one is because it’s drawn a number of responses from all over the Web, and a lot of people have kind of disagreed with what he said, and I feel kind of like even if I wasn’t drinking at a conference I wouldn’t feel excluded, and I feel it’s a great way especially for nerds who are kind of introverts by definition to be able to socialize a little bit more easily and get to know people, which is what I like about conferences maybe even more than the talks.

But I wanted to get, Patrick, your opinion on this because you’re one of the few people I know who doesn’t drink.

Patrick: (Laughs) you exclusionary –

Louis: I know, I know. So, yeah, I just wanted to know from like a quick read-through, I know I just sent it to you this morning, of this; like what are your impressions, how do you feel about this? You go to a lot of conferences.

Patrick: Right, and this morning being now, because it’s the morning in Australia, Louis just got this on Skype. You know I was really interested, I haven’t had a chance to really read it at all that much, I’ve scanned maybe a very small portion of it, but it’s an interesting topic for me. Like you said, I don’t drink really, I mean it’s not — I just didn’t get into it, like I have a toast if there is that sort of thing going on, but I don’t go out, I don’t drink, I’ve turned away — I’ve turned away thousands of dollars in free alcohol, I estimate, over the years (laughter), at all of the conferences I’ve spoken at, because I do speak at a bunch of conferences. And it’s an interesting thing, I don’t know that I’ve felt excluded, I can’t really say I felt excluded, I’ve gone places, I’ve stayed out, you know, I try not to stay out too late, but I stay out as late as I want, I hang out with the people I want to hang out with, I can’t recall feeling too excluded, I mean there is that sort of culture there I would say at many conferences, many tech conferences, where there is this level of drinking and all the parties for the most part have some sort of element, and that’s a part of how they value the party is if they can drink.

You know, again, I don’t really feel excluded, I think to me there’s always — part of the danger with this, and this is kind of a side topic I guess, but, I don’t understand some people who things that are let’s say not very good and then, you know, there’s obviously people taking photos and whatnot, so that’s kind of an undercurrent to this topic also is some people at conferences do go too far, but that occurs with drinking in general. So just to stick to the conference thing I would say I don’t really feel excluded. I know my friend Wayne Sutton, he doesn’t drink also, so we have like a secret club at conferences, when we are at the same one, of people who don’t drink, so we have a club of two (laughter). I randomly meet someone else who doesn’t drink, but, yeah, I’ve never felt excluded and I think it’s unfortunate if he feels that way because I’m sure that some people do, um, I don’t know, I would say that some people do make others feel that way whether on purpose or not on purpose. So it’s fair to feel as he feels, but it’s a big world.

Stephan: You know, I think it all comes down to personal choice, so if Patrick really wanted to have a drink he could have a drink, if he doesn’t want to have a drink he doesn’t have to have one. If Patrick wants to go to bed at 9:00pm at night and leave the party he can.

Patrick: Wait, wait, you’re saying too much! (Laughter), you’re going too far, I’ll stop you right there. No, sorry, go ahead.

Stephan: But my point really is this, is that there are some people who don’t want to partake in those parties, and that’s fine, I don’t think that conferences are going out of their way to not include people, and I think the premise — he mentions in his post he’s talking about getting sloshed.

Patrick: Right.

Stephan: So there’s a difference between having a drink and people getting just hammered, right, and so I think that’s the key is that do you think that at conferences you see a lot more of the heavy binge drinking, or do you just see people having a drink?

Louis: So the other thing that’s interesting about is he’s kind of talking about it in a broader context of the sort of startup tech culture, programmers, he’s talking about GitHub have their regular hack nights that include beer, and, you know, coming from here at the SitePoint Group of company, you know I’ll accept we do have a pretty alcohol-focused culture whereby we go out for drinks every month, and then even on a regular Friday we’ll usually have some beers in the office, and that’s just part of the culture here. But at the same time, you know, Kevin Yank who was here for probably just about as long as anyone at SitePoint –

Patrick: Who?

Louis: (Laughs) — who worked at SitePoint for over 10 years I think, and he didn’t drink, and looking at him I never felt like he felt that he didn’t fit in or anything, you know, if we were going out to the pub he’d come out and come along and have a soda or whatever. So, I don’t know, you know, I kind of took it awkwardly, it felt weird to me because I’ve seen examples of people who are in this culture and who don’t drink, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem for them. And likewise I’ll have times when for whatever reason I don’t feel like having a drink, and I don’t, and I still come along or I go home or whatever, and like Stephan said, it feels like this strong a reaction what bugs me about it is he makes it sound like it’s discriminatory, sort of like — and he opens up his whole post, in fact, the first paragraph says, “Lately there’s been a lot of great articles being written and discussion happening around sexism in the tech industry,” and he says that’s what reminded him of this post that he’s been thinking about writing for some time; those are totally different things I feel like, you know.

Patrick: Soberism?

Louis: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Patrick: And you know part of this post, too, is about health and whatnot, and you mentioned GitHub so I did a word search for GitHub, and it says, “As much as I love GitHub and think I’d love to do the kind of work they do, I can’t imagine actually going into that office everyday confronted with people drinking out of kegs; GitHub people this is not healthy, physically or mentally.” And, you know, to each their own on some level; I would not say that sort of thing personally, I don’t really like to tell other people necessarily what to do with their bodies, and so, I don’t know, I think there’s a certain perspective here that he’s expressing, and it’s sort of — it’s not just there’s drinking that goes on at the conferences, but it’s that drinking is unhealthy and so we shouldn’t be promoting it at conferences.

And, again, I haven’t read his whole post, so if I’m misrepresenting that in any way I apologize, but, so that’s kind of a side issue, and it’s a matter of choice, and I think if you are hanging out with people who make you feel like you are being excluded, you are hanging out with jerks, and I think you should pick more people to hang out with, because I hang out with a lot of different people at conferences, friends of mine obviously, and then people I just met, and in general I can’t say that I’ve really felt excluded by anyone, and if I did then I’d note in my mind ‘that person’s a jerk’, and I would not spend time with them, and I think that’s the choice we have to make as individuals.

Louis: Yeah, here, here, I’ll drink to that.

Patrick: Not with me you won’t (laughter).

Louis: I’ll drop in a quick link; one of the better responses to this post that I’ve read comes from Michael Rogers at michaelrogers.com, so I’ll drop a link in the show notes, but again, sort of a point of view of someone who organizes conferences and someone who feels like having that alcohol available to help especially, like I said earlier, people who are not necessarily the most sociable people who are programmers, to be able to form bonds and communicate with people really easily, especially in a short span of time where you don’t have a lot of time to get to know people, can be a real benefit. And you know I feel like I’ve made friends at conferences, and they’re people I only spoke with for a few hours on one night, but thanks to being able to be a little bit socially lubricated by alcohol I consider them good friends, and whenever I talk to them on Twitter it’s like, yeah, still have a good sense of connection and community there that I don’t feel like I would’ve had had I just been sort of awkwardly standing around in the corner. And maybe that’s me, maybe I need alcohol as a crutch because I’m bad at communicating, but that’s, you know, I think a lot of people in our community fall into that bucket, so that’s — anyway, so this is an interesting retort from Michael Rogers, something to check out before we get too deep into the psychotherapy aspects of the podcast.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah, it’s almost 10:00AM over there, how many have you had so far Louis?

Louis: Um, I’ve had one espresso, which is clearly not enough.

Patrick: No, you made me think of another point, I was just at SXSW and I went to a party, it was for Gokit, I think that’s gokit.me, and I was there because like I said my friend Wayne is on the advisory board for that and helped co-found it, and they didn’t have alcohol as part of the drinks tickets. And going in I thought, huh, that’s interesting, I wonder what people will think of that; if you can’t get one alcoholic beverage, it’s just for juice, soda and water. And they did it and, you know, people were there; people were there, people seemed happy, it was I would say a pretty busy party, pretty good event, and I think it was like 5:00 o’clock, so in the early evening, and it went fine, and there was nothing that transpired as far as I saw that was in any way negative, it went off without a hitch, and they saved money not paying for alcohol. So I think it kind of — I don’t know what that point really says except maybe to say that it kind of goes both ways, you know, alcohol is — it’s not as needed as you might think, but, you know, how much it hurts is really up for debate, and I think our experience here kind of says that, at least with us it hasn’t hurt our interaction with people, so, yes.

Louis: Yeah, I think that’s a valid last point, and I think it’s fair to say maybe there’s more room in the space of conferences to have a better range of alternatives understanding that not everyone is after that.

Patrick: There’s no one way.

Louis: And possibly it doesn’t have to be every conference doing the no alcohol thing, but if some of them do and focus on other things as part of their parties or part of their activities outside of the speaker tickets, then maybe that will appeal to certain demographics that can feel more included in those conferences, so maybe there’s room for a little bit more diversity there.

Alright, who’s left for a story here, I think it’s Stephan.

Stephan: Yeah, I can talk about mine if you want.

Louis: Let’s do it.

Stephan: Am I the last up?

Patrick: Yep.

Stephan: So we’ll close up the day with a story about Wikipedia dumping Google Maps, and they have now decided to go with Open Street Map. And I’m guessing the reason for this, and they’ve kind of said without saying it, is that the Google API is costing too much money, and so they wanted to go with an open source, Mapping Solution. So they have dropped it, and this is only for the Wikipedia for Maps I guess, I couldn’t understand it, I don’t actually use this so I don’t know, maybe you guys know; they have a mapping solution on the phone applications so when you, I guess, look something up on there on your phone in the Wikipedia application, you look locally, it can use this map data. I haven’t used it so I don’t know, but I think it’s interesting that more and more — because Foursquare ditched Google for Open Street Maps as well, so I’m wondering how many more people are going to start jumping on the Open Street Maps bandwagon.

Patrick: Yeah, looking at the post here it is, like you said, it’s mobile and that’s why I haven’t experienced it myself, there’s an app for IOS and an app for Android where they do have a mapping solution in previous versions, as you alluded to used Google Maps, but now they’re using Open Street Maps, and they say it’s thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library, and they’re using MapQuest MapTiles as well for the application but plan on switching to their own as well in the future, so a lot of different details there that our developer audience would appreciate. But, yeah, I don’t know; this is interesting, is there an estimate of like how much it was costing them? On the website it says Google was charging four to ten dollars per additional one thousand loads to any site pulling over 25,000 daily loads, there’s really no information on the post about how much they were loading besides to say they have 2.25 million installations of the app. So I don’t know what that would be, but I’d be curious to know how much it was costing them.

Louis: Yeah, we did talk about this on the show when Google Maps first introduced charging for the API.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: I think it’s good in general to have competition, and obviously for Google to provide this service for free and have it used so extensively it must’ve been costing them a fortune to provide Google Maps for free, and maybe the advertising wasn’t compensating for that so they figured, look, we’ll charge for API and if some people want to use it that’s fine, and if they don’t, well, maybe there will be alternative solutions, and if it has prompted alternative solutions to get better then great, and I’ve been wanting to look into Open Street Maps for a while now because it’s looking really good, and especially the custom tiles; I’ve seen some examples of people putting together tile sets that just look really gorgeous, so I think it’ll be really interesting to see what people do with that.

Patrick: Yeah, give me one second and I’ll know what episode of the podcast that was we mentioned it on.

Kevin: So, I have a question, is it openstreetmap.org, because we’ve been saying Open Street Maps.

Stephan: Open Street Map is the name.

Patrick: Yeah, you’re right; it is Open Street Map, good point.

Stephan: I always call it Open Street Maps, sorry.

Patrick: No, plural.

Stephan: Okay. It’s interesting because Apple, I had no idea about this either, but they actually switched over to using Open Street Map data for iPhoto on the iPad and iPhone. And I’m guessing this is because of the way it pulls data, right, when you load a map tile I think it has to make a call every time it’s loading a new tile, so you think about you scroll out, you scroll over, you zoom in, it’s having to reload tiles three or four times, so I can see it being potentially really expensive.

Patrick: Yeah, and if you want to see our discussion, or listen to our discussion about the Google Maps API charges when they first came out, you can listen to episode number 138 back in November.

Louis: Obviously in terms of features there’s so much stuff in Google Maps, you know those added features, whether it’s street view or traffic information, you know there’s all those extras piled onto it. But in terms of just straight up maps the Open Street Map one actually looks really nice, and maybe the colors give you a better idea of what the different streets actually are, and I’m looking actually, this is pretty cool, I’m looking at a park and it has mapped out all the paths in the park.

Kevin: Interesting.

Louis: Which I don’t think is in Google Maps, so it looks like it might even be more detailed in terms of an actual map, even though obviously some of the features aren’t there.

Patrick: I’ve actually never been on this, I’m just lacking in my knowledge of the Web. It’s actually got my town on it, that’s good (laughter), Open Street Map you’re okay.

Louis: Wow, lots of detail here. Anyway, before I spend the entire rest of the show just scrolling around a map of Melbourne why don’t we cut to spotlights.

Patrick: I’ll go first. My spotlight is the return — it’s a new thing really, but it’s kind of the return of the show Ze Frank, it’s a show with Ze Frank.

Louis: Ah, that was mine.

Patrick: And that’s why I had to go first because I had a feeling Louis was gonna snipe me (laughter), and I had a feeling that Louis was gonna come in and take that one, um, so yes, it’s mine!

Louis: Well, I had two and then I gave one to Stephan because I wanted to use that one (laughter).

Stephan: Now you’re screwed (laughter).

Patrick: So you are you are spotlight poor (laughs), well we can share this one because I know you’re going to have some complaints in a second. Anyway, the show with Ze Frank premiered today, it’s ashow.zefrank.com, the first episode is Invocation, and I enjoyed it, great stuff, we talked about his Kickstarter campaign in episode 152, and it close with $146,752 from 3,900 backers, so very successful, he only asked for $50,000 initially, so almost three times of the initial request, and yeah, I mean the show, a show is back and seemingly in full force save for some technical difficulties.

Louis: Obviously I’m super excited, the show was so good, and I actually — I came to it a bit late, like I was watching them on the day they came out for maybe the second half of the original show, but the first I wasn’t tuned into it. But, yeah, I mean it was the best thing the Internet ever did, and now we get more of it, so, (laughter) obviously I’m thrilled.

Patrick: There’s “the show” and then there’s SitePoint, and those are kind of the two main things.

Louis: Yeah, I was having a problem logging in to the show with Ze Frank this morning; did anyone else experience the difficulties that I was describing?

Patrick: Yeah, you know, I did; and we should say the show itself comes up fine, you can watch the video, it’s on YouTube too, the channel is zefrankone, but there’s also login system I guess to comment and whatnot, and I took a look at it and it took me a second to realize that it’s using — it appears to be using the login from star.me which is a — I’m not totally familiar with them but I think it’s a startup that he’s responsible for or in some way working with, or something, and so that’s a login system and so I noticed my email address was taken, that’s how I figured that out. And so they’re using that account system and my password wouldn’t work, I have to do a recovery, and I know you ran into like an SSL cert issue.

Louis: Yeah, I was getting an invalid SSL certificate on that login, although now I’m trying it, I was trying it on my phone originally, now I’m trying it on the desktop and it appears to be working I guess.

Patrick: Yeah, I didn’t get an SSL cert issue on the desktop, but I didn’t look on mobile obviously, me looking on mobile’s a problem.

Louis: Well, now that I see that it works on the desktop, because I did this sort of on my way to work this morning because I was running late for the show. It’s great, it’s a great first episode, and obviously super excited to have it back on the air, like I said, it’s more of the best thing, can’t go wrong.

Patrick: Yeah, it really is, and there’s a quote in the first episode that I thought was really good and relevant where he said, “Let me take the idea that has gotten me this far and put it to bed. What I’m about to do will not be that, but it will be something.” Good stuff. Who’s next? Spotlight stealer Stephan you’re up!

Stephan: Sweet. My spotlight was actually Louis’ originally but he let me have it, and it’s a really interesting look at the architecture behind Instagram, which is fitting today, and it talks about how they’re doing things technically behind the scenes to control traffic and make sure that they don’t go down due to traffic issues. And there’s some interesting stuff in here, they talk about some of their data replication and how they use PostgreSQL and Amazon to replicate their data when they need it. So I think it’s just an interesting read; what did you think about it Louis, I know that you picked it out so I wanted to know.

Louis: Yeah, likewise, I mean I really like these kinds of posts that are just sort of breakdowns of how a site coped or didn’t cope with a massive influx of traffic. So in this case, you know, obviously brought on by the launch of Instagram for Android, suddenly the platform within the space of 24 hours has to deal with a million new users, which is huge, right; I mean I’m pretty sure that none of the sites I’ve ever built would be able to handle that, and none of the infrastructure I’ve ever worked with, so it’s cool to see how these other services deal with this. And even though obviously they’re using Jango for Python is their framework, and they’re using Postgres as their database, so those are technologies that I don’t personally work with. I think the concepts behind it, being able to bring up read sites for your database really quickly using this streaming replication, and paying attention to stats using statsd which is a really nice library put out by the guys at Etsy to see what’s happening in realtime so you can react to it, so a lot of these concepts I think are applicable even if you’re using different infrastructure like if you’re using MySQL and Rails like we are, or if you’re using whatever else the concepts still hold.

Stephan: It’s a really cool article, thank you for sharing it with me.

Louis: My pleasure. Kevin you’re up.

Kevin: Alright, so I have an interesting site, it’s not a brand new site it’s a relaunched site, and this is snipt.net, and you can go over to this site and look at it and you’ll find a galore, or a large number of snippets of code, and in here you can sign up and add your own snippets to the public repository. Again, this site has just relaunched with a design, so it looks really, really nice, and I tell you the one feature I’d like to see on this is bookmarking, so you can’t currently, or from what I’ve browsed around the site haven’t figured out how to bookmark any kind of snippet, so I can’t go in favorite things. So hopefully that’ll come in the future, they’re also going to provide an API which I think will be rather interesting to get a hold of perhaps, you could put your snippets on here and pull those snippets into a site that you’re working on. So, yeah, it’s interesting and worth a look, and check it out, they’ve got many, many, many snippets on here.

Louis: Very nice indeed.

Patrick: My favorite snippet is long cat, halfway down the page, long cat (laughs), it’ll be so worth it (laughter), you won’t regret it.

Louis: Ah, yeah, right.

Kevin: You have to click expand, you have to click expand.

Louis: Click expand because obviously it’s a long cat, yeah (laughter).

Patrick: It breaks the page it’s so long I think; it breaks the design almost towards the bottom, and his feet kind of protrude through multiple snippets. There’s a vulnerability to here, long cat exploited it.

Louis: Mine doesn’t break the CSS, so in Firefox it works fine.

Patrick: I’m in Firefox.

Kevin: Get off IE; get off IE Patrick.

Patrick: No, I’m in Firefox 11.0.

Louis: Alright, well that’s — I guess that’s a wrap. I’m on 11.0 as well, so I don’t know, good, obviously go to snipt.net and search for long cat because it’s funny.

Alright, guys, let’s wrap it up for this week.

Kevin: You can find me, Kevin Dees, @kevindees on Twitter and at kevindees.cc on the Web.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network, I blog at managingcommunites.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I am Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and I blog at badice.com.

Louis: And you can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, you can go to sitepoint.com/podcast to find the show’s page and get all of our past episodes, subscribe in iTunes, leave a comment, all that stuff. You can email us at podcast@sitepoint.com, we’d love to hear from you, especially I’d like to hear what anyone out there thinks about the whole alcohol culture in the tech world debate, where do you stand on that, really interested to hear what other people think and what is it like in your workplace, at conferences that you’ve attended, if there’s anyone out there who doesn’t drink and who has felt excluded by the culture in the tech world, love to hear from you. And you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #157: Client Centric Web Design with Paul Boag

Louis Simoneau — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:17:38 +0000

Episode 157 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) interviews Paul Boag (@boagworld) of BoagWorld and Headscape about his new eBook Client Centric Web Design.

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SitePoint Podcast #157: Client Centric Web Design with Paul Boag (MP3, 41:15, 39.6MB)

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Episode Summary

Kevin and Paul talk in some detail on how we need to make sure our communications with our clients put them at the center of the design process, have them feeling a sense of ownership of the project, and use all their knowledge and skills as well as ours.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/157.

Interview Transcript

Kevin: Hi, and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Kevin Dees and today I’m joined by Mr. Paul Boag; welcome, Paul.

Paul: Hi, it’s really good to be on the show, thank you for having me yet again, it’s good to be back.

Kevin: Yes, yes. So I don’t believe I interviewed you before on the SitePoint podcast, but we have spoken a few times now so it’s good to hear your voice.

Paul: Yes, and of course we met at South by, not this time round but previously, so it’s good to catch up again.

Kevin: Yes, it is. So, today we have you on to talk about something I feel deeply about and I know you feel deeply about, which is the focus of websites and designs. And not only that, but also where agency and application development on the Web kind of come into play and some of the parts of that. And this is going to be an interview about your book, Paul, which is Client Centric Web Design, correct?

Paul: Yep, that’s right.

Kevin: Okay. So, before we get into that I feel that I should introduce you, a proper introduction anyways.

Paul: Okay.

Kevin: So, Paul, if you don’t know who Paul is, Paul does the Boagworld website, he also does the Boagworld Podcast which has been going on for some time now, many years; how many years now?

Paul: I’ve no idea how many years.

Kevin: (Laughs)

Paul: All I know is that there weren’t any others around when I started.

Kevin: Right. So, Paul is an established speaker, you’ve written a few books now, self-authored a few, and you also have The Website Owner’s Manual, correct?

Paul: Yep, that’s right.

Kevin: And so again today we want to talk about Client Centric Web Design which is your new eBook, self-published book, correct?

Paul: Yeah, it’s to go with the third season of the podcast I do, so each season I’m trying now to do an associated eBook with it.

Kevin: Well, I think this book is an interesting perspective on the way websites are developed because usually, if you haven’t noticed from the title already, it’s Client Centric Web Design, not user centric web design, which is really what most web designers, or designers in any field, think about is design based around the user.

Paul: Hmm-mm.

Kevin: And so you have this different take on where agencies and freelancers and those who work on the Web should put their focus, which is on the client. And so I’m hoping maybe you can explain just a little bit about Client Centric Web Design, and then I’ll have more questions around the way.

Paul: Sure.

Kevin: But what is Client Centric Web Design.

Paul: It’s interesting, isn’t it? We’ve been going on about we must user centric, we must be user centric, which of course is true, we know this to be true; I’ve got three principles of client centric design, because first of all you have to make up a fancy title for something if you want it to be adopted in the web design community, there’s Ajax and Responsive Design and Progressive Enhancement, all these things, so I came up with this title, Client Centric Web Design, and it’s got these three principles. And one of the principles is that — which is probably the most controversial one, the one that you’ve just touched on, is this idea that actually user centric design, this idea of putting the user first, is actually not as important as client centric design; sure it’s important, but it kind of sits as a subsidiary of client centric design. So let me explain what I mean.

You get this scenario where most of the time it is true to say that you want to make your site user centric because without your users being happy your users will leave, if they leave then you’re going to go out of business. But notice what you’re saying there which is that ultimately the reason that you’re user centric is so that the business succeeds. And sometimes I think we get so caught up in this idea of being user centric that we almost put the cart before the horse, we almost end up saying it’s more important to please the user than it is to meet the business needs, to meet the client’s needs. Now, most of the time the two are compatible, but just occasionally they get out of line, and it’s important that you know which is more important, so let me give you an example. There was a law firm that we did some work for, and this law firm all the users that went to the website cared only about one thing, and that one thing was going and seeing the biography of the particular attorney that they were either, you now, was either representing them or they were thinking of hiring or they were opposing counsel of, or whatever else, so the bios were everything. And that’s because in the world of attorneys it’s the person that matters, the superstar, the expert in this particular field of law.

But the problem is from a business point of view is that these attorneys come and go, they move between company, so it’s really important form a business perspective that users aren’t just impressed by the individual superstar attorney, but they’re also impressed by the organization, so maybe if that attorney moves on they still stick with the company. So even though the user’s requirement was show me the attorney information, show me the attorney information, from a business perspective it was more important to give that broader view. So that’s why I say that the business needs have to supersede the user’s needs in those rare occasions when the clash. Now in that situation obviously we can still send users through to the attorney information, but we want to expose them to other stuff too. So it’s kind of getting that balance I think is so important.

Kevin: Right. You know just the other day I saw something on Amazon, and they had completely replaced their standard homepage, there were no recommended selling points or anything like that, it was just this body of text, it was an announcement that the company was making to me as their customer. It was just right after I had finished reading this, and you know I had to sit down and think, I was like, you know, it’s true, right, like they have an objective, it’s not just to sell things to me and to get me the things that I need, but also to make sure that I’m aware of what their business is and what they’re doing.

Paul: Yeah.

Kevin: And so –

Paul: Absolutely.

Kevin: Yeah, I think it’s a really good point that you’re making here.

Paul: Yeah. So that’s one point of Client Centric Design. The other one is this principle that we should collaborate with our clients, right, I think so many of us have had bad experiences with clients over the years that we’ve got into this situation of kind of excluding them from the process, you know, so we have this attitude of we’re going to limit the number of iterations that we’re going to do on the design, and we’re going to go away and produce this thing of beauty and then we’re going to present it to them and they’re going to love it. But actually client want to work with you on the website, not just for you to produce something for them, and I believe a fundamental part of good client centric web design is this idea you work collaboratively with a client, and that a whole plethora of benefits comes out of doing that.

And the one other kind of underpinning principle of client centric design is the fact that the client has real value to bring to the table, you know, I think oftentimes we think we produce great websites despite the client, you know, that the client just kind of gets in the way. But I really believe it’s impossible to produce a successful website without the client’s involvement. And the reason I think that is because if the client doesn’t feel a sense of ownership over that website, if they don’t feel passionate about it, if they don’t feel it’s their website, then the thing is that they’re going to — they’re not going to invest in the website over the long term, and we walk away and it’s great for five minutes, the website we’ve produced, and then it becomes out of date and obsolete, you know, you need the client to be invested in the website.

Also, we have this — sometimes we get this arrogant attitude that we know best, but we don’t know the business as well as they do, and the chances are we don’t know their users as well as they do. So I think it’s really important to kind of bring them into the process, so yeah, you can tell I’m quite fired up on this subject (laughs).

Kevin: Yes, yes. I tried to interrupt you there for a second –

Paul: (Laughs)

Kevin: — but I want to jump back to that.

Paul: Yeah, you’ll fail.

Kevin: (Laughs) but basically you said that the client needs to be involved in the design process.

Paul: Yes.

Kevin: And help with the design. And you pointed out that that gives them the sense of ownership.

Paul: Yep.

Kevin: But doesn’t something like that increase the time scale and the scope of a project and can ultimately lead to overshot budgets where designers or agencies have to eat hours? Like how do you get around this?

Paul: Yeah. I can kind of understand why people come to that conclusion, however, that hasn’t really been my experience. Before we started to take this approach, right, an average project would run something like this, you would get a brief from a client, it was often more of a wish list than it was a brief, and it was all a little bit vague and wooly around the edges, but you do your best to kind of understand what it was the client would want. Then you went away and you produced this design based on what the client has told you that they want, then you come back and you present that, well, immediately you’ve got one problem there, and the problem is that there is a good likelihood you’re going to have misinterpreted what they want. Now that’s not because you’re a failure or because you don’t know, it’s because the client hasn’t got a clear idea in their mind of what it is that they want to achieve, not in every case but in a lot of cases, and until they see something they’ve got nothing to react to, you know, this is all new territory, it’s hard for them to picture it in the way that you do. So immediately when you come back with the design they’re going to start saying, yeah, but I want this and I want that, and you’re going to go well I didn’t — you didn’t specify that. So actually a lot of time is wasted at that point of that potential misunderstanding.

Then there’s another aspect which I think wastes a lot of time in the traditional way of working, which is that because the client wants a sense of ownership and wants to feel like they’re involved in the decision making, when you come back with a design at that stage the design is your design, not theirs, they’ve got no sense of ownership. So what they start doing is they start trying to stamp their mark on the design.

Kevin: Right.

Paul: And that’s where you start getting into iteration cycles which go on and on and on because the client doesn’t really know particularly what they want, they’re not experts in design, and you’re not really guiding the process anymore, they’ve just started coming back with changes. So I think we’re taking a more collaborative approach where you’re showing the design to them every step of the way, you’re showing them sketches, you’re showing them mood boards, you’re showing them wireframes, you’re both educating them but you’re also taking them on that journey with you where they feel that sense of ownership. And a client is much less likely to reject a design that they feel a sense of ownership on, so in most of our projects these days we go from initial inspiration, you know, kind of collection, to mood boards, to wireframes, to final design, maybe some minor tweaking to that final design, and then we’re done. And actually that process is as quick if not quicker than the traditional kind of ta-da! moment, here’s a wonderful design, oh no, we’ve got it completely wrong.

Also, because you kind of go through that process there’s no need to do multiple designs either, because that wastes a load of time as well.

Kevin: Yes, it does.

Paul: Because you only do multiple designs to provide a mechanism by which the client can feel a sense of they get to pick a design, and so all of that goes away as well which saves a lot of time.

Kevin: Yeah. I want to jump back to the design stuff later on and talk about the mood boards, because I think that has a lot to do with the multiple designs, it kind of modulizes that in a way. But I think what you’re saying here, and you’re making a good point, which is that the traditional way of doing it you end up doing these large iterations of multiple designs basically, and that ends up wasting the time that you make up for when you’re working with a client in tandem to create this design, so the agency doesn’t lose any time. However, but, I’m going to pushback on you again here –

Paul: Sure, fair enough. Go for it.

Kevin: So I think this is good, that requires more time with a client then, and so while the agency may be saving time, in fact, I totally believe what you’re saying in that it saves agency time, so you’ve bought yourself time but you’ve spent more of the client’s time.

Paul: Yeah.

Kevin: Do clients pushback against that or are they more opted to come in and help you out, because depending on the size of the client you have, if you’re freelance or if it’s a one-man show, or if you’re an agency you may have multiple people involved in the process, and I know we can step into the stakeholder interviews and stuff a little bit later on, but the involvement from the client and the amount of time that that takes, what do you have to say to this?

Paul: Yeah, I mean they do — in the vast majority of cases I think that’s what — I think clients actually want to work this way, they want to be involved, the do want a sense of ownership. For those that don’t I think they need to anyway; sooner or later a client has to invest considerable time in their site, if they don’t the site’s going to die, you know, they’re going to have to write content from it and they’re going to have to keep that content up-to-date, they’re going to have to work on social media stuff, they’re all going to have to engage, a website is not a brochure, it’s not something that can be built and then you can then walk away from. And so the kind of consequence is that because sooner or later they’ve got to do that, I think the sooner you break them in to that mindset of having to invest in the website, and the website being as much theirs as it is yours, I think that’s only a good thing. I can’t say I’ve ever come across a situation where a client has pushed back and has said no I don’t want to be involved, I’m too busy; if they did I’m not quite sure how I would react really, I think I would push them hard to be involved and would say that they do need to make time for it.

Kevin: Right. I think that’s a good response. I do want to get some more of these other questions, so I’m going to abruptly change subjects here, which is we’ve covered the basics of the client centric side of things, but you also take about a partnership of experts in the book, and you say that the client is an expert and you are an expert, and figuring out how to display yourself as an expert is a little bit different than figuring out the expertise that the client has. Can you talk about the two different segments of experts that you talk about in the book, one being the client, one being the designer or the agency.

Paul: Yeah, I mean the first thing to realize is that a client has got expertise. I think we can be very arrogant as web designers, and we live in our little bubble of web stuff, so if somebody doesn’t get the Web therefore they’re thick and stupid. Well, no, sorry, it’s not like that, you know the client is going to have their expertise in their particular field, be that marketing or project management or whatever, and I think we can utilize that as web designers. Also as I’ve said before, they’ve got expertise in their business, and they’ve got expertise in their users, and we need to acknowledge that as well. So a big part of kind of client centric design is checking this negativity towards clients and recognizing that they have value, recognizing that they bring something to the table, and treating them like experts and grownups that we can interact with.

So it’s easy for us to change our attitude towards the client, well, it’s not necessarily easy but we can do that, what we can’t do is change — we can’t alter the way a client thinks, we can only alter our own behavior and our own attitude. So the thing is, is that not all clients do recognize our expertise, and there is a need for us to establish in the mind of the client that we are the experts and they should trust us. And in the book I go through lots of different approaches to this, you know, I talk about — one thing I talk about is the idea of being an expert by association. And what that is, is if I turn around and say you should listen to me, I’m an expert, you know your immediate reaction to that is who the hell does he think he is, you arrogant little so and so. So it’s quite, you know, it’s not just a matter of saying you’re an expert, but what you can do is you can point to someone like Jacob Neilson or Steve Krug or whoever else and say, hey, that guy’s an expert, this is why he’s an expert, and he says this on the topic. And so you can use other people’s expertise as a way of adding to your own credibility because it shows that you’re knowledgeable, it shows that experts are backing you up in your opinion, it shows that you’re well read, etcetera, etcetera. So expertise by association is one thing.

Another way you can show your expertise is through process and projects, having a very specific process that you take the client through reassures the client that you know what you’re doing, that you have done this before, that you have a system that works, whether that be — you know, whatever your — I mean my system is let’s start with some inspiration, let’s work on some mood boards, let’s do some wire framing, let’s do some stakeholder interviews, etcetera, this plethora of tools that are available to me that I can use. And those give the client confidence as well as helping get the result that we need to from the website, and that gives them confidence that you are the expert and you know what you’re talking about. So that’s another tool that you can use.

So there are lots of different ways of kind of establishing your own expertise, and I think that’s massively, you know, is a really important part of it, because the client’s got to believe in you and believe in your abilities.

Kevin: Right. I think you’re spot-on about the process and giving that to the client, because it gives them something tangible to kind of take a hold of. In the past experiences I’ve had I know that has been the key factor that’s helped me win work and that kind of thing, where it’s been, okay, you know your stuff, show me how it’s going to work for me, and I think the process that you’re talking about is that piece that they get to touch and feel and breathe-in and experience.

Paul: And then also of course there’s referring back to old projects, you know, if the client’s worried about a particular decision that you’ve made on the design you can say, well, I took a similar approach on this project and it worked very well, and da-da-da-da, so, again, you’re referring back to that body of work behind you.

Kevin: Right. Okay, so another abrupt segue.

Paul: That’ fine.

Kevin: I’m good at those. But I said that we’d come back to the design side of things.

Paul: Yeah.

Kevin: And I don’t want to leave this part out because I think it’s super important, mostly because I believe the listeners of the show are probably going to fall more into this category on a broader scale. And so the person that’s coming in and they’re saying, okay, I’m going to try this client centric web design thing, and you talked about this design process of mood boards and these kinds of things, and that kind of goes into the expertise side of things as well. What would you say to somebody about the dealing with design on that side of things? You talk about in the book that pride becomes before the fall and the danger of limiting iterations, that kind of stuff, so where does the design, the dealing with the design, fall into client centric web design?

Paul: Yeah. I mean design is always the hardest area, and it’s the most likely to I think cause conflict because, you know, design is such a subjective subject I think, even we see design in very different ways, and so I think having a process is a big part of that, you know, I think that provides a lot of reassurance, I think you need lots of communication, you need to talk the client through the fact that design is a very subjective process, and that it cause conflict and disagreement. And one of the things that I’m a great fan of, and something that Andy Clark said to me only earlier today is that if a client comes back with a comment on design, say that’s great, I can see where you’re coming from and I can see your opinion, but do you have actually any evidence to back that up or is it literally just your personal opinion. So it’s kind of highlighting to the client what’s personal opinion and what’s, you know, what’s actually tangible fact, if that makes sense.

Another big part of it is clearly defining whose role it is to do what, because many clients kind of lack experience of web projects, they might be a bit unclear about what’s required from them, and I think this often leads to them suggesting design solutions rather than identifying problems; you don’t want a client coming back to you and say “make it blue.” What you would prefer to hear from a client is “I’m worried about the color scheme because you’ve done the design pink and it’s aimed at kind of middle age men, and we don’t necessarily feel that that color scheme is right.” And if you understand what the problem is rather than just being given a solution, then you could go back and say, well, yes I know it’s pink but I don’t feel necessarily the answer is to make it blue, why don’t we put — I don’t know, what do middle age men like, pipes and slippers on it, you know. So it’s a matter of kind of educating the client that their job is to suggest problems and not necessarily to provide you with the solutions, and for you to come up with the solutions.

Also I think another big part of getting designer privilege is to educate the client, so it’s about how you present the design to the client, you know, you show them a little and often throughout the process, there’s no big surprises, and you can talk them through the mood boards and the wireframes and all the rest of it. And even when we present final designs, you know, we present our final design as a video so that they can see the design but they’re hearing all the background and all the thought process behind it as we talk over the design, and we talk through how the design has been informed by the mood boards and by the research that we did and by the wireframe so that they’re being educated through the process as well. So I think those are all things that really make a big difference, but you’re right, I mean the other one you mentioned was pride, and I think as web designers we are kind of rightly proud of what we do, because we are experienced at building user interfaces, and the client is not. But we often become kind of very protective and get very easily hurt when the client makes even the smallest suggestion about the website. But actually a non-designer is capable of making a good suggestion about a design, they’re not going to be as well informed about you, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t suggest something that’s good.

Kevin: Right.

Paul: You know, and I think it’s really important that we stand back a little bit from our design and don’t allow our egos to get bruised, and don’t allow our kind of relationship with the client to become confrontational. We need to rely on our thinking, you know, we don’t just produce websites to look great in our portfolio or to impress our peers or even to impress users, we need to recognize that our job satisfaction should become for producing design that the client loves and not just design that we personally love. So I think putting aside our pride is a big part of the process

Kevin: Yeah. When you talk about educating the client, and educating them on what good design practices are, patterns, all this stuff, I feel like there may go on a little bit of patronizing or belittling of the client and their ability to comprehend what you’re talking about. And so how do you prevent what you’re saying to them coming off in that way? Basically how do you go about communicating to a client so they could understand the goals that you’re setting in place not only from a user perspective but from their perspective now, right, because this is client centric web design we’re talking about.

Paul: Yeah. I mean I think that’s where the collaboration really comes in. If you’re working side-by-side producing sketches for wireframes, if you’re looking through different websites and discussing color palettes and typography and all these things with a client, then they’re kind of being educated without you directly educating them, if that makes sense, they’re kind of learning on the job. It’s not a matter of you need to say, well, you need to understand this about color theory, it’s more the fact that you’re kind of playing around with color palettes and you’re saying well I’m not really sure that works because those two colors clash, check out this thing about colors that go together and don’t, and it’s much more of a kind of friendly collaborative working on it together approach rather than I’m going to sit and educate you now.

In terms of the videos where you’re kind of — you’re presenting the design, the education that’s happening there it’s not really education, it’s more reminding the client what you’ve already done, you know, it’s lots of okay we’ve done this on the design because we did this in the mood boards, and you remember we agreed on that in the mood board and, yeah, that was the way we thought we should go where you can see how I’ve reflected that here. So it’s more kind of reminding the client there of the process that you’ve already been through.

And the other way I think of kind of educating them is questioning a lot, so instead of saying, you know, taking the kind of attitude of, oh, don’t be so silly, that’s a ridiculous idea and here’s ten reasons why, I think it’s better to say, you know, to go to the client, let’s say the client suggests something outrageously stupid, I don’t know, they want a flaming logo on their website.

Kevin: Right.

Paul: At first when you go back say why do you want this logo, explain it a little bit more, you know, let’s kind of bat around some ideas, so they then talk about some of their thinking behind it, and then just ask questions about it. Say things like, well, how are we going to deal with that if we have that, how are we going to deal with that distracting people from the content, right. So what you’re doing there is you’re getting them to think through what they’re doing and suggesting some potential issues that might need solving, so eventually they come to the conclusion that their idea wasn’t the best idea after all. So it’s kind of leading them to the solutions rather than just bombarding them with this is why you’re stupid.

Kevin: Right. Briefly could you touch on another side of this, what you talked about being the yes man.

Paul: (Laughs)

Kevin: And I’ve actually put this into practice and it does work. So explain a little bit about the yes man concept that you talk about.

Paul: Yeah. I mean that’s really what — I’ve kind of touched on it already really. The yes man concept is simple: you should never say no to your client, right, every time I ever say that they’re just, oh, God, you’ve got to be joking; you’ve got to say no to them, they suggest such stupid things. But it’s the principle that says yeah! — the client’s come up with an idea, the last thing you should do is crush them, right, you know, you should encourage them, so even if they come up with a stupid idea say, oh, you know, yeah — it’s hard to word it in a generic way, but that’s great, thanks for the idea, I really appreciate the idea, wonderful, but let’s talk through that idea; is that really going to work? What issues are there that might come up, what problems might arise? And, again, it’s this principle of getting the client to think through the issues, and getting to them where they’re saying no about their own ideas rather than you saying no. And that’s the key, yeah, that does take more of a conversation, but, as soon as you say no to a client there’s nowhere for that conversation to go, right. The only way it can end is the client backing down or it turning it into a fight, right.

Kevin: Right.

Paul: And most of the time once people express an opinion about something and it turns into a confrontation, even if we have been — let’s be honest with ourselves, even if we have been convinced that we are wrong we still dig in our heels, don’t we, because we stated a position and we want to remain consistent with that. So the last thing you want to do is create a confrontational environment, so a ‘no’ only ever ends in confrontation, so instead get the client to think it through and get them to come to that point where they reject the design themselves, or their suggestion themselves.

Kevin: Right. So I wish we had more time to talk about this, it’s such a good topic.

Paul: It’s always the way!

Kevin: (Laughs) but I want to jump into the application side of this.

Paul: Yes.

Kevin: What can someone do today to start using client centric web design, because you’ve sold me on it; I don’t know that you’ve titled it this until recently, but I’ve listened to your podcast for at least two or three years now, and it’s kind of become your song in that clients aren’t the enemy. So how can somebody go about implementing this Client Centric Web Design approach?

Paul: To be honest I think the biggest part of it is your own attitude. This is different from let’s say a new CSS technique or, you know, most of the stuff that people write about, most of the time when people write books it’s here’s a list of a, b, c, d that you have to do and you end up with this result. Client Centric Web Design is not like that, it’s about a state of mind — wow, that sounds so pretentious.

Kevin: (Laughs)

Paul: But it’s making a decision that you’re going to treat the client as the center of your job. It’s about, as I said earlier, deciding you’re going to build your job satisfaction on sending clients away happy rather than you thinking your job is just about building websites. Once you decide that you provide a service and that you should have a service mentality, that changes everything, it changes your whole approach to websites. And I think that is the main thing that people need to do is starting out in this process is really set aside — set aside their prejudices, almost, towards clients and make a decision that you’re going to work collaboratively alongside clients. Once you’ve done that I think in terms of practicality it’s about how you work alongside clients, I think it’s sitting down and looking at the process that you go through to create a website, and identifying as many points along that process as you can engage the client with, right.

So I’ve already talked about, you know, if we just look at my design process that I normally start — once I’ve got the brief and I understand what I’ve got to do, the first thing I start doing is looking around at other websites or bits of architecture or print design, or whatever else, just to get inspired, right. So instead of keeping that inspiration to myself I now show it to the client, right, and that starts off a conversation, and maybe the client finds some stuff that inspires them and they like and they contribute that into the mix. Then once I’ve got that I go into my mood board phase where I kind of collect together different parts of the inspiration and start thinking about typography and color and imagery and all of that kind of stuff. And that’s where I start to explore ideas, but I do that with the client, I show them mood boards, I iterate mood boards, because producing a mood board only takes a few minutes rather than a few hours like a design comp does. So you can show and through lots of them and try different approaches, and show them to the client and say here’s a really conservative design and here’s a really kind of over-the-top hippie design, and just explore different areas and include the client there.

And then of course there’s the wire framing; instead of you starting to sketch out and think about the wire framing, sit down with the client and get them drawing some boxes, and get them saying well okay what do you think the homepage should look like? you know, ask them what element should be on it, how they would prioritize those elements and how they would organize them, you know, let’s try wire framing this website as if it was mainly focused around news and events, alright now let’s try wire framing it as if it’s focused around the ecommerce elements, or let’s try wire framing it if we were just aiming at this audience or that audience, and just sketch, sketches that take seconds to do and then discuss those and include them. And, again, with the design and as much as possible include the client in the process is the key really.

Kevin: Right. Now what about the situation, which I think is fairly common in the agency world, which is where the agency wants to keep the designer in a cubicle and have them just pump out these designs. How can someone in that position where they don’t really get to get in front of the client and talk to them, or that’s mostly done by project managers and sales people, how can you get this approach into that place where you’re working?

Paul: Hmm, that is difficult.

Kevin: That’s a tough nut to crack.

Paul: Because you’re trying to instigate a cultural change there. You know I could give the flippant answer and tell them buy a copy of the book and then give it to their boss.

Kevin: (Laughs) right answer.

Paul: I always present stuff, right; whenever I’m trying to convince anybody of anything what you’ve got to do is talk about it in terms of the benefit that it provides them rather than you, right. A project manager, if you turn around to a project manager and say I want to be speaking to the client, that’s immediately going to ring bells in the project manager’s mind of I’m going to lose control of the project, I’m not going to know what’s going on, da-da-da-da, and you saying but it’ll really help the design process ain’t gonna mean anything to the project manager, you know; that it helps you doesn’t matter, it’s got to help them. So in that situation you’ve got to package the message as a benefit to them, that it’ll mean that they will have to do less kind of middle man between the two of you, that you’ll be more proactive, that there will be less misunderstandings, you know, that work can be turned around quicker and the client feels more engaged and will be happier, etcetera, etcetera. So you put it in benefits that will make their life easier. And then at the same time you’ve got to think of it from their perspective and what problems they might have with it and address those problems. So, for example, they feel that they’re going to be out of control, that they’re not going to know everything that’s going on, well say to them, look, if I even have a conversation with the client afterwards I will confirm everything that was said to you via email so you have a written record of that conversation, or, you know if you want to be involved in every phone call that I have with the client that’s absolutely fine as well. So you kind of address their needs and their fears, it’s the only way you can really do it I think.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s an excellent answer, Paul. You know at the end of the day it really comes to communicating with anybody, clients, project manager, you have to communicate.

Paul: And I think that’s what we’re so bad at as web designers, and let’s realize, let’s make a huge, sweeping generalization here, but you know I do think as a sector we have a disproportionate number of people that are on the autistic spectrum, you know, we’re computer people, we’re not people people. But we work in a client service industry so we need to learn how to be people people, we need to learn — and it’s funny isn’t it, because on one hand we pride ourselves on our ability to get inside of the head of users, don’t we, to empathize with them, to imagine what they’re doing on the website and what problems they’re going to encounter, and we care, we put a lot of energy into doing that. But we need to put that same energy into what makes our clients tick, what makes our project manager tick, you know, what do they care about? One of the things I mentioned in the book is find out when you’re talking to say a stakeholder, if there’s a problematic person within the company, find out what is the one thing they really care about, and then any argument or anything you present to them build it around that; if they care about recruitment, for example, when you present the design make a point of saying how it can benefit recruitment, you know, you’ve got to find out what makes people tick, and we’ve got to put that same effort into doing that with clients and our colleagues as we do into our users.

Kevin: Right. Yeah, I guess the thing is you can’t be passive about your approach, you have to be proactive, a self-starter in a way.

Paul: Yeah.

Kevin: So, Paul, unfortunately we’re out of time.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely, I do talk a lot, I apologize.

Kevin: No, no, but it’s good information. I think this is something that needs to be talked about more in the community of web design, specifically when it relates to client work, but also I think it relates to also when you’re dealing with your own projects and your own needs, right; if I’m creating an application I need to use this approach as well because at the end of the day it’s an app, and so the app is kind of like my client, and I need to present the information that the users want to the users, but also at the same time put those behind the needs of the app, because at the end of the day the app or the client or whoever it may be, it’s ultimately their thing and the thing that they’re trying to sell, so it’s their goals above user goals in a way, correct?

Paul: Yeah. I mean absolutely. I mean with an app, I mean depending on why you’ve created the app, if you’ve just created it for a bit of fun then sure put the users first, but if you’ve created that app to earn money or you’ve got business objectives for that app then they need to be first, they need to — everything needs to hand off of that.

Kevin: Well, Paul, where can people find you and the book, where can they find more information if they want to know more about this Client Centric Web Design thing?

Paul: Sure. I mean there’s — basically the best place to go is Boagworld.com/season/3, and what that will get you is the podcast for this season that’s coming out, I don’t know when this podcast is being released, but we’re doing Season 3 of the Boagworld Show in April, April 11th it kicks off, so you can go to that URL, you’ll be able to get to all the episodes as they come out, all of that’s completely free. If you want to buy the eBook as well, which obviously goes into more depth, you can get to that from that page as well. But from my point of view it’s really about getting this message out and getting people to rethink how they’re running their businesses, because I’m certainly not going to get rich from selling eBooks, that’s for sure (laughter).

Kevin: Well, perhaps one day you will.

Paul: One can only hope.

Kevin: Wouldn’t that be nice. Well, Paul, thank you again, and do you have Twitter?

Paul: I am, yes, I’m on Twitter @boagworld, so you can check me out there as well.

Kevin: Awesome. Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on, I very much enjoyed our chat, and hopefully folks can start taking some of these things away and implementing them in their current workflow.

Paul: Yep, thank you.

Kevin: Alright, take it easy.

And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about today’s show please feel free to get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m. You can find me on Twitter @kevindees, and if you’d like to leave comments about today’s show check out the podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast, you can subscribe to the show there as well. This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Dees, 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.

SitePoint Podcast #156: Paywalls Revisited

Louis Simoneau — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:52:01 +0000

Episode 156 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/156.

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Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’m back; I’ve been off for a couple of weeks sort of touring around Australia with my brother who’s come to visit. We’re back with a panel show; unfortunately Stephen couldn’t make it today, but hi Patrick and Kevin.

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Patrick: Hey guys.

Kevin: How’s it going?

Louis: Going great. Thanks for filling in with those interview shows, Kevin, much appreciated.

Kevin: Oh yeah, no problem, it was fun, a bunch of really good guests and knowledgeable folks.

Louis: Nice.

Patrick: That sounded almost a little too slick (laughter), a little too slick, “A bunch of good guests and knowledgeable folks,” wink!

Kevin: That’s right.

Patrick: Well, it’s been a full month, it’s been a full month since we met up and did a group show.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: And I’ve been — we went to SXSW which is where Kevin got those interviews, and I got to say hi to him down there, and, yeah, just a mess of travel and being sick and having a cold and whatnot, but it’s good to be back.

Kevin: But you’re better now, right?

Patrick: I am. I’m almost 100%.

Kevin: Good job, yay.

Patrick: Yes. This isn’t like the poor podcast the other night that I couldn’t help coughing on; I had to keep muting the mic every 30 seconds.

Kevin: Yeah.

Patrick: Where does your brother live, Louis?

Louis: Lives in Montreal.

Patrick: Okay, wow, so that’s quite a trip.

Louis: Yeah, quite a trip, pretty significant.

Patrick: My brother only lives four hours away, so I’m thankful for that (laughter), not quite as long.

Louis: It’s a bit more manageable. So who wants to go first with a story this week?

Kevin: I’ll go first. I have an article from Chris Coyer on content folding, and he posted this a few days ago and it’s kind of relevant, but at the same time it’s a little future friendly, not necessarily now friendly, if that even makes sense. But basically he’s talking about the way you flow content with Responsive Web Design and what the W3C is doing in accordance to that with the — I think it’s the Regents Module. And basically he does a little tutorial on an interesting technique donated by Adobe on how to basically send pieces of content from one div to another based on how wide your screen is. So if you can imagine like with most sites you have a sidebar and a content area, and then as you lower the size of the screen the sidebar tends to jump all the way to the bottom, and so if you have like six or seven items there it’s not very useful, especially if those are ads. So what this does it allows you to create so-called divs within or between articles in that main content area, and when the screen size comes down instead of shooting all the ads to the bottom you can put them between the articles as appropriate. So it’s kind of an interesting approach, however, I did want to ask you about this, Louis, because in the example there’s some empty divs in here, and I don’t know, I mean you can always go and add that into a field divs, but I feel that would become kind of a standard thing to have empty divs laying around, and the semantics behind that I don’t know how I feel.

Louis: Well, a couple of things, one, semantically, at least according to W3C, semantically the div is neutral, it has no semantic meaning, so if you’re going to put an empty something it may as well be a div because that’s not saying anything semantically, right; if you had an article that is confusing semantically.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: But a div in theory is semantically neutral. Now obviously it sort of clutters up your markup and a lot of people are purists about that kind of thing.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: But, yeah, I mean this is obviously an important thing. I think that so many attempts at responsive design have had that sort of moment where you’re like, well, I don’t really know where to put all this stuff, and I can’t really integrate it intelligently using just CSS, so I’m just going to chump it all at the bottom; that’s kind of a cop-out for a lot of situations, right, sometimes the stuff you’ve got in that sidebar is useful, I mean sometimes you’ll have navigation in the sidebar that goes along the top, and then maybe some category links or lists of monthly archives for a blog, for example, and that’s find if that goes at the bottom, but as you mentioned, putting all your ads at the bottom doesn’t really make your advertisers very happy.

Kevin: Right. Exactly. You know, this reminds me of the days when people were using like span tags to create the before and after effects for a lot of things, like with rounded corners where you just have an empty element sitting there, and then you would kind of give it widths and heights to add your rounded corners sometimes, and then they came out with the unbreakable box model that Dan Cedarholm talked about, and so it’s interesting to see this kind of thing come back and then how it will retract I see in the future, at least is what the hope would be anyways.

Louis: Yeah, I mean my gut feeling would be that those kind of empty divs sort of shouldn’t be there, but maybe it feels like this is really probably the best solution if you want a really adaptive layout where things move around pretty flexibly, and you don’t want to use JavaScript to do it, although maybe someone would make the argument that it’s perfectly legitimate to use JavaScript to do it because the mobile devices you’re targeting being iPhones and Android devices are almost all going to have pretty competent JavaScript engines, and just using JavaScript to shuffle that content around might be a good idea. Or, you know I talked with Luke Wroblewski on the last interview show I did, and his approach of mobile first is an interesting way of looking at this; if your ads are actually included in your content in the original markup, and you move them out to the side when the screen’s wide enough, that might be a different way of approaching this.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah. I actually kind of like that approach a little more to be honest. But I don’t know, because like if you were to use that — not trying to get too technical here, but if you were to use that approach from desktop carrying to mobile, wouldn’t mobile have better support for these features in the future? Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff to think about.

Louis: Yeah, things have gotten a bit trickier with regards to a lot of this stuff, but I definitely think that this is an approach that people should be considering, and I think it’s important for people when approaching responsive design not to just do that copout of everything that’s in the sidebar goes at the bottom.

Kevin: Yeah.

Louis: Because that’s not really approaching mobile as its own platform, right, all you’re doing is being, well, I have less space and I’ve got all this stuff and I’m just gonna put the stuff that doesn’t fit at the top I’ll put it at the bottom, you’re not really thinking about the mobile user experience at all when you’re doing that. So I think it’s important to think about it and to start to have these kinds of technologies that are going to make that easier to do, so in this case it’s done in CSS and he uses some sort of browser detection for fallback. You know I think it’s great, and it’ll be more exciting once it’s well supported and everyone can do this sort of as a matter of fact when you’re building a new site.

Kevin: Yeah, I agree with you, I think this is going to be kind of an ongoing standard as we see the whole space move further forward, and you can always go — the site has demos and the files you can download to see it for yourself.

Patrick: And that was a great conversation I have to say, and one that I am absolutely not intellectually qualified to participate in (laughter), so I was happy to listen. But I’m just — my mind is blown by the idea that you can take content from one div and have it appear in the other, I mean my mind is blown around that concept. So I’ll kick it to a story that I’m a little more qualified to talk about.

So we talk about paywalls on this show somewhat often I would say, I did a quick search in our archives and saw we talked about it on episode 73 with The Times in the UK and the experiments they were doing, and we talked about it on 130 in regards to The Boston Globe, and then, Louis, you interviewed Ethan Marcotte on episode 132 and kind of brought it up briefly, so I found an interesting story that linked to by ReadWriteWeb and it was actually reported by the Columbia Journalism Reviews’ The Audit Blog, and basically it’s on the success of the New York Times digital subscribers, so in other words they’re paywall. And it’s illustrated in numbers, in the second quarter of 2011 they had 281,000 digital subscribers, in the third quarter of 2011 that went up to 324,000, the next quarter 390,000, and then this quarter, first quarter 2012 which is still under way, they’re up to 454,000. So some pretty impressive growth as far as paying digital subscribers to access the New York Times content behind their paywall, and these subscribers pay between $15 and $35 a month; $15 you get access to the website plus access on your Smartphone, for $20 you get the website plus access on your tablet, and for $35 you get all of it, and of course their print subscribers, the people who get the New York Times at home, they get access to this with their paid print subscription, and they don’t factor into these numbers, this is strictly the people who pay for digital subscription.

So in looking at this The Times at least appears to have been pretty successful with the paywall model, and I don’t know if that’s something that other publication replicate, but at least in the case of newspapers here in the U.S. some other major corporations have announced their plans to move to a little more paywall based monetization. Gannett, another big publisher here in the U.S., has announced that they plan to do their own paywalls, and also Lee Enterprises, a smaller publisher that does some Midwestern newspapers has announced similar plans, and that’s according to ReadWriteWeb.

So, do these numbers change the idea of paywalls in either of your minds, I mean does this change anything? I know the first episode I referenced before was before Louis was even with the show, and I don’t think — I think it was Kevin, and Kevin wasn’t too up on the idea of paywalls, but do these numbers illustrate that they can be successful?

Louis: Well, it certainly illustrates that they can be successful because in this case they are successful, right.

Patrick: Yes, absolutely.

Louis: Now, so just to clarify here, the New York Times does sort of an incomplete paywall, right, it’s not — the content is still accessible if you don’t pay, up to a certain limit, once you hit a certain number of stories that you’ve tried to view on the site and you’re not a subscriber it’ll say hey you’re using this a lot, you seem to like our content, you might want to pay for it, right?

Patrick: Right. Right, that number right now is 20 articles per month and on April — in April they’ll be taking that down to 10 articles per month.

Louis: Right. So that’s one thing, it doesn’t break your ability to share the stories online to people who might not be interested in reading all of the New York Times stuff, or who might potentially gain interest via having the story shared, right; we’ve all had the experience if someone posts something on Twitter and you click through and because you’re not a subscriber you either get taken to the homepage of this website or just a login page.

Patrick: Sure.

Louis: And that doesn’t even give me the opportunity to see is this something that I would be willing to pay for if I find myself using it a lot, it’s a wall, right.

Patrick: Yeah.

Louis: And more, the other thing though is that the New York Times is such an iconic publication and has so much quality content that — and so much quality reporting and editorial content that –

Patrick: Built-up credibility.

Louis: Yeah. And not only just built-up credibility, they’ve got the credibility, but they’re also still doing the reporting and still doing probably — I mean they still have better writers and better reporters than a lot of other smaller newspapers, right. So the willingness to pay for the New York Times versus the willingness to pay, for example, for your local paper or for a somewhat lesser known national paper I guess remains to be seen, we’ll see how successful other attempts at doing this kind of thing are; it seems like if someone was going to succeed the New York Times doing it this way was the best bet. And if that works then we have to try the other things that might be less likely to succeed, but who knows.

Patrick: Yeah, and you made a couple good points there to point out how it’s different from like it’s not simply pay or nothing, and there are actually a couple more points I read in a press release for the New York Times, and they’re going to knock it down to 10 articles per month, but on the Smartphone and tablet apps the top news section is already free and will remain free, so they already allow people to access kind of the top most popular news stories in the Smartphone and the tablet apps. And also according to the press release readers who come through links from email, search, blogs and social media will continue to be able to access those individual articles even if they have reached their reading limit; for some searches users will have a daily limit of five free links of Times articles. So there are these sorts of back doors I guess, if you will, where they allow people to read their articles if they’re coming through different sources and still allow the times to kind of tap into the power of social media, if you will, kind of an overused phrase, but if people are sharing links to the Times articles through social media those will then still be accessible. So it’s an interesting sort of hybrid approach, it’s not simply all or nothing, where they are still benefitting from the traffic that comes from being a top story on Twitter, for example, while still maintaining some control over let’s say the most active readers, the people who are really digesting a lot of their content.

Louis: Yeah, and I have to say I prefer this approach to a free approach but where the papers go too far out into the social media sharing, the passive reading sharing apps on Facebook for I think The Guardian and The Washington Post, for instance.

Patrick: Right, yeah.

Louis: That’s just really annoying, like not being able to click through the link without adding the app.

Patrick: Right.

Louis: And if the alternative is, you know, you either force everyone to share your stuff passively just to be able to see it, or you allow them to share if they want but you make them pay if they’re using it a lot, I prefer that partial paywall to the full-out social media press that these other publications have gone with.

Patrick: It’s funny you mention that because I’ve clicked on a couple links like that, like you said, the passive sharing or whatever it is, and it’s asked me to add the app, and I’m not like militant on this, but I still haven’t added the app.

Louis: No, because the thing is like it’s going to share it before you read the thing. What you’ll notice is that most of the things that get shared by via The Washington Post and The Guardian app are very, very sensational headlines because of the things that people are like, oh, I want to see what that is, and it’s not something that you would share after you read it, but you want to be able to read it. You know I usually just — I’ll Google the article and find it separately without adding the app because –

Patrick: Precisely.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: (Laughs) absolutely.

Louis: Anyway, so, I mean it’s great to hear that these publications can make a living for themselves, or carve out a niche for themselves on the Internet, and that the Internet doesn’t spell all doom and gloom for traditional newspaper and print publications.

Patrick: Absolutely. Yeah, for The Times, I mean like you said, they’re still massive, but this is a decent amount of money even if you assume that all those subscribers are on the $15 a month plan; 454,000 subscribers timed by $15 is 6.8 million dollars, and over a period of a year that balloons to 81.7 million. So, even to a big company like The Times that’s still a nice amount of pocket change I would say.

Louis: Yeah, I wouldn’t say no to it.

Patrick: (Laughs) neither would SitePoint.

Louis: Alright, moving on, I’ve got a bit of a story this week, back to some nerdery because that’s what we do here.

Patrick: Sure.

Louis: Sorry Patrick.

Patrick: I’ll be quiet now (laughter). I’ll go sit in the corner with my dunce cap on.

Louis: This is a blog post written by Stephanie Rieger, I think I’m pronouncing that right. This was a while back, it was posted in January but I only saw it a few weeks ago and I figured I’d pass it along just in case anyone had missed it; it is sort of a plea for progressive enhancement. So what she’s trying to say is that a lot of people sort of have leapt on the Responsive Web Design bandwagon but are not paying attention to traditional best practice techniques of Responsive Web Design, and just making the site accessible on as many devices and as many contexts as possible. So the whole post was prompted by her noticing the new campaign site for Barrack Obama for the upcoming presidential election in the U.S. I imagine, and it is a Responsive Design, it does collapse down if you’re viewing it on a mobile device, and it’s got this sort of slideout menu where you hit a menu button and it just opens up a big menu so you can navigate the site. And then she had it completely fail for her on an iPhone 4, and then so she went and did a bit of testing and wondered what does this menu actually work on, and found that the only device she could get it to work on was an upgraded iPhone 4 with IOS 5, or the newest Android phone the Galaxy Nexus. And it failed on the iPod Touch, failed on the iPhone 4 that wasn’t upgraded, failed on the previous top of the line Google device, the Nexus One, failed on brand new Windows Phone 7 devices, there’s this massive list, the Kindle Fire, all the Android tablets she tested, and just, you know, it was not degrading gracefully.

So she wrote this very compelling piece, the whole post is trying to impel Web designers and developers to not lose track of those traditional progressive enhancement techniques, and really focus on serving something that will work on any device even if it doesn’t have the screen size that you expect, or it doesn’t have the JavaScript performance or behavior that you would expect, you really have to have a baseline that works well and is usable, and then you can serve your fanciness to the latest generation of devices or browsers, but you really have to make things accessible and usable. And Responsive Design on its own is not a panacea for that; it doesn’t solve the issue of making your site degrade gracefully.

Kevin: Yeah, it feels like the whole prefix thing all over again, except in the responsive aspects where developers are just getting a little lazy, in my opinion, to just doing a good job, you know what I mean.

Louis: Yeah, and in this case obviously on mobile I mean we’ve had a hard time as developers for a long time just doing browser testing, right, if you want to have two or three versions of Internet Explorer on your machine, plus Chrome and Safari and Firefox, that can be tricky if you’re using a Mac or Linux, you have to have your Internet Explorer in some kind of virtual machine or a dual boot scenario, and then getting multiple versions of Internet Explorer is even trickier. That was tricky, but then on mobile devices it’s even harder because you have to own these physical devices, so, you know, this testing isn’t easy, but I think if you’re an agency that’s focused, and especially I imagine that the budget for Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign site was sort of on the high side as far as web designs go, so the kind of agency that takes on that kind of project one would expect to be able to do a bit of testing.

Patrick: That and the volunteers they have which is a massive number, they must all have different types of phones, they could just call them in.

Louis: Yep, absolutely. I’ll just quote a little bit from the end of this article where she sort of drives her point home. “The failure of the Obama site was not in the use of new techniques like Responsive Design; it was forgetting that older principles and techniques still have an important role to play in building a better web. If anything they’re more important than ever before. Without progressive enhancement Responsive Design is simply a site that looks pretty when you resize your desktop browser, with progressive enhancement the mobile web truly becomes a tool capable of reaching and connecting all of us.”

So, just making a really strong case for having at least your menu fail gracefully, for example; it’s a JavaScript menu, so if you’re using JavaScript to display something, conventional wisdom on the Web or for progressive enhancement, is have it open by default and then hide it with JavaScript once the page is loaded so that if your JavaScript fails the menu’s still accessible, right, which is something that wasn’t done in this case.

Kevin: If all else fails at least you know Barrack uses one of these two phones, the Nexus or the iPhone (laughter).

Patrick: He’s either on the latest iPhone or the latest Android, so.

Louis: Yeah. Also pointing out it failed on a number of Blackberry devices, so not impressive.

Patrick: This is a big enough issue for developers in the U.S. to change your vote, so definitely want to take a look at the code on his website, see how standards based it is, see how it looks, and then vote based upon that.

Louis: I think you’d have to compare all the candidates’ mobile sites and you’d probably find a pretty impressive level of failure on all sides; I don’t know if anyone’s got great mobile.

Kevin: Maybe this just means they’ll send us free phones so we can access websites, which would be kind of nice, I’d like that.

Louis: Alright, I think that puts a nail in the coffin of that one.

Kevin: So I have one more article here to talk about, and it’s about Google Play. Now, of course, it’s been a little while, but I believe from what I’ve read that Google Play came out on March 6th, and since then it’s had a little bit of an uproar in the community, specifically with Android, where basically they’ve changed the policy behind the apps. Now, there is a link to ZDNet where they talk about this, and so I’m kind of pulling for multiple places because it’s been out for a little while now. But basically Google Play has changed part of their policies, and Reddit Is Fun, this is an app for Android, has run into some issues with the policy plan. If you don’t know what Google Play then go check out play.google.com and you can find out from there, now I haven’t used it much myself, in fact I looked at it somewhat for the first time today, and basically what it is this is integration of Google’s products, sort of like Amazon Prime, where you have movies, music, books, and now the Android market has all been pulled into this. So, from what I understand, on the newer versions of Android you now use Google Play to buy your apps, not necessarily the old Android market.

Louis: Yeah, I actually got the update even on the old — I have an older Android device running I think 2.3.4, so a little bit out of date, and I still got an update that switched me over to Play.

Patrick: Okay, what is that, melted ice cream sandwich? (Laughter)

Louis: Aw, Patrick.

Kevin: Nice, very nice.

Patrick: Well, and I say that as a person with a cheap pay-as-you-go phone, that doesn’t have a Smartphone, so just, you know, I can’t be any more humble (laughter). But, yeah, Google Play is the Android market now, I mean it’s been rebranded; the Android market is no more, Google Play is it.

Kevin: Okay. Right, I use an iPhone, and again, I just looked at this today, so the information I have on it isn’t perfect, but, you know, from this like one of their top apps, Reddit Is Fun, is running into issues with this.

Louis: So this is an app with, according to this article, with 300,000 active users, it was the most popular Reddit app on the Android market, and then was more recently banned and removed from Google Play for policy violations. And the email to the developer said it was a violation of the sexually explicit material provision of the content policy. So basically it links users to the Reddit front page and to Reddit threads on that, and I guess if those links then in turn link to, let’s say not safe for work content, Google feels that it’s alright to block it from the market.

Patrick: Right. Now, personally, all things equal I don’t have a problem with Google doing this with their marketplace, but the issue here is that, and I feel like Jon Stewart when I say it wasn’t supposed to be this way, Google, (laughter); it’s supposed to be the clear alternative, right, and it’s not good or bad, I don’t view either approach as good or bad, but Apple’s, obviously Apple’s, the iTunes and app store, the marketplace is there, they have a tight restriction over those, they manage them very closely. The Android marketplace, and Android as a platform, more or less, was supposed to be more open. Now, and then I think that’s the biggest problem here is that I think people had an expectation of Google from Google’s own actions, and from their actions with regard to Android, and now feeling as though they’re coming down on them for adult content and maybe feeling a little betrayed.

Kevin: Yeah, I don’t really understand the whole Google stance on this because I mean if you have a Twitter account on here and somebody sends you an explicit Tweet, like, is Google going to ban Twitter now?

Louis: The Twitter client, yeah, that’s an extremely good point where it just becomes very ambiguous, right, a link to something on the Internet that’s coming through from content.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly.

Patrick: Sure. Yeah, I thought of — when you were reading out loud I thought of like forum reading apps, right, so certain forums have apps and there are apps that read forums, and certainly some forums might have a thread with this sort of content, maybe even on a once-off basis some sort of uncharacteristic piece of content, and then that leads to that issue. I mean that might be an extreme example, but I guess it’s the slope so to speak.

Louis: Yeah.

Kevin: Right.

Louis: Although, to be fair in this case, and going back to the original post that you linked to from ZDNet, it points out some quotes from developers who run a separate Android market, so the interesting thing about Android is because all that’s required to install an app is just to get the app installer file and run it on the phone, you can basically create your own market. So, they’ve got some quotes from a rival market here saying, you know, that they’ve been contacted by a lot of developers who’ve been affected by this, and that they’re trying to push ahead with that, so it doesn’t make it impossible to get these kinds of apps on the phone, but in the case of Reddit it’s not really, I think as we were saying, it’s not really an adult app, or it’s not an explicit app, it’s just — potentially linking to things that might potentially then link to explicit content, which is really hard to justify the ban.

Patrick: There was a lot of potentiallys there.

Louis: Well, yeah, and that’s the heart of the issue, right.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah. And you made a good point, though, as far as the openness of Android to the point of you can have other app stores, right, Amazon’s created one, and there are other ones out there that people can turn to. I wouldn’t turn to Amazon in this case because I don’t think they want your app either, but, I would say it creates a possible business, right, because if — and this is just the entrepreneur in me speaking, but if they don’t allow adult apps then you start an adult app store.

Louis: Yeah, and this is the one that’s linked to from here, I’m not going to drop the link because it’s been warned in the article that the site article is not safe for work, so I’m not going to drop the link.

Patrick: You can Google it! Ironically enough you can just Google it (laughter). Um, but, yes, I mean that’s the entrepreneurial spirit there is that you can create an adult app store, don’t call it an app store because Apple doesn’t — they’re going after Amazon for using that term, call it something else, call it an adult Android application market, or whatever, but, start your own app store and take that market.

Kevin: Yeah, and anyway, so the Google Play check it out, and I believe Google Play was kind of Google’s response to the Amazon app store in a way, or basically that Kindle Fire with its integration with movies, books and apps.

Louis: Yeah, and I mean obviously iTunes has had this sort of integrated store forever, right, that it was never a separate app store, or not really from where you would buy your music and your books.

Patrick: Yeah, they’ve had it since before The Land Before Time 1 came out, so.

Louis: Wow! That was a reference. (Laughter) now I just feel sad.

Patrick: And that sadness is the perfect segue to spotlights (laughter).

Kevin: Sad times.

Patrick: And I’ll go ahead and go first because we’re on sort of this app store, app talk, so my spotlight is a reading app, completely focused on Apple, so it’s an Apple e-reader called Read Mill, and I got to meet one of the founders, his name is David, down at SXSW, and he showed me the app, although I don’t have an Apple device so I couldn’t experiment with it myself, but I played with it on his device and he showed me it, and they have like a web interface, and they also allow you to import a little bit from your Kindle Fire, or your Kindle library I should say. But basically it is a — so it’s an e-reader but it’s more, it’s, you know, they call themselves a curious community of readers highlighting and sharing the books they love, so it’s very much based on highlighting excerpts from books, sharing interesting thoughts, commenting on them, there are authors in the community who highlight small excerpts and then provide additional context to those thoughts. And it’s really very slick, and it struck me as something that if you do a lot of reading on an Apple device, on an iPad or an iPhone, and you’re into talking with people who are reading a book, or sharing the books you are reading, it seemed like a very, very slick, very, very well done application and website, and I’ve started to play around with it myself. So if you’re a hardcore reader and for reading on an Apple device definitely check it out, it’s readmill.com.

Kevin: Very cool. But I have a spotlight, and it’s a very fun URL to begin with, so that’s what makes this spotlight awesome, so it’s craig.is/making/rainbows, which I think is awesome.

Patrick: Yep.

Kevin: And this is a JavaScript library, kind of a library, it’s multiple scripts that you can install and run, but basically it’s syntax highlighting for code within web pages. And I have to say I’ve used several like code syntax highlighting plugins before for, say, WordPress and Drupal and just standard ones like this, and this one definitely takes all with the way it’s implemented. It’s using some nice HTML5 stuff in here as far as syntax goes, and you can create your own expressions; this uses regular expressions to generate the content, or parse through the content, and figure out what types of code pockets that you want to copy, I don’t know how else to say that, or code blocks, and, you know, extensible, it’s very, very nice, and you only include the packages that you want. So if you want Python then you can just include a script, and I’m smiling a little bit here because this is so cool (laughter).

Patrick: I’m smiling because this is so cool.

Kevin: It is cool. It’s awesome; it has great documentation, just check it out guys.

Patrick: It’s 1.2 kilobytes of rainbow amazement.

Kevin: That’s right. And I know you’re thinking it, it’s double rainbow.

Louis: It is; it is.

Kevin: Almost a triple rainbow.

Louis: If only I knew what it all meant. Alright, we made it through Kevin’s spotlight, we made it alive. Cool.

Patrick: What’s your spotlight, Louis?

Louis: My spotlight is, again, it goes back a little while because like I said I’ve been disconnected a little bit, but it’s an article written by the one and only Jeffery Zeldman on his blog a few weeks ago, and what it is he’s pointing to a new technique for image replacement developed by a guy called Scott Kellum. And basically his point is that the traditional FARK image replacement that we all have been using forever, which is a text indent of minus some obscene number of pixels in order to knock the text off the screen and replace it with a background image, that’s a great technique, and we’ve all been using it forever, as long as we’ve been doing CSS. However, if you’re doing animation in CSS it does have some drawbacks because the browser’s actually going to draw this giant box that extends as far as that negative text indent goes, which when you try and animate it on a device that’s maybe not as fast or as powerful as it could be causes some performance issues. So there’s this alternate technique which someone has just developed using text indent to 100% and overflow hidden, which just sort of forces the text out but then hides the overflow. So just something to take a look at if you haven’t seen it, and I know for a lot o people it’s kind of hard to break the habit of doing something like minus 9999 pixels because it’s so ingrained in the way we do CSS, but there are alternatives, and they’re new alternatives, and that in some cases can perform better.

Kevin: This is very cool, I actually like this a lot. It’s a good link.

Patrick: Did you ever talk to Mr. Zeldman at SXSW, Kevin?

Kevin: I did not; I did not. I wanted to give him a hug but that might’ve been a little much (laughter).

Patrick: Awkward silence. (Laughter) I love that, sweet, good spotlights, absolutely.

Louis: We got an email from Zach Wong, and I’m just going to read it out, “hey SitePoint Podcast I just wanted to say that I’m an avid listener of your podcast and appreciate the insightful comments that you guys produce.”

Patrick: Sweet! Thank you.

Louis: “I also just listened to the last panel show of 2011, and I just want to give you some thoughts on ads, personally I don’t care about ads when I visit, I think that as web viewers we’ve grown accustomed to them, and we just ignore them now. Do I click on them? If they interest me, like you guys said. Will I buy anything? No. But I like just looking into it, that’s why I have no problem with Google tracking what I search, what I email, etcetera, to generate ads, it’s because they generate useful, interesting ads, that’s how I learned about 99designs.com; I appreciate useful ads if just simply for a brief off-task moment.” So that’s a bit of an additional perspective on the conversation that we had about ads and tracking, I don’t exactly remember what context we were talking about this in.

Patrick: Who cares about the context, he uses a SitePoint product (laughter).

Kevin: That’s right.

Patrick: It doesn’t really matter! Thanks, Zach, for the email and kind words. It’s like when Louis gets an email he yells at the top of his lungs in his office, “We got an email! The podcast got an email!” It’s like Steve Martin in The Jerk when the phone books come, that’s kind of an old reference, I don’t know who all will get that, but yeah, we like to get emails about the show, so definitely do drop us a line, and if you have some comments or something you’d like to add or feedback we’ll definitely read it on the show. Yeah, and so if you’d like to give us your two cents email us at podcast@sitepoint.com.

Louis: Alright, so that’s it for today’s show, let’s kick it around the table.

Kevin: So I’m Kevin Dees and you can find me at kevindees.cc and on Twitter as @kevindees.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network, on Twitter @iFroggy, i-f-r-o-g-gy.

Louis: Alright, and you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m; you can email us as Patrick said, at podcast@sitepoint.com, and you can find us on the Web at sitepoint.com/podcast, that’s where to find the show, leave a comment, subscribe to the show, all of that; we’re also on iTunes. I’m Louis Simoneau; you can find me @rssaddict. Thanks for listening, and next week we’ve got an interview that Kevin conducted, so I will be back in two weeks to host the next panel show. Thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #155: Conferences and CodePoet at South By Southwest

Louis Simoneau — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:13:47 +0000

Episode 155 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) has two more interviews for us from South By South West. He interviews firstly Christopher Schmitt (@teleject) and Ari Styles (@ari4nne) of e4h.tv on conferences, and then Evan Soloman (@evansolomon) who works for Automatic as a Growth Engineer on WordPress.com and specifically CodePoet too.

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SitePoint Podcast #155: Conferences and CodePoet at South By Southwest (MP3, 31:58, 30.7MB)

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Episode Summary

Kevin, Christopher and Ari cover conferencing including the different ways of running conferences, the benefits of those different ways and how to get the most from conferences. Kevin then talks with Evan about his work as a Growth Engineer at Automatic, and specifically the new development work taking place on CodePoet and how that will work for people who build websites for people with WordPress.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/155.

Interview Transcript

Kevin: Hi and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Kevin Dees and today I have two interviews for you recorded remotely from South by Southwest. In the first of these interviews I speak with Ari Styles and Christopher Schmitt from Environments for Humans about web conferences and how you can get involved.

So I’m here with Christopher Schmitt and Ari Styles, hello guys.

Ari: Hey!

Christopher: Hey, Kevin, how’s it going?

Kevin: So this is my first like remote interview, so pardon the audio quality if it’s not the best.

Ari: He’s taken it on the road.

Kevin: Yes. But I’m making up for that with some awesome guests to talk with me about conferences.

Christopher: Where, where are they?

Ari: (Laughs)

Kevin: They just left, dang it, end of interview.

Ari: Sorry, you’re going to have to talk to us I guess.

Kevin: Well, since I’m stuck with you guys, you both do online conferences, the Environments for Humans, and you also do a conference called the In Control, and that’s in Orlando; it’s been in Orlando for how long now?

Christopher: This is our third year, but we have been doing In Control for four years, the first year was in Cincinnati, and then for the last three years been in Orlando. Well, actually we go with — we work with AIGA, which is a graphic design professional network in America, and so we work with the AIGA Orlando chapter to have a web design kind of program not only for the community in Orlando but nationwide, actually they’re international, in fact, a lot of international attendees come in for the content. And In Control, it’s a two-day conference, it’s one track, we have keynotes on both days, but what makes In Control a little bit different is that Ari and I we really want to make sure that attendees get takeaways, they’re actionable, and that we actually kind of do something mean to our speakers who aren’t doing keynotes, and that makes you have sessions that are about an hour and forty minutes long.

Kevin: Right. Which is very unique to the conference world.

Christopher: Yeah, there’s workshops for sure, they’ve got three six hours or maybe longer, you add more days to them, and sessions are sometimes an hour, but they’re not really an hour, they’re usually like forty minutes and then some Q&A, and then if you have some technical difficulties with the speaker setting it up and getting everything ready. Or sometimes now some sessions are like thirty minutes long, which is okay and works for TED, but TED conferences they usually like work hard, speakers beforehand, so they get a nice compact presentation.

Kevin: So you’re giving the speakers at your conference a little bit — you give them a target topic but you give them more free reign over what they’re going to talk about.

Christopher: Yeah, like we don’t tell them what to do, we just said okay, and, in fact, it’s a huge undertaking; as a speaker I speak at conferences too, and I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I just know how much of an undertaking it is, how much time it takes, and we wouldn’t have them speaking if we didn’t trust that they didn’t know what to do.

Ari: Right, right.

Christopher: And not every speaker can do an hour and forty minute talk, so it’s like it’s very — we take our time with due diligence to find speakers that we think people will want to listen to but also can handle that load. And the reason why we want to do — find the speakers speakers is because we want to make sure speakers don’t feel rushed getting through a slide deck, you know, some speakers take a lot of time with slide decks, put a lot of content in them, and speakers sometimes feel rushed like oh, man, I got five minutes left, ten minutes left to go; twenty slides, let’s go, man, so they have to narrow it down. So we make sure they don’t feel rushed, and I think that’s –

Ari: And that a question gets answered.

Christopher: Yeah, yeah. And also like with the longer time we hope that the audience feels that, well, we have an hour to go, I should be okay asking a question here. And so we really want In Control to facilitate more speaker and attendee time together through –

Kevin: So that collaboration, right, that interaction you want to bring that out in the conferences.

Christopher: Exactly.

Kevin: I think that’s really great. The irony of this interview is kind of that we’re at South by Southwest.

Ari: Yes.

Kevin: So, you know we’re in the — I guess the Hampton Inn, right, so you can hear a little bit of background noise coming in here; I think that’s really fun. But I wanted to ask you, Ari, a little bit — you’ve been involved in South by Southwest before, right, and that’s kind of what pulled you into this conference thing. With that experience in mind, when we’re talking about this conference thing, not to make like specifically about Environments for Humans or the In Control conference, which are awesome, and I think that’s really great, but I also want to bring out like the importance for people to think about coming to a conference, right, because you know I have a few friends that they’re just now starting to come into the conference scene, like they’re thinking about it, they’re finally attending and seeing results. What would you say having the background from South by and now doing your own conference with Chris, like what are some of the things that people need to think about when they’re doing the conference themselves?

Ari: I would say that, well, to begin with South by sends its employees to different conferences, so that’s kind of what made me start thinking about it, and then Christopher speaks at a lot of conferences, so we came away with a lot of opinions about conferences and that sort of thing. I think it’s so important for people building the Web right now to think about what they want to get out of a conference because there’s, you know, you can come at it from a continuing education approach, you can come at it from an inspiration approach, you know there’s lots of different ways to look at it. We are really focused on practical takeaways from everything that we’re doing, you know, I have this fantasy that people will come to our conference and come away with a bullet list of things they can do, to get, to make their job easier and be able to go home earlier and have a life, you know, everybody kind of has their reason for what they do and that’s mine. And so because of that we really emphasize the practical takeaways, but in some cases people need that inspiration, you know, they need to go to kind of a more inspiration based conference to get the motivation to just keep on keeping on. And so –

Kevin: You hear a lot of that here at South by and others, like In Control I heard a lot of that as well, where people were like this just gave me that spark I needed to keep going, you know.

Ari: Right, because for so many people it’s an uphill battle, and I completely understand that coming from the non ideal world.

Kevin: And it’s constantly changing so fast, right, I mean you’ve experienced that, you’ve written, Chris, you wrote the CSS Cookbook, right?

Christopher: Hmm-mm, Cookbook, and then also HTML5 Cookbook, and I’ve been into the Web since ’93, so it’s changed a little bit.

Kevin: Just a little bit, a smidgeon.

Christopher: Just a little bit. So it’s constantly changing, and with things changing so fast you have to — it’s like somewhere you can be an apprentice, if you want to use that example if you don’t mind, you learn a craft, learn a trade, you can’t just do the same thing for forty years, you know, fifty years, whatever, so you have to constantly be learning how to do things better and faster too. I mean it’s amazing things like GitHub and Git, like actually GitHub.

Kevin: What are those services just to clarify?

Christopher: Well, Git is a service that allows for version control, and GitHub is built on Git but allows a social dynamic to source code, so they say it’s kind of a clearinghouse for people’s code, so when they want they want to open source code they put it out there on GitHub, people can do a search against it and they can find like probably a code solution to almost any problem that they’ve come across. And it’s constantly updated with open source volunteers and programmers who just update stuff for projects, bug fixes, and I think jQuery’s now all on GitHub, Paul Irish, all his stuff that he does is on GitHub.

Kevin: HTML5 Boilerplate, iI think CakePHP, so there’s a lot of really good projects out there, and that goes with the dynamic that the Web is rapidly changing.

Christopher: Exactly.

Kevin: And conferences help you to keep up with those things and build interaction, not just with the code itself but with the people behind it, and I think that’s something really valuable. Could you guys maybe talk about some of the people that you’ve brought into your conferences and some of the ways that those people interact with the people that come to the conferences that pay for the tickets and, you know, how that helps that community and helps people learn, could you talk a little bit about that.

Ari: Well, we see a different dynamic because we’re doing two different, very different types of conferences, you know, it’s almost like we’re developing two different products really.

Kevin: Talk a little bit about the online side.

Ari: Well, the online conferences we focus on one topic for an entire day, so it’s seven or eight hours of material on one topic, be it a coding language like CSS or a framework like jQuery or a content management system, that sort of thing.

Kevin: And this is your summit, these are your summits?

Ari: Yes, these are the online summits that we do. So we use Adobe Connect for that, people tune in, they can watch the speakers speak, see the slides, there’s a chat room built in, plus we usually have something like a Twitter backchannel, and people who attend will also have the chance to review recordings later, and they also get copies of the slides. So it’s really — it’s a huge boon, continuing Ed type of a thing.

Kevin: Do they interact with the speakers while in the chats and everything?

Ari: Yes, they can ask questions direct to the speaker.

Kevin: So just like a real conference, right.

Ari: Right, exactly. In fact, we actually see people ask more questions in the online format, and I’m not sure if it’s that little anonymity factor that makes people feel comfortable. We warn speakers expect a lot of questions because that’s what usually happens, people feel comfortable doing that.

Christopher: And we’re totally okay with that, we really want that to happen.

Ari: Yes, yes.

Christopher: That’s like one of the benefits I think that we try to install into the online conferences is that you want those questions to be asked, because if you’re asking the question chances are someone else wants that questioned answered.

Ari: Needs that.

Christopher: And doesn’t even know that they want it answered.

Ari: Right. And that’s also one of the great things about it being a live event too, it’s hard to pull together a live event, but we feel like it’s so worth it, I mean people can go back and watch the recordings, and we do have a handful of people that buy the ticket and just watch the recordings later because they’re too busy that day or something goes on.

Kevin: Which is a powerful point, right, which is even if you don’t have time in the day, maybe you can’t travel, right, so the online gives you the chance if you can’t travel, you don’t have that budget, you can at least step into the conference world in a digital aspect. And if you can’t even do that then you have the recordings, right, and then you also have your In Control which is the physical conference, and I had the privilege of attending that this year, I thought it was really great, I think the way that you lined everything up you kind of tied the first day really well together, you talked about HTML and CSS and JavaScript, then you wrapped it up at the end of it, here’s your workflow, here’s how you’re going to use all the tools.

Ari: It’s more strategic as it goes on.

Kevin: The application level is very high, I thought it was really great, and then the second day you got into sort of the meta things, you know, the inspirational factor; I thought it was really well put together.

Christopher: Yeah, we try to create that as much as possible because speaking at other conferences where there’s multi-tracks –

Kevin: Like South by.

Christopher: Which is a totally different beast from like ten years ago, but even smaller conferences where like you don’t want the HTML5 or HTML session to be on the last day, last talk, right, that’s a foundation for the Web, you want that at the very beginning so they can build on that, and that’s how we approach In Control is that once we give you something it’s for the foundation of the next thing we add onto it, and so we go HTML, CSS, jQuery and then the Web Workflow the first day just to give you those tools for building it the first day, and then the second day we’re like okay let’s look at some more kind of soft science but strategic tools that you might use. So this year we did a lot of content strategy, mobile design.

Ari: Hmm-mm, because of that progression we get people that are kind of like what I like to think of as advanced beginners where they’re wanting to learn more about the craft, they’re already doing this but they want to have a beginning to end feeling about their craft. We also have a lot of people that are managers that are trying to understand all the things that they’re having to take care of, and then the online summits because we’re focusing on one topic at a time we tend to see a lot more intermediate to advanced attendees. And we’re occasionally blown away by just how much the attendees know, and the speakers are sometimes too with some of the questions that they get.

Kevin: It’s a communal thing, right, that’s what the conference — I think that’s at the root of it; if there’s anything you take away it’s that at the heart of a conference it’s about community, right, there’s no other real reason to meet together like that, you can learn beyond a shadow of a doubt something like what people are talking about in books, online, but the real reason you come to a conference is to network, to meet people and build those connections, because those connections are going to be your portfolio for the future, and they’re going to be able to plug you into new ideas, also inspire you.

Christopher: It’s about people.

Ari: Right.

Kevin: Exactly.

Ari: Pull you out of the cave (laughs).

Kevin: I like one of the things you said as well which was you have managers come, right, these conferences in general, generalizing here, aren’t just for the Web nerds, they’re for anybody in the space who wants to know a little bit more, who wants to be a little bit more connected, and I think what you guys are doing is great, I think you guys have so much more to share that you probably could. So, to wrap things up just a little bit, I know we’ve already talked a little bit about In Control, if you guys could maybe talk about yourselves, where people can find you and contact you about learning a little more about these things.

Ari: Oh, sure, sure, sure. Well, my name is Ari Styles, once again, and our site e4h.tv, and I’m on Twitter, I always like draw it out for people because it’s @ari4e, because my name was taken so I had to improvise there.

Kevin: The number 4, right?

Ari: Right, the number 4, right, the number 4, so that’s me.

Christopher: I’m Christopher Schmitt, and I’m on — christopherSchmitt.com is my blog, which I neglect to my own peril, but I’m also on Twitter, I ‘twit’ a lot at @teleject; I’m, again, e4h.tv, and also incontrolconference.com is where you find our conferences, face-to-face conferences. Also our big conferences for online are csssummit.com and also accessibilitysummit.com.

Kevin: That’s the one I really — I haven’t spent enough time with Accessibility, and I really need to check that one out sometime soon.

Ari: Yeah, that one is really popular, we’ve had some in the past that are UXsummit, CSSsummit, accessibility, jQuery, and we also have a JavaScript one that’s more about optimizing your code as well. So all of those have been really successful in the past, they’re going to repeat this year, and then we also always try a few new ones.

Christopher: Yeah, try to fold in a couple extra ones every year.

Ari: See what sticks.

Kevin: That’s awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much, and if you didn’t take anything away take this away, go to conferences, network, meet people and be inspired.

Ari: That’s right, be open to new experiences.

Christopher: Definitely.

Kevin: Awesome, thanks guys.

Christopher: Thanks, Kevin.

Ari: Thank you.

Kevin: In this next interview I speak with Evan Solomon from WordPress about the new CodePoet and what WordPress has planned.

So I’m here with Evan Solomon from WordPress, welcome Mr. Evan.

Evan: Thank you.

Kevin: Or is it Mr. Solomon, which one?

Evan: Ah, I don’t really like Mr. at all. I guess Mr. Evan sounds a little more not like Mr.

Kevin: (Laughs), so you have been at WordPress for a year, right?

Evan: I’ve been at Automatic for a year as of tomorrow, and I’ve been building stuff at WordPress for a few years before that, but just joined Automatic about a year ago.

Kevin: That’s awesome. You have an interesting story about how you came to WordPress because it started, in a way, here in South by Southwest, right?

Evan: It did, actually I got my offer letter to join the company from Matt, Matt sent it to me from the WordPress party at South by Southwest 2011, and then here I am at South by Southwest 2012, so it’s a nice kind of circular anniversary I guess.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, welcome to the SitePoint Podcast, and just to give some people context about what you do, what has been your experience and what have you done at WordPress so far up to this point, and then we’ll get into what you’re working on now, which I’m really excited to talk about.

Evan: Sure. So I’ve been a WordPress user for four or five year, kind of grew into doing more and more of it. My title at Automatic is Growth Engineer, and so I work partially on wordpress.com a lot around kind of experimentation analytics, so doing things like AB testing and just kind of instrumenting user behavior across the site and working with a few teams to do that.

Kevin: Is this in the plugins and on the website?

Evan: So this is primarily on wordpress.com for users just within .com, so we build features as plugins, and we’ve released a lot, and I want to do more of what we’ve built at open source plugins, but the stuff we’re doing on .com is just kind of within the user environment of wordpress.com.

Kevin: That’s very cool. So when you first started you came in as a PHP developer or what were you doing in that?

Evan: My title is Growth Engineer, like I said, which is sort of a weird title, I do a mix; the way I explain it is a little bit of kind of programming, just traditional writing, plugins and things, a little bit of data analysis, so when we run experiments or tests or get data back helping us kind of parse it and makes sense of it, and then a little bit of marketing, so talking to customers and kind of building out visions for products and things like that.

Kevin: That’s very cool. With all this stuff that you’ve been doing with WordPress you’re now moving into this thing that has to do with poetry, or code as poetry, as you say. So what is this product, what’s it called and what are you excited about, like why are you excited about this product?

Evan: So WordPress has a tagline, just code as poetry, and we sort of built a brand around that called CodePoet, and there’s been a couple iterations of the site there, it’s codepoet.com, and essentially it’s been a directory of WordPress developers, so if you want to find someone to build a plugin, build a theme, we help you do it, but it was primarily focused on a relatively small number of people doing really big projects. And what we’re doing now is trying to sort of for version 3 expand that, we want to make it a resource for everyone building on WordPress, there’s thousands or ten of thousands of people doing that, and we think we can help them in a few ways where Automatic has a big advantage.

Kevin: Would this be something people had to pay for, is this like a premium thing; I don’t know how much you can really get into right now, but it’s a question people might be interested in that sort of thing.

Evan: Sure, so we haven’t launched yet, it won’t be like a paid membership or anything, it’ll be open, it’ll be I guess in a sense limited; we want it to be focused on people who are building WordPress sites for other people, so consultants, freelancers, things like that.

Kevin: How do you verify that kind of information?

Evan: You know at this point we’re just not really worrying too much about it, it’s sort of like we’re focusing on all our communication about it to those people, and if other people slip in, I mean there’s nothing secret, we tend to open source everything we do, so there’s very few secrets, but that’s kind of who we’re focused on building stuff for.

Kevin: Okay, so it’s a community driven thing.

Evan: Community driven thing, there’s no membership fee or anything like that, we want to give away — we have a lot of stuff we want to give away for free. At some point we very well may have premium features or sell plugins or things like that, but there’s not going to be like an upfront fee to join or anything like that.

Kevin: Is there anything out there, I’m not aware of anything currently as far as — I know there’s things like the Stack Overflow, jobs boards and that kind of thing; how is that different from things that already exist in the space?

Evan: Yeah. So there’s a ton of stuff in the space, there’s a Stack Exchange site, a Reddit site, WPTavern, tons of just WordPress specific educational sites, it’s a really fragmented market. And the way we want to be different is we’re going to focus really just on the ways that Automatic being a large scale, probably the biggest WordPress company in the world, that we can kind of actually have an advantage with that scale. So we’re not going to be a client service company, we’re not going to build websites for people, we want to take kind of the expertise and experience and the ways that our scale can be leveraged and use that to give back and add value to people building sites with WordPress. Not just because it’s a good thing to do, which it is hopefully, but we, you know, WordPress growing and more people building on it is good for us, it’s good for them, it’s a very kind of mutually beneficial kind of thing.

Kevin: Okay. And so what marketplaces, you said freelancers and developers, that kind of thing, is this for .org stuff too or is this specifically for like .com marketplace?

Evan: It’s specifically for .org.

Kevin: Okay, .org.

Evan: I guess in theory you could use .com for this sort of thing, but by and large the people building sites for other people are using .org, they’re freelancers and consultants and agencies and things like that, and 99.something percent of those are .org. So we won’t limit anyone from .com, but we’re mostly focused on people using WordPress open source to do this.

Kevin: What was the inspiration like? What made you guys say hey we need to create this new product, this thing for people to come in and sign up? You said that you did see there was kind of a fragmentation all over the place, there was nothing really specific, and then also I guess this is a different .com, right, so now why not just jobs.wordpress.com or something to that effect?

Evan: So I mean we have automatic.com/jobs for hiring, so we’re perfectly happy to hire people into wordpress.com, and we sort of had a job directory, or consultant directory; the need that we saw, there’s the fragmentation, which is a problem, we hear tons of questions: how do I get started developing themes, how do I find a resource for this? And it’s hard to point people to a hundred different places, and we know from surveys and data and talking to people that there are tens of thousands of jobs created by WordPress from developers to hosting to content creators, all kinds of stuff. And we only had a way really to work with a very, very small portion of those, and it’s in our best interest for WordPress to grow and for those people to get better and recruit more people, and we think that there are some places we can provide value, expertise from technical things we can make. And so that was really the confluence is that there’s a huge opportunity with a number of people, a place we thought we could provide value, and a market we just weren’t really in, we didn’t have a good way to communicate with yet. They’re the people who we should have a relationship with as kind of a huge WordPress company in the space, but we had just sort of gone all around the edges and they were being served, or are being served, in a sort of fragmented way that we think we can at least help. We don’t want to replace Stack Exchange, we don’t want to replace Reddit, we just want to augment it and make it easier.

Kevin: So you chose the new domain, right, I’m correct in thinking this is a whole — you chose that because you want this to be its own beast in a way.

Evan: So, codepoet.com actually until a couple days ago had a directory, that’s now on directory.codepoet.com, but it’s separate from wordpress.com, it’s separate from automatic.com, because it has its own brand, we don’t want to confuse it with thinking that we’re trying to make people use wordpress.com or trying to hire them at Automatic, we’re not trying to change the businesses as they exist, we’re trying to build a resource for those people. So the branding is very much around that idea of clarifying who it’s for and what we’re trying to do.

Kevin: That’s awesome. So you have Code Poetry, and you have people coming in, but you mentioned something else in the midst of everything which was you said learning. What do you mean by learning, are there going to be tutorial linkups on this site as well; I mean what’s going on in that space?

Evan: So one of the first products that we’re thinking about building and that we’re prototyping right now are — we’re calling them eBooks, but essentially short form one-two-three page content. It’s easier to think about it in terms of where we think the market is sort of broken is that if someone asks you let’s say how do I start building themes, a very fundamental theme thing you should learn about if you’re a WordPress developer, you point them to the codex, which has great resources, you can point them to the code obviously, which is great, you can point them to the various Q&A sites, the educational sites, but all of a sudden I’ve talked about five places, and I don’t know that any one of those is the right place to start. And WordPress is growing so quickly that there’s such a wide disparity in experience, so people who have been doing it for years, like you and like me, and there are people who have been doing it for four months and they just don’t know a whole lot yet, and they don’t have the experience. And so what we want to do is make a clear path to success for the most important things in WordPress, build a theme, build a plugin, understand child themes, set up hosting, deal with clients, how do you negotiate contracts, what should be thinking about in terms of maintenance.

Kevin: So there’s more than just the code layer and the design layer, there’s also the business layer as well.

Evan: We want to help people who are running businesses on WordPress, and that is everything from code to design to business to — there’s lots of things that go into that, it’s not just how do you write better code, that’s part of it, but it’s really how can we use the scale of Automatic to help you grow your business, help you grow WordPress which helps us.

Kevin: Right. The ultimate question after learning all about Code Poetry, or CodePoet in your case, or code as poetry, the ultimate goal in this is for people to get connected, to learn things, and then to actually implement. What would be the way that someone would come into this network and use it to help themselves, would they put links to their websites on there, like what’s the interaction like from the programmer to the potential client, or whoever they may be interacting with in that space?

Evan: So at some point there may be some sort of a directory or public phasing thing, but really that’s a longer term possible idea for us. The way it can be implemented we hope is that we want to make it like an obvious choice for a place to help you learn about running a business on WordPress. An analogy that I’ve used is I use TurboTax to do my taxes, I’m not a tax professional, it’s not something where I’m an expert, but it is a go-to resource for me; when I need help with that I go to TurboTax, it turns out to be once a year because that’s how taxes work. We think CodePoet can act in some ways like that, you’re running a WordPress business, we’re not trying to create a site where you’re necessarily going to be on it everyday, it’s not going to be Reddit or Stack Exchange, although we might implement some of the things we can learn from there, but we want to make it an obvious place to start, and an obvious place that if you’re not using it to grow your WordPress business you’re doing it wrong essentially. And that’s our goal is to make a resource that focuses on the places we can be helpful, let other people handle the places we can’t, and just add as much value as possible to the stuff that we think we have some expertise in.

Kevin: Right. For those that are looking at this or hearing about it and they may have something similar to you, what is — is there a way for them to plug into this so they don’t lose their market share, their business to WordPress in the space, or do you feel like this is different enough to where people don’t really have to worry about it so much? But even if they don’t need to worry about it like how could they use this so it doesn’t break their business model?

Evan: Yeah, sure, no. I think the places where there’s good resources available we would rather use that, point people to that, have you contribute to CodePoet, whatever might work. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, like I said, we’re not — we want to focus on the relatively small number of areas, depending on how you define the world of WordPress, where we can have the most leverage possible. We have a pretty small team, you know, we’re not going to try and reinvent every WordPress site out there; if you have a great, let’s say just for example tutorial for setting up a local development environment, we’ll link to that, or you can contribute to CodePoet, or whatever might work.

Kevin: And that’s relevant in the documentation of WordPress as well, there are many articles that you’ll go to and at the bottom of the page there will be a list of related links; I know securing WordPress has a lot of links on that, and other more specific things, but the security side I think has a really good list of links.

Evan: Yeah. No, I mean it’s core to obviously WordPress’ philosophy of kind of open source and freely sharing information, and from out point of view it’s just not — and not to insult content farms too much, but that’s not where we think we can spend our time most productively is just figuring out what content is popular and writing it ourselves, it’s not a good use of our team. We want to use the expertise we have that’s unique, we want to provide the technical solutions we can that are unique, and we want to point you in the right direction. We’re not going to become a WordPress university that’s going to teach you everything you ever want to do, we want to get you started on a good path, give you like the high-level important points, maybe something to take away, and then if there’s more point you to the resources that are right for specific things.

Kevin: Exactly. Basically generate good questions for people, help them create better questions instead of — like I know when I first got into WordPress I had trouble installing it, and so I had all these questions but they weren’t really the right questions, they weren’t — like I didn’t think about okay I’m trying to install WordPress on Windows with IIS, and so I was like, ah, WordPress is broken, no, I’m using IIS and not Apache which the tutorial I was looking at was going through, so –

Evan: And I think the reason for that is that the information is so fragmented that everywhere you go assumes you’ve read something else, how to tell what often.

Kevin: Or you’re using a specific set of hardware.

Evan: Exactly. And so what we want is — there’s a real gap we think in the starting point, whether it’s starting with WordPress or starting with a specific part of WordPress, there’s not a good place to start, economical source you might say, and that’s what we think we can help and aggregate all this expertise, all this existing content, technical solutions we can build to help stuff, all that can flow into giving you a good place to start and to always come back to when you need new information, new resources to run your business on WordPress.

Kevin: Yeah. CodePoet sounds awesome, like it sounds like it’s totally open like you can totally come in, right.

Evan: I hope so. I think it’s good market, I know WordPress is growing fast.

Kevin: Right. So it’s not a commercial solution, you don’t have to pay for CodePoet, right, so anybody can come in and learn and get involved.

Evan: Yep.

Kevin: I think that is awesome. I think the fact that you’re trying to bridge the new people to the veterans and everything, I think that’s awesome, and I think that’s really, really great. So like the stuff you’re doing totally two thumbs up from me.

Evan: Thank you.

Kevin: I’m sure people listening to this will be super happy to hear that WordPress is kind of building this out; hopefully folks will link to this. What should they do to share this with the community and get what you’re doing out there? I know the launch date isn’t quite here yet, maybe you can talk a little bit about that too so people can kind of work off of this, because this is up and coming, this hasn’t happened yet.

Evan: That’s right, yeah, so we’re planning on launching in the next month or two let’s say, right now if you go to codepoet.com you can drop your email address in, and what we’re really focused on is getting feedback from customers, so we’re building a little bit of these sort of ideas that we have, and we want to get that out to people as soon as possible, get feedback, launch something, iterate on it. So to get involved I guess, or to kind of know what’s going on, signup, if you’re a web developer, consultant, freelancer building WordPress sites, tell other friends or do those things, we’re not focused on end user stuff right now, I don’t think we will be. It’s really focused on people building sites for other people, and we want feedback, we want people who are going to be able to look at stuff we’re working on and say this is useful or this would be more useful, and that’s really our goal right now.

Kevin: That’s awesome. So I can’t wait to see this, and thanks so much for coming on, Evan.

Evan: Thanks for having me.

Kevin: Yeah.

Evan: Cheers.

Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about today’s show please get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepointd-o-t-c-o-m. You can find me on Twitter at @kevindees, and if you’d like to leave comments about today’s show check out the podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast; you can subscribe to the show there as well. This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Dees, 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.

SitePoint Podcast #154: Education and CSS3 at South By Southwest

Louis Simoneau — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:07:08 +0000

Episode 154 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) has two interviews for us from South By South West. He interviews firstly Bob Simonette (@Bongo_Bob) and Jeremy Stepp on web education, and then Chris Mills (@chrisdavidmills) who works for Opera about HTML5 and CSS3.

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SitePoint Podcast #154: Education and CSS3 at South By Southwest (MP3, 35:51, 35.4MB)

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Episode Summary

Kevin, Bob and Jeremy cover various things about Web education including how web educators can improve their courses and also how students can play their part in improving the courses they take part in. Kevin then talks with Chris about how we can take a pragmatic approach to the use of HTML5 and CSS3. Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/154.

Interview Transcript

Kevin: Hi, and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Kevin Dees and today we have two remotely recorded interviews at South By Southwest this year for you. The first of these is with Jeremy Stepp and Bob Simonette on Web education. Both of these men are practiced Web educators and have been in the field for some time.

So I’m here with Bob Simonette and Jeremy Stepp, tell me if I butcher your name in any way.

Bob: No, that’s pretty good, you got it.

Kevin: So, I’ve been following Bob on Twitter for a good two years now, and we’re still at South by, we’re at the Hampton Inn, and Bob and Steven are teachers, they’ve been teaching on the Web for quite a while from what I understand; how long has it been?

Bob: I’ve been — as far as doing Distance Ed or just teaching in general?

Kevin: Teaching, teaching.

Bob: Eleven years, so almost eleven and a half years now.

Kevin: So, you teach the Web specifically, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you because in the Web space there’s a lot of this kind of negative connotation that goes along with education in the Web, and not without good reason, because the Web is young, it’s only been around 20 some-odd years now, and so it’s very hard to have a solid curriculum with something so young; other things that they teach have hundreds of years of studies and things that you can go off of, such as mathematics and language.

Bob: Right.

Kevin: But the Web is a different beast in and of itself, and you get to teach that on a day-to-day basis. And one of the things I want to kind of make the topic of this conversation is how students can work to make education better for themselves because, you know, the learning has to come from the student, right, it can’t — it does come from a teacher but the student has to communicate that to the higher education, right, I would say to help you push that to the people that you have to talk to to get the curriculum. And so while there is a little bit of background noise here, it’s a little bit earlier in the day, I would like to get maybe some viewpoints that you have on some of the day-to-day things that you do in your classes.

Bob: Okay, well, in my classes in particular I teach most of the front-end stuff, the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, I also have a class that deals with putting video and audio and those types of things onto the Web. And so for me especially, and you’re right, it is the student, it does have to be up to the student moreso now than ever, that wasn’t the case really when I started eleven years ago, started teaching in the higher Ed space, I was doing it in corporate instruction from a corporate aspect before that. But some of the things that I have to deal with, probably the biggest issue is the rapidly changing pace of the Web.

Kevin: Right; HTML5, CSS3 now just from, what, two years ago people weren’t talking — I mean they were talking about it, but not like they are now.

Bob: No, not like they are now. And I mean even when dealing with other technology, I teach at a technical college and so there’s lots of technologies, but we probably are one of the few on campus that the rapid change of pace just — it’s really difficult to keep up. It’s difficult from the standpoint of myself as an instructor to stay up with the trends in technology because I’m busy grading and revising curriculum and all that, and then of course it’s also difficult in the sense with the students deciding how much of what are we going to give them, because we’re a two-year school Associates Degree program, so we only have — we have a limited number of hours that we can give to a student, and there is so much in this field. And so we have to kind of try to stay focused in on what do they need on an entry level kind of –

Kevin: Right, the basics, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, right, these are courses that you teach?

Bob: Right. But in our program we also do Flash, PHP, cover databases, we’ve been doing Cold Fusion, I think that’s going to be going away in the fall, but we have several other classes on e-commerce, creating shopping carts, all of those kinds of things, so it’s pretty broad, but we do have to pick and choose.

Kevin: So what is that process like of picking and choosing? I’ve sat on the board for ECPI, which is like kind of a fast-paced program in the South, I’m sure it’s elsewhere as well, but they’ll bring in like a bunch of practitioners and they’ll say what does next year hold. When I sat on it we talked about things like mobile space, right, at the time JavaScript wasn’t being taught as much, and so that and jQuery; like what are some of the processes that you have; do you have things like that or is it something else, is it basically the students need to complain and say we don’t feel like this is good enough?

Bob: Well, we don’t want the students to complain, no, but we do have — we have an advisory board that meets once a year with all the faculty and the department chair, some of the administrative folks, and during that meeting that’s kind of what we try to get from them is direction as to where we need to take the curriculum, because you know we can come to like South by Southwest and I can go home crazy about this is the next big thing, but out there in the business world they’re not interested in that, or they’re not interested in that as far as bringing people in as a new hire. So we rely quite a bit on our advisory board to give us that direction and tell us what is it, and the advisory board’s made up of folks from the industry who hire people in also from education as well, and we try to get a pretty broad spectrum of folks on our advisory board because we need to know that, we need to know, for instance, I just was looking in a book store and I saw these books on Ruby on Rails and I had heard about Ruby on Rails, and so I got a book and I started messing with it, and I thought oh, yeah, we need to get this in, and I brought that to the advisory board several years ago and they said, well, really not that much. So, I might have gone off and tried to fit it in the curriculum somewhere, but they kind of said no don’t worry about that right now and, in fact, it’s their direction why we’re taking Cold Fusion out of the program as well on their advice.

Kevin: So I think that kind of what we’re saying is very true in that in the industry what kids really need to know, and what I wanted to know when I was in school, was what are kind of the basic concepts that I need to know to be a good programmer, not necessarily what is the specific language, but how do I go about programming properly, right. And so I think that’s one of the wonderful things that Web Standards do, W3C, I know the WASP helps with that, like basically saying these are the methods, these are the web standards that we need to move in the direction of, not necessarily specifically to the technology, even though at its core that’s what it’s about, it’s really about the practice of moving the industry forward. And so I think the advisory boards are really good, and it’s really good to hear that the industry is doing things as well. From your experience what can students do to better help you help them, right? Because when I was in school we would complain, we’d say, oh, we don’t feel like we’re learning the best stuff, or we feel like it’s going to be out of date, but we wouldn’t really tell that to the teachers, we’d just kind of gripe in our own little circles, right. What would you like to hear from your students, and what can students listening to this go to their teachers and say, hey, this is what we need?

Bob: Yeah, that’s a really good point because I always feel like I don’t hear enough from the students, usually it’s a complaint about too much work or something like that, but, you’re right, I would love for students to say I was on the Web and I saw this, I read this blog, or I saw this article and what about that, and are we going to get that, are we going to cover that anywhere in this class or some other class in the program.

Kevin: Right.

Bob: And those types of things, or on the other side, like maybe I would love for them to come and say, you know, we’ve been talking about XHTML but I’ve been reading all about HTML5, what’s the deal, I want to get more of this. And I do get that occasionally from a student here or a student there, but I would like to hear it more from as many students as possible. I’ve even tried to elicit that kind of information, and students seem to be kind of shy about doing that.

Kevin: I think that is a pretty big barrier there, because I know when I was in school like basically you’d go and you’d read things online like you’re talking about, like I’d read a blog post and I would kind of, you know, you’d stick your chin out just a little bit, you know, you’re proud of yourself, and then you wouldn’t really go to the teacher and say anything. And I think looking back that was kind of a mistake because the teacher is looking for help, like I still go to my teachers from time to time and kind of send them emails and say, hey, here’s something I found after-the-fact, because I have now looking back like, wow, that could have been really helpful. So, with the students giving you kind of what they’re looking at, what they’re thinking, what would be your advice for a student to go and find those things? Like I know, for example, we mentioned the W3C, WASP InterAct, what are some other places that students can go to kind of see what’s out there to get that information and bring it back to their teacher?

Bob: Well, along with those that you mentioned, Opera, the Opera education, their space, they have a lot of good articles and materials that students can go to see what’s going on and to augment what they’re getting in the classroom. Another thing is I try to encourage my students to get a hold of a few blogs and then maybe from there they’re going to find some others.

Kevin: Right.

Bob: A List Apart is a great place to start, and what the students should do is when they find these blogs they should go back to their teacher and say, hey, I was reading this, what do you think of this person, because there’s so much out there some of it’s still old and may not really be relevant, and students may not know what’s relevant and what isn’t’, hopefully their instructors do. And so it’s a good idea for them to come back and say have you ever read this blog or what do you think about this? I tell my students at the beginning of the semester “I don’t know it all,” there’s no way, there’s just no way; the day of that kind of paradigm where the instructor held all the knowledge and you just dumped it in their heads, that’s gone, I mean it’s over and should be over, because all the knowledge is out there if they will go out and search for it. So, I try to get them on to some solid blogs, like I said, A List Apart, John Allsopp, all the rock stars, you know.

Kevin: Right.

Bob: And also I point them to places like Smashing Magazine. I like Smashing Mag because it combines, it goes out and gets all these articles and then puts them all together, kind of aggregates it, which is really nice; SitePoint, W3 Schools, those two, W3 Schools has some good tutorials that they keep up-to-date. I’ve gone out and found a lot of tutorial sites, they’re just not up-to-date.

Kevin: I know W3 Schools has taken a lot of flak in the past for not keeping everything they have up-to-date, but when you think about the W3 Schools, like they have a lot of information, right, and so it’s understandable on a basic level to say, hey, cut them a little bit of slack. But at the same time like when I Googled, when I was first getting into this when I Googled how to make web pages W3 Schools came up, and that’s where I learned a lot of my CSS, basic CSS stuff, and I thought it was a great resource because I learned it, right. Now, I learned that everything they said might have not been perfect, which can include any site, right, because some people are going to talk about something that’s actual and technical, and other people are going to talk about things that are abstract and kind of just ideas. So I think the list of things that you put out there are — you couldn’t come up with a better list, you got Smashing, I know this is going to be part of the SitePoint Podcast, you got SitePoint in there, right. To kind of wrap some of this up, what would be the one thing that you would say to students, and what would be the one thing that you would say to other teachers, like what are things that you’re doing, maybe you need to ask a question or maybe you need to make a statement; what are those two things?

Bob: Well, for the students I would definitely say — actually I’ll quote Andy Rutledge, or not quote, I guess paraphrase Andy Rutledge, but, your education, you have to basically own your education.

Kevin: I totally agree.

Bob: I think he said you have to go steal it. You really do. It’s really, really important that students go and say this is what I’m doing right now, I’m getting an education, and I’m going to do whatever it takes. And in this area where we’re talking about technology, and specifically the Web, doing whatever it takes means getting out there and reading and going beyond your textbook, beyond what your instructor, teacher, professor is giving you in the classroom, and finding out what’s happening out there right now, and then taking that back to your instructor and saying — asking what about this; ask, ask.

Kevin: Ask the questions while you can.

Bob: Ask the questions while you can. As far as to other faculty, number one, get on board with Web Standards; if you’re not there then, you know, as far as faculty teaching the Web, Web Standards, I can’t stress that enough; I’ve been a Web Standards advocate since 2001, and that needs to be. And please do whatever you have to do to bring your programs current, get them current; I know that’s hard in some places. We’re very fortunate where I teach in that we don’t have somebody else telling us what our curriculum is going to be, we get our input from our advisory board, and we take that and we kind of put that together and we discuss it, but then when it comes right down to building those classes and the content, that’s up to us, we do that. And that’s great because we’re a small department and we’re all on board with being right on the edge, and I know it’s hard in some places, especially four-year institutions.

Kevin: Doesn’t the WASP InterAct Group or the InterAct Web Standards, is that right website? I can’t recall the URL precisely, but that has a whole set of curriculum already pre-built with the current stuff, right?

Bob: Yeah, I’m not exactly sure either, but if you Google WASP Interact it’ll get you there. And, yes, they do, they have — it’s not complete yet, but they have a lot of good stuff out there.

Kevin: And it’s not meant to be, right, it’s meant to be growing with the industry.

Bob: Right. And they have, you can see where they’re going to go and when they’re going to come out with things, but, yeah, I’ve already used some of what they have, it’s great stuff.

Kevin: Awesome. Well, I know you didn’t get to say much (laughs), but –

Jeremy: Well, I mean Bob covered pretty much all of it, I mean you’re talking about the students having to own their own education, I mean that’s exactly right; students have to have the passion to be able to go out and learn this stuff, because without that they’re not going to get what they need to out of being in school.

Kevin: I think the college experience, too, like especially for the younger ones coming in like I did where you just come straight from high school to college, you kind of, in a way, if you’re not serious about it you just consider it that one more thing you have to do, ugh, I just want to go hangout with my friends or, you know, do whatever, and you kind of have to get past that in a way and say, you know, because you don’t have to go to college, right, but you have to say I’m going to college for me and this what I want to do, I want to make websites, I want to build applications, or whatever it is, you have to be serious, you have to be exactly what you were saying, passionate, I think your advice is spot-on there.

So to wrap things up, where can people find you to ask you questions maybe about some things?

Bob: Where can they — like an email address?

Kevin: Well, email, Twitter, whatever your preference is as a springboard to a conversation.

Bob: Okay, well Twitter, my Twitter name is @bongo_bob, so @bongo_bob.

Kevin: And yours?

Jeremy: Just shoot me an email, jeremy.stepp@tstc.edu.

Kevin: Alright, excellent guys, well thank you very much for coming on, and hopefully this is going to help the students get out there and be more productive and also learn some really good things and make education better, because it does, it builds up from within and not externally. So, thank you, guys.

Bob: Thank you.

Kevin: This next interview is with Chris Mills of Opera. Chris spoke this year at South by Southwest about HTML5 and CSS3, and the pragmatic approach we can have to using these technologies today, which include using Modernizr and things like Normalise CSS. I hope you enjoy the interview.

So I’m joined by Chris Mills here at South by Southwest. You gave a talk yesterday and I’d like to kind of hit on that a little bit, but first I’d like to say welcome to the SitePoint Podcast.

Chris: Well, thank you having me, Kevin; it’s great to be on board.

Kevin: So, your talk, you spoke about CSS3, HTML5, basically the new cool tools that you can use in the web development community, web design community, right now. And not only that, but you also talked about some of the issues around that, one of them being compatibility between browsers and what parts you can use. I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about some of these things like CSS3 gradients and transitions, all this stuff that you kind of demoed during your talk.

Chris: Okay, sure thing, I mean this is really one of the key subjects I’ve been focusing on for the last couple of years, I mean I work in the Opera Developer Relations Team, for people that don’t know, and a large part of our work tends to focus on site compatibility, and this is particularly prevalent for Opera because we’re a more minor player in the browser fields, and the trouble is that a lot of developers too easily forget about us. Sometimes they’ll make silly mistakes like only using WebKit properties where they could use prefix properties, where they could quite easily –

Kevin: Which has been a big kerfuffle here recently, right?

Chris: Absolutely. They could quite easily use all the different prefixes, or they could even use a solution such as Prefixer or Prefix less, to actually use some sort of JavaScript solution to apply the prefixes appropriately for the browser view in the page to cut down on the amount of work, because it’s obviously a complete pain having to add all of those multiple versions of properties to every style sheet you write.

Kevin: Exactly. You can easily go from 100 lines of code to 1,000 just by adding, you know.

Chris: Absolutely. But the mission here really is not to obsess over just Opera compatibility, my mission is to try and make it, websites and web apps, more compatible for all web users, so I have a large focus on compatibility with older versions of IE that still have significant market share, and also users of assistive technologies; I think the simple strengths of the Web, such as universal access, are often forgotten when you’re dealing with these shiny new toys.

Kevin: Right. So on the cusp of all this new CSS stuff coming in we’ve seen a lot of JavaScript libraries, such as Modernizr, come onto the scene to kind of help in this transition phase where technology’s just coming in. Where do you see these JavaScript libraries and the stance among the CSS tricks that you can do now?

Chris: Well, I think things like Modernizr for feature detection and polyfills and shims, things like CSS3 PIE and respond JS and media queries, JS for media query support, I think they’re pretty much essential if you want to use these tools in this day and age, because until the older versions of Internet Explorer die off in terms of their market share, we’re going to need to use things, because you can sit there and say, okay, as long as the content is still at a base level usable and accessible to use of those browsers, as long as it’s there at that base level then it’s okay, but often clients are going to want more, so instead of just relying on something like graceful degradation to say okay you’re not going to have the rounded corners and the gradients, but you’re still going to be able to read the text, you’re going to want some more intelligent, more reasoned, solutions for those users, so using Modernizr to detect for support for those features and then provide a really, really nice looking experience that’s different but still looks really good is very important.

Kevin: Is there some sort of practical application like maybe folks coming out of school or those working on small business websites, right, the time allocation is very tough to justify going in and using something like Modernizr; is there some sort of system that they can use to kind of creep into the new technology without increasing their budget time? I know that’s kind of a bigger question than maybe you were expecting.

Chris: No, it’s cool, it’s an interesting question, and it’s these kinds of things that we really are going to have to start sitting up and answering because, you know, it’s easy to sit there and just preach how cool these new features are, but we really are going to have to start answering questions that are in the minds of real people out there making money for real businesses.

Kevin: Right.

Chris: So I’m quite happy to talk about that. I don’t see that there’s any specific methodology, maybe we should write one, who knows, I’d love to have a go at writing one, get together with some of the other open standards advocates and think about this stuff. But my advice would be that, yeah, it’s a total pain, but I don’t see that it’s any more of a pain than the stuff we had to do in the late 90’s at the height of the browser wars when we literally had to think about doing complete code forking for Netscape and IE back in those days. It’s a lot easier than it was back then I’d say, but obviously a lot of people new into the industry won’t remember that stuff, a lot of the recent graduates and stuff. So I’d say, you know, no matter how bad you think it is it was worse back in the old days.

Kevin: Right.

Chris: And I’d say you need to deal with this on a case-by-case basis, you know, each site you come to build you think okay, well, let’s start off by looking at what we want to actually accomplish with this site, let’s look at the tools we want to use, and then you should be able to fairly quickly build up some sort of mockup for what the content and functionality going to look like in the new shiny browsers that support the new shiny features. But then it’s always worth going back and just having a careful look at what’s your first impression at what it looks like in the older browsers, how easy is it to get it looking very much the same or building an acceptable alternative experience.

Kevin: I think that is a tough part, right, it’s getting the client or whoever is working with the Web, even if it’s a personal site, right; you do want that experience to be the same for all people because you invested your time in creating that experience in the first place.

Chris: Well, I mean experience the same is always a very sort of subjective term, isn’t it.

Kevin: Right.

Chris: I like to think of equivalents of service, which it’s an official term, it tends to get used a lot in the business community and the accessibility communities, the idea that if it’s not the same experience as long as the outcomes are the same for different users I think that should be acceptable, and I try to preach that a lot to developers and designers to try and sell that to their clients in terms of a message, you know. And I think it’s easier to sell that message to clients; now we have such an increase usage of alternative browsing devices such as browsers on mobile phones and browsers on tablets, because back in the old days it used to be very hard to say to a client, “Well, here’s a load of different browsers on your same desktop screen, but it looks different on that one because that one doesn’t support the features as well,” and the clients going to look at it and say, “Well, I don’t care, I just want it to work.” Whereas these days you can show them a physical difference, it’s a much smaller screen, the experience can’t be the same, and I think clients find it much easier to get their heads around that and to swallow that.

Kevin: Right, because it’s not just a different screen size, it’s a completely different medium.

Chris: Absolutely.

Kevin: And the experience does need a change, right, we’re seeing a lot of the responsive web design stuff now, and some of the Mobile First approach that’s coming out and people are starting to pay attention to. So one thing I want to ask you about is the implementation of some of these JavaScript libraries and new CSS techniques, right. I know people in the past have used IE conditional comments, and if you don’t know what those are you can kind of Google them, but how do you feel about using the conditional comments, or do you think that the builds in functionality with Modernizr, like YepNope is a good solution? And then on top of all that is JavaScript being turned off really an issue, because most websites don’t work if they don’t have jQuery, everybody uses jQuery now, right.

Chris: And the HTML5 stuff really requires JavaScript to be of use. So let’s go through these one by one, and in terms of the people not using JavaScript I’d say that really depends what sector you’re in, I’ve actually come across quite a lot of people who have that as a requirement in public sector, health care and Government, for example, places like that; there seems to be a large number of people that still have that as a requirement, you know, it sounds a bit of a scary thing for this age, but the people are still out there, so.

Kevin: It absolutely makes sense, right, if you need to find out what prescription you’re taking or how much to take, or contact your doctor, those are important things and they need to be accessible at all times regardless of your environment.

Chris: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think in terms of the accessibility aspect, a lot of — I’m not saying this is particularly right, but a lot of agencies, etcetera, making private websites, they put it a bit easier because largely you can kind of say, well, this is the target audience so therefore we don’t really need to make it accessible for people without JavaScript, and we don’t need to specifically focus on people using screen readers, although I’d say it should be the right thing to do anyway. But for government sites they have it as an actual official mandate that you have to allow all people to access these services, all people must be treated equally.

Kevin: Right.

Chris: Allegedly, but yeah, so –

Kevin: But what are the legal things, I know there’s the WCAG and then the ones for the U.S. is the 508, correct?

Chris: Yep, section 508, yep, that’s absolutely right, and these things must be followed because this is where government’s going to actually fall foul of the law in a very objective way, whereas but then again anybody can sue anybody for anything, can’t they, but it’s a bit less, actually written into the mandate than it is for public sector. But then the next thing you were asking about was –

Kevin: Was the JavaScript; YepNope versus conditional comments, like where do those things fall in?

Chris: Well, so I think YepNope is a slightly different thing, that’s a — for people that don’t know that are listening, that’s a conditional resource loader so you can kind of say, well, you know, for example if the browser coming to view the site is IE6 and you want your media queries to work then you can conditionally load in something like Respond JS to actually provide support for those media queries in a polyfill kind of fashion, whereas conditional comments can still be used for that kind of thing, you can just basically say, well, I’ll put a conditional comment around this script tag to say if it’s IE then I can load this script kind of thing. So in essence I suppose, yeah, they do quite similar things, it’s just that YepNope is a slightly more intelligent way to do it which goes beyond just IE, you know, you can do that for more different browsers, and it’s a more intelligent way because it’s more like a feature detection stance, really, rather than just a single browser. You can say if the browser supports this feature then load this library, not if the browser is IE then load this library in because I mean it’s a lot more shortsighted to just do your specific browser support, browser-sniffing stuff.

Kevin: Where can you get YepNope, how can somebody access that and kind of play with it?

Chris: It’s actually included inside Modernizr by default, so if you use Modernizr you’ve got access to YepNope, pretty simple.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. So, and with Modernizr I know in your talk you said that’s like 42k, right?

Chris: 49, but let’s not split hairs.

Kevin: But that’s a significant page load, right, especially when you’re thinking about a slower browser that you would be testing for and using this tool for, right, so let’s say Internet Explorer 7.

Chris: Sure, yeah.

Kevin: And it’s going to take a little bit longer for it to process everything. Is there a way to make that smaller to where you don’t have to download as much?

Chris: So the fantastic thing is I think circa about Modernizr version 2 they actually included a system where you can go to the website and you can check and uncheck different boxes to exactly say which tests you want included inside your version of Modernizr, then you can load a custom version that includes just the tests you want for an actual production site. Whereas you can just get the version that has all of them included in the development version of Modernizr just for when you’re playing with it, but yeah, for the actual production version you can do that, which is great because you can significantly cut down the amount of kilobytes inside the JavaScript file.

Kevin: So you could totally get into the single k’s.

Chris: Absolutely, yeah, I’d say if you want, yeah.

Kevin: And then on top of that I believe Modernizr also includes the HTML5 shiv, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Kevin: So what is the shiv for HTML5, why is it important?

Chris: Okay, so the reason it’s important is because older browsers, again, we’re coming back to our old friends IE6 to IE8, they’re not going to support those HTML5 elements yet, they will treat them as unknown elements, which by default an unknown element is just basically treated like an anonymous inline element of some kind. And this is obviously a problem because a lot of the new HTML5 semantic stuff is pretty much turbo charged divs with more specific applications for semantic markup. So the first thing you need to do, by the way, this is not in the HTML5 shiv, this is just a CSS thing, you have to set all of those elements to display as block in your CSS to actually make them behave in most browsers, but IE needs some extra help, and this is where the shim comes in.

Kevin: Right. And so display block is included in things like Eric Meyers new version 2 of the CSS Reset, and there are other CSS Resets that also include this, right?

Chris: I mean that’s another interesting topic; I’m not actually a big fan of CSS Resets because I think they go too far. So, yeah, I actually prefer normalized .CSS because instead of adopting the root of resets, which just get rid of everything and make you have to start from the beginning again, Normalize actually just makes the styling of lots of things a lot more consistent across browsers, particular emphasis on stuff like form elements, which as many listeners will know seem to have very, very different looks across different browsers, particularly with IE6 and IE7, so they’re a total pain, but Normalize gets rid of a lot of that pain. Anyway, going back to the question of shivs, or shims as is the correct word (laughter), I believe that was due to an incorrect usage of a word on a John Resig blog post, and then it just got called shiv forever after, but it’s actually a shim. So what the shim does is it includes a bit of JavaScript code to, again, fix old friends IE6 to IE8, because even if you use CSS to declare those semantic HTML5 elements as block elements, IE still just refuses to pick them up and style them. So what the shiv does is it creates an instance of each one of those HTML5 elements in the DOM using document create element, and after that they can actually pick up the styles. It also includes a thing called the IE print protector which solves the specific problem on old versions of IE, it then screws up and can’t print those HTML5 element when you try and print the page out, so it fixes that problem as well.

Kevin: And that’s all included in Modernizr.

Chris: Yep.

Kevin: Except for the Normalize CSS.

Chris: No, Normalize CSS is a separate thing.

Kevin: Right, so you have to Google that and find it.

Chris: Yeah, you can find Normalize CSS pretty easily.

Kevin: Excellent. Well, is there any further thoughts that you have, things you might want to wrap up our conversation here today? And then after that where can folks find you?

Chris: So, the easiest way to find me is probably just to look me up on Twitter, it’s @Chrisdavidmills is my Twitter handle, so just please get in touch with me if you want to talk about any of this stuff. The only other thing I’d like to mention really is very briefly all of the education work I’ve been doing at the W3C, I’m the Co-Chair of the W3C Web Education Community Group, and our aims are to provide resources for teachers and students to teach and learn Webdev stuff in a much better fashion which is more in keeping with modern Web Best Practices, because a lot of courses out there really suck, to be blunt.

Kevin: Right.

Chris: And we also want to do a lot of outreach activities to get these materials to the people that could make most use of them, so if you’re interested in improving the Web of tomorrow through education please Google the Web Education Community Group and you can get in touch with me through those pages as well. So, yeah, anyway, thank you for having me.

Kevin: Yeah, thank you for coming on, have a good one.

And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about today’s show please feel free to get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m. You can find me on Twitter as @kevindees, and if you’d like to leave comments about today’s show check out the podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast; you can subscribe to the show there as well. This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Dees, 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.

SitePoint Podcast #153: Mobile First with Luke Wroblewski

Louis Simoneau — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:39:59 +0000

Episode 153 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Luke Wroblewski (@lukew), author of Mobile First by A Book Apart about what it means to design for mobile first, and why that is a winning approach for web designers.

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SitePoint Podcast #153: Mobile First with Luke Wroblewski (MP3, 28:46, 27.6MB)

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Episode Summary

Louis and Luke cover how you design for mobile platforms first and how this can provide a real ‘focus’ to the content and layout which benefits the design for all platforms.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/153.

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. Today on the show I’m very happy to have with us on the program Luke Wroblewski who’s an interaction designer and author based in the United States; hi, Luke.

Luke: Hey, how you doing?

Louis: Good, good, how are you?

Luke: Great.

Louis: So I wanted to have you on the show for some time now, I tried to get in touch with you a bit end of last year and finally managed to work out a schedule, and you’ve been pretty busy with conferences because you’re latest book came out at the end of last year.

Luke: Yeah, that was around October I believe on A Book Apart.

Louis: Right. And so this is a book called Mobile First, and this is an idea you’ve been talking about for some time even before the book came out.

Luke: Yeah, several years now actually.

Louis: Right. And I guess it’s maybe reaching a more critical mass point now with mobile.

Luke: Yeah, absolutely, it’s several years ago back in 2008, 2009 timeframe there were very few people who took it very seriously, but now I think it’s almost the exact opposite in that there are very few people that aren’t giving it some attention.

Louis: Right. So we’ll have a lot of opportunity to talk about Mobile First and what you mean by that in detail, but we could start by just sort of defining what you mean when you say Mobile First, and that’s the name of the book, and that’s the idea you’ve been throwing out for some time. What exactly does that mean?

Luke: Yeah, so it’s pretty simple, basically it means working on the mobile version of your software products first. Traditionally we’ve sort of done it the opposite way, we do the desktop/laptop versions, if you will, and then mobile if teams thought about it at all, it was a significant afterthought.

Louis: Right, and so obviously this comes at a good time, and like we were saying before, mobile is exploding in growth now, so we can sort of see why teams would want to start doing more mobile, but, what do you see is really the advantage above and beyond just getting access to that traffic, because you could get access to that traffic by doing mobile second, right.

Luke: Hmm-mm.

Louis: So what are the other reasons you suggest that people should go with mobile first.

Luke: Yeah, so there’s essentially three pieces to the reasons why, one you touched on which is just this crazy growth we’re having, and I think people will begin to operate differently, for example, in Japan, Mixi, largest social network there, 85% of their traffic comes from mobile now, whereas 4 ½ years ago it was 14%. So you start to really prioritize things differently when 85% of your traffic is coming from a particular channel, and a number of the largest websites worldwide are how hitting that inflection point as well, so, Facebook 425 million out of 845 million total users now on mobile, Twitter’s around 55% mobile, and so you’re seeing this happen with a number of companies; I believe YouTube in the next year or two predicts they’re going to have a majority of traffic on mobile as well. And so when that happens that becomes a pretty easy prioritization. And for the companies that that hasn’t happened to you yet, you know if you look at Facebook and Twitter as sort of lead indicators, since these are the largest websites on the Internet, their overall traffic patterns start to reflect the overall Internet at some point, and so if you look at them as lead indicators then it’s likely to happen to you at some point as well.

The other two reasons are the natural constraints of mobile, just sort of the human factors of having a portable device that has to fit in your pocket, so the screen has to be small, it has to work with spotty network connections so you can use it everywhere, it’s generally used with the fingers which are less precise pointing instruments because it makes sense to turn the entire screen into an interactive surface since it has to be portable and small, so all those constraints together are really good for overall design and ultimately business because they force you to prioritize and focus on the stuff that matters; there’s just not room for 50 navigation links like you have on a desktop web experience, there’s not bandwidth to waste on downloading huge images that provide no value. You have to get down to your core essence in order to actually make something usable on mobile.

And the third piece is while there’s all these constraints, there’s also a lot of opportunities, and those opportunities come from the very unique capabilities that mobile has in that the average Smart Phone today can do a lot more than your desktop or laptop, it knows where you are up to ten meters of precision, it knows the direction you’re facing from a digital compass, it has things like ambient light sensors, it knows like how close it is to other devices through things like Bluetooth, and so all these capabilities together add up for a much richer tapestry of options, if you will; you’re not just counting on things like page layout and a mouse and keyboard input, you have a lot of other things at your disposal. And if you start with mobile first, not only do you have this sort of constraint to keep you focused, but you also have all this opportunity of these new interactions, that you can use, which you wouldn’t have if you looked at other devices first.

Louis: Right. But I can imagine for a lot of designers those two factors would kind of play against each other, because some people might get carried away with all of the new capabilities and sort of lost part of the focus that they gained as a result of this restricted screen space and all of that.

Luke: Yeah, I think it’s a different kind of gain/loss I mean, right, it’s still a visible interface, and that visible interface still has a set number of pixels within which to work.

Louis: Right.

Luke: So that’s really more around information density/UI complexity. Where now it definitely is possible for you to go crazy and push all the complexity to like, you know, you can only shake the phone three times to get it to do something, or turn it to the left, and you go overboard on the capabilities, you can certainly do that. But I don’t think necessarily those capabilities alleviate some of the constraints that come with the device, right, it’s like both things are present, the constraints are there and the capabilities are there.

Louis: Right. And this is something that obviously designers and interaction designers and people who think about this a lot have been evangelizing for a long time the idea of really prioritizing what’s important and not cluttering websites. But I guess in your view now that there’s a business case for developing for mobile you can push that agenda more effectively to business stakeholders.

Luke: Yeah, I mean there’s actual physical constraints now, right.

Louis: Right.

Luke: Before you could say, oh, just add another link, there’s room (laughter), now there physically isn’t room, so you sometimes have to have those hard conversations, right.

Louis: Yeah.

Luke: Like, look, I’d love to add your 15th feature, but where’s it gonna go, it can’t go in here, there’s just no room. And somebody once gave me the metaphor that desktop websites or just sort of traditional websites are kind of like carp in a bathtub, that is, if you keep feeding it it’ll continue to grow to fill the amount of space it has available.

Louis: Yep.

Luke: And same sort of thing, you know, these things keep getting filled and filled until there’s no room left, and then some poor sap shows up there from a Google search or a Twitter link or something and they’re just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choice and content, and ultimately they end up doing nothing.

Louis: Right. So when you say mobile first, if a team is developing a website, say, and they start with the mobile version, and then how do you expand out from that into the desktop version without necessarily, well, preserving the benefits you’ve gained from that constraint? Like what’s the process that you use or that you’d recommend for making that evolution from the mobile into say the desktop version.

Luke: Yeah, I’d make the prioritization conversation that has to happen in order to fit things on mobile devices explicit, right, I’d involve people and I’d write it down, and I don’t think the prioritization of what services or information you’re providing for your customers changes just because the screen changed.

Louis: Right.

Luke: So your core value is the same across whatever device people are using to access your service. And once you get agreement on that and you write it down and everybody’s sort of signed off, then keep using that, right, don’t just toss it aside and say, okay, that was only the mobile thing, like make — sort of abstract that out from the mobile design process and have it be this is the prioritization of what we do and why, right, and that applies everywhere. And then when you move, when you get more into the tactical bits, and that’s sort of at the strategic high-level, when you get more into the tactical bits, Ethan Marcotte who coined the phrase “Responsive Web Design,” sort of put that philosophy together, has recently been talking about layout as an enhancement; I think that’s a nice way to think about it, which is if you get more screen space available to you in a different situation, well, that’s an opportunity to enhance your core value offering, right, it’s not an opportunity to change your core value and offering, it’s an opportunity to make it a bit better with some additional maybe features or information or whatever you can bring to bear on a larger screen.

Louis: Right. Obviously that’s a big shift for a lot of web designers and people who’ve been in this industry for a while. Everyone has this mentality of when you start to design a website you work out a layout and you work out a grid, and people have been thinking in this way for a long time. So, how do you think that the transition is going, do you see like a lot of smaller agencies are moving as rapidly as they could be to mobile, or is it still something that people struggle with.

Luke: I think it’s something that people are very interested in now, so the demand is there. I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t have deep experience in yet because they can’t, right, I mean the sort of modern mobile web instantiation is, I don’t know, like three or four years old, meaning having very capable web browsers on sophisticated mobile devices, so not a lot of people have experience with it, so what they tend to do is bring over what they knew from their previous modes of operations to this new form of media, right. And anytime you do that, whether it’s the transition from radio to TV, or the transition from, I don’t know, cinema to TV, whatever types of adjustment we’re talking about, the general tendency is for people to copy what they know, and then gradually try a few new things until finally they really figure out what works in that new space. And so we are at the early stage of that transition, and I think you have a few spot examples of people really figuring out what mobile’s great at and nailing it, but that’s definitely not the norm yet.

Louis: Right. So what are some examples in your mind of people that have done a great job with this, some inspiration?

Luke: Sure, so as a comparison point I like to compare like Flickr’s mobile web experience to Instagram’s mobile web experience.

Louis: Right.

Luke: So Flickr is something that grew up on the desktop Internet, and when you go their mobile website the whole thing is just filled with menus, and you have a whole bunch of choices, and you go in submenus, and it’s very reflective of taking all the stuff they had on the desktop and condensing it down to fit on these smaller screens. Whereas Instagram, which a service that went from zero users to 12 million in 12 months with just an IOS app, they made it all about the speed at which you can take a photo, make it look okay and share it, right, which is things that these devices are great at; you snap a picture, you want to get it out to some people, you want it to look good, they made that as fast as they possibly could, and they continue to work on making it faster. They also don’t start the experience with a whole bunch of navigation menus and things like that; they just fill the page with a stream of photos. And that aligns, again, with how people use devices, because you’re kind of bored, you want to see some interesting things, you pop it up, bam, there’s a bunch of photos, you just flick your finger and you’re looking at a whole bunch of cool things.

Louis: Right.

Luke: And so I think they’ve aligned with how people use these devices and tried to really work within the constraints and the capabilities of them, and I think it’s paid off tremendously.

Louis: Right. And so in that sense we’re looking at something which is on the one hand a mobile application which was developed natively; and Flickr’s mobile experience is largely through a mobile website.

Luke: Although they did have a couple iterations of apps as well.

Louis: Right. I guess my question was going to be how do you feel on that sort of interplay, you know, a lot of agencies are at a point where they kind of have to decide whether they want to specialize in doing mobile web or doing native development, and likewise any kind of a client who’s looking at a new mobile presence has to make that decision as well. What’s your take on when that’s a good idea or which of those choices to go for?

Luke: Yeah, I think it boils down to what your primary goal is for that effort. So the mobile web experience still remains the best way to provide access across all the platforms; it isn’t currently the best way to necessarily tap into what the devices can do, right, you are not going to get full potential of all of the capabilities of a decent Smart Phone right now inside the web browser, for that you have to build things natively. That said, if you build natively you’re not going to get the advantage of being on every single platform since every platform has a decent web browser now.

Louis: Right.

Luke: So there’s pros and cons, and what I think the emergent strategy is will create the mobile web experience for access, so people following email links, people following social network links, just people opening their web browser and doing a search can have a decent experience in the browser, and then we’re gonna use native applications when we really think the technology can be — can make our core offering either faster, easier or different from what we can do in the browser, and if that’s compelling enough then we’ll go invest the time and effort into making a native app.

Louis: Right. So you kind of see a well-designed mobile web presence as sort of a baseline that’s a requirement just because, again, as you said, email links or links from various sources, when it pops open on the device you want that to be a good experience that gives the user a clear vision of what your product is about.

Luke: Yep. And then the other sort of sad reality of native apps is it takes a lot of work to get that download from people, and just because you get that download doesn’t mean you’re going to have ongoing use, right. The magic number as I’ve heard it in a number of studies is around seven apps, which is how many apps people use regularly on their phone.

Louis: Right.

Luke: And then you have a whole slew of like 25% of the apps people download only get opened once and never get opened again, and only a quarter of them get opened more than 11 times, that means everybody else is just sitting there in the in-between zone, right.

Louis: Right.

Luke: And so it’s a lot of development time and effort just to get one open after you’ve worked so hard to get them to download it. Whereas on the websites people will access links all the darn time, in fact, they go to 24 different websites a day on a Smart Phone.

Louis: Right. So you brought up a lot of stats in that answer, and I guess that’s a big part of your approach to this kind of design is to really drill down into the numbers and figure out what people are actually doing, is that accurate?

Luke: I think you have to have an awareness of what you’re dealing with, otherwise you’re flying a bit blind, and it’s very possible for people to have these romantic notions of I’ll build a native app and everything will be great, right, whereas the reality of it — and, you know, these numbers I think they just help to illustrate the point, because if I were to ask the average person about their usage of native applications on their Smart Phone they would all tell me the same kind of story, right, which is there’s a couple apps I use all the time, and then there’s a whole bunch that just sit there and I never use them; you sort of don’t need stats to say that because everybody’s doing it anyhow, but it does help make it more visible what’s really going through the data.

Louis: Right. And it also prevents the sort of rationalization, you know, oh, I might only use seven apps, but our app people are gonna want to use, whereas if you actually have the data it’s a little bit harder to come out against it.

Luke: Yeah, it’s not just you, right.

Louis: (Laughs)

Luke: It’s kind of the general use of these things.

Louis: And do you take that approach when starting a new project to do a lot of research and get a lot of data about, for example, the website’s existing users or things like that before you even launch into thinking about what the approach is?

Luke: I think it helps to be as informed as possible. It’s very easy to come up with solutions for things, I think it’s a lot harder to actually take the time to understand the problems thoroughly; the more you understand the problem the more the right solution sort of emerges naturally.

Louis: Right.

Luke: But most people are likely just to go jump right into answers, right, and so I like to have as much of a handle on the problem as possible rather than just getting into answers right away.

Louis: Right. You talked a little bit earlier about Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design strategy, and that’s definitely gotten a lot of attention in the web design community in the past say year or so, and you’ve talked a little bit about the tradeoffs of that, and you’ve also talked about a strategy that incorporates some elements of server side code into a responsive technique, do you want to talk a bit about that?

Luke: Sure. So I’m not one of these people who thinks there’s only one way to do things, and I know Ethan isn’t either, so we both believe that there’s a time and place for everything, whereas other folks kind of jump the gun, if you will, and say this is the only way to do everything. I think it comes from, you know, especially in Responsive Web Design, if you’re a front-end web developer it’s a very tempting solution for you because it uses what you know already, and if you’re uncomfortable with the server then, yeah, Responsive Web Design sounds amazing to you because you never have to touch a server. But the reality is there’s certain things that each does well, and that’s probably more important, meaning it’s probably more important to understand what each one is good at and take advantage of it rather than clinging to the one that fits in with your world view. And the way I’ve been kind of trying to help people through that — because the other thing to look it, if you look at all the largest web companies out there, currently they’re not using Responsive Web Design; they’re all optimizing things with separate templates, right.

Louis: Yep.

Luke: And so you kind of say, hmm, well why are they doing that? And part of what I’ve been trying to make sure people understand is some of the reasons why they would do that, right, and when you understand those reasons then you can say, okay, well that makes sense for me or it doesn’t make sense for me. And the big thing that a separate approach gives you is the ability to optimize like hell for any particular device class, you know, your downloads, your interactions, even things like the markup source order, URL structure, all that, if you’re gonna say, hey, this is this particular type of device and serve something different then you get to optimize like crazy. But you do have to, and this is kind of the hard part of it, you have to know what device is hitting you so you can serve the right thing, and if you’re wrong you can come up with problems. Whereas Responsive Web Design you can’t necessarily optimize as strongly because you’re serving the same stuff to everything, and you’re basically saying hey device you figure out where you are and use what you need from all the stuff I’m giving you.

Louis: Right. So your approach, or the approach that you’ve talked about a little bit of Responsive Web Design with a server side element, kind of tries to bridge the gap between those two approaches.

Luke: Yeah, so it tries to do a bit of the things that are good, it uses the adaptive layouts and images and media queries aspect of a Responsive Web Design to adjust from a layout perspective, screen size perspective, but then it uses the server for where you want to optimize specific components. So let’s say you want to send small images down to mobile devices, and you want to send the big images to large screen devices or widescreen TV type devices, that’s the piece that you would put on a server and use device detection to change, but for layout you’d still use the same Responsive Web Design techniques.

Louis: And so that’s doing the device detection on the server side, you’re not using JavaScript to suss things out and then request the resources?

Luke: Yeah, no, they’re using it on the server side, and the general idea is send the device only what it needs as opposed to asking the device to take everything and then figure out what it should show or shouldn’t show or how it should show it using things like JavaScript.

Louis: Right. So are you generally opposed to the idea of doing this kind of JavaScript detection, or is it just something you don’t prefer as much?

Luke: I’m not as religious about it as other people are, there are some people who are very anti-user agent string detection, I understand some of the problems with it for sure. With the kind of combined approach of Responsive Web Design plus the server side stuff, which I call the REST, Responsive Web Design plus server side components, you’re doing it at a component level so there’s less potential to do bad, you’re not gonna totally go redirect and change the entire UI, you’re going to just adjust some pieces of it.

Louis: Right.

Luke: And there’s failsafes, meaning you put in some safe defaults so that if you are wrong you’re not going to destroy things, right.

Louis: Right.

Luke: You’re just going to maybe get a smaller image, and the default is going to be a safe default for the lower-end devices, and so worst case scenario the big picture device sees a smaller image but they still see an image, right, just the resolution’s a bit lower.

Louis: And, again, that’s one of those situations where it makes sense to start from the mobile device as a baseline, because even a mobile site on a full size screen is usable.

Luke: Yeah, exactly. It’ll be usable, it just won’t be as — and that’s the thing with the safe defaults, right, what you’re really taking the hit on is optimization, it just wouldn’t optimize to the extent that it would if you were right with the device you detected.

Louis: Right.

Luke: And, again, I am personally less afraid of being wrong in some of those places, provided there’s a default and provided it’s at a component level, I think that sort of not stuns, but it reduces the angst many people have around device detection solutions.

Louis: Right. How do you feel about the way that the mobile browser’s evolving? Because it seems like some aspects of current mobile device development are a little stunted by the fact that the upgrade path is maybe a little slower than it has been on the desktop, at least in recent years since we’ve had a rekindling of some sort of browser war. But I guess maybe on mobile because people actually have to go out and replace the device a lot of times, there’s not a clear upgrade path; it makes for a much more fragmented support playfield.

Luke: The thing that I’m actually more concerned with is the fact that the mobile browser is just falling behind in terms of support, right, I mean you can’t even upload a photo using a mobile web browser right now outside of Android 3+.

Louis: Right.

Luke: A tiny fraction of the handsets that are out there. So I’m more worried about getting those sorts of features that just brings — even that just brings the mobile browser to parity with the desktop browser, right, you’ve been able to upload photos on a desktop for years upon years. So that’s a little bit more concerning to me. In certain other areas the mobile browsers are kind of ahead of a lot of the situations we have to deal with on a desktop, meaning they got pretty decent CSS3 support, they have great HTML5 support, depending on where you look, right. So in some ways they’re ahead of the game, in other ways, especially in relation to how they interact with the mobile OS they’re pretty far behind. And it’s kind of concerning because that pushes people to go to native apps in places where maybe the only reason they’re going there is so they can do photo uploads.

Louis: Right. Coming back to sort of what I was saying, it’s more difficult for the innovation to happen because the browser’s just sort of what’s on your phone when you get it, and until you get a new phone that’s what you’re gonna use.

Luke: Well, I don’t know exactly how true that is because at least in the IOS world, right, the amount of people who upgrade the OS with which the new browser comes is very high.

Louis: Right.

Luke: You have a lot more fragmentation in the Android space, wherein like if iOS was Android the iPad3 would be supporting IOS 3.2, sort of illustrated by example, instead of IOS 5 or 6 or whatever it’s gonna support. There are definitely platforms where the fragmentation is a bigger deal and the OS’ don’t get updated very frequently, but then there are also OS’ like iOS where the updates come pretty regularly and the vast majority of people get them and they do get that new browser. That said, there are a lot more browsers than there are desktop browsers, and if you’re really gonna do the full rigor and test on everything you do have your work cut out for you for sure.

Louis: Right. In your work do you do a lot of device testing on a slew of platforms?

Luke: You know, I am a prioritization kind of guy, as we were talking about earlier, of the data; I look at what the biggest ones are and make sure there’s a great experience there and try and build that in a way that has fallbacks, so I’m not the person to go test on every single device and make sure it works everywhere, sort of like a recipe for badness to a certain extent.

Louis: Yeah.

Luke: But, that said, I will be — I do test on the devices that I think matter, because there’s a world of difference between what you see in like an emulator on your laptop of desktop than what you actually see on the phone in your hand.

Louis: Yeah, and in terms of obviously the way you interact with it, that’s one of the areas where the gap can be huge.

Luke: Yep, interaction. And even just the screen density, the overall kind of ergonomics of that phone, all that stuff really changed; something that could look good on the screen in terms of font size and layout and things like that, you put on the phone and it looks like crap.

Louis: Right. Maybe just to close off, what’s your vision of the way this is going to play out? I know you bring out a lot of statistics about the growth of mobile.

Luke: Hmm-mm.

Louis: Do you think that there’s a point in the future where there’ll be sort of a balance of what people do on mobile versus what they do on the desktop, because it feels like right now things are very much in flux because mobile is growing so much. What’s your vision for what’s going to happen over the next three or four years? I know everyone hates those kinds of questions, but –

Luke: Hey, if I knew I wouldn’t be talking to you right now, right, I’d be off making it. At a high-level I look at things that seem to be kind of inevitable, you know if I asked the question I say, “Do you think we’ll have more or less network connected screens in three to five years?” The inevitable answer is sort of, “We’ll have more,” right, and therefore I think people’s expectations will rise significantly in terms of being able to interop between those screens, and it will be interesting in the evolution of mobile devices to see what role the mobile device starts to play in that kind of universe. Is it kind of, you know, a remote control to other devices, is it more of a synchronization situation, is it more of a parallel functionality situation; these multi-screen features are the things that are kind of really emerging now.

Louis: Right.

Luke: Because in general we do have a pretty good sense of how people are using their mobile devices, they’re using it to look up and find out information, they’re using it to kill time, they’re using it to get small things done, and sometimes big things, but usually smaller tasks, right, every once in a while you’ll write a really long email, but usually you respond to quicker, smaller things. And they’re also using it to keep up with things that are important to them, whether that’s sports scores, financial information, news feeds and social networks, and so on and so forth. So we have a pretty good sense of the kinds of things that people are doing with these devices; I think the more interesting thing becomes how those tasks interrelate with other tasks on other screens as we get more networked products in our lives.

Louis: Right. Yeah, it’s definitely like you said, it’s a time where a lot of things are changing, and it’s going to be interesting to see how it develops and keep up with it. I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, it’s really appreciated. So your new book out is Mobile First, it’s on A Book Apart, so obviously people should check that out, and if people want to find you online do you want to drop links to your website and/or Twitter and/or other things?

Luke: Yeah, it’s all just @Lukew, if it’s on the Twitters or the websites (lukew.com) or God knows what.

Louis: Fantastic. Alright, well, thanks again for taking the time.

Luke: Great, thanks. Take care.

Louis: Thanks. And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to Sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to download or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #152: The Opposite Of Finland

Louis Simoneau — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:20:50 +0000

Episode 152 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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SitePoint Podcast #152: The Opposite Of Finland (MP3, 37:16, 35.8MB)

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Episode Summary

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Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/152.

Host Spotlights

Patrick: A Show with Ze Frank by Ze Frank — Kickstarter
Louis: Tower.js – Full Stack JavaScript Framework for Node.js and the Browser
Stephan: OpenGeocoder.net

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint podcast. Got a bit of a panel show going on this week, unfortunately Kevin could not be with us, but Patrick and Stephan are both here, hi guys.

Stephan: Howdy, howdy.

Patrick: Hey, it’s good to be here.

Louis: It’s good to be here for sure, how you guys been?

Stephan: Pretty good, pretty good.

Patrick: Pretty good, just working hard, keeping busy, looking forward to going to South by Southwest in about, what is it, two weeks, March 11th I’ll be headed — oh, I’m sorry, March 9th I’ll be heading out, and Kevin will be down there, get to see him and see a lot of other random interactive tech design people.

Louis: Very nice.

Patrick: It should be fun.

Louis: Yeah, I really, um, I should try and make it out there sometime, it’s a long flight when I was living in Quebec, but now it’s become an insane flight, so.

Patrick: Yeah.

Louis: Maybe someday, but I’m not making it easy for myself.

Patrick: Yeah, it’s like another extra couple days in the air.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: Stephan knows all about that.

Stephan: (Snickers)

Louis: Alright. So, what’s new on the Web this week, who wants to kick it off?

Patrick: Well, I’ll go ahead and kick it off with a story from .net Magazine, which gave us the Podcast of the Year Award a couple years ago, thank you for that again (laughter).

Louis: We’re just never gonna get over that.

Patrick: Yeah, it’s like give it to us again please, no. Anyway, kind of an interesting fodder story, not really news, but the story is Has the Address Bar had Its Day by Gus Andrews, and it talks about how Safari, Chrome and Firefox have experimented with getting rid of the address bar and how it has maintained nonetheless, covers some different viewpoints, like Jacob Nielson who says that he would support the idea of temporarily hiding elements of the interface like the address bar, but warned that “doing so is dangerous, what’s out of sight is often out of mind, and you definitely cannot rely on short-term memory in user interface design,” and that’s a quote from him. And other people say the address bar is a security feature because it shows people that they are on the right website, and then you have Jeffery Zeldman and Kevin Hoffman at Happy Cog who say it’s often a feature for advanced users because a lot of more novice people who surf the Web don’t really go to the address bar, they use the search engines or like Google.com and they type in addresses into the search box or find a website through some sort of search engine. So, yeah, I mean what is the thinking here, what do you think, Louis, about the address bar, is it something we can do without?

Louis: Not, definitely not; I don’t think so. I think that the address bar, first of all, I think both of those points are valid, one, you want your users to have an awareness of where they are, and even if it’s just peripheral vision this is what’s going on, and if you look at the way Firefox displays security certificate information in the address bar makes it very clear what the signing authority is and where you are, that’s one thing, but I also agree with this sort of power user feature, and I think it makes sense, especially if your application or your website is well designed and your URL structure is well thought out, it gives your users, and not even necessarily just power users, but it gives all your users the ability to use the URL bar as an interface into your application. For example when I’m using Twitter, yes, there are ways within the application to easily find somebody’s profile –

Patrick: Right.

Louis: — but none of them are anywhere near as fast as just going to twitter.com/ifroggy, for example, right; so I’ll get — if I’m looking at the interface and I want to jump to somebody’s profile, the first thing I’d do is go to the URL bar because Twitter has used this really simple, logical structure for the way that URL’s work, and once you’ve been using the app for even a little bit of time you figure that out and you can hop from place to place, and it’s always going to be faster than using the interface and clicking around and trying to search for things.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m just like you, if I know the username I go to the address bar. Now, is that a side effect of our advanced-ness do you think? Are we that high-level; is that not something that common people do?

Louis: You see I tend to think it’s probably something that the more visible the URL bar is, and as people are aware of it, it’s something that it’s there as an option for everyone, right, it doesn’t take very long to figure out using something like Twitter where people’s public handles are well known, you know, you know what someone’s user ID is in Twitter, whereas a lot of applications where you might not be exposed to people’s usernames, so even if you wanted to jump to their profile you wouldn’t know how. But there are plenty of applications where jumping to a category or jumping to different parts of the site are really easily accomplished through the address bar, and I think that having a good set of URL’s — now, there are plenty of applications that have terrible, terrible URL’s that mean nothing and that are just long strings of gibberish, and in those cases, yeah, the user doesn’t get any benefit out of it, but I think it makes sense to have that door open. And whether or not it’s a power user thing, you want the path for a regular user to become a power user to be available, right, and you’re never going to figure out how to use the URL bars and interface if you don’t see it, and you’re not going to suddenly decide to turn it on, so when you start using the Internet I think it’s an important way of understanding how the Internet works, that you’ve addresses, that there are pages at those addresses, and you jump between them either by links in the page or by going there directly.

Patrick: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, and I think what we’re talking about here is really hiding the address bar, because you can’t really get rid of it totally, but hiding it at least until someone gestures or they move to a certain area, and what you just said speaks to what Nielson said basically being out of sight out of mind; if people don’t see the address bar when they first get onto, you know, the Web, or at least start surfing heavily let’s say, then they’re not going to think to go check for it, they’re not going to look to see where they are on the Web or what the address is. And some would say maybe that’s a good thing because it simplifies the experience, but then others would say it’s not a good thing and there’s really no benefit to not knowing where you are, so I think that’s a great point, and I’m proud to say that my mom uses the address bar.

Louis: (Laughs) but to come back to the point you were making of hiding it when it’s not in use, every browser currently does that in full screen mode, so when you full screen your browser the address bar is not visible until you move your mouse to the top of the window, so I think that’s something that anyone can do pretty easily at the moment, I don’t think — I don’t know, you know, maybe there’s something to be gained from changing that, I don’t think so, I think especially I understand on mobile devices, and that’s pretty much already the case that you don’t see the URL bar because there’s just not enough screen real estate, but, you know, with the size of monitors and the increasing pixel densities, even on small laptop screens that we’re seeing now, I don’t think those pixels are that crucial.

Stephan: And if you want to hide it you can, right, I mean if you don’t want to see it you can hide it yourself, so, if the real estate’s really that important to you then you have the option, but I think it stays, it should stay, it’s important to the user.

Patrick: It’s really the battle of defaults is what this is about, battle of defaults, what should be there when they first open it before it’s customized.

Stephan: Yeah. I think the address bar needs to stay, personally, and maybe it’s just the way I browse, but I like it, I like having it there.

Patrick: Alright, that seems like a good finishing point. Anybody want to go next?

Stephan: The story I have is actually kind of some conflict going on in the Flickr Pinterest world, and some of the hubbub around Pinterest using content that is not necessarily made public to people. This originally broke, this story originally broke about VentureBeat had an article about Pinterest.

Louis: So can we step back one tiny step here and talk about Pinterest for a little bit, because I had not heard about it until something like last week, so I’m assuming there are probably a bunch of people who don’t know what Pinterest is.

Patrick: And here I was calling you an advance user (laughter).

Stephan: I may not be the best person to explain it.

Louis: I’m an advanced user of the Internet, I don’t like crocheted owls.

Patrick: Okay, ahhhh, okay, so this is what Pinterest is described as from Wikipedia: Pinterest is a Pinboard styled social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The site’s mission statement is to connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting. So, basically Pinterest allows you to take images from whether it be an article, it could be the header image of an article, and pin that article with the header image on Pinterest, it could be photography, it could be product images, and basically you’re collecting things that you like or things that fit a theme or things that you’re interested in. And that could be any photo, and it then reproduces the photo to Pinterest’s website, you can organize those into categories or pen boards, and then other people can view them and follow you and so forth, and that’s basically what the site is.

Stephan: I like to think of it as visual bookmarking, that’s really the way I see it.

Patrick: The public.

Stephan: Maybe I’m — yeah, public.

Louis: Yeah. Do you guys use it?

Stephan: No.

Patrick: I have an account, and I’ve used it a little bit, but I am a little uneasy with it, and I guess I’ll go into that after Stephan explains the story here.

Stephan: And my wife uses it. She doesn’t use it a lot but she does use it, so, that’s how I knew about all this. And then Patrick Tweeted about it. Anyway, so what happened was Pinterest they use, like Patrick said, they use public images, images that are out there on the Internet anywhere, and they reproduce them on their website as part of your pin board, and just recently they came with some code that allowed you to stop Pinterest from taking those photographs, and this was kind of after some outrage of people finding their photographs on Pinterest, and they were copyrighted or they were protected.

Louis: So this is like a meta tag, sort of, if anyone uses the meta no-follow, no-index.

Patrick: Yeah.

Louis: For the Google bot, for example, the robots meta tag this is very similar, and it’s a no-pin tag that you just put in your page and it means the images will not be posted by Pinterest.

Stephan: Exactly, yes. And so Flickr implemented this on all images that are marked as private, that are marked as adult only, and where the user has explicitly disabled sharing of the image, so, they can’t be pinned. Originally this story came out as Flickr was blocking all photos from Pinterest that have copyrights attached to them, so that’s not true, and Aaron Hockley has a fairly good write-up about this and what the actual restrictions are the Flickr’s put in place. I don’t know, what do you guys think about this? I think it’s good that they came out with code if you want to block people from using your images on Pinterest, but what’s the endgame here, what do we want?

Louis: When do we want it?

Stephan: Yes, what do we want and when do we want it?

Patrick: Take a step back one more time to finish the whole ‘how Pinterest works’ story. Basically you have how most people do it is you have a Pinterest, a pin-it button in your browser, you’re on website with a photo, you press that button, it takes you to Pinterest, you select the photo you want to use from that page, it takes the photo in full, puts it on Pinterest, and links the photo to the page where you got it from, and also there’s a small credit link beneath the photo, I believe, so that’s how it works.

Louis: Right, so nothing terribly new there; that’s not particularly different from how Facebook shares links, except that when you post a shared link to Facebook you’ve got a small thumbnail of the image and a big text description, and when you post it to Pinterest you’ve got a big photo and no text description but there’s still both links.

Patrick: Right. What you get with Facebook is, like you said, the thumbnail, of which is kind of a big deal, and that’s one of the reasons why a lot of people are uncomfortable with it because they take the photo in full, the full size high-quality photo, and they reproduce it on their website. And here in the United States we have the fair use exception to copyright law, and when people talk about thumbnails and the usage of thumbnails, and specifically the ruling is Perfect Ten v. Google, and basically that ruling said that Google served thumbnails in search results, thumbnails, right, not full images, so that ruling isn’t going to help Pinterest because Pinterest reproduces the whole work, there’s no fair use really if all you do is take the photo and republish it, so that is sort of a sticking point with Pinterest right now and a lot of people who are criticizing it. In addition to that, they not only take the photo but they strip out the Metadata that’s in the photo itself, which some photographers have taken issue with, and also in their terms of service they reserve the right to sell the work that’s pinned to the website, so understandably some photographers are upset with that. In addition, on their website they encourage people to pin images from any website; there’s a difference between saying you can upload it to your photo gallery here then you tell people to go out and just pin it from any website. And the final issue that I noticed with them that was kind of strange, and this is kind of — Flickr’s a good example of them, and maybe them taking a little too many liberties, is if you know Flickr you know they have a license on all their photos, it’s right there on the page, and it’s either a copyright all rights reserved or it’s a creative commons license, often as creative commons, and that data is there to read. I use a plugin for WordPress called Photo Dropper, and that’s what I include in my blog post is images through this plugin, Photo Dropper, where I can search for creative commons licensed images that allow for commercial use, and then it automatically inserts the image in a way with the proper citation, that means not only Flickr’s community guidelines but also the creative commons license. And so they could’ve got that license data, but instead they just disregard it and take everything, and so Flickr is now in the position of kind of I would say defending their community in a way, which is of photographers and creative people who often care about how their stuff is used, and giving people the option; Flickr users have the option to enable sharing and enable Pinterest or disable it. So, right now Pinterest is a hot topic and it’s on kind of tricky legal ground, so I guess we’ll have to see how it works out, but I hope that they take some better steps to manage their platform a little better. I don’t know how it’s going to work long-term though just because you can’t get around the fact that they’re taking full images and then competing with those images in search engines, and, yeah, it’s gonna be tough.

Louis: Alright. So a couple of things, first of all, the last thing I want to do is get into a debate with Patrick about copyright because that’ll go on forever, but what I want to say is that personally if it’s my website and my work then the more links the better, and I don’t particularly care if it’s the full version or a small version that’s posted, if it’s linking back to the source then obviously anyone who sees an image they like is more likely to go and see, oh, is there more stuff in the same vein at this place where this came from, so I don’t see a reason to get upset about that. Then for me the no-pin tag really does accomplish the required objective, especially now that Flickr’s given its users the option of having that automatically applied if they choose to make the photo private then it won’t be re-shared, that’s great, so Flickr users have that option, it makes sense for other sites to do a similar thing to give users who are uploading photos the option of making this Metadata available to stop it from being re-shared. And, finally, in terms of the shaky legal grounds, it just doesn’t seem like, you know, there’s so much stuff out there that exists where people have been posting, for example, music and videos and clips of movies, and you know those are on even shakier legal grounds, and they do get shut down fairly frequently, but it just seems like there’s nowhere near as strong a photography industry as there is the record industry or Hollywood, so it seems like the challengers to this type of infringement, if it is infringement, are going to be a lot weaker and less frequent, so I don’t see — it seem unlikely that this kind of behavior on the part of Pinterest or other sites like it would change anytime soon.

Patrick: So I don’t want to get into a debate with you either, but I will say a couple things. Obviously if you want and appreciate and desire people to take your photos and put them elsewhere that’s certainly the right you have, you know, that’s not the same application of rights that everyone will want to share with you, and the other thing is that you say anyone will visit a website if they see something they like and click through it, no, they won’t; at the end of the day if the full work is reproduced then in many cases they simply will not go farther than just viewing the photo, and maybe you have to spend some time with Pinterest also to learn kind of the functionality, but a lot of it is like, re-pin, like, re-pin, so a lot of it isn’t going anywhere. You could argue about the commercial impact of that certainly, but at the end of the day there is a lot of photos being taken, and the tricky part, as you said, is that the industry is there, photographers are there, but photos don’t seem to command the same level of, I don’t know what it is, sensitivity, whatever it might be, as video and audio, and it’s a tricky thing because a lot of people just take images for their blog posts.

Louis: Well, that’s just because they’re not a multi-billion dollar industry.

Patrick: Well, photography’s a big industry.

Louis: Well, it’s not Hollywood is what I’m saying; I’m not saying it’s not a big industry, but there’s an issue of scale here.

Patrick: Right, I mean Getty Images, AP, right, I mean there’s a lot of photo agencies that make a lot of money selling photos, so I don’t know if it’s as big, it’s not as big as those industries but it’s still a pretty big thing, and also it’s worth point out, I know you’re not familiar with Pinterest, but this isn’t like a small operation, they’ve received at least 37.5 million in fundings so far, so they have money is what I’m saying to explore things, it’s not like it’s one person running it and surprised by the success, so with all of that money is also going to come a burden or responsibility to find a way to make this work, so I guess we’ll have to keep an eye on it and see how it goes with them.

Louis: Yep, definitely. Moving on, I had a story this week which came out of Facebook’s technology blog just yesterday. So, Facebook has released a mobile browser test suite that they are calling Ringmark, basically it’s this little application that can run in your mobile device, and what it does is it provides this very thorough test of all different types of functionality that exists in the browser so things even from the most basic CSS and Canvass and HTML5 audio and video going to things like WebGL for 3D, and all sorts of things like that. So it’s really interesting, you can load it up in your mobile device directly by going to rng.io, and the goal here is that it’s a tool for mobile developers, or mobile web developers, to be able to look at a device and figure out very thoroughly what’s supported. And one of the things that’s interesting about it is that the goal is to try and find out whether the feature actually works, right, so I don’t know if you’re familiar with sort of JavaScript feature detection, but a lot of feature detection just goes along the lines of checking window.geolocation and if that is defined, if that exists and it’s not undefined in the browser then we just assume that geolocation works, whereas this set of tests are much, or from what I understand, are much more thorough, so they actually go to the trouble of trying to create objects and play around with them and poke at the API to really make sure that the feature is really supported and usable. So, yeah, very interesting. And so right now the software is not open source, however, what’s in this blog post it says that it will soon be open source and will be donated to the W3C; I don’t know why that wasn’t done from the get-go, but, look, if they stay true to that word and it does eventually become open source and donated to the W3C then I think it’s a great thing.

Stephan: So my question for you, Louis, is this: how does this — this is actually just testing a device, right, the browser of the device, so it’s just going through a bunch of tests and saying this browser supports Canvass or this browser supports WebGL or whatever it is, and giving you kind of a lowdown on that; it looks like it has kind of a debug screen. What would be the use for this, I mean are people going to sit around with 50 devices and see what this supported?

Louis: Right. So that’s one thing that’s kind of tricky, but it does at least give you a very quick overview of what’s supported on a given device, but that’s obviously not a really — like you said, it’s not a really useful workflow to just sit there with a device, hit this thing and watch what it supports, and then hit it with another device in order to be able to develop your app. However, if the tests are all open sourced then that opens up a lot more possibilities, right, because a tool like Modernizr does something very similar, although it just really detects the presence or absence of a given feature, it’s not really thorough testing, but in this case if you had access to say the test code to ensure that a feature that you want to use is not only present but works as expected in the browser, then you can incorporate that into your application and either provide a fallback or just provide messaging to the user saying this app requires WebGL, for example, and it’s not supported on your device.

Stephan: I got you, I got you. So it’s kind of like you could build your library, put it in your library of code, yeah.

Louis: Yeah, the actual visual thing where you just go to it on your browser and it tells you everything that your browser supports is nice and it’s good to be able to — and that might also help browser makers and mobile device makers test out their devices, I mean that’s not — we’re not sure whether this is something they would actually use, but if they do then that’s potentially powerful, right, because it’s nice green circles and you want your new phone to have lots of green circles, right. So if it pushes browser makers in the right direction then that’s great, but on top of that if you can rip out the little bits of the test library and use them in your code, specifically for feature detection, and if they’re more complete tests than what we have up-to-date then it’s not just checking to see if the feature’s there but really works, then that can be really useful. So, again, I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t follow through and, as they’ve said, open source it and donate the tests, but I’m a little mildly baffled as to why they would come out and announce it if it hasn’t already been open sourced, but we’ll wait and see.

Stephan: It looks cool.

Patrick: Yeah, I was just reading a story before the show about Facebook and mobile, their developer blog reported that they have 425 million monthly mobile users, and the platform sends more than 60 million visitors every month to apps and games which generate more than 320 millions visits. So, pretty big numbers, and about 16% I believe was the percentage of visitors to mobile are going to apps, sorry, 14% are going to apps, so that’s a lot of traffic to apps, and I can see why people are developing mobile apps and why they felt the need to put this tool out, I’m sure it encourages their ecosystem.

Louis: I guess if Facebook is seeing a huge growth in mobile use they want to make it possible for developers to jump in and plugin to Facebook.

Patrick: And do it right, of course.

Louis: Yeah, unlike those passive read-share apps. (Laughter)

Patrick: The competition is crazy in this space.

Louis: Yeah, I wonder how many of those app visits were actually deliberate or just people clicking on a link in Facebook thinking they were going somewhere and it asked them to install an app.

Patrick: I don’t know, how many visits have there been to the SitePoint app? (Laughter) Oh!

Louis: Oh! Snap. No, we don’t have an app, see that’s it, we link to our content.

Patrick: I know.

Louis: We do Internet correctly.

Patrick: Sorry. Well done, SitePoint, well done. So I picked up on SitePoint.com on Craig Buckler’s story, Microsoft Rebuilds a New Windows 8 Logo, and as he says, he says, “I wouldn’t normally write an article about it, but this is the first major redesign in 22 years, and since most of us use Windows everyday that’s a fairly big deal.” So, Windows 8 logo, it is kind of a bright blue, a window-like icon and then the word Windows followed by 8, of course; have you guys seen this logo, what do you think, too simple?

Stephan: This may be the worst logo I’ve ever seen (laughter).

Patrick: Oh, come on, that’s not fair!

Stephan: It’s terrible, this is terrible, I mean it’s — it’s bad. And they tried, like they made the window at an angle so that the one side is bigger than the other.

Louis: Yeah, but the angle is pointing away from the logo.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s odd. It’s just odd. I don’t even know what to say (laughs).

Patrick: Right, okay, so they wrote a blog post about this on the Windows Team blog, and I’ll just give you a quick summary of what the logo represents to them. First of all they wanted the new logo to be both modern and classy by echoing the international typography style or Swiss design that has been a great influence on our metro style design philosophy, which means using bold flat colors, clean lines and shapes. Number two, it was important that then new logo carried their metro principle of being authentically digital, by that they mean that it doesn’t have to emulate Faux industry — Faux industry design characteristics such as material, glass, wood, plastic, etcetera, it has motion, and these are their words, not that they make sense to me (laughter). And the third point is that the goal is for the logo to be humble yet confident. So, that’s kind of the vision for the logo, and you know, it’s –

Louis: Man, it’s just the spacing is weird.

Patrick: It’s there, you know, it’s just there.

Louis: Yeah, I don’t — it doesn’t even look like a logo, really, it just kind of looks like some text and a picture of something that might be a window.

Patrick: Yeah, you know, it looks like for it to be a logo it would have to be from like the 1800’s, like the New York Times logo which is just like text, it doesn’t really look like a logo that you’d expect to see brand new, but, I don’t know, I don’t know, yeah, it will seem strange, like imagine the window start screen coming on.

Stephan: This reminds me of AOL.

Patrick: AOL, yeah, you know that’s a point, or GAP, I suppose.

Stephan: Yeah.

Patrick: You know, very simple.

Louis: Wasn’t it AOL that did that thing where there logo was just negative space and superimposed on different images.

Stephan: Exactly.

Louis: Oh, yeah.

Stephan: (Laughs)

Patrick: AOL, big A, small o, small l, and I think a period, yeah, that’s what it is, and they have it on the homepage now, it’s a leaf, it’s over a leaf on AOL.com right now.

Louis: I’m seeing a cityscape, so maybe it’s random on refresh.

Patrick: It could be.

Louis: Yeah, it is, I got a dove when I refreshed, you see I actually kind of like that, I like this better than the Windows 8 logo.

Patrick: All it is is negative space.

Stephan: Let’s think about this, I don’t know have you guys seen that video with the little kid, the little girl going through the logos as they go on the screen, have you seen this?

Louis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, somebody posted this, a designer had his daughter sort of say the first thing she thought of when she was seeing all these different –

Stephan: Yeah, and the first thing I wonder is what is she going to say when she sees this that looks like the flag of Finland (laughter), it’s just opposite colors.

Louis: I think you’re giving this five-year-old far more extensive geography knowledge than is average.

Stephan: Probably.

Patrick: Or even me far more extensive geography knowledge.

Stephan: Well, it’s the colors reversed, so, yeah.

Louis: Yeah, it’s the opposite of Finland. That should be the slogan: Windows 8, it’s the opposite of Finland (laughter).

Patrick: Or everything that Finland isn’t.

Stephan: Ohhh, yeah, it’s bad. Makes me not want to buy Windows.

Patrick: They should launch it in Helsinki.

Louis: Well, I mean it’s kind of the end of an era; if you scroll down Craig Buckler’s article he’s posted all the previous Windows’ logos, and it really is since Windows 3 that there has been this kind of four-colored, wavy window that’s really become iconic and that’s held out through the years, and this is the first time that that’s going away.

Patrick: Yeah, and he also included the Windows 1.0 logo which is in the Microsoft blog post also, they have like a more complete list of logos, but they mention that it was, uh, they found it refreshing and inspiring as they were doing their work, and you can kind of see the resemblance, in a way at least; some might argue that the Windows 1.0 logo had a little more to it.

Louis: Yeah, the Windows, it actually had some use of typography in the way that Microsoft is offset from Windows, whereas this new one just the spacing kills me, it doesn’t seem unified, it seems like it’s three separate things; there’s a window, the word Windows, and an 8, and they’re not like — they don’t feel linked at all to me.

Patrick: Yeah, and it probably doesn’t help –

Stephan: They’re missing a registered trademark sign, that’s what they’re missing.

Louis: No, it’s there.

Stephan: No, no, they’re missing it by the 8, though; you see what I’m saying? (Laughter)

Louis: I wonder if they would be able to get away with trademarking the letter 8 in that typeface (laughter), probably not so much. Look, obviously if anyone on the Microsoft team who was involved in designing this is listening to us right now, well, they’re not listening anymore.

Stephan: We’re sorry.

Louis: It’s probably too little too late.

Patrick: It’s easy — if they are listening it’s easy to be snarky.

Louis: They’ve seen chucked their iPod out the window, oh, sorry, their Zune; that was a totally unnecessary last minute thought.

Patrick: You didn’t even get a complimentary laugh for that. What do you want for that, do you want like a slow clap or something (clap slowly).

Louis: Yeah, alright, well yeah, look, it’s a logo. I mean I do kind of look forward to the new Windows, I do use Windows on occasion, I don’t use it at work or for any kind of development, but I do have a home machine that use mostly for gaming and casual use that’s a Windows machine, so I do look forward to Windows 8, I’m excited to see what it comes out with, but maybe not so much the logo. Anyway, do you guys want to talk about some spotlights?

Stephan: Let’s do it.

Patrick: Yeah, let’s hit it. I’ll go first with my spotlight, it is a Kickstarter campaign for a show with Ze Frank, Ze Frank, the video web show godfather that he is, launched The Show with Ze Frank in 2006, and he wants to bring it back, and he’s got a Kickstarter campaign going for it.

Louis: So is this really a return of the show?

Patrick: It’s a big deal. Like I said on Twitter, the ruler is back.

Louis: (Laughs)

Patrick: It’s slick Ze.

Louis: I’ve got that snare drumroll stuck in my head.

Patrick: (Laughs) but, yeah, that’s what it says, there’s a Kickstarter campaign, like I said, and it says on it that “In 2006 I launched a show called The Show with Ze Frank, it was one of the most strange, exciting, difficult and amazing things I have done so far. I think it is time to do something similar what with the economy in the crapper and the election coming up, if Newt can do it, so can I, so can we, same but different.” So, some similarity, obviously some differences, he says it’ll be — from the campaign here it sounds like it’ll be a pretty similar format, and he’s got a number of backers; I watched the Kickstarter campaign jump up just in front of my eyes. When I first saw it, it was 5,000, about five minutes later it was 10,000, let me refresh it, my current — when I’m looking at it right now it says 19,008, I opened that probably 15 minutes before we started the show, so about an hour ago, it’s at 24,781 now, so money and backers are pouring in, and I have little doubt that it’ll rich that 50,000 goal soon and we’ll see the show return.

Louis: That’s very exciting. That’s the best news I’ve heard all month.

Stephan: It’s awesome.

Patrick: I deliver again (laughter). With a different beat, different snare.

Louis: I’m going to deliver a far more down tempo spotlight this week, something I saw on Hacker News this morning, which is a full stack web framework built on top of node.js, it is called tower.js and its homepage lives at towerjs.org. And, yeah, so it’s a combination of Node for serving the backend, MongoDB for the database, it’s written using CoffeeScript, which if anyone is familiar with is just sort of like this pre-processed JavaScript language that gets turned into JavaScript but that’s a lot prettier and easier to write than JavaScript. So, yeah, and it seems like this is sort of maybe one of the first indications of Node having gone beyond this very, very low-level hackery where you can maybe write a socket-based chat client in a couple of lines, but you wouldn’t want to build a whole website into it, to something that you can really develop on top of. Obviously it’s a fairly new project, but if you’re looking at starting up a new MVC back to web application and you were curious about Node or CoffeeScript or trying to do JavaScript on the server, yeah, it looks like it’s pretty full-featured, it’s got models, it’s got controllers, and it ties in nicely to the view; I get the impression that it can probably do some clever things with interacting with layouts because the layouts are also using JavaScripts, so there’s maybe a bit more potential for code reuse than what you’d get in a typical application.

Stephan: Cool, looks neat.

Louis: I haven’t had a chance to play with it at all because obviously I just saw it this morning, but it’s potentially exciting and good to see Node progressing to the point where there are really big application frameworks written on top of it which might let people get into it without having to write everything themselves.

Stephan: Cool. I’ll go last. So I have something called opengeocoder.net, and it is from the guy who brought us openstreetmap.org, and basically it’s a — it allows you to search for a place and if it’s there, fine, if it’s not then you can add it, and they also have a JSON API so that you can get geo-coded location information from their API, so it’s all open source, all your search queries go into the public domain. So, it’s pretty neat, I’m a big fan of GIS and map data, I think it’s really –

Louis: Does it do reverse geo-coding, can you throw coordinates at it and get the name of a place.

Stephan: I have not played with it enough to know, but I think that’s what the point of it is, so if you have some lat-longs I would type them in and we could find out.

Patrick: I entered my city and it’s not there.

Stephan: You gotta add it, that’s the point (laughter).

Patrick: But I’m not a programmer. I’m just kidding. I’ll have to add it then.

Stephan: It’s just a neat way, you know, because it’s hard to get geo-coded data quickly and cheaply, sometimes you have to buy libraries or you have to pay-per-use for the Google API or something, so I just think it’s neat, I hope it takes off, I hope they’re putting more work into Open Street Map, it’s a cool thing as well.

Patrick: So this data, this lat-long city –

Louis: I’m just sort of figuring it out, so it’s got this box that you can drag around, so if you do a search that isn’t there it gives you a rectangle that you can drag around to mark what the boundaries of the place that you’re describing are so you could theoretically use descriptors for any neighborhood or even smaller areas than that.

Stephan: Exactly. So, what’s missing right now is a lot of street names, there are some neighborhoods that are missing, there’s cities apparently that are missing, so I see it could be a really cool tool in a year or so after people have added a lot of data.

Louis: Yeah, definitely.

Patrick: Where Louis is right now, enter (laughter). No direct match, click here to add it. How can I add it if I don’t know it! Sorry.

Louis: Let’s see, we do we got, Collingwood, Victoria.

Patrick: I have to enter Harbinger, North Carolina.

Louis: Are you from a place called Harbinger?

Patrick: Harbinger, yeah, it’s actually Harbinger, not Har-binger, but it’s spelled like, you know, of doom.

Louis: Ha, ha, ha, wicked.

Patrick: Which explains my generally sunny disposition.

Louis: That joke would make sense if it was ironic, but you’re not a pessimist so it doesn’t really.

Patrick: Oh.

Louis: Alright, let’s wrap it up.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network; I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, I tweet @ssegraves and I blog at badice.com.

Louis: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m; you can find us on the Web at SitePoint.com/podcast, and you can email us at podcast@sitepoint.com; you can find me on Twitter @rssaddict. That’s all for this week, thanks for listening.

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.

SitePoint Podcast #151: Vender Prefixes vs Web Standards with Rachel Andrew

Louis Simoneau — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:17:47 +0000

Episode 151 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew), one of the co-author of Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong and the author of The CSS Anthology (about to go into it’s fourth version) about the ongoing vendor prefix saga and how that affects the future of Web standards.

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SitePoint Podcast #151: Vender Prefixes vs Web Standards with Rachel Andrew (MP3, 30:55, 28.4MB)

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Episode Summary

Louis and Rachel cover Mozilla considering supporting the WebKit vendor prefixes for certain CSS properties Firefox already supports and how that could lead us away from having an effective set of Web Standards for the future.

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/151.

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast coming to you a little bit late this week, we had a little bit of trouble getting the schedule together, but I hope it was worth the while because we have with us today on the show Rachel Andrew; hi, Rachel.

Rachel: Hello.

Louis: So Rachel is a web developer, will be well known to any long time SitePoint fans, she’s the author of a few of our books actually, co-authored Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong with Kevin Yank, who was the former host of the podcast, and also wrote The CSS Anthology, and you’re currently working on a fourth edition, is that right?

Rachel: That’s right, yeah.

Louis: Just putting the finishing touches now, if I understand it.

Rachel: That’s right, yeah.

Louis: We’re expecting that in a month or two maybe.

Rachel: Hmm-mm, yeah, I believe so.

Louis: Fantastic. I want to talk to you a bit about what’s new in the book a bit later, give you the chance to plug it a little bit, but before that, the main reason I wanted to talk to you is this ongoing I guess you could call it a drama concerning vendor prefixes, which came out of a W3C meeting recently, and you wrote a blog post on it about the issue for the Web Standards Project’s blog.

Rachel: Hmm-mm.

Louis: So, we talked about this a little bit on the podcast last week, but for anyone who’s either just tuning in, or to get a more complete breakdown of the issue, do you want to just go over sort of what happened and why it’s important.

Rachel: So what’s really happened is that because of the mobile web particularly being very WebKit-centric, you know, most of the browsers that people are using on mobile devices are running some form of WebKit, or the ones people are caring about, they’re thinking about iPhones and Android devices as well. So, web developers are implementing the new features of CSS3 using these vendor prefixes and only using WebKit prefix, when in fact we’ve got prefixes for Mozilla, for other browsers as well, but these aren’t being used. And so what’s happening is that obviously in the browsers that have support for these CSS features with their own prefix, people aren’t seeing the site in the same way they’re seeing it on WebKit browsers, which obviously for those other browser they want the site to look as good. So the danger is that what will happen is that other browsers will start implementing WebKit prefixes rather than allowing people to use their own prefixes or the standard feature, and this is becoming a real sort of problem, and so developers have been asked to really do something about it and to think about what they’re doing.

Louis: Right. So the issue came up at a W3C CSS Working Group.

Rachel: That’s right, yeah.

Louis: And I think it was someone from Mozilla who was making the point that at some point in the future Mozilla would need to implement the WebKit prefixes in Firefox just because they were so widely used.

Rachel: Yes.

Louis: Even for features that Firefox did support in its own version.

Rachel: That’s right, yeah. And really, as someone who’s been involved in sort of Web Standards for a very, very long time, you know this sort of brings us back to the point of a browser or an implementation sort of hanging around for an awful lot longer than it really should do, we’ve really just got to a point where we’re kind of getting rid of IE6, which has hung around for over 10 years; it was a great browser when it first came out. And we were, as developers at the time, were really excited about IE6, it might be hard to think if you’re a newer developer, because we could use a lot of CSS2, so people were just supporting IE6. You know at one point it had huge market share, there was really nothing else out there in sort of common use, and so we just built sites, or a lot of people just built sites for IE6 which is why IE6 has hung around for as long as it has. So I think those of us who are sort of the old geeks on the Web are slightly worried now that we’re going to see this happen again but with WebKit browsers and with WebKit extensions sort of hanging around for much longer than they really need to because of this.

Louis: So there are a few separate issues here. I guess one of the points that people make is that this to some extent bypasses the Standard’s Project, because a few of these WebKit properties aren’t actually in the CSS spec at all.

Rachel: That’s right, yeah.

Louis: They’re simply properties that have been added by developers at Apple or at Google; has Google also been involved in that?

Rachel: I’m not too sure, I think the common things are stuff which really are I guess making experience of mobile websites better, and so have been added for that purpose, but of course you know we do have mobile — Firefox, and Opera, of course, is important mobile browser. So, I think sort of going off and people just deciding to implement WebKit means that, yes, you know, sort of the WebKit process and Apple perhaps, or maybe Google, could start to pull the development of the Web and make it very proprietary rather than it going through the W3C process.

Louis: Right. So the idea here is that if someone — or if Apple implements a new property in WebKit doesn’t bother submitting it through the W3C to be included in the CSS spec, all the other browsers adopt it because other developers start using it, suddenly you don’t have a Standard’s process, you have various browsers implementing things willy-nilly, and if it catches on so be it, and if not, too bad.

Rachel: You know I’m all for browsers implementing features and coming up with new features, I mean obviously Apple have got a huge amount of stuff to add in terms of mobile web, and where we are now is very much being led by sort of iPhone and things; it’s not a bad thing for browsers to be implementing features and thinking of new features, but what we need is for things to then come back to that Standards process so that we can all sort of move along together and we don’t end up with a situation where we end up having to either build separate sites for different, you know, I can remember doing that sort of back in the browser wars days.

Louis: Right. An example that I’ve seen thrown around, for example to support this argument, is the case of the WebKit gradient syntax where the initial version was extremely verbose and complicated and so hard to use that people didn’t really understand it. And so that was the WebKit version, Mozilla developed a separate version, eventually the Standards process settled on something that was very close to the Mozilla version, and because they had been separately vendor prefixed it became pretty easy for developers moving forward to settle on the standard version.

Rachel: Yes, yeah.

Louis: Whereas if Mozilla had just implemented the WebKit version, or worse, had implemented their own syntax under the WebKit prefix, we never would have been able to make that kind of progress.

Rachel: Yeah. I’m quite a fan of vendor extensions, I think sort of coming from having worked through the sort of browser wars era with their version 4 browsers, I can understand why the vendor extension and things are kind of a good way forward, kind of the only way forward for browsers to be able to start implementing this stuff, try it out, let us try it out, let us feedback and say, no, that doesn’t work very well or that’s very confusing, and then come to eventually a sort of standard implementation of that feature. And I think it’s great, you know I enjoy trying out these different features even when they don’t really work in much; you know (laughter) I can’t really use it on real projects, but being able to have a play-around, see how something might work, and then feedback as well if possible to say that doesn’t work so well or what the problems are with it, because then we’re moving things on.

Louis: Yeah. Coming back to the idea of developers using these WebKit prefixes exclusively, do you have any sense of how widespread this is, because I get the feeling when I look at, for example, educational materials on the Web, that usually the authors of these materials are very clear in saying, you know, you use all the prefixes and you follow it with the un-prefixed one to make it future-proof. Now there are some cases of these cool demos of emerging WebKit features where people will just use the WebKit one and not bother to put in the un-prefixed one because it just isn’t supported anywhere else. But in the real wild of the Web is this something that’s really widespread?

Rachel: I’ve certainly seen it. I think it’s really difficult, you know, you have to sort of get out of the kind of Standard’s bubble; I think those of us who are very sort of keen on Web Standards, very keen on the open web, are going to be trying to do things the right way because we kind of care about that. But I think for a lot of people who are just building websites and they’re seeing mobile as being WebKit, which I think is often quite a reasonable assumption to make, have a quick look at the stats of the sites that I’m involved with, you know, many of which the traffic isn’t sort of web people, it’s just regular folk, you know, and the mobile landscape is very WebKit-centric, you don’t see very much else. And so I think it’s kind of a reasonable assumption for people to make to say, well, we hardly ever see Opera, we hardly ever see any of the mobile browsers so why bother. So unless people actually realize why it’s important to bother, and that it’s not just the browser support today isn’t just the issue, you know, then I think people aren’t really going to sort of engage with that as an issue at all.

Louis: Right.

Rachel: It works. I mean that’s always been the problem, you know, if something seems to work in the browsers that you know visit your site, unless you actually understand what the underlying issues are then why would you do anything else?

Louis: Right. So we’ve seen this kind of educational approach with web developers sort of work in the past, the initial push towards standards was largely driven by developers, but there was also a roll played by the browser vendors themselves.

Rachel: Yeah.

Louis: Do you feel like they have in some sense or responsibility to not go down the road of supporting WebKit prefixes? I know, for example, I quoted in the last episode of the podcast of Eric Meyers’ blog post on the topic.

Rachel: Yes, yeah.

Louis: Where he very nicely put it from the point of view of the browser makers; obviously their concern is for the users, and if the users aren’t seeing the site as pretty as it can be then that’s the step. But do you feel that that’s entirely right? Do you feel that there might be some greater sense of responsibility from the browser makers?

Rachel: Yeah, I mean I would like there to be a sense of responsibility from the browser makers, but also I understand that their sort of businesses or their browser has to sort of be front and center for them, they have to do what people want and what will ensure people carry on using their browser, so I can kind of understand the problem that they’re in, the quandary; do they make a stand and say, no, we’re not going to do this because it’s bad for the Web, or do they say, yeah, users want to be able to see the site the same, we can do the same as WebKit, we don’t want to look inferior to WebKit because people haven’t bothered to use the extensions.

Louis: Hmm-mm.

Rachel: I think that’s the sort of issue that browser makers are in, and I think that’s the point at which developers hopefully can make a difference because we can say well, no, we’re going to make sure we’re using these prefixes and makes sure every browser looks as good as it can do. But, yeah, I can see where they’re stuck and, you know, just as businesses and organizations wanted to make sure that their browser carries on being used and isn’t seen as some sort of lesser thing.

Louis: Right.

Rachel: Which, you know, I really feel — I have a real sense that we in recent years, and I guess with IE9 coming out, looking towards IE10, we’ve really got what we asked for with WaSP, you know, we asked for browsers to implement all the standard features in the same way so that we could build a site — I’ve been involved in a sort of big responsive web design project at the moment which I’ve been working on, and essentially I built is using Firefox because that’s the browser I developed it in, and I’ve looked at in IE9, I’ve looked at it in all the current browsers, and it just works, it’s all the same (laughs), and that’s what we asked for, that’s what we wanted, and it would be such a shame if having got to that point, got to the point where the standard features are pretty much implemented in the modern browsers in the same way, and new features being pushed forward through the sort of vendor extensions and in appropriate ways, it would be a real shame if we then kind of took a big step backwards with this issue.

Louis: Yeah. It would be largely a big step backwards that was prompted solely by over-enthusiasm and wanting to use all of these new features that we now have access to and that are now coming into browsers at a very fast rate after all these years of essential stagnation.

Rachel: Yes, I mean, you know, it’s a really exciting time, and I think we just need to temper that with remembering that we can actually cause some damage, you know.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a very valid point. So there’s a few various initiatives that you linked to from your blog post on The WaSP site, so one of them is Prefix the Web, which is an initiative I think which was started by Christian Helmut?

Rachel: Yes.

Louis: So this is an attempt to sort of go through a lot of these fancier demos on GitHub that are sort of trying to show web developers what’s possible with CSS3, and a lot of those if those are using only WebKit obviously then anyone who goes and tries to find how to do something by looking at this code might fall into the same trap.

Rachel: Hmm-mm. Yeah, I mean I said, yeah, there’s a lot of people that will just copy and paste code as well, you know, so this works.

Louis: Yeah, definitely. And there’s also a petition which is being run on change.org, sort of a pledge to the browser makers asking them to not do this, and also pledging to not do this on our sites.

Rachel: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I think we can do a lot by making sure people understand what the issue is, you know, and it’s not just a kind of academic thing, that there is a real problem here that we can kind of solve if we make sure that we’re doing — writing things in the right way, and hopefully we can kind of head this off.

Louis: Right.

Rachel: Saying to the browser makers, look, this is why it’s important, and we think it’s really important.

Louis: Yeah, I’ve seen a few different suggestions thrown around for ways that might help to avert this sort of vendor prefix clash, and so I don’t know what do you think about this? So one of them was to have everyone use the same thing but not be vendor specific prefix, so something like beta.

Rachel: Hmm-mm.

Louis: One of them was — and this is one that I kind of think makes sense, is that once a browser adds a non-prefixed version of a property, that it should remove support for the prefixed version.

Rachel: Yeah.

Louis: Now that makes sense to me. I can see, again, how it puts the browser makers in a tight position, obviously, because removing support for something that developers are using is going to make some sites out there look broken.

Rachel: Yeah, and that’s the problem is that we should feel safe to use — I mean there are people who say, well, just don’t use vendor prefix stuff on production work, but I don’t think that’s a reality. And part of that is because the actual standard’s process is pretty slow, and, you know we’re not getting the non-prefixed version as quickly maybe as we could, you know, you sort of have things that have really been stable for a very long time, and yet still we have to use a prefixed version. So I think really what we want to see is once things have been decided on and generally everything’s using the same implementation, it would be best to be using obviously the Standard version. But, you know, I could understand that browsers aren’t going to want to pull out those prefixed versions just in case people aren’t using them in the way they’re intended and are using them for things that worked in a slightly different way originally, you know, on sites that are sort of hanging around.

Louis: Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah, so I think there’s various things; I think the idea of a sort of beater-type extension if we’ve got something where everyone has agreed on it, that’s kind of cool, but, as you say, that sort of stops thing where manufacturers can implement things in slightly different ways as we’re coming down on what is going to be the final standard. See, I mean we don’t want to stop.

Louis: Yeah, obviously it makes sense for these different implementations.

Rachel: Yeah.

Louis: Again, coming back to gradients, if it had been the case where WebKit was using a beta prefix and Mozilla also wanted to use a beta prefix, it couldn’t go and completely change up the syntax.

Rachel: No.

Louis: Which I think anyone who’s worked with gradients can be thankful of the way things played out.

Rachel: (Laughs) yeah. And I think, you know, we want to encourage the browser manufacturers to put all there skills behind coming up with great implementations of this stuff, and coming up with new ideas, absolutely. We’ve got some very, very clever people, you know, working at each of these browsers, and we want all that (laughs) to be thrown into our daily work, essentially, and to come through.

Louis: So we can come to the conclusion that the best course of action for developers is to go through your sites and ensure that you’re using every available prefix and a non-prefixed version.

Rachel: Yeah, definitely.

Louis: To make sure that their stuff will go on working and to ensure that the browser makers will never be — or won’t feel pressured to support other vendors’ prefixes.

Rachel: I think so. And especially if you’re writing articles and tutorials and that sort of stuff to be — you know, I fully understand that you’re trying to keep the amount of code down, you’re trying to keep an article under a word count or whatever, but I think it’s really important that when people have cut and paste code that it’s correct, and that it won’t just lead them down this route of thinking, oh well, it doesn’t matter because it works in WebKit so it’s fine.

Louis: Yeah. And there are, of course, a number of tools available to make this easier, both preprocesses on the server side, which will run over your CSS and output it with all the required vendor prefixes so that you write it without prefixes.

Rachel: Yeah.

Louis: And then there are also client side solutions; I spoke on the podcast a few months ago with Lea Verou, who wrote an excellent little snippet of JavaScript that handles all of the prefixes for you on the front-end, so, again, you just write the canonical version and the prefixes get taken care of for you.

Rachel: Hmm-mm.

Louis: So, no excuse, and I think the first step is the petition, and after that the witch hunt starts and we start pointing fingers; is that right, am I getting that right?

Rachel: I mean I think if we do — if we spot stuff that is particularly high-profile articles or sites that we’re seeing, and we know this is the case for them, I think yeah, you know, drop them a line and say, hey, this is important, can you change this, especially for people who are educating, who are writing and speaking and teaching, I think we have to sort of hold ourselves to the highest level of Standards compliance, I think that’s really important.

Louis: Entirely. So speaking of writing and educating, that segues me perfectly into talking a little bit about the upcoming book. So, for anyone who’s not familiar with The CSS Anthology, so you’re on the fourth edition now, so it’s –

Rachel: It makes me very old (laughs), yeah.

Louis: Definitely part of The Web Standards canon, it’s been around forever, and it’s a fantastic resource, but you want to explain a little bit for anyone who’s not familiar with the book how it’s structured and what it has gone into in the past and maybe what’s different about the new one.

Rachel: Okay, well, the original idea of CSS Anthology is that it would be a collection of tips and tricks, so essentially it’s all question and answer, how do I do whatever. And so it’s essentially something to dip in and out of; you’ve got a CSS problem and hopefully it will have an answer for it and essentially a copy and paste solution within an explanation of how it works. In the first edition we talked about dealing with Netscape 4, so it’s goes back a long way (laughter); it’s very funny looking through the progression of the editions and the sort of different browsers that have come and gone and been important. So, when I came to write this fourth edition, and obviously it’s a revised edition, and sometimes you do a revised edition and you really don’t have change that much, you tighten things up, you make it a bit more modern; however, as I sort of read through the table of contents from the third edition, I said, you know, this is a rewrite, we’re going to have to start again because so much has changed. And it’s not just that, obviously we’ve got a lot of CSS3, which is now possible for us to use in production, and one thing I’ve always thought with this book is it should be stuff that I would use myself, I’d happily use in a client project, because ultimately that’s what I am, I’m just a web developer, I work with client projects and other products, but I wanted this stuff in the book to always be things that people can use, not sort of experimental CSS, not stuff that needs to be used with a whole load of provisos. But, you know, we’re at a point where we can use a lot of CSS3, and there is a chapter in the book which deals with what to do if you have to support older browsers, and particularly the very old browser, things like IE6 and 7.

Louis: And 8 (laughs).

Rachel: IE8 for an awful lot of the stuff actually isn’t too much of a problem so –

Louis: Rusty, archaic clunkers like IE8.

Rachel: (Laughs) well, um, I mean, you know, I think an awful lot of the stuff that we cover actually works reasonably well in IE8, the real problems really the sort of old dinosaurs, certainly in my work I’ve had projects fairly recently where we’ve had to have very good IE6 support just because of the type of people viewing the site, so unfortunately it’s not completely gone away.

Louis: Right.

Rachel: But you know generally it’s forward thinking, it’s using stuff that works very solidly across modern browsers, of course, you know we’ll be looking forward to IE10 being released hopefully before too long, and IE8 then becomes a two-versions old browser, which hopefully will help things move on a bit. So, yeah, and not only have we got CSS3, we’ve also got a real change in approach in terms of how we’re building sites; I’m sort of really talking about responsive design. And I think although we haven’t actually got any real new ways of laying out sites, you know the actual techniques we’re using we’re still having to use floats, we’re still having to lay things out in very much the same way we have been, there’s some new stuff on the horizon which is very interesting in terms of layout, but it’s not there yet. However, while we’re still using the same tools, I think the way we’re thinking about layout is very different, and how we’re thinking about providing layouts that work for mobile devices and, you know, having sort of one web approach to design. And so I’ve covered a lot of that in sort of the chapters with layout, I’ve assumed that people are going to be thinking about working in a responsive or adaptive way.

Louis: Right. And that, I mean that’s increasingly becoming the standard, we’ve only seen maybe a few very high-profile sites adopt it, but I can’t imagine it’d be very long before we’d see a whole slew more.

Rachel: Yeah, that’s it. And obviously in this book these sorts of layout solutions are essentially one chapter, I can’t teach everything that I know about responsive design or everything that’s out there, but what I’ve tried to do is show people how to get started with making a site responsive, the sort of key tools they need. And that’s very much the approach of the whole book, you know, I get people started, I show a technique, and I hope that then people will use that and start experimenting from that point and play around a bit and see how things work.

Louis: Right. I imagine some of the stuff that must have been a lot of fun working on this book is seeing techniques that were five pages worth of delicate, nested div background image placement that became a one-line CSS declaration.

Rachel: Well, exactly, yeah, I mean stuff like rounded corners, we had this enormous section about how to implement rounded corners at one point, you know, with all these different ways, whether you might use sort of JavaScript or sticking images in (laughs), you know, and that was — and this is just one line.

Louis: It’s one paragraph, exactly.

Rachel: (Laughs) I mean it’s brilliant, and, yeah, I mean stuff like that, so that’s been, yeah, great fun actually in doing a new edition is sort of seeing all the bits I’ve just gone, nah, we can throw that away now (laughs), which is, yeah, it’s fascinating. And, you know, sometimes people say, oh, everything — things don’t change very quickly, but actually what we’re doing has changed hugely in the last few years; I think it’s only a couple of years since I wrote the third edition, and this stuff was all just on the horizon, you know, it was there but we couldn’t really use it.

Louis: Yeah, absolutely, and no one was thinking about responsive design or –

Rachel: No, no.

Louis: — we had fluid layouts but a lot of people didn’t like fluid layouts for a number of reasons.

Rachel: Well, I think, yeah, it got to that point where people were doing fixed width because they understood people had enormous screens, and so fluid layout just didn’t really work for that, and I mean, yeah, that kind of whole debate about fixed width versus fluid, it sort of got to the point where people were saying, yeah, I don’t like those long line lengths (laughs), and so actually responsive design has kind of turned all that round now, and we can have things which work well for large screens and small screens without having that horrible long line of problem and designers getting upset about that. So, you know, I think it’s great, I love working with responsive designs as a developer, I really enjoy it.

Louis: Yeah, it’s definitely a bit more work up front because you have to think a lot more about where things go.

Rachel: Yeah.

Louis: But once it’s accomplished you can just drag that window around forever. And I find that the — well, anyway, the weirdest thing for me is showing it to people who aren’t involved in web development, and I drag the window around, “see, look how it fits in all sizes,” and they’re like “I didn’t know that was a thing, is this good?”

Rachel: Well, the issue, and I’ve got a 14 year old daughter, and I always show — I’m showing her the site I’m currently working on and saying look at this, and she’s got an iPad and a Blackberry, because that’s what all the teenagers like, so, but I was showing and I was dragging the window around, and she’s like, “Doesn’t everything do that?” “Is that not just normal?” Because she kind of — you know, she sees websites very differently, I think, as a child, and being very used to mobile devices, and it seemed logical to her that some things should display differently no matter what you’re using.

Louis: Yeah.

Rachel: It seemed strange to her that things don’t (laughs), and I thought it was quite interesting, you know, sort of kids coming up and just get used to the fact that things work on phones, and to me it’s quite exciting, quite amazing.

Louis: Yeah, well I guess that’s true in any technology or any field, right, you come to it as a user expecting it to just work, but when you’re the implementer you get interested in all the little tricks that are required to make something feel like it just works.

Rachel: Yeah, and, you know, it’s really nice, at the moment I’ve got this little stack of devices on my desk which I’m constantly going through and looking at the site that I’m working on, and it’s actually really enjoyable to feel that you are presenting that nice experience no matter what people are using, and that’s something we’ve always tried to do, but I think we’re really kind of getting to a point now where we’ve got more tools to do that, and I think there’s sort of new things coming up for CSS layout as well that will make that even easier, so we are somewhat tied at the moment to things like source order and where we can actually put things. So, yeah, it’s an exciting time, it really feels at the moment like we’ve got so much new stuff, you know, going back to the vendor prefix issue I think it’s just making sure we use this new stuff responsibly and still care about the things that we’ve always cared about, caring about standards and caring about accessibility and the things that, you know, well, we get excited about all the new shiny, to do that in a responsible way in a way that moves the Web forward all the time.

Louis: And not forward off a cliff, forward in the direction we want to go in a safe and productive future.

Rachel: Yeah, I mean that’s it, and you know I’m really excited about the Web at the moment, I think that there’s lots of really interesting stuff happening.

Louis: Yep, and I keep saying this every time someone comes on basically, and we end sort of at the same place where the guest is just saying this is all great and wonderful and I’m really excited, and it’s fantastic to hear this sentiment echoed so consistently across such a wide range of people working in so many different areas of the Web.

Rachel: Yeah, and I’ve been to the Web Conference and things recently, and talking to a lot of people who were sort of around my age or have been doing this for as long as I have, and everyone just seems really kind of, yeah, reinvigorated and excited about what’s going on at the moment, which there are some really great minds out there in terms of people thinking about the Web, and it’s good to see older people as excited as sort of new people coming in who you kind of expect to be enthusiastic and excited because they’re new and they’ve just found out about all this stuff. But I think that mix of younger people and new people coming in with all their sort of ideas and enthusiasm, and those of us who’ve been around a long time and perhaps can temper that with a bit of we don’t want to go down this route because we did last time (laughter). I think that’s great, and the fact that everyone’s excited about it from all their different viewpoints is really important, and I think will sort of push things forward in good ways.

Louis: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So, I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, I know it’s a little hard to work out time zones, especially with Australia and the UK are particularly difficult, but very much appreciate it, I want to wish you all the best of luck on the book if you’ve got any work left.

Rachel: Yeah, it’s getting there.

Louis: Fantastic. So to anyone listening, The CSS Anthology fourth edition will be out soon with SitePoint, so keep your eyes and ears peeled. If people want to find you online do you want to drop some links to either your website, Twitter?

Rachel: I’m @rachelandrew on Twitter, and rachelandrew.co.uk is my personal site, edgeofmyseat.com is the business site.

Louis: Fantastic. So thanks again for coming on.

Rachel: Okay, thank you.

Louis: And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to Sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to download or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and 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.

SitePoint Podcast #150: The Vendor Prefix Kerfuffle

Louis Simoneau — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:12:01 +0000

Episode 150 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

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SitePoint Podcast #150: The Vendor Prefix Kerfuffle (MP3, 38:29, 35.3MB)

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Episode Summary

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/150.

Host Spotlights

Patrick: Superbowl Ad Video (comedy)
Stephan: YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener
Kevin: SSH tricks
Louis: Subscribe — Destroy All Software Screencasts
How and Why to Avoid Nil — Destroy All Software Screencasts

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast, I think it’s episode 150, is it not?

Stephan: It is 150, I believe.

Patrick: Everyone believes, no one knows, that’s how all opt-in we are (laughter).

Louis: That’s how organized we are. So we’ve got a panel show this week; Patrick, Kevin and Stephan are all on the line, hi guys.

Kevin: Howdy, howdy.

Patrick: Hello.

Louis: How you guys been?

Stephan: Busy.

Patrick: Pretty good; last show I was down in Orlando to record it with Kevin on his couch, and spend some time in Atlanta, spoke at CNN, and I’m actually drinking a Coke from a glass bottle right now, so, there’s that, I got it from the World of Coke in Atlanta. Which if you know me you know I love soda, and I love the World of Coke where you can drink over 60 different soft drinks from around the world, but also the new Coca-Cola Freestyle machine which dispenses another 100+, so, yes, it’s a great place.

Kevin: I absolutely hate those Coke dispensers because they are not as carbonated as they should be, and it feels like a mixed drink that hasn’t been mixed thoroughly, so, you know, and you don’t want to mix a coke because then you lose all your carbonation, so it’s like you don’t have enough carbonation and then you mix it and they don’t have any carbonation anymore, so now you’re drinking a flat soda. Cool idea, bad implementation.

Louis: (Laughs)

Patrick: And then it turned into the soda show (laughter). No, I love the Freestyle, I love the Coca-Cola Freestyle, but I will say that there are some sodas, and it’s really like one or two that I prefer the standard mix versus the Freestyle, but the Freestyle is actually kind of new and kind of cool technology that our audience might appreciate because it dispenses the syrup and the carbonation and the water in like a precise formula so that the restaurant can’t change that and mess it up, so this is how it’s supposed to actually taste, so, I thought that was interesting.

Louis: Years ago when I was traveling through the U.S. I was in a, um, I think it was a McDonald’s, and they served I think it was a Sprite where it was too much syrup, where they’d messed up the mix, and it was just like — it was just like liquid sugar with a little bit of water and a little bit of carbonation, it was awful.

Patrick: Yeah.

Louis: Anyway, I don’t do soda anymore, not because of that (laughter).

Patrick: You came to America and America totally turned him off to soda because of that McDonald’s, shame on you.

Louis: Yeah, no, that’s not how it happened. Anyway, so we should talk about things other than soda because I’m sure that, you know, that’s not what brings our audience to the SitePoint Podcast, although it may in the future; if you like hearing soda-related tidbits come back next week.

Kevin: Soda-cast!

Patrick: Yes!

Louis: We should make a soda-cast. Anyway, so the major story this week, at least that crossed my radar, has been an ongoing kerfuffle, let’s call it that, at the CSS Working Group and W3C. So this all sort of came to light on Thursday of last week when Daniel Glassman, I hope I’m pronouncing that name correctly, wrote this blog post describing some of the goings on at the latest meetings of the CSS Working Group. And basically the rundown of the situation is that as many of you will know, recently as new CSS features make their way into browsers, a lot of browsers sort of testing the waters with their implementations, and they’re not exactly sure how — or the spec isn’t finalized yet, for example, so they’ve been using vendor prefixes, you’ll be familiar with a -webkit- property name, so like WebKit box shadow or a WebKit border radius, the Mozilla one is Moz, and the Opera one is just an O, so obviously developers have been using these pretty extensively; Kevin and Stephan you guys write some code, have you guys done a lot of work with vendor prefixes?

Kevin: Too much.

Louis: (Laughs)

Kevin: To sum it up.

Louis: Right. So, anyway, the goings on at the Working Group were that the other browser makers, that is to say not Google and Apple, have said, look, everyone’s just implementing the WebKit ones, web developers, that is to say, are writing sort of WebKit-only pages to sort of test these experimental features, even when those features are available in prefixed form, or even in non-prefixed form, you know, the browsers including mostly Firefox and Opera, but also for some properties I guess Internet Explorer. And what happened is that Firefox, or the makers of Firefox just sort of said, look, we are gonna start supporting the WebKit prefixed one, and that’s what everyone’s doing, and people don’t seem to know that in the case of some stable features they can just drop the prefixes, and in the case of other features there is a Mozilla equivalent; people are just writing the WebKit ones because they’re trying to support mainly IOS and Android on mobile, and also Chrome and Safari on the desktop; WebKit has a pretty big market share at the moment. So obviously this caused a bit of uproar, and Glazman wrote this big, I guess, call for action is what he calls it, saying look if we let this happen it’s pretty much the return to the days of proprietary features in IE6, and then everybody came out sort of in support of that. So, I wanted to get your guys’ read on this, maybe Kevin especially because you do a bit more front-end stuff.

Kevin: Yeah, so, I mean prefixes are kind of the cola wars of browsers, in my opinion, you know it’s not as flamboyant as it was back in the IE5, IE6 days where everybody was just kind of up in arms, you know the Firefox one day just, well, just, you know, everything coming to a head, and the invention of Ajax and all that, so all those things were good, though, right, I mean that’s what brought us to the Web where are today. So, like I said, we have Ajax where we can do asynchronous calls to XML files, even JSON, you know, any kind of document we want. Now today it’s the prefix, right, and it’s been a big topic because it’s kind of a valid way of doing this because it’s in the CSS specification where you can — it’s basically set out that you can use vendor prefixes. And so to me that’s what makes it more of a cold war, right, because it’s legal everybody’s just kind of doing it under the table, doing their own thing. And so to other vendors picking up other vendors’ prefixes seems a little scary to me because that’s stepping outside of what the W3C had set out to do with these which was prevent that very thing from happening, like you had with the filter element in Internet Explorer, right. And so, yeah, you know, this doesn’t give me a good feeling, I like the idea of vendor prefixes, I think it’s great for expanding on ideas and trying out new things without effecting the way things can be implemented in the future, but at this point it looks like I think this is really a problem that’s been designer related, right; designers and developers have created this demand for these features, and since the W3C can’t move fast enough to feed the designers what they want, and the developers as well, I’m not trying to make this a one-sided argument or anything, I think that’s kind of what’s causing this issue is the impatience of developers, and that kind of thing. And so the only solution that browser makers can do, because nobody’s going to pitch their browser if they’re behind, right, I mean you can see there are a lot of things in play here, and so, yeah, I think it’s just a big, crazy mess, and the W3C has to figure something out to work with all these browsers, I mean it’s nothing — it’s hard to just make a small comment on because it’s so complex.

Louis: Yeah. So, a couple of things related to some of what you just said, one of them is saying that developers are impatient for these features, and that’s true to some extent, and there are cases that are more similar to filter, in the case of, for example, WebKit Text Size Adjust is a property that was created in WebKit, and it’s used on IOS and Android but was never in the CSS specifications, but a lot of these things are properties that were in the specifications and either, well, first of all the CSS3 spec is still in progress, the browser didn’t want to lock down –

Kevin: Exactly.

Louis: — and create a version of that that might then be not backwards compatible. A good example of that is the original gradients and syntax that existed in WebKit is not the syntax that’s currently used in the W3C spec, and it’s not the syntax that was used by the other browsers. So currently if you do WebKit gradient that does something entirely different from the linear gradient and radial gradient properties, and the fact that it was boxed away into a vendor prefix form sort of protects us because we can now use the standardized form, and it won’t break on those older versions of Chrome and Safari, of which obviously there are a few because the browser upgrade cycles have improved as well. And then putting it back on the W3C, as you said, they have to come up with something; I don’t think it’s necessarily up to the Working Group and up to the browser makers, there’s not a lot they can do, and Eric Meyer wrote a good blog post sort of summing up what he sees as the browser makers positions here, so I’ll just quote briefly from his blog post, “As a vendor it may be the least bad choice available in every competitive marketplace, after all, if there were a few million sites that you could render as intended if only the authors used your prefix instead of just one, which would you rather: A) embark on a protracted massive awareness campaign that would probably be contradicted to death by people with their own axes to grind, or just support the prefix that people are using and move on with life?” So in this case he’s saying if you’re Mozilla, yes, the correct thing to do is to keep pushing the -moz- prefix and supporting a standardized non-prefixed form once the thing is stable and you feel like you’ve got a solid implementation, but if there are a million sites out there on the Web that look broken because they’ve only used WebKit, then for user browser makers your main prerogative is to serve your users and make the sties that they visit not look broken, right. I think it’s largely up to developers to really not be lazy about this, if you want to make a cool demo and you use Chrome and you have an iPhone that’s great, you can make a cool demo, but take the time to find out whether the property that you’re demoing actually exists in Firefox and exists in Opera, and chances are it probably does, and if it does don’t just do the WebKit one, right — right?

Stephan: Right. (Laughter)

Kevin: You know sometimes you have to stop and think about these kinds of things for a second, it’s hard to — because I mean it is a complex situation; you know right when you think web standards has won, you know, something like this comes out and happens and it’s a little scary, and something you have to be watchful of, it’s good that people are talking about it, you know, but at the end of the day web standards are just that, they’re standards, and you’re trying to create a unified language for everyone to use that way when, like you said, a browser gets updated your site doesn’t break. And so the danger that I see in this is, yeah, you’re gonna go and adopt this other prefix, let’s say you’re at Firefox, right, and you adopt the WebKit prefix, you go and do this but it doesn’t change people’s code, you know what I mean, it’s like it doesn’t help standards at all, it only hurts them.

Louis: Absolutely. I’m not saying that this is a good thing for Mozilla to be doing, it’s a terrible, terrible idea, but from the perspective of a browser maker, like what Eric’s article was trying to say, is that it seems like it’s the logical thing for them to do, even though it’s the wrong thing objectively for the Web and for web standards going forward. I mean the last thing we want is for these WebKit properties to wind up in all browsers, and that sort of circumvents the W3C entirely, right, then it’s just whatever WebKit does other browsers decide to support if they like it, if they don’t they don’t, I guess, and then you don’t have a standards process, then you just have one browser maker controlled by a few ginormous companies that — or, to be clear, WebKit is open source but a large percentage of the contributions come from Google and Apple, you know, that’s definitely not the way we want to go.

Kevin: You know because there are so many platforms in place, I mean you have Windows, Linux and Apple, right, right now, and those are kind of the big-time, I mean you have other proprietary operating systems, but those are like server software and that kind of thing, so you don’t really have browsers on them. But, uh, it’s something where I mea I know they’ve been fighting for this for a long time and we’re probably pulling this out, this conversation out a little bit, but it would be nice if everyone could just get together and say here is our one rendering engine, and I know this isn’t gonna happen because there is a certain amount of control that you need on an operating system to please, I mean it’s a business. At the end of the day what I’m trying to say is it’s a business, and whether you’re Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google your business is getting people to see your brand, and since everybody surfs the Web, the browser’s an excellent way to do that, and I think until that goes away we’re always going to have standard problems.

Louis: Okay. So first of all I don’t think that’s a fair call because at least one of the rendering engines out there, which is to say Firefox from Mozilla, is not a business, it’s an open source project put out by a non-profit.

Kevin: This is true.

Louis: And to some extend WebKit also sort of falls in that realm, even though it’s championed by two very large companies, and those two very large companies another valid point is that they’re often at each other’s throats, so saying that they’re trying to push the browser engine WebKit to try and advance through an agenda is valid, but they’re also helping their competitor, right, so it doesn’t — it’s not just business, I don’t think that’s the only reason why the standards process is difficult, and I think it was actually kind of working, I mean these vendor prefixes were effective. One of the suggestions people have made is that the experimental ones shouldn’t still be there after the property is stabilized, so that means if you support box shadow in an un-prefixed form in your browser then there’s no reason to still support WebKit box shadow because you want to push developers towards using the standard form, right; these are only sort of an interim stopgap solution while you’re testing things.

Kevin: Right. That still kind of breaks the Web in a way, though, because you lose future compatibility versus backward compatibility.

Louis: Yeah. Another suggestion that I read that I really liked, I don’t remember who suggested this, but someone had mentioned that a good idea might be to have the vendor prefixed properties only exist in develop versions of the browsers. So if I’m using the nightly builds of WebKit then I can test around with these WebKit ones, but as soon as it goes to a full release where it’s pushed out into Chrome and Safari either you support the property or you don’t.

Kevin: It’s an interesting idea.

Louis: If you do then there’s no prefix, and if you don’t then it’s just out, which I think is probably — it seems on the surface of it like a good idea, I haven’t given it a whole bunch of thought, but it seems like it might sort of solve some of these problems where people are making websites out in the wild using these experimental properties and sort of tying their sites to one browser or one rendering engine.

Kevin: Right. Yeah, I like that idea because at the end of the day what a lot of browser makers need is feedback from implementers, right, and so that would be an excellent way to do that, I think. Now, you wouldn’t get as many implementers because not everybody runs develop builds, but you would still get a good many.

Louis: Yeah, and without necessarily running the risk of people developing production websites with experimental properties. Anyway, I just — it’s good to get a bit of a read on this, it’s been obviously a huge outroar on the Web, there have been blog post far and wide, SitePoint, long time SitePoint friend Rachel Andrew wrote a blog post decrying this action on the part of Mozilla and other — well, basically just saying look we’ve got to fix this, so people have come up with — there’s a petition and a pledge telling browser makers not to implement WebKit vendor prefix and promising to update the sites that you do control, so if you do feel like this is something that matters and you don’t want the other browser vendors to start standardizing around the WebKit form then there’s that option, there’s also a project started by Christian Heilmann, who’s of Mozilla, which is called Prefix The Web, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, and that is people going around finding open source projects on GitHub and demos of CSS3 functionality that people have put on GitHub, and just patching that code to support other browsers where possible, so there’s a whole list of those of projects people have found and updated to be more cross-browser compliant, so a lot of things that, you know, a lot of people are jumping into this bandwagon and trying to get people up and angry about this, so that’s good, we’ll have to wait and see what happens though.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s the nature of the Web, right, there’s always something crazy going on, it really is.

Louis: Yeah, cool. Well, I guess that wraps that if someone wants to jump in with the next story.

Kevin: So, I have an interesting article to get off the CSS train for a second and talk about the Kickstarter.

Patrick: Yay. (Laughter)

Louis: Yeah, what happened to the train, we haven’t heard the train yet today Kevin?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah,

Patrick: whoo whoo (laughs)

Kevin: I’m sure it’ll be around later, I think it comes at 7:30, but maybe 7:45 today, we’ll see.

Patrick: It’s running late from Albuquerque.

Kevin: So, there’s a blog post up, it was posted on February 10th, about the last 24 hours, of course then, of Kickstarter and how they’ve made some giant leaps and bounds in what they’re doing. And I think Kickstarter is a worthy company and project to talk about because it helps other people work together to finance ideas and projects and that kind of thing. Basically what they have going on is basically a timeline on this blog post of all the things that have happened over 24 hours, it was a big day for Kickstarter and just all the different things between political efforts and some very large projects that they have going on; I believe Elevation Doc saw close to a million dollars for their project. And so I was wondering maybe if you guys had thoughts on a project like this that kind of takes off, like your opinions and stuff on maybe what other people could do to get involved in a project like this. Like how — I think, Patrick, you would probably have some opinions on this, but, you know, I’m sure you’ve heard of Kickstarter, but how would somebody go about getting involved not only in like one of these good projects, but also starting their own project. Like because I think on the cusp of something like this it’s good to kick into the imagination; I know I’m stumbling all over my words here, but, interesting I would say.

Patrick: Kickstarter’s awesome, I mean I think I love the idea of it, it’s not like a complex idea, it’s a pretty simple idea, it’s a simple concept, and they’ve got the community and the traffic to make it a successful venture, and that’s really what it’s about, not necessarily the idea but the execution. And I think it’s great for them to hit this mark and to have projects that go over a million dollars, it really makes me think creatively about what I could do with the platform myself if I have different ideas for different projects that I want to fund, and to be able to get that funding before laying out the investment. Not that it really disrupts venture capital so much, I think that space is still kind of its own sort of country and has it’s own sort of norms and principles, but definitely this is a case where people can go out there and more simply get funding and maybe maintain more control of their idea by delivering it directly to the people who want their product or want to see them release whatever it is they are interested in putting out. So, to me it’s a great idea and it’s great to see them be successful, and it’s great to see so many different content creators and product developers look to Kickstarter to put out something; I notice a lot of web video channels, a lot of successful — YouTube channels especially, putting out Kickstarter campaigns or similar campaigns to fund their next big thing, or maybe they’ll want to do a movie or a longer feature, and so they’re using Kickstarter or something similar to fund it, mentioning people in their videos, having people pick elements of the video; there is a series called Beer and Board Games from Blame Society Films that is a lot of fun, and they have people who you can pick the beer, you can pick the game they play, and so they get the funding but then they make the people a part of the project as well, and I think that’s a lot of fun.

Louis: Yeah, it’s an awesome thing, and it’s great for people who have ideas to be able to just kick it directly to their fans, especially if they’ve already got a following and just want to, like you said, do something a bit bigger and more ambitious. I have to say — I’m just gonna nerd this up a little bit; I was kind of disappointed because when I see these like, oh, we had this crazy 24 hours blog on a startup website I’m hoping for like our servers were getting hammered and here’s what we had to do, and all the nerdy technical details. And just so the listeners aren’t disappointed, there’s none of that, it’s all about successful and just how it blew up on social media, not about how they weathered the storm of all the increased traffic.

Patrick: Right, no, none of that (laughter). It’s a mainstream blog post; we’ll put it that way.

Louis: Yeah, maybe they have a technical blog as well; maybe I’m just not looking at the right place.

Patrick: Yeah, it’s possible.

Kevin: I think I’m a little biased to Kickstarter in a way because it’s such a good site, right, I mean I’ve seen really good things come out of it, there’s projects for like WordPress plugins, and that kind of thing, and I think even some iPad gear came out from this, and these are all just individuals who have an idea and want to get other people who like that idea, or have similar interests, to get involved so you can help create things that aren’t just blah, if you know what I mean, like it’s a quality product, right, because there is some investment, and you can put time behind the things, and I just love it, I think it’s great.

Patrick: Yeah, it is, and have you funded anything, Kevin?

Kevin: Yes, I have. So, one of my friends, he works with a lady and they do music albums, and so I supported them, it’s the Hannah Miller, you can look them up, I love that music, it’s good.

Patrick: Okay, yeah, I haven’t funded anything myself, not yet anyway.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: I want to, though, I will one day, I’m sure. Put your money where your mouth is, Patrick.

Louis: That’s right. Yeah, let’s do it. Speaking of money, that’s a perfect segue.

Patrick: So, speaking of money, I picked up a story on TechCrunch by Rip Empson, and he reported on the sale of two domain names, not your everyday sale, though, because it was challenge.com and vi.com, and challenge.com was sold for $500,000.00, while vi.com was sold for $325,000.00 to a company named Visalus Sciences, I believe. And that story linked me to bigger lists of the biggest domain name sales of 2011, so last year’s top 100 domain name sales by the actual cost of the domain name. So the number one domain name last year sold, the most expensive one was social.com, which was sold for 2.6 million dollars, then domainname.com, and dudu.com, I assume that means something to someone or in some other language, both sold for a million dollar each, and there’s this long list of names, 3d.com jumps out to me for $500,000.00, and for the kind of web dev technical audience that we have, datacenter.com sold for $352,500.00, and livecloud.com sold for $92,000.00, so, yeah, I’m always curious of what domain names are worth, so this helps to guide me; not that I have any that are worth half a million, of course.

Louis: Yeah, I mean that stuff is kind of crazy, it’s really surprising to me to look at this because — and so what did you say social.com sold for, sorry?

Patrick: 2.6 million. It was the most expensive by far, like the closest one was domainname.com for a million.

Louis: Yeah, but I mean even let’s go with $500,000.00 and up, I find it difficult to imagine other than, you know, if it’s your brand, if it’s like hp.com or apple.com then obviously the value of that to you as a company could reach that kind of number, but I can’t possibly imagine anything that you could do with social.com that would reach anywhere near that level of investment that you couldn’t do with a different domain. Increasingly it seems like the domain name is less and less relevant in web ventures because everyone finds things via Google, or you’ve got a Facebook page or Twitter, I mean it’s easy to find anything. I think even as recent goings on with like, for example, Facebook login being the most commonly searched thing in Google, right, or it was at some point, or it was in the top ten of searches, right; people aren’t even entering Facebook.com to go to Facebook, so it seems like the domain name is kind of irrelevant, and especially something like social.com where it doesn’t have a strong branding, it’s just sort of this random word, it kind of baffles me.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean I can understand that. There are two, you know, there’s a couple thoughts, domain names, branding, it can have an impact on getting funded, I’ve heard multiple people say this before that if you have a great pitch and great domain name you’ll go a lot farther than if you just have a great pitch. Is that fair? Is that vanity or cosmetic? Perhaps, but it is something that I’ve seen repeated multiple times, and so you do have as far as, like you said, people go to Google, the domain name does impact searches and results, what’s in the domain name. So, for example, domainname.com might have a decent chance at ranking for the search term domain name if you were starting now versus starting as eNom, let’s say eNom has built up links and they’ll get credit for that, but if you are one of those right now and you’re targeting that term, domainname.com is gonna put you head and shoulders above generic branding. But I can understand your point because that’s a point a lot of people make is that if you have a million to spend on a domain name then you have a million to spend on something else.

Louis: It just seems to me like if you’ve got — let’s say I’ve got an idea for a website that is gonna be the next social network, right, I can either spend 2.6 million dollars hiring developers and designers and making a product, or I can buy social.com and then spend a thousand dollars hiring designers and developers making a product. And if feels to me, like my gut feeling is that the better product is a more worthwhile investment of my time, whether or not it’ll be more successful, and you mentioned funding, I mean the funding thing is crazy too, right, because that’s not an indication of actual success, as we’ve seen recently with Groupon and things like that, you know, getting funding isn’t an end in itself, right, it’s just another step along the way, and if you don’t have a business model or if you can’t turn a profit or if you don’t have a product then that’s not getting you any further than a good domain name is.

Patrick: Yeah, and one thing that you might throw out there is that if you have the money to pay developers and you have the money to get a great domain name, then it’s maybe better to have both instead of one. But if you have to choose one then you want to be careful where you invest it.

Louis: You know up to a point, I can understand if you’re starting a new venture that domain names you want aren’t necessarily available, right, or if somebody’s got them and you can get them for two or seven or even ten thousand dollars, if it’s part of a big business venture and you say this is the domain name, and I’m not expecting you to be able to start — I’m not saying that people can ‘I want to start a new website about whatever’ and the domain name is just gonna cost me the ten dollar registration, I don’t think that’s very common anymore because a lot of domain names are taken or squatted, right. So you might have to pay something for them, but it just seems to me like paying that much for them is kind of crazy. Again, part of it is coming from the perspective that I come from working at Flippa where we do a lot of sales of websites, established websites, and not a lot of sales of domains like Sedo, which is mentioned in this article, do more domain sales, but for us we’re seeing like when you’re looking at a website it’s all about traffic and links and even revenue, because these are real businesses, right, you’re buying something, not just a property, which is hard to quantify anything about other than it’s a dictionary word and it’s short and so it’s worth two million dollars, I don’t know, it baffles me. Clearly it doesn’t baffle people who have two million dollars, and maybe they’re smarter than me because that’s why they have two million dollars.

Patrick: I don’t know if that’s the case, but domain names do have value, I think, at the end of the day, so that it’s kind of like that — the address or the real estate of the Web, there’s value there, and there’s different examples, like I could say Flippa, for example, if you search websites for sale Flippa is number one right now, flippa.com/buy, and that’s a great place to be. Of course Flippa has the SitePoint –

Louis: The SitePoint bump.

Patrick: — party limited. Yeah, the SitePoint bump, but if you go to the third site there, Websites for Sales, plural, is the third site listed there. And the site that I go to is nothing particularly nice let me tell ya. So, there is something to be said for that, but I do agree with you, and, you know, I think it’s an interesting discussion, and also one thing I wanted to point out also was country code domain names, the most expensive country code domain names, so non-.com, .net, .org, specific countries, was at Aktein.de which is stocks in German, that sold for $725,000.00, and on the web development note, or at least the Web note, internet.co sold for $40,000.00, seo.in sold for $18,500.00, servers.eu and addserver.d sold for $18,000 and $17,940 respectively.

Louis: You know, of that I would have to say that seo.in sounds like that was a bargain, like it sounds like you would expect to pay more than $18,000 for that given the sort of explosion of SEO. So, in is India, right, I’m not getting that wrong?

Patrick: I believe that is the case, yeah.

Louis: Yeah, anyway, I think someone got a steal with that one, but, again, I don’t know anything because I don’t have two million dollars.

Patrick: I wish I had lots of money. I would have many beautiful domain names. With that said, I think it’s time to talk about spotlights, and I will go first with my patented offbeat spotlight, Patrick’s offbeat spotlight corner, a regular series here on the SitePoint Podcast.

Louis: Is Patricksoffbeatspotlight.com available? (Laughter)

Patrick: It might be.

Louis: Is that worth $18,000.00?

Patrick: I think it’s worth the registration fee; might not even be worth that. But, so my spotlight is a commercial from the Superbowl called Man’s Best Friend, it was part of Doritos Crash the Superbowl website where people can submit different commercials, this one was by Jonathan Friedman, and the description is: while working in his yard a man observes a crime being covered up, but the culprit has a unique way of keeping the two witnesses quiet, and I kind of don’t want to talk about it because it’s 30 seconds, so if I describe it it’s ruined, so just check out the link and enjoy the commercial.

Louis: Right. And the Superbowl is an American football competition, if I understand correctly.

Patrick: Yes, yes, and assuming — it’s inconsequential to what we’re discussing here. Now, the one thing is, though, I’m hoping that people beyond U.S. will be able to see the commercial. I can’t guarantee that for sure, but hopefully that is the case.

Louis: We’ll find out. Yep, I just tested it and it works here, so most likely it is available in all countries, or at least most countries.

Patrick: That’s what they say about Australia, right, if you can make it here you can make it anywhere, isn’t that Australia?

Louis: (Laughs) if you can see it here you can see it anywhere, that’s what they say about Australia on the Internet.

Patrick: There we go. Down to the last minute. Stephan, what do you got?

Stephan: I can go next. I’ve got this website called yourls, it’s y-o-u-r-l-s.org, and it’s a custom short URL creator, and it has a plugin for WordPress, so it’s a set of PHP scripts to create your own short URLs. I know we love those on this show, so I figured why not.

Louis: Yeah, I mean I think we have talked about this before, and it is definitely cool to be able to have your URL shortner on a server you control so you have it in your own database, and it also does click tracking and statistics like Bit.ly does, yeah, it looks really cool.

Stephan: Yeah, simple.

Patrick: Do you use this, Stephan?

Stephan: No, I don’t, I just found it today, so I thought it would be neat to share.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m familiar with it, I just haven’t made the decision of what I want to use, like, and if I want to even do it, because I have ifrog.gy, so ifroggy but i-f-r-o-g.gy, and I’m not sure if I want to put it on bit.ly or if I want to use this, or what; if anyone has a recommendation leave it in the comments.

Louis: What’s gy?

Stephan: I think it’s Guyana.

Patrick: That’s correct, Stephan, it is. Gee-yana, Guyana, something like that.

Louis: Was Guyana fairly easy to deal with registration.

Patrick: I paid via carrier pigeon.

Louis: Like some of them you have to fax something in, some of them you have to prove you’re a business.

Patrick: No, it’s a bad joke, but yeah, I mean it was a slow process, I had to register, like wait a month and wait for it to go through and them to email me, because the site that I registered through, 101domain.com, they’re a pretty well-known registrar, but I guess it was the actual person who manages the registry in that country that takes a long time, but once it’s set up and on the server I mean my assumption is that it should be okay, but that is part of my hesitation.

Louis: Yeah, a friend of mine was trying to register at .ie, a domain name, which is Ireland, and apparently they just said, no, that’s not a website devoted to an Irish business, like you really have to demonstrate that you’re making an Ireland-related website or you’re an Irish business.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah.

Louis: You can’t just use it as part of a word like people do with ly or gy in your case.

Patrick: Yeah, different countries have different restrictions as far as what you can do, and many of them do require you to at least maintain a presence in the country or in some cases even stricter than that.

Louis: I’d maintain a presence in Guyana, I could get a little beach house.

Patrick: (Laughs) I don’t know.

Kevin: Carrier pigeon.

Louis: Just for the domain name, of course.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m looking at the Wikipedia page for a list of Internet top-level domains, and like Finland requires you to be a company or organization registered in Finland, or be a Finnish national, Guinea requires a local contact, so, yeah, it seems like — I don’t know how common that is or how restricted they are, but in some cases it definitely is the case. I mean they make less money, but I guess they maintain a more, how do I want to put this, pure domain pool, I don’t know.

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: Kevin! What do you got?

Kevin: I have an excellent article on SSH, since SSH is super exciting.

Patrick: Yay.

Louis: I’m really excited by SSH, I don’t know about anyone else, but I didn’t even take that sarcastically. (Laughter)

Kevin: It actually is a very cool thing, in fact, it can be more cool for you if you’re using it for just secure — connecting to your server securely, connecting to a server; you can use it for a lot more, and this article covers just that, and so they cover why you should use SSH, and then also maybe executing remote commands, copying files, you know, so there’s a lot of really cool stuff in here you need to check out if you use SSH. I use SSH for everything; I use it to connect MySQL databases, I use it to — I mean if it has to do with a server I use SSH, and I think this is an excellent article on the topic.

Louis: Yeah, I spend pretty much ten hours a day everyday shuffling through SSH because I develop on a virtual machine and I SSH to the terminal.

Patrick: Ouch!

Louis: Any little tips and tricks I definitely appreciate. Speaking of tips and tricks, see segue, man, we’re all about segues this week; my spotlight is a series of screencasts created by a guy called Gary Bernhardt, and they are called Destroy All Software. So, he bills it as screencasts for serious developers, they are not free, they’re a nine dollar a month subscription, but they’re great, we’ve collectively bought a subscription here at Flippa for our dev team, and I’ve been powering through them in the last couple of days, and they’re really good. So they’re kind of more advanced developer topics, so either UNIX command line stuff, test driven development, a lot of stuff about VIM and using VIM effectively, and Git for version control. The bits that are about development and software tend to focus on Ruby, but there are little tidbits and design patterns sort of useful in any language. But it’s one of those things where you’re watching them, and they’re very, very dense, he does a lot of stuff in 10 to 15 minutes per screencast, but just being blown away by how fast and how effective the guy is using his tools and understanding the code that he’s writing, and it really gives you a good insight into the stuff. So if you use any of these tools I recommend checking it out, there’s one of them that is available for free as a demo, and it is the one about avoiding nil or nul values in your code, why that’s important and how to do it, so I’ll put a link to the one that’s free as well in the show notes.

Kevin: Interesting. See now you have me excited.

Louis: Awesome (laughs).

Kevin: It’s a good trade, it’s a good trade.

Louis: That’s what we aim for. Alright, so that wraps it up for this week, and let’s just go around the table.

Kevin: I’m Kevin Dees and you can find me at kevindees.cc, and on Twitter as @kevindees.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network; I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and I blog at badice.com.

Louis: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepointd-o-t-c-o-m, you can email us at podcast@sitepoint.com, and course you can go to sitepoint.com/podcast to find all of our show, subscribe to the RSS, leave a comment, anything you want to do with the podcast will be at sitepoint.com/podcast. Thanks for listening, next week I hope to have maybe a little mini-panel of interviewees talking about the whole vendor prefix kerfuffle, so tune in next week; we should have a great show of some experts being able to comment on that.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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