SitePoint Podcast #165: You Say Cache, I Say Caché

Episode 165 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of 3 of our 4 our regular hosts, Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Kevin Dees (@kevindees) and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).

Download this Episode

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

SitePoint Podcast #165: You Say Cache, I Say Caché (MP3, 45:15, 43.5MB)

Episode Summary

The panel discuss topics such as the applications received by ICANN for new TLDs, the X-Box getting a version of IE 9 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/165.

Host Spotlights

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint podcast. It’s our biweekly panel show, and I’m back.

Kevin: Yay!

Patrick: Welcome back.

Louis: Steven’s not back, though. Patrick and Kevin are with me on the show today.

Patrick: He’s healthy, though. He’s healthy. He didn’t fly off a bicycle going 80 mph with the wind ablaze, fires, flames, and everything.

Louis: Alright. That’s certainly a dramatization of the events that occurred. Because I’m concerned for what stories people might have constructed in my absence, let me say that I was on a bike going well under the speed limit.

Patrick: Is this a pedal bike or a motor bike?

Louis: A pedal bike. In a bike lane, when a car that was going to park in the street side parking across from the bike lane cut across the bike lane without actually checking his mirror, to get to the parking spot. He knocked me off the bike. I would have been going about 30-35 kph, so still fairly high velocity. I hit the ground hard and have some cracks in the tips of my elbows and one of my ribs as well. So, I’ve been out of commission for a while, but I’m mostly back. I got some ability back in my arms. I can’t lift anything, but I can type and move around. I’m getting there. So, if you are a motorist listening to this, please just check your mirrors. Be aware of other things around you on the road. If you’re a cyclist and this thing happens to you, don’t do what I did, which was to get get pissed off, give the guy hell, get back on your bike, and ride away because you felt fine. You probably will feel fine, even if you’ve broken some bones, right after getting knocked off the thing, because of the adrenaline. So, do take the time to sit around for a little bit and see if you’re going to be okay. Also, get the license plate number of the person who hit you, which I didn’t do, because I felt fine. I was like this is bullshit, rode off and went home. About an hour later, my elbow started swelling up and I couldn’t move, so I had to go to the hospital. So, that’s my advice to listeners. Don’t get put off riding a bike. Riding a bike is great. I feel bad about this, because I’m a total cycling advocate, and I’m going to be back on the bike as soon as I heal up. It’s a faster and better way to get around the city.

Patrick: So, if you happen to see Louis going down the road and get hit, and you were there to see the license plate, e-mail us.

Louis: Absolutely.

Patrick: So, when you say you fell, did you cartwheel, was it pavement?
What did you hit?

Louis: I hit pavement, pretty much. I don’t exactly remember the specific details of what happened. But, I was definitely was knocked by the car over my bike, and sort of fell off the bike. I landed on my arms. I don’t really remember. My rib started hurting a few days afterward. I asked the doctor and he said it was probably broken, but there was nothing we could do about it, anyway, so we didn’t bother x-raying it. I must have fell onto the handlebars with my chest. That’s what cracked my rib.

Patrick: Ribs are a pain. I had a very small double hairline fracture on my rib. Ribs are the worst because they didn’t do anything. Good luck, I just had to stay still for a while.

Louis: To be fair, they also didn’t do anything for my arms. I went to the fracture clinic a few days after I got off. I had slings from the ER. When I went to the fracture clinic, the doctor said “I would usually put them in casts for a couple weeks, but because it was both of your arms, it would make you completely useless, so I don’t want to do that. I could put a cast on one of your arms, but that would be arbitrary because they were both broken. So, we’re just going to go ahead and not put casts on.” Which is good because I can move around. Even thought it’s been painful sometimes, it’s good to be able to stretch them out so I won’t be too stiff once the healing is done. So, without further ado, or discussion of my situation, although I do appreciate that I got a bunch of SitePoint podcast fans who messaged me on Twitter to express their concerns, and a big thanks for that as it’s nice to have some messages of support, let’s just dive right into the stories.

Patrick: This story comes to me care of Revenws. It recalls the 118th of the SitePoint podcast released almost a year ago, June 4th, 2011, where we discussed the plans for ICANN to offer arbitrary TLD’s. Things like dot-
whatever-you-want. You have to pay the application fee of $185,000, then there’s maintenance fees on top of that if you get approved, and we discussed that. We didn’t necessarily know what to make of the idea, or that it would be that important or powerful, but some companies have taken notice. One of those companies is Google. Vince Cerf, Internet pioneer and chief Internet evangelist at Google, posted a entry on the official Google blog. Where he mentioned that they had applied for some TLD’s. He mentioned four specific ones. They’re the four categories that the applications fell into. First, their trademarks like .Google. Second, domains related to their core business, like .docs. Then, domains that they feel will improve user experience, like .YouTube. Finally, domains they think are interesting, such as .lol. Ad Age reported that they applied for more than 50 new domains. As part of their applications, they plan to make security and abuse prevention a high priority, work with all ICANN accredited registrars, and then work with brand owners to develop sensible rights protection mechanisms that build upon ICANN’s requirements. Also, other companies have announced that they’ve applied for names. Tech Crunch reported that web.com had applied for .web. Cloud Names applied for .cloud and .global. A company called Radix had applied for 31 TLD’s, including
.law, .music, .movie, and a number of others. If you add it all up, you get
$185,000 per application. We have about 100 announced applications, that’s quite a bit of money going to ICANN. I don’t know where the discussion goes with this. Are you surprised there’s been at least some serious interest in dropping down that almost $200,000 just for an application, by these different companies?

Louis: It seems to me that for one of those, especially the more generic ones, if you can then go in and act as a registrar and charge people to register domains on that TLD, so thinking of things like .web, .movie,
.music,

Patrick: Louis.lol.

Louis: And .lol is another good example of that, it seems like it wouldn’t be very difficult to recoup that money over a couple years of domain registration. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I don’t know what the percentages of registrations under .com versus other, lesser TLD’s like .biz or .net. The ones that don’t make any sense to me are the brand-specific ones like
.Google, or .docs. I don’t get it. Are you going to be Google.Google?

Patrick: Not “Google.” The mathematical googol, I think. Like “get real tricky.”

Louis: That’s even worse. Some of that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. There’s obviously a need for additional name spacing in the web , because there’s an explosion of demand with problems of squatting and domain trading, there’s so much real estate that’s unavailable out there. It’s new territory.

Patrick: In the Ad Age story, ICANN apparently said they’ve received more than 1900 application, which would bring in an estimated $350 million in application fees. That’s a substantial amount of money. You mentioned how much is registered for .com versus other ones. Cerf mentioned that in his blog post. The disparity and lack of diversity in domain names. He said that nearly 50% of the websites we visit are found in the .com top level domain name. He linked to a report in March of this year that included a breakdown of total domain name registrations. In Q4 of 2011, because you can’t get the number, they have a graph, and it looks like about 100 million domain name registrations were made for .com. You had ccTLD’s, which are country code top level domain names. There’s a generic list of ‘other’ that accounts for maybe 55 million. They break it down a bit. .cn did about 3 million or so. The popular one, .de for Germany was probably the most popular non .com domain name. Then you have .info. It’s not a massive part of the chart, but you’re talking about 8 million names, let’s say. If you can hit 8 million names in a quarter, or even a year, at $10-$20 a pop, then you’re going to make money off of this. Pretty easily.

Louis: That’s definitely the case. For something generic like .web, it seems like something that could have potential to get traction. It’s a little more confusing to try to understand why companies would go after things like their brand name as a TLD, especially when they already own that name in .com name space. Which feels like it’s going to be the first place people think to look in the foreseeable future.

Kevin: I kind of like this. Maybe SitePoint should drop a few pennies down for .sitepoint. We could be podcast.sitepoint. That would be pretty sick. Sorry, Kevin.

Kevin: It would, actually. I was going to say I like the fact that bigger companies are taking a look into doing this, because the .com name space is very saturated. People are used to typing .com, so you don’t want to take them away from what they’re used to. If bigger companies start doing this, especially one like Google which you associate as the internet sometimes, it loosens that grasp that .com has and opens the door to more name spaces. My personal blog is kevindees.cc. I can’t get kevindees.com. I would like to have.com. But, now that Google is doing this, I don’t feel as tense about not having .com. They’re kind of going after .Google.

Louis: I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes up at these addresses. I don’t think any of these new TLD’s actually resolve yet, right? Am I correct in saying that?

Patrick: Right. They just applied. It’s just an application.

Louis: Right. So, once we see if companies actually start doing this and offer the possibility for consumers to register with these TLD’s or set up their own sites that are accessible by these TLD’s and we see them in the wild, then we might be able to have another chat about this, may in another year. We can follow up when the first one of these things goes live.

Kevin: I’d love to see Google use that brand name. Instead of going to Google.com, of course you’ll always have Google.com. You could go to search.Google, youtube.Google, or video.Google.

Louis: I guess that’s potentially interesting at least.

Patrick: That’s like AOL keywords. Maybe we’ll talk about this in a couple weeks because ICANN has said they will unveil all applications on June 13th. A fun part for me, will be to look at the most obscure thing that somebody applied for and decided to pay like $185,000 for some 25-letter word or phrase.

Louis: We’ll see what happens.

Kevin: I have the probably the best story of the day, not to be narcissistic, or anything. But, it’s totally E3, this week.

Louis: Just putting it out there.

Kevin: E3 is going on right now. I’ve been doing a little watching and a little peeking in there. I’m super excited about Halo 4. That looks really cool to continue that story [Arc]. I love that game. But, more importantly, some updates to XBOX, and the introduction of a browser to the console, at last. But, it’s not Chrome. It’s Internet Explorer.

Louis: Would anybody have expected it to be? It is Internet Explorer. Do we have details on what version of what rendering engine will be in this thing?

Kevin: From what I’ve seen on the Twitter feeds, it’s going to be IE9, and because it’s XBOX, they can patch that to IE10 when they need to. More importantly the way the browser actually works. The rendering engine is important because you have to build around that, but the interaction takes it a step further. You aren’t going to be typing anything in. It’s all voice driven through Kinect. There’s some touching and clicking through their new Smart Glass platform, with the XBOX. Smart Glass, just to clarify, if you have seen Wii U, if you’ve seen their new controller with a screen on the controller, except you can use your phone or tablet as a touch surface for the XBOX console, in conjunction with Kinect. Internet Explorer is going to take advantage of both of these things. I like that. If you watch the video, I have an article from cnet.com, and another article on this. They just say “XBOX, do a search” for whatever they need to do. You can select things off a list with your voice. If you go to a website, you can use your phone as the mouse pointer. It’s a nice looking mouse. It’s not the classic Microsoft mouse. You don’t have to worry about that. It’s not going to be any kind of sore thumb. It’s an interesting thing they’re trying. If you’ve ever used the Wii browser, you have to point your thing at the screen and try to click on letters. It’s very wrong, so it’s nice to see somebody trying something different.

Patrick: You have to point your thing at the screen and try to click letter. It sounds very wrong. Sorry. So, here’s the thing. Are you telling me that the XBOX had no browsing capability prior to this?

Kevin: They had Bing, I believe.

Patrick: Is that what they called a browser? How did you surf the internet? Could you view a YouTube video on there? How did that work?

Kevin: I never used Bing, that’s the thing.

Patrick: But, you’re going to use Internet Explorer?

Kevin: This is Internet Explorer for XBOX, not just Bing for XBOX.

Louis: There have been a lot of attempts to make browsing on the television, as it were, become a more consumer friendly way of accessing the internet, and it hasn’t really taken off. If you look at any websites statistics, if we look at Flippa stats, we have 60% desktop, 40% mobile, and .5% other. Is it Opera on the Wii? It’s a very small number and not something people have leaped into. As web designers, we don’t have to worry or think over much about the different kinds of interaction patterns, and different input devices that would be used in those contexts. Certainly not in the way we do mobile. We’ve had to really rethink how we design sites from the ground up, just to deal with small screens, low connectivity, touch interface, and no physical keyboard. Even no mouse means no drag and drop, and certain other modalities like hover or drop down menus don’t work on a touch screen. So, we’ve had to re-think about how we design websites as a result of mobile gaining ground. It would be interesting to see if this kind of thing does take off, and if this is an inflection point that does make it usable enough. We know it’s a good browser. IE9 is a good browser. I’d like to see IE10 directly in there, but as you pointed out, the ability to push updates directly means you probably will have IE10 as soon as that’s released, hopefully. Microsoft, are you listening? I don’t want to be stuck with a million XBOX’s out there with IE9 that are never going to upgrade. If this takes off and becomes a more commonplace way of browsing the internet, it does have big applications for web designers. You’ll have to start looking at this whole different paradigm of interaction. You might have to get XBOX’s to test your sites on. That’s a good excuse to give your significant other. I just need it to test my websites.

Kevin: Business expense. Finally.

Patrick: The office needs an XBOX, because we need to test. If there’s anything web developers want, it’s another platform to have to design for.

Louis: Absolutely.

Patrick: It makes you think. This is an appropriate time to throw this out there. We really talked about it in detail in the episode Louis was out for. Google Chrome just surged ahead of IE. It’s official because the month-
by-month stats for May came out from statcounter.com. Craig Buckler posted the recap, as he always does. Chrome is now at 32.51%, beating out IE, which is at 32.13%. IE saw a pretty good sized fall month-over-month. Firefox and Google gained. Google has taken that lead, officially. We talked about it in the last show. For around 14 years, IE had had the lead, from the numbers I could find. Even if it’s just for a moment, even if it’s just a percentage point, it’s a pretty historic thing. Louis, you didn’t get a chance to comment. So, I’ll throw it over to you.

Louis: Right now, it’s pretty amazing for a non-default browser that’s going up against the path of least resistance for most computer users, which is just to use whatever comes on the machine. Which in most cases, that’s going to be IE or Safari. To be able to take the lead away from that, and I know Firefox made strides in that direction but was always somewhat of a minority, and to surge ahead and have a majority of people, if you add up Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, you will definitely beat out IE and Safari, that’s a majority of people going out of their way to install a non-default web browser on their computer. I think that’s a great victory. It means people are more aware of what they’re using to access the internet, and they’re making choices about the quality of experience they get. Chrome right now, as far as I’m concerned, is the smoothest and best experience you get using the internet.

Kevin: I would agree with that. Absolutely.

Patrick: To throw the number out there, if you add Chrome, Firefox, and Opera up, you come to 60%. Those three total about 60%, just about, of the market. Another thing people or developers might be interested in from this, is that IE6 took another good fall, a relative percentage of 46.3%.
It’s now used by only .66% of the world. That’s fallen below 1%, so that’s a big deal, too. But, just to tie it back into the gaming thing, with IE back on XBOX. Is that going to be the resurgence of IE, do you think? I think it’s highly unlikely, because it’s never really worked before. I tried browsing on a Playstation. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. I don’t even know what that’s powered by. I found an old blog post that said Netfront, or something? I don’t know.

Louis: The thing is, it can happen. People would have probably said the same thing about browsers on cell phones before the release of the first iPhone. It can’t just be an incremental improvement with the interface. If you were just using that d-pad browser that you had in old feature phones, that was never going to be good enough to get people to use their phones as a primary way of accessing the internet.

Patrick: At this point, I raise my hand. That’s exactly what I have. I don’t use the internet.

Louis: Do you have one of those d-pad’s?

Patrick: Yeah. For me, browsing the internet on my cell phone is more of a party trick at tech conferences, than anything else.

Louis: Right. My point is that before the release of the first iPhone in 2007, everybody was in the same boat as you. Browsing the internet on your phone was something you would do, maybe to show off to your parents that your phone had the internet on it, but you wouldn’t actually do it if you were out and about looking for a restaurant. It was just far too inconvenient. Likewise, I think that’s been the state of browsing on gaming consoles and televisions. It’s still the case, but I believe with a really revolutionary user interface, it could be made accessible to people. You just need to make it easy and intuitive. Whether that’s going to be the case with this particular implementation, remains to be seen. It’s always good to see the internet become more ubiquitous, because it makes our job as web designers and developers more interesting. One of you made a joke earlier about having another platform to worry about, which has been true with mobile, to some extent. But, on the other hand, I think a lot of people have been invigorated with the possibilities that mobile browsing has raised, and the way it’s made us think different about our websites, and about what it means to have websites that are more a part of people’s lives because they’re more ubiquitous, because are accessed from all these different contexts. Whereas before, it was just a loose hierarchy of information. You point and click with a mouse, and you weren’t really thinking about how it played into people’s lives and daily activities. So I think our jobs as designers and developers it makes are job more interesting and challenging. I’m not denying that. I think having more platforms, and a more ubiquitous internet to deal with, makes our job more fun. Hopefully, this does take off.

Patrick: On a more technical note, you can also pinch and zoom on the Smart Glass. They’re using some of those already learned design patterns like pinching and zooming, for example, to integrate that into the current experience of this. I think that plays a lot into the success rate of this. They have to take a little from the desktop, and a little from the smart phone, to really give people the full experience of what they’re used to, regardless of the device. I think that’s a smart move.

Louis: This Glass thing, sorry, just a bit of a technical question here. Is that an app that you’re running on the phone that integrates with what you’re using in your living room, or is it a separate device?

Kevin: It’s not a separate device. It’s your tablet. In my opinion, it’s either a website or app. Likely an app that you’ll download. I know you can get the XBOX app for Android, so I imagine it’s something along those lines, maybe integrated with an app that already exists. Again, the information on this, since it was just announced about six hours or so ago, there’s a lot of information just coming to light. I’m sure they’ll do a full press release on it. I believe it will be an app. That’s the only way I can see from a developers perspective, that they’ll handle that.

Patrick: There was a story in the Wall Street Journal, by Ian Sherr, who referred to it as a piece of software. He said it promises to bring together several Microsoft products, including the XBOX, tablets running Windows 8, and Windows phone devices. Microsoft says it will allow tablet or smart phone to stream media to a big screen controlled by the XBOX console. It can also augment video games with additional information such as team formations in a sports game. It will be free and work on Windows phones, Windows 8, and other portable devices.

Louis: That potentially concerns me because of Windows phones market shares at the moment. It might make this a little inaccessible to a big chunk of consumers. If they do eventually release an application that allows this integration for Androids and IOS, that will help to encourage adoption a lot more than trying to make it this tightly integrated Microsoft universe. A lot of people have XBOX’s that don’t have Windows phones. Of the people who have XBOX’s, I would venture to say that probably 95% of them don’t have Windows phones.

Kevin: Maybe even smart phones, in general.

Patrick: That’s a great point. As I found in this article, they spoke to that concern that smart people, like Louis, would raise. It says here that Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s gaming business, said the SmartGlass apps will
“allow your XBOX to communicate with whatever glass surface you have. It’ll work with devices customers already own, including iPad’s and iPhones, as well as Google’s Android operating system, aside from Microsoft’s own devices. All they do is download the app and it knits their content together.” So, there you go.

Louis: That’s very nice. I don’t know if you’ve seen that iPhone users who have an Apple TV have some really nice integration with regards to streaming media on the iPhone over the speakers, remotely controlling their media via the smart phone. Because Google’s media platforms, let’s say Google TV, hasn’t really taken off, there’s been a limited market for the same thing for Android users. So, it seems like it would be cool for Android users, especially if you already have an XBOX, to suddenly have that same level of integration that iPhone users have had, because Microsoft has gone out and made this app. It’s exciting.

Patrick: Seeing down the line, if it’s successful, Google could make a deal with Sony to be browser for Playstation, and we have the gaming console browser wars.

Kevin: Well, a successful TV browser right?. Google tried to do the smart TV thing. If you get a blu-ray player, they try to get the web on there, as well. It just hasn’t worked right. It also has to do with updating, because who can figure out how to upgrade their blu-ray player or Google TV. It’s a process you have to go through. With XBOX, you turn it on, and just press A to update.

Louis: Absolutely. I think we’ve gone on a little long about this topic. But, as I said earlier, hopefully we can look forward to a new frontier for the web, which will bring it into even more contact with people’s lives, and gives our websites and applications that much more reach, by virtue of being accessible on these big screens in the living room, in addition to the tiny screens that people carry around with them, and the screens that people sit in front of all day.

Patrick: Does anyone remember Web TV from the mid 90’s? That came to mind. It was this set-top box that allowed you to access the internet. It was a company that Microsoft bought and turned into MSNTV, and of course it no longer exists.

Louis: Nobody could have existed that outcome, surely.

Patrick: Right? You don’t want to be first to do something in a lot of cases. They were founded in July of 1995, so a good 17 years ago. Those guys have to be like “Oh, man.”

Louis: People have been trying to do this for a long time. I think that’s a valid point. It’s possible that without the few things coming together, and speech recognition becoming as good as it is now, and a majority of people in Western countries having high-resolution touchscreen devices in their pockets at all times, those two things combine to make the interface more accessible than it was with trying to use a remote with a d-pad to navigate the internet.

Patrick: Not to draw this out too much longer, but to give you an idea of what it was like when that came out, there are hardware specs on this Wikipedia page, the first two had 2 MB of RAM, 2MB of ROM, and a CPU speed of 112 MHZ with a storage of 2 MB. So, the storage was equal to the RAM.

Louis: Those were the good old days.

Patrick: They were. So, our last story of the day, I saw this and said “holy mackerel.” This is a story I can explain, but that Louis and Kevin will appreciate, because that’s the kind of techy people they are. I saw this story at The Next Web. It’s about the Google Doodle for Moog Music, which they did to celebrate the birthday of Bob Moog, who was the inventor of the Moog synthesizer. His birthday was May 23rd. The article talks about it and links to other stories like a blog post and a Google+ entry from CloudFlare, and talks about what you get when you’re the number the one result for a Google Doodle search term. The types of traffic. In this case, it talks about how they dealt with it. In this case, Google told them four days out that they were going to do this Doodle, and they were going to be the first link, but couldn’t tell anybody. They were embargoed. They needed to start working on this, and prepare to have the world start going to their website. They started working on it themselves, and as soon as it happened in Australia, which was the first place that got the Google Doodle, they were free to tell people. The team they were working at, called Purple Cat, turned to Cloudflare, and explained what was going to happen. Cloudflare worked quickly to get their system in place in cache content and get them ready for that massive amount of content. They message in the post that at the time of writing, they were receive a hundred requests a second. They were driving more traffic to that website every fifteen minutes than the VPS it’s on was supposed to handle every 24 hours. They showed a graph of 171.2 GB bandwidth saved by Cloudflare, 7 million requests saved by Cloudflare. Some of this I don’t understand, but it’s a pretty cool story about how you deal with this much traffic, and what to expect when Google says they’re going to draw a picture about you.

Louis: This is all pretty impressive. I have to stop you. Did you say “cash-ay” content? I have this ongoing feud in our office about whether it should be pronounced “cash” or “caesh,” and “cash-ay” is one I’ve never heard before. So, I just need to make a note of it.

Patrick: I did. I might live in infamy for that. I don’t know if I’m the first to say it that way. I’m aware of that debate, though. For me, it’s either “cash” or “cash-ay.” If it’s “cash,” I’ll say it that way from now on.

Kevin: I’ve always said “cash.”

Patrick: OK. There you go.

Louis: I say “cash,” but a lot of people in Australia say “caesh,” so I’ve started say it. E-mail us with your preferred pronunciations. If you support Patrick’s “cash-ay,” we want to hear from you.

Patrick: Wonderful. Perfect. Thank you.

Louis: This is great. As everyone who listens to this show regularly will know, I’m a fan of these postmortem breakdowns of huge traffic spikes, from an infrastructure point of view. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. Moogmusic.com was averaging over 100 requests per second at the height of this thing, which is pretty massive. It’s fantastic promotion for Cloudflare, if they’ve managed to keep this up throughout this event.

Patrick: There’s a post on Google+ from somebody at Purple Cat, which is the company I mentioned. They said that at peak, they were over 60,000 connections per hour. The graph here is for about 24 hours of time. It says 305.1 GB and over 12 million requests saved by Cloudflare, and in that, about a million page views. Sorry, Kevin.

Kevin: I was going to say, it’s great that Google tells them about this. At the same time, it’s kind of like making them have to pay so much to their Cloud service provider, because they want to put them on their homepage. So, they’re going to have this $1000 bill.

Louis: Ideally, additional traffic will cost you more in the short term, but if you are a big website you should have some way of monetizing that. In the case of Moog, it probably has more to do with long term brand awareness than it does with the short term of converting the traffic into sales of synthesizers, which probably isn’t the case. It’s probably not true that any significant percentage of people who clicked through from the Google Doodle will buy a synthesizer.

Patrick: Because Google gave them one for free in the Doodle. Good job, Google. Not only are we using your bandwidth, but we’re going to give away your product on our homepage.

Louis: I certainly hope they don’t. I don’t want the next 12 months to be nothing but terrible new electronic bands breaking out on the scene, because everybody decided to buy a Moog as a result of this thing.

Patrick: Kevin’s point is interesting. It’s a situation where this site handles about a thousand visits per day, and is on a VPS. So if you go from that, depending on what you do, that might not be generating a lot of money. To go to a million page views, it could be an outlay of cashe, to be able to support that. I suppose the opposite is that you could just say “forget you, Google,. We’re shutting down that day, and you can go nowhere. We can’t afford to pay” whatever it was. You do need to have a backing of revenue. But, I think, for the most part, that will be true. This is kind of a semi unique case, because it seems like a lot of the times that they do a Doodle, it links to Wikipedia as the first link.

Louis: Yeah, A lot of times it will be the birthday of a historical figure, in which case it is almost always a link to a Wikipedia page. So, in this case, it’s a little unusual that it would point to a companies specific website. That’s a huge opportunity for that company.

Patrick: It’s a good story. Also, since you mentioned pronunciation, I just wanted to mention that I looked at this name, Bob Moog. It’s “Mogue”, as in
“vogue.” Bob Moog. That was his preferred pronunciation, rather than
“Moog.” Just to put that out there. Now, you know how to pronounce a name that you probably won’t need to say again

Kevin: In a general sense, it’s good to see that they decided to go with a CDN like Cloud Flare. Because without a CDN, you’re really pegging your server extremely hard. Certainly, your site would have gone down. But, because they distributed their resources across different servers using a service like that, they were able to maintain it over time. In general, if you’re not on a CDN, you need to be on a CDN, regardless of whatever website you’re using.

Louis: What are you, Wyslo, all of a sudden?

Kevin: No, no. It’s just good to have that, in general. Right now, I usually,run all my stuff from Rackspace Cloud. I just throw all my files on there. They gave me a $.05 discount, so I was all about that. It’s fairly cheap, though. It’s like $.10 per GB, for your bandwidth. That alone, is great.

Patrick: It’s funny, because regular podcast listener, Chris Trinkovic, just pointed out to me that I should be using Cloudflare before I even saw this story. I guess I’m not in the cool crowd, Kevin. I’m not on this sort of service, just yet. I was hesitant to lock into anything that was free, and then you’d have to pay for one day, if they should switch that model. Just because I can’t afford the rate for all my websites, even though it’s very affordable. But, yes, it seems like a good service.

Louis: Sorry. Is is just me? Every time I say the word “Cloudflare,” I think I’ve said it wrong. I feel like I put an “r” in there somewhere. I go back and listen to myself. Does anybody else get that?

Kevin: Like “Crowdflare,” maybe?

Patrick: I don’t know. Cloudflare.

Louis: I don’t know. Every time I say it, I think I just screwed it up. Then, I realize I didn’t. Anyway, maybe it’s just me.

Patrick: I hope you feel subconscious, just like I feel subconscious every time I say “cache” from now on. So, have fun, Louis.

Louis: Awesome. Do you guys want to do some spotlights? It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to do some spotlights, so I’m excited, personally, because I got one.

Patrick: How many do you have saved up now? 7?

Louis: I’ve forgotten a lot of them, obviously, because of the pain killers. I’ve got one.

Patrick: That’s the spotlight. The drugs you’ve been taking.

Louis: This is a YouTube video entitled “World’s Worst Hacker,” which I think was posted fairly recently. No, it wasn’t. It just came to my attention fairly recently. Maybe people will have already seen this, but I did not, until it came across my Twitter stream this week. It’s this guy who had a Linux server which was a honey pot, so it was there to entrap hackers as it were. So, this is a screen recording of a hacker trying to run some malicious scripts on his server. Obviously, it requires a little bit of knowledge on Linux to be able to know what’s going on. But, if you do, it’s hilarious. I don’t know what’s going through this person’s mind in the hack. They’re clearly following instructions that they’ve seen on a website, like running some commands without knowing what they are. They know some things. They know how to change directories, but they don’t seem to realize that the prompt is telling them what directory they’re in. They don’t seem to know where they are most of the time. They’re trying to run scripts that couldn’t possibly do anything in the context they’re in. Anyway, I don’t want to spoil it. I was on the floor laughing throughout the entire thing. I highly recommend it. It’s worth checking out. It’s pretty sad. That’s my spotlight.

Kevin: That was me, Louis, by the way.

Patrick: If you laughed that hard, it probably caused you some pain.

Louis: What was that?

Kevin: That was me, trying to hack that site.

Louis: Oops.

Kevin: You should see my command line skills.

Patrick: I don’t even know enough to do this, to make a fool of myself.

Louis: I know this isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. You have to be a little Unix savvy to get the joke, as it were, but it’s hilarious. Sorry to whoever the person it was, but it’s funny.

Patrick: It’s anonymous fun at their expense.

Kevin: Reminisce, reminisce.

Louis: Alright. Who’s next?

Kevin: Snoopy is my little bookmarklet. I can never say that word, bookmarklet. Sometimes I say “favlet” or “bookmarklet” depending on what browser you’re in. I think IE’s rendition is favlet. Bookmarklet is more for Firefox, but that’s a little too technical. You throw this thing on your mobile device, Mobile Safari on your iPad, for example. You can do nice things like view source to look under the hood of your website, which is nice. Sometimes you’re browsing around and don’t know what’s going on. You can use this bookmarklet to do so. It’s pretty cool. You can also use it on a desktop. It’s one of those that’s been around for a little while. It’s kind of nice to come back to these things and use them and have fun with it.

Louis: Especially for mobile where debugging options are still extremely limited, so it’s nice to have some tools that provide some visibility.

Patrick: Excellent. Well, my spotlight is a YouTube video, as well.

Louis: Let me guess. It’s about web development, right?

Patrick: You know me so well. No, I have a reputation to uphold. So, my spotlight is the Andy Samberg class day speech at Harvard. This was posted on the Harvard YouTube channel. He gave a class day speech to the graduating seniors. It’s 23 minutes. It’s a lot of fun. I’ll just say this.

Kevin: Isn’t Andy leaving Saturday Night Live? Sad times.

Patrick: Andy Sandberg is getting ready to leave SNL. He just announced that he’s leaving after 7 years. He’s definitely one of my favorites on there. All I can say about the speech is that here’s part of the conclusion. You can see where it goes if you get the reference. He says,
“In fact, I’m realizing that only like 7% of what I’ve said today has been at all helpful, or even passable as English. But, in the end, I feel I’m only truly qualified to give you 3 simple tips on how to succeed in life. 1, cut a hole in a box.” If you get that reference, you’re laughing, and if you don’t, you’re not. Check his speech out for some hilarity, which is what I deliver here on the SitePoint podcast, or try to.

Louis: Good times. Alright. Well, it has been most excellent to be back on the show. Thanks, again, Patrick, for filling in a spot with an interview last week.

Patrick: Of course. We already had that planned. That was already in the book. Louis was like “I’m going to drive extra dangerous on my bike today, because I know Patrick has that interview already done. So, let’s just get those legs going.” So, yeah. It was already planned, but a stroke of genius, nonetheless.

Louis: Alright. Good times. I will see you guys, and Steven, as well, in two weeks time. For our next panel show.

Patrick: Awesome.

Kevin: So, around the table we go. I am Kevin Dees, at kevindees.cc. And,
@kevindees on Twitter.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network. I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @iFroggy.

Louis: You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. If you go to sitepoint.com/podcast, that is the place to find us on the web. You’ll find all our past episodes. You can leave comments, subscribe to get our episodes, or you can subscribe in iTunes, if that’s your podcast injection method of choice. You can e-mail us at podcast@sitepoint.com. We’d love to hear what you thought, your opinions on the pronunciation of the word cache as you prefer, I’m not going to say caché. That’s the place to e-mail us. I’m Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter @rssaddict. Thanks for listening, and bye for now.

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Theme music by Mike Mella.

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