SitePoint Podcast #191: The Beat Don't Stop

Episode 191 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have the full panel, Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).

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~~SitePoint Podcast #191: The Beat Don’t Stop~~ (MP3, 41:44, 40.1MB)

Episode Summary

The panel discuss topics that were discussed in the first SitePoint Podcast and how things have changed in the period of just over 4 years.

Here are the main topics covered in this episode:

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/191.

Host Spotlights

Interview Transcript

Louis: Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the SitePoint podcast. Hi guys, we’ve got a full house today.

Stephan: Good evening.

Kevin: Yeah.

Patrick: Yes, we do.

Kevin: I sounded really depressed.

Patrick: Sounded very authoritative. Like, “Yes. We do. You want to make something of it?”

Kevin: Oh, me. Good times.

Patrick: This is our final group news show. This is the end.

Kevin: I’m very sad.

Louis: It is.

Patrick: I’ll miss our chats. The first one we did that was a group news show, that was what the podcast originally was, was November 10, 2008 we released Episode 1. Four years and about a month later released. New show. Time to wrap it up. We have some good stories. Look back a little bit and should be fun.

Kevin: Yeah.

Louis: I’m still here.

Patrick: That’s all I’ve got to say. Why don’t you interject with something, Louis?

Louis: You had this cool idea to jump back and have a look at the stories that were covered in Episode 1 of the podcast and just thought we’d talk a little bit about what has changed and what hasn’t changed. Maybe we can start with that. What was Episode 1 all about?

Patrick: That’s a great idea and we have a couple of extra stories at the end. As I said, four years ago, Episode 1, we had three news stories on that show. That show was hosted by me, Stephan, Kevin Yank and Brad
Williams. The first news story that we discussed was a study that was done by Opera and they found just 4.13% of the web’s code was standards compliant. I actually looked to see if they had updated this survey at all, if they had done it again, and I could not find it. I don’t think they have updated but I guess it’s an opportunity to reflect on where the web has come in four years as far as standards compliance goes. 4.13 now. What would it be now?

Louis: I feel as if you were, and this is just a total shot in the dark but that’s what we do here, if you were to go with the HTML 5 specification I think you’d probably have a much larger percentage of sites validating only because HTML 5 is a bit more lax. Did they mention in that study what standard they were validating against? I’m sure there’s still a ton of broken code out there but I feel as though HTML 5’s approach of paving the cow paths and being less arbitrarily strict about things like quoted attributes or self-closing tags means that there’s probably a lot of things that wouldn’t have been valid as HTML 4 strict or as HTML 1.0.

Patrick: The articles I’m reading just say that they passed the W3Cs validation tools.

Louis: I guess with whatever doc type they had declared.

Patrick: I was looking for a particular doc type but I don’t see one specified.

Louis: In fairness, obviously you couldn’t validate a document…it would be whatever doc type the sites themselves specified which I guess would still be the case so there are probably just as many invalid sites out there that haven’t switched to an HTML 5 doc type and they’re still invalid for whatever doc type they do declare. And I guess there are probably a lot that don’t declare a doc type at all. So in fact it’s probably not much better. Maybe I’m pessimistic but it feels as though it wouldn’t be that much better.

Stephan: I’d have to agree with you, Louis.

Patrick: Yeah.

Stephan: You guys will have to laugh at me a little bit because if I was still running my old website when we first started this show on this old CMS that I wrote myself I wouldn’t have declared the doc type.

Louis: I guess that’s another valid point though. You’re talking about CMS in there. I guess perhaps the spread of WordPress and the fact that a lot of people are running really simple sites rather than hacking together mark up themselves would be just installing WordPress. Maybe that will give those numbers a bump. Maybe we’ll see higher levels of standards compliance just because people are using tools that generate the mark up for them and those tools are written with standards compliance in mind. Kevin, what were you going to say?

Kevin: I was actually going to say just that. I was going to mention content management systems but I have another take on it. It wasn’t the positive view; it was the clients-from-hell approach which is clients drop Microsoft Word, copy and paste right into the content management system. It’s just a nightmare. That’s probably where the majority of these invalid sites come from.

Louis: I guess if you want to include unencoded entities as some of that that number’s probably right on the money. Coming back to what I was saying about HTML 5, I think HTML 5 is a bit more accepting of…I want to say ampersands…inside of a text area you can use an unencoded ampersand and that’s legit?

Stephan: Instead of ‘and Amp’.

Louis: Yeah. Let me just have a quick look. “An ambiguous ampersand is an ampersand character that is followed by one or more characters.” Right. If it has another letter or number immediately after it where it could be considered an actual entity then you would have to encode it if you wanted it to be an actual ampersand. However, if it’s on its own, for example, surrounded by spaces then you’re able to not encode the ampersand in HTML 5.

There are a few things like that may get a little bit easier to achieve standards compliance but it feels as though we don’t have the same kind of either-or approach that we used to. Because the browsers are better as well and browsers do render standard CSS and HTML in much the same way at least for modern browsers, I think maybe there’s less emphasis towards new developers and front end developers in general to focus on standards compliance.

Patrick: A couple other things that were mentioned in this survey that were interesting back in ’08 was that just 50% of the sites that had a badge saying they were valid weren’t actually valid.

Kevin: They were valid, Patrick, just before the clients got to them.

Patrick: Sure. Blame the clients. Always blame the clients. Another thing is they mentioned the most popular HTML tags and one of the ones mentioned in this eight is the table tag. I wonder if that’s now swapped out for div or something like that.

Louis: There’s definitely a lot less table based layout going on. I don’t know if you’ve ever opened a reasonably complex website there are thousands of nested divs. It’s pretty horrific. I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m really glad those badges went away. I realize they were super-
important at the time for getting developers to move away from tables and towards CSS layouts and towards standards but…

Patrick: I suppose ‘super-important’ is one way to refer to those badges.

Louis: I don’t think we need them anymore.

Stephan: Wait. You guys are saying you didn’t like the little badges that told you what application was running your website? Like PHP? The little rectangles with the purple that had PHP? I miss them. Just getting a little nostalgic.

Louis: No. I don’t miss any of those at all. Although there was an attempt…do you remember those HTML 5 badges that had the weird logos for all the different components?

Kevin: Absolutely.

Louis: That was about a year ago?

Kevin: You had CSS3, HTML 5 and I think it was JavaScript.

Louis: There were some even weirder ones in there. There was one for the video, one for interactive elements…They were pretty but it was kind of a mess.

Patrick: Yeah. It was a bunch of stuff.

Kevin: Yeah.

Louis: I mean they were pretty but it was kind of a mess.

Stephan: I think I’m going to go old school and just put my website back up with those.

Kevin: Those badges or logos actually reminded me of superheroes. I want one of these on a cake so I can walk around my house…or on front of a t-
shirt. Except with the six pack of abs on the t-shirt too.

Louis: The CSS 3 one and the video and multimedia ones make sense but then the other ones are just goofy.

Kevin: Connectivity’s looks like some arcane kind of…I don’t even know.

Louis: Like a beetle maybe? Or like the mark of Cathilo.

Kevin: The only one you can pick out is the multimedia logo.

Patrick: You have to remember my perspective on this is not as a developer like you guys so I just think of these as pretty pictures. So to me it looks like a flower, a police badge, a TV, a cardboard box, some guy with short hair, a sprocket . . .

Louis: Some guy with short hair? Where do you get that?

Patrick: You’ve got the page up: W3.org/HTML/logo. You scroll down to the bottom it says, “What the tech?” So you check everything to get this badge and there will be icons. I guess…gosh, which one is it?

Louis: You can tell them above the badge builder. If you click on them, you’ll see what they are.

Patrick: There you go. You’re right. The guy with short hair is multimedia.

Louis: Here the rest of us are like the only one that is recognizable as anything is the multimedia one and Patrick thinks it’s a guy with short hair so clearly…

Patrick: Look at it, right. I mean, come on, in the right light it’s almost like Bart Simpson.

Louis: There we go. That’s one thing that’s changed in the last four years:
badges have become significantly more hilarious.

Patrick: The next story from that first episode was Yahoo! Launches Web Analytics. This was probably quick and dead.

Louis: That’s just cruel.

Patrick: Because I wasn’t expecting Louis’ reaction. I don’t know. It threw me off guard there. Or off balance, I should say. But I found a story, June 15th this year in MarketingLand.com, Daniel Waisberg: Yahoo! Web Analytics to be Discontinued.

Stephan: Imagine that.

Patrick: That is over now. It is dead now.

Louis: I for one am shocked. No, that’s all right. Look, we loved Yahoo! but…

Kevin: The web analytics page is still there. web.analytics.Yahoo!.com.

Patrick: It is. And apparently…this announcement says that on October 31st, 2012 all projects on Yahoo! Web Analytics are scheduled for discontinuation and will be shut down including the discontinuation of Yahoo! Web Analytics consultant network for all users. They’re supposed to be down but…

Louis: But can’t even shut it down correctly.

Patrick: I don’t know. They forgot to shut it down.

Louis: Oh, my God.

Stephan: So it’s about as dead as the Feedburner API, right?

Patrick: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. At least we didn’t have Yahoo! feeds or I guess Yahoo! pipes.

Stephan: I miss pipes.

Patrick: We used to use pipes for this podcast to notify us of new comments, I think. I don’t know if you all remember that. Probably just me and Stephan. That was probably before Louis and Kevin Dees here. I guess that’s the end of the story. Am I right?

Louis: I think that’s the end of that story. Although it is interesting to note how dominant Google Analytics has become in that time. There was a time when a competing company could start a web analytics platform and expect anything other than abysmal failure. Whereas today it doesn’t feel like that’s the case anymore. If Microsoft came out tomorrow and said, “We’re launching a web analytics platform,” I think we’d all think that was a little hilarious.

Patrick: Yeah.

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: I think there is one thing to be said for Yahoo!, they did try the real time data stuff whereas you had to wait a day to get anything from Google Analytics and Yahoo! attempted to do the update in a few minutes. They did have that edge for maybe a few years and now Google has that.

Patrick: Rest in peace, Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Louis: Or not. Or zombie web analytics because the webpage is still up.

Patrick: You never know. They could decide to mount a challenge on that front. The third and final story from episode one was that Amazon’s EC2 was out of beta. “Now with Windows support and more.”

Louis: That one went significantly better than Yahoo!’s Web Analytics.

Kevin: I would agree with that.

Patrick: It did, it did.

Louis: Understatement even.

Patrick: Right. EC2, Amazon web services have this whole cloud computing thing has happened over the last four years or at least has grown in popularity and AWS is a big part of that. A lot of these hot startups use it, a lot of web services rely on it. It’s just popular.

Louis: I can’t even imagine running stuff on individual rented servers. The ability to, if we want to try a new project, to just spin up a new server and see how it works when you want to launch. We’re using this software called ErrBit which does error reporting. We just pop that on a small instance. It’s a completely different world in terms of working with servers. It’s amazing. The downside of that is because EC2 has such a huge market share whenever they have problems all the Internet goes away.

Kevin: I remember from episode one the conversation took place about there being no uptime guarantee. I imagine that has changed. I don’t know. I don’t use EC2 on a regular basis. Does anyone know?

Louis: Let me look that up. Obviously it’s very good. The number of outages you have is still extremely low.

Patrick: Amazon EC2 does have an SLA service level agreement and they say they will, “use commercially reasonable efforts to make EC2 available with an annual uptime of at least 99.95% during the service year.” That’s their commitment and if they fail to satisfy that commitment, then you will be eligible to receive a credit.

Louis: Nice.

Patrick: That’s the guarantee.

Louis: Nice. I don’t know how you guys feel about this but one thing that comes up whenever there’s an EC2 outage and we’re talking about it at work, yes, obviously the downside from a user’s perspective when EC2 goes down everything goes down. Suddenly Netflix is gone and Pinterest is gone. It feels to you like the whole Internet is gone.

Patrick: People don’t tweet, they just complain to each other via text.

Louis: Or something, right? The potential advantage to this as a company…we’re talking, well maybe we should try and get more, but you think about it from your point of view as a company if the whole Internet seems to be down your users will be less angry at you. If you’re down and also Netflix and Pinterest and Twitter are also all down, then even for users not technically savvy, it becomes apparent that that’s an infrastructure thing and not a you-messed-up thing. I don’t know how you feel about that.

Patrick: I guess if you’re on the wagon train and you’ve got the smaller wagon and the big wagon topples over then you get less attention. I think there’s something to be said for that idea; it’s not that you want to be known as someone that goes down but obviously Amazon Web Services is a reputable service run by a reputable company, widely trusted by people who run projects probably much larger than yours. That’ll be the headline. The headline is, “Netflix goes down.” The headline is, “I can’t settle for three hours of downtime. I paid seven whole dollars, damn it.” That becomes the headline. Not that some web developer focus service is down. They tend to be more understanding. You’re right.

Louis: Both those stories bring me back to the same place. I was talking with regards to Yahoo! Analytics that Google Analytics has become essentially a monopoly as far as web analytics goes. And EC2 is almost in the same place with regards to cloud hosting. There are probably a few more serious competitors in the space of cloud hosting. Rackspace Cloud is one and Microsoft has one but I’m pretty sure it has fairly low market share.

How do you feel about the fact that in a few of these major aspects if you run a web application your hosting and your analytics are essentially run by companies that don’t have any serious competition.

Kevin: I’m glad they’re nice. They don’t hate me.

Stephan: I’ve got to stick to my status quo and say I don’t like it actually.

Patrick: Here’s the thing: is could hosting really that monopolized? I mean, cloud hosting…there are a ton of services out there. There’s Rackspace cloud, there’s AWS. Google search will lead you to a bunch of competitors.

Louis: I kind of want to know what the market share is.

Patrick: Stephan, continue your point.

Stephan: My point is this. There seem to be a lot of cloud hosting solutions out there but as the Amazon outage showed there are actually a lot of things hosted on Amazon’s cloud service. That’s the weakness, that’s the flaw: so much stuff is hosted on it when it does go down it does affect a lot of things. Heaven forbid, Facebook. Had Facebook been hosted on Amazon cloud people would have lost their minds.

Patrick: Stephan’s like, “I don’t want to walk the streets. If Facebook is hosted by Amazon, it’s not safe out there for me.”

Louis: That’s basically the case. I agree with that. I’m searching and not finding any numbers. People say at least 50% market share but no firm numbers anywhere.

Kevin: At the end of the day you could always buy a hard drive and a computer case and throw those things together and have your own web server under your own control if you wanted to.

Louis: You could. It would be awful.

Patrick: That’s for weirdos, Kevin.

Kevin: You guys don’t do this? I imagine you don’t have bomb shelters either.

Patrick: No.

Louis: No.

Stephan: No. No bomb shelters.

Kevin: I do have a zombie preparedness kit.

Stephan: I just go in the bathtub.

Kevin: Hey, man, my machete is sharpened.

Patrick: But so does everyone else in Texas.

Louis: That took a turn for the weird.

Kevin: Yeah. I’m sorry. I do these things sometimes.

Stephan: That’s what I’m here for.

Patrick: We talk about Google Analytics but when we want browser statistics where do we go?

Stephan: We go to Stat Counter and the browser trends have been a constant topic on this show for its entire run. Maybe too much so.

Louis: So let’s just rest it.

Patrick: Yeah, we have to wrap it up. We have to do this right. I saw that Craig Buckler on SitePoint.com had posted the browser trends for December, obviously the numbers for November. And I had to go back. Our show, like I said, episode one came out on November 10th, so the October numbers from StatCounter had just come out then. Let’s take a look at where the browsers were when we did episode one and where we are now as far as market share goes.

October 2008, picture it, there are no cloud yet. The clouds haven’t yet landed in the sky. I’m just kidding. The browsers are as follows: First place, Internet Explorer: 67.68%. Second place, Firefox: 25.54%. Third place, Safari: 2.91%. Fourth place, Opera: 2.69%. Fifth place, Chrome:
1.02%.

Louis: What?

Patrick: Sixth place, Other: 0.17%. That’s the top six in October 2008. Let’s go to now, December 2012. First place is Chrome, 37.14%; up from 1.02%. In other words a 36% gain in that time. Second place is Internet Explorer, 29.2%. They lost 38 percentage points. Third place is Firefox, 22.11%. They actually have lost too; they lost about 3.5%. Fourth place Safari, a big gainer here, a 6% gain. They’re at 8.57%. Fifth place, Opera:
1.27%. They lost; their market share was cut in half. Sixth place, Other:
1.7%.

There are a few observations there. Obviously the biggest one is Chrome. They don’t have the big dominance IE did but they are the leader in the market now.

Louis: Yeah. That’s a pretty crazy level of change there. The other nice thing is seeing those older versions of IE really drop off pretty exponentially. What was the latest version of IE in 2008?

Patrick: Internet Explorer 7 was released October 18th. Yeah, it was 7. It was two years old at that point. 8 didn’t come out until March of ’09, so another six months.

Louis: If people had asked us what the best case outcome would be for the future of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 at that time this is maybe not everything we could have hoped for but it’s pretty close.

Patrick: This is the best case for web developers, right?

Louis: Yeah.

Patrick: Let’s clarify that.

Louis: Well, the best thing for everybody. Who doesn’t benefit from not using IE 6? Everybody benefits.

Patrick: Who doesn’t benefit from not using Windows?

Louis: What’s that?

Patrick: Who doesn’t benefit from not using Windows?

Louis: That’s debatable. Windows is a legitimate platform. IE 6 is not a legitimate web browser.

Patrick: It’s funny you should mention that because I actually had those numbers put aside because I knew it would come up. IE 6 at that point, October 2008, was at 27.38% of the market. That’s four years ago.

Stephan: That’s crazy.

Patrick: Now at 0.35%. It’s dropped 27.03%, almost all of its share as we’ve talked about over the last number of months. Still that’s a big drop there.

Louis: It’s awesome.

Kevin: Yes.

Patrick: It’s everything you would hope for, Louis.

Louis: It is almost everything you would hope for. You really hope for zero but…

Patrick: Come on, you’ve got 0.35. Does it really have to be 0.000?

Louis: Yes.

Kevin: I’m going to plus one that.

Louis. Yeah, it does.

Patrick: Here’s the thing: IE 6 outlived this podcast. Say what you want about it.

Louis: Badda bing.

Patrick: That’s just the way it is.

Louis: Ouch, that hurts. That hurts right here.

Kevin: Patrick, you don’t know that. It could hit 0.00 tomorrow.

Louis: Yeah, you never know.

Kevin: Fat lady not sung yet, my friend.

Louis: Oh, yeah. What else is there to say? The browser landscape is so much nicer now than it was then. Obviously we’re presented with new challenges. There’s been a lot of talk over the past year about web developers working either on new projects or experimental things being lazy about their HTML 5 and CSS 3 properties and only using WebKit prefix versions so there’s a risk of a new specter of browser incompatibility on the horizon or has already arrived but on the whole I think we’re doing a lot better than we were. It’s interesting. These numbers wouldn’t include mobile browsing, right? Because you’d be looking at somewhat different numbers. There’s no way that all of mobile is in that “other” 1.3% or whatever.

Patrick: That’s a good question. I’ve thought about that because there is mobile browser. That is a separate category on StatCounter, is mobile browser. I’m not really sure. I don’t have the answer.

Louis: It feels as though a fairly significant percentage of browsing would happen on mobile nowadays. When you click on global stats you do see…when they do Safari they’re doing Safari combined because Safari iPad is 3% on its own and Android is .5% on this graph I’m looking at. All those numbers feel really low. Maybe my usage is different but I feel as though I load probably 35% of the websites I open, I open on my phone. Maybe it’s StatCounter’s numbers or something. I don’t know. Do you guys have any…in your own analytics do you see anything that would…

Stephan: I get a ton of traffic via phone. Mostly Android, which is surprising to me.

Louis: Is this for your person site?

Stephan: Yeah. Just for my personal stuff. That’s why it surprised me. I expected to get a little more iPhone usage just because people…I’m more in the tech community than anything else and I figured people would have iPhones but I guess you guys are Android hackers and that’s fine. I thought that was interesting. The stereotype for us is iPhones. I just haven’t seen that. I can pull up the numbers.

Louis: It’s an interesting thing. Obviously there have been some pretty big shifts even in the last 12 to 18 months. Android’s market share has grown significantly but they’re keeping these reports stating that Android’s market share is 65% or whatever but it only accounts for 20% or 30% of website traffic. The stats that most people seem to be seeing seem to imply there’s more at least website traffic coming from iOS. But tech is an interesting one.

Patrick: I can give you the numbers from KarateForums.com which is a pretty good sized martial arts community and a non-web techy audience, more of a general consumer web audience. According to Google Analytics, there they are again, it looks like I get about 25% of visits, that’s the visits metric, from mobile according to the mobile category here. And as far as devices go Apple iPhone is the leader far and away followed by Apple iPad and then Apple iPod and then they actually have the device names on here so the next one beyond that…
I have to say it’s…not 10% but 7% of what iPhone gets so far and away. Motorola Droid Razr 4G is the next visitor there and the HTC 1 Samsung Galaxy so some of those Android devices come in but far and away it’s the Apple products. At least on my martial arts community.

Louis: I’m checking some of my analytics as well and seeing a pretty similar shift. There’s a lot more iPhone and iPad than there is most other things. When you break down the Android devices into individual devices I’m seeing separate entries for…what is this? Even on the first two pages of my analytics I’m seeing entries four or five different variants of the Galaxy S3. I’m looking at 280 visits from the iPhone and then Galaxy S3 is 12 plus 5 plus 5 plus 5 plus 4. It looks like a lot less but if you added it up…Kindle Fire is . . . Man, there are a lot of devices out there.

Kevin: Yeah, there are.

Louis: Some of these things I’ve never even heard of.

Stephan: I guess my numbers are just an oddity. I’m an odd fellow.

Louis: Yeah, maybe.

Patrick: I’m not even going to disagree with you. We’ve only got one show left. You’re odd.

Stephan: Well, that’s okay.

Louis: Come to think of it…sorry. I’m going to take that back. It starts with the highest one; Apple iPhone is 281 for the past month on this site. iPad is 107, iPod is 38 and then the rest is all these devices most of which look to be Androids although there are probably a couple of Blackberry devices in there but that’s out of a total of 651 which, if you do the math, iOS is only slightly more than half of that total. It looks like the far and away winner because it’s all grouped into a single device.

But anyway just thought that was an interesting thing to point out about browser statistics. Obviously, mobile is the biggest changer. Again, a lot of the browsers on these devices tend to be fairly good competent browsers although we hear a lot about Android 2.X devices being the next IE 6 because the upgrade curve is really not looking positive for those older Android phones.

We’re not seeing 2.2 and 2.3 devices drop off and that browser definitely has some limitations and has some CSS 3 and newer JavaScript API features that it doesn’t support so that can be a show stopper for a lot of people. Especially because it’s a little bit harder to upgrade than upgrading your browser on your desktop because it’s requires replacing a physical device.

Patrick: I guess the last thing we’re going to talk about and we’ve done a good job of covering and looking back on episode one but another constant is the show is Internet Explorer. And you see on this show if we talk about browsers where do we go? Internet Explorer. I think some of our busiest shows over the years, and this is something I’ve been told by former hosts and other hosts and people at SitePoint have in some way been tied to IE and an often a general distaste for Internet Explorer.

It was funny, they’ve recently released a video called, “Do You Know this Guy?” It’s part of this “Browser You Loved to Hate.com” campaign. That’s how we get traffic in many ways: we talk about Internet Explorer and people come and bash it. I thought it was a really funny thing to mention and to look at if you haven’t seen it. There are a lot of sites and publications and new podcasts that have gotten a lot of traffic from that same thing, people commenting that IE sucks. Now this campaign essentially says, “IE sucks less.”

Louis: I did see this video. Obviously it definitely made the rounds on Twitter when it came out. It’s pretty cool.

Patrick: It’s clever. Even if you don’t like IE, it’s clever.

Louis: You can kind of give it some respect. Because IE 10 is a really competent browser and it does support a lot of really good stuff and in this video they go the goofy angle and talk about saving kittens or whatever and a bit of nonsensical stuff when there’s a lot of really strong technical reasons why IE 10 sucks less. I always feel a little bit like if someone’s trying to pull the marketing wool over my eyes, I’m not a big fan of it. I think IE 10 is a strong browser…

Patrick: You wish they had less of a sense of humor about this.

Louis: Yeah. I wish this video was more boring, I guess is what I’m trying to say. I don’t actually; I think it’s cool. I don’t know if there are a lot of people who are the target audience for this campaign who would actually switch to IE 10. I don’t know how many people use IE 10 or IE in general as a choice rather than they use Windows and didn’t bother to get something else. I think IE 10 is probably the first version that it would be legitimate to actually choose to use it just because you like it.

Patrick: I’m going to say, Microsoft, from Louis you have to take that as the deepest compliment.

Louis: That is really as good as it’s going to get.

Patrick: That was quite a roundabout, running around the bush, beating the bush and then doubling back and beating it again compliment from Louis. Just so you know. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s funny. I think it’s interesting. I don’t know how effective it will be. It’s kind of a quirky thing, that kind of self referential humor that they have quotes from people saying, these aren’t exact quotes but, “I can’t believe I like IE 10 or IE 9. What’s wrong with me?” That tongue in cheek humor.

And they have graphics about major comebacks like farming innovation, for example, and how cool farming was. They have a graph that basically shows olden time. So you have a tractor and then farming innovation dropped and then you got Farmville and farming innovation is up again. Comebacks come in many shapes and sizes. They do those kinds of things and it’s funny. Substance-wise, who knows. I don’t know but we will not live to find out.

Kevin: I will, Patrick.

Louis: You guys want to do one final round of host spotlights?

Kevin: Not sure.

Louis: All right. That’s cool. We can just go. That’s all right.

Patrick: All right. Well, I’m Patrick . . .

Stephan: Who wants to go first?

Kevin: I have a hotspot hot light spot light. I have a bright light.

Louis: You might want to see a doctor about that.

Kevin: Jeez. I was looking through articles and this was a video as part of a larger SEOmoz blog post which had to do with building a website, SEO strategy. This video was included in there and it’s pretty cool. It’s called, “So Really, It’s Scary.” And they’re advertising how realistic their LG monitors are. This a commercial by LG. They take these monitors and they put them on the bottom of an elevator so the entire floor is covered with these monitors.

People step into it and when they push a button it makes a really…the lights flash in the elevator and a strange noise happens and then the monitors that you’re standing on, because it’s so realistic, the floor falls out from under the people in the elevator. And it’s so funny; these people jump to the edge and grab the sides of the elevator and it’s hilarious. You have to watch this thing. It’s awesome.

Patrick: That is a pretty funny. It’s a pretty good trick, I have to say. I watched it with mute on here obviously because we’re doing the show but that’s really cool.

Louis: I’m watching this right now…

Kevin: If only this was a video podcast.

Stephan: I can go next because mine kind of ties in, speaking of elevators. I have an article from the Wall Street Journal about the ups and downs of making elevators go. It’s all about the mathematics involved in elevators and how they program them and how they decide how many people they should hold. It’s an interesting read. Apparently Americans are 22 pounds heavier than the average Chinese person which comes into play.

Patrick: They need to make the elevators a little stronger for us.

Stephan: And apparently in Asia more people will board an elevator car than in Europe or in New York so she has to plan the elevator timings around that. It’s an interesting read and I thought I would go out with a mathematical bang.

Louis: Cool. I will definitely have a read of that. I have a totally off topic spotlight.

Kevin: It’s not elevators.

Stephan: Awesome.

Louis: I think as my co-hosts know but listeners probably don’t, one of my pastimes for the past year or so has been trying to learn how to play the mandolin. I just wanted to throw out a spotlight to a really, really good online resource that I’ve been using. I’ll drop a link in the show notes. It’s BanjoBenClark.com. This guy does instructional videos for bluegrass guitar, banjo and mandolin and really, really, really in depth instruction with great high def videos showing both the fretting hand and the picking hand at the same time. It’s got two cameras.

When he does a song he’ll play it slowly and throws up, for the mandolin solo, will chuck up a rhythm track on guitar so you can practice along with the rhythm track. I think there are some free videos and tabs up there and I think you can sign up for $5 a month to have access to the whole thing or a onetime $75 lifetime access. It’s really inexpensive and it’s been really useful for me so if anyone is looking to learn to strum some bluegrass, which I know is probably not a lot of our audience, but I thought I’d throw it out there because it was a really big help to me.

Kevin: This is actually a really great website.

Louis: It’s awesome, isn’t it? And the price is almost nonsensical. He throws up new videos almost every week, really in depth and a lot of content. At that price, $5 a month, it’s a no-brainer.

Stephan: I like the logged in or you have to be logged in or a member webpage. The pop up that comes up if you’re not logged in to view a video. It’s awesome.

Louis: I may not have seen that. There’s definitely some humor in the…

Stephan: It’s self-deprecating humor. It’s great.

Patrick: I’m looking forward to the mandolin and Large Professor, or mandolin and Nas some sort of mash up there. New York State of Mind over a mandolin or something, so don’t disappoint me on that, Louis.

Louis: I have to go off that. Are you familiar with an outfit called Gangsta Grass which was exactly that? It was a mash up of old bluegrass recordings. It was this hip hop producer who made some records with rappers that he works with mashed up over old bluegrass tracks. If you haven’t heard that Patrick, I think that may be exactly what you’re looking for. I’ll drop a link to that in the show notes as well because it’s a really cool sound they’ve got going.

Kevin: Awesome. that is neat.

Louis: Their album is called Rappalachia. You got to love that.

Stephan: That’s pretty clever. I like that.

Louis: All right. That’s almost a double spotlight for me so it’s time to wrap it up with the king of the off topic spotlight. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Patrick O’Keefe.

Patrick: Oh, man. I love you guys. Cool. I’ve always done the off topic spotlights. If you’ve listened to this show for a long time you know that I’ve always tried to go off topic with the spotlight. I was thinking this is the final one, this is the last spotlight we’re doing so what should I spotlight?

What I went back to was episode 19 because that’s the first episode where we did host spotlights. I think it was Kevin Yank who wanted to do that and we gave it a try. Michael Jackson had just passed away and there were all these tributes popping up and one of the tributes stands out to me, still stands out to me, it’s called Eternal Moonwalk. eternalmoonwalk.com. It’s this really cool mash up of people doing the moon walk and it follows them along . . . if you’ve never seen it, definitely check it out. The beat of Billie Jean is there.

It keeps going on and on. The moonwalk never ends, the beat never ends, and it keeps going and I thought there was something poignant here for this show and for us. The show’s coming to an end but obviously we’re going to continue to do other things. I love that mash up. I wanted to spotlight that again because that’s where I started it and that’s where I ‘m going to finish it. So eternalmoonwalk.com.

Louis: This is pretty cool. I hadn’t actually seen this. It’s a really nicely done site. I like the idea.

Patrick: It is. And it’s even four years old and is still nicely done so there you go.

Louis: Does it keep…does it loop back to the beginning?

Patrick: Keep watching.

Louis: Is it actually eternal? Well, I can’t keep watching forever.

Patrick: Keep watching. We’ve got all night. I don’t know. As far as I know it never ends. Who knows? The beat never ends, Louis, he says as he continues to watch it.

Louis: I just going to watch. For me this is going to be like Kevin in the click and drag XKCD. I’m just going to . . .

Patrick: Oh, the guy with the ice skates.

Louis: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin: I have to say some of these people are quite horrible at the moonwalk. And some are actually good.

Louis: The beat don’t stop.

Patrick: Bang, bang boogie.

Louis: All right. We will actually be back next week with another show. Patrick, do you want to give listeners a run down on what that’s going to be all about?

Patrick: Sure. I can tease it a little bit. We are going to do a final episode of the SitePoint podcast. No news stories, no spotlights. Just us talking about the show, the history of the show, our favorite moments and reminiscing a little bit, sharing some memories.

We’re going to bring back some faces from the past. Have some of them back on the show, have some of the people that have worked behind the scenes on the show, have them come on and just talk about the same things: what the show has meant to them, what their favorite moments are, what their favorite memories are. Do a lot of reminiscing.

We’re also going to have a bunch of listener comments and feedback on the show. If you’d like to send us comments you might want to have in the final episode via text or audio, the e-mail is podcast at SitePoint.com. If it’s audio upload it somewhere and send us a link to that address and text you can also send to that address. We’ll likely get it on the show. The deadline for that though is Sunday, the 9th. If you want to send a comment, this show is out on the 7th, you’ll want to get it in by the 9th. Yeah, just a lot of fun.

Louis: Awesome. For a penultimate time let’s go around the table.

Kevin: I’m Kevin Dees at KevinDees.cc and also @KevinDees on Twitter.

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 Seagraves. You can find me on Twitter @SSeagraves and I blog at Badice.com every now and then.

Louis: I’m Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter @RSSAddict. You can also find SitePoint on Twitter @SitePointdotcom. Obviously, if you want to go back and listen to any of the past episodes of the podcast they will remain online. If you go to SitePoint.com/podcast you can hear any of our past episodes including a lot of really great interviews; some stuff if you haven’t heard I think you should really check out. We managed to get some really insightful people involved in our industry on the show over the years so I highly recommend checking that out if you haven’t already.

Patrick: We did. If it ever does go offline I’ve got all the sound board bootlegs so just contact me and I will hook up with the bootlegs. So there’s also that.

Louis: Awesome. Are those on 45 rpm vinyl?

Patrick: Yeah. Everything. Vinyl. 8-track. Cassette. We’ve got it.

Louis: Awesome. Again, the e-mail address if you want to send us some comments or audio to play on the air for our grand finale episode next week just e-mail that to podcast@sitepoint.com. Obviously you can hit us up individually or at SitePointdotcom on Twitter as well. Thanks for listening to this final newest episode of the SitePoint podcast and we will see you again next week with our finale show.

Patrick: I have to say this.

Louis & Patrick: Peace.

Stephan: Beep, beep, beep.

Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.

Produced by Karn Broad.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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