Author: Nadreck

WordCamp 2011

I’m at the Eliot Center in Portland, Oregon for WordCamp Portland 2011. The keynote was just starting as I arrived, so this may start out a little rushed.

Key ideas out of the keynote (Scott Berkun @ Automattic):

  • Without content, you don’t have a blog. The point of a blog is to post.
  • Automattic, the folks who drive WordPress, use almost no email, and are effectively all remote workers (they have an office, but it’s generally pretty empty). Instead they use IRC, Skype, and blogs running the P2 theme.
  • If you average 1 post per comment, you’re ahead of the curve.
  • Group blogs get more traffic, because when you first start, blog traffic is driven by the people you know: more authors means more networks that are getting tapped.
  • Slow growth is the reality of a blog: don’t be discouraged if you don’t get a lot of traffic right away, just keep posting on a regular basis.
  • They started a daily post challenge, and they’re getting good info about ways to make posting regularly easier. Some of which is already hitting WordPress in 3.2 and 3.3
  • Figuring out a “Post Post” page. The act of posting should be exciting and encourage the user, instead of just a little line at the top saying “Successfully posted.” They’re experimenting with pulling stats about how long it took to write your post, how many subscribers you just published to, how many twitter followers you just broadcast the post to, et cetera, and give you a more rewarding experience.
  • There are 60 million wordpress installs, half of which are on wordpress.com.
  • Something to consider: a doc for new bloggers that says “What you should expect in the first 30 days of your blog.”
  • They use a lot of live-site A/B testing (keeping the experience good for people is important, but exposing new experiences on the live code seems to get more real-world metrics).
  • WordPress.com tends to be the proving grounds for new features, and where possible, those then get rolled into wordpress.org (sometimes into core, sometimes into a plugin, and they’re pushing JetPack as a catch-all plugin to house these features).
  • Project Management is largely about respect and trust (both ways). Developers need to respect and trust the PM, and the PM needs to respect and trust the devs.
  • Longer and shorter posts both have benefits: longer posts are more engaging, but are read less — the TLDR effect. Shorter posts get a higher read count and keep people coming back regularly.

And now we’re getting ready for the unconference session scheduling (Cami is explaining the process)… and now the mad rush to put up sessions on the board begins! (I’m hoping someone will have a session on coping with the Second Year Slump, but not enough to put it up myself.)

Using WordPress as MVC (Using WordPress as an application development framework):

  • There are apparently some interesting hooks and code within WordPress already present
  • The presenter was able to convince his team to switch to WordPress for their web application backend (vs Rails or similar), because WordPress basically does a lot of the annoying things for you
  • A lot of other options out there (Plone, Rails, Django, etc) are really customizable, which is great, but sometimes you don’t want to re-invent the wheel for your basic interface materials every time. Maybe you don’t need that level of customization. At that point, having a tool that has an opinion to express in their experience, like WordPress (where they’ve spent considerable time and resources making a lot of their interface very useable and clean).
  • The name of the session was a bit of misnomer: it’s not a replacement for MVC (awww), but it IS a solid application framework.
  • Check out WP Alchemy for some useful custom field handling.
  • “How do you mitigate using a platform that can change on you between updates?” — they avoid custom DB queries and other custom changes to core. By using stock functions wherever possible (and then small utility functions where extension is needed), it helps mitigate using an actively changing backend.
  • Constraints are your friend: if you are explicit about what you are using, you reduce developer chaos, and makes it WAY easier to maintain.
  • Stuff still happens: they’ve not moved to 3.2 yet because of changes to the metabox tools they’re using. (Minor releases tend to go out right away, bigger ones are delayed to make sure everything is working.)
  • Use logs! Get it logging to somewhere you can check, and check them regularly. It’s not enough to say “Well, it’s loading, that’s good enough.” It’s entirely possible for a page to load, but throw several warnings or errors with issues that could choke your site under load.
  • A key takeaway: Be kind to yourself, and be kind to your content creators.

The official schedule is now online.

Second Year Slump: What to do when it’s no longer shiny:

  • Moderated discussion rather than presentation: no one has a perfect answer, so let’s hear some ideas
  • (Since it’s more conversational, been harder to liveblog, sorry!)
  • Create a schedule of drafts that will post whether you post or not, so you’re driven to fill them in before they post.
  • A post can be three sentences (or even one)! It’s okay to have a short post!
  • Avoid self-censoring! Sometimes what you think was the crap post gets the most comments and people like it.
  • Switch media: if you’re stuck on writing, post a video, post a picture, or some sort of audio post.
  • Federate! Engage other bloggers via your blog rather than comments, create a dialogue.

Lunch. Pasta this time — in the past it’s generally been Nicholas’s, but pasta is good too. I also checked in for my t-shirt, but apparently a few too many people collected my size. I was asked to come back towards the end of the day in case more of the right size shows up, and if not they’ll order more and mail it to me. These things happen, not too worried.

Andrew Nacin: You Don’t Know Query (WP_Query):

  • In general, don’t use query_posts, use wp_query! Please!
  • Everyone uses queries, but very few folks really know how or what it’s doing.
  • Query is ridiculously robust, and is the core part of a loop. You can also run multiple queries, to create very precise, custom loops for content.
  • wp_query is actually a reference to a more obscure wp_the_query
  • When we load wordpress, before we load the theme, it already queries for a list of posts. Yep, before the theme loads, wordpress already has all your posts queried.
  • This means there’s actually a whole lot of querying going on, which isn’t super efficient. There are better ways to do this!
  • WP_Query is robust and lets you lets you manipulate the object and use conditional tags without having to re-query.
  • Something new in 3.3: is_main_query
  • Neat flowchart as to different query methods (and why you should generally use wp_query): bit.ly/wpsequery

Music Blogs:

  • There’s the question of how to link to the music you want to review or expose, but doing it legally/safely.
  • The flip side is that artists often don’t want (or can’t due to publisher agreements) it streamed.
  • There aren’t many good solutions right now: it would be nice to have a clean plugin that stores music securely and then only exposes that song via stream.
  • Observations has been that you need to not worry about the downloading — if it’s streamable, it’s collectable, period.
  • Check out TopSpin for audio management. Creates promotion with tracks as reward. (Trading music for an audience.)
  • GigPress is still kind of the best plugin option for handling events/scheduling.
  • Most people tend not to make money on the music, they make money on touring and the merchandise and licensing.
  • Check out Press75 for some of the stuff happening with oEmbed for showing video.

Snacktime! Delicious fried berry pie, provided by @Whiffies. As an aside: I randomly came across a show while wandering N Mississippi with Jade back in July. One of the bands in that show was The Doubleclicks, and we thoroughly enjoyed their set. In true Portland small-world fashion, I totally just bumped into Angela from The Doubleclicks at the music blogs session.

The Personal Blog in 2011: Beyond Cat Photos:

  • Aaron Hockley is presenting, mostly because it’s relevant to his life.
  • Back in the day, blogs used to be really casual, just done haphazardly on geocities and livejournal and similar.
  • He’s been paring back on his blogs, came to the realization that a lot could be put back into a personal blog.
  • What sites he was finding himself going to was interesting writers with a small handful of topics, ends up being more of an evolved personal blog.
  • These broad-topic, semi-personal sites are more engaging and exciting to read.
  • The new “personal blog” is the consolidated blog — the personality-driven blog with a handful of topics.
  • Usage is medium-long form articles — there are gallery sites for photography (500px) and Twitter for status updates.
  • The reality is that while keeping topics separate makes some sense, it’s harder to generate the personality, and often there is a lot of overlap between interests, so why not run with that?
  • Personal identity is becoming increasingly important, and self-hosting means self-managing your identity.
  • Question Posed: Generating revenue is more straightforward on a targeted site.
  • Aaron’s gut feeling is that it’s not as easy but could be more rewarding overall.
  • Some debate over whether to just post everything into the same stream hodgepodge, or to offer feeds per category, and allowing users to decide what things they’re going to follow. (I’m inclined to say offer both.)
  • The goal of the personal blog these days is to consolidate, condense, and make it easier to create a relationship with the user.
  • [As an aside: a lot of this is line with the philosophy of IndieWebCamp]
  • The question: “If it’s your personal blog, why would you want to monetize that?” “Why not?” Longer answer: if it’s relevant monetization (amazon links/etc for a book or camera or whatever is being talked about), it’s not intrusive or bad.
  • “Do you want big numbers, or do you want more engagement?” (Targeted silos of content get more subscribers, but personal blogs get more engagement from the subscribers they do have.)
  • As you go more personal, where do you censor yourself, not necessarily in your own interest, but out of respect for those around you that may not be comfortable with information about them discussed online.
  • Personal blogs can be useful from a business perspective as well: the authenticity carries over, people DO research the people behind the brands, and tend to do more business with those who they can align with personally.

Last session for today (this is getting long enough that I’ll do tomorrow as a separate post).

Blogging for Photographers:

  • Mislabeled: actually about proofing via blogs.
  • Using WordPress as an online proofing manager.
  • (Another example of what we’re talking about is SmugMug or ZenFolio.)
  • What do we want out of a proofing service? @TheFrosty (running the session) is looking into building one and would like input.
  • Want: flagging for corrections (marking an image as desired, but needing touchups or other corrections).
  • Having some method of rating that can be shared between multiple proofers.
  • Having some method for sorting proofs, so you can show “photographer’s picks” and similar.
  • Lightroom plugins exist, finding some way to piggyback on that for image uploading would be great.

And the Alarm Went "Wii U, Wii U, Wii U…"

There have some been some criticisms surrounding the new Nintendo console, the Wii U. I’ve seen complaints that they focused too much on the new controller, and glossed over the new console itself (seems valid, and something Nintendo has admitted to dropping the ball on). There are also other complaints that seem less valid, and a remarkable amount of press attention to Nintendo’s stock price dropping 10% after the announcement. The reactions to it seem fairly down the middle, with the dividing line basically coming down to those that got a chance to demo a unit in person thinking it’s an interesting device, and those that didn’t get to demo the unit thinking Nintendo has completely dropped the ball.

A New Console, Now?

You can find what specs have been published for the device from Nintendo’s website, so I won’t bother rehashing it here. The quick summary: beefed up processor, beefed up graphics capabilities, full HD support, all around decent specs for a modern console. It’s not a mindblowing leap forward, but that is not, and has not been the point. The point is that the cost of having the higher end graphics is finally low enough that they don’t have to sacrifice their target pricing model in order to compete graphically with the other consoles. So basically, they let their competitors take a significant loss on every console in order to support HD, and then once the technology had matured, caught up while having made a profit the whole time.

It makes sense that they’d put out the Wii U now. Look at their past development cycles:

  • NES – 1983 (Japan), 1985 (US)
  • SNES – 1990 (Japan), 1991 (US)
  • Nintendo 64 – 1996
  • GameCube – 2001
  • Wii – 2006
  • Wii U – 2012

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the trend here: Nintendo puts out a new console every 5-6 years. By contrast, we’ve heard nothing concrete out of Microsoft or Sony for a new console (and if so, it’s unclear what they would be adding), with as recently as a few months ago, Sony claiming the PS3 would have a 10 year product lifespan (it sound like they are no longer saying this, instead claiming somewhere between 8 and 10 years), meaning we can’t really expect a new console from either other major console company until at least 2013, more realistically 2014-2016. This all puts Nintendo in a great position by putting a new console out now.

What about their existing user base?

Wii U is backwards compatible with the Wii, so it becomes a no-brainer for consumers to upgrade. Easy migration plus a HUGE existing install base (86 million units, versus Microsoft’s 55 million and Sony’s 50 million). So, again, why not put out a new console now? Getting out of sync with the other console maker’s schedule is a good thing: less competition for consumer dollars, and games currently in development can ostensibly add support or the new console fairly easily (known architecture, and comparable specs to other consoles).

The Stock Drop is Irrelevant

Full disclosure: I do own some shares in Nintendo (a whopping 4 shares). That said: I don’t care what the stock price is. Nintendo is a dividend-bearing stock, unlike a number of other technology companies. As long as it continues to make a profit, the stock price is largely irrelevant to existing investors, unless they are the sort who feel the constant need to buy and sell shares (to which I say: go play with your IPO stock bubbles and leave long-form investment alone).

So considering the nature of Nintendo’s stock, why the hell is the gaming press making a big deal about their stock drop? It has absolutely NO relation to the quality or nature of the new product. Further, it shows a lack of historical awareness: it’s not uncommon stock prices to dip after a keynote — look at Apple. For years, even when they announced hugely successful products (that were clear to be successful from the start, no less), their stock took a marked dip immediately after.

Disruptive Technology is Called Disruptive for a Reason

It feels like a lot of the people complaining about this announcement are complaining for the sake of complaining. They don’t understand the new technology and its potential effects, or in rarer cases understand but disagree with the direction. A lot of those complaints were also levied against the original Wii as well, which then swept the market for the last 5 years, with a significantly larger install base than either competitor. Iwata’s 2006 GDC keynote discussed expanding markets and to not keep only vying for the same hardcore gaming market — this philosophy worked with the Wii, it worked with the DS, Microsoft adopted a similar stance with the Kinect to great success. Given all this, it increasingly feels like the complaints are coming from a small subset of people who are either resistant to change, or simply have a myopic view of the gaming industry and the shifting landscape of the market.

Here’s something to think about: the gaming news media is comprised of people who love games. Its why they chose that field. Don’t you think that this love of how games are now or have been, might bias their views on what could shift or change the gaming industry?

Lions, Dashboards, and Calculators (Oh My!)

This summer, Apple is planning to release their next iteration of Mac OS X, 10.7 (codenamed “Lion”). From the looks of things, their primary focus this time around is interface improvements to make the user experience more fluid and effective. In general, I’m liking what I’ve been seeing, though looking at the system requirements that have been coming out suggests that I’ll be on the hairy edge of being able to run it at all (a Core 2 Duo or higher is required, of which I’m running the first Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro they offered), so I’m not sure how much real benefit I’ll be seeing in the near future. That said, one of the design changes they’re making seems like a horrible idea: they’re moving the Dashboard into its own space, rather than continuing to work as an overlay over whatever screen you’re on.

Given that the dashboard is for quick-reach, simple widgets, this seems remarkably backwards, and more like something you’d do to get people to not use it so it can be phased out of a later release. Think about it for a second: widgets are meant to show information at a glance, i.e. without significantly interfering or distracting the user from their task at hand. While several widgets seem like simply a bad idea to be shoved into their own space, there are a few that will have their usefulness significantly reduced, most notably the calculator.

To be clear, the dashboard calculator is not especially robust. It has no history or “tape”, no special functions, just your basic arithmetic. About the extent of its bells and whistles is that it accepts numeric input instead of being forced to use the buttons. But you know what? That’s the point. It’s a simple calculator for when you want to run some numbers really quickly, without interfering with the rest of your workflow. More often than not, these numbers will be pulled off a website or email, or chat. You aren’t particularly invested in running the numbers, you just want to check them really quickly. This, specifically, is the value of the dashboard calculator: just pull up the dashboard, and you can punch in the numbers, which are still visible, into the calculator for a quick total, without going through the process of loading up a separate application. I don’t want to have to constantly page back and forth between two screens just to run a quick number check. At that point, why not just use the actual Calculator app?

I doubt I’ll ever know, but I would love to find who made this particular design decision and ask them what on earth they were thinking.

It’s Been So Long Since We Had a Parade

[Including the lyrics on this one, because they are important.]

Dear brothers and sisters,
Dear enemies and friends,
Why are we all so alone here?
All we need is a little more hope, a little more joy;
All we need is a little more light, a little less weight, a little more freedom.
If we were an army, and if we believed that we were an army,
And we believed that everyone was scared like little lost children in their grown up clothes and poses,
So we ended up alone here floating through long wasted days, or great tribulations.
While everything felt wrong.
Good words, strong words, words that could’ve moved mountains!
Words that no one ever said.
We were all waiting to hear those words and no one ever said them.
And the tactics never hatched,
And the plans were never mapped,
And we all learned not to believe.
And strange lonesome monsters loafed through the hills wondering why…
And it is best to never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever wonder why.
So tangle – oh tangle us up in bright red ribbons!
Let’s have a parade.
It’s been so long since we had a parade, so let’s have a parade!
Let’s invite all our friends
And all our friends’ friends!
Let’s promenade down the boulevards with terrific pride and light in our eyes
Twelve feet tall and staggering
Sick with joy with the angels there and light in our eyes
Brothers and sisters, hope still waits in the wings like a bitter spinster
Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires
It’s because of our plans man; our beautiful ridiculous plans
Let’s launch them like careening jetplanes
Let’s crash all our planes in the river
Let’s build strange and radiant machines at this jericho waiting to fall.
—Thee Silver Mt Zion, “Built then Burnt (Hurrah! Hurrah!)”

New Year, 2011

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. — Neil Gaiman

Mr. Gaiman certainly has a knack for stating things well.

Emotional Communication

There is no language I know of that exists today that is able to truly convey our emotions, our inner needs. The scope just isn’t there — the best we can do is approximate it. We have words that are supposed to convey meaning, but even then, exactly what meaning is so fluid and amorphous, the true intent and meaning is lost in translation. Think about some of the biggest emotions in our lives. Think about love for a moment. “I love you.” “I love this television show.” “I love this song.” “I love my family.” There are so many valid contexts for the verb “to love.” As far as language is concerned, they are all valid, and we treat them as such socially. But the emotions underneath vary wildly. As human beings, we try to pick up on this additional nuance and emotional intent through body language, through situational awareness, the timbre of the voice, the tension of the moment. All of which rests on the hope that those around us are observant enough to notice, and aware enough to interpret these signals correctly. This is frightening, that so much of our emotional communication and well-being is reliant on others’ ability to perceive our comments in the way we intend. Given that, it is unsurprising that so many people feel isolated and alone.

Which brings us to another tool we have to try and communicate: if language does not have the tools to describe an emotion directly (not in a meaningful way, anyway), then it can at least describe them indirectly. Think about music, or books, or film, or photographs, or paintings, or any number of forms of art. The classic question of “What is art?” is easily defined to me: work intended to convey an emotional or personal response to someone. It’s an imperfect tool — there will inevitably be a lot of people who don’t “get” it. It’s not a fault of the artist, or of the viewer — they simply lack the shared context to invoke a response. A photograph of a weathered fence post in a field may not speak to some, but for others it can invoke a personal memory of visiting their grandparents on the farm, or strike a chord more metaphorically, describing for a moment the feeling of isolation that the viewer may be feeling or have felt. Put simply: art describes emotions.

Personally, I tend to draw from media sources to describe a range of emotions and personal thoughts pretty often. I’ve been doing so all week with video clips and songs and quotes, and this is hardly the first time, and I’m not remotely the only one — for every random silly link blog of goofy stuff out on the web, there is also a curated blog of someone trying to point at something in the hopes of getting their message across, and communicate something they feel is important to those around them. I post videos and quotes and songs and images to create a pastiche of who I am and how I’m feeling. (I’d be interested to see what interpretations people draw from the entries posted this past week.) Of course, I’m always afraid that I’m a bit of a Hector the Collector character when I do so, but if even one person gets and appreciates what’s shared, it’s worth it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cud_k9f6tqk

Controlled Information

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. —Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On”

To further this notion, check out this commentary on the difference between 1984 and Brave New World.