Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

The Bias of Transparency

When I was in elementary school, we used to go to SeaWorld all the time. I loved seeing the animals, I loved being able to pet and feed dolphins. I loved the whole data dump of the ocean information. I went back in the days where the trainers were in the water with the orcas. I fed one once, and patted it’s nose. I danced with a seal (and sea lion). I really fell for the whole “Humans and animals together!” patter.

And then I grew up and read about how SeaWorld got those animals in the first place.

Your personal feelings on movies like Blackfish aside, even SeaWorld admits today that they were wrong in how they captured orcas back in the day. They were cruel and wrong, and SeaWorld hasn’t done that in 35 years. But the part of me that is upset with them is the part that wants to know why it took Blackfish to make them step up and say that. And the part of me that’s livid is the part who asks why they don’t disclose their history as a learning experience?

Transparency in development is not a new thing. Technology used to be a magical black box, but the more people embrace open source, I feel they’re more willing to express their issues and explain things that have happened. Even when you don’t understand the whole explanation, being told something like “Yes, the outage was caused because some electrical work caught fire” is much more satisfying than “The outage has been resolved.”

When I talked about why an outage didn’t inspire me to change my webhost, much of the reason was because of communication. While it could have been better, my host was transparent with me such that I knew what was going on. Perhaps not as fast as I wanted it, but I did, at all points in time, know what the deal was.

Being up front about problems gets messier when you start to talk about things like security. Earlier in the year, MailPoet had a security vulnerability. They fixed it, pushed the fix, and then it was reported on and everyone found out. People were surprised to find that the exploit was hunted down by people now that the information was in the wild, and others pointed fingers at the reporters for publicizing of the issue.

It’s a double edged sword. If they don’t report on the situation, people don’t understand how important it is to update. If they do make it public, the bad guys know what to look for. That’s why you get things like the accidental DDoS from TimThumb. People knew to attack for it, and they did. It’s the same thing with the HeartBeat vulnerability or the recent Bash issue. Once a vector is found, it will be exploited.

There isn’t a perfect answer here. There isn’t a perfect balance between information and education and secrecy. We want people to know “Hey, fix this!” but we don’t have a way to tell them without telling evil people. This ends up making us want to keep secrets and hide the truth, which just isn’t going to work in the long run. The only practical answer would be to fix this as soon as possible and hope no one hits us in the meantime.

8 October, 2014
Featured Image Size Redux
One of my themes didn’t have a Genesis Featured Image.

Actually it did, but it didn’t have it as an named additional image. And this was a problem because I like to have the featured image size listed in my featured image box, as I explained how to do in my post about how to do this in Featured Image Size. That theme was using the ‘medium’ size for featured images, which meant by code made the box look like this:

This is because I had no $_wp_additional_image_sizes, and that’s what I meant when I said there was no named additional image size. So I had to change up my calculation and check first if the name of the image size was one of the defaults, ‘thumbnail’, ‘medium’, or ‘large’, and size off that and then check the other options.

Which gives me this:
```
// What is my image size?
add_filter( 'admin_post_thumbnail_html', 'helf_admin_post_thumbnail_html' );

function helf_admin_post_thumbnail_html( $content ) {
	// Define what the name of our featured image size is
	$genesis = get_option('genesis-settings');
	$genesis_image_size = $genesis['image_size'];

	// Get featured image size
	global $_wp_additional_image_sizes;

	if ( in_array( $genesis_image_size, array( 'thumbnail', 'medium', 'large' ) ) ) {
		$size_width = get_option( $genesis_image_size . '_size_w' );
		$size_height = get_option( $genesis_image_size . '_size_h' ); 
	} elseif ( isset( $_wp_additional_image_sizes[ $genesis_image_size ] ) ) {
		$size_width = $_wp_additional_image_sizes[$genesis_image_size]['width'];
		$size_height = $_wp_additional_image_sizes[$genesis_image_size]['height'];
	}

	$my_featured_image = $size_width.'x'.$size_height;

	// Apply
	$imagesize = '<p>Image Size: ' . $my_featured_image . 'px</p>';
	$content = $imagesize . $content;

	return $content;

}
```
Right below the global check, I do an if to scan the array and grab the sizes based on that. It’s exceptionally simple, and the major change was moving it to set variables and then setting based on those outside of the if/else check. But it works perfectly on both my sites with regular sizes and the fancy sizes.

I still don’t have a check to see if the theme is Genesis or not, but this multisite is 100% Genesis for all sites, so it’s not an issue for me. If anyone has a way to check “Is this active theme on this site Genesis or a child,” please share. The world will thank you.
6 October, 2014
WordCamp Tokyo

There was something about me being busy this year… I’m headed overseas on the 7th to my second international WordCamp (Montreal being the first, back in 2012).

WordCamp Tokyo, I will be on a panel discussing the Worldwide Usage of WordPress. Representing America, I’ll be on an international panel to explain where I see WordPress being used and where it’s going here (and in Canada, I can speak for them, I am half-Canadian, I’m my own hat!). I am highly delighted about getting to say ‘international panel’ to some of my family. This is my first time on a panel for WP, though!

This is my second trip to Japan. The last time was in 2008 when I spent 12 days hiking around Shikoku with my father and brother, visiting the temples of Henro in Awa Prefecture. One day I’d like to get the chance to finish the hike. It was beautiful and amazing and blew my mind.

Also this is why I had to decline WordCamp Europe and Dallas/Fort-Worth, both of which I really wanted to attend. I can’t do that much travel in that short a time, seeing as WordCamp SF is right around the corner. I’m really excited to be going to Japan and getting to talk about WordPress while I’m there. This is one of those things you hope will happen when you get a job with a company as cool as DreamHost.

I know I won’t see many of my regular followers there, but I will see some wonderful new faces and I can’t wait.

3 October, 2014
Drag to Choose File

I don’t know why I never knew this. Did you know you can drag a file to the ‘select file’ button on Chrome?

You know the button, right, this one that just says Choose File:

I happened to be testing if the drag/drop area was working (it wasn’t) and I noticed the button changed colors when I dragged the file over it:

So I let go and it was there:

And yes, it worked. This will save me hours of work!

1 October, 2014
Single Site Login Loop

Have you ever tried to log in to WordPress and have the login page just refresh with no errors?

No, I don’t mean that Multisite Login Loop.

After upgrading a bajillion people to WordPress 4.0 on DreamHost, I noticed something a little weird. People couldn’t login and they didn’t get an error. They would put in their ID and password and the screen just refreshed. So I took a look and decided to start with the obvious tests.

Assuming that the username and password were correct, I checked what happened with a fake account and password. I put in ‘admin’ with a password of ‘areyouduckingme?’ (which no one but me would use) and expected to see a nice login error like this:

I did not. Right away I knew what was wrong. There was a miss-match with the home and site URLs!

At DreamHost, we allow you to pick if you want to force www or non-www or not at all for your domains, and I always go to check what the customer did there, just to see. If they picked ‘neither,’ then I’ll usually flip it to non-www because I hate www in your domain and I’m fixing things. Of course, if they have set it to www or no-www, I make a note and honor that.

Then I go check the home and site URL and make sure they’re both the same in so far as the domain does. If one is www.domain.com and the other is just domain.com, and 50% of the time, it was this all along. The other 50% is that WordPress thinks it should have www and the domain settings think it should not. The point here is that everything needs to match up nicely when it comes to your domains.

It’s also a good idea to check the .htaccess to see if they’re forcing it one way or the other in there (I do).

And you’re done. Refresh the page, see if you can login. Should be magic.

Of course the question is then why did this happen, and the answer is that WordPress is trying to make it harder for people to break into your site. Part of these means making sure that cookies match domains properly, and when you have an inconsistency like www.domain.com and domain.com, the cookie is invalid and WordPress doesn’t know where to go. It wants to go to one but gets tossed to the other.

29 September, 2014
Make Your Advice Work

I love Project Runway. Seeing people be that dramatic and traumatic over making clothes is fun, plus I love the design. One of the best parts is when Tim Gunn steps in as a mentor. He rarely tells people exactly what they need to do, but he will give them his opinion. It’s the way he handles critique that makes him impressive. Recently he had a new show called Under the Gunn where he let other people mentor some young designers, and that show was, shall we say, less than spectacular.

One of my favorite designers, Nick Verreos (aka Uncle Nick), was one of the worst mentors. Instead of helping his mentees, he did the work for them and made their designs look more like him. He drew for them, he sewed for them, he even gave them ideas.

That’s not the Tim Gunn way.

COURTESY OF A+E NETWORKS
Tim Gunn (left), host of the new Lifetime show ‘Under the Gunn,’ on set with mentors (second from left to right) Mondo Guerra, Anya Young-Chee and Nick Verreos, all former contestants on ‘Project Runway.’

When people ask you for advice on their work, it’s hard to not insert yourself into the process and put your own self into the work. You, too, are a smart, creative person. That’s why they asked you! So how do you keep yourself out of your advice and let people learn?

Boy that’s hard.

You have to let go of your own ego to do this. You have to be willing to remove your own desires from the equation, and instead of saying “Do this” you have to suggest “What if you did it like this?” It’s a classic case of leading the horse to water, but you really are the one who is going to show them the land where the ideas are and nudge them along.

One of the things I do a lot of is plugin reviews, and many times I see people reinventing the wheel. I don’t often put value judgements on plugins, and in fact I try hard not to do so. But when I see someone taking the hard road of handling a feature, like wanting to put autoplay in all YouTube videos, I wonder why they’re inventing a new oembed and shortcode and not filter oembed_fetch_url and have it check if it’s youtube and, if so, put in the arguments for autoplay?

But… Do I tell them “Here’s the code you want” and give it to them? Will that make them better developers? No, it won’t. Instead, I have to explain why reinventing the wheel isn’t a great idea.

Any time a plugin replicates functionality found in WordPress (i.e. the uploader, jquery), you’ve done something wrong. It’s a security risk, for one, as the features in WordPress have been tested by many more people than use most plugins, so the built in tools are less likely to have issues. But more importantly, you’ve given people too many ways to do one thing. A user doesn’t want to remember seventy shortcodes. They want to know “Hey, I know pasting in my video URL makes it show up on WordPress! I’ll do that!”

They want the easy, and you need to remember to give them the easy.

Similarly, advice on what’s right should lead towards what’s easy. What’s easier for you to maintain, to develop, and support. I know what works for me, but when I’m teaching someone how to update plugins and they ask me “What tool do you recommend?” I say “What do you already use and like?”

That’s my secret, by the way. I teach and mentor by trying to learn what they already know, what they’re already comfortable with, and then explain how to do things better or faster with those systems. But I try not to show them “This is the way to do it.” I stress this is A way to do things, unless what they’re doing really is a reinvention of the wheel, without making the wheel any better.

26 September, 2014

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

The Bias of Transparency

Featured Image Size Redux

WordCamp Tokyo

Drag to Choose File

Single Site Login Loop

Make Your Advice Work