Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Responsibility, Responsibility, Responsibility!

So you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into a site. You finally made it popular. You have regular visitors who comment, retweet, like and share your stuff. You’re getting traffic and the ads are actually paying for things! Everything should be smooth sailing, right? Wrong.

Last year, I touched on the Dangers of an Unchecked MultiSite. While that was specific to the trials and tribulations of WordPress’s (then new) feature of MultiSite, it hammered home the lesson that you, who runs the site, are responsible for what goes on there. There’s a reason I have a comment policy on this site and a terms of use. I am aware of my responsibilities, but I don’t take responsibility for everything.

You have to look at your website like a business. If you ran a business, you would be responsible for whatever crap your employees looked at on-line, how they used their phones, etc etc. If someone uses your services to do something illegal, you’re responsible. That’s why you have to sign your life away in blood. Not that anyone reads that stuff for most things, but you do agree to not break the law when you install your operating system, for example.

At the end of the day, when you’ve made a site, you become responsible for the content (with some exceptions). You’ll note that the Terms of Use for this site have a pretty hefty bit of disclaiming going on, and outright says I’m not responsible for the contents of any message (i.e. comment). That’s a mostly legally safe claim to make, and I’m being up front saying ‘Hey, if someone’s a dick in the comments, that’s on them.’ Later on I say I reserve the right to delete anything I damn well feel like, and I do, but the point is I’m still responsible for your antics! That’s why a big part of running a site is moderating the community.

If someone makes a comment you (or your visitors) deem to be offensive, it’s in your best interest to quickly take decisive action. Make a choice, pick your stance, and stick by it. Don’t waver or feel guilt. This is your site, your responsibility (there’s that word again). If it makes you understand it better, this is your job. The easy part of the site is building it, the hard part is maintaining it. For those of you who just spent months getting your site to look just right, the idea that something is harder than that may be daunting.

First you put in the sweat equity to make the site. Then you spend hours researching and writing posts. You’ve already found out about how much time you have to put in fighting spammers. Now here I am telling you that you get to spend even more time and energy keeping the community of your site going. It’s okay to hate me. I actually spent more time these days keeping people in line and tending to them than I did anything else a couple years ago. That’s the real reason a lot of sites go in for moderating teams. It’s a lot of work to keep track of everything. Since then I’ve turned to what I call ‘community moderation.’ Plugins like BP Moderation (for BuddyPress users) and Safe Report Comments let your visitors flag posts for you to come back and review.

Regardless of this, there remains one person responsible for this site: Me. I’m responsible for what people who have accounts do here. I’m responsible for what I say and what they say. I’m responsible for your comments and the ads on this site. Everything here is my responsibility and I take it seriously. To carry it up a level, if your site sells a product, you are responsible for all of that product.

Recently there was a kerfluffle when Joost de Valk announced that his SEO plugin was being infringed on by WPMU Dev. Of course there was a public rebuttal by WPMUDev and a response to the rebuttal. Even WPCandy stepped in.

Before everyone gets het up about this one, I honestly don’t care who’s right or wrong for the purpose of this post. My opinion, and yes, I have one, doesn’t matter.

See, no matter what else, at the end of the day, a company is 100%, totally, unequivocally, responsible for their own products. Full stop. Everyone can agree to this (and as far as I can tell, everyone does agree on this point). No matter what, WPMU Dev is responsible for their products. No one is arguing this. The fact that they pushed a flawed product that slipped through their checks and balances is the point. They can’t blame the developer without blaming themselves for not checking his work. Regardless of if they failed to check the plugin, or forgot to tell the developer to always attribute his work, or whatever it may be, the company who hired the developer assumed all responsibility for the work which was then pushed forth in their name.

They weren’t the first people to make this sort of error, and they won’t be the last. Making the error, in and of itself, is monumentally stupid, but you know what? We’ve all been there. We all take responsibility for these screw ups. It’s horrifying, the first time you realize you’re responsible for something that you’re not in control of, but there you are. You run a company. Sometimes things go wrong in ways you never predicted and should have, but didn’t. In 2009 Microsoft yanked code they’d stolen. I know, stealing is a dirty, hot-button word, but that’s what it is. PC World says it right:

Third parties or not, though, Microsoft is responsible for making sure its software isn’t stolen, and it’s simply not doing the job. (Microsoft yanked code they’d stolen – PC World)

Think it’s just software? Think again. Last winter, a small magazine called Cooks Source lifted someone else’s work, wholesale, and put it in their magazine. The author was attributed, certainly, but not compensated. When the author found out, she contacted them and asked for a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. She got a pretty awesomely horrible reply, and posted it on her livejournal. From there, the Internet exploded. (If you go to http://illadore.livejournal.com/ you can see the crazy first hand.) How far did it all go? Well the magazine is no more, after the Internet got their hooks in it. People called up the advertisers to tell them that Cooks Source was a plagiarist, and more than one advertiser bailed. Then it turned out they’d stolen multiple articles from multiple sources, non paid, and photographs as well. Let’s not get into the website, which had stolen content all over the place.

It’s your site. It’s your name. You are responsible. Make all the excuses you want, but it doesn’t exculpate you from that role.

13 June, 2011
What’s Your Net Worth?

I get a lot of requests from people to link to their sites. Back in the day, we all used to have massive link pages where we just listed all the cool sites we knew about. On a fansite, I actually still have one where I list all the related sites, organized by how they’re related, separated by language, etc etc. Here, though, you see a list on the right of links, broken down into “Websites” and “WordPress” and that’s pretty much it.

The reason is that I subscribe to the belief of contextual links. If a link, by itself, has no context, my reader cannot determine the inherent value of the link. When I write a blog post, I try to put links that make sense inside my post. On my fansite, where I have a moderately sized wiki, I link from the related page to the related site.

Still, when people ask me to link to their site (or to friend them on Twitter/Facebook whatever) my knee-jerk reaction is “Why?” and it should be yours too! You should always ask that when someone wants to network. What’s in it for me? What good will this bring me? Do you write good content? If you’re asking someone to link to you, you had better be bringing something good to the table, other wise you’re an unsolicited request, and no one likes those.

Perhaps this flies in the face of my SEO advice (which is to network), but networking doesn’t mean you should cold-call everyone with a related site and ask for attention. Sometimes networking is linking to people, but it’s also tweeting and working the community. If you have a site about dog biscuits, hang out on the Milk Bone forum and talk to people. If someone has a question about the best biscuits for an old dog missing teeth, and you know you wrote a great post to it, you link to it. “Hi, Bob. My dog is 16 and he’s got no teeth on the right side, I know your pain! I spent a lot of time researching this problem, and hopefully this will help you. Link.”

Look at that! You were nice, polite, and helpful! It’s even better if you stick around and talk to Bob some more, if he needs it. You’re building your reputation in a productive and constructive way.(Yes, it’s a lot of work. If you haven’t caught on to that yet, I also have a bridge for sale …) The most important part is that you told Bob why your link was going to help him. You put up some cred and you didn’t make it too long.

When you think about it, the best way to get people to link to you is to get them interested in your site. The best way to get them interested in your site is to make content of value. Part of having a site with percieved value is having a site that attracts myriad walks of life. It’s a vicious circle. You have to get that foot in the door for people to notice you, and that’s what makes you popular.

How do you get the foot in the door if you don’t want to spend all your time on related sites?

You don’t.

Look. If this was a brick and mortar company, you’d be advertising, wouldn’t you? You’d know you had to network your vegan dog biscuits to all the hippies and dog lovers out there, and you wouldn’t think twice about it. You’d hire that idiot kid to stand on the corner in a gorilla outfit handing out coupons, or spin a sign while dressed as a sandwich. You would spend money and time to introduce the world to your brand.

The Internet is the exact same way. So when you cold-email someone and say ‘Hi, I really like your stuff! Will you link to me site?’ you need to bring your A Game. You need to sell your work, explain to me why you’re worth space on my site, and how come I should read your blog. Just saying ‘I, too, am a blog about vegan dog food!’ doesn’t cut it for the bigger sites. You can’t expect people to spend all their time checking out people they should link to, especially if you’re not already linking to them. Think of it like coming up with a good cover letter for your resume. You want people to read that page and go “Yeah, this cat is cool!”

Your links make or break you, but more important than who links to you is who, and how, you link to others. If you link to every dog site in the world, links from you are worthless. If you’re discerning and link only to the ones that mean the most to you, or are the most like your own site, then you’ve shown the ability to tell the difference between any old site and one of value. You’ve made yourself worth something.

And when you’re there, you won’t need ask people to link to you any more. That’s when you’ve made it.

Just don’t think it’ll happen all in one day.

6 June, 2011
SEO “Experts” Are Lying To You (About Backlinks)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

“For just $19.95, we offer hundreds of certified backlinks!”
“Quality backlinks for your site!”
“In just one week, we can make your site #1 in Google Searches!”

I see people ask, a lot, what the best WordPress plugin is to generate backlinks. And I always reply something like this: “The best way to get backlinks is to write good posts that people will link to and share.”

But what is a backlink anyway? As obvious as it sounds, a backlink is a link from someone else’s site back to yours. So when I say things like “Yoast’s explanation on how BlogPress SEO Plugin generates spam is an invaluable resource”, I’ve linked back to his site and made a backlink. If he has pings on, he’ll see my remark and link, and it’ll show up on his site in the comments section.(I actually turn pings off, because of the high number of spammers and the low value it was giving me. If the only reason you’re linking to someone is to get the link BACK to your site, you’re doing something wrong, but that’s another blog post.) Backlinks, honest ones between two good sites, are great. I love getting linked to from CNN (it happened once) or other sites who like my writing. It’s a great compliment.

However, people seem to think that backlinks are going to ‘generate SEO.’ First off, they’re not using the words correctly. SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization.’ My first grown-up job, where I wasn’t just fiddle-farting around on the computer, was to optimize meta-data for sites to get them ranked first on AltaVista, so yes, I do know what I’m talking about here. Due to that early work, I’ve got pretty awesome Google-Fu, because I used to spend hours going over the specs for search engines, and reading up on how they worked, what their algorithmic engines were, and how to get legitimately good results for my key words. I also learned what keywords are useless.

Back in the day, search engines would rate your site based solely on your self-contained content. One of the ways we would promote our sites would be to use hidden text or meta keywords that only the search engine would see. We’d list all the keywords related to our site about dog biscuits, and awesomely, we’d get rewarded. Naturally some people would shove totally irrelevant keywords in, to game the system for other searches. Which is why sometimes you’d search for ‘free range catnip’ and get a link for ‘wetriffs.com'(Note: wetriffs.com is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!). Today, no search engine relies on keyword meta data because of that (though most sites still include it).

Nothing can ‘generate’ SEO, because by it’s nature, optimization isn’t something you generate. It’s something you can leverage and build on, but we don’t generate it. Backlinks are, certainly, a component in getting your site highly ranked on Google for your keywords, but you’re really not optimizing your site for backlinks by doing anything other than making good posts, if you think about it. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but your page rank (i.e. how cool Google thinks you are) is going to be build on a few things, and while backlinks are one of them, it’s not everything.

Here’s how you make a good site that’s highly ranked in Google:
1. Write good content
2. Include decent meta data in your site’s HTML (If you need help with that, check out Google’s page on Meta Tags.)
3. Network with other (related) sites to share links
4. Advertise
So why do people get all fired up about backlinks? Google themselves say:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.(Link Schemes – Google.com)

Sounds great, doesn’t it? If a lot of people link back to me, like WikiPedia, then my content is proven to be good, and I win! You knew it wasn’t that simple, right? Google’s smart. They actually care about the quality and relevance of people linking to you! Heck, Google actually agrees with me when we both say the best way to get a good page ranking is to make good content. More to the point, those get-backlink-quick tools are going to engage in what basically amounts to spam, which will adversely impact your page ranking.

Of course, there are good backlinks. Like mine to Yoast’s (not that he needs the ‘link juice'(The term ‘link juice’ is what we use to call the ‘value’ of a link coming back to our site. If I link to you, I give you ‘juice’ which boosts your page rank. In Yoast’s case, he doesn’t need any help, but I give it anyway.)). But the best way to get those is to get yourself known in your arena. People don’t link to new sites because they don’t know about them, so you need to get out there and get known. Talk to a site you admire (or people you admire) and ask them if they’ll read and review your site. Post your articles on twitter/facebook/digg/whatever and basically put in the sweat equity to make your site shine. And if that sounded like a lot of work for you, then you’re right. It is work. It’s hard work.

The obvious question now is that if these so-called experts are telling you that they can generate hundreds of backlinks, what are they actually doing? They’re ripping you off. There’s no automatic, auto-generated, way to create backlinks. So if someone tells you that they can do it for $19.95, they’re not lying, but they are cheating you out of money, and giving you something useless. If you’ve fallen for one of those scams, I’d cancel that credit card ASAP. I have a horror story about a guy who got scammed and then ripped off for a couple grand.

The lessons learned from this are pretty simple: There is no quick fix, no magic bullet, no perfect tool that will make you popular. You have to find your audience and pitch good content to them. You have to work hard and yes, this takes a lot of time and effort. Anyone who says differently is selling something. Of course, optimizing the hell out of your site (with caching software and minification and CDN) is a great thing to speed your site up, but at the end of the day, all advice in the world boils down to this: If there’s nothing here for people to read and find beneficial, your site is useless.

Before you get depressed and think there’s nothing you can do to improve your site, I refer back to Joost de Valk. When people tell me they’re an SEO expert, I compare their website and work to Yoast, because in my opinion, he’s the example of what an SEO expert looks like and he doesn’t call himself an expert. He says he’s a ‘SEO and online marketer.’ Sounds to me like a guy with his head on staight. Pretty much everyone else I ignore. And he’s written the Ultimate SEO Guide and it’s free for anyone to use.

SEO Folks I Would Hire (culled from my ‘Folks I’d Hire’ list):
1 June, 2011
How to Support Plugins

This is not meant to be a perfect, will work for everyone, solution. But if you’ve made your first plugin and you’ve no idea how to support it, this is for you!

I’m going to present this under the assumption that you already understand how to code, even if your coding is about as good as my French. I’m also going to assume that you are a thinking being with the ability to be rational and accept defeat.

History first. I picked up WordPress back when MovableType decided to change their licenses, and I’ve never looked back. First it was just my blog, then I learned all the cool things I could do to it. The turning point for me was when I decided to rebuild my fansite using WordPress. While I do write code for my day job at a very large bank, I spend an awful lot of time troubleshooting for developers.

In a nutshell, I take phone calls (and emails) from very smart, very technical savvy people, asking me questions about things I know nothing about and make them work. I support software I don’t use, I support software I don’t understand, and I support software that’s almost as old as I am. It’s a very weird job, but I like it, and I do well at it, which is why I keep my day job and just play with WordPress! And what do I do with WordPress?

I help in the support forums!

My job made me accustomed to taking weird questions from smart people about a brand new topic, learning what I need to in order to solve the problem, and hand them the information quickly and in an understandable way. My mom loves this, and knows she can call me about anything computer related, and I’ll find the answer for her. When I started helping on the WordPress forums, this was suddenly a skill whose worth could not be measured. I wasn’t afraid to jump in and help out on topics I was unfamiliar with because I knew I could figure it out.

The magic to it, the secret to my power, is that I know how to learn, when to ask for help, and to admit when I don’t know.

That’s pretty much it. And I’m going to teach you how to do it too, provided you’re willing to think, and to admit that you’re wrong sometimes. Don’t worry, I’ll be wrong right along with you!

You are not the only user of your plugin, so be available

Most people who write a plugin do it for a few reasons:

They need to do something special
Someone else needs something special
They want to feel important and praised
They’re a bored genius maniac (see pic on the right)

It all boils down to the idea that we do it for ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that. Remember, as long as that plugin is just yours, sitting on your server, you could do whatever you wanted. The moment you start handing out your cool ‘just for me’ code to other people, there is a level of responsibility that you have to own up to. You’re now a developer and that means you need to help people. If your plugin is up on the WordPress repository, you are no longer making this for you, but for anyone who needs it. They’re going to ask for help, they’re going to tell you that you did it all wrong, and they’re going to be unreasonable.

If you’re making a plugin that you don’t want to support, this better be painfully clear on the plugin readme.txt, or you will be in running for my asshat of the year award. There’s nothing wrong with making a plugin and abandoning it, but there is something wrong with not telling people that. For the rest of us who are supporting our plugins, make sure it’s clear how they should contact you.

The default expectation is that if I post in the forums and tag my topic with your plugin flag, you will see it and reply. There is no law that says this must be the case, but since it is the common way plugins are handled, you must be explicitly clear to people that you want to use a different method. As a forum helper, when I see someone ask for help on a plugin, I always go look at the plugin readme first. If it says ‘for support, go to…’ I always tell people to do that.

Now that said, you still need to remember to add the RSS feed to your reader, because some people don’t read, and sometimes they’ll let you know of something huge in the forums, and not contact you correctly. I’m not saying you need to reply to them, but think of it as a CYA manuver. There’s a great URL that anyone can use for all your plugins: http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-committer/YOURHANDLE

That will update every time anyone posts about any of your plugins. If you need it to email you instead of RSS, I suggest using RSS2Email, FeedBurner or any other web-app that turns feeds into email to alert yourself.

It’s your plugin

At the same time, this is your plugin. You designed it to fill a certain void and damn it, if you don’t want it to have dancing monkeys, then you don’t need to! This has been where I see most developers get into ‘fights’ online. People often have unrealistic expectations for free products, and most of why I charge people for phone/email support is because it gets rid of the stupid requests and keeps me sane. If I answered every email, IM or forum post someone addressed to me with the same attentiveness and response-time I give at my day job, I’d be working 60 hours a week on a free product, with no monetary kick back. I don’t have the time for that. Neither do most people.

The hardest lesson to learn is how to walk away when you feel responsible for your product. Even though these are your users, and these people rely on you, there is a point at which you cannot explain ‘why’ sufficiently for them to understand it. Either they’re stuck in their world, or you in yours, but regardless, you are at an impasse. And this is when you have to walk away. Tell them ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do that. You’re welcome to fork the plugin if you want.’ And walk. Away. Sometimes things are just outside your scope, and if you don’t want to support the addition, you don’t have to. Don’t let people bully you into things.

The expectations of ‘free’ plugins are crazy, and we all know that. It’s like not feeding the trolls, though. When people are unrealistic to you, you’re under no obligation to support them. But also, when things are outside the scope of your plugin, you can tell them that and be done. I’ve said no to people who wanted things added in, even after I spent a day down the rabbit hole applying code to implement their feature, because I neither wanted to support it nor did I find it useful. At the end of the day, it’s my plugin. I decide what it should do.

Don’t forget you have a life!

Most problems people have with plugins are literacy problems. That is they did not RTFM, or they didn’t pass reading comprehension and are over-thinking a problem. I spent 4 hours once at work talking to a woman who didn’t understand what I meant when I said ‘If the folder’s not there, just make it.’ She was certain I was omitting a crucial step, or secret hand shake. This goes back to what I said about why I have a per-hour price for personal support. I don’t have time to walk someone through the basics of how to FTP or edit a file. That’s not the support you need to offer for plugins, and if someone can’t do it, it’s okay to tell them that they need to hire someone. You have a life! Don’t let them take all your free time.

I have other hobbies besides WordPress. I write, I play guitar, I ride my bicycle, I’m in the SCA, I do some volunteer work for bicycling, I’m part of a couple fandoms, and so on and so forth. I have a family and friends and interests outside slaving away at a computer all day and night for no compensation. So I try to balance my time and yes, that means sometimes I walk away from a coding frenzy, but sometimes you just have to. There are commitments in life, and you will have to sacrifice them sometimes. Don’t sacrifice your self, though. Embrace your life and don’t let one obsession rule it. That will help you keep it all in perspective.

Users are people too

Maintaining a plugin will involve sacrifice. The first thing you’re going to lose is free time, but the second is you will lose face. You’re going to get into a fight with someone on the forums, no matter how well you mean. Part of this is because text is an imperfect medium. My father complains about it, because he says it’s not a discussion, but a debate, and most people in the US never took a debate class.

It’s really hard to remember to be polite, especially when these people aren’t reading the damned manuals/readme/directions. I fail at it often enough that I used to joke it’s why I’d never be promoted at work or made a forum moderator for WordPress. Ironically enough, both those things happened roughly within weeks of each other. I suspect the reason is that while I do lose my cool sometimes and write angry, I mean well and try hard to be polite and do good.

Every time I train new people in how to work our tech support, I tell them that from Thanksgiving to New Years, our busiest time of year, everyone will make at least one, massive, giant, phenomenal “Oh dear GOD am I about to be fired!?” magnitude of an error. Without fail, at least one person will promise they won’t, and I write their name on my white-board with the date. Without fail they will make a huge error. The point is that everyone makes mistakes, everyone forgets how to reset a password, everyone forgets something basic, even you. So just remember that.

It’s okay to not know

I don’t know how set up domain mapping. I have to read the documentation every time, and often I ask Andrea or Ron. On the flip side, Andrea has remarked more than once that when she sees a weird .htaccess request, she defers to me. I know what I know, I know what I don’t, and I have no shame in telling someone “You know, I don’t use IIS and I really have no idea how to help you here.” If you don’t know how to do something, say so. Maybe the person you’re trying to help actually does know how to code it, or maybe someone reading it will know.

When you make a BIG change, document the hell out of it

Recently, W3 Total Cache pushed a new version with a lot of cool features and better tools. The problem was that many people found it broke their site. The fix was really easy. Change the new ‘default’ setting for Minify from ‘Auto’ to ‘Manual’ and set it all up manually. The problem was that the developer didn’t make this clear in an easy to find way. He tweeted about it, certainly, but he didn’t announce anywhere easily (logically) located about this.

Now W3TC also fails on one of my critical hallmarks of support: Nowhere in the readme (or on the official WordPress repository page) does he say how to get help. I happen to know that if you want to report a bug, you go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=w3tc_support and use the form there. He also doesn’t link to his website, or even the plugin page on his website from the repository, nor does he mention that he doesn’t help you configure the site for free.

While I love this program and use it on all my sites but one (at 60 hits a day, it doesn’t need it), I think he’s wrong to not spell out how support works, and he failed to explain what was happening. All we know is he fixed this:

Fixed bug with existing installation upgrades: set minify to manual mode by default

Nothing was clearly documented, nothing was clearly explained, and no one really knew where to go for help, which meant the forums were filled with a lot of angry, ignorant, people, getting no responses from the developer. Simply put, it looks bad, and if people feel that the support is non-existent, they’re going to get angrier, and post things like how you suck and they’re leaving your product, which makes you angry and feel bad, and less inclined to help them at all, the ingrates! It’s a vicious circle, and spirals downhill really fast and segues right into my final point…

They’re not attacking you

Take a deep breath. What I just said about W3TC can very easily sound like an attack. A lot of the time, people will argue they’re not attacking, they’re being passionate, and in the same breath accuse you of being overly defensive. You’re going to, rightly, be defensive and proprietary of your plugin because, as we discussed, it’s yours. You put in the sweat equity, you researched, studied and tested, and you made something awesome. It hurts when people tell you it sucks.

Alas, they’ve forgotten you’re a person too. There isn’t a good/easy way to remind them you should be treated as a human, sadly, so when people start getting fired up and telling you that you suck and the plugin sucks, the best you can do is be the better person. I mentioned before that users are people. This is not a repetition of that fact, but a reminder to yourself that there are days where all this is going to be terrible, awful and you feel like the users have pitchforks and want your head

When this happens, they’re not attacking you. They don’t hate you, they just don’t know how to explain problems without hurting you, because you’re always going to be too close to the problem. I’m willing to bet Bill Gates and Steve Jobs still feel twinges of pain when people rant about their products. Like a parent, you love what you’ve created, and every slight against it feels like fishhooks in your skin. This cannot be avoided, and the best you can do is recognize that they are a little unreasonable, and that your reply is probably a little unreasonable, and stop.

If you can’t address the situation without feeling your skin heat up or your blood pressure rise, walk away for a while. We’ll still be here.

In Summary

I would never say ‘don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff’ or anything trite like that. I will say the point of all this is to be honest, be upfront, be clear and keep it all in perspective. That way you will have both respect and your sanity.

24 May, 2011
WordPress: EU Compliance
ETA: Please check out Trac #19622 – There will be a new way to do this in WP 3.4

Before I get into this, you do not need to do anything to WordPress to comply with the EU cookie law. The legal whoo-hah is clear: Third party cookies (and cookies which track data across multiple sites) are the only ones they’re talking about. MultiSite installs are, technically, one site, all owned and managed by one person, so it’s fine. Google.com, gmail.com and anything else registered to Google would also be fine internally.

But if you’re dead set on this…. Let me explain first.

For WordPress, if someone comments on your blog, cookies are stored on their computer that store three things: name, email and website. Even then, they’re only put in when the user enters then. That would entail implicit agreement to having cookies put on your computer, wouldn’t it? Even if you have no idea what cookies are? That certainly is a problem. People don’t know what cookies are, why they’re on their computers, and what they can do. But is that the responsibility of website owners to educate? Certainly, you can easily add a checkbox to your comment for that says ‘save cookies,’ have it link back to an explanation about what’s going on, and make it required.

It would be pretty easy to flip WordPress around to not save cookies for non-logged in users.

First you change your KEYs and SALTS in the wp-config.php (you can get new ones at http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/wpmu/salt). This will force all users to log back in.

Next you change your registration/login page to alert people to the cookies. There are plugins for this, and on BuddyPress you can edit your theme’s template page for registration easily. By having the login/registration page say ‘hey, you’re gonna get cookies if you log in!’ you’re now in compliance with EU law!

Finally you slap this your header (or functions or a mu-plugin file), to delete cookies on every single page you visit, which will prevent cookies from staying on people’s computer ONLY if they’re not logged in:
```
<?php if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) { wp_clear_auth_cookie(); } ?> 
```
One could go even further, making a check-box to permit cookies or not, though that would be far more complicated to track. This very basic way of making the code you own compliant is enough to get you through the day and keep the enforcers off your back.
19 May, 2011
Website Viewability

The goal to make your site look cool, be easy for people to use, and be available for all, is a holy grail trifecta that is rarely achieved. Many times, you have to sacrifice one leg of the tripod in order to achieve your goals.

The advent of Typekit has led to a lot of websites using cool custom fonts in a way that is supposed to solve that age old problem of what happens when you design your site with a font the end-user doesn’t have. For a very long time I couldn’t understand what the big deal was, since I often read these sites from work, and their fonts were all jaggedy and ugly. Then I fired up a site from home and was astounded at the difference.

This is what I normally see when I go to TypeKit:

This is what you’re supposed to see:

I know it doesn’t look too bad, but basically what I don’t get are the nice, smooth, edges on fonts, so when I read a whole page like that, it’s hard on the eyes. TypeKit works by javascript, so arguably, it should work on all browsers with JS enabled (which is to say all modern browsers). I’m using Chrome (latest and greatest) and I get crap.

That’s from Ed Jeavons’ Beyond web-safe fonts with Typekit, which is a great article. But the whole thing is unreadable to me because of that.

So where is the break down here? TypeKit’s goal is to make their fonts work on every site, regardless of if you have the font installed on your server. Jeavons says “Typekit degrades gracefully so that anyone without JavaScript, or with a browser that doesn’t support the necessary features, will simply revert to your standard CSS rules.” If that was the case, shouldn’t I be seeing a better site?

According to TypeKit, the problem is that the sites I’m seeing didn’t make good standard CSS rules. My anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. After all, every site I go to has the exact same problem. So I turned off javascript and went back to the site:

Now that looks like you’d expect graceful degradation! At this point, my answer is that something TypeKit does is unwelcome on my office computer. Or more likely, my office firewall. That’s a whole new kettle of fish. I can’t reasonably expect everyone to go find an office behind a firewall made of adamantium and test their site. But clearly this is not the fault of the individual site. Is it reasonable to expect TypeKit to look into this? I went on a search and found they have a cool little checker too typecheck which says I’m fine:

There’s nothing in their FAQ or help desk that mentions Firewalls having this issue, so I decided to check out Google Web Fonts. Lo and behold, I get the same problem. Some more digging and I found someone who ‘fixed’ the problem using css. My Twitter friend @cgrymala suggested I also try ClearType, since I’m on Windows XP at work. That actually helped a lot (seriously, I cannot tell you how much nicer things look) but the main problem is still there.

Where’s my problem? My problem is that TypeKit and Google Web Fonts, while they purports to be a one-size-fits-all/degrades-nicely app, are not. If you’re not on the forefront of technology, if you’re behind a firewall, if you’re on a weird setup, these things are not going to work. This is not really TypeKit’s or Google’s fault. They’ve done an amazing job setting things up so it works most of the time. At best, they could have their javascript detect browser and OS (yes, you can do these things) and if it’s IE 6 or Windows XP (for example), revert to the javascriptless version of the site.

It’s nigh impossible to solve the firewall problem. You can’t detect the firewall easily, and part of the point of them is they obfuscate who and what they are. And if the problem is a combination of OS, browser and firewall, then the best you might be able to do is somehow detect if any one of those three are on the known ‘possible’ trouble list, and shunt them off to a non-js version. And now you’ve added a lot more load to your server.

The best you can do is to avoid using these cool systems and features until they’re more supported, which is where the whole concept of sacrifice comes in. If it’s more important for you to have your site look cool than to work for everyone, you have to find a way to degrade better. For a long time I had an alert bar on my site to tell you that if you were using IE 6, you needed to upgrade. Going back further, we used to regularly make sites that said ‘Best viewed in Netscape Navigator.’ Thankfully sanity struck, web standards started to stick, and we began to design sites that looked good in most browsers.

I cannot advocate a return to ‘Best viewed in…’, but I can suggest that if you’re relying heavily on cool, cutting edge, features, you also have a printer-friendly version of your site that runs without any of the bells and whistles.

16 May, 2011