Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Targeting Ads

Selling things on your website isn’t a strange concept. A lot of people have sites where they want to do that if only to break even. And most people do it with generic ads. When, for whatever reason, Google and such aren’t a viable option, it’s time to consider targeting your advertising a little pragmatically. Or rather, more specifically.

Take Aim At Your Content

One of the reasons Google Adsense is so popular is that it claims to target your readers for you. It does the hard work and you can just walk away. But the reality is that it’s targeting your readers based on their search patterns, not necessarily based on your content.

Now. Google does target ads based on content. However it’s not the way I felt would make the most sense. You see, when I think about content targeted ads, I would think “this post is about bicycles, I should have ads about bicycles.” What actually happens is you get some bicycle ads and then some ads for table wax, because you were shopping for that earlier in the week.

Advertisers over Content

The problem arises in prioritizing advertisers over readers. It’s one of those peculiar paradoxes. Ads are made by people to make money. They pay you to put them on your website. But that only works if the people who visit your website click on their ads and buy their things. That means it’s more beneficial for advertisers to aim at the visitor directly than via your website’s content.

Most people don’t actually go to their ad preferences on Google and fiddle with their personal preferences, so the default ads are always going to be based on everything. Since some people have weird interests, the ads on your site might be geared towards beds instead of bicycles.

Taking Control

If your goal is to have fewer generic ads then the only solution is to take charge of what ads are on your site. And that’s work. Not many of us have the time to pick our ads every single day, and even if we did, we’d be set with the ones offered to us. I’ve used Project Wonderful before, and it lets you pick what ads you show. But only from the ones that submit to your site.

The next choice is cherry picking ads from what’s available on a service like Amazon’s Associate Program. That shows you all of Amazon’s available bounties and promotions, which you can put on your site and leave them alone. Some even last ‘forever’ so you don’t have to worry about expirations.

More Control?

Of course, there’s also the work of adding individualized ads on each page, for the product you’re talking about. But that is another post.

28 September, 2017
Make WordPress Gay
In September, WordPress.com changed their admin bar from the normal black or blue to a rainbow color. Why?

Australia will be holding a national survey on marriage equality over the next two months. To show our support as a company for marriage equality, we’re showing the rainbow bar in the WordPress.com admin bar to all logged-in Australian visitors. You can read more about the marriage equality campaign here: http://www.equalitycampaign.org.au/

And this was super cool. They’d done it before when Gay Marriage was legalized in the US and it’s much appreciated as a show of solidarity. But… The menu bar only shows if you’re visiting WordPress.com from Australia. This causes two problems for me:

1) I’m in the US
2) I self host

Don’t worry, there’s a solution.

The ‘Official’ Solution

The code for what WordPress.com does can be found on the Github repository for Calypso. But that’s all mixed in with a lot of extra ‘stuff’ that has to be there for their services, like geo-location and so on.

The rest of us don’t need that, and since Gary (the fellow who wrote the ticket) is a friend of mine, I asked him if the code was available. It is.

Rainbow Bar Code
```
<?php

/*
 * Plugin Name: Rainbow Bar!
 */

function rainbow_bar() {
?>
	<style type="text/css">
		#wpadminbar {
			background: linear-gradient(
				to bottom,
				#e24c3e 0%,
				#e24c3e 16.66667%,
				#f47d3b 16.66667%,
				#f47d3b 33.33333%,
				#fdb813 33.33333%,
				#fdb813 50%,
				#74bb5d 50%,
				#74bb5d 66.66667%,
				#38a6d7 66.66667%,
				#38a6d7 83.33333%,
				#8c7ab8 83.33333%,
				#8c7ab8 100% );
		}

		#wpadminbar,
		#wpadminbar .quicklinks > ul > li {
			-webkit-box-shadow: unset;
			-moz-box-shadow: unset;
			box-shadow: unset;
		}

		#wpadminbar .ab-top-menu > li > a {
			background-color: rgba( 50, 55, 60, .85 );
		}
	</style>
<?php
}
add_action( 'wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'rainbow_bar' );
```
Install that to get this:

Small Changes

In order to make it look ‘right’ for me, I changed two things

I removed this:
```
	#wpadminbar .ab-top-menu > li > a {
		background-color: rgba( 50, 55, 60, .85 );
	}
```
And I added this:
```
	#wpadminbar .ab-item, #wpadminbar a.ab-item, #wpadminbar > #wp-toolbar span.ab-label, #wpadminbar > #wp-toolbar span.noticon,
	#wpadminbar .ab-icon, #wpadminbar .ab-icon:before, #wpadminbar .ab-item:before, #wpadminbar .ab-item:after {
		color: #000;
	}
```
Caveats

Even with my changes, the color for my Jetpack stats looks wrong. It’s too washed out. And that’s because it’s apparently hardcoded into the plugin in a way I can’t overwrite. I can live with that problem.

The other issue is that this will only show for logged in users (unless you’re using some code to always show the admin bar). That begs the question, of course, of why would you do this if only logged in users?

If you’re running a queer themed website that happens to use WordPress … like, say, Autostraddle, then this makes perfect sense. For me, it just makes me feel happy to see that pride rainbow all the time.
26 September, 2017
Plex + Roku = TV
I’m really trying not to add new devices to my life. I picked up a Roku last year so that I could watch CBS’ internet TV on my regular TV. I chose that instead of the Amazon or Apple TV because the Roku also let you add ‘apps’ for regular TV channels (SyFy, Freeform, PBS) and if I missed a TV episode due to travel, I could watch it on the big television.

Then I wanted to play some shows that I’d saved as MP4s from my laptop to my TV, without a new device like a Chromecast.

The solution was Plex

Plex is a media server you can run on your computer that lets you add all your media, even things that don’t exist in iTunes, and organize them sanely. You can manage it in your web browser (or command line) and while you do have to have an account with Plex the service, you don’t have to pay or sign up for any of the services.

If you have an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire you can use those too, but I used my Roku, added my media, and boom. Watching videos I own from my laptop on my TV.

A couple caveats:
1. If you download MP4s from cough torrent cough places, you’ll need to get their subtitles too.
2. TV show files need to named SHOWNAME - S##E## - EPISODENAME.EXT to work properly.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than trying to watch TV on your computer.
21 September, 2017
Admins Are Humans Too
This conversation happens often enough that I've ceased to be mind boggled by it. A developer will submit code, I review it, and I'll tell them to please sanitize the input. Instead of just using the functions, they'll come back and ask why? Invariably they'll point out that they're using nonces to make sure only authorized actions can happen (no cross site scripting), and they're checking user permissions too, limiting access to only admins. So why am I being pedantic? My default reply:
Admins are humans. Humans make mistakes. Computers do exactly what they're told to do.

Admins Are Humans
I'm often a broken record, telling people to sanitize, validate, and escape. When people ask me which sanitize function to use in WordPress, I play Socrates and walk them through the logic process. What kind of data are you saving? What will it look like? Okay, now what of these looks the most appropriate based on their descriptions? Sanitizing data is contextual. By this I mean we sanitize for what the saved data should be. If you're saving an email address, make sure you sanitize for email and so on. This has a side benefit of helping validate your data as well. If you check that the email address entry actually is an email, you're both sanitizing and validating. Now you've prevented someone from putting in a domain instead of an email!
Humans Make Mistakes
The details of 'best practices' for coding change often, as we learn about how to make code safer and smarter. That said, the ultimate best practices have nothing to do with the language you're writing in, the app you're writing for, or even the platform!
- Restrict access to only the people who need it
- Sanitize and validate the data you're given
- Provide helpful error messages
- Test your code with good and bad data
- Document what the code does and what the errors mean
Those practices transcend every single minutia of programing. If you do those five steps, your code will be robust, sane, and safe. Because you will have taken the steps to ensure that humans can make as few mistakes as possible. You don't save 'Dog' when true/false is the only valid answer.
Computers Do What We Tell Them To Do
The real problem is that AI doesn't exist.

Source: CommitStrip.com

Computers can't think for themselves, and humans have a tendency to stop thinking at weird moments (or just go on auto-pilot) which means nothing can destroy work faster than a human. And since a computer does what it's told, the most dangerous computer tool is the one that doesn't account for how big a mistake a human can make.
Sanitize, Validate, Escape
Especially when it's an admin.
19 September, 2017
Housing Large Media Files
For the most part, the WordPress media library is fine. It falls down when we start needing to upload large files, though, for a variety of reasons. When we look at files like large PDFs or movies or podcasts, it’s really not a great solution to upload through WordPress itself. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and worst of all, those large file downloads can slow your site.

The ‘right’ fix is to offload large media to servers that are built for this sort of thing. And in this case, I’m talking about Amazon AWS or DreamObjects.

Of course, if you search for solutions like this, you’ll be disappointed. You will mostly find plugins that are geared towards syncing your media library with the cloud services. To be honest, the more I think about doing that, the less I feel like it’s a sustainable idea. Unless the CDN is super fast, it could actually make your site worse off by adding another domain to download from.

I Don’t Trust Simple CDNs

I’ve always been skeptical of CDNs in general. When there’s a shared library, it makes sense for everyone to call the same library. That keeps the world in sync. But your own media? The reason a CDN is good is that you can distribute your content across multiple locations. Provided you can actually, you know, do that. And keep them all in sync.

Before hosting, I worked at a bank, and one of the headaches we had was pushing software updates across multiple servers and locations. After all, you can’t just upgrade the Chicago servers and not the LA and Atlanta ones. Plus you have to do them all at the same time, or make sure Jane in Idaho isn’t in the middle of depositing money when we reboot her server.

Knowing how crazy all that is, I worry about keeping data in sync across all the servers. What happens when media is updated? Is the CDN built so that my primary location properly triggers updates for everything else, and the data is updated? No matter what, I’m sure I’ll end up with some data out of sync for at least a little while.

In short, CDN synchronization isn’t simple and anyone who tells me it is, is selling something.

So Why A CDN At All?

Big files.

The goal of a CDN is to speed up delivery of content without slowing down your website. For most images on a website, this isn’t a huge issue. But for those big files, it sure is. And uploading them to the could means three things:
1. No lost disk space
2. No lost bandwidth (if someone’s watching a movie for example)
3. No lost speed (see the aforementioned movie)
The rest of your CDN ‘needs’ can be handled properly by caching. I prefer server side, but as you like it. This means if I upload my large files to the CDN, I can link directly to them in my post content. Everyone wins.

Except Uploading Sucks

The common solution is to manually upload the file via a client like Cyberduck or Transmit, copy the URL, and then paste it into a blog post. Yuck. What I need is a file manager for the cloud. And that doesn’t seem to exist for WordPress.

So I made something. DreamHost Objects Dropzone lets me upload files to DreamObjects, through WordPress, without touching the file server at all. It’s not perfect. It can be slow when trying to get stats on all the items in a bucket, and I don’t quite have an interface to make it easy to insert links and content into posts. Yet.

Something to look forward to though.
14 September, 2017
But Seriously…

In reviewing people’s code for WordPress, I’m constantly struck by the lack of foresight people put in to their success. When a developer makes it clear they intend to run a business or have some modicum of popularity, one would expect them to put a bit of effort into it. Instead, I’ve watched people make the same mistakes over and over. And they complain to me about why their plugin is failing to become “the one” to use.

The answer always seems to surprise them. People don’t take them seriously because they are unprofessional.

WordPress Basics

First of all, no one magically knows all this when they start. So it’s alright not to know. However. If you’re going to go into business based around anything, you need to learn the rules of the road. Take the time to learn that it’s WordPress with a capital P, that there’s a foundation, a trademark, and, yes, that you cannot use WordPress in your domain name.

If you were going into business with PayPal or CitiBank, that’s all legwork you are expected to do beforehand. This is a business, and when you don’t take WordPress seriously, you won’t be taken seriously by WordPress.

SEO Basics

Pick a good domain name for your business site. Make sure you’re not violating a trademark or copyright. Pick a good name for your product. For the love of all things whiskey, don’t name your slider plugin “Slider” and stop using “Mega” as a prefix for anything. Remember, the name of your product cannot infringe on anyone’s trademark. So while “Shoppable Cookie Cutters” is not trademarked, “Shoppable” is. And yes, you’ll get a C&D for being similar.

Write good copy for your website. Have a clear mission statement, a human about page, and some semblance of being real people. This extends to your documentation. Write it. Write it good. Write a readme that tl;dr pitches your product, explains why someone needs it, and details out what kind of services it uses (if any). Remember that most of your SEO comes from humans. Write for them.

Community Basics

The OpenSource community in general will help anyone who asks politely. So be polite. Be respectful. Be courteous. Be generous. If people are helping you for free (and most of them are) then thank them and ask how to pay it forward. Offering services, answering generic questions, educating users, or even just publicly thanking volunteers helps.

The community also includes your users. Respect them. Especially when they’ve gone off the deep end and accuse you of wild impropriety. Your plugin hacked their site? Probably not, but treat them with respect and kindness. It goes a long way to inspiring the volunteers to back you up. But also don’t spam your users with a million in-product reminders to review your product, give it five stars, or otherwise distract them from actually using your plugin.

Universal Basics

Do your research. There is nothing on this earth that is a get-rich-quick, so study what you’re getting into. Don’t jump in blindly. Make sure the community is one you can work with, that they have ethics similar to yours. And if not, make absolutely sure you really are comfortable with going for the money.

Set your expectations realistically, and be willing to have them reset. Take your work seriously, don’t make excuses like “someone else did this first!” Own up to any mistakes or missteps you make. Remember, you absolutely will screw something up along the way. The measure of success can be found in how you handle it.

12 September, 2017