Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • It’s Okay To Overwhelm

    It’s Okay To Overwhelm

    “Your email overwhelmed me! I can’t do this!”

    That’s what the email reply I got was. It had started innocently enough. Someone asked how to set up Multisite. I linked them to the article and sent them a free copy of my ebook WordPress Multisite 101.

    He emailed back asking again how to to it and I replied that he needed to read the link and the ebook and, if he had a specific question, to ask, but otherwise, those two items were what I could do for him at the time. He wasn’t a customer, a client, or even a friend. He was barely a friend of a friend of a friend. There was no social contract or legal one. He was basically someone who asked a question.

    Seven emails later and a very angry chain, he finally explained that he had already activated Multisite, before the initial emails, and it was broken. He could no longer log in and, damn it, he didn’t actually WANT multisite. So I explained he needed to un-do Multisite, showed him where (in the ebook, and via a link) he could get directions on that.

    And that overwhelmed him.

    Now at this point, my friend who introduced him to me apologized and said he’d explain to the guy what ‘taking advantage of someone’s kindness’ meant.

    While I do feel sad that I overwhelmed someone and that he was in over his head, I don’t feel any guilt for not providing hands on help like that. There’s a limit to how much ‘freebie’ you can throw out into the world, and this fellow was not being very clear about what his actual situation was. If it had started with “I accidentally set up Multisite. How do I undo it?” I would have given him a quick set of directions with a note of “If editing the DB is too complicated for you, you’ll need to hire someone.”

    There is no shame in hiring someone when you’re overwhelmed.

    When you’re in over your head, you will make bad assumptions, get lost, and make expensive mistakes. If you think someone is expensive before you start your own demolition and plumbing, imagine how much the cost will be when they have to fix what you did to yourself? Websites are pretty much the same way. It’s the nature of the service industry really. You’re trying to perform a service on your own instead of paying an expert. If you get it right, awesome, you’ve learned new things and have a new skill! If not, you pay more.

    But that’s actually why I think it’s okay to overwhelm someone sometimes. When you give them a large amount of data, if they’re willing to learn and concentrate, then they can learn not only about a process but about themselves. The issue isn’t the data dump but how we react to it.

    When you’re overwhelmed, and believe me I’ve been there too, you have to take the elephant one bite at a time. You didn’t know how to drive a car perfectly the first time you sat in one. You couldn’t ride a bike from day one. You won’t be able to do anything 100% correctly out of the gate unless you’re a savant. Most of us aren’t.

    Perfection is the enemy of progress, though. If we all wait until we’re perfect, we’ll never get anywhere.

    It’s alright to be overwhelmed. It’s not alright (though certainly understandable) to let that prevent you from making progress.

    Be overwhelmed. At if, in that moment, you learn one thing, then you’ve made progress.

  • Say Thank You Publicly and Be a Better Coder

    Say Thank You Publicly and Be a Better Coder

    Takayuki Miyoshi is one of the best developers for WordPress you probably don’t know about. Miyoshi-san is quiet, thoughtful, and had written a handful of plugins you probably do know. Like Contact Form 7. He’s also written a wonderful multilanguage plugin called Bogo.

    He gave his very first presentation in English about why he uses free plugins. Miyoshi-san’s reasoning is plain and simple. By giving back to WordPress and open-sourcing the code, you have a greater chance of people helping you make your code better. More people will find bugs, more people will help you fix, more people will use it, and things will be made better for everyone.

    This is much the same idea as Pippin Williamson has about his open source philosophy. Now Pippin is pretty upfront that he thinks you should open source your plugins. And he’s got some strong views on supporting your site projects (and the responsibility there in). But he also mentioned once that he supports putting premium (i.e. paywall’d) products on Github.

    For free.

    That’s right. He said you can totally put your code up on Github for anyone to download or edit or fork.

    I thought about it for a moment, and how open and honest Pippin has always been with his code, and how some of his early WordPress code was not the greatest. Yes, I have been around WordPress long enough that some of the people I think of as being ‘The Real Shit’ about coding for WP were pretty bad. Maybe not as bad as I was when I started, maybe they were. My point is that Pippin, like everyone else, started out as a beginner. And some of his beginner code was bad, like everyone else’s.

    Would Pippin be as good a programmer as he is today without open source and without people giving him code corrections and suggestions?

    I think not.

    Furthermore, I don’t think that you’re going to lose any money here. The intersection of people who would both buy your plugin and are technically capable of using Github to install plugins is pretty small. I say this as someone who understands well the desire of people to get things ‘free’ from the internet and the seriousness of customers. If you make it easy for someone to buy your products (and in the case of WordPress, get updates for it), people will pay you. Because they like convenience. Remember the tale of Oatmeal vs HBO. If you stop people from being able to get your product easily, they just won’t.

    Most people are afraid of monetary loss, which I get. But you have to rethink things. First of all, most people won’t use Github. They won’t like not getting security updates, for one. And if you present Github as a technical place, they won’t use it. Done. Secondly, I happily bought the Person of Interest DVDs once Netflix got punched by (I presume) WGN on re-broadcast rights and couldn’t show me Season 4 before Season 5 airs. I get the added bonus of watching it on my Blu-Ray player, in super ultra HD. This behavior is NORMAL. Amazon made it easy for me to get what I wanted, and now I own it and if the Internet is out, well I’ll watch Root and Shaw and the Machine all day.

    And there’s something else to consider. The people who would use Github to get something for free are the folks who wouldn’t have paid in the first place. You’re losing money that you’d never have. To help explain this, I’ve made a little Venn Diagram for you, to show you how small this intersection is:

    percentage of people who would both buy your plugin and are technically capable of using Github to install plugins is pretty small

    I’m serious here. This is non-mathematical but based on my allegorical experiences of years in support be it free or paid. This is coming from someone who lives and breathes WordPress plugins. If you make it easy for them to pay, you will not lose money by putting the code up in a way for other developers to submit pull requests. That small sliver of green, the people who can use Git and would still pay you, those are your contributors. Those are the people you want. Because Open Source Code means more eyes, and more eyes means more reviews, and more reviews means better code.

    Everyone wins.

    And like Pippin and Miyoshi-san, I think that having your code available for others means I may learn new things and become a better developer. When I say ‘pull requests welcome’ what I mean is ‘teach me what you know, I love to learn!’ Even if I say “No, I don’t want to add that feature” trust me that your lesson was welcome and absorbed.

    When I went to WordCamp Tokyo, I had the intention of seeking Miyoshi-san out to tell him how much I like Bogo. That it solved a problem for me. That it just worked. That the code was good. Miyoshi-san also wanted to tell me thank you for the things I’ve done for him.

    It’s possible we both got a little teary eyed.

    And he and I agree on the big things. Make your code available for others to review and comment on and get pull requests. It will make you better.

  • Rant: Lightboxes and Scrolling

    Rant: Lightboxes and Scrolling

    Lately I’ve run into a problem where a tool I’m using has a lightbox that’s cut off at the bottom of the screen.

    This generally happens because I have my browser at half-height, or because I’ve pressed the ‘increase font’ keys to make a site 110% text for readability (WordPress P2, I’m looking at you). Here’s what life can look like for me:

    Dropbox doesn't scroll with lightboxes

    This image shows a lightbox cut off midway. The bottom of the picture shows the bottom edge of my browser. Obviously I could make my browser window larger, and most of the time this is what I do. But should I have to? There are situations where I can’t do that, like on mobile. Whomever decided that overlays on mobile was a good idea needs to have their favorite sweaters eaten by moths.

    Make your screen scrollable. Make sure your lightbox doesn’t get totally jacked up when a screen is ‘too small.’ A major part of responsive design is not just making sure your site works on mobile devices and ‘full blown’ computers, but that it works on all sizes of monitors when a browser isn’t maxed out.

    Here’s another example:

    Another example of Dropbox not accounting for screen limitations

    In that image I have what I can only presume is an advertisment that wants me to click something. It’s not until I change my zoom to 75% that I can see this is an ad for Dropbox Business:

    I can only see the ad for Dropbox Business if I reduce font to 75%

    Oh and Dropbox was totally unhelpful when I reported these things, which is why they’re getting shamed. They said to fix my screensize.

    When a similar issue happened with Slack, I got an apology and a promise to address it. Which they did within a week.

  • Arbitrary Component Upgrades Are Not Helpful

    Arbitrary Component Upgrades Are Not Helpful

    Often WordPress gets shit for still supporting PHP 5.2. In fact, while they recommend 5.6 or up, WordPress still works on 5.2 and probably will for years to come, even though everyone knows PHP 5.2 is buggy, insecure, and not supported. No sensible webhost still uses it if there’s an alternative, but sadly there are reasons why some hosts are stuck on it.

    Why does WordPress still work on 5.2? Because there’s little benefit to be had in upgrading, and only harm. As I’ve said before, in the name of progress we run the risk of running ourselves right off the cliff. There’s nothing in 5.4 that WordPress needs. Please remember that I am a stickler about needs vs wants, there’s a lot we want, but nothing that is critical and that cannot be accomplished in a PHP 5.2 world. One day that will change, and when it does, we’ll rethink this whole argument. But right now, there is no need.

    My fear with a PHP 5.2 upgrade is that the people we would hurt with it are the ones least capable of resolving the problem. If we showed users an alert on their admin dashboard saying “You’re using PHP 5.2, please contact your hosting administrator and ask them to upgrade to a modern, secure, version of PHP” then we’re telling the wrong people something. It’s not the users who need to hear this, it’s the webhosts. And speaking as one? We know. Not only do we know, we actually care more than you do, and we’re working on it for everything not because of WordPress and it’s 25% market share, but because we know it’s the right thing to do.

    But this is not a PHP version debate. This is actually a reflection on something happening today. You see, WordPress still uses the 1.x branch of jQuery. Why? Again, it works. There’s no reason to upgrade to jQuery 2.x and doing so would break things. Among other reasons, WordPress still supports IE 8 which is used by 11% of computers out there. That’s not a small number. In fact, 11% of WordPress sites still use PHP 5.2! You see the situation? 11% is not insignificant.

    This comes up because Bootstrap 4 has decided to drop support for the jQuery 1.x branch. As far as I understand, they don’t want to support IE 8 and it’s 12% smaller. There isn’t a single code benefit that is included in jQuery 2.x that Bootstrap is using and, since jQuery 2.x is compatible with 1.x, you can switch back to it right now without any loss. But they don’t want to support IE 8. In fact, they don’t support it, and from that perspective it sounds wise, doesn’t it?

    It’s not.

    WordPress includes its own version of jQuery (still on the 1.x branch) and many other similar JS files, which have all been rigorously tested with both WordPress and many of the most common plugins. In order to provide the best compatibility and experience for users, WordPress asks that you not package your own (especially not an older version) and instead use wp_enqueue_script() to pull in WordPress’s version. There are many reasons for this but the simplest are as follows

    1. WordPress has jQuery. Save diskspace and leave your own out.
    2. If every plugin and theme removes WordPress’ jQuery and uses their own, there’s a potential for conflicts. Who’s jQuery wins?
    3. Using your own jQuery changes the way WordPress plugins and themes may work in unexpected ways.

    Can you remove jQuery and use your own? Of course! You just can’t host your code on WordPress.org if you do that.

    Now, there’s a missing metric here. What the percentage of sites using Bootstrap are on WordPress? For that I’m going to have to extrapolate. Looking at builtwith trends, it looks like 1.8% of the entire Internet uses a site with Bootstrap. Joomla 3.x uses v1.11.3, Drupal 7.x uses jQuery 1.4.4, and Drupal 8 will use 2.1.4. Remember this is a total rewrite of Drupal, though. They do not concern themselves with backwards compatibility when they jump to new versions, and that means you cannot measure the percentage of sites on the internet that will use Drupal 8. We can reasonably assume, since WordPress is fully backwards compatible, that the 80% of WordPress users who are on the 4.x branch will upgrade to 4.4 in December, and continue to do so for the future.

    Even if we cannot claim that 25% of Bootstrap sites are on WordPress, we can argue that with all major CMSs currently using jQuery 1.x, Bootstrap is about to kick a significant portion of their audience to the curb. Of course, not even 2% of the Internet is using Bootstrap. Will that be a great loss for the Internet? Not really. But it will incur a massive lost to Bootstrap.

    This real life example is precisely what I mean when I say that I worry about the user experience with our bold assumptions in our projects. Bootstrap’s logical assumption, that since they don’t support IE 8 there will be no loss by moving to components that don’t support IE 8 either, is a fallacy. They are thinking only on one level. They’re only seeing the ‘benefit’ (and I use this term loosely) of formally ending support for a user-base they never supported in the first place. This won’t impact their users, so it doesn’t matter.

    What they’ve neglected to consider is that their userbase actually encompasses other people who support IE 8. So while we know that no one using Bootstrap and WordPress supports IE 8, simply by dint of using Bootstrap, this new jQuery version actually forces them to exclude them, instead of passively. And by doing this, they will shortly find plugins and themes that use Bootstrap 4 rejected from the repository, which will only harm adoption of Bootstrap as a framework.

    This isn’t a threat. This is reality. This is the difference between “We don’t support IE 8” and “We would rather not support IE 8 than be compatible with 25% of the Internet.”

    Looking at it that way, it’s a simple call.

    Put jQuery 1.x back in. Make 2.x a recommended option. And move on.

  • I Am The 20%, And So Are You

    I Am The 20%, And So Are You

    We speak of innovation in WordPress. We present new features like post embeds and emojii, things not everyone wants to use on their sites, things that slow down sites, and we tout how we are making things better.

    But do we consider all the users when we do this?

    One of the tenets of WordPress, one of the core philosophies, is that we make decisions, not options. And we base these decisions on the 80% rule. We say if a feature will not be used by 80% of the user base of WordPress, we won’t add it.

    In early November, WordPress reached the 25% saturation threshold. We have, generally, taken that to mean that WordPress powers 25% of the Internet. A more accurate statement by W3Techs is this:

    WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.

    That means sites like my library (which is using Jekyll) or a site built by hand because it’s 5 pages are still considered. Jekyll and Github pages might skew the spectrum, but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt, that they know how to adjust for that. The statistics are really quite impressive.

    But with that volume of users comes a great responsibility.

    952,795,650 websites and counting. If we take away the 75% that are parked domains and redirects, we have 238,198,912 websites. Let’s call it 240,000,000. Of those, 25% are WordPress. 60,000,000 websites on WordPress. 48,000,000 users is 80% of that. Realistically, since we all have multiple websites, I’ll say 45,000,000 individuals.

    We are now trying to build websites and predict the behavior of 45,000,000 users.

    And you know what? I’m not excited about it. I was a little excited when we hit 16% but when we hit 18% and then 20%, I started to be filled with dread. The numbers of who uses WordPress are skyrocketing, and while I should fear the edge of the cliff, the day the inevitable WordPress killer steps out of the shadow and destroys us (by the way… that totally happened to Windows and Mac, didn’t it? They’ve been top dogs for even longer…), I worry that we’re now crossing a different line.

    When we start to propose things like embedding posts, or speeding up WordPress by shunting legacy code to a plugin, or dropping support for shortcodes, I fear we’re about to walk off the cliff ourselves.

    Let me paint you a picture of our world.

    We have spent a decade (close to 11 years) teaching people to use plugins. We explain that the exhaustive feature set of WordPress is best served by plugins. We have created a moderated, but not curated, repository of themes and plugins. We allow multiple plugins for innovation, for solving problems in new ways, and for demonstrating the myriad ways which one can use WordPress. Similarly we have taught them that themes are the right way to design and style a site, and themes can also be at the forefront of these innovations.

    That said, we have not yet managed to teach people how to pick a plugin or theme. They think it’s on WordPress.org, it must be safe. In general, the majority of themes and plugins on the WordPress.org repository are better written than their premium counterpart. Please note: majority – the minority of stunningly well written themes and plugins are not to be discounted, but let’s be real folks, they’re the minority. At the same time, the majority of plugins on the repository are crap.

    So let’s recap. If you take all the plugins in the world and round them up, more of the best ones will be on the WordPress.org free repository, but so will more of the bad ones. Following me still? Okay.

    Now end users, the majority of our 45,000,000 users, do not know how to pick a good plugin from a bad one. They don’t know how to read, or even skim the code to find out if it’s secure or not. They rely on maybe a quick search for reported issues, if that. They look, they find, they use. Of course they do. We told them to. We linked them to these plugins and said proudly we had found their solutions.

    On top of that, we’ve failed to teach them the importance of upgrades. WordPress core handles security updates, but since plugin and theme developers aren’t all as tenacious and consistent about their updates as WordPress core, we cannot always push updates of themes and plugins. WordPress is reliable. Not everyone else is. Not every one of the 50,000 plugins in the repository can possibly be.

    This means we don’t have the ability to just update everyone’s site with themes and plugins right away. We just don’t. There are some plugins and themes that will break when we do, or cause each other to break. Worse, there are some plugins and themes that don’t offer updates. Which means we have created a world where people don’t know they need to upgrade to be safe, or that they have to upgrade if they plan on using WordPress 4.6.

    And oh yes, we’ve taught them the importance of upgrading WordPress core very well. We’ve cajoled webhosts into upgrading WordPress core for them. We certainly upgrade WordPress core. That’s why over 80% of sites on WordPress are on the 4.x branch. We did our job well, but not fully.

    So when you talk about removing features from shortcodes, or dropping support for PHP 5.2, I think that the people who would be hurt by this would be the people least able to understand why.

    These people use plugins and themes and don’t know that Johnny Dev used old code. And if Johnny doesn’t update his code in time to meet the changes to the shortcode API, or there’s a bug that makes it not work in PHP 5.4, the user gets hurt.

    And when the user is hurt, they don’t blame Johnny Dev. They blame WordPress.

    They blame WordPress because we told them to install plugins and use themes. And they trust us. And in that one move, we have betrayed the trust.

    That’s the cliff I see us rapidly approaching. And that is the cliff I fear more than anything else. Our idealism and hope may drive us off the edge before we realize it.

    We developers, we builders of WordPress, are the 20%.

  • Mailbag: Why Won’t You Help Me From Myself?

    Mailbag: Why Won’t You Help Me From Myself?

    I won’t name names here but I suspect people know who I’m talking about it. Please note, any comments naming names will be deleted. They deserve a chance to redeem their name and exactly who they are is not the issue.

    We never received any advice when we asked. Only warnings.

    A company made a new plugin, released it on WordPress.org, and then emailed a lot of people about it.

    It was brought to my attention first as a potential plugin violation. Was someone culling emails of the plugin install and using that to send email? A quick check of the code showed that was not the case and I informed the reporters as such.

    But then people said “I don’t even use this plugin and I got emailed.”

    At this point, I dropped them a note and explained that sending out spam email like that was going to piss people off. Lo and behold, their plugin was filled with one-star reviews.

    In the end, the asked the plugin to be deleted because they felt they could never recover. And I had not helped them, only warned them. This was true. I had not offered to help them make peace. I’d told them what was about to happen. And it did.

    Why didn’t I help them? Simply, I’m not their marketing department.

    As I said. Who they are doesn’t matter. They aren’t the first person to have this problem and they won’t be the last. And the question they’re really asking is two fold.

    First, why won’t I delete bad reviews based on people not liking getting spam. Second, why won’t I fix the problem.

    For the first, it’s because the experience of your plugin begins with how someone is introduced to it. If the first experience I have with a product is a racist or sexist ad, I will not use it. If it’s a product I was considering using, I might leave a comment or review saying “I would have used this but…” That was my experience. It doesn’t matter than I never used the product if my experience with it beforehand was strong enough to inspire me to leave a review.

    For the second, I can’t fix your problem. You did this to yourself. You had a poorly conceived of ad campaign and it shot you in the foot. You aren’t the first person to have this problem and you won’t be the last. You’re just someone else who screwed up and was hit by the social monster.

    And you know what? It sucks, and it’s not fair, but it’s something you did to yourself. Yes, you did it by accident, but covering it up doesn’t make it go away.

    We all screw up. We all have to apologize. If it was me? I’d reply to every single one star review and tell them I was sorry, it was a bad idea, I won’t do it again. And then I’d donate money in WordPress’ name to the EFF, explaining that while I can’t compensate them for the plugin without it approaching bribery, I can endorse the protection of our online privacy, which I flagrantly disrespected.

    It won’t be perfect, but it gets you started.