Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

NUX: Setting Up Ghost Pro
NUX stands for “New User Experience” and I’ve been dabbling in it recently with WordPress, trying to understand where we fail for new users. My friend did a comparison for his company of other similar tools and told me that Ghost’s was the worst. I didn’t believe him, so I decided to check it out.

Ghost is a simple, powerful publishing platform. It’s dead simple. It’s basic. And it’s weirdly hard and complex. The code is simple, but much like WordPress, it’s hit the wall of explaining new concepts to people. Ghost Pro is their ‘managed hosting’ version, where you sign up and get a blog.

Of note, this is not talking about the self hosted Ghost application.

Registration Is Easy As Pie

This is easy. You go to the main page of Ghost.org, you pick a username and password, you press ‘test it out.’ That then asks if you want the download or to make a new site, and don’t worry about the credit cards yet. You get 14 days free. If you pick the new site, it asks for the site name, the URL you want (it’ll be something.ghost.io) and then…

It’s weird that it wants my name and password, and I do wonder if it’s making another account on the system. Do I now have a user account and a ‘network’ account?

Writing A New Post Is A Lie

Once you have your site, you’re dumped here:

They even have an animated ‘Write A Post’ button there, which is great. Except it’s a lie. That link kicks you to the https://something.ghost.io/ghost/1/ page which is the ‘Hello World’ type post and you can edit it. Except you’re not told you can edit it. You’re just told your site is live.

First up, that “Write A Post” button should have been “Complete Setup”.

Second, when I do complete setup, I should have a nice popup to tell me “Your site is setup! This is your first post. You can edit it…”

There is a nice EDIT button, but that should have been animated too. That takes you to the editor, which is realtime and actually quite nice.

Continuing Setup Is A Five

If you go to https://ghost.org/setup, it will tell you there are five steps to setup.
1. Create an Account (you’ve done that to get this far)
2. Writing a post (you have to write a new one, not edit the existing one)
3. Picking a Theme
4. Add a domain
5. Share your work
Write A Post? Let’s Try.

The setup is an editor only on the left, with a preview on the right. Fine. Click click type. Then I wanted to add an image, so I tried the old drag & drop from WordPress. Nope! Looking at the Help, I found this:

When adding images to your Ghost blog, you start by either pressing Ctrl+Shift+I or by typing in ![]() into your post editor. You will then see an image box show up on your markdown preview.

That was fairly easy to find, but then I got this:

It took me a moment to realize I could click on that to get the uploader interface. In fact, not until I hovered over and saw ‘No File Chosen’ did it register. The little link icon on the bottom left made sense, but there was nothing that told be “Click here and upload.”

Scheduled Posts … Why?

I decided to try scheduling a post. Since by default the save button on the bottom right is ‘Save Draft’ and I knew by hovering that I could do a ‘Publish Now’ there, I assumed the little gear to the left was for extra things:

And lo, it did show me a lot of options, that were just a bit too long for my 15″ monitor:

There I was able to pick a future date, but instead of changing to ‘Schedule Post’ the button remained ‘Publish Now’ which was rather disconcerting. Picking publish, it worked just as it was supposed to, though, so there’s that.

Themes Don’t Fly

Time to pick a theme! From the getting started flow, I pressed the button for ‘Marketplace’ because I don’t need to watch a video, right?

That button takes you back to your Ghost dashboard. From there you have to click on the link at the top of the page for the Marketplace. Then you download the theme’s zip, go to the settings page for your blog, and upload the zip there. Very weird. Very odd.

Overall? Not Yet.

I like it. It’s easy to write once you figure out a couple things, but the disjointed behavior of where you go to do things is confusing and a bit of a headache. For a brand new user who’s never have a website, it fails when you compare to WordPress.com except in the arena of posting content. It’s simple for that. It’s the management levels where it fails.
22 April, 2015
Hello, Mike
There’s an interesting thing when people think I’m Mike. Or perhaps it’s interesting when people think my name is Mike.

My name is four letters. Three are the same as Mike. The last is an A, however. The best guess I’ve ever been able to make has been that people read ‘MIK…’ and their brains absolutely stop. This has been a problem my entire life, in and out of tech support, from school to work to everything in between. I was called ‘Mike’ at my SATs, much to the hilarity of my classmates.

But I rarely correct people these days, certainly not when I’m online, because it’s one of those things that really only matters if we meet in person. In person, I will correct you. “Actually it’s Mika. With an A.” I’ll always be polite when you ask me how to pronounce it. The first time. The second and third time get you teased. At four or five, there will be serious remarks. At seven, I start intentionally mispronouncing your name.

Since most of my communication, even with my own coworkers, is online, and since there’s a fellow named Micah (pronounced the other way), I really give people a pass with mucking up my name. It happens and if it’s not intentional or obstinance, I don’t mind.

At the same time, I like to keep track of places where I’m more often called Mike. I try to make sense of the madness just to understand the world a little more. While all of this is anecdotal, and while I did make a scratch sheet where I tallied these things over the course of 4 months, this is not some government funded study. The numbers are also off if I’ve been talking to people from countries where Mika is a normal name, and moreso in Japan, where it’s a girl’s name.

When am I Mika or Mike?

So here’s the non-scientific notes I’ve boiled things down to:

I’m Mike…
- If I do technical things really, really well
- When I talk code/development
- When I talk about my wife
- When someone is incredibly upset for whatever reason
I have no name…
- When I do technical things really wrong
- When I disagree with developers
- When I apologize to people
I’m Mika …
- When someone realizes they’ve been wildly out of line and apologizes to me
- When someone has been really personable and polite the whole time
- When I talk to someone who consistently uses proper grammar and punctuation
What Does This Tell Me?

It’s important to note that the ‘technical’ things I do well or not don’t actually have to be correct. Many times I do the code things really well and they just disagree. But if I’m perceived to be correct, I’m generally a Mike.

When people are angry they tend to stop reading well, the comprehension goes out the door. That lends some credence to my theory that people’s brains stop. Strangely, though, when I get things really, really, wrong (or am perceived to do so), the use of any name in their replies plummets. Like I found three in a year. It’s possible that those people, still being angry, are reading my name as ‘Mike’ but cannot find it in themselves to be angry at a male name in the manner they’re about to be.

As for me talking about my wife, that’s just heteronormativity in action, and for the matter of this study I ignored it. It skewed results. It’s the same with folks who are from Scandinavia, where Mika is a boy’s name.

My Conclusion?

People still often default to thinking everyone’s male.

I too have this flaw, I admit. But seeing it in others and how it impacts me certainly makes me think about it more.
20 April, 2015
Mailbag: A Case Against (Part Of) Jetpack

You told me to try Photon, but I noticed you’re not using it on all your sites. What gives?

When people ask me how to speed up their sites for images, I often recommend Jetpack for the CDN boost. It’s a double edged sword, though. While Photon does two things amazingly well (resize images and put them up on a CDN), it’s hosted on wp.com which means I can’t use it.

What? Why not? No, it’s not that I have something against wordpress.com, it’s that other people do. Like China, Pakistan, and Turkey.

The list is probably longer. But those places, among others, block WordPress.com which means every module of Jetpack that phones home (stats, photon, tiled galleries, LaTeX, related posts, etc) cannot be active on my sites that have a large enough user-base in those places. When I leave those Jetpack features on, the site grinds to a halt for them, which is a terrible experience for my (often non-technical users).

Now that said, I do still use the stats plugins on all my sites with Jetpack. It’s a pretty safe loader to run, and it doesn’t slow the site down terribly (see Issue #566 for the code magic). Photon on the other hand I had to disable entirely because my poor users in China were complaining they could see nothing. I can live with a little delay for loading. I can’t live with an image heavy site not working.

So should you use Photon? Yes! Unless your visitors are blocked by WordPress.com.

17 April, 2015
Learn Another Language

At WordCamp San Diego, someone asked how he, as the only English support tech, could help his coworkers learn English. I gave an answer (watch sitcoms with closed captioning on and try some software) but then I took the opportunity to remind everyone that was a native English speaker to learn a second language.

Many people have thanked me for saying that publicly since then. For those who missed it, here are my thoughts on why and how we should do this.

Learn Perspective

All the BS about opening your neural pathways aside, it’s a good idea to learn another language. I picked French because my mother, father, and step-mother speak it. It’s one of the most commonly spoken languages, it’s useful in most of Europe. But more than just being able to communicate more with family, learning French puts communication in perspective.

As I learned at WordCamp Tokyo, I need to phrase myself clearly and simply when I’m speaking via a translator, or with someone who does not speak English natively. Learning French is also giving me a great deal of sympathy for the people who get emails from me about Plugins. Here I have to talk about things in technical terms for which there are no decent simpler terms. When I connect that I’m talking to someone who’s ESL, I change how I explain things to try and make it easier to understand.

Learn For Fun

I sometimes set my phone to French. I watch movies in French (with subtitles). I read comics in French. Doing those things, forcing immersian for fun, makes me think harder and process. My phone in French lasted a brief moment before I realized I didn’t know how to ask what the weather was («Quel temps fait-il»). Having to both ask and listen to Siri in French showed me where the major gaps were in my skills. I have trouble thinking in French. It’s been a couple years since I studied it, though, and I only started studying again in earnest in February.

Learn With Software

We’re techs. I use Duolingo which is free and lets me ‘play’ in French on my iPad. I take breaks, I sit on the couch and give it 10 minutes of my brain, and I struggle with one stupid section.

See? I’m learning French!

I’m not very good, but it lets me keep trying. And I can use my iPhone, iPad, or browser. I can see where I suck and where I’m great. I can go back and take a test over again all I want, and no one cares but me.

Having also used Rosetta Stone, I find this far less frustrating. Also did you know on the Mac keyboard you can hold down a letter to find the version with accent marks?

Cool, right?

Learn The Point

English isn’t the majority language.

WordPress (and many other CMS tools) are pushing Internationalization.

Internationalization will be a big focus of the coming year, including fully-localized plugin and theme directories on language sites and embedded on dashboard in version 4.1, which is coming out December 10th.
— Matt Mullenweg: State of the Word 2014

Simply put, if you’re not getting yourself ready now, you’ll regret it later. Pick a language. You won’t get better until you start.

15 April, 2015
WordCamp Elevator Pitches

When I go to a WordCamp, I bring a little notebook. We had a DreamCon and there are about a vigintillion little Scout Books branded for it and no one at the company wants them, so I have 20 at my desk and a couple boxes more at home, and every month I burn through one. But I also bring a fresh one to each WordCamp:

WordCamp

March

Both of those notebooks are 90% full right now. At the end of a month, I copy over everything that wasn’t done in the previous book and put it on the first page. After that everything gets a new page and I X out the page when it’s done.

But this isn’t about how I take notes, or not, it’s about how I learn something new at every WordCamp I go to. Often I learn about new products from people I know, but other times I learn about new methods to coding, tricks I can use to improve my development processes, or just understanding a feature a little better.

I stress everyone should unplug at a WordCamp, turn off the laptop (unless you can just take notes without checking Twitter and Facebook compulsively), and listen. I take notes by hand because it forces me to focus. I have to listen and write and pay attention. By hand I can doodle as well, so I give myself visual clues to what I was thinking later on.

One thing I also do is that I take notes on sessions from the front to the back, but from the back to front I write down all the new-to-me products and features. Sometimes it’s just ones I know about and need to look into a little more. Sometimes they really are brand new. This is why I don’t take your business cards. I write down what I need to know, what I think about it, and your URL. If you can’t give me a URL (or your URL is too long) maybe I’m not going to look at your site.

After a camp, in my ‘downtime,’ I go back through the notes I’ve made, look them up, and decide if I like them or not. From that I’ve sorted out some tips for vendors and people trying to give me their elevator pitch on why I (or my company) need to pay attention to them.

Make It Short

If it takes you longer than 5 minutes, I’m tuning out. You’re at a WordCamp, people are generally checking you out in between sessions, so we want the tweet version of what you’ve got.

Our product compresses images better than SmushIt.

That was perfect. That got my attention and immediately had their name in my notebook.

Make It Easy To Find

If I go to your URL, the one you gave me, and cannot find the ‘WordPress’ product in one click, you’ve failed and I’m not looking at you anymore. The aforementioned image compression tool failed on that one. I went to their company site, the one they gave me a URL to, there was no information on that specific product. In fact, it’s been a few days, and I googled for it, and I still can’t find it! I know it started with a V, but I assumed that they’d have a link to their WordPress related products on their webpage.

If the main URL of your site is not the one with this product, make that clear.

Check out example.com/product-name/

Oh and that’s a great URL.

Have a Demo

I want to see how good this is. Period. With the exception of ‘I’m a new webhost’ if you have a product, let me see if and if possible play with it. This is incredibly true of people who have proprietary code, like a service. No demo? Not going to look further.

Be Ready for Tech Questions

You’re at a technical conference. I’m going to ask things like “Have you benchmarked against TinyPNG? What’s the improvement over the similar functions in Photoshop like XYZ? Does the plugin hook into an API on your end? How do you handle network latency and speed? What happens if it times out? What’s the failback?”

75% of the vendors I talk to at WordCamps tell me “I’m not the technical person…” That’s disheartening. If your sales people can’t answer the basic questions, or you don’t even have a white paper with some tech dirt, you’re not thinking about your audience. Selling to WordPress people means you shouldn’t forget the devs. You can sing and dance your cool factor all you want, but if someone asks a technical question, you should have a technical person around.

Show Me The Code

This annoys me a lot. When people are selling a plugin, I have to buy it to see the code. So when someone asks me to eval, the first thing I ask is “Is this a service?” If it’s not, I’m annoyed I can’t see your code. Moreso when I ask you “Well I’d eval but it’s pay for. Can I look at the plugin source code?” and you say no.

If you’re at a tech conf and they want to see your code before committing, you may want to consider who you just asked to evaluate the code. I do explain that I’m a plugin reviewer for WordPress.org and I work for a webhost. Now if you’re interesting enough, I’ll buy your plugin and check it out. Still. A lot of us want to see the code.

Your Product Beat Your Swag

There were two vendors at a recent WordCamp where the swag they gave out was more memorable than what they were selling. That’s just sad. I don’t care that you were giving away notebooks or watches or cups or shiny balls. I care what you’re selling.

13 April, 2015
Mailbag: Self-Signed SSL

This was actually a tweet, not an email, and I’ll get to it later on in the post.

Essentially, a weird thing happened.

I’ve been setting up SSL for admin’ing my sites (because you should) and using a mix of Comodo SSL via Namecheap and StartSSL depending on the domain. But I also set up some Self-Signed SSL certs for other domains. In particular, this one.

Now. SSL certificates provide encryption between the two ends using the certificate. That’s all. They’ve never been able to verify who the two ends are, and all a paid-cert does is say “And I paid these guys to prove who I am” so now you’re ‘trusting’ three people. Maybe. The point is that there’s nothing wrong with a self-signed SSL certificate in specific situations.

If you’re messing with money or personal identification, you need to use a signed certificate. This isn’t even an option. But halfelf.org doesn’t do that and I really just wanted an SSL cert for a secure connection to my wp-admin dashboard. No big, right? So I did that, posted a new article the next day, and my buddy Mike said:

hey there, clicking on the article title from the email notification tries to force https:// and throws privacy error warning

What the what?

For some reason, the setup I had that works perfectly fine, no errors on ipstenu.org wasn’t working on halfelf.org, and the only difference was that self-signed certificate. Apparently the emails sent by Jetpack grabbed the https URL and while the server was set to redirect to http, users still got that moment of “Hey, this isn’t a real certificate.”

I know that a self-signed certificate means there’s no chain of trust, but it’s quite annoying that Google Chrome and other browsers flip out when you’ve done it. If it was just a warning “Hey, this site is secure but we can’t verify it…” that would be one thing. But what Chrome does is slap up a big fat warning and stop users, making it a double click through to get to the page, which forces them back to http anyway. Visitors may not trust my site to be safe, but frankly, that site wasn’t really meant to be ‘safe’ anyway. It’s safe on the back end for me. Not you.

It’s a complicated mess, and I can’t wait for Let’s Encrypt to take off. I’ll be installing that on my server ASAFP because the ability to self-sign without making browsers flip out.

To fix it for now, I turned off SSL over admin (which literally was all I’d done for WP) and picked up a legit certificate. But it’s rather stupid that the email sent from Jetpack decided it was meant to be https when it wasn’t, and that my site that forced http over https for non-logged in users wasn’t ‘enough to convince the browser they were in the wrong place.

10 April, 2015