Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

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
How Do You Solve a DB Like Maria?

I was talking to my friend James about upgrading SQL. If you didn’t know, upgrading SQL is a horrifyingly monumental thing, because there’s no way back except restore from a backup. Minor upgrades are generally painless, but the CentOS warning is as follows:

Upgrades to new major releases (the first two digits in the version string) are more involved because there is a substantial risk of data loss.

Data. Loss.

It’s scary when you consider doing it for yourself. It’s horrifying when you consider doing it for a few thousand users.

On top of that is the issue that MySQL is owned by Oracle and they’re not exactly known for being good stewards of OpenSource. Unlike many other Open Source projects, Oracle owns the entire copyright to MySQL. All contributions are done if the developer has signed a “contributor agreement” that assigns ownership to Oracle. This isn’t all that weird, to be fair. When I worked for The Man, that was basically how things worked and it made sense. The work I did for the company belonged to the company.

Where this is weird is that Oracle has said that about a GPL product, even to parts of it the company has not written. Why is that? It’s because all contributors to the code have to sign a “contributor agreement” assigning ownership of the copyright to Oracle, which is not alone in this. Sun before them used contributor agreements to get full source ownership, and many other projects do the same.

Now, James and I looked at the MariaDB vs MySQL compatibility doc and had a laugh.

tl;dr “For all practical purposes, MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement of the same MySQL version,” except for this long list detailing where you’re screwed.

Now when you get down to MySQL 5.5 and MariaDB 10, the issues become very minor and unlikely to cause you migraines, which is a relief, but that list sure is long and daunting.

I’m not yet running MariaDB because it’s an all-or-nothing move. I can’t keep on MySQL, and I have a few old (ancient) bits of non-WordPress code on this server. I always stress that WordPress is not the limiting factors in server upgrades, and it’s still the truth.

I’ve started doing the recon work to make sure MariaDB will work for all situations on my server, for all apps, and I’m currently pretty sure that I’ll be fine, but I do have one way-out-there app to check into. They’re also one of the few people who pay me for hosting, so we may have to have a sit-down anyway to discuss their future.

@Ipstenu Yep!

— Gary (@GaryPendergast) March 24, 2015

The most important question has been answered.

8 April, 2015
Git Flow
Late as always to these git things.

In the ever increasing madness to the method of making code easier to do, we come to the automation of git-flow. This is a library of git subcommands that helps automate some parts of the flow to make working with it a lot easier if you’re using Vincent Driessen’s model.

This model is not bad, if a little confusing at first:

Jeff Kreeftmeijer already has a good primer for it so these are just my quick notes to add in things that should have been obvious. The basic concept for the model is that you have two main branches, master (the ‘current’ version) and develop (where you’re working on the next version).

Install git-flow

You have to install it to use it. I use Homebrew so it was brew install git-flow and that was that.

Add it to your repo

Again, you have to add it to have it. git flow init is run inside the repo and you’re good, except you may not be.

Since I’m starting from an existing repository, which was up to date in master, I made a new branch: git checkout -b develop

Then I ran git flow init which is not the same as it would be on a new repo:
```
$ git flow init
Which branch should be used for bringing forth production releases?
   - REL_3.3
   - REL_3.3.1
   - REL_3.3.2
   - master
Branch name for production releases: [master] master

Which branch should be used for integration of the "next release"?
   - REL_3.3
   - REL_3.3.1
   - REL_3.3.2
Branch name for "next release" development: [master] develop

How to name your supporting branch prefixes?
Feature branches? [feature/]
Release branches? [release/]
Hotfix branches? [hotfix/]
Support branches? [support/]
Version tag prefix? [] REL_
```
Should you happen to do as everyone says and ‘accept the defaults’ you get this:
```
Branch name for "next release" development: [master]
Production and integration branches should differ.
```
Also if you don’t have a develop branch, it punts you out.
```
Branch name for "next release" development: [master] develop
Local branch 'develop' does not exist.
```
So a couple ooops along the way. It’s not

Using A Feature

First you make a feature:
```
$ git flow feature start utility_1.0.3
Switched to a new branch 'feature/utility_1.0.3'

Summary of actions:
- A new branch 'feature/utility_1.0.3' was created, based on 'develop'
- You are now on branch 'feature/utility_1.0.3'

Now, start committing on your feature. When done, use:

     git flow feature finish utility_1.0.3
```
Eventually you’ll be done and use that finish command, which merges it all back into ‘develop’ and changes you back to that branch. Which is good for reasons we get to in a moment. Since I work on multiple computers, I do this at the end of my workday:
```
$ git push --all
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ipstenu@example.com:/home/ipstenu/repositories/theme-wordpress.git
 * [new branch]      develop -> develop
 * [new branch]      feature/utility_1.0.3 -> feature/utility_1.0.3
```
So now when I do my pull later on the other computer, it’ll be easily usable. Provided I remember to install git-flow and init it on my other laptop. But it’s a little more complicated than just that.

Releasing a Release

You can only run this from the develop branch, which makes the previous command pretty awesome, right? So now we’ll do this: git flow release start RELEASE

Once we’re good to go, it’s git flow release finish RELEASE

What About Two People?

This is where we want to use publishing. Technically I’m collaborating with myself across two computers, so I always publish my feature to my remote server so it can be used by my other self: git flow feature publish MYFEATURE

To pull the feature down, git flow feature pull origin MYFEATURE is just as logical. And that’s actually how I handled pulling the feature utility_1.0.3 onto my work laptop.
```
$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
$ git branch develop
$ git flow init
[snip .. same as before]
$ git flow feature pull origin utility_1.0.3
Created local branch feature/utility_1.0.3 based on origin's feature/utility_1.0.3.
```
There’s a good cheat sheet for help about this called Git Flow Cheatsheet.

Now there’s nothing but to do it.
6 April, 2015
Mailbag: Facebook Page Notifications

A family member, after teasing me for not knowing someone was married because the only place they announced was on Facebook (and Shredder? You’re not off the hook either), finally asked:

Why do you still hate facebook?

Because the interface is inconsistent and sucks. Let me explain by showing you about my Page Notifications.

I still use Facebook under duress and happily go weeks without noticing I have alerts waiting. When I do remember to check in, this is usually my first clue I have that there are unread notifications:

If I click on the group, the toolbar at the top of the page gives me a much better idea of what’s going on:

So I logically click and I get this:

I don’t like that I have to click three times just to see my notifications. Yes, I can click on that teeny-tiny number to go to the page properly and wipe them, but what if I don’t want to? Also have you noticed how small the number is? It’s hard to hit if you’re not ‘great’ with your mouse. Guess what I’m not? Great with my mouse. I like larger icons because they’re easier for me to tap. I’m not the only one.

The next problem is the text color. It’s not really all that distinct. It changes to a useful red/orange on other pages, but the subtle grey on blue grey, combined with the size, makes it weird. Compare it to the alerts you get for unread posts in your timestream, or personal notifications:

Clearly their goal is to keep me on that front page (which is obviously why they swap my ‘recent posts’ to ‘top posts’ every chance they get). But even then, once you click on the item, the number goes away but the items are not marked as read. You still have the mark-as-read buttons, which are not very noticeable or distinct. In the case of a page, the number count on the sidebar goes away, but not the one on your toolbar or the notifications page. Welcome aboard the inconsistency train, thy name is Facebook.

Interestingly, this day when I clicked on the “Mark as Read” link, the number dropped from 20 to 1. But there was nothing else to mark as read. All the backgrounds went from pale blue to white, and there was no other indication as to how I might find what was unread.

Eventually I saw the sidebar:

There it was. I hovered over it, clicked ‘Mark As Read’ and that number went away. I had to refresh the page to make the orange alert go away, because apparently that level of Ajax is hard.

My conclusion is pretty simple. Facebook wants me on the main page of their site, my timeline, all the time, and that’s fine for a user. But in doing so, they’ve made administration of their pages and groups overly complex and inconsistent with the rest of the flow of their site. They want me to add in content, but they’re going to decide how I, and others, consume it, which means my ability to easily input and manage is secondary (or even tertiary) to their consumer design.

The pages and groups are a nice idea, but still ill planned for a ‘MySpace’ replacement. The only reason that even worked was because MySpace blew up on itself.

3 April, 2015