Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

Update Fatigue
The week of April 20th saw a lot of WordPress related updates:
1. WordPress 4.1.2
2. WordPress plugins with a major security issue
3. WordPress 4.2 and 4.1.3
4. A bunch of themes fixing the same issue plugins had
5. WordPress 4.2.1 and 4.1.4
I don’t know about you, but even with automated updates, I was tired of all the updates. I was also tired of explaining to people that, yes, those security issues were a massive hole and yes, they did need to be patched. And yes, I know it’s annoying to get all those emails and have to test all the things because not every plugin or theme is created equal.

In the midst of all that, I noticed one of my plugins had updated 6 times in ten days. That’s pretty much an update every other day and you know what? That’s way too much.

If I have to update your plugin every few days for minor releases, I’m going to stop using it. Update when you:
1. have a point release
2. are fixing really important bugs
Other than that, if you update every few days for minor changes, I really am stopping using your plugin because you are making my life annoying. You’re why people hate updating. You’re why they stop.

There are valid reasons for multiple releases in a week, like bug fixes for 0-day security holes that have already been publicly disclosed. But in this case, it was all minor changes, like adding languages and so on.

That was useless and pointless and annoying. Okay, fine. Maybe not useless or pointless. Those are important things to update. But when should you update them? Not every day, certainly, nor even every week. If you look back on my two simple rules for when you should update, consider them seriously.

Is this a bug or a new feature?

New features means new major revision unless there’s a reason not to. My plugin Genericon’d keeps pace with Genericons’ versioning, so while they’re on 3.3, I will update 3.3.1 with a new feature. The majors are at their behest, so I have to take control over minors only. It’s not ideal. I hate it but it’s the best way to make sure people know “Hey, this has version 3.3 of Genericons!”

New languages aren’t bugs nor are they really features, but they should only be added if there’s a major release. Alternately, you can slip them into a bugfix, but they shouldn’t be your only fix. As for the person who really needs the language? Make them available on git or svn and tell them to download and put it in the /wp-content/languages/plugin/name/ folder. Not ideal, I agree, but it’s a majority/minority issue.

How often should you patch bugs?

Is it a zero-day exploit, released in the wild, bug that’s breaking sites right now?

RELEASE THAT SUCKER!

Is it a minor bug that annoys you but doesn’t cripple the site? Make a dev branch, fix it, but don’t push the release just yet. Wait until you have a lot of bugs fixed. Or wait until you have the next major release.

Take a page from how WordPress.org pushes minor releases. Fix the bugs that need fixing. Solve the security problems. But updating every day? Not a great experience for anyone.

Opps! You missed a critical bug!

That happens. Update the plugin right away. Yes it sucks but see the bit I bolded above? That’s your exception. If you break something, fix something. We pushed 4.1.3 because we broke sites with 4.1.2. Period. Fix it.

But you’re sure people really want this new thing!

Maybe, but people also really don’t want to be hassled and you’re hassling them. People have (understandable) concerns about updates. They worry about bug fixes. They worry about how your change will impact all their other plugins and themes. Keep that in mind before you push a change or a fix.

Did you update that changelog?

It’s your code diary. For every good commit message there should be a good changelog entry. Just do it. You’ll be thanked.
4 May, 2015
Mailbag: What’s The Diff?

How do you compare two plugins to see if one’s a fork or stolen? What’s the difference between a fork and a clone?

Sometimes people like to ‘steal’ plugins. This normally happens when someone takes a premium (purchase only behind a firewall) plugin and attempts to give it away for free on WordPress.org. They tend to violate copyright when they do that, but also it’s just not a cool thing to do and I find it distasteful.

Often we catch these since people who steal like that aren’t always very smart and we recognize code that is generally well known and popular. But more often we don’t catch it because CodeCanyon has 3400+ plugins and WordPress.org has 37k+ and that’s a lot to compare and remember. And that’s when we get an email from a plugin developer who says “So and so stole my work!”

What do we do? We ask them for a copy of their code, in a zip, and say we’ll compare. Most developers are happy to do that. We’re a trustworthy lot, otherwise we wouldn’t be on the plugin team (yes, being a good, moral, and ethical person is very important). Once I have the zip, I download the claimed-clone and compare them line by line.

Well. Not really.

My toy is DeltaWalker.

With DeltaWalker I can compare two zip files without having to open the zips and look at each line. In the below example, I’ve got Akismet 3.0 vs 3.1.1 and I can see every single change just by tossing the zips in as files to compare:

DeltaWalker is so good, it helps me compare the readmes so I can easily see that someone has just fiddled with the original and not written their own.

What I look for is code style, formatting, and naming conventions. Rarely do two separate individuals use the same code formatting (tabs vs spaces vs tabs+space etc), so seeing their additions will jump out. Similarly, the code style, their internal logic, is often wildly different. Same with naming conventions.

When you look at it, it will jump out at you that generally all anyone does is rename functions or classes. They remove credit and copyright information too, and sometimes they mess with the help docs. Rarely do they add anything of substance. If they do then it’s a legit fork and we’ll push them to restore credit and copyright information.

But since it’s generally not, we will quickly see that the plugin is a direct, no feature added, copy, and remove it.

If this happens to you, if your plugin is ‘taken’ and duplicated without any code being added, email pluginsATwordpress.org with a copy of your original plugin (and a link to perhaps prove it’s you) and we’ll look at it. If you get an email where we tell you that your plugin is a copy, take a moment to review your code and feel free to talk with us about it. A ‘one line’ change actually MAY be acceptable as a fork, but it’s rare unless it’s adding in a massive feature, or totally changing functionality.

Above all, remember this:

Despite the fact that all plugins in our directory are licensed under the GPL or compatible licenses, we do not allow direct copies of other plugins to be re-listed under somebody else’s name. “Forking” is acceptable only when the resulting fork is of a substantial nature, or when the original plugin is no longer updated or supported.

Always try to contribute back to the original plugin’s authors if you wish to make improvements to the original plugin, instead of creating an entirely new version and thus creating incompatibilities and duplicated code in the repository.

Alternatively, write your own plugin to perform the functionality you want to have, drawing on ideas from the original. Ideas can always be copied.

1 May, 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