Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

Chrome Dumps Webkit

Chromium, the machine behind Chrome, has dumped Webkit.

This speaks for us all:

Chrome is no longer using webkit. Every developer in the world:http://t.co/3wIT6XCaxO

— soully (@soully) April 3, 2013

I’m not sure what’s going viral first, that gif or a ‘Don’t blink’ joke that someone has yet to make up. Oh, the new system is called Blink, and it’s open source.

We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.

Yes, this means we all get to use even more browsers to make sure our sites look okay on all of them. Again. Thanks. And while they say it’s ‘based on’ webkit, that’s about as ‘related to’ as when Law & Order would say ‘The following episode is based on a true story, only names have been changed…’

This prompted my coworker Shredder to opine “Are Google and Mozilla late-april-fooling us?”

Did you miss the Mozilla/Samsung partnership? ~~Or maybe you didn’t notice that Opera moved too Webkit in February.~~ No wait! OPERA SWITCHES TO BLINK

Okay, Rarst is right: They’re out to screw over Apple.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see the new ways in which my sites break!

3 April, 2013
Collecting Conflicting Stats

While, like many people, I use Google Analytics, I don’t really trust it’s parsing. I do use mod_pagespeed which lets me auto-embed my GA code in every page without plugins or extra work on my part, which is great, but the results are questionable and often wildly disparate and conflicting.

Let me demonstrate:

Google AWStats Webalizer

Page views 2,607 10,354 8,502

Hits 49,830 59,542

Visits 888 1,274 2,255

First of all, I can’t find ‘hits’ anywhere on Google. Their layout is different and changes regularly. Secondly, and I’m sure this jumps out at you, according to AWStats and Webalizer, I’m getting 4 to 5 times the pageviews compared to Google. I previously configured AWStats and Webalizer to exclude wp-admin and other ‘back end’ pages by editing the configuration files. I did the same in my .htaccess for PageSpeed, so I know no one is tracking admin pages.

I already know that AWStats errs on the site of users, so if it can’t tell something is a bot, it assumes it’s a user. I also know it tends to overcount, since it bases its counts on traffic in a way that is a little generous (a 60 minute count for a visit). Not a huge deal, but enough to say that yes, the 10k pageview is probably closer to the 9 or 8 of Webalizer. Speaking of Webalizer, it uses a 30 minute count, so there it skews higher. Fine, let’s be harsh and halve them.

That gives me 4000-ish pageviews. Google gave it 2600-ish.

Interestingly, Google gives a 30 minute visit count too, but it also uses cookies and javascript, which while fairly safe, doesn’t run on everyone’s browser. As an amusing side-bar, when I switched from using a plugin or manually injecting Google Analytics into my sites and started using mod_pagespeed’s insertion, my results went up. Noticeably. In part this is attributed to the fact that my site is having higher traffic than normal, but when I compared it to WordPress Stats, it was a bigger than expected jump.(I’m not using WordPress’s Stats ala Jetpack in this experiment because it only counts WordPress pages, and the site I’m using is not just WP. However on a pure WP site, WP’s stats tend to skew higher than GA.)

Which one is right? Most people will say Google is ‘closer to the truth’ but I don’t know how much I can rely on that. Certainly it’s more true for how many actual people are visiting my site, and when I’m judging metrics for marketing, I’m a little more inclined to use Google. That said, if I’m trying to understand why my page speed is slow, or where I’m getting hammered with traffic, AWStats and Webalizer are far more accurate, since they’re counting everything.

From “Manga Guide to Statistics,” Shin Takahashi, 2008
Right now, I’m keeping Google Analytics on my sites. I don’t really need the measurements for marketing (that would involve doing marketing), but there are better social engagement stats provided that make it helpful. Like of all the social media sites, Facebook and Twitter are tied for traffic, and Google Plus is only high scored on my tech blog. I think that if Google let us auto publish to Google+, those stats would change, but for now, it’s all manual.

This is not to say that I think auto-posting is great for social engagement, but I find I actual pay attention more to the social aspect of the media if I don’t have to remember to post all over the place. This is a massive shift since October 2011, when I’d stopped auto-posting for SEO reasons. Why did I change my stance? Well it because easier to autopost and keep that personal touch with Jetpack’s Publicize feature. Now I can easily insert a custom message, and I know it’s going to (mostly) use my excerpt.(For some reason Tumblr is a moron about this) That saves me effort and allows me to spend more time actually interacting!

Auto-generating my stats with little effort, and being able to easily read them without needing a degree in SEO (no they don’t exist) is also hugely important. Google Analytics is easy to read, but curiously I find it overly complicated to understand. The different pages and layouts make it surprisingly hard to find ‘What were my stats for yesterday?’ Sometimes I have a boom in traffic on one day (like the day I had a 600% increase) and I want to see what went on and why. Where was this traffic coming from? WordPress’s stats do this amazingly well, just as an example.

No one tool provides all the data I need to measure all aspects of my site, nor does anyone one tool collect all the data. Google tells me more about browser size, screen resolution, and everything it can grab about the user, where AWStats and Webalizer give me more information about traffic by showing me everything, bots and humans. Basically server tools are great for collecting server stats, and webpage tools are great for user stats. But you need both.

So in the end, I have at least four different statistic programs I check on, regularly, to try and understand my traffic and measure success.

25 March, 2013
Genericons: Plugin’d

The thing about all this is that I really like Font Awesome. The licensing drives me to drink. The WordPress Repository has an extra rule, saying everything there has to be GPLV2 or later, for reasons that aren’t the point. What is the point is that the moment Genericons came out, I knew that it should be a plugin, because a totally GPL-compatible version of a font like this was what people wanted.

Since I also knew Rachel Baker had made a killer Font Awesome Plugin (and yes, that’s the one I use), I quickly stripmined its code and made Genericon’d.(At this point it’s pretty much a re-write, but I always credit where I started!)

The name is not Genericons because it’s not official, and they may want that name later. With that in mind, I thought “Well I totally Genericon’d them all!” because sometimes I talk like Zaboo from “The Guild.” I think of him as the Patron Avatar of this Plugin (though he’d probably ask why there wasn’t a Genericon for his staff, or Codex’s).

So what are these ‘font icons’ things anyway and how do they work?

Normally if you want to insert a Twitter image, let’s say, you would have to go find the image, download it, edit it to the right size, upload, embed. On the other hand, with a font you can do this: That will look like this: Isn’t that cool? All you have to do is include the font and the CSS in your site and you’re good to go. All those files are smaller than most images, load faster, and best of all, they scale better.

[genericon icon=twitter size=4x] Same font, bigger size. Isn’t that cool? Since they’re pure CSS, you can do whatever you want, from changing colors and size to inserting into menus, like I did on another site. When you add in their relatively small file size and scalability, you gain and added level of awesome because your little icons always look amazing on retina displays too! After all, they’re just fonts.

The alternative to something like this would be to use sprites, which is actually what WordPress uses today on your dashboard, and they look like this:

If you go look at your WordPress dashboard, you’ll notice that hovering over these images makes them change between the dull grey and the cool colorized version. In order to do that, you have two images. Not so with Genericons! .genericon-twitter:hover {background-color:pink;color:purple;} would do the same thing (in pretty garish colors…). Just as an example of how it works, here’s a link with a Genericon in it: [genericon icon=twitter] @ipstenu. It’s actually kind of nice how it automatically adapts to the CSS I have in place for hovering over links.

Basically the reasons to use icon fonts instead of images are that you can style them with CSS, they look good on all displays at any resolution, they easily adapt to fit your site when you change themes and colors, there’s only one HTTP call for the icons, and they’re open source.

Here are some features in Genericon’d (as of version 1.2) that I think are kinda awesome:

On the fly color changing.

You can make a Twitter Blue icon: [genericon icon=twitter color=#4099FF] makes [genericon icon=twitter color=#4099FF]

On the fly resize.

You can make a Facebook icon bigger: [genericon icon=facebook size=4x] makes [genericon icon=facebook size=4x]

And it all pretty much works the way I want it to. I did tweak the CSS a little to use em instead of px, which isn’t perfect. Genericons works best when your font is a derivative of 16, and for some reason, people still default to 12px. Protip: Ask someone with imperfect vision to look at your site. If they squint, your font is too small.

Genericons, and any font-icon add-on, aren’t perfect for everyone or every site, but they’re here if you need ’em.

7 March, 2013
Let Your Content Be Copied

Recently I undertook a personal project to convert a website from Flash to WordPress. I didn’t do this for any reason other than I wanted to do something nice for someone who has, in a very strange way, been the reason I am who I am within WordPress. She’s an artist, which means her website was very media heavy, and back in the early 2000s, the way to do this was Flash.

I hated it.

Oh I loved how it looked, but really that was it. It made her content slow, and it made it impossible for me to say “Hey, check out the new content!” without also saying “To get there, click on Sputnik, then on the fourth star, then the fifth box…” It’s just really bad UI, and no matter how pretty it is, the barrier between reader and content was nigh insurmountable. Also it doesn’t work on iOS these days.

My father, similarly, had his old site as all PDFs, so when I redid his site for his birthday (which he loves, and yes, WordPress), I copied his PDFs to text, with a lot of LATex in there for the math, and he complained. “People will steal my content.” I pointed out they could do that anyway. In fact, I had, in essence, done what they would, downloading the PDF and copying out the text and images. He grumbled, but as soon as his peers remarked that they could finally read his work, he calmed down.

I understand the fear of theft. You want to show you work to draw people in and then sell yourself. My father is a consultant and speaker, and his fear is that people will take his work and plagiarize him, or worse, make it seem like he endorsed them. If you think libel is a rough road on the Internet, try the endorsement shenanigans. Some people will do anything to make themselves seem more appealing.

At the same time, I agree with Cory Doctorow that giving your books away isn’t bad. The reason my ebooks are pay what you will is that I want people to find me, and find value in me. You can argue I wouldn’t have my job if I didn’t do that. My ebook profits paid for a brake repair and help keep my webhosting fees under control, but I sure don’t make a living off two ebooks. But again, the point is not that the website, directly, makes me money, but that it allows me to make money.

It seems counterintuitive. How can I make money giving things away? A website is like advertising. You don’t make money directly on an ad. You pay around $3.5 million dollars to have an ad in the Super Bowl not because you think someone will drop what they’re doing, run out and buy Doritos, but because you are trying to make an impact. The best Super Bowl ads, the best ads in general, are the ones we watch and want to share with our friends. We talk about them, and when we’re at the store and spot Doritos, we have a positive association with them, and are inclined to buy them. Sneaky ain’t it?

The website is the same thing. You read a lot about WordPress here, so at a certain point you start to associate ‘Ipstenu’ and ‘Half-Elf’ with WordPress. You see me on the forums, posting and helping people, and you get positive reinforcement of that association. Then you see I have an ebook about Multisite and you buy it. So why are the ebooks also pay what you want? Because people come to these things the other way, too. They find the ebooks, wonder about my qualifications and merits, and later come back and pay. And yes, I’ve gotten money that way too. After a while, when you build up your cred, you don’t have to mess with that and you can just sell, but at the time of my ebooks, I wasn’t someone who could say “My job is WordPress” so I couldn’t afford to just sell. I probably could today.

By why keep giving things away? WordPress (the code) is free, and my content is technically free here. You’re not paying me to read this, after all. It goes back to positive associations. If you get a good association with something, you keep using it. Newspapers, back in the day, were the only way to get news. You paid for two things: the information and the reliability. The radio came and changed the game, letting you listen to news, but the papers stuck around because unlike TV and radio news, you didn’t have to wait for your segment to come up, you could flip the pages and read sports.

The value of straight news didn’t really change until the Internet, where we started offering you the information at no immediate cost. Most of the time, the Internet sites can’t compete with reliability, but people became increasingly annoyed with having to pay for content. Buying the paper, sure, but I’m already paying for the Internet (access to it). Shouldn’t that be funneling back like TV fees do? Alas, they don’t, which means news media goes through hoops and ladders to try to lock their content down so you can’t copy it, or you have to pay to get at it. In return people like me find ways around paying to read content.

It’s not that we don’t think we should pay for things. I do pay for books, music, movies, media, news, etc, and I encourage people to do so. It’s not the money at all, it’s the barrier between me and the content. There’s obvious value in reading the news, but the value is diminished by proliferation and frankly by their own quality. It’s true that if you build it they will come, but without letting people share what they found, then you won’t get more readers.

That’s why the walls between your reader and your content need to go. That’s why you need to allow a direct link to your content, so I can say “Hey, I read this awesome article, go here!” You want me to tweet, text, link, post, tumble, and share your content so you get more readers, and more to the point, you get happy readers. The happier your readers, the more they feel like they should share. They’re getting a psychological kick-back from sharing, and we’re back to the positive association reinforcement we want.

I’m certainly not going to say that giving away all your content is going to make you money, but I will say that giving away some of your content will do so. There’s no magic formula to say where the breakpoint is for your product, but there’s no way to do that for anything. You have to determine where you’re going to make your money. My father makes money with his work and lectures. By posting smaller excerpts of his essays and papers online for free, people can find value in his work and hire him. An artist can post lower resolution/quality versions of their art for free, and let the reason find merit in the product. A writer can put disparate thoughts that don’t really combine themselves well into one work up on their blog, and let people see the value in their books. And by letting people copy your content, by letting them quote in part on in whole, you make them happy.

Do I worry about plagiarism and content theft? Funny thing, no. By having my SEO ranking high, based on Google and all being able to read my content, if someone searches for phrases found in my articles, they’ll find my site before the sploggers and thieves. By making it easier for people to link to me, I increase my SEO. The same goes for my quality of content. I make it high, people will link to me, and we get a happy circle of reciprocity. I never fear content theft, and because of that, I let my content be copied.

It’s served me well.

11 February, 2013
Hotlinking is Evil (And So Is Google)
We all know hotlinking is a bad thing. Hotlinking uses up someone else’s bandwidth, which costs them money. It takes away from any profit they might make on ads, because you’re not going to their site. It removes their credit from images. So why did Google decide to hotlink when they made their faster image search?

This is what the new image search looks like:

I’ll admit, that looks pretty nifty. It’s a fast way to see images. But it’s also a fast way to lose attribution. Here’s what just the new image box looks like.

This image now loads ‘seemingly’ locally. It’s totally a part of Google, though, there’s no reference back to how the site looks (it used to be an overlay). In fact, most people will just see the image, copy if they want, and move on to the next site. No one has any reason to dig deeper and to visit the image’s page.

By contrast, the thumbnail images you see on Google, if you viewed source, look like this: https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQPNtMLkk8rwj3lLv6a2kEQ8_eo6BuiUZYn3N5z3cbMu6rVPo3Xkw If you go to gstatic.com though, all you get is a 404 error page, but it’s pretty easy to find out this is where Google saves all their static content. Including images. These thumbnails are in moderate to low quality, and if that was all Google did, show small, iffy, thumbnails and redirect people to the real site, that would be great. Instead, now they actively hotlink from you. Oh yes, that full image you saw in my screenshot was directly linked to the owner’s media file.

The first thing I did after noticing this was to add the following to my robots.txt:
```
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
```
Those directions are right from Google, who doesn’t even pitch you any reason to why you wouldn’t want to do this. Normally they’ll tell you ‘You can, we’d rather you didn’t because of XYZ, but here it is anyway.’ This time, it’s a straight up ‘Here’s how.’ I find that rather telling.

Naturally I went on to read why Google thought this was a good idea

The following points are all reasons Google thinks this is better.

We now display detailed information about the image (the metadata) right underneath the image in the search results, instead of redirecting users to a separate landing page.

The first part about this, the detailed information, is great. Having the meta-data right there without redirecting to the separate page like the used to, with the data on the side that no one read, is an improvement. Thank you for that.

We’re featuring some key information much more prominently next to the image: the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size.

Again, this is great. I think that the data should be more visible than it is, especially the ‘This image may be copyright protected’ stuff. Considering Google won’t allow you to use ads if you use copyright protected material (which they claim I do here, by the way), they really have a higher measure of standard to live up to when it comes to informing people of the stick by which they are measured.

The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.

I can see this being true. Again, the links should be more obvious, and really they should link not to the image directly, but the contextual page in all cases. Traffic is important, and if you send people to the image page where they don’t see the ads, you’re causing them to lose money. So the idea behind this part is really nice, and I’m for it, it just needs some kick-back improvements. Google should give people a good reason to go to the parent site. And this next item is where they fail…

The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view. This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.

And now we hit the problem. While this is true (it will be both faster and use less of my bandwidth while decreasing load), it’s still showing my image off my servers! Worse? It’s got the full sized image from my server, which means if I have a 4 meg photo (and I do), they’ll be pulling all 4 megs down, and the reader can just right-click and save. They never need to touch my site.

As Bill and Ted would say, Bogus.

Go back to how Google shows thumbnails. They have their own, lower-rez version. I regularly post other people’s images on a site, and when I do, I purposefully keep a lower resolution version on my site, and link to them for the best. Why? Because it’s their image. They did the work, they made it, I should honor them and respect them, and be a good net-denizen. Google’s failing on that.

For me their search has always been a little questionable for images. Now it’s outright evil.
1 February, 2013
Anti-Social Competition

A lot has been said already about how stupid Twitter is to bite the hand that tweeted them into fame. People are all on about how Facebook’s draconian actions will hurt them. Now Instagram is in on the restriction game. There are business models for actions like this, and we’ve seen them time and again. People think the only way to keep their user base (i.e. their revenue) is to stop the users from integrating with the other tools.

They’re wrong.

Look, none of us use a product because they limit us, or because they force us to. While the monetary loss and software hassle of switching to a PC would hurt me, the reason I use a Mac is not because they make it impossible to switch, but because they make me not want to. It’s a part of a psychological gambit, making it easy to do what I want, and if I really wanted, easy to walk away. But what neither Apple nor Microsoft does is attempt to lock me in to their way forever.

Now some of you might argue that’s not true, but look at the US phone system. AT&T and Verizon and all the other traditional companies lock us into their systems. We can’t leave without paying exhorbinant fees. With Apple and Microsoft, the setup fee was my choice, and I don’t pay ongoing prices to use their service, though I can in some cases.

When I see things like Instagram and Twitter having a slap-fight, to the point that Twitter decided to remove Instagram’s embedding in Twitter, I wanted to kick them both. Twitter is going to hurt itself more and more by biting the hands that feed them (which we already knew about when they decided people making their own Twitter tools was bad). Instagram is following the trend, and that doesn’t help at all. What they’re doing is generating anti-social behavior, which is to say that they’re making it hard to be social.

These are social media outlets, and it’s almost to the point where they’re saying ‘You can drive our car, but it only uses gasoline from these vendors.’ We would cry foul and sic the lawyers on them for that. In fact, we did. Remember when Microsoft made it near impossible to run other browsers by tightly integrating IE with their OS? Look at how well that worked out. Sidebar: I don’t think Apple limiting the default browser on iOS devices is the same thing. Unlike Microsoft, they own both hardware and software, so it’s more like saying ‘You can’t put a Fiat engine in your Mini Coop.’ I do think they should allow it, but it’s not the same as the gasoline analogy. Hair splitting, I know. Don’t think I like that I can’t set Chrome as my default browser on my iPad, it really annoys me.

One of the driving points I love about open source is that we all work together to make things better. With a few notable exceptions, we really try hard to be cooperative, because we know that one group, alone, can’t do everything. This is why I’m often an evangelist for people to contribute, I know that we need to work together in all things. My chosen flag is, right now, Open Source.

For some reason this is lost on people when they start looking to monetize their products. And it’s not just products like Twitter that do this stupid thing. Right away, everyone’s an enemy. Recently, Carrie Dils ran into this when her presentation at a WordPress Meetup was rejected. Carrie correctly pointed out, she’s not your competition. (I’m very confident this will be addressed in the meetup world, and I know this is not the kind of behavior anyone encourages or endorsees.) Except in a way, she totally is my competition. Just not the way that guy seemed to think of it.

That bizarre situation points out the absurdity in all this. The world is not a zero-sum game. You’ll never have all the money, all the products, all the clients, or all the people. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to have as many as you can manage, but it means you don’t need to attack the other guy. Having a rival, having competition, is good. Every other forum moderator is better than I am at something. Even if it’s just quilting, or as weird as Microsoft servers, the crux of the issue is that competition can be a good thing, and the way to ‘win’ is not to smear the other guy or block them from sharing your client base, but to offer what the other guys doesn’t have.

Look back at Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is for sharing 140 characters of words. Instagram is for sharing retro photos. So what does Instagram have to gain by blocking people from being able to show photos in Twitter? Well there is a practical point here, and it’s one I tout: Own your own data. After all, I don’t allow hotlinking of my images on other sites specifically because I want people to come here for content (and it’s bandwidth theft, which I hate), but also I don’t like when people steal my content without asking and present it as their own. A large part of owning my own data is also owning where it lives. So while I use Instagram and Twitter (and Facebook), anything of merit that isn’t just casual chatter ends up on one of my own sites.

Unlike Instagram, I will happily embed small version of my content (excerpts) on any social media site I care to use. Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus all allow me to put a link, or a link and a phrase, that shows a teaser of my blog content. This drives traffic back to me, which increases my presence, and nets me what I want. Instagram could have done this, and permitted embedding like that on a small scale (click to see bigger, click to leave comment) on Twitter and anywhere else, which would probably help them.(Wouldn’t it be cool if we could code our own sites to let Twitter embed some media from them too? Sadly, they won’t let us because some people would use it for Goatse.cx (DO NOT VISIT)) Instead, they put up a wall to make people click a link and go through. This is why WordPress lets you embed media on your site from other sources. They get it.

I wish those other guys did. I just want to play in the park with everyone.

24 January, 2013