Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

A Name is Not A Description

One day, you found a app or plugin or add-on for something. It was a feature you always wanted, did exactly what you needed, was well written and supported. It was that panacea of perfection. You loved it. Then you had a computer crash, or a house fire, or moved, and you forgot what the name was. All you could remember was the name was something about what it did. So you decided to Google for it, and quickly found a billion things that fit the bill.

SEO vs Generic

When you’re naming your product or company, you work very hard to think of a name that encapsulates what you are, what you do, and what makes you unique. For example, you don’t name yourself “Shoe Company” and expect people to be able to find you. With very few exceptions (and really only No Name comes to mind), if you want to stand out, you pick a good name where you are prominent.

This directly relates to SEO, and people’s ability to find you. Ever used Apple Pages or Sheets and tried to Google something? Like “How do I make Pages Templates” perhaps. You often feel damn lucky when you get the right result immediately:

But you’re not Apple, are you? So if you named your product “Foods,” you’d probably have a devil of a time getting ranked so people could find you in search!

Unique vs Memorable

Take a look at WordPress. Pretend you’re looking for a slider plugin. Hush, just come with me here. Now. You remember a really cool slider plugin, but all you remember is it was named something like “Best Slider Plugin.” Yeah. You ain’t gonna find it. Probably ever. But what if you were looking for a lightbox plugin, and you remembered the name as “Foobox Lightbox” … Hang on a second. That’s one you’re going to be able to find. It has a unique name, but better than that, it has a memorable name!

The only reason Apple Pages actually works is that Apple is huge and also the fact that most of us Google “Apple Pages whatever” and not just “Pages.” It’s the same with the Apple Watch. It’s nice they call it “Watch.” We call it the “iWatch” because we have to be able to find it, and they picked stupid generic names. Being Apple, they can get away with it.

To their credit, the name is memorable. It’s not unique, but you will remember it. Even if you remember it as “That stupid Pages app Apple made.” You remember Microsoft Word, but you also will remember WordPerfect, and possibly WordStar. But if you listed four Twitter apps, could you remember what differentiates each one without looking? Definitely unique names, like Tweetbot and Twitterific, and certainly memorable, but in the wrong way.

Names vs Descriptions

Many people make a common mistake. They remember the tools they use on their computers, like “TextEdit” and “Notepad” and they think that in order to be found, the name must be short and descriptive. That’s why we get Notepad++ and iTerm. To an extent, this works. LastPass and OnePassword are going to be memorable and unique and descriptive names. But the longer a product, or suite exists, the more likely they are to corner a market and make it harder for the little people.

Let’s go back to WordPress. You’ve made a great popup plugin and you want everyone to know it. There are roughly 500 plugins that use ‘popup’ or ‘popups’ as a tag. There are 2500 or so plugins that show up for a search on ‘popup’ in the directory. Besides the fact that you really should use the ‘popup’ tag in your plugin, there’s no way in the world you’re going to get your new popup plugin to the top of the list in a day.

But … users don’t look for ‘popup’ or even ‘best popup plugin.’ They look for something else. “WordPress popup plugin with call to action on page exit.” They may simply that to “wordpress popup plugin call to action page exit” but they’re going to look for what they need. And they’re going to remember the plugin named “Wait Don’t Go! Popups” that has a nice plugin description of “Grab your visitors’ attention one more time before they leave your page forever.”

Humans vs Robots

Putting a million buzzwords in your product’s name, the description, and the URL aren’t ever going to make you popular. The only thing that does is bring people in the yard. If they see your website is fill with upsell and hyperbole, they’re going to walk right out again. If they see features and explanations and proof that you are, indeed, the bees knees, they’ll stay. If you have a catchy or unique name, they’ll remember and recommend you to their friends.

And then, then you will be a success.

27 March, 2018
Hey, Twitter, Why Do You Hate Us?
Hi, Twitter.

I know we fight a lot. You know I report a lot of abuse and harassment, and you do nothing about the Nazis, and we have our differences. But this isn’t about that. I mean, yeah, I’m salty about the Russian thing, but we need to talk about something else.

We need to talk about using Twitter on a desktop when you have multiple accounts.

Multiple Twitter Accounts Happen

I have a legit reason to have multiple accounts. A good one, in fact. I have my personal account, but I have two others for brands I manage. And that means I kind of need to be able to log in to all three at once and wrangle things.

If you use Twitter on the web, your choices are regular Twitter or Tweetdeck. The latter makes you sign up via a very convoluted process in order to grant access to accounts. Basically, you have to give your ‘main’ account access to the ones you want to manage. It’s not very obvious.

And there are weird things missing from Tweetdeck. Like … no decent notifications. You can’t tell what you’ve read or when people @ you or anything like that. Not easily. Oh, and there’s no GIF button.

Finally … with three accounts I get to have NINE columns. Three each for ‘home,’ ‘mentions,’ and ‘messages.’ Thanks. A lot.

No Great Desktop App

Here’s my problem. There’s no good Twitter desktop app. Your own app went unloved until you pulled the plug. In a tweet. Nice. Really nice. That leaves me with a few choices.

TweetBot: I like Tweetbot, except that I can’t see polls in it, and I can’t navigate to embed Gifs. But it has a pretty decent interface. The biggest issue is that you can’t see group DMs. Sometimes keep on top breaks. Sometimes not.

Twitterific: This is a wonderful app except that scrolling sucks. If you switch to a different account, keep on top stops working, and ⌘↑ (which should take you to the top of whatever you’re on) doesn’t scroll right. Oh and no embedding Gifs. And again, no group DMs and no polls.

What about TweetDeck’s desktop app? It hasn’t been updated since 2015. The best version I’ve seen is Tweeten but again, I’m back to 3 columns per account.

What I Want Is Simple

I want the iOS app, but for the desktop. I want to have the following features:
1. Multiple Account Support
2. One visual ‘column’ per account (it can have sub tabs, whatever)
3. The ability to insert and read polls
4. Support for multi-person DMs
5. Notifications
6. A damn GIF button
Instead, I get to use Tweetdeck in my browser. At least, until Twitter dumps that too.
1 March, 2018
Let’s Talk, Slack
Hi, Slack. You’re the cool product everyone uses to communicate on scale. You’ve introduced a lot of features and aspects that are great. We all like to use you for our non-company work, but I’ve noticed something interesting.

See. You constantly remind us that Slack is for Business. But you don’t seem to have actually spent enough time in corporate land to understand what that means. So, as someone who worked for nearly 15 years (and recently at that) with The Man, and the last five with a smaller company, let me try to explain to you what mistakes you’re making. Oh, and before anyone asks, yes, I’ve pitched all of this in tickets/suggestions to Slack already.

Constant Barrage

Being able to tune alerts on Slack is basically the only way you have to live or die. I can mute channels or group-chats pretty easily, to allow a conversation I need to be aware of, but not right now to carry on around me.

What I can’t do is mute my really, really, really chatty and annoying coworker for an hour so I can get work done.

Oh sure, Slack, it’s passive aggressive to just mute Bob over there who knows I love the Cleveland Problematically Named Baseball Team, and wants to tell me something I will care about in an hour or so. But right now? I have a job. And I want to concentrate without your alerts popping up on my screen and showing that dreaded unread icon. And yes, Slack, I could mute everything, but what about my coworker Jane, the nice one who pings me with an apology because she knows I’m super busy, but she has a critical work problem, and I’m the expert.

Come on, Slack.

Asynchronicity vs Work/Life

While everyone in startup land likes to brag about how they work 80 hours a week, the reality is that most business aren’t actually that stupid. We take vacations. We don’t work weekends. We like to spend time with family, go to a sports game, and not be distracted by the ping of work.

While you have do not disturb settings, Slack, I can only set them for specific hours. So yes, I do set them for 4pm to 7am, because I actually do have an end of day. But I can’t set my work days, I can’t connect Slack to (say) my Google Calendar and have it automatically detect that I’m out of the office. I have to constantly fiddle and tweak things. It’s a mess.

Out of Office Messages

Speaking of this, if I (perchance) happen to forget to mark myself as out of the office, I’m going to get alerts. Fine, that’s on me. But. You introduced custom status messages, which you tout I can use to announce I’m on vacation. Awesome! Now can you make them useful?

See the problem is I put in “Out of the office until Feb 20” pretty recently, and I thought “My coworkers are intelligent, they’ll see this message and know ‘Aha! Mika is out!’ They don’t. And looking at this, I can’t blame them becuase of two things:
1. Readability on MacOS is shit
2. The message doesn’t fully show on iOS
Don’t believe me? Here:

Slack Example from iOS

Slack example from MacOS

Those are hard to read! And why don’t they auto-alert like a DND message does when someone DMs me? “Mika is currently [status message]” — Oh yes, Slack, I know people like to use those for jokes. Want to stop them? Make them auto-reply. Then people would only use them for real.

And by the way…

You’re Ageist

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, not very long ago either, I supported desktop software. I received a phone call from someone in the Big Building, aka where the real bankers worked, and she couldn’t use a product because the screen was unreadable. She couldn’t see the buttons or dropdown. I asked her to give me 30 minutes and I would call her back. Quickly I went through a few steps to size and resize the window, and I couldn’t figure it out. I called her back and asked if I could come to her office.

One 20 minute bus ride later, I’m at the fancy building, going through metal detectors, and I head up to her floor. I apologize for not being in a suit and ask her to please show me her desktop. One glance and I realized the problem was that her desktop itself had been resized. I explained I was going to change the resolution, resize it, and see if that fixed it. I promised I would reset everything.

Nervous, she allowed this. After all, if I closed a specific window, I could cost the company a hefty bit of money. I very cautiously (without minimizing anything), changed the resolution.

“Oh, that’s how it was this morning! My coworker was using my workstation.”

After I head-desked a few times, I checked the app I was responsible for. It was set to take up most of the screen but not all. I resized it, manually, and then restored her preferred resolution. I then wrote down how I did that, how to fix it in the future, and went to give her coworker a stern word that began with “The first rule of using someone else’s workstation is THOU SHALT NOT MESS WITH THEIR SETTINGS.”

A few years later, when I no longer worked on that team, I got a phone call from her again. “My new coworker is having the weird screen problem I had a million years ago. Can we pay you with lunch to fix it again?”

Of course I said yes.

Now re-read those problems I have with you, Slack. Because you’re worse.

To Review

I look at Slack, and I look at the problems I have, and I think “If I wasn’t technically competent, I would be lost.” And I realized “I am technically competent and I still get lost.”

Slack. If you want to make it bigger, if you want big companies and banks to start using you instead of Lotus Notes Messenger, you need to step up your game. Provide business tools, the ones they need to make sure if they’re not available, someone knows who to contact next. Treat people like grown ups with mortgages, not 20-somethings who exist on packing peanuts and internships.

Basically, Slack, you want the grown ups? Grow up.
27 February, 2018
What Is The Measure of a Site?

After you think about where you’re saving your data, internally or externally, you’re going to be faced with the biggest problem known to exist.

What do you do with your data?

Common Data is (Mostly) Obvious

Some data, as I’ve said before, is obvious. That is, you know what you want to do with statistics of visits. The base outset is ‘figure out how many people visit my site.’ Right? Not too hard. But that isn’t all you want to know. You want to know when your site is busiest, what content people read, and maybe you want to know on what device.

You want to know these things because they can help you optimize what you do next. If, for example, your Monday posts are super popular, then you want to make sure you post them at the time the most people are going to visit your site. If you know only 2 people view your site on an iPad, maybe fixing that little annoyance can wait a bit.

Rare Data is A Headache

On the other hand, when you look at statistics for your complex data, like a site with TV shows and characters and actors, you have a completely different problem. What public stats are both relevant and meaningful? And how do you represent them in ways that people can understand?

Like, do you use piecharts?

They can be helpful but only if you don’t have a large number of data slices.

I made a pie chart with 28 slices and it was unreadable. Though that was mostly because everyone had between 1-5% except for one that had 75%.

The Question Is Usage

This is a problematic question because it has no easily defined answer before you start building out your site. We’ve all seen an image of a paved path and then a foot-trail cutting away from it, or winding around an obstacle. People like to joke about how it’s design vs usage. While our goal when making any product is to avoid people walking off the paths, it’s unavoidable. And in the case of public statistics, it’s even harder to predict usage.

A large reason for the problem is what is called a failure of imagination. This is, in part, the fault of the designers. That is, they didn’t predict things properly. Which requires metrics. Which can’t be gathered until people have used the site a little.

You see the problem, I hope.

Start With The Easy

When I built out stats on my site, the ones I wanted people to use, I made sure to start with some easy things. Like those pie charts. Those are just pulled from a custom taxonomy which every character has. They’re simple. They’re easy. And they let people visualize.

After I released it, someone asked “Could we have a chart to show how many actors a character has?”

That was actually not easy, but the point is that by starting with something ‘easy’ I was able to inspire people to ask what they wanted to see.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Wrong

Remember I mentioned that evil pie chart? You’re going to be wrong. You’re going to assume that the best way to show a specific data point is a pie chart when it really should be a bar chart. If you pick the right chart systems, it shouldn’t be too horrible to switch between them. But sometimes it will be.

Just remember, it’s okay to make mistakes. You can dig up a path and repave it after all.

22 February, 2018
Processing Numbers with WordPress

The very idea of ‘I should make statistics’ or ‘what are the metrics of this’ starts from the same place. We have a desire to understand what a thing is. Statistics, like traffic, and metrics, like speed, can tell us obviously important information about our sites. Faster sites do better. More traffic gets you more… whatever.

But those are the obvious things. There are easy to understand numbers and there are difficult to process numbers. And it all matters where you save the data.

Getting At The Data

When I set about making statistics for LezWatchTV, the biggest problem I faced was determining what I wanted to show. Some things were simple. How many characters died and what percent of all characters was that? How many shows have dead characters?

Since I chose to use WordPress features, like custom taxonomies, for the majority of the aspects of the site, getting those numbers was simple. There were, of course, some that were very difficult to get at, and this is fully of my own design. Sometimes there will be data you want to use that is just harder to get at than others.

This means the question of understanding your numbers begins with understanding where they belong.

Save Data in Smart Places

I say this over and over. Use WordPress’ native features first.

I mean use the taxonomies and the custom post types and the post meta wisely. But. When you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be cross related, consider saving it someplace else. For example, the reason FacetWP is so damn fast is that it doesn’t query WordPress all the time, and instead uses it’s own tables.

Having it’s own table means there’s less overhead as they can make direct SQL calls to pull the data. When you have data spread across three post types, this becomes pretty much an imperative. You just have to script the code to save it properly.

External Data

While FacetWP does save data to it’s own tables, there is another option, and that is external locations. You’re most familiar with this with regards to Google Analytics. Some data makes sense to keep local, but keep in mind what you’re doing and what you’re generating with the data. When it’s just posts, local is perfectly logical. When you get into statistics… Well. Maybe you should export it.

That brings up the next question. What data to you export, and to where.

20 February, 2018
Accidental Example

My father was having email woes, so I undertook the monumental task of sorting out his hellish setup. Among other hurdles, he still uses (and in fact prefers) POP email.

Don't judge him.

However it was in reviewing the POP mail that I found a problem. He had over 145 emails, and of them only 33 or so were legitimate emails. Of the other 112, about 20 were 'mailing lists' (like Safeway and Egencia and crap we do actually use), 5 or so were porn, and then 87 were from a deployment service.

Not His Monkey House

I double checked that my father didn't use the service and then I looked at the email. They were all emails for an account payable system that he absolutely didn't use.

That's not at all Dad's job, so I agreed they were likely junk but how did they get there?

A Real Company

The first thing I did was check that this was a legit company. Interesting. I then did the logical step and requested a password reset for his email. It emailed me a link, which I clicked and yes, it let me reset the password… Except it didn't.

I got an error saying that the 'username' was already in use.

Which made no sense. I was on the password reset form. Not a create user form. So I tried a few different ways, and then tried to file a bug report or ask for help with is email and it all error'd out. It did not like his email.

To Twitters!

I then complained on Twitter, which netted me the very helpful Isabelle who DM'd me and knew right away what was happening.

The hundreds of emails were actually just a mix-up because one of our product specialists had a demonstration company with a database with tons of 'demonstration users' with personalities and characters names and your dad's email got in by accident (due to its homonym toy story character).
Isabelle

Dad's domain is woody.com you see.

Suddenly it all made sense.

Why We Use Example.com

They went ahead and removed his email from all their pipelines and deleted the fake account they'd made for the domain (which explains why I couldn't do a reset). And I haven't seen an email come in after that.

It was a rude awaking for this poor company. We don't use real domains in our examples for a damn good reason: people copy/pasta.

No one thought to check if the domain existed, and it's pure coincidence that they picked his email for the demos and examples. And yet it's a good reminder for you too. Those example domains you pick will probably be used by someone in production. Don't spam them.

But a bigger concern is this. How much private data got sent to my father over the course of the weeks this was the case? How much information did he have access to that he shouldn't? You're all very lucky he's not malicious.

23 January, 2018