Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

You’ll Never Take My Freedom!

I am an adherent to GPL.

This means I understand what it means, what it protects, and what it does not. So when in the beginning of August I saw a guy selling 200 free WordPress plugins for $9, I really don’t mind. I mean, I, personally, think that selling the plugins is the wrong way to go about it.

I will defend your right to resell MY plugin

Look, I may think it’s a total dick move, and I may personally find it distasteful, but what I don’t find it is illegal. Morality is something else. I am legally permitted to take a plugin from another site, a paid plugin, and if it’s GPL, I can give it away, sell it, or do what I, as a user, want to do with it. Would I? Actually, yes. I have. It’s called forking a plugin. But I always attribute the authors, thank them, and point out what I did to make this plugin different.

In fact, it’s not the reselling at all that fired up my blood. It was this one line where he says you can’t resell the plugin compilation for less, and you can’t give it away.

It’s highly possible what he meant was ‘This set is a set, don’t steal my shit!’ And to that, yes, don’t take his hard work and steal it, that’s uncool. But where he looses his right to say that is when he tries to revoke freedoms clearly laid out in GPL, notably, I have the right to take a GPL licensed plugin and do what I want. You just can’t have it both ways.

Don’t worry! This can be fixed!

Otto pointed out that, as he’s also using images and other possibly non-GPL items in his product, that in a way, this is okay. Well, that’s nice, but he still can’t take away my GPL freedoms. He can do a pseudo-split license, and say “These products are GPL, and as such, all GPL freedoms remain intact. THESE products, however, are not GPL, and fall under the following provisos.” That’s a lot of work, I know, but suddenly he’s GPL-compliant! Yay!

Of course, that assumes he had the right to use those non-GPL items in the first place. And we already knows he’s buzz-worded some BS.

1. I have Full Master Resale Rights and Each One of the Plugins Listed Above Has Resale Privileges attached to them.

2. Because of the Master Rights, I have the each developers expressed permission to offer Private Label Rights to All Who Purchase WP Million Dollar Plugins.

3. Being That these are Unique & Rare Resell Rights Plugins You Have a Two-fold Benefit,
a) The Personal Use of the WP Million Dollar Plugin
b) The Ability to Offer This Unique/Profitable Package to Your Customers.

The rampant abuse of capitalization aside, items number 1 and 2 there doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. First, I know that at least one plugin dev didn’t give any ‘extra’ permissions outside of what GPL already provides. So if we know this guy didn’t ask permission, what ‘master right’ does he have? Not a one, that I can come up with.

GPL freedoms don’t require asking permission to reuse them, they don’t permit ‘private label rights’ (which actually is just marketing speak, and means nothing at all legally) or any rights that further restrict your freedoms.

Another easy way to fix this is to not include the plugins, but instead sell it as a $10 book: The 200 best plugins for your site, how to find them, which ones to use, and why they’re great! Imagine a book that could help you get started by breaking down the best plugins for what you’re trying to do? A lot of newbies would kill for that. So sell THAT. Sell your own work. If you’ve done the research, sell it. But unless you make the plugin, or are going to support it, you’re nothing more than a hotdog vendor.

Free is better, right?

In the end, peer pressure reverted this $9.95 deal into a ‘free’ download by the end of the day, which I did not try (since the amount of layers to download looked like a rip off to me, and lead to a $950 … thing). No one ‘won’ anything, though. I’m sure the guy feels blasted by the people who descended upon the forums (as well as the ones who private messaged him). It’s fairly clear the forum regulars were not pleased by the onslaught nor their attitude.

A lot of agony could have been avoided if research had been done in the beginning. If more time had been spent looking up what was being sold, and why, instead of slapping marketing speak (much of which has been removed). When selling becomes more important than doing the right thing for the product and the users, you’ve lost something. Make good things, make that important, and not making money and selling them. If that’s all you care about, I’ll make sure to avoid your product.

By the way… It’s WordPress, with a capital P.

2 August, 2011
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) Will Confuse Your Users

If you’ve never heard The Four Lads (or They Might Be Giants) sing “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” you’re missing out on a great swing song. The lyrics basically dance around the fact that Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, but also how even New York was once New Amsterdam, saying things like “People just liked it better that way.” and “It’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”

Eventually you’re going to look at your website and think that you need to redesign it. In ages past, I would say things like ‘What would Amazon do?’ to indicate how people generally should not redesign their entire site. But those ages are long past and now, if you want to redesign your website, it’s an accepted standard of life. Both the code running your site and the look and feel of it have to be updated more than with just a slap of fresh paint.

Now that everyone’s accepted the fact that sites will update and change, the trick is how to make a change without forcing people to wonder why Constantinople got the works!(See? The song title had a point.) You can’t just assume your user-base is going to magically divine how everything works and know where to go to do things, after all.

Obviously you can make a blog post that explains where everything went, but eventually that will fall off your front page. So you could also make a new ‘page’ for your site features, and hope people saw that. Toss in some customization on your 404 page (and maybe some clever .htaccess redirects to send people to the right place), and you should be okay.

Should is the key-word there.

Science has proven to us that people like what they like, and changing it is a sure-fire way to cause problems. And once people make a decision that they like something, they will grow to actively dislike anything else. That’s why you get rabid Apple vs Windows fanboys. (Read The science of fanboyism by The Tech Report.)

At its crux, that is why bigwigs tell you not to redesign your site. Not because new layouts are bad, but because people are used to your site and, probably, like it the way it is. That tells me that when you make a change, and you will, you need to do it in a way that looks similar enough that while things have changed, the ‘feel’ remains the same.

The feel of a site is a terribly nebulous thing. The ‘feel’ has to be right for you, because if you don’t like your own site, you’ll never use it. The ‘feel’ has to be right for your target audience or they’ll never use it. Anyone who tells you they know all the answers, by the way, is lying. There’s a reason big companies hire folks to do tons of studies before changing the UX (User eXperience) of a site, after all. Generally speaking, as Matt Mullenweg said recently, “The software is wrong, not the people.”

Have you ever felt like a fool because you can’t remember the 16 special clicks and drags to get MS Word to do something? It’s not you, it’s the product. Your website is your product, and if even one person complains and says ‘This isn’t right!’ you need to stop and think about it. I’m not saying you have to change it, but I am saying you have to consider their point of view. Get out of your monkey house.

What it all comes down to is simple. If your site isn’t easy for your intended audience to use and understand, they won’t. If you change your site to something new and different and they don’t like it, they’ll leave. You need to understand what makes your users tick, and cater to them without kowtowing to their every whim. Sometimes learning that balance will make you take the wrong path. That’s okay. Mistakes are things to learn from, so don’t fear them.

On the subject of ‘big’ changes, there is a time and a place for them. When you look at how Amazon, Apple and Microsoft looked in 1999 and compare them to 2011, you feel like they’re the same sites, only grown up.

1999

2011

For the most part, color schemes are the same and so is layout. But if you were to jump from one to the other, it would feel like a big change. In reality, the move from 1999 to 2011 was all done in steps, slowly and carefully, so as not to jar the user too much out of their comfort zone.

This doesn’t just apply to site design. The GAP logo changed recently, and was universally panned. It was so bad that GAP actually had to change their logo back. Pepsi changed their logo and got more hate than Coke did for New Coke. (Actually I don’t know if anyone cared about the Pepsi logo. We drink Coke in my house.)

Some of the changes were pretty bold, and they all drive home the point that you do need to make changes. But they also remind us that the changes must be recognizable. “People just like it better that way.”

26 July, 2011
Get Out of The Monkey House

“I have this refrain about the monkey house at the zoo. When you first enter into the monkey house at the zoo, you think, ‘Oh my god this place stinks!’ And then after you’re there for 20 minutes you think, ‘it’s not so bad’ and after you’re there for an hour it doesn’t smell at all. And anyone entering the monkey house freshly thinks, ‘this stinks!’ You’ve been living in the monkey house.” (Quoth Tim Gunn, from the 2008 finale of Project Runway)

Bless Tim Gunn for saying it out loud. Sometimes you’re too deep in the monkey house to realize your idea stinks. This isn’t to say it’s a bad idea, but you’ve spent so long working on the project you lose your perspective, and can’t see how it looks to someone from the outside.

Being able to keep your mind open and see things from the perspective of the programmer as well as the end user is difficult, to put it mildly. When you write and design something, you know where you’re starting from and where you’re ending. You understand, instinctively, the journey it takes to get where you’re going.

This is true of webdesign as well as programming.

For me, I know how to navigate my sites and find what I’m looking for, because I know where to find everything! I have no problem popping around to where I need to be, to do what I need, because I built everything and I’m as familiar with it as I am my closet. Possibly more-so. So when someone mentioned, after I did a redesign, that they had just learned where everything was, and they would have to re-learn it all, I smacked my head and shouted, “Why is it always monkeys?”(That’s a Kim Possible joke.)

This sent me on a three day documentation binge, where I struggled to explain things about BuddyPress that I took for granted. Like how you edit your profile, what ‘activity’ was, and how you sent a PM. It doesn’t help me that BuddyPress and WordPress are in a weird in-between stage of their Admin Bar relationship (I’ve beta-tested Boone Gorges’s new code for it, and it looks lovely). But knowing well that I’ll implement it and be comfortable using it, regardless of my user base, drove me to sit down and explain.

It was in those explanations that I realized things were wrong. Things weren’t intuitive the way I’d designed them, not for someone new, and the layout could be better. It smelled bad, and by the way, did I forget to look at the site in FireFox? The only way to chase off those monkeys is to find a way to look at everything with fresh eyes. For me, I get there by documenting with pictures and explaining a process to someone with no basis. I get there by finding a specific error, bouncing between three browsers and wondering what the heck happened to my CSS?

I have to thank a teacher, Ms. Gallagher, who sat us down one day in Life Science class and asked this question: “Pretend an alien has come to earth and asks you ‘What does salt taste like?’ They have no concept of sweet and salt, they have never eaten any human food. How do you explain it?”

I was flummoxed then, and to a degree, I am now. The answer was that you cannot explain things without something to compare it to. The human mind, at least, needs an analogy, or a basis, to stand on and build their new concepts from. Even the greatest genius in the history of pyhsics said that explaining things in laymans terms was not simple at all, which when you think about, is a hell of a lesson to toss at a bunch of hormonal 12 year-old kids, but boy did that lesson stick!

Understanding the ‘why’ behind a website may not be as complicated as physics but the basic tenant, that a person is going to look at your website and ask ‘Why do I need to do that?’ and ‘How do I do this?’ we can accept as givens. Thankfully we don’t need to subscribe to the intense level of intellectual honesty that Richard Feynman does with science. We can say ‘BuddyPress groups are similar to FaceBook pages.’ We can assume that people have a basic concept of what a forum is. We can trust people know that when there is a text box for ‘Username’, people will fill in their user name.

And yet. These are all learned skills that we have developed over years of using the internet. Twitter makes perfect sense to some of use, while others need to read mom, this is how twitter works.

The deeper you get into your own work, be it a website, physics, or painting, you have to remember you are in your monkey house. Sometimes the house is clearly visible and understandable, sometimes the house locks you in. Be that as it may, get out.

18 July, 2011
Introducing HEO

We all know that SEO is ‘Search Engine Optimization.’ I humbly suggest we pay better attention to HEO – Human Experience Optimization.

After you spend hours and hours optimizing your site for search engines, you should sit back and think about how the humans who are reading your site. This should be blindingly obvious to everyone, but more and more we hear about how you should make your URLs SEO friendly, or your post excerpts/slugs/format/meta-data the best to get highly ranked in Google. At a certain point, you’re missing the goal of a website.

A website is not for search engines, a website is for humans.

Humans like to be able to find what they want relatively painlessly. They like to know when something was written (or when whatever it’s about took place). They like to be able to search, sort, surf and select. They like to know weird things. It’s your job to make sure that when a user hits your site, they stay.

Fonts

I’ve mentioned before that font choices matter on your site. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about fonts is that people have to be able to read them. A lot of sites make their fonts very small, which force viewers to hit Ctrl-+. This is one of Jakob Nielsen’s pet peeves. Users should be able to control their font size, but you should also set your font starting size to something legible.

Imagine my surprise when I went to a site and saw this:

I had to zoom in to read. That font is set to font: 11px/13px "Lucida Grande"..... Just by changing it to 12px/20px it was easier to read, but to make it a perfect starting point, it should really be 14px/20px. You’ll need to balance on your font choice with the size, though, as too-thick and too-thin fonts are equally painful for people to read.

Colors

I’m in my mid-thirties with the best worst vision you’ll find before someone gets classified legally blind (that said, I have fantastic night vision). I cannot read black backgrounds with white text for more than a few seconds without getting after-images. I’m not in the minority of the world. There’s a reason books, eReaders, newspapers and magazines tend to print dark text on light backgrounds, and it’s not just the cost. More people can read that setup. On top of that, don’t use background images. The busier the background, the more difficult it will be to read and you’ll draw the attention away from the text.

The colors on your site need to be easy to read, and not strain the eyes.

Layout

Did you know that users tend to read to the left? This sort of flow makes sense when you consider that most languages are read left-right. Jakob Neilsen points out that people spend “more than twice as much time looking at the left side of the page as they did the right.” (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, April 6, 2010: Horizontal Attention Leans Left) Not only that, but people actually tend to read pages in a pretty distinct F-shaped pattern. (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, April 17, 2006: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content)

So how do you best layout your website? I tend to think people read content better if it’s on the left, so I put the body of my text left and the sidebars right. I also take into account that newspapers and magazine break up text into columns for readability reasons, and set a fixed width to my site. That choice is somewhat controversial among my friends, but I like to look at the iPad and Kindle for examples as to why you want to not allow forever-width pages. Monitors are big, browser windows can be huge, but in the human head, eyes are spaced in a certain way. Making your page’s content too wide is a drain.

Page Length

There used to be a concept of ‘The fold’, which was basically that people didn’t scroll down on webpages in the early days of the web, so if they didn’t see your important content on the top half of your page (i.e. above the fold), they weren’t going to see it at all. It’s 2011. People know to scroll down a page.(Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, March 22, 2010: Scrolling and Attention) But you still need to make sure your site has the most important content ‘above’ the fold.

Where’s the fold these days, though? Monitor size is a lot more variable today than it was in 1995, and the break-point on a page is getting pretty difficult to figure out. Unlike a newspaper, where the ‘fold’ is pretty obvious (unless you’re the Chicago Sun Times), you have to take a pretty good guess at where the ‘top’ of your site is. Oddly, this is a lot easier with the iPad, which currently is my benchmark for ‘the fold.’

Keeping that in mind, page length matters! I try to keep each post no more than 1200 words, because of human attention span. If I happen to dip longer, I’ll consider breaking the post into multiples.

Permalinks/URLS

Samuel Wood (aka Otto) said it simply:

Humans care about dates. Leaving a date identifier (like the year) out
of the URL is actually de-optimizing the site for humans.

Not everything should have a date, mind you. Resources like WikiPedia or other sites that act as repositories for static, timeless material (like a book), certainly do not need date stamps. Deciding if your site needs to include the year in the URL (like I do here), or not at all (like I do elsewhere), is something you need to think long and hard about. If you’re making a ‘traditional’ blog, or a newspaper, or some site that acts as a repository for time-based information, the answer is simple: Yes you do.

In addition to sorting out if you need dates or not on your site, you have to think about the post format. I’m a huge proponent of pretty URLs, so I tend to lean to custom crafted URLs. On WordPress, I always review the permalink and, if I think it could be better shorter, I do so. MediaWiki defaults to whatever you want to name the page and puts that in as your page title(Oddly you can only override this with {{DISPLAYTITLE:Custom title}} , which has weird results in searches.), but WordPress uses the ‘title’ of your post and makes that your page title.

This is pretty easy to change, though. Just click on edit and make it shorter (which I strongly suggest you do in most cases).

What else?

I could go on and on. Like how you shouldn’t use too many ads (and whatever you use, they shouldn’t be bigger than your post content!), don’t use flashing images/text, and keep in mind your audience! What are your hot-button topics for making your site human friendly?

27 June, 2011
The Truth In Presentation

By now, the internet knows about how the Gay Girl in Damascus was a hoax and Paula Brooks of Lez Get Real is a straight man. These aren’t the first people to be caught ‘faking it’ to tell a story. In fact, both Tom MacMaster (‘Amina’ from Gay Girl in Damascus) and Bill Graber (‘Paula’) claimed to do what they did with the best intentions. They had seen the way gays are treated and felt that, as men, their point of view would be dismissed. Where this crosses the line from ‘best intentions’ and wanders right into out and out deception, however, is where they begin lying to cover their tracks.

Look, this isn’t new. George Eliot (who wrote Silas Marner) was a woman. James Chartrand of Men with Pens fame is actually a woman. George Eliot did it to protect her personal life, James Chartrand did it to make a living. (Her story about the whys, hows and repercussions is pretty awesome.) There’s a long history of people using pen names, and a lot are mentioned in Carmela Ciuraru’s new book Nom De Plume: A Secret History of Pseudonyms.

Pretending to be someone else is draining. You’re constantly aware of pronouns and speech patterns. Do I sound like who I am supposed to be? I’ve done it before as a social experiment in college, to see if someone can ‘fake’ being a man online so well that no one would know.(Of note – this was in the early 90s, so things were pretty new then.) I did it so well that, when I carried on doing it for a few more years, there was a hilarious point where I was flirting with my girlfriend (she knew the truth behind the ‘character’) on a public forum, and someone felt it was important to tell me that she was both taken and a lesbian.(This may be why so many people think I’m a man online… I guess I ‘write male.’)

Using a pen name is something we all accept and can understand. It’s when you delve into the complete fake persona that the world gets a little hinky. ‘Paula’ was a deaf lesbian, who had a girlfriend, kids, and a father who answered the phone and ‘interpreted’ for her (most people think the ‘father’ was actually Graber). At some point, ‘Paula’ killed off her girlfriend. And ‘Amina’? She told in depth details about her parents, how she hid in secret rooms (ala Anne Frank), and how most of her family had to leave the country.

These people became deceitful when they crafted complex dramas for their fake lives, and wrapped in layers upon layers of excuses and explanations as to why they can’t meet you.(My excuse is the truth – I’m really shy and nervous around meeting new people.) The bigger the lie, the more likely they are to get caught. ‘Amina’ was caught because her blog claimed she was arrested and no one in Damascus could find information on her.

And this is where the technology aspect of the drama unfolds. This becomes a post about technology and not just a rant about deception when you realize how careful you need to be to keep up the lies. If ‘Paula’ left a comment on my blog, her IP address would be logged. If she, subsequently, said ‘I’m in Amsterdam this week and…’ I could look at her IP and sort out where she really was. If she was using something like The Tor Project (aka Onion routing) to hide her location, I would be suspicious.

Thankfully, for people like me who spend time worrying about impersonators, you can peel back the onion layers of Tor and deduce who people are. Currently, there is no 100% reliable way to back-trace an IP through all the Tor layers, but simply the use of it on common, casual sites would be enough to raise eyebrows and some risks.(If you’re really interested in tracing Tor/Onion users, read Practical Onion Hacking) In 2007, a German blogger acting as a Tor providor was arrested because someone used his service to download child porn.

Why would someone want to use Tor at all? Tor is great for doing things you aren’t supposed to be doing, and while a lot of the time that means impersonation, trolling and general internet asshollery, it also can be used to allow information to be posted from places where a repressive government doesn’t permit, or where it would be socially unacceptable if you were found out. Like if ‘Amina’ had been real, her use of Tor would make sense. If you really were a persecuted lesbian in a hostile environment, you would use Tor to make your blog posts so the local government couldn’t track you down at your house. Assuming they don’t know how to hack a Tor setup.

Besides the technical aspects, there’s a lot of social engineering that goes on behind impersonation. ‘Paula’ turned herself in after constant questions from the news(I should mention that the Paula Brooks story is even more intricate and crazy than originally though! Bilerico reports on the inconsistencies and the more we learn the less we seem to know about the ‘real’ person behind Paula Brooks.), but ‘Amina’ was found out only after red flags were raised when people tried to help the poor arrested girl. In both cases, there were enough holes in their stories that people began to question the ‘facts’ as well as the motives. There is a difference between using a pen name to protect yourself (or to advance your career) and creating a whole persona. The difference between James Chartrand and someone like JT LeRoy is that James didn’t create an elaborate backstory, James just wrote under a pseudonym. It’s most likely that no one ever asked if James was really a man, they just assumed. There are a lot of ways, legally, to do that. Get a good lawyer you can trust, and they can act as your proxy in all things. Now no one has to know.

Law & Order has done a couple episodes based on this phenomena. Some are about the people who use plastic surgery to hide themselves, another on the woman who hired an actor to ‘play’ her male persona and was betrayed, and so on and so forth. It makes for good TV, I’ll admit, but the truth is that all of those people were found out, and many times before their ‘death.’

I think the most ironic thing to come from the whole mess is this:

In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian. (Source: Washington Post – ‘Paula Brooks,’ editor of ‘Lez Get Real,’ also a man)

Between the technical and social engineering weaknesses, using a pen-name to craft an entirely new identity is something that can get your credibility shot. There’s a reason we leave false identities up to people like WitSec or the CIA. It’s hard, and the costs of being found out are devastating.

20 June, 2011
The Redistribution of Apps

Mac is going virtual. They’ve finally agreed they’re a hardware company (yay) and they’re trying to make it easier to install software. No longer will you go to the store, but you will logon to the App Store and download. Apparently the App Store is already bigger than Best Buy. The big news of the month was iCloud (and iTunes Match), where you can sync your data across multiple devices. Wirelessly. Okay, that is pretty cool. But the announcements didn’t get everything right.

The concept of mobile redistribution of applications is not a new one, but Apple, as always, is attempting to do it more elegantly than before. At the very least, the ability to sync (for free) my documents among multiple devices at once is worth the price of admission. I like to write on my iPad and my laptop, after all. While iCloud isn’t out to the public yet (Lion, the next OS 10.7, comes out in July, so I would expect iCloud by Christmas), we can speculate on how it will handle the sharing of more than just data.

Here’s what I think they need to have to make this a winner:

Torrent-style downloads

I have two laptops and three iOS devices. That means I have to run upgrades multiple times, and some of these are pretty big. Do you know what happens if your net craps out in the middle of a 200meg download of iOS 4? You get to start over! The new Lion OS is a 4G install, and it’s a disk-less revolution. Great, that means it’s cheaper ($30 vs $130), but that also means I have to download it for each computer I need to upgrade, and I have to pray my net doesn’t blow up in the middle. Which brings me to…

Backup to Disk

I know we’re going diskless, and that’s great, but if I legitimately buy a product, I should be able to sneaker-net if I want to. Frankly, it’s going to be faster than downloading if I have to upgrade more than 10 computers. I won’t bottle neck things with 10 concurrent 4G downloads all at once. While you can’t really do that with the iOS stuff, I wish I could use one download for all my iDevices. Of course, with the new idea of AirDrop we could…

Copy Between Computers

Why not come up with a way to flag up to 5 computers as your ‘home network’ and, if they’re all on the same IP range, let them share installs? So I download Lion, and then AirDrop it to my other computer. Done! To a degree, it looks like iCloud will be able to do this, but it seems to only be for data. For photos, music, documents, etc that’s great. Those aren’t all of what I do. I write code. What about webpages I work on? I like to have those backed up too. In fact, the best way to do this would be….

iCloudShare!

If I have a Time Capsule, why not let me store all my installers there, register my computers on TC, and then have a local repository of my paid for installs, so I can download them at any time? Think of it as having your own personal little cloud where all your stuff is there, and then when you want to re-install, off you go! Mind you, I already know from experience that if I restore from backup between computers, I can copy over all my apps and preferences. With the new iCloud they’re working on this for iOS apps, which is something they certainly can do. Then you can bring in ….

MyCloud

The real replacement for MobileMe would be MyCloud. Work with ISPs so you can plug a Time Capsule (now renamed Cloud Maker) into your network hub, and it automatically makes it so you can connect your registered computers no matter where they are. I would restrict full backups to LAN (local area network – i.e. only at home) only, but you can sync docs and whatever else you want no matter where you are (like DropBox, only at home).

So what do you say, Apple?

16 June, 2011