Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: essay

  • Mailbag: Delete My Account, Please

    Mailbag: Delete My Account, Please

    Becuase I’m active in the support forums, people find me and ask all sorts of questions. Like Charlie.

    I want to totally delete my word press account. I will PAY you to do this. Why? Because I worked for 15 minutes on the original word press website but found it too difficult for me and chose to go with a super easy Wix.com website, which is now published and works well. In searches I come up under wordpress only and my deleted wordpress website is still there. I want people to be able to find my wix site. I hope there is a way to TOTALLY delete my word press account. I will PAY you to do it.

    Sorry, Charlie, no can do. I checked his email and his domain that he put in his email and it was on WordPress.com so I sent him the link on .com for How to delete your site.

    I will note, I am sorry he wants to use Wix.com, but on some levels it is far simpler than WordPress (yes, I said it). It’s drag, drop, and done, and looks great on desktops. Mobile? That’s another story. But I had a paint-by-numbers GeoCities account back in the day, so I really don’t have room to talk about ugly first websites.

    The story doesn’t end here. Charlie asked me to do it for him.

    Even if he was a customer at my company, I would tell him no. I would send him directions on how to do it but I would not delete it for him. I don’t delete customer’s sites or data (unless the data is a Terms violation). Hell, even with hacked content, I back it up elsewhere first. Deleting someone’s data is an absolute, 100%, last resort. You should never ever do it. There’s no going back.

    Then Charlie asked me again.

    I suspect his issue was that he was really frustrated and wanted everything to die in a fire. Which I totally understand, but amidst all your anger, you need to take a deep breath and follow the directions. And, when someone tells you “I don’t work for that company, but I found out how to do it. Here you go!” perhaps you can say “Thank you.”

    Just a thought.

  • Turning It Off And On Again

    Turning It Off And On Again

    Apple’s watchOS 2.0 came out on Monday Sept 21, and I was one of the unlucky ones who had a problem. All of the new ‘native’ apps crashed.

    If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the original Apple Watch didn’t allow apps to really run on the watch. They ran on the phone and you had to use Bluetooth to connect for data. Now, with watchOS 2, the apps can load locally and use wifi on the Watch itself, making them faster. Exciting times for all. As I explained to my wife, all the Apple default native apps worked fine. The 3rd party ones did not. They all crashed.

    Also my battery life went to shit. So I did what one logically does. I rebooted my Watch. That didn’t help. So I went to Google and Reddit (yes, Reddit) and I dug around and found what everyone else had done to fix it:

    • Unpair and re-pair
    • restore from backup of 2.0
    • Setup as new
    • Let it sit overnight
    • Uninstall apps from phone, reboot phone and watch, reinstall apps on phone, reinstall apps on watch
    • Reinstall from my 1.0.1 backup

    None of that worked for me, so I filed a ticket with Apple support at about 7:15am. They called me back at 7:30 (which was nifty) and we discussed what I’d tried. They walked me through things, I confirmed I’d tried all of that, and detailed what I’d seen happen. Finally the woman apologized, said she didn’t know why it couldn’t work, and asked if I wanted to mail it in to Apple for a replacement.

    I didn’t. I was sure this wasn’t a hardware bug. I asked if I could take it to an Apple Store, and she said yes, making me an appointment at the store for the weekend (the earliest time) but I work .5 miles from a store so I planned to head down after lunch to have a go.

    I ended up not doing that.

    I work in tech. I’m used to troubleshooting. I went over everything I’d done. I checked and double checked that I was sure I did it right. I went back to the Reddit thread and looked to see if anything new had been posted. Sure enough, there was something. A Zen man in the MacRumors forum had an answer:

    • Doing a iphone backup with encryption of data on itunes.
    • Delete content of iphone.
    • Restore from a backup.
    • All native apps are working fine!

    While I couldn’t say that was a ‘great’ idea, I figured I had nothing left to lose. Since I always keep a spare cable for my phone and my watch in my bag, I connected them both and tried.

    And yes. It worked. Immediately I canceled the appointment with the Apple Help Gurus and started a live chat with them to explain how I fixed it. I also contacted the two app companies I’d been chatting with about it and made sure to confirm on Reddit that it worked for me. Because I will never be DenverCoder9.

    The debugging process with the Apple Watch is convoluted. I had a similar headache when I couldn’t get the WiFi working properly. I ended up having to disconnect WiFi from my phone and then re-add it for the Watch to pick it up. It’s not really the best experience, and there’s not a lot of ways to debug things.

    While I do like the Apple Watch, the black-box technology aspect of the iPhone is increased since it’s, literally, impossible to use the watch without a phone. You have to both attempt to fix things on the watch and the phone, without having a way to determine which is the broken one. And a ‘reinstall’ is not really the friendliest thing. Had I not had a handy laptop, I would have had to do an iCloud restore, which would kill my activity history (something I’d already accidentally wiped out).

    The problem comes back to meaningful error messages. All I could say was “The app crashes and kicks me back to the home screen.” Apple faces the same issues we all do with errors. How do we explain things in an informative way that allows people to react to the errors and know what to do next, when there is no way to gauge their skill set? Sadly, Apple’s route is “Take it to a professional.”

    We can’t all do that with our products, and more often than not it leads to frustration and things like ‘Bendgate,’ where people just rant and make a product seem worse when it’s really only a very small percentage of those who are impacted.

    Is there an answer? No. But it’s just one more thing to consider when we discuss elegant failures.

  • An Ad Network You Can’t Use

    An Ad Network You Can’t Use

    Amidst the kerfluffle of Peace being pulled from the App Store after a couple days, there was a mention of how it also blocked the Deck Network ads.

    Most people in tech have seen Deck ads, but few outside the ‘hard core’ geeks know of it, and it’s for good reason. It’s an invite only ad system that makes ads that don’t slow your site down.

    Manually curating ads, they restrict users to show one and only one ad on the site, perhaps not on all pages of a site, but just the one ad.

    In essence, buying a month on The Deck gives you an exclusive showing on three percent of all the pages viewed for that month across all fifty-two sites and services. And there won’t be Google or other third-party ads diluting your exposure. The Deck ad is the only ad on the page.

    It’s a phenomenal amount of work. And that would be why only fifty-odd sites are in. Peace happens to be on that network. But let’s put aside the whole ethics and morality of ad-blocking for a day.

    The idea behind the Deck Network is everything I want an ad network to be. They pride themselves of relevancy to their network and only show ads relevant to the network. They only show ads they’re okay with seeing. As mentioned before, it’s an incredible amount of work, but it’s exactly what you’d want to see in an ad network. Ads that people would rather be relevant than, nessecarily, make money.

    That’s really kind of the same reason as my I like Project Wonderful so much. With Project Wonderful, though, the quality of the ads is a little crowd sourced. If enough of us report an ad, it will likely get pulled but it will always be reviewed. With The Deck, it’s the other way. Nothing gets in that isn’t vetted first.

    The amount of work that goes into that is exactly why, every time anyone says “I’ll pay you to put my ad on your site” I say “No thanks.” The whole mess of running my own ads, having them expire and rotate and change, is a hassle I don’t want to mess with. I don’t want to spend my time running ads, and I’m a one-woman-show here, folks.

    The balance between making money and having relevant ads is tricky. I think, for the tech world, The Deck gets it right. But I doubt any of us will ever be on it.

  • Fetch As Google Failed

    Fetch As Google Failed

    Once upon a time, I got an email from Google recently saying that Fetch as Google was failing for ipstenu.org.

    I eyed them like they had a fifth eye. I was on ipstenu.org. I was on halfelf.org. They were clearly wrong. So I went to Google Webmasters Tools and checked out what was going on. I had a whole page that said “Temporarily unreachable.” I gave it a day. Sometimes that’s just Google being weird. But no.

    Google's error - temporarily unreachable

    After cursing a little while, I turned off all the plugins on the site and switched to the default theme. And the fetch worked. So I turned them on one at a time until it stopped.

    And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that even though it’s been ten years of WordPress, when someone asks you to make sure you go through the normal debugging steps, you do it.

    • flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches.
    • deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin (read “How to deactivate all plugins when you can’t log in to wp-admin” if you need help). Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems. Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old
    • switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme to rule out any theme-specific problems. If you can’t log in to change themes, you can remove the theme folders via FTP so the only one is `twentyfifteen`. That will force your site to use it.
    • manually upgrading. When all else fails, download a fresh copy of the latest.zip file of WP (top right on this page) to your computer, and use that to copy up. You may need to delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders on your server. Read the Manual Update directions first.

    So yes. Do try it.

  • To Block or Not To Block

    To Block or Not To Block

    Ad blockers. Okay.

    I have ads in this site. I have donation buttons. I make more via the ads, naturally, and I use the money to offset the absolute frivolity it is to run a web server. I also use ad blockers.

    And I also understand the worry of ad blockers on iOS because I see the possible loss of income.

    But.

    My ads are not obtrusive. I hope. I test them a lot on browsers. I don’t display them on smaller ones. I am picky about the ads. I don’t have pop-up/lightbox ads or alerts that congenially prompt people to sign up for a mailing list or try a service. I hate those things. They get between me and the content I’m trying to read. They prevent me from visiting sites. And if you’ve tried to click away an ad like that on your iPhone, you know my pain. Let’s not even get into the accessibility problems.

    No, ethically I chose not to host the ads I hate.

    And I lose money because of that.

    A lot of money. Probably a hundred a month, easy. And I’m personally okay with that, because I can afford this website. I have the money to keep it up, and for what it costs me, it’s cheaper than other hobbies. It’s helped turn a hobby into a career.

    But the same cannot be said of all websites. Many need those ads to survive and flourish.

    So in the balance between content and money, with accessibility and speed on the line, what is the right answer? Who is more important? Where is the right path to earn money while showing ads and not pissing off readers?

    And I’m not the only person who has trouble with this balance. The developers of Peace, an iOS ad blocker, pulled his product after two days, saying it didn’t feel good. He doesn’t like being the person who gets to decide what ads are right and wrong. That said, Marco is still a proponent of blocking for the ethical reasons of knowing who’s tracking you.

    Disclosure time! I use an blocker on my computer. It’s µBlock, which Taylor Swift also uses:

    But the truth is I actually block few things. It’s not that I want a blocker but I want an unobstructor tool. Just like we despised pop-ups, I hate the following things:

    1. Ads that redirect my iPhone to the App Store to buy your stupid game
    2. Ads that cover my entire browser window, forcing me to click away
    3. Ads that autoplay, making me scroll the hell around and figure out what I have to turn off
    4. Ads that popup in the background, making me address them before I can read

    If you can’t see a trend, let me explain it for you. I hate all things that pull me away from your content.

    The New York Times has reported on this: Enabling of Ad Blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 Prompts Backlash

    “When ad blockers became the most downloaded apps in the App Store, it forced publishers and advertisers to rethink the role that advertising plays on the web,” said David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design.

    That illustrates the issue. It’s not that we hate ads. Most of us understand them as a necessary evil. We pay for Netflix to get fewer ads. We pay for cable to get higher quality shows… in theory. We get ads with free TV because it’s free and has to make money. We get ads on newspapers and in magazines because they are surprisingly low cost for what they are. Ditto comic books.

    We know and we understand why ads are there. We rebel because the ads make it impossible to get at the content. The thing we came for.

    I don’t have an answer. I know that, sometimes, I actually do click on ads that interest me. I also know that most of the time people don’t click on ads. I know that many sites need ads to keep going and to keep delivering content. But I know what we’re doing, making ads more and more in your face, is not the right way to win.

    Right now I have no iOS ad blocker. I haven’t found one I like yet. I’m sure that will change.

  • Stupid Easy

    Stupid Easy

    You have made yet-another stupidly easy plugin. I love it!

    My buddy James said that after testing a plugin I wrote for WordPress that has no settings.

    Frankly those are my favorite plugins, the ones where you install them and walk away because they do one thing, they do it well, and you’re done.

    A plugin without options means it does the one thing, I don’t have to decide how I want it to work, and it just goes. Now, at the same time, a black box plugin with no information can be complicated and tricky, which means you have to sit and make the decisions thoughtfully at the beginning.

    The first question I ask is “Who is it for?”

    I love W3TC, but dear god is it complicated. It’s doing a lot of things and while it does them all very well, it’s hard to understand what all the settings mean and how they all need to work together. When I set about adopting a Varnish plugin, it was picked by my coworkers specifically because it was simple and it worked the majority of the time. Can you break it with other plugins and themes? Sure. That’s the nature of WordPress interoperability. But at the same time, it works without user interaction.

    That was the key, we felt. A plugin that just runs, no user interface needed, just let it go. This was simple, this was easy, and this was direct.

    Since then, I’ve added in two ‘options.’ One is the ability to define your true IP address. This is for people who are behind proxy services like CloudFlare. The way a Varnish purge works, is it sends a command to the domain name. If your domain is handled by CloudFlare’s servers, then it gets messy. The second was a ‘purge all’ button on the toolbar, which let you manually flush the entire site.

    Those two settings are hard and easy to access. The defining the IP can only be done via editing your wp-config.php or via command line. Why? The majority of people don’t need it. It’s actually often a latency issue when you cache a cache with a proxy, so it’s not really the best idea in the first place. The purge button is limited only to the admins of a site, because they’re the only ones who should be flushing the cache for an entire site anyway.

    Does this work for ‘everyone’? No. No it doesn’t. Of the 6000 people who like it just fine, there are about a dozen who want things differently. They want a settings page, where they can allow more people to flush cache and define the IP. They want a per-page flush button. They want better error reporting.

    I’m with them on the last one but the others… well it’s interesting. Adding more complications will certainly expand the usability of the plugin, but is that the goal of this plugin? No. In many ways, it would be much better to make a second, different, plugin. Maybe an add-on. Call it “Varnish Advanced” for those people who need more power.

    But the majority need the simple because I knew my target audience were the people who didn’t know or want to know the technical stuff. I handed them a plugin that works in the majority of use cases. I made sure it handled the majority of situations. And I made it so they could just install and walk away.

    I do agree that it needs a little better error reporting, but even that has to be handled carefully. You can’t just hand an end-user an error without simultaneously giving them a direct way to correct it. And no ‘Talk to your host.’ is not a fix. A fix means the user can do something (hopefully simple) to correct a problem. Now, my ‘edit the wp-config file’ fix is not super simple for everyone, but at the same time it serves an important purpose. It makes someone think about how big a change is and what it means.

    Knowing my users means I know they need that stop to think, and it means I know they will think.