Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: essay

  • Your Website is Work

    Your Website is Work

    I spend a lot of time teaching people, and also giving directions (which I seem to have to send out repeatedly) only to be faced with a remark that doing all these things to manage a website is hard and time consuming and complicated and painful. It takes a lot of effort for me not to reply like this:

    Life IS pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something

    Of course it’s hard. Malcom Gladwell, in his book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” posits that it takes 10,000 hours of work to become an expert at something. Anything. Now, believe that or not (and yes, some people are naturally gifted so maybe they can do these things faster or achieve an even better expert level than you), the fact remains that we all had to learn skills.

    What’s interesting is this is nothing new. We know this. We’ve known it for years that we have to put in the sweat equity. But people look at a website as being “easier” and think it’s really all a ‘set it and forget it.’ But it’s not. It’s never been that way. Making a website and walking away is dangerous not because you might get hacked (which you might), but because people will walk away when there’s nothing new.

    At WordCamp Chicago, I talked about this. There’s a difference between how someone like Ron Popeil sells things and how Julia Child did. No one can argue she wasn’t successful, but she, like Chris Lema sell you on yourself, rather than ‘You need this one thing to be a success.’ If I stick to my food analogy, Emeril sells things but Alton Brown sells you skills.

    This just comes back to the basic understanding of needing skills, some skills, to keep your website up and running. We’re not all going to be hard core coders, nor should we be, but we do need a modicum of technical savvy to use the tools. Our technology gets more complicated, and while I know WordPress is concerned with that, even plain HTML is complicated to figure out that first time. The bar is there, and you have to master jumping it, or even peeking over it, to get through your day.

    A website is work. The health of your website is directly proportional to the work you put in, and as we all know…

    If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything.
    “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”

    I would like to propose we all, for 2014, be shamelessly honest (to steal a phrase from my company). Be upfront, direct, and truthful. When people say “Is WordPress easy?” we say “It can be, but remember, no matter how easy a tool is, your website is still going to be work.” I would like us to stop selling our tools because they’re so easy a caveman can do it, and start selling truth about how it’s being used. “Everything gets easier the more you use it.” and “The more familiar you get with this, the easier everything becomes.”

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.This is not to say that our tools can’t be easy and shouldn’t be easier, but we have to face the facts that no matter how easy we make WordPress, or Drupal, or any tool, our presence on the Internet will remain work. And work means that sometimes you’re going to have to learn new, harder-for-you, skills to keep up with everything, or spend money to hire someone to do things.

    No one can tell you how easy something will be for you, and I think we need to stop telling people “Don’t worry, it’ll be easy.” When I tell someone they can fix a hacked site, I tell them they can without losing their content, and while it can be overwhelming and scary, if they can copy files between folders, they can do this. By being honest about the work that goes into your website, the more prepared they will be for the inevitable moments of pain and difficulty, and the easier it will be for them to solve those problems.

  • No Contact Information

    No Contact Information

    Semi related to the theme shakeup is my new business card. My old ones had my name and my email, but they were kind of cute and made in a rush before WordCamp San Francisco 2012, where I was pushing to get a new job and needed them.

    One of my personal rules about a business card is that the back should be writable. I always like to write on the back where I met someone. Like I have a card from Laura Legendary, and on the back it has a scribble of “WCLV’13 – accessibility – REDO SLIDES!” which tells me where I met her, what we talked about, and what a big take away was. My extant cards had a sketch (by me, not the awesome one by Ben Dunkle that I will treasure forever) and some basic information with my personal URL and my techy one. Oh and my email. Which resulted in a lot more email than I wanted at my personal account.

    Bad call on my part. Then I read Bob’s post OMG! I Can’t Find Your Email on Your Business Card. He talks about how the times are changing and how if someone wanted to find him, they would Google “BobWP” and find him! So really all they need is his URL. This is true, and when I revisited what I wanted on a card, I thought “My name, my silly titles, a URL, and a ‘not available for contract work’ note.”

    That last one was really important, since I’m just … not. I don’t like doing it, I don’t need to do it, and I won’t do it for most people. Now I know there are about five people going “But Mika, you do my website stuff!” Hey, there are exceptions. And the small group of people I do ‘consultant work’ for are part of why I don’t do more. I can’t and maintain my hobbies. Since I don’t need do, I don’t do it. But sometimes I do little tradsies. Like I did one for a friend recently who had a plugin break and she was lost. I knew what was wrong, walked her through fixing it, and she replied with an email a week later with the following design that just came to her:

    My new business card - name, URL, titles

    The photo (which is also the background on the new design) is one I took this summer outside my gym of a palm tree. She said it was cheerful and welcoming and established me as being in a warm place. She lives in upstate NY where she already has feet of snow this year, so it may be related. Now unlike Bob, I do put my name there, and on the back are two icons (Twitter and WordPress) above a simple word “ipstenu” but nothing more (leaving massive amounts of white space for notes).

    The one thing I left out was what I do. I mean, yes, I say “Half-Elf Support Rogue” and “DreamHost WordPress Guru” which should explain something, but the goal isn’t really to get more business, but to have a reply to those people who say “Have a card?” Maybe they’ll look at my site and buy an ebook, or whatever. But hey, now they know what’s up.

  • A New Utility

    A New Utility

    I’m more like Brian Gardner than I care to admit.

    I’m often dissatisfied by the feel of a site, my own included, and for a long time I’ve been ‘not quite right’ with the theme here on Half Elf. Oh, sure, it works, and I love the open whitespace, but … I wanted something else. Since I spend a lot of time looking at other sites, and especially Genesis Theme Devs, I had a vague idea of what I wanted. Even if I have no plans to change my site (and frankly I never plan this stuff) I want to be able to help people when they say “I want a theme that does this!”

    My checklist:

    • Less cartoony
    • Font Icons
    • Easy to configure front page sections

    Begin the hunt!

    This was a close race. I’ve been looking at the themes from Web Savvy Marketing for a while, and I was this close to taking one of those and editing it, when I thought “I don’t want a slider.” I will note that if the only thing bad I can say about a theme is that it has a slider, then that theme is doing something right. While I have an idea about that hunter theme or maybe Colin, none of them were quite right. They were all so close it hurt.

    My initial mockup design of my siteThen I stepped back and looked at my list again. Font Icons was easy, since I wrote Genericon’d after all, and everyone else had these photo backgrounds and neatly blocked sections that resized, and while I had something close, I kept screwing it up when I went to edit it. Maybe what I needed was something that stopped me from doing that?

    I doodled out a sketch of what I wanted: Title, menu, welcome box, Call to Action section, list of posts. That’s pretty much what it looked like from the top down, so I needed to find a simple, direct, theme that did all that and let me jiggle the CSS if I wanted to.

    Enter Carrie

    There’s this awesome person I know, Carrie Dils. She fell into my web of friends when she had a horrible experience at a meetup a year ago, and was told she wasn’t welcome to speak because she was someone’s competition. When that post hit my feed, retweeted by a friend I knew and trusted, I remember spinning my righteous anger into full gear and asking this (then) total stranger for information so I could pass it on to the Official WordPress Meetup Peoples.

    Before I did that, though, I read her posts (just to make sure she wasn’t on the wrong of this argument, hey, it happens) and found a delightful, intelligent, witty, and skilled theme dev. Themes! My Kryptonite! Carrie (perhaps accidentally) leveraged her situation into talking about collaboration at WordCamp San Francisco in 2013, and by that time she had ended up on my list of awesome people I want to hear from regularly about things.

    So I thought I’d pop over to her site and see what she’d done with Modern Portfolio (oddly the same theme I was using here at the time). I liked what she did, but it wasn’t quite right for me. I wasn’t enjoying the three column latest posts, since mine kept goofing the alignment with different length post titles and excerpts. But what should my wandering eyes appear? A link to her theme: Utility.

    It does what it says

    Photo of a palm tree near my gym Seriously it does exactly what it says. I picked a photo I took of a palm tree outside my office/gym earlier this year (which a friend was putting on cards for me for something else) and gave the green color a little kick. With built in button CSS classes, I was able to ditch my own and while I do have some of my own custom CSS going on, it’s because I have a couple plugins that need some extra love.

    In the end, it worked how I wanted to, and fast. Normally when I change my sites, I get to a point where I say ‘Eeeeh, close enough.’ With this one, though, I spent about two hours (while working, so really maybe an hour) moving widgets around, replacing a couple plugins, and then I said “Oh. That feels right!”

    This was, I feel, a choice that was well worth the work.

  • Don’t Say WordPress

    Don’t Say WordPress

    This time I’m absolutely 100% serious. Yes, I can be sarcastic and humorous when I talk about WP, but in this case, I’m being honest, and I promise you serious. I work for DreamHost as a WordPress Guru. I’ve been training people, and teaching them one at a time, and in doing so, confirmed a bias I’ve had for years: Tech Support goes blind sometimes.

    Man with tape over his mouthI don’t think this is really their fault. They have to handle 60 to 100 tickets a day about everything from “How do I reset passwords?” to “My Database is speaking in R’lyehian. HALP!” In order to get through that volume, they look for the key words, the important ones that tell them that this is the problem. And one of those keywords is “WordPress.”

    This is not great, because sometimes the problem isn’t WordPress. Like a PHP isn’t running, or the DB is missing, or a hundred other ‘It’s not WP’ problems. Naturally, that means a handful of tickets escalated to me aren’t WordPress at all, and I have to dig into it, and explain why.

    Before my coworkers think I’m pointing figures or blaming them, I really don’t. It’s a volume thing, and it’s got to do with how the customer presents the error. If they tell you “My WordPress site is down, I’m getting an error 500 on all pages!” you think “Oh, it’s probably .htaccess or they’re using too many resources.” Those are the most common causes after all. After that, you start getting messy and into weird things like “PHP memory is set too high, causing WP to crash” (which I didn’t even know you could do to be honest until November). And sometimes it really takes someone who knows how WordPress works to put the pieces together and determine “Oh! This is it!”

    However, hands down, when I’m working with Multisite and I see someone say “My wildcard subdomain isn’t working!” and the ‘error’ page they get is not a WordPress styled 404, I will tell them “DO NOT mention ‘WordPress’ or ‘Multisite’ to your host. Tell them this:” and here’s my copy/pasta:

    I’m trying to set up a wildcard subdomain, so anything.mydomain.com will pull the files from mydomain.com, however I’m having problems. I’m getting a server error instead of seeing the content on my site. Is there a trick to setting this up on this server?

    Now some hosts will look and say “Oh well you’re using WordPress, that’s why.” and I want to kick them a little. No, that’s not why. When you go to a subdomain and get the server error (like subdomain not found) or worse a DNS error (like Google saying the domain doesn’t exist), then the problem is not, and cannot be WordPress.

    That’s why it’s really important to present your error in the best way possible. The most accurate to the actual problem. Of course, if you have no idea, then you should just be honest and say what you did. If you really, truly, didn’t do anything, though, be prepared for someone to ask “Are you sure? You didn’t change a setting on the dashboard?” And sadly this is because a lot of people lie, a lot of people misrepresent the facts, and a lot of people play dumb. There is a very small percentage of people who will come back and say “You know, I may have done something, but I cannot remember what I did.” I like those people a lot. They’re my people. They admit they may have, but they can’t recall.

    WordPress FauxGo
    WordPress FauxGo (yes, this is the FAKE logo)
    Sadly all those people who aren’t quite as truthful screw it up for the rest of you, which is why there’s a time and a place to point at WordPress, and there’s a time and place to not do so.

    How do you know the difference? Well you have to think. Is what you’re trying to do something you do with a plugin or theme? Did it happen after you made a change to your site’s settings? It’s probably WordPress. However if you’re trying to do something outside of WordPress, like domain mapping or wildcard subdomains or creating a database? Then don’t mention WordPress.

    It’s counter-intuitive, I know. I’m telling you to be honest and say what you did or what you’re doing, but at the same time I’m telling you to leave out what might be important information. And that’s why you have to think. Is the error a WordPress error? Learning that takes a long time, so for a lot of rookies, the easier question is “Does the error happen without WordPress involved?”

    Let’s go back to that subdomain thing. Turn off Multisite. Does the same problem happen? Probably not WordPress. So don’t bring it up just yet. Now if they ask “What are you trying to do?” or why, tell them. “I’m trying to setup wildcard subdomains so I can use it with WordPress, but at this point, I’m not even getting a WordPress error.”

    Of course, it’s not always that simple. Like what if I told you that, on Multisite, not getting the CSS to display on subsites could be a server error? That’s when you get to say:

    My complex .htaccess rules don’t seem to be honored by my server. Is AllowOverride set to either All or Options All in the httpd.conf (or equivalent) file?

    Notice how I didn’t mention WordPress? This is because I know that if my .htaccess rules are right, the problem’s not me. Unless of course my host blocks that on purpose because they don’t want to let me run Multisite on a shared box.

    It’s not cut and dried, it’s not ‘If this, then that!’ But what it is, is education and thinking. As long as you can learn what is and is not WP, you’re on your way to knowing when you ask about WordPress problems, and when you ask about server problems.

  • Presentations Are Not Transcripts

    Presentations Are Not Transcripts

    After my review of SEO Slides (they’re pie, not cake), someone remarked to me that my slide decks are useless because I don’t put all the information on the slides. They pointed out, correctly, that my slides are image heavy with, at most, a couple lines of text (with one notable exception: WordCamp Chicago 2012), except my ‘Who am I?’ slide. I told them “Yes, this is true.” and then Tweeted about it.

    SlidesMy belief (and this is shared by a lot of people) is that slides should accent and relate to my talk. If you just need to read the slides to get all the information, why am I there? Coming to a live presentation to just watch someone reading off slides seems counter intuitive to me. Heck. I could go pester my coworker and get the studies showing that when you have a slide with a lot of text, people read the text, then look at you. That means that they aren’t listening until they read, and if, when they’re done, they come to find you’re just reading what they read? They’re probably bored.

    When I give a presentation, it’s usually on a topic I’ve written about before. Actually, that’s generally how I decide what I want to talk about! I picked “Don’t use WordPress Multisite” for WordCamp SF 2013 because it is still, to this day, the most popular post on my site. And it’s my most popular presentation. Some may ask “Why would you give a presentation on something I could read?”

    BoredPeople learn in different ways. I, personally, suck at learning from videos. However I learn well from presentations in person, where someone talks to the room, pays attention to our energy, and teaches, using the slides as an emphasis. I also learn well from a written post. Finally, I learn best by doing things. So for me, if I’m blowing up a site, it means I’m learning in a speed unparalleled. There’s a converse to this, and if I hit a blocker were I can’t do something, I get really upset.

    What does this have to do with slides and why mine are mostly pretty pictures with a sentence for emphasis? I don’t write my slides to be a transcript because I’m going to write a much longer blog post on the topic, with the same pictures probably, if I haven’t already. So for the person who wants to read the content, I’ll have you covered. And for the person who wants to be inspired by looking at slides? Well I have that. Finally for the person who wants to watch a video, WordCamp does that for me, thankfully.

    This is not a perfect system, of course. Like I said, people learn in different ways, so there’s probably someone out there who loves slideshows of text on pictures who is grumpy. They probably also like infographics. Which I don’t. You see a trend here? I don’t like getting my information from pictures. Because of that I suck at writing them, so I just don’t.

  • Why I Hate Facebook

    Why I Hate Facebook

    I do, you know. I hate it for a couple reasons, but the primary one is the user interface sucks. It’s just horrible. And since I’ve apparently turned Friday into my free, shortform, random topic day, let me explain to you why.

    Ignores My Settings

    I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone to my timeline and seen garbage from last week. “What the hell?” I would shout, and look to see that my timeline is ordered by something called “Top Stories.” Interesting, because I know for a 100% fact that I set it to “Most Recent.” But no, no, Facebook changed it. So I change it back:

    Sort Order

    And don’t ask me how many times I’ve had to turn chat OFF.

    Click Don’t Matter

    This is worse on iOS where I have to click twice on every single link, but it’s bad on the sort order, which is not a link but a drop down. Only since it’s right above the post in my timeline, I have to wiggle my mouse around until I magically click the right place for it to work. Using Facebook on my iPhone means I have to use their app, which behaves radically differently from the normal app, so thanks. Now I have to learn everything twice.

    Unfollow Does not Mean What You Think It Means

    If I comment in a thread, I follow it. Okay. I can see why you do that, and while I’d like an option to default that to off, I’m not going to argue. But when I make a comment, sometimes I click ‘Unfollow’ right away, because I just wanted to say one thing, or post “Congratulations on your baby!” and move on. That’s the end of it, right?

    Nope. Every time someone ‘likes’ my comment, I get a notification. Every. Smegging. Time. I’m witty. Lots of people like my comments, or find them helpful, or whatever. That means I get a lot of BS notifications I don’t give a horse’s patootie about.

    Wrong location For VERY important information

    Do you know how to ‘tell’ if a post can be shared? Some can, some can’t you see. Let me help. This post is public and can be shared:

    Public Share OK

    This post is friends only and cannot be shared:

    Only Friends

    Different icons, different meanings. Where are these icons? At the bottom of the post. Why is that a problem, you may ask? After all, the share button is down there too! Not everyone shares with share buttons. A lot of people will copy what someone says on FB to a blog. If they don’t happen to scroll down (which, let’s face it, a lot of us don’t), and don’t happen to know magically that a globe is public and a group of little people is a friends-only thing, they’ll copy the post content, paste it to their website, and share with the world.

    I’m not so naive to think anything I put online is ever fully ‘private.’ But I’m intelligent, experienced, and I work in IT. I understand the world around me, and how the digital world shares data. If it’s online, someone will see it, share it, and make it public. Not everyone gets that, and they get upset.

    How could Facebook fix this? Put at the top of the post “Friends Only!” or “Public Post” so it’s clear right away.

    Bad Colors

    Did you know you can embed Facebook posts in WordPress?

    https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151997270514795&set=a.10150154582169795.302445.251152514794&type=1

    That’s my high school celebrating soccer season. The link for embedding FB? Grey. Pale grey. In the image below, I’m hovering over it. It’s still grey. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was plain text!

    Embed Link

    There should be a color change when you hover over a link, a noticable color change.

    But wait, there’s more!

    I’m sure there is, but at over 600 words, lets call this a day. What annoys you about Facebook’s user interface?