Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: essay

  • But Seriously…

    But Seriously…

    In reviewing people’s code for WordPress, I’m constantly struck by the lack of foresight people put in to their success. When a developer makes it clear they intend to run a business or have some modicum of popularity, one would expect them to put a bit of effort into it. Instead, I’ve watched people make the same mistakes over and over. And they complain to me about why their plugin is failing to become “the one” to use.

    The answer always seems to surprise them. People don’t take them seriously because they are unprofessional.

    WordPress Basics

    First of all, no one magically knows all this when they start. So it’s alright not to know. However. If you’re going to go into business based around anything, you need to learn the rules of the road. Take the time to learn that it’s WordPress with a capital P, that there’s a foundation, a trademark, and, yes, that you cannot use WordPress in your domain name.

    If you were going into business with PayPal or CitiBank, that’s all legwork you are expected to do beforehand. This is a business, and when you don’t take WordPress seriously, you won’t be taken seriously by WordPress.

    SEO Basics

    Pick a good domain name for your business site. Make sure you’re not violating a trademark or copyright. Pick a good name for your product. For the love of all things whiskey, don’t name your slider plugin “Slider” and stop using “Mega” as a prefix for anything. Remember, the name of your product cannot infringe on anyone’s trademark. So while “Shoppable Cookie Cutters” is not trademarked, “Shoppable” is. And yes, you’ll get a C&D for being similar.

    Write good copy for your website. Have a clear mission statement, a human about page, and some semblance of being real people. This extends to your documentation. Write it. Write it good. Write a readme that tl;dr pitches your product, explains why someone needs it, and details out what kind of services it uses (if any). Remember that most of your SEO comes from humans. Write for them.

    Community Basics

    The OpenSource community in general will help anyone who asks politely. So be polite. Be respectful. Be courteous. Be generous. If people are helping you for free (and most of them are) then thank them and ask how to pay it forward. Offering services, answering generic questions, educating users, or even just publicly thanking volunteers helps.

    The community also includes your users. Respect them. Especially when they’ve gone off the deep end and accuse you of wild impropriety. Your plugin hacked their site? Probably not, but treat them with respect and kindness. It goes a long way to inspiring the volunteers to back you up. But also don’t spam your users with a million in-product reminders to review your product, give it five stars, or otherwise distract them from actually using your plugin.

    Universal Basics

    Do your research. There is nothing on this earth that is a get-rich-quick, so study what you’re getting into. Don’t jump in blindly. Make sure the community is one you can work with, that they have ethics similar to yours. And if not, make absolutely sure you really are comfortable with going for the money.

    Set your expectations realistically, and be willing to have them reset. Take your work seriously, don’t make excuses like “someone else did this first!” Own up to any mistakes or missteps you make. Remember, you absolutely will screw something up along the way. The measure of success can be found in how you handle it.

  • Is This A Good Idea?

    Is This A Good Idea?

    I’ve joked about this a few times, that I should go into business telling people if their web idea is a good one or not. The prices would be simple.

    • $25 – A quick yes or no.
    • $100 – I’ll tell you if it’s dangerous or possibly illegal.
    • $500 – Details of everything.

    While I doubt anyone would ever actually pay for that, let me tell you some things I think are bad ideas for the web, and why.

    Obvious Bad Ideas

    Excluding the whole “Facebook but for pets!” and “Uber but for Pizza!” ideas, and dismissing every single ‘disruptive’ concept out there (seriously, no they’re not), some ideas are really easy to point at and say ‘this is a bad idea.’

    If you’re thinking about making something new for WordPress, before you start coding, please use google. Because the first kind of bad idea is the idea that’s been done before, ad nasueum. For example, sliders, snowfalls, BMI calculations (actually ANY sort of calculators including loans), ‘simple’ contact forms, and Google Analytics.

    These are bad ideas because they are overdone.

    If it’s been done more than 10 times, and you’re not introducing something totally new (this includes the fellow who made a ‘login logo slider’ – no, it wasn’t new), then file it away as a good experiment. Write the code, but don’t publish it.

    Illegal/Dangerous Ideas

    Depending on how often you hear me rant, you may or may not be surprised to find out how often people write code that’s illegal.

    Now hold on. Before a single one of you says “But the GPL!” let me remind you. The GPL doesn’t make things magically legal just because it’s open source. You can use GPL code to break laws (like, say, make a child porn website), and while that’s fine for the GPL, it’s still illegal.

    On a less creepy but still illegal note, the Yahoo! finance APIs aren’t actually legal for you to use in your code. Yes, I am well aware of the number of people who make packages for it. I’ve actually spoken to Yahoo about this and the way they explained it was this. Their Finance API is for your personal use. You’re not meant to use it to retrieve data for apps (and yes, plugins are apps) or any third-party usage (again, plugins). Also they do make it pretty clear with this comment:

    By accessing the Yahoo! site, you agree not to redistribute the information found therein.

    A lot of public APIs have these restrictions, including Airbnb and even some Google APIs (finance again). And using them without checking the terms of use and verifying they’re allowed to be used in your situation puts you at risk for breaking the law and that is dangerous because, in the case of a plugin, it’s not just you who pays the price.

    Ignorant Code

    Really the magic of everything, the answer to all ‘is this a good idea’ questions can be found in this. Did you bother to do the research first? And no, I don’t mean did you do market research (though that’s a good idea too).

    Did you check if the idea existed already? Did you check if the tools you want to use permit that kind of use? Did you read the terms of use of any service? Did you listen to your gut or not?

    Think first. Look before you leap. And above all, please don’t make yet another snowflake tool. No one actually likes them.

  • I Hate Migrating Sites, And That’s Okay

    I Hate Migrating Sites, And That’s Okay

    Friday I tweeted coming up for air after migrating a 1 gig website. And I had hated doing it.

    Apparently that was a signal for men with whom I’m acquainted with but am not friends to drop unsolicited advice on me, most of which I’ve already written about on this blog.

    I found this incredibly condescending from most people. When someone says “I hate X…” and your reply is “Have you tried…” then you aren’t listening to them. You’re addressing them from a place of superiority and arrogance. “I know better than you. Let me tell you what to do.” Or worse, you’re listening for keywords and then pitching your wares.

    Let me put this clearly:

    1. I did not ask for help (I didn’t need it)
    2. None of the men asked if I needed help (they assumed I did)
    3. None of them were friends.

    That last one is important. If my good friends, the people whom I play CAH with or share drinks, offer unsolicited advice, they know me well enough to do so intelligently. They do it respectfully and sometimes sarcastically. But they are friends. When non-friends, Internet people with whom I’ve exchanged words or reviewed code, do it, it’s not at all the same.

    Here’s a selection of how my weekend went:

    “But I love it!”

    That one wasn’t advice, and as it happened, he didn’t like moving sites, he liked writing the code to do it. Me too! But watching a site move is as fun as watching paint dry. And testing everything to make sure the code works on the new server is similarly dull. And yet you have to do it.

    “That’s not a large site.”

    Didn’t say it was. Again, not advice, and this was from someone I know fairly well, so I was more inclined to chat about it. Turns out he has to move a 5 G site multiple times a year. Which … something’s wrong there, first of all. But also his users need to sit down and talk about image sizes, because daaaaayyyyyyymmmmmnnn.

    “You should use wp-cli.”

    Funny thing, I did. I love using wp-cli for updating the database, and since I happened to be unraveling a multisite, it was perfect. But you know… I’ve written tutorial on it, added documentation, written extensions, and talked about that tool multiple times. Including on this site. Know your audience, folks.

    “You should use zip [instead of rsync].”

    When you’re looking at large files, like gigs, sometimes zip is stupid and won’t unpack. PHP has limitations of 2G you see. I did zip up the plugins and themes and then the uploads, but I had to move them from server A to server B. And I did that with rsync. My other option was to download and then re-upload. Maybe if you’d suggested SCP you would have been helpfull. Rsync made sure I didn’t re-copy anything.

    “You should use [my service].”

    No. Absolutely not. No. JM Dodd is the only human I would trust with that kind of a migration. Why? Because it was WordPress Multisite. None of your tools, not even VaultPress, is capable of handling that well. Plus, the added wrinkle was moving one multisite into it’s three separate sites.

    Also … I am very very very skeptical of using anyone’s tools. I review their code and their websites and their communication skills. And honestly, I’m not impressed by that company. They just don’t give me the feel-goods I’d want when going into business. To be fair, I’m not sure how I feel about VaultPress either, but they’re my experiment.

    To be fair, one of the services apologized after.

    “Why not move things manually?”

    I … did? This one takes the cake because when I pointed out that I did know that stuff, and perhaps one should think about to whom they are offering unsolicited advice, I got told that I should use a specific host and service. After I blocked him, he subtweeted about women/lesbians and their egos. Not a great way to win your case, buddy.

    “You should use host X.”

    Stop. I didn’t ask for hosting advice, nor was it mentioned. People move sites on the same host sometimes, you know. And once I had the site up on site.dream.press, moving it live was ten seconds of work.

    I Never Asked For Help

    This is the big deal. The word ‘help’ never came out of my mouth. I didn’t even break DNS or forget TTL this time. I didn’t need help. All this was, was me saying I hate moving sites when they’re a gig (or more) of data.

    Not single man asked me “Do you need help?”

    They all assumed I did.

    That, friends, is why I called it Mansplaining, and blocked over ten men on twitter.

    Comments on this post are disabled. Don’t reply, just think about it.

  • The Passion of Change, Part 2

    The Passion of Change, Part 2

    This is part 2 of The Passion of Change. Last time I talked about some theory and decision to make about why to do this with WordPress. Now let’s talk about how it’s done.

    Collecting Data

    There’s no way around this. To collect data that’s … well … never been collected in one place before, you have to sit down and do the work. And it’s hard. This is why companies hire interns, but really you need a researcher who is an expert in the field. And you have to guess and what data is going to be important. Do you just want names and shows, or do you want death days, actors, and cliches and tropes? Decide on your datapoints, but collect more than you need. Trust me on that one. Backfilling dates for 1000 posts wasn’t fun.

    The trick with WordPress is understanding how to organize your data. With Hugo, there’s the basic concept of “everything is a post” and really that’s what WordPress does too. Everything is a post TYPE. By making a custom post type for your data, you can have it listed and organized how you want. We opted for a type for shows and characters, with post meta to store the complex and unique data and taxonomies for the common and shared.

    Display The Data

    Part of displaying your data properly is to do so in a way that is conducive to your SEO. Yeah I said a dirty word. CMB2 lets you add in post meta easily. Yoast SEO lets you add that information to your meta data. AMP makes it better to read on mobile, and FacetWP makes it dynamically sortable. And the Rest API? Well that makes it easily consumable. Anywhere.

    To make it easy to enter and maintain the data, we use CMB2. You can also use PODS or ACF to do this, and really it’s its own post. But the point here is you need to go back to that data you collected and figure out how it needs to be presented. While you could code it all by hand, I strongly recommend a plugin that will let you add in these fields more easily. You need to make sure you data can repeat what needs to be repeated.

    SEO

    And the best part here is that if you have good data and you’ve entered it in a smart way, it will lead to good SEO by doing things like this:

    %%title%% is a %%ct_lez_gender%% %%ct_lez_sexuality%% %cf_lezchars_type%% character played by %%actors%% on %%shows%% %%sep%% Clichés: %%ct_lez_cliches%%

    With Yoast SEO in conjunction with CMB2 I was able to auto-populate a unique and yet repeated description for my meta desc in all my posts. The goal here is to optimize smartly. You want your research to be found, so you need to make it easily finable for the right search queries.

    Mobile: AMP

    I use Automattic’s AMP plugin combined with Yoast’s AMP Glue plugin for mobile optimizations. By default it only adds posts as AMP data. I built out custom templates for my CPTs to allow those to show up as AMP pages as well. I did this because I wanted the data to be accessible in more ways than just normal WP pages. Democratizing consumability means being flexible about your displays. Get the data out there clearly.

    Don’t Predict Paths

    Putting the data out there in easy to find ways is step one. When you have lists of data, you also need to make them sortable. FacetWP is a tool for advanced filtering. It lets you sort and resort your data, so if you wanted a list of blue eyed, left handed, centipede groomers, and you had all that data stored, you could find it. It’s a little tricky sometimes to build out your facets the way you want, but they let you refine searches and drill down so you can find everything in the way the users want. The goal, and FacetWP meets it, is to make finding the data people want easier.

    But… There’s another path to consider. The REST API.

    This is hands down my favorite part of the whole thing. It’s great we have all this data we collected, and we can show it in myriad ways. We can get stats to show you trendlines and averages and percentages. But… How do we get the data back out there so other people can consume it? What if you wanted to take the data to make stats we didn’t? This is all done via the Rest API.

    JSON: It Gets The Job Done

    The Rest API made it EASY for me to export all this data into a format anyone could take and expand on. I made them simple, with just names and dates, and complex with everything I could think of. And by doing so, other people DID start to grab the data and use it to construct their own narratives and find their own answers.

    It also let me make a plugin!

    The irony of using a Rest API to power a plugin that lists dead female queers is not lost on me, by the way. I built out a JSON powered plugin that calls the data and uses it to output the data in widgets or shortcodes. It’s possibly the most simple and basic way you can do anything with this, but it demonstrates the extendability. It’s fast, it’s low load for my site which is always good, and it’s easy for me to update.

    All that work that went into the plugin, with the JSON API, was transformed into an Amazon Alexa skill, where you can ask it “Hey Alexa, ask Bury Your Queers who died on March 3rd” and your Echo or Dot will reply. At it’s heart, it seems silly and trivial. The more I worked on the code, though, the more I realized how you could extend this to share more data. Trivia and minutia are small beans, but they’re the beans we REMEMBER. And what we remember is what changes the world.

    Open Data – Sharing Passion Enhances Everything

    Hopefully the story you got from all this is that with WordPress you can share your passion for … well. Anything. And you can use it to fuel change. In the last 18 months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people world wide about how just seeing the representation and the statistics have helped them. Including TV producers. And yeah, that was weird. But more over, I’ve helped get data out there and used it to change one thing. And that is the passion that causes change.

  • The Passion of Change, Part 1

    The Passion of Change, Part 1

    One of WordPress’ big claims is that it democratizing publishing. In recent years, it’s also begun democratizing the distribution and consumption of data via the Rest API, and it’s helped push the openness of data, which can be used by anyone to make the world a little better.

    Change is born of many things but it always stems from a refusal to accept the norm. When Shay died on the TV show Chicago Fire, many of us were angry. When Lexa died on The 100, we became irate. And then we organized. Multiple groups, separate, all used WordPress and social media to power our desire to show the world what was wrong and what needed to change. We took our hobby of television and made it our passion, and we let our passion start to change the television landscape.

    WordPress Enables Change

    Having built many sites in many different CMS tools, ranging from Jekyll and Hugo to MediaWiki and Sharepoint, WordPress still makes it easiest to share the data in more ways than just plain old HTML. By allowing us to output our content in JSON with that API, we can create paths for people to transmute our data and display it in new ways we never dreamed of.

    In the last two years, I’ve been able to take my simply hobby site from a list of information to a open API for people to get lost in like Wikipedia to an open-data resource for all people to generate dynamic results. Without data we cannot come to accurate conclusions about the world, and without OPEN data, we cannot work together to make the world better.

    Taking a hobby as a vector for change didn’t happen overnight. It came with toil and hard work. It came with research of plugins and solutions. It came with hours and hours of watching TV just to come up with a reasonably accurate list of all the queer females on television, and if they were alive or dead. And with this data, we’ve been able to help news reporters and tv show writers visualize the impact on the world. We’ve started to change the world, just a little, with WordPress.

    Bury Your Queers

    Just telling people “Hey, WordPress helped me power a site that publicized the information of a hitherto uncollected dataset” would be a pretty short post.

    I mentioned change was born of a refusal to accept the ‘norm’ in our lives. As it happens, being a queer female on television is more dangerous than being on the Titanic. In 2014, it was reflecting the darkest aspects of ourselves. In 2015, 33 queer females died on TV. Over 40 in 2017. Trans people are being murdered in record numbers today in the real world. All of this is related to the Dead Lesbian trope, AKA Bury Your Queers.

    My theory is that the more we accept death in our media, the more we accept it in reality. The media is pervasive and colors our lenses to accept normal when it’s not. There are a lot of hills to stand on and make this point, but I picked the one that reflects me the most, and the one I felt I could tackle. My hope was that it would just be the start.

    A Brief History

    • December 13, 1971 – Julie Solkin / Executive Suite
    • August 15, 1995 – Talia Winters / Babylon 5
    • May 7, 2002 – Tara Maclay / Buffy The Vampire Slayer
    • May 13, 2014 – Leslie Shay / Chicago Fire
    • March 3, 2016 – Lexa / The 100
    • June 4, 2017 – Barbara Keen / Gotham

    It would take me a while to list all the deaths, so I’ve listed six of the more prominent deaths here. Julie was the first recorded death. Lexa set the world on fire. These deaths, out of well over 270 since 1971 by the way, shaped our perceptions. They told us it was okay to kill off the queers for shock value. But the thing is, with Lexa, last year, people lost their minds.

    If you were in the LA area, you may have seen some surprising billboards in 2016. There were four all told, four separate billboards crowdfunded globally via Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and a WordPress site. They collected the money and put the billboards up and said that WE would not stop. That wasn’t the end of it. There’s been a convention, ClexaCon, and more activism.

    Why WordPress?

    One of the interesting things was we all sat down, in our various corners of the internet, and asked “How bad is this, exactly?” Sites like AutoStraddle made a straight up (heh) list of all the dead and all the happy-endings. Spoiler, very few have happy endings. Other sites, like LGBT Fans Deserve Better and LezWatchTV started to make lists of everyone we could find. And we all actually used WordPress.

    There are pros and cons for every platform. There was never a doubt in Tracy’s mind that we were going to use WordPress, but I always think about pros and cons. MediaWiki is amazing when you want anyone contributing becuase it allows anonymous edits. But there was too much possibility for abuse so MediaWiki was out. Static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll are fast and secure (go on, hack my html please. Knock yourself OUT). But they’re not very flexible and can be difficult to manage with multiple contributors or non-technical ones. WordPress, though, is flexible, allows for multiple editors, processes images easily, and is incredibly extendable.

    What Next?

    Obviously I haven’t even begun to touch on the code part, of how you build out the data and make it beneficial to people via tools like plugins or Amazon Alexa, and not even how you build the data so you can do those things.

  • Hello Trello

    Hello Trello

    Organizing my life is usually done on the Apple Reminders app. I shove my to-dos in there and it alerts me when I forget about scheduled, repeated, events. Like mailing in a rent check.

    But when you have a group of people, it can be trickier, especially if you all use different devices and have different workflows.

    Enter Trello

    There are a lot of options out there, but Trello is free for the small scale. It’s easy to set up and my friend Tracy uses it a lot. When I realized we needed something better than my list to keep track of everything, I popped over to Trello to make it work.

    I’ve used it before, and I use Jira — which is owned by Trello’s Atlassian — so I’m familiar with the basic style of Kanban boards for tracking work. Every project has a ‘board’ and on the board you have ‘lists.’ In each list you have your ‘tasks’ which you drag from list to list to list. The general concept is you have a list of ‘backlog’ where you store everything. Tasks move from there to ‘in progress’ and then to ‘done’ (or they get archived).

    There are some things about the flow I find annoying. Like there isn’t a way to mark something as ‘done’ unless it’s scheduled, it just gets archived, but it can work. And you can integrate it with Slack so that’s nifty.

    What About WordPress?

    I’m going to shoot your hopes and dreams. There isn’t a WordPress plugin for Trello.

    Oh fine, there’s WP Trello but that actually is meant to display your boards as widgets or shortcodes. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why anyone would want to do that. No, what I mean is there’s no back-end WordPress plugin where I can go to, say, the dashboard and check out what boards and tasks are being worked on.

    I suppose that’s much the point, though. You shouldn’t be managing those things in WordPress. In fact, if you look into it, embedding Trello anywhere is kind of a mess. They clearly don’t want you to miss out on their API and their apps. Their experience matters.

    On the other hand they’re very hip on integration, letting people stick in one tool and access everything. I suspect the brunt of the lack of a WordPress tool is due to the fact that there’s no one recommended PHP API. If you go to their community page, you’ll see a lot of python and Ruby, but no PHP.

    What Can You Do With WordPress?

    Thankfully, you can integrate WordPress and Trello. There are extensions for Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms which let you integrate your form submissions and make them into Trello Tasks. If you use those plugins to allow visitors to post submissions, it’s a near perfect idea. They submit a post, you make a to-do, and your life remains organized instead of wondering who handled which submission.

    But if you’re looking for more, you need to consider a 3rd party integration via Zapier or IFTTT. There isn’t even a Jetpack contact form to Trello plugin.

    Yet.