As of Dec 2, 2024, I am employed with AwesomeMotive! I am no longer in need of a new gig. I am leaving this post up in case someone does want to pay me to work on LezWatch.TV and make bagels all day.
As of 31 October 2024, my engagement with XWP will end. I am incredibly thankful for the time I spent with them and the trust they placed in me. Don’t get me wrong, it sucks, but the world just works like this sometimes.
Honestly as much as I’d love someone to pay me to just work on LezWatch.TV and make bagels all day, it’s pretty unlikely (though if you do…).
What I’m looking for is a full time job where I get to make cool things, get a fair paycheck that allows me to save to buy a house, and provides enough vacation time that I’m not spending all of it on Jewish Holidays and can actually take a trip now and then.
What do I want to do?
This is likely a tech stack question. I can do WordPress, I’m very good at it, but I also know Hugo and can pick up other stacks pretty quickly. I’ve done full stack work before (server birth to death), worked in automation, and myriad other platforms like MediaWiki, ZenPhoto, and more. I’m game for learning any CMS.
Would I really still work in WordPress?
I would.
Look, I know there’s a lot of volatility in the WordPress world but honestly with that in mind, you need someone like me! Why? Because I know WordPress plugins! If something happens and you can’t access .org, I’m your girl. I know how to scan plugins (and themes) for backdoors and bad code, as well as write the good stuff. I know risk assessment and management, which means I can help you when plugin ownership is in doubt.
I also know a lot of backstory to a lot of development shops and how they treat people. What? You knew I took notes about plugin devs!
There are millions of WordPress sites out there. They still need devs.
Would I leave WordPress for anything else?
Absolutely! Nothing against WordPress (or the current state of affairs), but my love for it is not absolute. It’s tempered in reality. WordPress is not the perfect solution for everyone, after all. I’m game to learn new things, to integrate, to test, and to break things.
And if you’re transitioning a site to or away from WordPress? Hey! I’m uniquely positioned to be able to tell you exactly what that code was doing and, in most cases, why!
Would I work for Automattic?
No. That ship sailed about 15 years ago. I interviewed pretty much around now back then, and in talking with Matt directly we both agreed I would be a bad fit. No harm, no foul. I think that was the right choice, all this time later, and I have no regrets.
Would I go back into Hosting?
Sure. I liked that work. It’s fun, challenging, and I learned a lot of new platforms and specifics. I got to play with servers and it gave me a deeper understanding in how to approach asking a host for help. Bonus? I know devs, so I can help debug your code on servers!
(If DreamHost calls me up right after this post, I would absolutely talk with them about opportunities without a second thought!)
What about Agency Work?
Depends on the agency.
Some agencies are real meat grinders, and some are less so. The hardest part about agency life is how fast everyone and everything has to move. Also it’s incredibly volatile! If the company who hired you isn’t doing well, fffftttt you’re screwed.
(Again, if XWP called me tomorrow, I would happily talk with them.)
Would I work for a plugin shop?
Yes, I would. I know plugins, I know the repo (sure things have changed but the basics aren’t going to), and I know the forums. Plugins are a lot of work of course.
How about a security company?
That would be epic fun. Yes. Finding issues, reporting them reasonably and privately, getting them fixed, and helping everyone? I miss that from Plugin Reviews.
What about just plain ol’ IT?
I’ve done it before. I’m sure some of my info is out of date (anyone need a Windows NT Server certified dev?), but again, I’m willing and able to learn. Basic IT has some joy you know, and users do some wild and crazy things you don’t expect.
Didn’t anyone tell me not to sell ME in a resume?
Many. But the thing is, you’re not hiring a machine, you’re hiring a person. If you want a grunt to grind? That ain’t me.
If you want a well reasoned, insightful, and creative individual who thinks for herself and is willing to try things even if they fail, because those lessons help you going forward? Who fights for the users and is honest even when it hurts? Who will stand by her principles even if they cost her work? Who is passionate and puts her all into everything?
Sé and I go back a while, so when she asked me if I’d like to come on WPwatercooler and talk about Piracy and the GPL, I said sure! I’m including the video at the end so you can see the whole conversation but … What got me interested was that she didn’t ask me about what I thought she would!
The Hill I Die On Is Theft
I always get people pissed off when I say this, but you absolutely 100%, without question, can steal GPL code if you mess with copyright law.
I even went and asked ChatGPT for some fun:
It would be considered unethical and potentially illegal to take GPL-licensed code and release it as your own work. The GPL requires you to respect copyright laws and the rights of the original authors. By claiming GPL-licensed code as your own without proper attribution or acknowledgment of the original authors, you would be violating both the terms of the GPL and copyright law.
The GPL allows you to use, modify, and distribute the code, but it also requires that you maintain the integrity of the original license and give appropriate credit to the original authors. Failure to do so could lead to legal consequences, including potential copyright infringement claims. It’s essential to adhere to the principles of open source licensing and respect the contributions of others in the software development community.
I expected the chat to be about that. It wasn’t. It was about the lovely grey area I spent a decade and a half in.
Piracy is/n’t Theft
The crux of Sé’s question was this: Is it piracy to get a copy of a premium plugin (one you have to buy to get) from someone else.
The initial answer is ‘yes’ but then Sé laid out some amazing nuance.
She’d already bought the code before
She couldn’t buy the upgrade because the devs are in Russia (and sanctions)
There was a workaround to pay an intermediary, but she felt it was sketchy
She intended to migrate off the plugin, but needed the latest version to do so
Someone she knew offered to give her a copy of the latest version
Now, I worked for a bank before WP, and I can tell you that her workaround is what you do when you launder money. And if you did use that workaround, you run the risk of ending up on the FBIs sniff-list and they do not have any sense of humor about ignorance of the law.
So now, would I still call it piracy? Actually … yes. I would. But it’s small scale and not actually a huge issue and really depends on the intent of the person who gave it to her, and what Sé did with it in the end.
The Scale of Piracy
There’s a constant battle going on between consumers and corporations. I’ll use an example close to my heart. The TV show Willow was a fun fantasy romp with silly flashbacks and messy magic. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but it was fun. Shortly after it got mid-to-low reviews, it was removed from streaming.
There is no way to watch the TV series, except for piracy.
Is it piracy if I had managed to download the videos beforehand and kept them for my own entertainment? Yes. Yes it would be. The same as how all of our mix tapes were technically piracy. Mixtape artists have been arrested under RICO charges for that!
But the reality is that no one was going to waste time and kick in your door for making a mixtape and giving it to your sweetheart. They didn’t really care that much about it (and in some cases, like The Grateful Dead, encouraged it). It was incredibly hard to make money off mix tapes. I made copies of a CD I had bought in high school for friends, never sold ’em.
Then came the internet and suddenly I could copy that CD into files and send them across the world! And you know what? People did. Suddenly the scale of what could be done with a pirated copy of a CD had skyrocketed.
Obscure Monetization
I pause here to quote from Cory Doctorow’s interview back in 2010, when he was asked why does he give all his books away for free?
I give away all of my books. [The publisher] Tim O’Reilly once said that the problem for artists isn’t piracy – it’s obscurity. I think that’s true. A lot of people have commented: “You can’t eat page views, so how does being well-known help you earn a living as a writer?” It’s true; however, it’s very hard to monetise fame, but impossible to monetise obscurity. It doesn’t really matter how great your work is; if no one’s ever heard of it, you’ll never make any money from it. That’s not to say that if everyone’s heard of it, you’ll make a fortune, but it is a necessary precursor that your work be well-known to earn you a living. As far as I can tell, these themes apply very widely, across all media.
As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?
The only people who really think that it’s plausible to reduce copying in the future seem to be the analogue economy, the people who built their business on the idea that copying only happens occasionally and usually involves a giant machine and some lawyers. People who are actually doing digital things have the intuitive knowledge that there’s no way you’re going to stop people from copying and they’ve made peace with it.
On the podcast, I mentioned a book I’d bought for school that was over $100 (this was in the mid 1990s) and, having bought it, I worked with a friend in the print shop to make copies for classmates and sold them at enough for me to break even. I think it was $5 a pop, and I would accept lunch instead.
Piracy? Oh you betcha.
Illegal? Again, yeppers!
Immoral? ….
Oooh now I brought up a dirty word.
But it ties in to that intent I mentioned when I was describing Sé’s situation.
If Sé or I took the copies of the book/plugin and sold them with the intent of making a profit, then yeah, we’re immoral shitbags. But that isn’t the case. I was trying to not go broke because of that stupid college textbook scam that’s only worse with DRM. Sé wanted to properly move off a plugin that she cannot use anymore.
It’s all about that intent. As I said on the podcast, if you see someone sleeping in their car and it’s illegal where you live? No, you did not see anyone sleeping in their car. Did you see someone shoplifting diapers? No you did not. And if I have to explain why you didn’t see those things, you may be following the wrong blog.
Those GPL Avenger/Nulled Shops
I have to loop back to the GPL.
Officially, technically, 100% the GPL says that the code you write and release under the GPL is free for anyone to do whatever they want. And if you make changes, you have to release it under the same license.
Now, if you’ve spent any time in the WP world, you’ve run into sites that offer the same expensive plugins as you’ve seen for sale, but cheaper and ‘nulled’ (which means they no longer phone home to momma for your license). And technically under the GPL, that’s allowed. But I argue this:
The intent here is to circumvent legitimate, available purchasing
There is no assurance the code has not been tampered with
It’s a dick move
Can plugins been overly expensive? Yes, absolutely. I saw one for over $500 and it was not worth it. But you’re not paying for the plugin itself, you’re paying for security, support, and maintenance.
(Off Topic: I mentioned how cool it is when someone releases free back ported security fixes for premium plugins – I wish it was easier to do and everyone could do it, but it’s really freakin’ hard! Still, the easiest way would be “find all people with expired licenses and email them the latest release of the last branch they paid for, free of charge”. Easier said than done.)
The other problem is that by giving away the plugin, you may have broken the purchasing agreement. You know the one? Don’t rip off the tags on this mattress? Well first of all, the GPL actually supports people selling code (they’re not stupid, people gotta earn a living), and they’re of the Doctorow approach — watch your price point, convert the free users to paying one with value.
The value most plugin shops offer is support and updates. They’ll patch your plugin until they go out of business. And they’re clear about how you’re not paying for software, you’re paying to have it sent to you:
You can charge people a fee to get a copy from you. You can’t require people to pay you when they get a copy from someone else.
So what do I mean by a purchasing agreement? Well it’s your license agreement. I pay for YoastSEO, and from them I get a license. If I break the terms of that agreement, they have the right to sever my license and no more updates for me.
Those nulled/GPL Avenger sites are regularly playing with fire, and most have to make purchases with disposable credit cards and shuffle things around in order to not get caught. Once they’re caught, they’re banned and blocked and someone figures out how to catch them ahead of time next time and prevent sales in the first place.
Piracy is Nuanced
The reality of all this is piracy is an incredibly nuanced situation.
Pirate Radio Stations use airwaves they didn’t pay for and play music they have no license to. But at the same time, they might be the first way you hear a certain song that inspires you to go out and buy the album.
Sharing Cory Doctorow’s books for free takes money from him, but how is that different than using the library or loaning your favorite book to a friend? The goal isn’t to make money, it’s to share joy.
Asking a good friend for a copy of a premium plugin so you can test it out is, in my eyes, much the same. Asking for a copy so you can update and move off it is also fine.
When you start working at scale to actively block people from making a living (like if I took all of Doctorow’s books, printed, and resold them) then you’ve crossed my line about what is ethical piracy and what is just being a jerk.
Don’t be a jerk.
And remember, they’re more like guidelines.
WPwatercooler
Watch me on the world’s most influential WordPress Podcast, talking about piracy, GPL, copying books, and money laundering.
I’ve been using Tiny Tiny RSS for … well years. Almost a decade. I like it a lot, the interface is nice and pretty to use. But there have always been some serious lingering issues with it.
The developer is very opinionated, to the point of aggression
The development is Docker, to the point that non-Docker support is non existent
Support for ‘non modern’ browsers means Safari is not supported
Now I’m opinionated, and I can be curt and blunt at times. And I work with a lot (A LOT) of people who are similar. I do plugin reviews for WordPress.org — trust me, I know from opinionated developers. I have lost track of the time I’ve spent arguing with prima donnas who cannot fathom that their code might not be god’s gift to the universe.
The majority of people, thankfully, are not like that. They recognize no one is perfect, they understand that sometimes you have to make allowances in your code for the sake of a system, and most of all they aren’t aggro when told “no.” (If you find yourself getting pissed off, BTW, when someone reviews your code, yes, I’m talking about you.)
Anyway. Andrew Dolgov is an amazing developer, a talented one at that. But he has a very ‘my way or GTFO’ kind of flow, and since it’s a single-man project, I really do get that. And for the time that he happily supported PHP on whatever, I didn’t care. The code worked, he didn’t have any strong opinions that offended me (like being a Nazi sympathizer, and yes, I’ve ditched software I love for that), and so what if he was a bit prickly?
But… He’s Docker all in. And I like Docker, but I don’t want to run it all the time, and certainly not for a flippin’ RSS reader that is PHP and SQL and that’s it. As time went on, it got harder and harder and harder to manage and maintain a slight fork, to the point that it’s just not worth it.
The Replacement: FreshRSS
FreshRSS. It’s a barebones, simple, easy to install RSS reader. How easy? It’s practically a ‘famous five minute install.’
The install was to download the latest release, unzip it on my server, and then I went to the URL where I’d installed it ( i.e. https://example.com ) and entered the DB credentials. Then I made a new account and boom. Done.
Much like with TTRSS, I have to set up a cron job to run the refresh, which I set to hourly:
Don’t waste time with the various plugins, they’re not supported and in my experience, don’t work. Also if you’re mystified trying to find out how to export, it’s not just you. I had to trawl through the forums to find an example that didn’t work, but did link me to the code and I was able to figure it out from there.
Once you have that, save the OPML file and pop over to FreshRSS and import. It will keep your categories and everything.
Yeah, that was it!
The Tweaks
Most of the settings are fine as is. I turned off the option to mark as read when I scroll by (I regularly use unread to know what I need to handle next):
I also added in a filter to mark a specific feed as read unless it mentions a keyword which was as easy as a filter for -intitle:keyword to that feed.
For a number of reasons it was time to move on to new things. I was looking for a better, more modern solution to running my own short URLs.
There are a lot of reasons people want these. When I started with them, it was because Twitter had limits and I wanted to control my tweets and short URLs. But then time moved on, Twitter decided to meh, not care about URL length, which meant I didn’t really need the extra weight.
But I had a reason to keep mine around, and that’s WordCamps. 99.999% of the use of have for short URLs is to link people to things for WordCamps, like my slides but also related links that otherwise would be too long for anyone to write down in a reasonable time frame.
And while I’d been using the same old, functional, system, it had quirks that had long since frustrated me, including not being a modern design. I felt like I was stepping back into the early 2000s, and yes, that UX matters to me.
Enter Shlink.io
After experimenting around, I found Shlink.io, a GDPR (yes!) friendly self-hosted URL shortener that is a little more tech, but a lot more smooth. It has a full blown API, a deep command line, and an (optional) admin that is, well, nifty.
Features include:
Custom short URLs
Multiple Domains
QR Codes
Tags
Robust stats
Validates URLs before linking
It’s not a set-and-forget install, to be sure, and each server is going to have some quirks, but overall I’m happy with it already.
What’s Missing
There’s no WordPress plugin. Yet. I suspect this will happen once people realize the API is so freaking crazy.
There’s no way to import everything from another service, but I did a fast export of my DB and then grep’d and search/replaced so I could run commands like this:
php bin/cli short-url:generate -c SHORT https://example.com/
Done and done. Imported a few thousand URLs. I will note that most of those links don’t matter, since nearly no one hit them, but I’m just a stickler for old URLs continuing to work. Most of the time. I went back through all the failed import and found I had old links to things like test sites.
Also the admin backend is an add-on (or non-hosted but I’m neurotic). I installed the web client at a subdomain and then used the configurator to allow passwordless logins. No, I didn’t leave it unprotected! I went old school:
#Protect Directory
AuthName "Dialog prompt"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/ipstenu/example.com/admin/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLRequireSSL
SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq "sub.example.com"
ErrorDocument 403 https://example.com
<Files "servers.json">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
</Files>
What Was Messy
The GeoLiteDB stuff was weird. It took me a while to realize I was running out of space in tmp and that was blocking me from doing anything. Since I host this VPS on DreamHost at the moment, and I work there, I went and set tmp to disk instead of memory and that magically worked.
Now. Would I like the admin stuff to be built in and easier to manage? Of course. And would I like ‘better’ security when I use the server.json file (like maybe telling people to protect it and hide their API keys, hey) but I’ve properly opened up a ticket for them on that one.
End Result?
I like it. So I’m using Shlinks now and there you go.
It’s that time of year where people post their ‘top X influencers’ for whatever they happen to be blogging about. It’s not a secret I hate those lists. In fact, I ask to be left off of them entirely.
All Lists are Incomplete
No matter what, no matter if you list 100 people, you’re going to leave someone out. This is a huge problem because those people will be hurt. The common complaint you hear is that a list cannot possibly list everyone, and that’s exactly the point. You know from the start you won’t have everyone listed, so you’re just going to pick the people you like best. And this is because…
All Lists are Biased
A couple years ago I saw a top-40 list that was 97.5% male. That means there was one woman on that list. Equally bad, there was only one non-white person on the list. They were not the same person, which meant this list left off someone who should have been terribly important since she led a major WordPress core release that very year. Leaving off hugely qualified people because of your unconscious (I hope) bias means you further work against the progress to be found with representation. And really that points to the next problem….
All Lists are Personal
If I was to list the biggest influences on, say, WordPress for me, I would include my father and my wife. To his dying day, my father emailed me a PDF and asked me to upload the content to his blog. My wife constantly asks me for help remembering the rare parts of WordPress. It’s that kind of experience that drives me. They influence me every day to make things easier for the non-technical. Another major influence are my co-editors on LezWatch.TV who ask me things that I feel should be obvious but clearly are not. Which means …
All Lists are Pointless
My mother is a huge influencer in my life. But you’re not going to get anything from following her. The developers I follow are ones who speak and talk in ways my brain has no problem following. The designers have taught me how to visualize (something I’m terrible at). The political wonks aren’t just an echo chamber, they’re thoughtful and educational. I follow a Sappho bot because I like her poetry. But none of that, not one thing, will help you get better at development or WordPress or anything really other than knowing I’m a human who likes a lot of weird stuff.
We’re Solving the Wrong Problem
What’s the point of these lists anyway?
I can only come up with a couple reasons people make them:
Currying favour with the people on the lists to make them feel important
Lists are easier than actually writing a post with content
That’s all I’ve got. And that brings me to my point.
No One is a “Top Influencer Anyway”
The person who influences WordPress the most is probably someone you never noticed.
People tell me I should be listed and I point out that my ‘influence’ is not seen by the majority of people who use WordPress. They never see a plugin review or the work we put into making things safe and stable for them. And that? That is as it should be! How many users can name the release leads? Those names don’t matter to them, and they shouldn’t.
Dad never cared if Nacin or Helen or Mel or Matt lead a release. He didn’t even care that I know them. He cared that WordPress worked and did what he needed.
Isn’t that what we all care about? Not the personal aggrandizement of a few select individuals, but of the collective success of the WordPress project.
Make Lists Matter
If you want a list that matters, make a list of the best talks/blog posts/event-things you experienced in a year and explain how they influenced you. Tell people about what you learned and how you use it. Explain why things matter.
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.
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