Site Point Podcast 5e2e1o

Episode 192 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have the full current , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees) who are ed first by previous hosts Kevin Yank (@sentience) and Brad Williams (@williamsba) and then later by producers Karn Broad (@WebKarnage) and Carl Longnecker.Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #192: The End (MP3, 02:11:04, 125.8MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode SummaryIn this, the very last episode of the SitePoint Podcast, the extended of hosts and producers take a reminisce through their memories of the four years doing the podcast, what it has meant to them and how they will look back on it.Interview TranscriptPatrick: Hello and welcome to the final SitePoint podcast. I’m Patrick O’Keefe, and I’m ed by my usual cohosts, Kevin Dees, Louis Simoneau and Stephan Segravess. Gentlemen, as Michael Jackson once said, “This is it.” How’s it going?Louis: Hey, guys.Stephan: Hi.Patrick: Kevin, do you want to say something?Kevin Dees: I don’t know what to say.Patrick: Forget it. We’ll just skip you then. All right. So, we have quite a show planned for you today. We’re not going to do the stories. We’re not going to do the spotlights. We’ve kind of wrapped that up on the last episode for the final time. Instead, we’re going to be looking back at the past four years of the SitePoint podcast. We’re going to bring on some familiar faces from the past. Like former host, Brad William and Kevin Yank. And, just have a lot of fun reminiscing about the show, where it started, how we made the journey and finally where it ends up at.Stephan: Sounds like fun.Patrick: And without further ado, let’s go ahead and get this show on the road. We now have Brad Williams and Kevin Yank on our show with us back again. Brad, Kevin, welcome back.Brad: Hello.Kevin Yank: Hello.Brad: How’s it going?Patrick: It’s going good. You know this is the first time, we’ve had all six current or former SitePoint hosts on a single Skype call, on a single show, so hopefully, it doesn’t break the Internet with all this great awesomeness, manliness, and handsomeness.Kevin Yank: It’s like we never left. It’s the last one. What have you guys been talking about?Patrick: Nothing really. We’re just going to. We were waiting to talk about anything until we got you guys on here. So, I was just looking at the topics right now.Kevin Yank: No, I don’t mean this episode. I mean all this time since we left. Fill me in.Patrick: I don’t know. I don’t know. What happened? Well, there’s Internet Explorer. Right?Louis: Mostly Internet Explorer. Yeah.Patrick: Mostly Internet Explorer.Brad: So, you picked up right where we left off is what you’re saying.Patrick: Exactly. It’s all the same. So, you know, you mentioned where we left off and so you know, I think it’s fitting to start like where the show started and I put together a little bit of a timeline, back in the SitePoint forum. It’s a private forum there which I still have access to for probably a limited time. Pull out those spread. So, the first mention of the SitePoint podcast was June 27th, 2007. Okay? And Brad started a thread to ask if there was any interest in a site point podcast, not the SitePoint podcast but just a site point podcast. Brad, do you doing that? And what kind of your thought process was when you kind of had the initial idea?Brad: I do. Yeah. I mean it seems like such a world difference back then too, because I mean five years. I’m sure if any one of you guys or any one of the listeners think back what they were doing five years ago, it was probably a little bit different than what they’re doing today if not significantly different. For me, it’s significantly different. So, yeah, so I was actually doing a–well, when Patrick invited me on the show and kind of told me what was going on last week, I kind of went back in the archives and did a little digging too because I had forgotten how long this show had been around. And since you mentioned 2007, I mean that was, it was like a completely different time in my life of what I was doing. You know, I was IT director of successful e-commerce company. I had a nice cushy job. And then, you know, basically right around the time that we started the first episode was released, I moved to New Jersey. Basically left my job, moved to New Jersey, decided to start my own business. You know, it was pretty big change for me and it pretty much evolved around with the podcasts because the first podcast was just a few months after I moved to New Jersey. It was kind of an interesting timeline how the podcast lines up with that transition in my life, but at that time I was listening to a lot of different podcasters. There was a lot of tech podcasts out there. I really enjoyed listening to them all day long. That’s kind of where the idea came from, was hey, why doesn’t SitePoint have one? I mean there’s a lot of obviously a lot of really talented people on SitePoint from the staff to the community. So, I knew it could benefit from one for sure. So, that’s kind of where the idea came from.Patrick: And then I looked farther ahead and I found in November 2007, you started a thread to organize that podcast and for various reasons, jumping through different hoops, whether on our end or SitePoint’s end, or whatever, it didn’t really get going until July 11, 2008 when you started a thread to get it back on the burner. I don’t even what happened in a year’s time, but I don’t even know what the delay was for a whole year. Do you?Kevin Yank: I guess a podcast is a hard thing to get off the ground because you got to get a group of people all together to all have that critical mass of enthusiasm all at once and yeah, I guess it did take a year to wrangle the people, for people to let it slide and then feel the frustration of it not happening and then jump back on it. So, I don’t think a year’s out of the question for getting something like that off of the ground.Brad: It definitely takes a lot more work than people realize. And even more work than I realized when it first started. I was like, “Oh, they just sit around and talk about it. That’s easy.” Right? Well, it’s definitely more thought has to go into it than just jumping in front of a mike and talking. And I think we all learned that because I didn’t have really any experience podcasting when we started this. Kevin and Patrick, you guys might have had some experience or no? Or Stephan?Kevin Yank: No. Next to none. I had all the enthusiasm in the world, but none.Patrick: I hosted a show about community management for like 27, 30 episodes and that was about it. So, beyond that I hadn’t done any podcasting and I really . . .Brad: So you were really. Patrick, you’re the most seasoned out of the group.Kevin Yank: What am I saying? I had done some podcasting before. I did a little show with a friend of mine named John Corry. The show was called Lost Out Back. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the SitePoint podcast. But the site is still up. It’s a lostoutback.com and it was kind of a funny, I like to think it was funny, comedy show about two guys living in Australia who are not from Australia. John was from Ireland. I was from Canada at the time and we were both dealing with the culture shock of learning to live in Australia and we did about ten episodes on that. So, it was short-lived, but I think we burned brightly at the time.Patrick: Is you mentioning that podcast sort of like somebody mentioning their first web site on GeoCities?Kevin Yank: The first web site on what?Patrick: Is he mentioning that podcast sort of like you mentioning, sort of someone mentioning they’re first web site on geo cities.Kevin: Yeah. Exactly. It felt that way.Brad: The web site looks like you’re first web site on GeoCities.Kevin: It’s still running on WordPress, and I’ve kept it up to date all this time.Patrick: Yeah. It’s funny because a baby takes nine months, but it’s reasonable that a podcast would take a year. But anyway, we, you know, just to follow that timeline. In October of 2008, we all agreed to do a show on Mondays at 7:00 p.m. I thought that was funny because we kept that time slot for the entire run of the show. Mondays at 7:00 p.m. through all the different hosts.Kevin Yank: Really? That’s amazing.Brad: That is. I didn’t realize that it’s stayed the same either, I can actually. I actually don’t what day it was on. But then you said that and it reminded me. I’m surprised you guys hadn’t changed it at some point.Patrick: Well, it’s been convenient for everyone except Louis.Louis: What’s that?Patrick: Mondays, the time we record, has been convenient for everyone except you. It interrupts your work day.Louis: Yeah. Well, I think it would have been the same with Kevin. It’s fine when it’s winter here and summer there because then it’s 9:00 a.m. here.Patrick: Right.Louis: Which is fine. But when the daylight savings switches then it’s 11:00 a.m. here which is in the middle of the work day. When I was working at SitePoint, that was really fine because I was, you know, it sort of fit in with the other stuff I was doing because I was doing a lot of web content to do with all this news as well. So, you know the research kind of fell into the same vibe. And I think that was probably the same with Kevin as well.Kevin Yank: Yeah. For sure.Louis: Because you left the show shortly after moving to [inaudible 00:07:38] full-time.Kevin Yank: Yeah.Brad: I the scheduling was always a bit interesting because there was, well, when we first started it was Patrick, Stephan and myself were in the U.S, and then Kevin was in Australia. So, we’re recording in the evening our time and Kevin’s early, not early morning, but the morning of the next day. So, which was basically, like you said, 9:00, 10:00 a.m. in a work day. On a Tuesday.Kevin Yank: Yeah. That’s why Louis and I are the only two who sound awake.Brad: You’re trying to get back to work and we’re trying to go to bed.Patrick: Yeah and also you always had the next day’s news always handy.Louis: Yes. Exactly.Patrick: That’s the last time.Brad: I think we used that joke every week for the first 100 episodes, but it’s kind of cool, or highlights a cool thing which is technology. You know, like even, I mean this was four years ago that we did this. I mean, just a few years prior to that it would have been really hard if not impossible to do it. You know, cross-continent like we did for as long as we did. So, I think it’s just really cool knowing that we were actually doing that. A lot of people, I’m sure you guys probably heard the too, they all thought we were at the same place at some point because we do that recording locally and then mash it together. So, the quality comes across way better than like a straight Skype recording.Kevin Yank: That’s falling out of fashion. A lot of the podcasts I listen to now, they record over Skype and you can hear the drop out sometimes and you can definitely tell that these people are not in the same place. I think it’s a testament to the quality, the ongoing quality of the SitePoint podcast that we continue to record locally and do an edit after the fact.Louis: I can’t image. It just seems crazy to me to not do that. But I mean, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to have someone working as an editor and no one who is doing the show is particularly savvy with audio editing, I guess it’s probably a bit of a challenge to get us sounding even half way coherent.Patrick: Yeah and it’s really a credit to the rapport that we’ve all had one with another. First, you know, when Louis ed and Kevin Dees ed, you knowing, having the ongoing rapport but also a credit to Carl Longnecker and Karn Broad who have produced the show, edited the show and made it sound like we are half way coherent and in the same basic vicinity.Kevin Yank: Shout out to the producers.Kevin Dees: Absolutely.Brad: Seriously. That’s tricky. Again, I’ve done some podcasts after SitePoint and, you know, we’ve never had the luxury of having a producer or someone to help with the audio. So it’s always been, like you said Kevin, kind of straight from Skype, and there is that quality loss from doing that, but at the end of the day if it’s between that and not doing it at all then, you know, people do it, which if fine, but you’re right. There is that quality loss.Louis: Yeah. I was amazed the first few times I heard the show, especially some interview shows, where I felt like I was kind of struggling to ask my questions and keep it together without umm- ing and ah-ing too much, and then I hear the recording after the edits and it sounds like a completely different person, because it was so, so cleanly edited that I sound like I’ve got it totally together. Yeah. It was pretty impressive.Kevin Yank: We need a super-cut of Louis falling apart.Patrick: That guys sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.Louis: Sorry, what’s that?Kevin Yank: We need a super cut of Louis ums, and ahs, and falling apart.Patrick: Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.Louis: Exactly. I’m sure if you cut it all together from the time I’ve been on the show it would be something ridiculous, like a day of umm, ah, umm, ah.Kevin Yank: What’s next on the timeline?Patrick: Well, October 15, 2008 we recorded the pilot episode, and what we did was actually we released it, and that was just me, Brad, Stephan. We recorded the pilot together as sort of a test, and released it for the SitePoint forum staff, the SitePoint staff. I don’t really too much about that. Stephan, do you have any memories about those times?Stephan: Man, I have no recollection whatsoever of the first show.Brad: This is pre-first show. This is the pilot.Patrick: So, we did the pilot. Yeah, yeah, the pre-first show. Yeah. I don’t know if you ever actually released that, but it was just us three, and we put that out for the SitePoint staff, and then Kevin Yank got on board.Kevin Yank: I hearing it. I Brad, you were the MC for that show?Brad: I think so.Patrick: Yeah.Brad: I quickly was replaced. I was happily quickly replaced.Patrick: You were the person who said hello, as I like to call it. The person who says hello for the…I think the first few episodes, and then we kind of slotted it over to Kevin Yank, but…Brad: Honestly, that’s a much better fit…I’m not the MC type of person, even if I do shows now I generally don’t like being that person. I like to kind of sit on the side and make comments rather than actually run the show. So, I mean when Kevin took that over I was happy, and Kevin, I mean you knocked it out of the park. You were a natural, and Patrick too. I mean Patrick I you did quite a few shows too. You guys are both, I think, naturally good at kind of running a show like that, which is a talent I’m lacking.Patrick: You’re too humble.Kevin Yank: I when Shayne Tilley, who was the marketing manager at SitePoint at the time, he came to me. As marketing manager, he was monitoring the forum and what the community was talking about. At the time, I had moved into kind of a development role. It would’ve been around the time that I was working on the SitePoint reference site and things of that nature. He came to me. He said “Listen, what’s your interest in being involved in a SitePoint podcast?”, and I said “I think it would be awesome. I had been saying for years that SitePoint needs a podcast, but I don’t think I can do it all by myself.” He said “Well, have a listen to this thing. It’s a pilot from the forum, and I think the guys could use a SitePoint voice, but this is happening with or without us. So, the question is, Kev, do you want to be on board, or do you want to watch from the sidelines?” So, I said “I totally want to be on board.” To this day, I still feel kind of guilty that you guys had the energy and the drive to get this off the ground, and I sort of jumped on board after the cart was already in motion.Patrick: You know, it’s funny you should mention that because Shane, I asked Shane for a comment for the show, and he sent me an email, and this seems like a good time to share his remarks, because it’s directly relevant to what you said. He said “I would like to on, not my sadness that the show is coming to an end, but how proud I’ve been of everyone that contributed to the show over the years. I still a meeting early on a Saturday morning for me, where the show was pitched by the original cast, the original theme music, the look on Kev’s face when I mentioned we were going to do a podcast without him. I could go on. In the office, we had been talking about a podcast for about 12 months before you ed me, and nothing had happened. When I went into the office the Monday after I approved the first episode, there was a look of horror on Kev’s face when I told him we were going to start a podcast without him. Suffice to say, he emailed you guys within a few minutes.”Brad: And the rest is history.Kevin Yank: Yup.Patrick: You know, different memories. Yeah, the rest is history. He says “190 plus episodes later, all I can say is congratulations at the end of a job well done.” He mentioned something about crickets, and maybe Brad, I don’t know if you this. He says “If I could make a request, can you please play the cricket sound effect that was oh so controversial many, many shows ago. The crickets, I can’t the actual episode, but it was around the time of the election. Kevin made a comment about it, and there was nothing but silence from the other host. Kev came to me with two versions, one with a cricket sound effect. After the uncomfortable silence, one without. Suffice to say, we went with the sound effect.” I have no idea what that’s about.Kevin Yank: It would have been in the first five episodes for sure, back when we were still stressing about little editing choices like that.Brad: Yeah. I that, but I couldn’t tell you what episode that was in. I do crickets getting-it wasn’t live though, right? It was in a post production the crickets were put in, I think.Kevin Yank: I think so. Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely.Patrick: Right. Yeah. We’ve never been technical enough to really have a sound board.Kevin Yank: If there are any SitePoint podcast superfans out there who can figure out what episode and time code that occurred at, I’m sure we would love to hear it again for old time’s sake.Patrick: Yeah, definitely. So, we recorded episode one on October 27, 2008 and released it November 10, 2008. So, that’s how it got started.Brad: You know, I was listening to the first episode earlier today, which is a blast from the past. You guys should check it out. You cringe only a few times, you know, it’s like. Obviously, it’s episode number one, but one of the funniest lines was in the first few minutes. I was kind of talking about what to expect and how the show is going to go in the format, and I think I mentioned that the show will be 30 minutes in length, 30 minutes. Every other week we’ll be 30 minutes. We’ll try our best to hit that mark. I don’t think we ever had a show come anywhere close to 30 minutes. Maybe the first one, and even that’s over 30 minutes.Kevin Yank: I that was my suggestion. I said we’re planning this podcast. If there’s one thing wrong with all the podcasts out there is that they waffle on and on for hours. I’m not going to name any names, but there are definitely podcasts out there that take 20 minutes to get past the sort of “Hey! We’re back for another show,” and you don’t even get to here word one about what they’re actually going to talk about until 15, 20 minutes into the thing. So, I was determined the SitePoint podcast would not be like that, and I think despite our lengthy run lengths over the years, I think we’ve always been good about getting straight into the show.Louis: Yeah. I think it’s been great for that, and I agree with you. I struggle with some, you know, podcasts that are more amateur productions like ours, a lot of times for the same reason. Yeah, I think that even in those shows, I think the longest we did…I don’t know if, Patrick, did you post stats on this? You pulled a lot of stats for today’s show. So, do you know what the longest show we did was?Patrick: Oh, man. That’s a good one. No, I don’t know what that one is. Dang it. Darn you. If you had asked us for the podcast stats can’t you…Kevin Yank: Cut it out. Edit it out.Brad: There’s some that were like an hour and a half plus I .Kevin Yank: Yeah, for sure.Patrick: Really?Louis: That would’ve been before my time. I think the longest we did with me would’ve been an hour or ten or something.Patrick: Yeah, but we’re normally within that 35 to 45, you know, category I want to say. You know, 35 to 50.Brad: 30 minutes is tough. I’ve tried to do shows since and we, again same thing, try to get it in 30, and it’s just really hard to do. Like, you have to get in the show immediately and have a really strict schedule with topics. As soon as you hit that five or ten- minute mark, you have to move on, regardless of how awesome the conversation is. You just have to move on if you’re going to hit that mark. It’s really hard to do.Louis: Yeah, especially with a big show like this, because everyone wants to contribute something to every, you, every conversation. You know, with one on one interview shows there have been a few that have been more around that length. I think some of them are under half an hour.Kevin Yank: I think you’re absolutely right. When you’re planning a show, you kind of think of what you have to say about it, and you go “I could probably talk for 30 minutes about that. I’m pretty interested in that topic. I’ve got 30 minutes of stuff to say, and sure, there will be other people saying some stuff too, but they’ll probably say some of the stuff that I’m thinking of. So, I won’t say that stuff, and I’ll even out to about 30 minutes.” When in reality, every person is bringing 30 minutes plus to the table, and we always have to say less than we would like.Brad: Got to get that last word in four times.Kevin Yank: Yeah.Patrick: Like you guys are doing going back and forth? No, I’m just kidding.Brad: Crickets.Kevin Yank: So, what comes next?Patrick: Geez, Kevin. Calm down.Kevin Yank: I’m so excited.Patrick: Stop pushing me along. You’re a guest, okay. You’re a guest.Kevin Yank: I’m sorry.Patrick: I’m just kidding. Okay. So, another thing I wanted to talk about is our live show, because we did some live show, and we did four of them. Three of them were in person. One was not, and the first live show we did was May 22, 2010, and we did a live show at WordCamp Raleigh, in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was me, Brad, and Stephan, and then we came back again a year later, and the cops were there to get me. They heard about the last podcast. Run, Okay. Yeah, and then we came back a year later, May 21, 2011, and did a live show at WordCamp Raleigh again, same lineup. We had a really cool setup on stage with like arm chairs and stuff, and it was really a very talk show-esque. I just want to talk about that, because that was fun, especially the first one was kind of unique, and we had a really great lineup of people to talk to. Stephan, do you have any kind of memories of that?Stephan: Yeah. You know, it was a lot of fun. Like, at the time, it made me very nervous. I, I’m not a get up in front of people type person, so getting up there and doing a live show made me a little uncomfortable, but you guys, you guys were troopers. I think both of, both you and Brad had public speaking experience, so it made me a little more at ease, and I think I’ve gotten a little better now, but it was, it was fun. I think, I think, the, the audience actually, they kind of got into it and they were asking questions and we got to meet some people and it was fun. I really enjoyed it.Brad: Yeah, I, I had a lot of fun with that. The first one was definitely, I was definitely a little more nervous on the first one because it’s, I think the show was, what, two hours?Patrick: Yeah, we did about a two-hour show.Brad: Yeah, a two hour show, and so I’m like, initially, a little nervous just thinking “All right, we have two hours we’re going to be up here and we have to make sure we are doing something the whole time, right, for two hours”.Patrick: Juggling, talking, whatever, as long as we have something.Brad: Yeah, showing off our talents, you know, whatever it may be. But once we got going and we had such a, a strict kind of schedule of guests, when they were coming on, when they were coming off, we had a lot of helpers from the audio-video side. We also had, I believe we had someone set up that was going to kind of round up who was coming up next and make sure they were ready to go. So it was like, that took a lot of the stress off because you know “All right, every 10 minutes they’ll be someone new sitting here” and that makes it easy, and then the time really flew by. As soon as we started we were over, so I thought it was a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with it. The first one I think is probably the most memorable for me just because it was the first time I’d done something like that, but the other two that we did were, were great, and I especially liked the BlogWorld one just because it was the first time the four of us had ever been together.Kevin Yank: Yeah. Oh I was, I was devastated to have missed those WordCamp ones originally, just listening to them after the fact I was thinking “Oh, it would have been amazing if all four of us were there”.Patrick: Yeah, we got that opportunity at BlogWorld Expo. That was October 15th, 2010, and all four of us, that’s the first time and only time that the entire current host line up at any time has got together face to face and recorded a show and that was a lot of fun. I mean, I have a lot of memories of that trip and, you know, one of the ones, just go, I mean, we went, the night we all got there, we went to the buffet at Mandalay Bay and, like, it’s like 10 SitePoint people and then me, Brad and Stephan, we all just had fun getting to know each other. It was really cool to meet everyone, to meet you and Shane and, and Luke Cuthbertson who was the CEO of SitePoint at the time and the other people. It was a really great conference.Kevin Yank: It was a great opportunity. SitePoint was there to, to launch the Learnable site at the time and we-Patrick: Yeah, yeah.Kevin Yank: Were there meeting bloggers and finding bloggers who would be interested in recording courses for the site and, yeah, it was just, I suppose, fate that we were all ending up going to that event and not only that but they had a dedicated podcast area that as far as I can tell no one used except us. Is that right?Patrick: Yeah, and it’s funny you mention that. I, I don’t know, and it’s funny you mention that because one of the funniest thing I can about that whole thing is that, you know, I don’t mind saying this, but BlogWorld, you know, dropped the ball, right? I mean, they, they fumbled it and they kicked the ball behind the fridge. I mean, literally, like, we, we did, we did not know we were going to be recording until, like, a, a few days before, and I had hooked them up with SitePoint, you know, you guys, I know you guys, not you guys, but SitePoint organization, Learnable, etc., spent a lot of money to be there, and also gave money to the conference and we were just going to do this podcast. That was the start of it and they promised us this area and then bad communication. And I you emailed me, like, I don’t know, 10 days, 8 day before and said “Guys, I don’t know. I don’t know if we have a show”.Kevin Yank: I’m pulling the plug.Patrick: And I sent them and email and something that, yeah, and I sent them an email. It was a funny thing you told me, you said the email I sent them which was kind of pointed, you printed out and put it on the wall and everyone in the office laughed at it. Because I, I was the bad guy I guess because I had to say “Hey, stop asking about this, just get our podcast stuff together,” and it worked out.Kevin Yank: I think they put it out there that they would have a podcast facility and probably the only people they heard from who were interested in using it was us. I know the Twit Network did some broadcasting from the show, but they had their own gear and their own set up. They were roaming around the, the place and talking to people on the show floor. We were the, the s of the podcast place and I, I guess, I don’t know, it felt like it stalled at the point of trying to schedule the times that we would use the thing, but the place was vacant the rest of the time. I have to say the, the guy, I wish I could his name, but the guy, the technician who was there on the day to help us with the recording, I wasn’t expecting anyone. I thought we were going to walk up and there would just be, you know, some chairs in an empty space, and we’d, if there were microphones we would be lucky, but there was a guy there. He had microphones, he had professional recording gear. He knew exactly what he was doing and he took really good care of us, and he even dealt with it when we wanted to plug in our laptop to UStream so that we could stream the recording live as we were doing it.Brad: Yeah, I mean, at the end it came out great. Like the, the quality was awesome.Patrick: Yeah.Brad: You could kind of hear a little bit of the background which I thought was cool, but it wasn’t like, overpowering at all. And then, yeah, we had the live stream going on, so at the end of the day I think it came out really great.Kevin Yank: Absolutely.Patrick: So yeah, that was a lot of fun. And then our third live show of the four was February 13th, 2011, when did our live 100th episode and we did that over video. I think we used TinyChat to have a little chat element and that was kind of the first time, and I don’t want to say we tried it the next week or two weeks from then, and then we kind of didn’t do it anymore, but we had kind of that chat experience and video and that kind of brought a different element to it.Kevin Yank: I have to say, in hindsight, I really enjoyed that process and, I, I’m not sure why we didn’t keep doing it. I think it might have just been one more element that we had to set up or plan when we were recording a show and it was maybe just a little too much work, but when we were doing it, it, it seemed great.Patrick: Yeah. I think it was because you and Brad, you and Brad didn’t want to have to comb your hair.Kevin Yank: Yes. My lengthy locks.Brad: You mean put pants on, right?Stephan: I actually liked the video shows. I thought it was kind of cool that we had, like, a video going. I was uncomfortable at first and I, I just think we had some technical difficulties with it. We could never get it to, to do it right. We would have the audio recording, and we could never get the video to show up in synch or, or we could get it to show up sometimes and I think we just kind of said “Eh, forget it. We’re just going to, we’re just going to go with the audio because that’s what we’re comfortable with.” That’s what I of it.Kevin Yank: Yes, but the surprise for today is that the reason the SitePoint podcast is ending is because we have figured it out and the, the podcast is ending and the video podcast starts next week right guys?Patrick: Yeah. Show me, tell me where to sign up.Kevin Yank: It’s a whole new cast I’m afraid. We have nothing to do with it.Patrick: Yeah, I mean, so I think part of this, what we’re talking about is the diversity of the show, right? I mean, we did group news shows. We did group shows. We did shows with guest hosts. We did group interviews where we, were more of us, more than one of us was on to interview someone. We did solo interviews. We did live shows, live shows with video, live shows in person, two, three, four host set ups, so really, we, you know, we tried most every kind of format.Kevin Yank: Yeah, and for a while, at the beginning, for the first year or so it was an every two weeks show, it was a bi-weekly show.Patrick: Right.Kevin Yank: And then I distinctly a conversation I had at a Web Standards group meeting Melbourne one night, I think I had spoken it early on the night, and someone came up to me and bought me a drink afterwards and he said “Listen, I’m a big fan of the SitePoint podcast” and it was probably the first time I had met someone in person who, who was a listen to the show and he said “Do it more often. Two weeks is too long to wait” and I kind of thought “Maybe this is our only rabid fan who wants twice as much SitePoint podcast, but maybe there are people out there who would listen to it every week.” And I know a lot of the really popular shows that have broken through and have built really huge audiences over the years, they do that through consistency and having a particular day of the week that it comes out and it always comes out on that day of the week and, and you can count on making that show part of your week as a listener and I thought, “You know, there’s something to that and maybe if there’s a way that we could take the show weekly, we should.” And I think that’s when we hatched the idea to do an interview every second show.Patrick: Yeah.Kevin Yank: And that’s something you continued right through till today, right?Brad: So that idea all came from someone buying you a drink, huh?Kevin Yank: Yes. I wish, once again, I can’t his name.Patrick: Yes. Just had to grease the wheel.Brad: Yeah, I actually, the interviews were fun. I didn’t do nearly as many as you Kevin. I did a few though, and they were definitely memorable. It’s the first time I ever Matt Mullenweg as actually the first interview I’ve ever done, one-on-one interview I’d ever done in my whole life like that, so that was a little bit nerve-wracking, especially since I was, you know, really just getting into the WordPress community and he’s kind of the, the godfather of it all, you know, so that didn’t help either, but, you know, overall I learned a lot from doing it and I, I really enjoyed it, so I did a few others over the years. That’s definitely a lot harder than it sounds, a one-on-one interview because, well, you guys know, I think we’ve all done one here, but to listeners, maybe not, that, you know, you kind of have to, you don’t know what the, the interviewee is going to kind of toss back at you. Some people could chat all day long about, with one question. Other people might give you a five-word answer and that’s it, and so it’s like you have to kind of be prepared to roll with that and also have questions lined up and if there’s something else, you know, kind of dive into the topics a little bit more, so it’s more of a challenge than a group where, especially interviewing somebody with multiple people because it’s all on you to kind of keep that, that flow going. So I distinctly that, when I was doing these interviews, how it was a lot more prep work doing those than it was the group shows for me.Kevin Yank: Absolutely. I would say generally though, there are a lot more people who give a good interview than not, and I think a one-on- one interview is one of those unique situations where both people feel a lot of pressure to deliver. The interviewer wants to make this a great experience for the person who’s given of their time and they also want to ask good questions because if the interview’s no good, they’re going to blame themselves. They’re going to go, “Obviously I didn’t ask them anything they were interested in talking about.” Whereas the interviewee also, even though, supposedly they are the star of this show and they are the celebrity that’s been invited on to talk about something that’s of mass interest. Nevertheless, usually those people feel a lot of pressure as well to deliver, to be interesting because this show is all about them. It’s not like a show where if you’re having an off day you can sort of sit in the background a bit and whatever is going on. As an interviewee, it’s all about you. There’s no getting out of that spotlight and if the show is bad, there’s no one to blame except you as the interviewee. So most of our interviewees, I think, did a great job of taking on that responsibility and providing something entertaining and insightful and something new and original that they hadn’t said before elsewhere.Louis: Yeah. I’d second that. I think we had, or at least for the interviews that I did that had a really amazing run, I think the ones that were more challenging were definitely a minority and for the most part, I had a great time with almost everyone I spoke to on the show.Kevin Yank: Were you surprised by how easily people say yes when you ask them to an interview? I know I was always going I can’t ask that person, but hey, I’ve got their e-mail address, I might as well.Louis: It actually, what happened to me, is that there were definitely people who I didn’t even consider asking for a long time or at least when I started on the show. And then what happened at some point was I was talking to two of the authors of SitePoint’s mobile web book, Max Wheeler and Myles Eftos, and we were just talking about a blog post that Jeremy Keith had written which sort of said, again paraphrasing, but sort of response web design is the only way to go, dedicated mobile and apps is kind of not as good approach. And we just sort of talked about it. They said, we sort feel it’s sort of dogmatic of way of thinking about this. And then, after the show went out. Jeremy Keith posted in the comments of the show, something like, “Well, that’s not exactly what I was saying. Obviously, I’d love to come on the show any time to clear this up or talk about it with you.” And so that’s when I kind of had the revelation of whoa. Well, Jeremy Keith, he wrote the first JavaScript book that I read when I was starting to program, learned web development. So, for me that was like, this is crazy, and did that interview and it went super well because obviously Jeremy’s a really funny, engaging guy.Kevin Yank: Yeah.Louis: So, once I’d had him on the show, then I sort of felt like, look. If I’ve interviewed Jeremy Keith, then I think that kind of broke any inhibitions that I might have had about asking people to come on the show. And so from then on whenever I wanted to email someone, didn’t matter how much of a superstar I felt they were, I was just like, hey, yeah. Want to come on the show? And like you said, most, really the majority of the time, the answer was yes.Kevin Yank: Plus, you could say do you want to come on my show that Jeremy Keith has been on? You know?Louis: Well, then, you could say that. Yeah. It was definitely surprising to me how willing most people were to come on the show. You know people, some people, I found, were a little bit uncertain because they hadn’t done interviews before. Even people who did a lot of you know, public speaking and blogging and people who were really, really out there as far as making their opinions known when it came time to do like a one-on-one interview, there were a little uncertain about how to proceed and that was kind of surprising as well because you’d think that between doing an interview for a podcast that’s edited and that’s just a few questions and getting up in front of a conference and addressing five hundred people, the interview would be a far less daunting task but it seems like it is a different thing in some people’s minds.Kevin Yank: Yeah. I’d have to agree with that.Kevin Yank: And that’s a good time for any young budding podcasters out there is there is probably someone out there worth interviewing who owes you a favor or who would never say no to you for whatever reason. And get them on your first show and then from then on, that breaks the ice if you’re inviting someone on your show, they’ll go to your site and go, “What is this show that I’m being invited on? Hey. Jeremy Keith’s been on it. It can’t be that bad.”Patrick: Right.Louis: And another good tip. This is just the tip for anyone who wants to start a podcast about web design development. If you want a smooth interview to get you started, and you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to ask good follow up questions and if you’re going to be able to run an interview, get John Allsopp on your show because you basically have to say, “Hi John. Welcome to the show.” And then you get 45 minutes of content.Kevin Yank: Plus he will always do an interview.Louis: And he loves. He’s really helpful. I mean the last time I had him on, it was like a week before Web Direction South So, I can’t imagine. I e-mailed him and I was like look I realize that you’re obviously really busy, but there’s been some stuff that you’ve blogged about lately that I’d like to talk about.” And was like, “Yeah. Sure. 100%. No problem.” He’s a great guy.Kevin Dees: I have to agree with you, Louis, on doing interviews. Even before I came on the SitePoint podcast, I having that same animosity, I guess anxiety, like about doing an interview with somebody and I just ended up asking one of the guys that was in town to do like basically one of the first interview shows for a podcast that I was doing at the time. His name was Benjamin Young. And then eventually, I think Patrick, yeah, we interviewed you for that podcast and then kind of from there. I think Patrick was the first person that I had asked to do the interview because I had been listening to the SitePoint podcast from episode 2. I wish I had figured out about it since episode 1 but it could be. Okay. I was like an original fan but unfortunately, I missed that mark. But, yeah. I sent Patrick an e-mail and Patrick was more than happy to come on. I think after getting to talk to you Patrick, it was kind of downhill from there as far as somebody I had not met before that I asked to do an interview on the show or actually, our concept was a little bit different because it wasn’t actually an interview. Jonas and I actually got to talk to you together. So, that was kind of an interesting thing.Patrick: Yeah. It’s funny how it starts from there because like you know, you had interviewed me, and I had listened to your show a little bit and when Brad left, it was. And Louis, we’d been talking to Louis about maybe doing a little less interviews because interviews I talked about require a lot of preparation. A lot of time was in that. After you’ve gotten to a certain point, you’ve interviewed so many people and it becomes harder to think of new people, so that was one of the things where I knew you did interviews and so I was like, I wonder if Kevin will do some of these interviews. And then we can invite him to be on the show as a host and so it worked out from there from us just talking and me being on your show and seeing that you’d interviewed a lot of well known web designers and had a good rapport with them.Kevin Dees: Yeah. It was definitely really fun, kind of getting into the community. I haven’t been around quite as long as you guys have, but you know, just the enthusiasm that the community has and just the listeners as well, I mean even on the podcasts that we were doing at that time. We got to do and talk to one of the listeners on the show and then, moving into that, my own personal blog and able to talk to people doing video interviews.And so all that stuff, you just become, I guess, more comfortable with it because you realize that every person that you talk to is just a person and they just happen to be doing something different than you are and that’s what makes it worthwhile to talk to that person. And I don’t. I found you think of somebody like a superstar and really they’re just like you. They’re just wanting to do something and so they’re more than happy to talk about it.Kevin Yank: Absolutely.Patrick: That’s funny. You know, I like your honesty because you said you’ve been listening since episode number 2 and a lot of people would just say, you know what that’s long enough. I can say from the beginning, but no. You specifically say episode number two. You have to love that honesty. But that brings up a point I want.Kevin Yank: That would be the easy cheat. To go back and listen to episode one but.Patrick: It would be and that bring up something that I wanted to ask and I think Louis’ done probably more interviews than anybody else if not right up there. So, I want, I was curious to ask you, what’s your favorite interview? And it doesn’t have to be one you did but obviously I expect one of the ones, some of the ones that you did to be one of your favorites. What are your like three or however many you come up with, favorite interviews, Louis?Louis: I think I can answer that pretty quickly. I’m just going to quickly double check. So that first interview I did with Jeremy Keith was amazing. I had a really, really good time. Even listening to it now, I think it was funny. I think we raised a lot of interesting points that are relevant to designers and I think it was a great interview and it’s also been, at least from the stats I pulled from Libsyn before today’s show, it is, by a significant margin, our most ed episode. It seems that that is also the listeners’ opinion.Patrick: Oh my God. It might be Jeremy Keith’s followers’ opinion on Twitter, but I don’t know about the listeners. I’m just giving you a hard time. Go ahead.Louis: All right. All right. All right. Now, that’s legit. In fairness, you’re right. A lot of that was probably because he has a, sort of a podcast, web app called HuffDuffer and he probably shared it pretty extensively on that which probably contributes to that count.Patrick: I’m just giving you a hard time. You should be proud of that. It is our most listened to show far and away and it’s because of you and your interview.Louis: That’s all right. It’s all right. No, it’s fine. You can give me a hard time. I can take it. And, yeah, so other ones I liked, we. I interviewed Ethan Marcott very shortly after he had just finished his involvement in the responsive redesign of the Boston Globe. So, I think that that was a great interview and that one, surprisingly when I was looking at the list was sort of down in the middle of the numbers. So, I imagine they’re probably people listening to this who haven’t heard it. And that’s pretty cool. It was fun to hear him talk about, you know, working on a project of that size and with the various teams that he worked with to try and get, you know…it was probably the first responsive design at that scale. It really needed to be really fast and effective at that size. So, it was an interesting conversation.Kevin Yank: I’ve got a few memorable interviews that I’d like to jump in with.Patrick: Yeah. How about I’ll throw it over to you next because I think it’s between you and Louis for number one and number two as far as who did the most interviews. Who are some of your favorites?Kevin Yank: Some of my favorites? We had a lot of them on the episode 100 when we did the live one to thank them. We invited them back and top of that list for me would be Chris Wilson, who was always generous with his time. I did a live interview with him at a Web Directions conference once upon a time. We were in the little speaker’s lounge that no one used for anything except us doing these interviews, I think. He was there as a speaker. He was there manning the Microsoft booth. Nevertheless, he gave me a good 15 to 20 minutes of his time to sit down and chat about his thoughts. Which at the time, no one would like to be the guy answering for Internet Explorer at that time and yet he was happy to give up his time and answer honestly and candidly. It was great to have him back on episode 100 once he had made the move to Google. At that time he was on the Google TV team, but he has since moved back to browsers. His first love and he is working on Google Chrome these days. Probably my very favorite interview of all time is Derek Powazek, who I have had a long-time Internet crush on.Louis: I love that show. I hearing that interview. That was a two-part show, right?Kevin Yank: Yeah, we broke it into two parts because he had so much to talk about. It wasn’t even one of those artificial two parts, where we just edited it, after the fact. He literally spoke for a whole episodes worth during the first time slot that we had lined up. At the end of it we both agreed we’d love to chat more, so we scheduled a second recording after the first one to do a follow up episode.Louis: I absolutely loved that episode, so that’s another one if anyone’s listening to this and hasn’t heard the talk. I think that’s not, you know, the content is definitely still timely and it’s absolutely worth the listen.Kevin Yank: We spoke about online communities, which is something that I know you’re ionate about as well, Patrick. In hindsight, I would’ve loved for you two to have gotten in on that show as well. You’ve certainly had plenty of opportunities to talk about community in your time. The other episode. The second episode. I forget which order they came in. We also spoke about publishing because he was involved in MagCloud at the time and he was also publishing his collections of short stories, the magazine called, “Fray”. These days he is running his own start up which is called, “Cute Fight,” and if you haven’t checked it out and you have a pet in your life or if you know of anyone who has a pet in their life, I recommend you check out Cute Fight. It’s just gone public. It’s a silly online game for owners of pets to decide once and for all whose pet is the cutest.Louis: Fight to the Death.Kevin Yank: Yeah, it is a fight to the death. You get to pick which gladiator stadium you’re fight takes place in. You pick three of the photos you’ve ed of your pet and they go at it and the community votes on which one is the cutest. It’s great fun and Derek continues to make great contributions to the web. Other people that come to mind are Jeffrey Veen, who is at TypeKit these days, but his involvement in the web can be traced way back to the origins of Google Analytics and even before that. Alex Payne, who was on the Twitter API team and later at Bank Simple. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Alex does next. He recently wrote a great article in The Magazine which is an IOS only magazine publication which is published every two weeks. He posted a great article about how, “Being alone with technology.” He’s a guy that’s starting over a little bit. He’s left his position at Bank Simple and also ended a long term relationship in his life and it was really interesting reading his perspectives on that. I can’t wait to see what comes next for him. Those would be my top four just off the top of my head.Patrick: Cool and just to draw on those a little bit, Chris Wilson interview was episode 11. The interview with Powazek and I actually did get in on that. I was…I interviewed him for the community stuff too, right alongside of there. He brought me on to do that, yeah, so episode number 48 was a publishing episode and 52 and 54, we released the community episode in two parts. It’s funny that you mentioned that because that is one of my favorite interviews on the SitePoint podcast. I think that was a really good show. I enjoyed talking about online community with him as he is a veteran of the space and I’ve been around the block a few times myself. We were about to have a really good conversation. I really enjoyed it. So, my other favorite interview would be…Kevin: I’ll just jump in and say if you want more Derek Powazek, he also presented a talk on running your own start up on Web Direction South this year and the video for that session is going to be posted online any day now. It was a great talk. He just sort of went, “Here are six situations in which I completely messed up in my career and here’s what I learned from them.” They were great no holds barred, looks back at personal failures in start-up business. Great war stories to hear as well.Patrick: Cool. In addition to Powazek, Paul Boag was one of my favorite ones and also Amber Naslund and Jay Baer. The interview I did with them was really cool because Jay has been around the block on the Internet for a very long time and worked for the first company to offer shared hosting solutions, I believe it was. It was just a really interesting conversation. So, Kevin Dees, you’ve probably done third among us as far as interviews. Who are a couple of your favorite interviews?Kevin Dees: Yeah. So, I’ve been on the show for about a year. I’ve been able to have a few interviews and I had to say among those, like you said, Paul Boag, I got to talk to him about his concept of client-centric web design instead of -centric web design. I think that was a really cool interview to get to do with him because he had just released the book and he had just done his series on his podcast kind of talking about the topic. Just the idea that the company goals of the client that you’re working with kind of come above the goals and all the things around that. How the business objective is. The business objective and as designers and developers, sometimes we can get caught up in the idea that it’s the above and beyond. It isn’t to say that the customer experience and all that kind of thing isn’t important. That was one of my favorite ones and then actually, the second favorite that I did was the one I got to do with Dave Rupert a few weeks ago. If you haven’t listened to that we got to talk about the Open Source projects that he’s been involved in like Fit Vids and Fit Text. Just after that actually, I got to talk with my friend, Ronnie Taylor about Drupal. That one actually did fairly well on the stats for the SitePoint podcast. I don’t really know if we talked about Drupal much. That was a really fun conversation to kind of touch on something that was outside of Word Press. Sorry, Brad.Patrick: Brad, is it safe to say that Mullenweg is your favorite?Brad: Yeah, I think so, not just because of who he is, but also being my first one. I had learned a lot from it. So, absolutely. It’s been a while. That was three years ago. A Lot has changed in the Word Press world since that interview.Patrick: Stephan, you have a favorite?Stephan: Do I have a favorite? I really never interviewed many people. I’m not a good interviewer mostly because it was hard for me to do it every Monday.Patrick: We totally understand that.Kevin Dees: I’ll have to say Stephan did an interview at Word Camp Raleigh 2011. You got to interview me.Stephan: That’s right.Patrick: Very good.Stephan: I don’t know if that was more of an interview or more or less me letting you express yourself. I wouldn’t call it really me interviewing you.Patrick: That’s what the greatest interviews are. Letting them express themselves.Brad: It sounds like that really left an impression on Stephan. He ed that.Kevin Dees: He said no more, no more.Louis: I actually just thought of another one that I really enjoyed. I thought I’d just throw one into the list. An interview I did for podcast 139 with Lea Verou. It was just a great interview. I feel like I got the impressions talking to her by email when I asked her to come onto the show and even when we hooked up the Skype call that she was a little bit anxious about being on an interview and she didn’t really know…we didn’t really have a clear topic to talk about. I was just going to ask her about all the different various projects that she had done and her talks at conferences that I’d seen videos of. That kind of interview where you don’t have a core topic and you’re not asking someone about something they feel really opinionated about can be really challenging for everybody, but this one went really well. It was just a lot of fun to do. Lea, is obviously an amazing developer, if you’ve seen any of her work on CSS3 and Javascript. She’s pretty crazy. So yeah, that was a lot of fun as well.Patrick: You know, one of the things I thought would be fun to look at, I actually did do this research is to, you know, line up kind of the first and last episode of each host and when they debuted. So I’ll just quickly run through that and then we can kind of talk about if there’s anything to talk about, and if there’s something in the middle that I think we’ll talk about, but, the pilot episode, October 15th, 2008, that was the first episode for Brad, Me and Stephan. Episode number one, November 10th, 2008, was the first episode for Kevin Yank. Louis ed us on episode number 101, that’s March 3rd, 2011, but Louis has been on the show before. That was his first one as a host, interviewing someone, or as a host otherwise, but he was actually on the show as a guest before that on an episode that was called “The Occasional Dick Move with Louis Simoneau “.Kevin Yank: That’s when I interviewed you, Louis.Louis: Yeah.Patrick: Yes. Yeah, and that’s a good title.Kevin Yank: Yep.Louis: I had a lot of fun on that episode and, and I think it kind of gave me a taste for it, so, when, when Kevin decided when he wanted to move on from the show and asked me if I wanted to, to hop on, I think having done that I felt really, really excited about the possibility.Kevin Yank: Muahahaha! My plan all along.Patrick: You were trapped. Kevin and his charm, trapping hosts since 2011.Louis: It was pretty cool, because, because for some, for some time after that show a Google search for my name turned up that as the first result, which I thought was pretty awesome, and I kind of wished it had stayed that way, but unfortunately all good things must come to an end.Patrick: Yeah. And so, let’s see, episode 108, April 16th, 2011, that was Kevin Yank’s last episode, so from 1 to 108. Episode 138, November 11, 2011, that was the last episode for Brad, so he went from October 15th, 2008, to November 11, 2011, and what was, or I should say pilot to 138, but what was memorable about that for me is I actually recorded it with him in person in his office in his house in Pennsylvania.Kevin Yank: It was a last ditch attempt to make it as convenient as possible for you to be on the show, but it didn’t work.Brad: Yeah, there were, there were tears, there was hugging. It was emotional, but I actually forgot you were here, Patrick. I’m glad you, I’m glad you brought that up. I forgot that’s the one. I knew you were here for one of them. I forgot that was my last one. I probably should have ed that, but that was fun.Patrick: Yeah, I hopped on the iFroggy private jet when I heard you were thinking of leaving and, you know, flew, I had them drop me out of the plane, no time for a landing, parachuted directly onto your roof and jumped down and saw if I could convince you and I couldn’t.Brad: Valiant effort.Patrick: There’s nothing, there’s nothing to say to that because it’s all made up, but, you know, and that was a fun episode. I mean, it was fun even though it was the last one. And you have no memories of that so you’re not saying anything.Brad: I the last show. I just forgot that you were in your house during the last show.Patrick: Apparently it meant nothing to you. I was sneaking behind you. And, of course, right after that, Devin Dees came on, episode 140, November 30th, 2011, that was his first show, and finally, episode 192 is going to be our last show for Kevin Dees, Louis, me, and Stephan. So that’s the host timeline.Brad: You know I see that you actually had Kevin back on again on episode 161, but if you look at the time line, you know, you never had me back on again so, I don’t, I don’t know what that says, but you bring me back at the, when it’s over.Patrick: You’re back on now.Brad: I’m kidding.Patrick: But to be fair, we did interview you on the show while you were still a host. We had you on as a guest with the co-authors of your first book to interview you about your book, so there’s always that.Kevin Yank: That’s a great point.Patrick: Yes. That is a great point. Thank you, thank you Kevin. I appreciate that. And I, and in doing this research I actually tallied up how many shows each of us hosted.Brad: This’ll be a fun stat.Kevin: Drum roll please.Patrick: And those numbers are as follows. Yes, drum roll. Okay. I hosted 124 episodes of the SitePoint podcast. Stephan hosted 99. And this includes the final one here also, if that was not clear, 124 for me, 99 for Stephan. Brad and Kevin actually came out tied at 84.Brad: Oh!Patrick: You guys, if one of you had just hosted one more.Brad: I’ll share it. We can share.Patrick: Or one less.Kevin Yank: Yeah.Patrick: You’ll have to share it. Louis Simoneau hosted 68, Kevin Dees, 31, and also, I realized this as I went through, Matthew McGain and Shane Tilley each were allowed to host one episode to do an interview with someone.Kevin Yank: Never again.Patrick: You know, it was, it was permitted once each in a pinch.Kevin Yank: Just, by the way, for any Matthew McGain fans out there, I have it on good authority that he has a podcast planned.Brad: Nice.Kevin Yank: Watch iTunes for that one.Brad: So Patrick, you won, by quite a bit.Patrick: I am the winner. The biggest, I am the biggest loser of them all. Yeah, I don’t, you know, Stephan, when I was looking through the numbers on Stephan I realized that he didn’t miss an episode for, like, six months on the first run. Like, every time his name was in the, he was on every episode for, like, I don’t know, three to six months, and all of us has skipped at least one, but you know, he was the early iron horse. Okay. So I don’t think you guys, I don’t know if I mentioned this to you or not, so I’m not sure if you had time to prepare for it, but maybe there’s something off the top of your head, I thought it might be fun to talk about favorite show titles, and obviously number 97, “The Occasional Dick Move with Louis Simoneau” is probably the leader and probably the winner in everyone’s mind, And, you know, it’s funny you mentioned that about t

Episode 191 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have the full , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #191: The Beat Don’t Stop (MP3, 41:44, 40.1MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics that were discussed in the first SitePoint Podcast and how things have changed in the period of just over 4 years. Here are the main topics covered in this episode:Opera: Just 4.13% of Web’s Code is ValidYahoo Launches Web Analytics Update- Yahoo! Web Analytics To Be DiscontinuedEC2 out of Beta: Now with Windows and MoreBrowser Trends December 2012: Chrome Grabs Legacy IE sDo you know this guy? | Internet Explorer from The Browser You Loved To HateBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/191.Host SpotlightsPatrick: Eternal moonwalk – A tribute to Michael Jackson.Louis: Banjo Ben | Banjo Ben Clark | Home | Online Banjo, Guitar & Mandolin Instruction and GANGSTAGRASSStephan: Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go | Creating – WSJ.comKevin: So Real it’s Scary – YouTubeInterview TranscriptLouis: Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the SitePoint podcast. Hi guys, we’ve got a full house today.Stephan: Good evening.Kevin: Yeah.Patrick: Yes, we do.Kevin: I sounded really depressed.Patrick: Sounded very authoritative. Like, “Yes. We do. You want to make something of it?”Kevin: Oh, me. Good times.Patrick: This is our final group news show. This is the end.Kevin: I’m very sad.Louis: It is.Patrick: I’ll miss our chats. The first one we did that was a group news show, that was what the podcast originally was, was November 10, 2008 we released Episode 1. Four years and about a month later released. New show. Time to wrap it up. We have some good stories. Look back a little bit and should be fun.Kevin: Yeah.Louis: I’m still here.Patrick: That’s all I’ve got to say. Why don’t you interject with something, Louis?Louis: You had this cool idea to jump back and have a look at the stories that were covered in Episode 1 of the podcast and just thought we’d talk a little bit about what has changed and what hasn’t changed. Maybe we can start with that. What was Episode 1 all about?Patrick: That’s a great idea and we have a couple of extra stories at the end. As I said, four years ago, Episode 1, we had three news stories on that show. That show was hosted by me, Stephan, Kevin Yank and Brad Williams. The first news story that we discussed was a study that was done by Opera and they found just 4.13% of the web’s code was standards compliant. I actually looked to see if they had updated this survey at all, if they had done it again, and I could not find it. I don’t think they have updated but I guess it’s an opportunity to reflect on where the web has come in four years as far as standards compliance goes. 4.13 now. What would it be now?Louis: I feel as if you were, and this is just a total shot in the dark but that’s what we do here, if you were to go with the HTML 5 specification I think you’d probably have a much larger percentage of sites validating only because HTML 5 is a bit more lax. Did they mention in that study what standard they were validating against? I’m sure there’s still a ton of broken code out there but I feel as though HTML 5′s approach of paving the cow paths and being less arbitrarily strict about things like quoted attributes or self-closing tags means that there’s probably a lot of things that wouldn’t have been valid as HTML 4 strict or as HTML 1.0.Patrick: The articles I’m reading just say that they ed the W3Cs validation tools.Louis: I guess with whatever doc type they had declared.Patrick: I was looking for a particular doc type but I don’t see one specified.Louis: In fairness, obviously you couldn’t validate a document…it would be whatever doc type the sites themselves specified which I guess would still be the case so there are probably just as many invalid sites out there that haven’t switched to an HTML 5 doc type and they’re still invalid for whatever doc type they do declare. And I guess there are probably a lot that don’t declare a doc type at all. So in fact it’s probably not much better. Maybe I’m pessimistic but it feels as though it wouldn’t be that much better.Stephan: I’d have to agree with you, Louis.Patrick: Yeah.Stephan: You guys will have to laugh at me a little bit because if I was still running my old website when we first started this show on this old CMS that I wrote myself I wouldn’t have declared the doc type.Louis: I guess that’s another valid point though. You’re talking about CMS in there. I guess perhaps the spread of WordPress and the fact that a lot of people are running really simple sites rather than hacking together mark up themselves would be just installing WordPress. Maybe that will give those numbers a bump. Maybe we’ll see higher levels of standards compliance just because people are using tools that generate the mark up for them and those tools are written with standards compliance in mind. Kevin, what were you going to say?Kevin: I was actually going to say just that. I was going to mention content management systems but I have another take on it. It wasn’t the positive view; it was the clients-from-hell approach which is clients drop Microsoft Word, copy and paste right into the content management system. It’s just a nightmare. That’s probably where the majority of these invalid sites come from.Louis: I guess if you want to include unencoded entities as some of that that number’s probably right on the money. Coming back to what I was saying about HTML 5, I think HTML 5 is a bit more accepting of…I want to say ampersands…inside of a text area you can use an unencoded ampersand and that’s legit?Stephan: Instead of ‘and Amp’.Louis: Yeah. Let me just have a quick look. “An ambiguous ampersand is an ampersand character that is followed by one or more characters.” Right. If it has another letter or number immediately after it where it could be considered an actual entity then you would have to encode it if you wanted it to be an actual ampersand. However, if it’s on its own, for example, surrounded by spaces then you’re able to not encode the ampersand in HTML 5.There are a few things like that may get a little bit easier to achieve standards compliance but it feels as though we don’t have the same kind of either-or approach that we used to. Because the browsers are better as well and browsers do render standard CSS and HTML in much the same way at least for modern browsers, I think maybe there’s less emphasis towards new developers and front end developers in general to focus on standards compliance.Patrick: A couple other things that were mentioned in this survey that were interesting back in ’08 was that just 50% of the sites that had a badge saying they were valid weren’t actually valid.Kevin: They were valid, Patrick, just before the clients got to them.Patrick: Sure. Blame the clients. Always blame the clients. Another thing is they mentioned the most popular HTML tags and one of the ones mentioned in this eight is the table tag. I wonder if that’s now swapped out for div or something like that.Louis: There’s definitely a lot less table based layout going on. I don’t know if you’ve ever opened a reasonably complex website there are thousands of nested divs. It’s pretty horrific. I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m really glad those badges went away. I realize they were super- important at the time for getting developers to move away from tables and towards CSS layouts and towards standards but…Patrick: I suppose ‘super-important’ is one way to refer to those badges.Louis: I don’t think we need them anymore.Stephan: Wait. You guys are saying you didn’t like the little badges that told you what application was running your website? Like PHP? The little rectangles with the purple that had PHP? I miss them. Just getting a little nostalgic.Louis: No. I don’t miss any of those at all. Although there was an attempt…do you those HTML 5 badges that had the weird logos for all the different components?Kevin: Absolutely.Louis: That was about a year ago?Kevin: You had CSS3, HTML 5 and I think it was JavaScript.Louis: There were some even weirder ones in there. There was one for the video, one for interactive elements…They were pretty but it was kind of a mess.Patrick: Yeah. It was a bunch of stuff.Kevin: Yeah.Louis: I mean they were pretty but it was kind of a mess.Stephan: I think I’m going to go old school and just put my website back up with those.Kevin: Those badges or logos actually reminded me of superheroes. I want one of these on a cake so I can walk around my house…or on front of a t- shirt. Except with the six pack of abs on the t-shirt too.Louis: The CSS 3 one and the video and multimedia ones make sense but then the other ones are just goofy.Kevin: Connectivity’s looks like some arcane kind of…I don’t even know.Louis: Like a beetle maybe? Or like the mark of Cathilo.Kevin: The only one you can pick out is the multimedia logo.Patrick: You have to my perspective on this is not as a developer like you guys so I just think of these as pretty pictures. So to me it looks like a flower, a police badge, a TV, a cardboard box, some guy with short hair, a sprocket . . .Louis: Some guy with short hair? Where do you get that?Patrick: You’ve got the page up: W3.org/HTML/logo. You scroll down to the bottom it says, “What the tech?” So you check everything to get this badge and there will be icons. I guess…gosh, which one is it?Louis: You can tell them above the badge builder. If you click on them, you’ll see what they are.Patrick: There you go. You’re right. The guy with short hair is multimedia.Louis: Here the rest of us are like the only one that is recognizable as anything is the multimedia one and Patrick thinks it’s a guy with short hair so clearly…Patrick: Look at it, right. I mean, come on, in the right light it’s almost like Bart Simpson.Louis: There we go. That’s one thing that’s changed in the last four years: badges have become significantly more hilarious.Patrick: The next story from that first episode was Yahoo! Launches Web Analytics. This was probably quick and dead.Louis: That’s just cruel.Patrick: Because I wasn’t expecting Louis’ reaction. I don’t know. It threw me off guard there. Or off balance, I should say. But I found a story, June 15th this year in MarketingLand.com, Daniel Waisberg: Yahoo! Web Analytics to be Discontinued.Stephan: Imagine that.Patrick: That is over now. It is dead now.Louis: I for one am shocked. No, that’s all right. Look, we loved Yahoo! but…Kevin: The web analytics page is still there. web.analytics.Yahoo!.com.Patrick: It is. And apparently…this announcement says that on October 31st, 2012 all projects on Yahoo! Web Analytics are scheduled for discontinuation and will be shut down including the discontinuation of Yahoo! Web Analytics consultant network for all s. They’re supposed to be down but…Louis: But can’t even shut it down correctly.Patrick: I don’t know. They forgot to shut it down.Louis: Oh, my God.Stephan: So it’s about as dead as the Feedburner API, right?Patrick: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. At least we didn’t have Yahoo! feeds or I guess Yahoo! pipes.Stephan: I miss pipes.Patrick: We used to use pipes for this podcast to notify us of new comments, I think. I don’t know if you all that. Probably just me and Stephan. That was probably before Louis and Kevin Dees here. I guess that’s the end of the story. Am I right?Louis: I think that’s the end of that story. Although it is interesting to note how dominant Google Analytics has become in that time. There was a time when a competing company could start a web analytics platform and expect anything other than abysmal failure. Whereas today it doesn’t feel like that’s the case anymore. If Microsoft came out tomorrow and said, “We’re launching a web analytics platform,” I think we’d all think that was a little hilarious.Patrick: Yeah.Stephan: Yeah.Kevin: I think there is one thing to be said for Yahoo!, they did try the real time data stuff whereas you had to wait a day to get anything from Google Analytics and Yahoo! attempted to do the update in a few minutes. They did have that edge for maybe a few years and now Google has that.Patrick: Rest in peace, Yahoo! Web Analytics.Louis: Or not. Or zombie web analytics because the webpage is still up.Patrick: You never know. They could decide to mount a challenge on that front. The third and final story from episode one was that Amazon’s EC2 was out of beta. “Now with Windows and more.”Louis: That one went significantly better than Yahoo!’s Web Analytics.Kevin: I would agree with that.Patrick: It did, it did.Louis: Understatement even.Patrick: Right. EC2, Amazon web services have this whole cloud computing thing has happened over the last four years or at least has grown in popularity and AWS is a big part of that. A lot of these hot startups use it, a lot of web services rely on it. It’s just popular.Louis: I can’t even imagine running stuff on individual rented servers. The ability to, if we want to try a new project, to just spin up a new server and see how it works when you want to launch. We’re using this software called ErrBit which does error reporting. We just pop that on a small instance. It’s a completely different world in of working with servers. It’s amazing. The downside of that is because EC2 has such a huge market share whenever they have problems all the Internet goes away.Kevin: I from episode one the conversation took place about there being no uptime guarantee. I imagine that has changed. I don’t know. I don’t use EC2 on a regular basis. Does anyone know?Louis: Let me look that up. Obviously it’s very good. The number of outages you have is still extremely low.Patrick: Amazon EC2 does have an SLA service level agreement and they say they will, “use commercially reasonable efforts to make EC2 available with an annual uptime of at least 99.95% during the service year.” That’s their commitment and if they fail to satisfy that commitment, then you will be eligible to receive a credit.Louis: Nice.Patrick: That’s the guarantee.Louis: Nice. I don’t know how you guys feel about this but one thing that comes up whenever there’s an EC2 outage and we’re talking about it at work, yes, obviously the downside from a ’s perspective when EC2 goes down everything goes down. Suddenly Netflix is gone and Pinterest is gone. It feels to you like the whole Internet is gone.Patrick: People don’t tweet, they just complain to each other via text.Louis: Or something, right? The potential advantage to this as a company…we’re talking, well maybe we should try and get more, but you think about it from your point of view as a company if the whole Internet seems to be down your s will be less angry at you. If you’re down and also Netflix and Pinterest and Twitter are also all down, then even for s not technically savvy, it becomes apparent that that’s an infrastructure thing and not a you-messed-up thing. I don’t know how you feel about that.Patrick: I guess if you’re on the wagon train and you’ve got the smaller wagon and the big wagon topples over then you get less attention. I think there’s something to be said for that idea; it’s not that you want to be known as someone that goes down but obviously Amazon Web Services is a reputable service run by a reputable company, widely trusted by people who run projects probably much larger than yours. That’ll be the headline. The headline is, “Netflix goes down.” The headline is, “I can’t settle for three hours of downtime. I paid seven whole dollars, damn it.” That becomes the headline. Not that some web developer focus service is down. They tend to be more understanding. You’re right.Louis: Both those stories bring me back to the same place. I was talking with regards to Yahoo! Analytics that Google Analytics has become essentially a monopoly as far as web analytics goes. And EC2 is almost in the same place with regards to cloud hosting. There are probably a few more serious competitors in the space of cloud hosting. Rackspace Cloud is one and Microsoft has one but I’m pretty sure it has fairly low market share.How do you feel about the fact that in a few of these major aspects if you run a web application your hosting and your analytics are essentially run by companies that don’t have any serious competition.Kevin: I’m glad they’re nice. They don’t hate me.Stephan: I’ve got to stick to my status quo and say I don’t like it actually.Patrick: Here’s the thing: is could hosting really that monopolized? I mean, cloud hosting…there are a ton of services out there. There’s Rackspace cloud, there’s AWS. Google search will lead you to a bunch of competitors.Louis: I kind of want to know what the market share is.Patrick: Stephan, continue your point.Stephan: My point is this. There seem to be a lot of cloud hosting solutions out there but as the Amazon outage showed there are actually a lot of things hosted on Amazon’s cloud service. That’s the weakness, that’s the flaw: so much stuff is hosted on it when it does go down it does affect a lot of things. Heaven forbid, Facebook. Had Facebook been hosted on Amazon cloud people would have lost their minds.Patrick: Stephan’s like, “I don’t want to walk the streets. If Facebook is hosted by Amazon, it’s not safe out there for me.”Louis: That’s basically the case. I agree with that. I’m searching and not finding any numbers. People say at least 50% market share but no firm numbers anywhere.Kevin: At the end of the day you could always buy a hard drive and a computer case and throw those things together and have your own web server under your own control if you wanted to.Louis: You could. It would be awful.Patrick: That’s for weirdos, Kevin.Kevin: You guys don’t do this? I imagine you don’t have bomb shelters either.Patrick: No.Louis: No.Stephan: No. No bomb shelters.Kevin: I do have a zombie preparedness kit.Stephan: I just go in the bathtub.Kevin: Hey, man, my machete is sharpened.Patrick: But so does everyone else in Texas.Louis: That took a turn for the weird.Kevin: Yeah. I’m sorry. I do these things sometimes.Stephan: That’s what I’m here for.Patrick: We talk about Google Analytics but when we want browser statistics where do we go?Stephan: We go to Stat Counter and the browser trends have been a constant topic on this show for its entire run. Maybe too much so.Louis: So let’s just rest it.Patrick: Yeah, we have to wrap it up. We have to do this right. I saw that Craig Buckler on SitePoint.com had posted the browser trends for December, obviously the numbers for November. And I had to go back. Our show, like I said, episode one came out on November 10th, so the October numbers from StatCounter had just come out then. Let’s take a look at where the browsers were when we did episode one and where we are now as far as market share goes.October 2008, picture it, there are no cloud yet. The clouds haven’t yet landed in the sky. I’m just kidding. The browsers are as follows: First place, Internet Explorer: 67.68%. Second place, Firefox: 25.54%. Third place, Safari: 2.91%. Fourth place, Opera: 2.69%. Fifth place, Chrome: 1.02%.Louis: What?Patrick: Sixth place, Other: 0.17%. That’s the top six in October 2008. Let’s go to now, December 2012. First place is Chrome, 37.14%; up from 1.02%. In other words a 36% gain in that time. Second place is Internet Explorer, 29.2%. They lost 38 percentage points. Third place is Firefox, 22.11%. They actually have lost too; they lost about 3.5%. Fourth place Safari, a big gainer here, a 6% gain. They’re at 8.57%. Fifth place, Opera: 1.27%. They lost; their market share was cut in half. Sixth place, Other: 1.7%.There are a few observations there. Obviously the biggest one is Chrome. They don’t have the big dominance IE did but they are the leader in the market now.Louis: Yeah. That’s a pretty crazy level of change there. The other nice thing is seeing those older versions of IE really drop off pretty exponentially. What was the latest version of IE in 2008?Patrick: Internet Explorer 7 was released October 18th. Yeah, it was 7. It was two years old at that point. 8 didn’t come out until March of ’09, so another six months.Louis: If people had asked us what the best case outcome would be for the future of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 at that time this is maybe not everything we could have hoped for but it’s pretty close.Patrick: This is the best case for web developers, right?Louis: Yeah.Patrick: Let’s clarify that.Louis: Well, the best thing for everybody. Who doesn’t benefit from not using IE 6? Everybody benefits.Patrick: Who doesn’t benefit from not using Windows?Louis: What’s that?Patrick: Who doesn’t benefit from not using Windows?Louis: That’s debatable. Windows is a legitimate platform. IE 6 is not a legitimate web browser.Patrick: It’s funny you should mention that because I actually had those numbers put aside because I knew it would come up. IE 6 at that point, October 2008, was at 27.38% of the market. That’s four years ago.Stephan: That’s crazy.Patrick: Now at 0.35%. It’s dropped 27.03%, almost all of its share as we’ve talked about over the last number of months. Still that’s a big drop there.Louis: It’s awesome.Kevin: Yes.Patrick: It’s everything you would hope for, Louis.Louis: It is almost everything you would hope for. You really hope for zero but…Patrick: Come on, you’ve got 0.35. Does it really have to be 0.000?Louis: Yes.Kevin: I’m going to plus one that.Louis. Yeah, it does.Patrick: Here’s the thing: IE 6 outlived this podcast. Say what you want about it.Louis: Badda bing.Patrick: That’s just the way it is.Louis: Ouch, that hurts. That hurts right here.Kevin: Patrick, you don’t know that. It could hit 0.00 tomorrow.Louis: Yeah, you never know.Kevin: Fat lady not sung yet, my friend.Louis: Oh, yeah. What else is there to say? The browser landscape is so much nicer now than it was then. Obviously we’re presented with new challenges. There’s been a lot of talk over the past year about web developers working either on new projects or experimental things being lazy about their HTML 5 and CSS 3 properties and only using WebKit prefix versions so there’s a risk of a new specter of browser incompatibility on the horizon or has already arrived but on the whole I think we’re doing a lot better than we were. It’s interesting. These numbers wouldn’t include mobile browsing, right? Because you’d be looking at somewhat different numbers. There’s no way that all of mobile is in that “other” 1.3% or whatever.Patrick: That’s a good question. I’ve thought about that because there is mobile browser. That is a separate category on StatCounter, is mobile browser. I’m not really sure. I don’t have the answer.Louis: It feels as though a fairly significant percentage of browsing would happen on mobile nowadays. When you click on global stats you do see…when they do Safari they’re doing Safari combined because Safari iPad is 3% on its own and Android is .5% on this graph I’m looking at. All those numbers feel really low. Maybe my usage is different but I feel as though I load probably 35% of the websites I open, I open on my phone. Maybe it’s StatCounter’s numbers or something. I don’t know. Do you guys have any…in your own analytics do you see anything that would…Stephan: I get a ton of traffic via phone. Mostly Android, which is surprising to me.Louis: Is this for your person site?Stephan: Yeah. Just for my personal stuff. That’s why it surprised me. I expected to get a little more iPhone usage just because people…I’m more in the tech community than anything else and I figured people would have iPhones but I guess you guys are Android hackers and that’s fine. I thought that was interesting. The stereotype for us is iPhones. I just haven’t seen that. I can pull up the numbers.Louis: It’s an interesting thing. Obviously there have been some pretty big shifts even in the last 12 to 18 months. Android’s market share has grown significantly but they’re keeping these reports stating that Android’s market share is 65% or whatever but it only s for 20% or 30% of website traffic. The stats that most people seem to be seeing seem to imply there’s more at least website traffic coming from iOS. But tech is an interesting one.Patrick: I can give you the numbers from KarateForums.com which is a pretty good sized martial arts community and a non-web techy audience, more of a general consumer web audience. According to Google Analytics, there they are again, it looks like I get about 25% of visits, that’s the visits metric, from mobile according to the mobile category here. And as far as devices go Apple iPhone is the leader far and away followed by Apple iPad and then Apple iPod and then they actually have the device names on here so the next one beyond that… I have to say it’s…not 10% but 7% of what iPhone gets so far and away. Motorola Droid Razr 4G is the next visitor there and the HTC 1 Samsung Galaxy so some of those Android devices come in but far and away it’s the Apple products. At least on my martial arts community.Louis: I’m checking some of my analytics as well and seeing a pretty similar shift. There’s a lot more iPhone and iPad than there is most other things. When you break down the Android devices into individual devices I’m seeing separate entries for…what is this? Even on the first two pages of my analytics I’m seeing entries four or five different variants of the Galaxy S3. I’m looking at 280 visits from the iPhone and then Galaxy S3 is 12 plus 5 plus 5 plus 5 plus 4. It looks like a lot less but if you added it up…Kindle Fire is . . . Man, there are a lot of devices out there.Kevin: Yeah, there are.Louis: Some of these things I’ve never even heard of.Stephan: I guess my numbers are just an oddity. I’m an odd fellow.Louis: Yeah, maybe.Patrick: I’m not even going to disagree with you. We’ve only got one show left. You’re odd.Stephan: Well, that’s okay.Louis: Come to think of it…sorry. I’m going to take that back. It starts with the highest one; Apple iPhone is 281 for the past month on this site. iPad is 107, iPod is 38 and then the rest is all these devices most of which look to be Androids although there are probably a couple of Blackberry devices in there but that’s out of a total of 651 which, if you do the math, iOS is only slightly more than half of that total. It looks like the far and away winner because it’s all grouped into a single device.But anyway just thought that was an interesting thing to point out about browser statistics. Obviously, mobile is the biggest changer. Again, a lot of the browsers on these devices tend to be fairly good competent browsers although we hear a lot about Android 2.X devices being the next IE 6 because the upgrade curve is really not looking positive for those older Android phones.We’re not seeing 2.2 and 2.3 devices drop off and that browser definitely has some limitations and has some CSS 3 and newer JavaScript API features that it doesn’t so that can be a show stopper for a lot of people. Especially because it’s a little bit harder to upgrade than upgrading your browser on your desktop because it’s requires replacing a physical device.Patrick: I guess the last thing we’re going to talk about and we’ve done a good job of covering and looking back on episode one but another constant is the show is Internet Explorer. And you see on this show if we talk about browsers where do we go? Internet Explorer. I think some of our busiest shows over the years, and this is something I’ve been told by former hosts and other hosts and people at SitePoint have in some way been tied to IE and an often a general distaste for Internet Explorer.It was funny, they’ve recently released a video called, “Do You Know this Guy?” It’s part of this “Browser You Loved to Hate.com” campaign. That’s how we get traffic in many ways: we talk about Internet Explorer and people come and bash it. I thought it was a really funny thing to mention and to look at if you haven’t seen it. There are a lot of sites and publications and new podcasts that have gotten a lot of traffic from that same thing, people commenting that IE sucks. Now this campaign essentially says, “IE sucks less.”Louis: I did see this video. Obviously it definitely made the rounds on Twitter when it came out. It’s pretty cool.Patrick: It’s clever. Even if you don’t like IE, it’s clever.Louis: You can kind of give it some respect. Because IE 10 is a really competent browser and it does a lot of really good stuff and in this video they go the goofy angle and talk about saving kittens or whatever and a bit of nonsensical stuff when there’s a lot of really strong technical reasons why IE 10 sucks less. I always feel a little bit like if someone’s trying to pull the marketing wool over my eyes, I’m not a big fan of it. I think IE 10 is a strong browser…Patrick: You wish they had less of a sense of humor about this.Louis: Yeah. I wish this video was more boring, I guess is what I’m trying to say. I don’t actually; I think it’s cool. I don’t know if there are a lot of people who are the target audience for this campaign who would actually switch to IE 10. I don’t know how many people use IE 10 or IE in general as a choice rather than they use Windows and didn’t bother to get something else. I think IE 10 is probably the first version that it would be legitimate to actually choose to use it just because you like it.Patrick: I’m going to say, Microsoft, from Louis you have to take that as the deepest compliment.Louis: That is really as good as it’s going to get.Patrick: That was quite a roundabout, running around the bush, beating the bush and then doubling back and beating it again compliment from Louis. Just so you know. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s funny. I think it’s interesting. I don’t know how effective it will be. It’s kind of a quirky thing, that kind of self referential humor that they have quotes from people saying, these aren’t exact quotes but, “I can’t believe I like IE 10 or IE 9. What’s wrong with me?” That tongue in cheek humor.And they have graphics about major comebacks like farming innovation, for example, and how cool farming was. They have a graph that basically shows olden time. So you have a tractor and then farming innovation dropped and then you got Farmville and farming innovation is up again. Comebacks come in many shapes and sizes. They do those kinds of things and it’s funny. Substance-wise, who knows. I don’t know but we will not live to find out.Kevin: I will, Patrick.Louis: You guys want to do one final round of host spotlights?Kevin: Not sure.Louis: All right. That’s cool. We can just go. That’s all right.Patrick: All right. Well, I’m Patrick . . .Stephan: Who wants to go first?Kevin: I have a hotspot hot light spot light. I have a bright light.Louis: You might want to see a doctor about that.Kevin: Jeez. I was looking through articles and this was a video as part of a larger SEOmoz blog post which had to do with building a website, SEO strategy. This video was included in there and it’s pretty cool. It’s called, “So Really, It’s Scary.” And they’re advertising how realistic their LG monitors are. This a commercial by LG. They take these monitors and they put them on the bottom of an elevator so the entire floor is covered with these monitors.People step into it and when they push a button it makes a really…the lights flash in the elevator and a strange noise happens and then the monitors that you’re standing on, because it’s so realistic, the floor falls out from under the people in the elevator. And it’s so funny; these people jump to the edge and grab the sides of the elevator and it’s hilarious. You have to watch this thing. It’s awesome.Patrick: That is a pretty funny. It’s a pretty good trick, I have to say. I watched it with mute on here obviously because we’re doing the show but that’s really cool.Louis: I’m watching this right now…Kevin: If only this was a video podcast.Stephan: I can go next because mine kind of ties in, speaking of elevators. I have an article from the Wall Street Journal about the ups and downs of making elevators go. It’s all about the mathematics involved in elevators and how they program them and how they decide how many people they should hold. It’s an interesting read. Apparently Americans are 22 pounds heavier than the average Chinese person which comes into play.Patrick: They need to make the elevators a little stronger for us.Stephan: And apparently in Asia more people will board an elevator car than in Europe or in New York so she has to plan the elevator timings around that. It’s an interesting read and I thought I would go out with a mathematical bang.Louis: Cool. I will definitely have a read of that. I have a totally off topic spotlight.Kevin: It’s not elevators.Stephan: Awesome.Louis: I think as my co-hosts know but listeners probably don’t, one of my pastimes for the past year or so has been trying to learn how to play the mandolin. I just wanted to throw out a spotlight to a really, really good online resource that I’ve been using. I’ll drop a link in the show notes. It’s BanjoBenClark.com. This guy does instructional videos for bluegrass guitar, banjo and mandolin and really, really, really in depth instruction with great high def videos showing both the fretting hand and the picking hand at the same time. It’s got two cameras.When he does a song he’ll play it slowly and throws up, for the mandolin solo, will chuck up a rhythm track on guitar so you can practice along with the rhythm track. I think there are some free videos and tabs up there and I think you can sign up for $5 a month to have access to the whole thing or a onetime $75 lifetime access. It’s really inexpensive and it’s been really useful for me so if anyone is looking to learn to strum some bluegrass, which I know is probably not a lot of our audience, but I thought I’d throw it out there because it was a really big help to me.Kevin: This is actually a really great website.Louis: It’s awesome, isn’t it? And the price is almost nonsensical. He throws up new videos almost every week, really in depth and a lot of content. At that price, $5 a month, it’s a no-brainer.Stephan: I like the logged in or you have to be logged in or a member webpage. The pop up that comes up if you’re not logged in to view a video. It’s awesome.Louis: I may not have seen that. There’s definitely some humor in the…Stephan: It’s self-deprecating humor. It’s great.Patrick: I’m looking forward to the mandolin and Large Professor, or mandolin and Nas some sort of mash up there. New York State of Mind over a mandolin or something, so don’t disappoint me on that, Louis.Louis: I have to go off that. Are you familiar with an outfit called Gangsta Grass which was exactly that? It was a mash up of old bluegrass recordings. It was this hip hop producer who made some records with rappers that he works with mashed up over old bluegrass tracks. If you haven’t heard that Patrick, I think that may be exactly what you’re looking for. I’ll drop a link to that in the show notes as well because it’s a really cool sound they’ve got going.Kevin: Awesome. that is neat.Louis: Their album is called Rappalachia. You got to love that.Stephan: That’s pretty clever. I like that.Louis: All right. That’s almost a double spotlight for me so it’s time to wrap it up with the king of the off topic spotlight. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Patrick O’Keefe.Patrick: Oh, man. I love you guys. Cool. I’ve always done the off topic spotlights. If you’ve listened to this show for a long time you know that I’ve always tried to go off topic with the spotlight. I was thinking this is the final one, this is the last spotlight we’re doing so what should I spotlight?What I went back to was episode 19 because that’s the first episode where we did host spotlights. I think it was Kevin Yank who wanted to do that and we gave it a try. Michael Jackson had just ed away and there were all these tributes popping up and one of the tributes stands out to me, still stands out to me, it’s called Eternal Moonwalk. eternalmoonwalk.com. It’s this really cool mash up of people doing the moon walk and it follows them along . . . if you’ve never seen it, definitely check it out. The beat of Billie Jean is there.It keeps going on and on. The moonwalk never ends, the beat never ends, and it keeps going and I thought there was something poignant here for this show and for us. The show’s coming to an end but obviously we’re going to continue to do other things. I love that mash up. I wanted to spotlight that again because that’s where I started it and that’s where I ‘m going to finish it. So eternalmoonwalk.com.Louis: This is pretty cool. I hadn’t actually seen this. It’s a really nicely done site. I like the idea.Patrick: It is. And it’s even four years old and is still nicely done so there you go.Louis: Does it keep…does it loop back to the beginning?Patrick: Keep watching.Louis: Is it actually eternal? Well, I can’t keep watching forever.Patrick: Keep watching. We’ve got all night. I don’t know. As far as I know it never ends. Who knows? The beat never ends, Louis, he says as he continues to watch it.Louis: I just going to watch. For me this is going to be like Kevin in the click and drag XKCD. I’m just going to . . .Patrick: Oh, the guy with the ice skates.Louis: Yeah, exactly.Kevin: I have to say some of these people are quite horrible at the moonwalk. And some are actually good.Louis: The beat don’t stop.Patrick: Bang, bang boogie.Louis: All right. We will actually be back next week with another show. Patrick, do you want to give listeners a run down on what that’s going to be all about?Patrick: Sure. I can tease it a little bit. We are going to do a final episode of the SitePoint podcast. No news stories, no spotlights. Just us talking about the show, the history of the show, our favorite moments and reminiscing a little bit, sharing some memories.We’re going to bring back some faces from the past. Have some of them back on the show, have some of the people that have worked behind the scenes on the show, have them come on and just talk about the same things: what the show has meant to them, what their favorite moments are, what their favorite memories are. Do a lot of reminiscing.We’re also going to have a bunch of listener comments and on the show. If you’d like to send us comments you might want to have in the final episode via text or audio, the e-mail is podcast at SitePoint.com. If it’s audio it somewhere and send us a link to that address and text you can also send to that address. We’ll likely get it on the show. The deadline for that though is Sunday, the 9th. If you want to send a comment, this show is out on the 7th, you’ll want to get it in by the 9th. Yeah, just a lot of fun.Louis: Awesome. For a penultimate time let’s go around the table.Kevin: I’m Kevin Dees at KevinDees.cc and also @KevinDees on Twitter.Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network. I blog at ManagingCommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy. I-F-R-O-G-G-Y.Stephan: I’m Stephan Seagraves. You can find me on Twitter @SSeagraves and I blog at Badice.com every now and then.Louis: I’m Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter @RSSAddict. You can also find SitePoint on Twitter @SitePointdotcom. Obviously, if you want to go back and listen to any of the past episodes of the podcast they will remain online. If you go to SitePoint.com/podcast you can hear any of our past episodes including a lot of really great interviews; some stuff if you haven’t heard I think you should really check out. We managed to get some really insightful people involved in our industry on the show over the years so I highly recommend checking that out if you haven’t already.Patrick: We did. If it ever does go offline I’ve got all the sound board bootlegs so just me and I will hook up with the bootlegs. So there’s also that.Louis: Awesome. Are those on 45 rpm vinyl?Patrick: Yeah. Everything. Vinyl. 8-track. Cassette. We’ve got it.Louis: Awesome. Again, the e-mail address if you want to send us some comments or audio to play on the air for our grand finale episode next week just e-mail that to [email protected]. Obviously you can hit us up individually or at SitePointdotcom on Twitter as well. Thanks for listening to this final newest episode of the SitePoint podcast and we will see you again next week with our finale show.Patrick: I have to say this.Louis & Patrick: Peace.Stephan: Beep, beep, beep.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Produced by Karn Broad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 190 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) interviews Dave Rupert (@davatron5000) of Paravel about open source development.Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #190: Open Source Projects with Dave Rupert. (MP3, 38:11, 36.7MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryKevin and Dave discuss developing open source projects, but before that Patrick O’Keefe has an announcement about the SitePoint Podcast. Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/190.Interview TranscriptPatrick: Hello, and welcome to another addition of the SitePoint Podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe and before Kevin Dees gets started with the interview that he recorded for this week’s episode, we wanted to take a moment to share a special announcement with you.There’s no way to say this without it being a surprise. There’s no way to say this without it coming completely out of the blue. There’s just no way around that. The announcement is that the SitePoint podcast is coming to an end. We’ve had a really great run, and it’s been a great experience for all of us. But everything must eventually come to an end, and now is that time for this show.We’re sorry to see it end, but we are planning a grand finale two weeks from now, and we want you to be a part of it. One of the greatest things about this show for us has been the listeners, everyone who tunes in, who shares the show, who subscribes, who listens, who leaves comments. This is one of the things that has really made it worthwhile for us and that’s why we want you to be a part of our finale.We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, your memories, your favorite moments. Whatever you want to share, please send it to us via email at [email protected]. We accept both text and audio comments. For audio comments, please record them and then them somewhere where we can them. So for example, your Dropbox , your web hosting space, something like that, and then send us the link to the file via email.Don’t worry if you don’t have the greatest mic in the world. But if you do have the opportunity to export it in a higher quality audio format, for example, .wav or a high quality Apple format, that’s great as opposed to an mp3. But even if all you have is an mp3, that’s fine as well. More than anything else, we just want to hear your thoughts on the show.Again, send us a link to your audio comment, or send us your text comments at [email protected], and they might just be included in our final show. The deadline for submissions is December 9th, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. That’s 8:00 p.m. GMT UTC -5, or 1:00 a.m. on Monday, December 10th, UTC time.Whether you submit a comment or not, we’d like to take a moment to thank you for all of your over the years. It really has meant a lot to us, and we look forward to sharing more of that with you on our grand finale, which will be released on Friday, December 14th. Announcement out of the way, please enjoy this week’s interview. Over to you, Kevin.Kevin: So today I get to talk with Mr. Dave Rupert. Hello, Dave.Dave: Howdy, howdy.Kevin: I’m so excited to get to talk to you. This is awesome.Dave: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, and it’s nice to be here. Good to see you again.Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Well, see via video.Dave: Virtually seeing, yes.Kevin: Right. Very good. If you don’t know who Dave is, I’m not going to put shame on you, but you will get to know by the end of today. Dave has been developing websites and things to do with programming, oh, for a long time now. How long now have you been doing this?Dave: Well, I think unofficially I’ve been doing this since 1995-ish.Kevin: Since the internet was created.Dave: Yeah. But with my company, Paravel, been making websites with them since 2006 or 2007-ish, we started in one way or another, and now we’re just trucking along.Kevin: Right, so you’re older than Google, then?Dave: Just a shade. No. Google, relatively speaking, is probably more successful.Kevin: Right.Dave: But they’re doing all right. It’s been fun. It’s been a wild ride. I’m actually, before we had this call here, I am putting together a talk for In Control Conference. It’s a conference that is happening in Hawaii, being put on by Environments for Humans. But I’m doing a lot of research on the history of web.Kevin: Wow.Dave: Kind of like HTML5 and just how it all came about. I’ve been spending just the last few days just down memory lane. It’s been kind of interesting. It’s like, in 2002 SVG was spec-ed out. You’re just like, “Ah, those were the days.” No. It’s interesting.Kevin: Since we all use SVG now. That’s just the new thing. But, yeah, among what Dave has talked about, he has actually a few accomplishments, I think mostly known for your small jQuery plug- ins, such as FitVids and FitText, and I believe there’s one other.Dave: Lettering.js, yeah.Kevin: Lettering.js. I think that was the first – Lettering was the first one, right?Dave: Yeah. I’m a bit of a purveyor of tiny jQueries. I love it. I think they’re very fun to make and just kind of like single-faceted utilities. I think they’re a lot of fun to make. I don’t know. I’m not rich because of it, but I have a lot of fun with it.Kevin: Right.Dave: Yeah. For me, anything over 100 lines of code, I start losing interesting. I’m just like, “Oh, God. It’s too complicated. I quit. I’m done.”Kevin: I wish everything was under 100 lines of code, but then we’d have a very modular-based internet.Dave: Yeah, it’s called modularization. It’s the new thing.Kevin: Everyone would be ing everyone else’s code constantly.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: Excellent. Dave, again welcome to the show. Today, I kind of want to get to at least talk to you a little bit, if not in the majority of the conversation, about just those things, the little plug-ins. Creating a work and putting it out there in the world where other people can experience it, and kind of maybe even learn a little bit from the code you write. So to expound on that, I wanted to ask you a few questions, and maybe we can elaborate on those, if that’s okay with you.Dave: Yeah, sure. Hit me.Kevin: Okay. Excellent. To kind of start things off, can you tell me a little bit about what possessed you, what made you want to create these tools online? Maybe if you explain a little bit of what fit-text was and where that came from, maybe the story behind that just so people can have an idea.Dave: Yeah. FitText is a great example. One day, Trent Walton is redeg his blog. He’s going responsive, and if you’ve been to Trent Walton’s blog, you know that every feature article is custom designed, and he’d kill me if he heard me say this, but it’s kind of the blogazine-style layout? Every post is kind of art directed, or every feature post is art directed, and he was looking at responsive and he was just saying, “Hey, this would be great. I want to try responsive, but I have all these headlines and stuff that are totally custom. They’re using lettering. They’re high web font plus graphical, or sometimes they’re just graphic and some text.”He wanted a way to make titles scale similar to, Lord forgive me, Flash, and how you could put some vector text in Flash have it just scale to the width of the Flash movie. He asked me about this, and I was just like, “I don’t know, dude. I think it’s tough.” There was stuff out there at the time. Zach Leatherman, zachleat on twitter, he had a plug-in, or still does, called big text, and what it does is kind of fill up the parent container exactly.That was awesome, and we looked at implementing it, and there would have had to have been some markup changes. Overall, it was good, but we didn’t necessarily want exact fitting text. When you have exact fitting, it has to do calculations to measure and then size and then adjust sizing until it fits exactly.Kevin: Right.Dave: We kind of wanted a loose form of just a scaling text. I was just thinking about it, and I tried a few things, but then after about an hour I came up with something that kind of worked. It was ratio-based resizing. This was before Ethan Marcotte’s book, Responsive Web Design, came out, but after the post obviously. Before his book came out which kind of thoroughly drove that target divided by context equals result. FitText works a lot based on that. It’s kind of a predetermined ratio you’re working with it, but basically it’s ratio-based resizing. It defaults to one-tenth of the parent container. If I haven’t bored your listeners already, I’ll finish.Kevin: No. This is actually really good stuff because I think a lot of times in the community, at least from my personal experience, right? I’ll be working on something, and I’ll think, “Why would anybody else want to use what I’m working on,” right? So to kind of get the full story I think is important because when you just look at something, and you say, “Oh that’s successful,” then you don’t feel like you can measure up, because you don’t know what happened. So when you can go through the story and talk about what it took and the reasons that you made it and kind of how you used other people’s plug-ins, like you were saying, I think that’s so important to the entire context of everything. Because, as you talk about code, people realize, “Oh, I still have to write the code.” So there’s this technical process we have to go through. It’s just like, your Dave Rupert and jQuery plug-ins pop out of your brain and straight onto the screen, right? There’s something that has to take place, and it’s called code.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: That’s what you’re dissecting, right?Dave: Yeah.Kevin: Things like target attribute dividing equals result or whatever, that’s an important piece of the puzzle that we can’t leave out. Obviously it can seem boring if you’re not a coder, if you’re a designer and all you care about is making Photoshop graphics. And you just hate us code guys because we tell you that you can’t rotate the text 3% because it’s not going to work in all the browsers. I feel like what you’re talking about isn’t boring in that it gives us the full picture. So you have to walk through this code, right?Dave: Yeah. I guess, you need a good reason for developing any sort of plug- in or any sort of open source you’re releasing. So this was ours, was just we wanted this kind of, a little more scale like resizing. After about an hour I had a really rough version, and I sent it over to Trent, and he dropped it in. Just, I made it a plug-in, and he dropped it in, pointed it at his headlines, and it worked. We were like, “Hey, hey, hey. I think we’ve got something here.” Because at this point, really super-scaling text with web fonts wasn’t really a thing.Kevin: Right.Dave: Like I was saying, Zach’s plug in, it does that, but it was designed right before responsive web design, when he built it. So it was very kind of fixed-width-y, and we really wanted this vector- like scaling of text.Kevin: Right.Dave: So we built that, and we were happy with the results. Sort of for us, when we are building something, and we like it, and we can give a name to it, we were just like, “It makes your text fit, so we’ll call it FitText”, which that’s probably a bad name looking back on it. It should be called Inflato-text or something, Ratio Text? I don’t know.Kevin: Inflato.Dave: But we really enjoyed what we had. Once you build something and you find it useful – like you’re dog-fooding it I think is what it’s called – but you’re using it yourself, and you see a practical application that someone else can use, that’s where we say, “Hey, let’s put this up and give it away.”Kevin: Right.Dave: We could have held onto it greedily, and then been like these master . . . No. No one’s going to come to us for that little effect. But it was just a cool thing we had built, and we just decided to give it away for free.Kevin: Yeah. That’s awesome. I think that’s really cool. The specific plug-in had to do in large part with the idea of getting away from images for text. You talked a little bit ing custom fonts, right?Dave: Yeah, exactly. With the explosion of web typography – again I’ve been researching lately, and that’s been a big deal in the last two years, let’s say. So if you ask people who was using web fonts in 2009, there were not that many people even though it was technically possible.Kevin: Right.Dave: In 2010, boom, it’s like a web font explosion, and everyone is using web fonts everywhere. That’s where type-cape gets born, and that’s where all these other things start happening. So web fonts – they’re awesome.Kevin: I know. Right.Dave: They’re beautiful. They’re high quality for the most part. There’s so much you can do. Now, we’re finally at a point where you can have typographical-driven websites where before it was Georgia, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial. Those were your choices.Kevin: Yeah. Or compensate with gradients, and stripes, and glossy buttons.Dave: Yeah. So, totally image-based websites. They just slug and chug, and they’re super difficult to kind of deal with. Now we have this totally vector, totally new medium for us. So we just decided this is the way of the future. We have an in-house kind of joke at Paravel. We just decided if we could never use an image again, that would be awesome. That’s maybe an extreme. Obviously, you’re going to have…Kevin: Not at all, Dave. That’s not an extreme. You don’t even want to use images for the times when you want to post photographs. You want to do those all vector-based in code.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: Like your LOL cats? Vector, no images.Dave: Yeah. Roto-scoped cats. Yeah. I mean, obviously your cat pictures, your “business guy in suit shaking hand of other business guy in suit” photos are going to have to be raster. But you can start creating graphics and header graphics. back in the old days when you’d drop this hero unit, and it was this 16 meg graphic, because it had all these swooshes and swashes and text overlaid? Yeah. So it was just kind of like, “Let’s break up with that. Let’s go text.”Kevin: Right. Absolutely.Dave: The font we’re using in our hero graphic could also be the font we’re using on our titles. You only have to load that once. It takes some clever positioning of your absolute position and relative position and stuff like that. It takes a little bit of kung fu there. But, man, for us it was a lot better than image generation.Kevin: Yeah.Dave: If the client comes to us, and they’re like, “Hey, I want it to say ‘biz SEO’ instead of ‘you’re great’ headline.” Then we can easily just say, “Okay, it’s ‘biz SEO’ now. Thank you.” We don’t have to open up Photoshop. We don’t have to export. We don’t have to . It’s just straight, change HTML save.Kevin: That’s great, and I think the key point here is you created something that’s practical so anybody could use it. Therefore you can release it and it would become what you would call “popular plug in” because it’s useful for more than just like six people, right?Dave: Yeah.Kevin: I want to ask the next question in this. What I’m trying to get at with this conversation at least is to maybe inspire somebody who has code out there that they’ve held on to and they don’t feel worthy to release it, maybe they’ll be inspired to do that by the end of this thing. I think one of the unique things you showed in your example here was that your plugs-ins are really small. They’re what you might call an insignificant code base, but the impact and implication of them is actually rather large. How does somebody know when they can release something? What is too small, what is too big? What would be your advice? You’ve had success in this area, so maybe it was luck, maybe you had a huge strategic plan. What was the deal there?Dave: It’s a tough question. It’s a fine line. Is three lines of jQuery a plug in or is it just a snippet you put on your website or something like that or you make a gist on Github. That could be how you do it, but for, I think, for me the line is, kind of what I said before, is if you can see other people using this, man, just release it. Or, I know this guy Ian. He’s a listener on the Shop Talk show, a show I host with Chris Coyer, but he wrote in to me and was asking me to review this thing. He basically took the HTML5 doctor reset, the Eric Meyer reset – I guess HTML5 doctor is Bruce. But, anyway, he took a version of either Eric’s or the HTML5 doctor’s reset and modified it to the stuff he does on a regular basis, which are things like web kit appearance none on form elements and stuff like that. Border one, pixel solid, pound CCC, or something like that. Because he was doing this over and over and over. He was like, “This is dumb that I do this all the time on every website I make, so I’m just going to change this and put it up on Github.” For me, if that’s the use case, that’s perfect. Is this something you do over, and over, and over? Are you doing this over and over? Well, chances are, somebody else is doing this over and over and over. Put it online. Put it online for yourself so that in your brain you’re not, “Oh, which file do I have to copy and paste from, from that old client”, you know and then you have to spend hours hacking up and old client’s website just to get the base reset you did a year ago. Why not just put it up on Github. Then it gets better over time. As you notice a change, you’re like, “Oh, you know what? I don’t do that anymore. I’m just going to delete it off this thing.”Kevin: Right.Dave: You may have people following you on Github or following the project at that point, and that’s ideal. It’s kind of your project, and they can fork it if they don’t like it.Kevin: Right.Dave: You just put code up there, and if it’s something you use, use it and do that. I know Divia on twitter, she recently just deleted a bunch of old projects, which is like, “Oh, no. She’s deleting something from the internet. It’s not okay.” Guess what, it is okay. She just wasn’t using them anymore. It’s done. The internet’s fluid. There are no guarantees. You know, just putting something out there. I think that’s the biggest thing. A little bit of marketing helps. I’ll say that. I’m not ashamed to say. I don’t think FitText or lettering or FitVids would be nearly as successful without the help I got from Trent Walton and Reagan Ray, just to put the sites together.Kevin: Right. You have micro-sites for them, right?Dave: Yeah. We have little Github pages that are there. Just little micro- sites that show how people are using the plug in. That helps. We do that on lettering. FitText is a great example of how it works. It’s this huge thing that goes up to 1900 pixels or something like that. It’s ridiculous.Kevin: Yeah.Dave: You immediately kind of cognitively have a click on how it works. FitVids has a great name, but it has a demo, a video of what the problem was and what the solution is, and the whole thing is about embedding videos. There’s a video embedded, and it works as you’d expect.Kevin: Yeah.Dave: A little bit of marketing goes a long way. I don’t know if designers listen to your podcast, Kevin, but I feel like we get a lot of designers calling into Shop Talk saying, “How can I get involved” and “How can I get better at Github”, and offering your services to really ugly open source projects would be awesome.Kevin: Absolutely. That’s a great idea. Every designer out there listening to this, absolutely go out there and make the web pretty for free. Unfortunately, you have to do it for free, but it’s possible.Dave: Not to be totally, I don’t know, this may sound legalistic or intolerant, but if you’re going to grift off the open source machine, you’ve got to give back. It’s just kind of a karma deal. That’s where it was for me. That’s why I decided to open source stuff. Just because I use WordPress, and I make a living off of WordPress. I should probably put something out there and give it away for free rather than just being a hoarder of all these tiny snippets or something.Kevin: Right. I want to make two points here. The first one is you mention Github a lot, and I want to ask you about that. How do you think maybe that’s important? The second piece to it had something to do with the design community and what that actually means, because we kind of made fun of it a little bit, but maybe what in a practical sense that can look like? Those two things – is Github really the only thing out there that people should be looking at? Is it okay to just use that for all the open source stuff? Is it a conspiracy that everything is on Github? Should people host their own stuff? Then also maybe more on this design thing. How can designers? Because I think that is a missing piece to this.You see outside of icon sets that people can give away maybe on Dribble or something, like that’s really all you get to see from designers for the most part, or all us programmers get to see from designers. I think on the most part, I think there’s a huge demand for this, right?Because there’s this overwhelming use of twitter bootstrap now, and it’s just because it looks nice, and all the developers want to run to that right away because it looks so much better than everything else there. It’s really the only thing. Can we overcome the idea that bootstrap is the only good-looking framework out there, maybe, for stuff?Kevin: That’s a bunch of loaded stuff.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: Five minutes, five minutes. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.Dave: Okay. Timer, go. Credit where credit’s due. Designers do offer a lot of I would call it open source. I’m not personally going to go sit and draw vector icons for every single social network that’s ever been ever. Props to the people who have, and mega thank you, because that solves a problem in my life.Kevin: Absolutely. I concur with that, by the way. Thank you designers.Dave: Yeah. I don’t want to be dogging on designers or anything like that. They do a lot. It’s kind of this awesome circle. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this trend. Somebody will put something up, a design on Dribble, and then somebody will take it into Code Pen and make it into code, and then that’s something you can use on your website. It’s just straight up available now. It’s documented how they built it, and it’s really pretty cool like that. There’s a lot of cool stuff like that. I guess the next question was?Kevin: I feel like bootstrap kind of says with a megaphone, right, there’s a need for good design on the web. Since this is almost the only resource, everyone is going to use it. How can we alleviate this? I understand why people want to use this framework.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: Because it is a framework. It’s the idea behind it. Everybody gets behind this one thing. In a sense that people are using it, maybe not because it’s a bunch of preset classes, but because they look nice, right?Dave: Yeah. I think bootstrap is amazing because it has like everything you need to build a website. In theory you could become a bootstrap developer, and if you’re really good at skinning it and stuff like that, you could probably make a pretty sweet living not re- inventing the wheel over, and over, and over. That’s the majority what maybe I do. I’m going to build this from scratch, ta-da-da, ta-da-da, and then it’s like, oh call, I just made bootstrap again.Kevin: Yeah.Dave: Oops! I think it’s a really powerful framework in that regard. I feel like it is designer-y, because it had designers involved, because some thought has been put into the type and the higher key, and just UX even. They give different button styles for different error message and statuses and stuff like that. That’s super awesome. I feel like it’s a gateway drug for most developers just because they can look at their code, their scaffolded error messages, and say, “Hey that looks just like my application.” I feel like bootstrap is actually doing a lot of good in that area. I feel like the only problem with bootstrap is I feel like the Bootstrapper community or developers have said this themselves, for whatever reason the imagination got lost in translation.It was kind of like, here’s this, now improvise and build off it and change colors, and make it your own, but a lot of it is just a black bar with a white page. Every website is that.Kevin: Right.Dave: There are great examples of good bootstrap. I’m personally when I might just use bootstrap just because, even though I know how to code out my own framework and stuff like that, it’s just going to get me to point B faster. . .Kevin: Right.Dave: . . . in some circumstances. Was the other thing you mentioned was why Github? Am I just ing a conspiracy? Is that right?Kevin: Yeah, yeah, basically.Dave: Well, bootstrap is immediately successful because it is on Github. I would go out and say that. We’re in this age of social coding, and that’s kind of what Github is. Git can exist on your own server and never even touch Github, and that’s cool, but this social coding aspect is amazing. I can put something up onto Github, and people can look at my code, they can comment on individual lines. They can say, “Hey, you failed here.” Please don’t say that. They can just dissect problems, like in code, online, and it’s like having a team of advisers across the whole world, any time of day, any time of night. This is kind of an amazing advancement. Why wouldn’t I put it just on my website? If I put something on my website, then chances of people casually giving me a code review or casually deciding to fix something is terrible. They would have to it, change it, put it up on their website somewhere, and then they would have to email me and say, “Hey, I fixed your thing. Check it out.” Then I’d have to go to their website, it. Github is solving tons of problems. Github is not the end-all be-all.There’s Bitbucket and stuff like that. That’s based on mercurial, I believe, and that’s an option. There are other different micro-platforms for specific languages or specific features, or something like that.Kevin: Right.Dave: Those are cool. I feel like the social coding aspect, though, of Github is awesome.Kevin: Absolutely.Dave: They’re light years ahead of their competition, I feel like, or their competition is just emulating what they have. They’re saying, “We’ll juts copy them, because they’ve done it well.” That’s why I am a fan of the octo-cat.Kevin: That’s awesome. That’s very cool. Dave, I hate that we’re kind of running out of time here.Dave: Oh, geez.Kevin: Yeah, I know. It’s been fast. It’s been really fast. I really wanted to go through this with you and maybe for some personal reasons. But I wanted to ask you how can somebody go about getting their stuff out there? How finished does something have to be? How complete does it have to be? Does it have to be what they want it to be? And also, to get people to latch on to it, do you need a cool design? Do you think that’s a really important piece, to have that microsite to let people go to and experience the thing you want them to before they it? How can a person go out there and get their stuff known? How do they become known, not necessarily themselves, but their code?Maybe they know they have something. I know it’s good. I don’t have this problem with, is my code too small? I know it’s great and I know people can use it. How can I get it out there? What would be your advice to that person?Dave: Cool, yeah. I’ll address that in two parts. When should you release? For us at Paravel we kind of take a tad bit more mature policy, the big reveal strategy, the HGTV big reveal, just because we’ve found that works for us. We feel like we like that more. Recently Nicholas Gallagher, he’s a developer at Twitter, he was talking about how this big reveal thing is kind of like ego driven, and I would totally agree. The big reveal thing, if you reveal it when it’s a little bit more mature, after it’s been stealth tested, then you can avoid some big bugs at the beginning.Kevin: Right.Dave: Like big bug reports and stuff like that. To Nicholas’ point, why not just put it out there and let it grow and mature? That’s like WordPress 1.0 was really garbage compared to what it is now.Kevin: I think some developers would argue it still is, but I’m a WordPress fan, so I’m not going to argue that point.Dave: Yeah, that’s fair. I’m just saying comparatively. If your first version isn’t embarrassing, then you’re not growing as a person in my opinion. That’s like the win. It’s really up to you. In regards to how you should release something, Github has, again Github, auto-generated pages, and you pick a theme and it’s up and going. I did that for one just because we were too busy to do something. We were just like, “Okay, we’ll just do this. Done.” It works nice and looks nice. It’s good enough, you know?Kevin: Right.Dave: It gets the point across. I feel like that’s an option. Just the past things that help is a little logo, something so people it and people are like, “Yeah, I use this because it looks like a leaf” or something like that.Kevin: What about the developer who is sitting there, “That’s great Dave. I’m not a designer. How do I get a logo?”Dave: Again, beg your friends.Kevin: I like it.Dave: Make friends with designers.Kevin: On your knees. Just go over to Dribble. Who wants to make an awesome logo? Hey, maybe that’s not a bad idea.Dave: Hack up some clip art. Maybe you’ve heard of this, the Noun Project is a thing you can go to. The nounproject.com I believe. Just Google it, or Bing it, or whatever you do. They have icons. It’s become this world icon database. That’s the goal of it. You can these. You can use them. You can attribute and use it for free, or you can pay for it and not attribute them. this icon. It’s SVG. Pop it into Photoshop or Fireworks and then export it as a PNG or whatever you want to do. Pick a color scheme. That’s all you need, is a color and some sort of icon logo or something. That’s all you need.Kevin: Are you telling me there’s no excuse to not be able to get a logo?Dave: Yeah. I’m saying there’s no excuse really. It’s pretty easy. I mean color, logo, font. That’s all you need. A good color, a good log and a good font.Kevin: Right, so comic sans, clippy and black background with lime- green text.Dave: Yep. That would be noticeable. That would be shocking.Kevin: It would be like DOS, plus Microsoft Word, plus best font ever invented.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: That’s epic. Everybody wants to go to that.Dave: I could say confidently that you would define your base with that combination.Kevin: I’m going to go for that, man. I’m doing it.Dave: Try it. You should release the same project with that combination and with nothing and see which one is more successful. Do a hit count. A-B test it, boom.Kevin: There you go. That’s an awesome idea. I’m going to do it. Designer not allowed. Comic sans.Dave: Yeah.Kevin: That’s awesome Dave. Is there anything else outside of just really taking care of the details when you launch something, make sure it’s, I don’t want to just say pretty, because that’s the worst thing you could ever say to a designer, but is there something you can do outside of making it pretty? Maybe doing a big reveal? Is there any other strategy that maybe you’ve used that has helped you? Is that kind of the place to start and then kind of go from there?Dave: Again, it depends on your style. I think you could totally just release something and let it get better as you go. Incrementally improve. That’s awesome. That’s agile and perfect. Then, you could also just do a big reveal and beta test it a bit and let it mature. One thing I would recommend is to have your code checked by somebody smarter than you before launching.Kevin: That’s impossible. No one that listens to this show has anyone smarter than them, Dave.Dave: That’s true. Your audience is high caliber.Kevin: Absolutely. Our listeners are amazing.Dave: It’s going to be tough, guys, but just dig down and find somebody you respect.Kevin: Don’t call Dave. Don’t call Dave, because he doesn’t know.Dave: No, you’ll just get a busy signal. I’m sorry. That’s kind of the big deal, finding somebody who you trust and saying, “Hey, can you review this? I think it’s ready, but I would love some .” I did that with lettering, JS and a few other things. I asked Paul Irish, Alex Sexton and Chris Coyer. Chris Coyer – he kind of master-minded FitVids and stuff like that.Kevin: That’s unfair, Dave. I don’t have those connections.Dave: I feel like you can find somebody.Kevin: I agree.Dave: There are plenty of browser evangelists. That would be a good one, too. You don’t want to launch something and it not Opera. Find an Opera evangelist, and they would probably love to audit your code and make sure it works on their browser.Kevin: I would say also that within just local networks, like I know Austin has meet-up groups, and where I live, Greenville, does as well. There are a lot of people who are more than willing that are super smart. Let’s say even if they can’t be quite more intelligent than our listeners, right? That just a second pair of eyes looking at it and saying, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?” I find for myself, I’ll develop something, I’ll make a feature, and I’ll know there are bugs, but I just don’t have the energy to do that one last thing that’s going to make it great. I kind of pretend like it doesn’t exist, and then somebody comes in behind me and says, “Well, what about that?” And I’m like “Dang you!”Dave: Totally. I feel like front end especially, but any sort of code is so complex, you need a buddy. It’s a buddy system deal. Any help, any review you could get would be priceless.Kevin: I think that’s awesome. Well, Dave. Thank you so much for your time. I’m sure there are a million other things we could talk about. Talking about code is always fun. Talking about getting other people to write code is even more fun, because you don’t have to do it. I really have enjoyed this. I hope the listeners have enjoyed it as well.Dave: Thanks, Kevin.Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about today’s show please feel free to get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m. You can find me on Twitter @kevindees, and if you’d like to leave comments about today’s show check out the podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast, you can subscribe to the show there as well. This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Dees, bye for now.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 189 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have the full , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #189: Websites Got Fat (MP3, 38:58, 37.4MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics such as 30% page weight increases, are responsive images worth doing, the demand for different platforms when selling websites and more! Here are the main topics covered in this episode:Average Page Weight Increases 30% in 2012 – SitePoint referring to Optimizing large font files for @font-face | Kevin Dees and Yahoo! Smush.it™What’s Powering the Internet? Flippa’s In-Demand PlatformsHow should we handle responsive images? | Boagworld – Web & Digital AdviceBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/189.Host SpotlightsPatrick: Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web – The OatmealLouis: vimtips (vimtips) on TwitterStephan: Learn how to make Data Visualizations with D3.jsKevin: Retro Game Crunch • Six Games in Six MonthsInterview TranscriptLouis: Hello. Welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. We got a full- show back together this week to discuss the last few weeks’ events and happenings in the world of the web. Hi, guys.Kevin: Hi.Stephan: Hi.Louis: How is it going?Patrick: It is going great. Kevin and I were just together this past weekend, in Raleigh, North Carolina, for IndieConf, which is a conference for independent web professionals, freelancers, solo entrepreneurs, and so on. Kevin did a great job talking about pragmatic WordPress development. I performed at a satisfactory level. Right, Kevin?Kevin: Patrick had one person tell him that he spoke a little fast, so Patrick got a 99.9 out of 100.Louis: Right, OK.Kevin: It was a lot of fun, a great event; a lot of freelancers, developers, programmers, and people of all stripes. It was pretty cool that we had a listener come down from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, her name was Meg Prescott. On Twitter, she is @meg_at_e_lys. I realize that is not the easiest Twitter name to spell out.Louis: That is an awesome Twitter handle.Patrick: I spoke slowly there. She is an associate professor of computer technologies at Great Bay Community College, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and again, came about 760 miles, so that was really cool. She came just because we mentioned it on the show, and mentioned how we would be there.Louis: Holy . . . That is extremely impressive.Patrick: It was awesome. She was really nice. She attended both our sessions, also. We had a great time chatting with her afterward, at the networking event. Really, it was really cool.Louis: That is awesome. That probably takes the cake for Listener of the Year.Kevin: Yes, I would agree. I am going to vote 10-stars.Louis: I know it is still November, but I think . . .Patrick: Everyone else is going to stop listening then, because they are out of the running. That is great.Louis: They are going to say, ‘Ah, no.’ Cool. I was also away on the weekend. I was at Rails Camp, in Tasmania. It was a lot of fun.Patrick: Oh, yes?Louis: If you do not know what a Rails Camp is, find one in your area and go to it, even if you are not a Rails developer. Half the people there were just hacking on JavaScript projects. It is an un-conference, one of those things where there is not really any schedule or anything; everyone just brings their laptop and spends most of the days hacking away on various projects, and most of the evenings either drinking, playing games, or just hanging out. It is 3 days, there is no internet, and you are in a camp situation, just dorm rooms. You spend like 60-straight- hours developing and working on projects, and then people demo what they built. There was a lot of cool stuff that came out of it. It was a lot of fun.Patrick: How much did you have to rough it?Louis: You do not really have to rough it, that bad.Patrick: Did they make you program on Windows 95 machines? Do they throw you in the woods with an early 90s laptop that is like the size of your head?Kevin: No internet, Louis. Come on, that is roughing it.Louis: No. ittedly, if you are used to, and I am definitely one of those developers, whenever I want to do anything, I just pop open the API documentation in a web browser and look up, ‘What is the method that shuffles an array, again?’ Not having internet, because I was even out of cell phone coverage so I could not even tether to my phone. On the one hand, you end up messing around on a console a lot and maybe discovering different methods that you did not know existed, or playing around with stuff, which is a different way of interacting with the language than just looking stuff up online. The other thing you end up doing is asking people about things like, ‘If you wanted to do this what would you do? Rather than Googling it. Asking people sitting next to you, especially people with very varied experience is a really cool way of being exposed to different techniques, as well. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. If you are a web developer and there is a Rails Camp, or I think there are also JS Camps, as well, if you have a chance to go to one of these events, I would highly recommend it.Stephan: Is that the point of the ‘no internet,’ to get you to interact?Louis: Yes, I think so. There are no distractions; you are not getting any news, or Twitter, all you can do is hack. If you run into any limitation . . . The one thing is that we did have a local mirror of Ruby Gems, which is the Ruby Gem host, so if you needed to use a library that was on Ruby Gems, you could get it, so there is that, because obviously, that would be a limitation if you could not use any libraries in your code. With all that being said, let us just kick in to the news. I think me and Patrick picked up on the same story this morning, or this evening for you guys. Patrick, did you want to introduce?Patrick: I could take a crack at it. Craig Buckler, at SitePoint, that is SitePoint.com, it is a website that you may be familiar with, I do not know. He talks about the HTTP Archive Report, and that report correlates technology statistics from 300,000 of the web’s most popular sites. The biggest takeaway for Craig was that the average page-weight has, in his words, ‘bloated by 30% in 1 year to reach 1,250 kB, yes, 1.25 MB. He breaks down the different technologies and how much they ave increased from the end of 2011 to the end of 2012: HTML code up 24%, JavaScript up 28%, CSS up 28%, and Other is up 35%. Other is mostly media like images, but also font stacks; custom font usage has also grown as part of that, 13% up from 7%, a year ago. Flash is the only area that has not increased, it still takes up the same amount, on average, of these 300,000 websites. Websites are getting bigger. I was curious to know what you guys think of these observations. What about the thought that even though Craig says ‘bandwidth it is rarely plentiful and it is never free’? Bandwidth adoption is constantly growing. Is this a consequence of that, that there is more available, or is the expectation that websites are something that are going to get lighter over time? I do not know if that is realistic. What do you think, Louis?Louis: Yes. Obviously this is pretty huge. A 30% increase in average page-weight across 300,000 sites, that is pretty representative sample. An average increase of 30% in a single year is crazy, that is insane. I weigh about 190 pounds, and that is like saying I would have put on nearly 60 pounds in a year, so that is a massive increase.Patrick: We need a Photoshop photo of that one.Louis: Yes, exactly. What would I look like if I were 60 pounds heavier? That is how bad this is. Talking about bandwidth, that is really interesting in one sense because, yes, on the one hand, broadband internet increases every year. Access to broadband internet, the number of households connected, usually in most places, you do see increases in caps. A lot of places do not have caps, and you get faster speeds. We are starting to see Fibre to the Curb roll out in Australia, Canada, and the United States, as well. Yes, on the one hand, we do have a lot more bandwidth so, possibly, it does not matter so much. On the other hand, more and more people are accessing the web on mobile devices, over 3G, even on 4G, 1½ Meg for website is enough to slow you down, especially if it is not just a question of the speed but that there are a lot of external resources, then that means that you can only hold so many HTTP connection at a time. Usually on a mobile network there is a high latency even if the speed is pretty good. Yes, this is extremely concerning, I think. It feels to me like a big part of this increase is going to have to do with the spread of a lot of premade libraries.Kevin: Yes.Louis: I think web developers may be a little bit too trigger-happy just to reach for a big JavaScript library or a CSS framework to get an off-the-shelf solution, to be able to develop it quickly and not pay as much attention to how much of a jump that causes to the weight of the website.Kevin: I absolutely agree with that, Louis. I think Twitter Bootstrap is the doom of the internet.Louis: You blame this entire thing on Twitter Bootstrap?Kevin: I have this sentiment against it now. Me and Twitter Bootstrap do not get along anymore, we had a falling out, and now I blame all the internet problems on Twitter Bootstrap. Seriously, when you think about how many sites use that now, I am actually really surprised that Twitter Bootstrap has not really had like a CDN setup, like you have seen for some of these other resources, like JQuery for example, just because the explosion in popularity of Bootstrap itself. Bootstrap, in essence, is a really good tool, however, it is massive. If you use all of Twitter Bootstrap, you are looking at, I need to look up the numbers for this, but I imagine it is right around a Meg exactly, just to use all of Twitter Bootstrap, if it is not compiled. Obviously, there is, for example, if you are using Rails, a project I have been using Bootstrap on, you run it through the compressor and everything so you do not have to query quite as much about it. These frameworks that everybody, like you said, jumps to right away because it is just so easy to have a design up and running.Louis: Yes. Another thing that might be worth pointing out, not only frameworks, but even things like preprocesses like SaaS or CoffeeScript. You are writing code that is pretty terse, but sometimes, the output can end up being really redundant, especially in the case of SaaS, I think more so than CoffeeScript, because CoffeeScript ends up producing fairly well- structured JavaScript. In SaaS, if you just do a lot of nested rules and ampersand selectors, and you do not really pay attention to what that is actually doing, you can wind up with these really, really verbose CSS files that get output. I do not know, it seems like we are moving really hard in the direction of developer convenience with these libraries and preprocessors, and maybe not paying as much attention as we should to the effect that it has on page weight.Kevin: Something just came to mind. A lot of sites are now using really large images for slides. Maybe this has a little bit to do with mobile, as well. My article actually talks about this optimization for mobile versus desktop; this idea that you need these responsive images and now you have this increased page weight because responsive design. Do you think maybe that plays a little bit into it? A lot of sites I have been seeing, that are coming out to redesigns, their images are huge.Louis: Maybe. I do think that one of the really interesting things about this, and it is possible that this is maybe even a bigger impact. Wait a second. When we look at the jumps, because he has a breakdown by what has increased the most; Other increased the most, and I assume Other includes images.Patrick: Yes.Louis: Other includes images. Other is the biggest increase. There are big increases in JavaScript and CSS, and JavaScript is still one of the major culprits. If you look at, not only as a percent increase, but in of the overall, Other went from 629 kB. Other was the biggest piece of what was the weight begin with, and it has increased the most in a percentage sense. You got more than 200 kB of the increase is due just to Other, and that is mostly images, also font stacks. Obviously, web fonts is probably going to be a player as well, because web fonts really took off in the last year, and font stacks can be pretty big, so there is definitely a lot to be said for optimizing font stacks. If you are doing something, I will try and find a resource about this, but have a look at . . . what is the word I’m looking for? Kevin, maybe you can help me out with this. You know when you have a web font stack and you can select a subset of characters that you want to include, rather than including all of the characters in the font? If you know it is only going to be used for page titles and you know you will not need certain symbols, you can remove those symbols from the font file before delivery.Kevin: I actually have an article on my blog that covers just how to minimize the size of your font. I link to, I believe Jonathan Snook had a good article at one point, and I linked to that, as well. Basically, you can use a tool called Font Forge to reduce the size of your font faces. If you are using them for, maybe you created your own, like you took a font and you made an icon stack out of it, or like you said, you just have an open source font and you put that through Font Squirrel and you have this giant file. What Font Forge lets you do is lets you go through and remove the characters that you are not using, so you do not have to use quite as many. There are a lot of other tools out there that you can use. Yes, I have an article and we can link to it on the show notes, on how to go through that, for files.Louis: Awesome.Kevin: Not to pimp my own article, but I know it is there because I wrote it.Louis: No, that is fantastic. That is exactly what I was looking for. I just figured I did not have time to look up a link about that, but if we have one at the ready, that is fantastic. We will drop that in the show notes. The other thing I was going to say is that because of the growth of mobile websites, I get the feeling a lot of sites probably have, or that some of these top 300,000, I would guess that probably a fairly significant percentage have a dedicated mobile site that does not load large images, and I think that has freed people up to use really big header images on the desktop versions of their sites. If you look at any site that was redesigned, especially news sites, but almost any site that was redesigned in the past year or two, there is definitely a trend toward using these massive masthead images or big textures for the background. A switch away from using these tiny little thumbnail images here and there, towards using really full-width masthead images for news stories. That feels like it could be a big player.If you are doing responsive images, I do not know how the HTTP Archive did these tests, but if you are dynamically loading your images with JavaScript and being responsive, getting smaller images for mobile devices, or if you have a dedicated mobile site and you are only using those big images on your desktop site, then maybe the increase is not so bad, but it definitely highlights the importance of paying attention to this stuff. I think if developers think, ‘We got all the bandwidth in the world,’ because they are testing with a fast machine with a fast connection because you are a web developer, so you obviously have a fast machine and a fast connection, and you are just reaching for libraries willy-nilly whenever you have a problem, really pay attention to the weight of your site. If you got just a pretty straightforward home page and you are over a megabyte, then there is probably some work you can do.Kevin: Right, absolutely. There are a lot of compression tools out there for images, as well. I think Yahoo! has a compression tool for images. You can throw your PNG into it and it will . . . basically, there are a lot of these lossless tools that you can use to compress images.Louis: Obviously, if anyone is listening that does not use either YSlow for Firefox or Google’s PageSpeed Insites, in Chrome, definitely use those tools, because that will point out anything. It points out some stuff that probably does not matter, like minimizing your HTML is a pretty low benefit thing you can do. In of overall stuff, obviously GZipping, making sure your images are compressed, making sure your JavaScript and CSS are minified. Moreover, I do not know about you guys, but I have seen sites on several occasions, and I think this came up recently. We were looking at some redesign and they had managed to accidentally include JQuery in the page twice, from two different sources?Kevin: Sounds like a WordPress install.Louis: Obviously, that is just ridiculous.Kevin: Yes, absolutely. If you are not going through and checking what files are included and if some are included twice, redundancy is the number one killer of any performance. Even at a programming- level, you do not want the same object or include loaded twice.Louis: Awesome. Steven has been too quiet, I think we should do Steven’s story.Kevin: Stephan, you have backed yourself into a corner.Stephan: On a slightly different note, we are going to talk a little bit about demand for platforms on the internet. Flippa, Louis, just came out with a new study. They had some data done up, I guess you guys use an internal measuring system or API to get these statistics, and they have a number of statistics on what is powering the internet. It is a nice little infograph on learnings that you guys have made over the last 12 months. Some interesting things: Demand for different products, different CMSes, different forums, and all that is rolled up into a nice little chart. It is interesting because WordPress is on the decline; it seems, down 4.2% in the last year. That is some interesting things. What else stood out?Louis: WordPress? That is demand for WordPress sites.Stephan: PHP usage is down; I guess that is not really surprising. I do not know, what do you guys think of this? It is a lot of information from last year.Louis: If you have a look at overall, if you look at the demand and supply of WordPress sites in 2012, it is nearly 85% of the market. Obviously, when the market is that saturated with WordPress sites, and because WordPress is so easy to setup on shared hosting and a lot of one-click installs, you definitely get a lot of WordPress sites that are just the domain name with a WordPress install, it is just an idea. They sell at pretty low rates. I think it is normal that demand would slack off because it is a pretty saturated market there, and the subset of sites that are established, have good traffic, and have revenue is a bit less for WordPress sites, probably just because it is so easy to get going. In of the other numbers, what have we got?Stephan: The other big one was Magento, it dropped by 31.7% from last year.Louis: It seems like Magento dropped significantly and Shopify skyrocketed. It seems like Shopify is making big gains, probably at the expense of Magento.Kevin: Do you think the Magento chain has a little bit to do with ex- commerce that eBay had?Stephan: Just some interesting numbers on vBulletin, it is up 6%. I guess we are seeing a little bit more demand for forums. I have never heard of Pligg, but I went and looked it up and it is like a social networking platform that you can customize, so it has taken off a little bit, too.Louis: Which one is that, sorry?Stephan: Pligg, P-L-I-G-G.Louis: No, I have never heard of that either.Patrick: Is Pligg not and Digg-type clone?Stephan: It looks like it is like a framework.Patrick: Or it used to be. At one point, maybe that is how it started. It might have changed, but I am pretty sure that Pligg used to be. Yeah, it was a Digg-like clone.Louis: Oh, yes. Right.Patrick: I do have a question though. My understanding of this, in reading it is that, and I just want to this. Supply is the number of times a site powered by this was listed for sale on Flippa. Is that correct? Demand is how much they were purchased? Am I understanding that?Louis: If you look at the very bottom of the page, at the very bottom down there. ‘Supply data is based seller-provided tagging, as well as third-party listing.’ That is any time a site is put up for sale, that applies to supply.Patrick: OK. That is what I was thinking.Louis: Demand is based on views for the tags, so page views for those tags; if you have a page that is all the listings with the Ruby tag, for example. Page views for that tag and searches for those keywords, as well, are combined into the demand numbers.Patrick: That is basically what I was thinking. OK. I think it is interesting, I do not know that it necessarily strikes me in any sort of way. Obviously, Shopify growing in popularity, as far as sites people want to sell. In forums, obviously, vBulletin is a commercial solution. PtDB tends to be far and away the most popular, most widely used solution because it is free, open source, came into the market at a good time, has a great community, and so on. vBulletin is popular, especially with forums where there is a lot of monetization, and I think that that does play well into Flippa, as well, because you are selling websites, oftentimes, based on evaluation of monthly revenue, so it makes sense that vBulletin would be so dominant. Though, I am surprised at to the extent that it is; 91.3% of the supply, and MyBB having 8.7. That leaves little for the other platforms.Louis: One of the things that I find even more interesting than the supply and demand breakdowns is the average sale prices of these different sites. For example, if you look at average sale for CMS, the average sale for a Drupal site is nearly 4-times the average price for a WordPress site.Stephan: Is it just because Drupal is harder to develop for?Louis: Yes, just because you have spent 10 times as much work building the thing.Patrick: The site to have the most IE6 adjustments is the site that is worth the most because of all the development hours. I think some of this has to do with Drupal having such a small demand. It makes sense that the more you would pump into something, the more sites there are, the lower the sale will be, because then you start getting into the lower-priced sites dragging down the average, is what I am trying to say.Louis: That is fair to say.Patrick: It is interesting, because Shopify maintains a pretty nice percentage of the demand and it also maintains the top dollar amount at over $10,000 for the eCommerce platforms.Louis: A very high price despite being probably the easiest eCommerce platform to use. They are interesting numbers. Obviously, if you are building a website that you think you might eventually want to sell or that you plan on monetizing and then potentially eventually selling, then maybe you do have to think about the technology choices, not only in of what technologies you are comfortable with and what technologies you think are going to be the easiest for you to work with, but also what technology choices you are going to be able to then be able to sell the site. If you use something that is less portable across different hosts, something that is harder to set up, or something that is less-known, then you might have a harder time selling your site than if you used something that everyone is comfortable with and that is easy for people to transfer on to their own hosts, for example.Patrick: At the end of the day, if you make piles of money, on Flippa it will all get thrown to the side as long as you make piles and piles of cash.Louis: That is true.Stephan: I think the average sale for a .NET development site is $17,000, and that is almost double a Ruby website, which is the next highest.Louis: I am a little bit surprised by that, let me look at this. In of supply, .NET is a fairly small chunk of the supply. 3.4% of the sites listed are written in .NET, so it is a very low number. I do not even know what to think about that.Patrick: I think it is more of a small sample issue with that, because it is such a small amount of demand, that . . .Louis: It might be a very small sample. I am actually curious.Patrick: It is almost like a niche curiosity, maybe people pay a little more for. I do not know.Kevin: It is the people using SharePoint for their websites is what it is.Louis: People using what, sorry?Kevin: SharePoint, I am sure.Louis: Right.Stephan: That could be it.Louis: I am actually going to go and have a look at what is there. WordPress; there are currently 500 open WordPress listings. Obviously this is based on, for any one of these platforms, there are not very many, most of them except for WordPress, PHP, something that is a high volume thing, you do not have a lot of listings open simultaneously. Just looking at the open listings, right now you cannot really see much, in of what is happening in .NET and vBulletin. Nonetheless, some interesting statistics for anyone who is interested in buying and/or selling websites. Hint, hint. Plug.Patrick: What we have learned in the end today is that you use Shopify, Drupal, and .NET, that is what you use when you use a website; you use all those together, somehow. I do not know how you are going to do it, and I am not even a developer, but I can imagine the complexity that exists with that conundrum. If you do it, you could be the next .com millionaire.Louis: After the 17 years it has taken you to get the thing up and running, you might be able to sell it for a slightly higher price.Stephan: Cool.Louis: All right. I reckon that is a wrap.Kevin: All right. I have an article over on Boagworld: Dan Sherman posted this, and it is basically on responsive images and how to handle this. He gives some of the common examples of how that would be handled server-side or loading mobile images by default and sniffing out screen size to load bigger images. Also, he talks about the reposed picture element, and just the different ways you can do that; loading different images as backgrounds, using media queries, that kind of thing. The list goes on, he says. Basically, he comes to the conclusion that mobile networks compress these things by default, so why bother to do anything, at all? He has some interesting stats on this, actually. He says that this technique of not bothering with responsive images works for him about 98% of the time, 98.21% if you want to be super technical. Basically, he talks about how the mobile networks compress these images by themselves. He was able to see an image that was approximately 12,000 pixels wide go from 470 kB, and he watched that drop down to around 45 kB, just from the mobile network compression. I do want to make a note, because Paul made it within the article, if you go into this article and you look at the images as the example, WordPress is doing some funky stuff, so you really need to perform this test on your own. Basically, that is a big difference.Louis: It is definitely a big difference.Kevin: It is like 1000% decrease.Patrick: You cannot have a 1000% decrease.Louis: Look. It feels like before I decide to do this craziness. I would need really good statistics on how many different carriers this was tested with. Obviously, the level of compression is going to be different. Some carriers might choose not to do compression.Kevin: Right.Louis: Especially, you would have to check this across multiple countries, obviously. I am assuming this author is in the UK, probably?Kevin: Right. Paul’s company, Headscape, is in the UK, yes.Louis: Whether that is also the case with carriers in other countries. I think it is obviously a super-refreshing look at the issue of responsive images and I think it is totally valid, because you do not have to worry about the situation of, as we have talked about several times on this show before, when I spoke with Jeremy Keith, we talked about this. The correlation between screen size and bandwidth is not as strong as I think most developers would like to think it is. Just because you have a small screen, you could be using like a 7 inch tablet or 4½ inch phone, just because you have a small screen does not mean you are on a low connection. Maybe you can afford to have a nice crisp image because you are on broadband. Dan’s solution of just relying on the mobile carriers does do away with that, because you know the mobile carrier is the 100% sure way of knowing that someone is on a slow connection. On the one hand, I think it is great, refreshing, something that . . . there has been so much discussion about responsive images in the past year, any different approach to it I think is really interesting. It feels like before going down this road, especially if you are doing a site that is going to have a big audience and you really care about that mobile experience, I think you would want to see more testing on any carrier in any country that you expect a sizable portion of your base to be coming at you from.Kevin: Yes, I agree with that, Louis. I feel like Dan, in his article, talks a little bit on that note of, ‘Before you just decide not to do anything, look at the project requirements.’ Because at the end of the day you could put time into maybe something a little more important than optimizing images, especially if it is a blog that is not image heavy, maybe a design that does not have a lot of images. There is a give and take in development time. He said, obviously . . . He listed the techniques above, so he is obviously saying, ‘You can use these if you want to, but here is an alternative method.’ Maybe he is saying we just do not need to put as much effort into it right now as we think we do. I do agree, you do not want to make an assumption, especially if you are developing a site and your client has paid for an optimized mobile experience. You are just not going to ignore it and say, ‘They are going to take care of it,’ it is lazy.Louis: Like I said, I would love to see more statistics about this. Obviously, it is a huge endeavor of going through the effort of finding out what you are looking at; probably 4 or 5 major carriers in each country and potentially hundreds of countries that you might want to have statistics for. Obviously, it could be a big challenge to find out how much compression, what types of files are being compressed, and all of that information across multiple carriers. Obviously, it would be awesome statistics to have.Kevin: Yes, absolutely. It would be nice to see, as well, Wi-Fi put into that, for the mobile devices, anyways; Wi-Fi to using 3G or 4G.Louis: Oh, what are the percentages, yes. I did see some stats on some point that was pertaining specifically to tablets. In those cases, I think this was back when it would have been the first or second iPad and there were not really any other tablet competitors that had a significant market share at the time. I reading some statistics that something like 90% or 85% . . . obviously, do not quote me on this number because this was years ago and I do not it, but a very high percentage of sites viewed on the iPad were over Wi-Fi, not on 3G. There are probably a lot of smaller and lower-cost tablets, like the entry-level models of the Nexus 7 and 10, and the entry level models of the Kindle Fire, which do not have 3G or mobile data. I think that goes along with the general consensus that a lot of tablet use seems to be in the home, it is a device that people use, if you would usually just be browsing Facebook or reading a book on your kindle in bed, you could do that on a smaller tablet or a lower-end tablet. I think on those devices, there is defiantly going to be a lot of Wi-Fi use. Once you get into mobile phone territory, then it is all up in the air. We need more data, basically, is what I am saying. I am saying this is a great idea that this article presents, but I would not go down this path without having a lot more data about what different carriers are doing.Patrick: Something wicked this way comes.Kevin: I think that is a wrap. I think that is good.Louis: I do not know how to respond to that.Patrick: It is a dangerous path, Louis. Do some research first before you traverse it.Louis: Yes, OK. There we go.Kevin: Louis, are you saying we should think before we act?Louis: I am suggesting that. I know it is crazyKevin: I do not know if I can accept that.Patrick: That is what a pragmatic developer would do, right Kevin?Kevin: Yes, that is what I do.Patrick: Excellent.Louis: OK, guys. I imagine it is time for our Host Spotlights. What has caught your eye in the past few weeks, on the World Wide Web?Patrick: My spotlight is a comic by The Oatmeal. It is called ‘Some Thoughts and Musings About Making Things For the Web: A Rather Lengthy Comic by The Oatmeal.’ Have any of you read this yet?Louis: Yes.Stephan: Oh, yes.Louis: I read it when it came out, obviously.Patrick: Good. It is a spotlight that everyone already knows about, excellent; those are the best kind. Anyway, it is really funny. If you make things for the web and you have even a modest size audience, I think this will speak to you, I know it did speak to me; I thought it was a lot of fun. I particularly like the idea, and I have talked about this before with sites like Lanyard that do not have comments. The thought that a lot of people who create things feel that there needs to be comments on every single thing that they create, and how that is not always a positive thing, how it can be a negative. That is just one of the many observation that were made in the comic, that I found to be interesting, and of course, it has got that Oatmeal humor, so it is a lot of fun, as well. I know I was cracking up as I read it.Louis: Awesome.Kevin: Very cool.Patrick: Who is next?Kevin: My spotlight is actually a … ah what’s wrong with me?! Retro Game Crunch, say that two times fast. Basically, it is 6 games in 6 months, it is a kick starter. I have to put disclosure in here; I do know Shaun, who started the project. Do what you will with that, but I actually like it. It seems pretty cool. Basically, they are going to do these HTML-vibe video games and you will be able to play it on Mac too, I do not know, or Windows. It is really cool. Basically, they did a competition, and in the competition they did like a 78-hour game or something to that effect. They created this game called Evolution. I played it; it is pretty fun for a quickly made game. I am curious to see what they can do quickly. If anything, it is worth checking out just to check out the game that they reference, that they have already developed, that you can check out. The website is RetroGameCrunch.com, but it will take you to the Kickstarter. It is a little fun thing, check it out.Louis: Very cool. I like the look of this.Patrick: I would just like to point out that the first two spotlights both involve someone named Inman.Louis: I am going to buck the trend and bring to the table a spotlight that does not involve someone named Inman. As we know, The Oatmeal is written by a guy called Matthew Inman and Retro Game Crunch is run by Shaun Inmans. Unfortunately, I do not have another spotlight featuring someone called Inman. What I do have, however, is a cool Twitter that is called VimTips. So Twitter.com/vimtips, which is just a not-quite-daily, but every-so-oftenly helping of short tips and tricks on how to use Vim more efficiently. Obviously, anyone who uses Vim as their text editor will know that . . . I do not think there is anyone alive that knows all of the commands that are available to you in Vim. I personally, probably know like 10% of them, and it is still faster and more powerful than any other editor I could imagine using. It is great to have access to other people’s little tips and little quick; either search patterns, different commands, or combinations of commands that let you do really useful things. It is a really cool Twitter to check out if you are a Vim . If you are not a Vim , you should be.Stephan: I am not a Vim , but this is interesting.Patrick: I am not a Vim either. I think with that survey sample in mind we can safely forecast that 50% of the world, at least, is not a Vim .Kevin: I would say Sublime is a good alternative.Stephan: Wait. Louis, do you use a Mac?Louis: I use a Mac; however, almost all of my development is done on a Linux VM over SSH.Patrick: Scandalous.Louis: I do not actually dev on the Mac. The Mac is just an expensive aluminum box to get into Linux with.Stephan: Gotcha. I was just wondering, because I have seen some of the Vim clients for Mac and nothing is very impressive. That is why I was wondering.Louis: No, just terminal, all the way.Stephan: Gotcha.Louis: Anyone that says otherwise is crazy.Patrick: Cool.Louis: Bring on the flaming.Stephan: Emacs!Louis: I just want to say to our listener who is an Emacs . . . sorry. I know there is just one of you, but I did not want to offend. So, sorry.Patrick: You could still be Listener of the Year if you come to a conference that me and Kevin are both at, and you travel at least 800 miles.Stephan: I think Louis might disqualify them.Louis: On the basis of being our only Emacs listener? No, he is cool. Emacs guy is alright. I will vouch for him.Stephan: I guess I will go last, then. I basically have an online book, or I do not even know how to describe it. It is just a tutorial in a bunch of sections on how to use D3.js, which is a data visualizations library. It is pretty interesting just because I am getting into this data visualization stuff, and this is a great place for me to start because I am not a JavaScript-savvy person.Louis: This is very cool.Stephan: Yes. It walks you right through what you are actually doing, how you are using the data that comes to your page, and how to translate that data into some visualization. It is really neat.Louis: Yes, that is cool. Every single person I know who has used D3 has said, ‘D3 is awesome. It is the best thing ever, but the learning curve is, to say the least, a little steep, and it will involve at least a couple weeks of tearing your hair out.’ Having a good resource like this with a really good one-stop- shop for a full tutorial taking you all the way through is pretty awesome. Although Kevin will take issue with this site, for obvious reasons.Kevin: Yes, here is another great example of Twitter Bootstrap. I have to say, Stephan you are not the only one who endorses this. The most interesting man in the world also endorses this.Louis: Yes, also.Stephan: Yes, it is true. It is.Patrick: When he needs visualization, he uses D3.js.Louis: Awesome, guys. It has been yet another great show.Kevin: Yes, I think so.Patrick: If you say so.Louis: I do say so, OK? All right. Let us take it around the table.Kevin: I am Kevin Dees and you can find me at kevindees.cc and @kevindees on Twitter.Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe. I blog at ManagingCommunities.com. On twitter @ifroggy.Stephan: I am Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and I blog every now and then at BadIce.com.Louis: I am Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter @rssaddict. You can also find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. You can find the Podcast on the web at SitePoint.com/Podcast. You can see all of our past episodes there, you can leave a comment, as well, and you can get the RSS feed. Of course, we are on iTunes, so feel free to look us up there. Leave us a review if you like this show. You can e-mail us if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or stories. The address to use is [email protected]. Thank you for listening. Bye, for now.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Produced by Karn Broad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 188 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) interviews Lee LeFever (@leelefever) from Common Craft about how their explaining videos came about, the community around Common Craft, his book The Art Of Explanation and more!Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #188: The Art of Explanation with Lee LeFever (MP3, 54:54, 52.7MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode SummaryPatrick and Lee talk about the place for creativity in explaining many things and how explanation (or sometimes the lack of it) can impact in so many areas of creativity and client relationships.Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/188.Interview TranscriptPatrick: Hello and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe and I’m doing an interview show today with my friend Lee LeFever. Lee is the founder and Chief Explainer at Common Craft, and he’s the author of a new book, The Art of Explanation: Making Your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand.According to the Common Craft website they are on a mission, they want to make the world a more understandable place to live and work by helping professionals like you possibly become explanation specialists because more specialists mean better explanations. And that’s a good thing. Common Craft is married couple Lee and Sachi LeFever with Tom Bosco serving as a mascot.I’ve known Lee for a while and it’s great to have him on the show. Lee, welcome to the SitePoint Podcast.Lee: It’s great to be here Patrick, thanks.Patrick: My pleasure. I want to talk about a few different areas of your life and your business, Common Craft, and a little bit on online community and of course explanation. So first the business, Common Craft. I mentioned how Common Craft is just you and Sachi, and for the record, on the cover of the book, is that you and Sachi to the right?Lee: Yeah, that is an image that has been with us for a few years. I re-did it for the book but it is meant to be me and Sachi.Patrick: Okay, now who’s that other third guy, is he like a creepy guy who follows you around pointing at his head, or who is that person?Lee: Just a little more Common Craft art.Patrick: Awesome, so one of the cool things about Common Craft, and there’s a number of cool things about Common Craft, but you’ve spoken about how important lifestyle is as a priority for you as a business. Specifically being small and happy. To me, Common Craft is at least to some extent a lifestyle business. You’re successful but you never want to be successful at the cost of sacrificing your independent lifestyle.That sometimes can be hard for some people to understand, because they think that you should always want to be bigger, bigger, bigger. But bigger can come with a cost, and it’s been interesting to watch Common Craft grow while also seeing you negotiate that cost and maintain your mission. I wanted to ask you to speak a little bit about that negotiation with the cost of sacrificing that lifestyle but also growing and how you’ve been able to accomplish your goals.Lee: Yeah, definitely, that’s a great question. Common Craft started in 2003 with me being an independent consultant and then when Sachi ed in 2007 we became a two-person company and that’s when we started making the videos for which we’re known now. From the very beginning of that whole transition into videos we saw some opportunities to be a sort of home-based business of two people. After doing that for a little while we realized that because we have made this choice to be small and to be home-based, our happiness matters a lot.If we’re not happy, if work is not making us happy, then that means that our whole life is not happy. So we started to think about how could we build a business like Common Craft that would pay the bills and help us earn a good living but also make sure that we’re happy and love our work and feel good about what we’re doing. The more we looked at that we thought about how we could build a studio and have employees, but it just wasn’t something that we felt like fit with what we wanted on a personal level.We’re sort of fiercely independent in that way. We want to be the masters of our domain I think. While there might be a lot of opportunity to make a lot more videos and to grow a business, I think that the way that you put it in the introduction is that does have a cost. It may mean that Common Craft is not going to be a $20 million company in five years, but it means that we’ll be happy I think if we choose to stay small.But what’s missing about that is that if you’re a small business that chooses to stay small, then usually that comes with real factors in of what kind of business you can really be in. We used to make custom videos and that was a business that made good money for us but it wasn’t scalable. There was no what to make more custom videos without hiring people. That constraint helped us see the opportunity to start licensing videos.That was a model that we could make our own videos and manage the whole process of making and licensing the videos and scale to thousands and thousands of people given the right opportunities. So I think our size helped us see these opportunities that I think have helped us be successful over the last couple of years.Patrick: So between you and Sachi, how are your roles divided?Lee: I think that Sachi and I are really different people, and I think that comes through in our work. Sachi is very detail-oriented and really great at analytical strategic kinds of things. I’m much more big picture, idea- creative kind of person.Patrick: Got it.Lee: And that’s really how it happens in Common Craft, I set the creative direction and get started on new videos and blog posts and things, and she’s the one that really shapes it into something that’s ready for prime time.Patrick: And you draw the art, right?Lee: Yeah, I do.Patrick: And you’re the voice. But I think what you’re kind of alluding to is that Sachi does a lot of those behind-the-scenes things. I think I either heard you say in the interview that you did with Chris Brogan, or mention it in the book that she is behind the scenes by choice.Lee: That’s true. She wants me to be the face of the company; she doesn’t have an interest in being that public face of the company. But I always want people to know that just because she’s not the face of the company doesn’t mean that she’s not responsible for everything she… People might underestimate the amount of value and everyday good things that come from Sachi. She’s behind some of our best ideas and it’s a real team thing. It’s certainly not just me, even though it might appear that way.Patrick: Right, and that’s the same for a lot of different businesses, whoever’s out front tends to be associated with the brand, but to make that happen there’s always people behind the scenes doing a lot of the work. Another interesting thing about Common Craft to me has been the revenue models over the years and how you’ve experimented with them. You mentioned this a moment ago about custom videos. You know that’s kind of how you started with the custom client videos and as you described you found it wasn’t scalable.Not without adding people or adding overhead, which you wanted to avoid. I’m not going to have the precise timeline here, but I know that you stepped back from that and focused on video licensing. You didn’t really do custom videos for a while. Then I think you did a few more, and then you launched your subscription model, which itself has matured over time. I love how you’ve experimented with the different business models and how you’ve tried new things.For me, that’s where it is, that’s the only way you find out what the limits are and what you can make and what’s best for you is to experiment. Then of course you have the Explainer Network. I’d like to walk through that a little bit. You mentioned the custom videos, and then you moved more to licensing videos. What led to that focus?Lee: We’ve always made videos that are our own videos. The first videos we became known for were RSS in Plain English and Wikis in Plain English. Those videos weren’t about products, they were about these ideas. We continued to build a library of videos that were like that without really a big business model in mind. But what started to happen pretty quickly was teachers and trainers and librarians were saying hey, can I use this for my work?We started to think wow, maybe there’s a business here, maybe there’s a model here where we can give these teachers, trainers and librarians a better version of the video or tools for making the video more useful and relevant to them that they can’t get anywhere else and that will allow us to make money in that way. Originally we had an ala carte sort of iTunes model where you put in a credit card, pay 20 bucks, a video file, then you could use it for training.That eventually, about a year ago, morphed into a hip service where you become a member of Common Craft and then have access to our library of 50 videos that you can embed and at any time. It’s always-on access to our library.Patrick: I was just looking at the hip in preparation for this interview. I already knew about it obviously, but just updating myself on what you’ve made available now and what you’re pricing was. It’s very affordable for people to access the videos and be able to embed them. For the whole library it’s only $159 a year, which is $12 a month or something like that?Lee: It’s not too much.Patrick: It’s a really small figure for the quality programming. Then you just recently started the DIY explainer thing, which I want to talk about which is licensing your artwork to people to use in presentations and to use in their own explanations.Lee: That’s right.Patrick: You mentioned in the interview you did with Chris Brogan capitalizing on the wave of people who, to put it in a flattering way, who want to be like you. It’s like be like Mike, except it’s Common Craft. I think that was a really interesting move. What did you see that made you say okay, we’re not just going to give the videos we want to give people access to our library of art work that we’ve drawn ourselves and use in our work?Lee: Sure. I think that a lot of our decisions in the direction that Common Craft takes comes from the that we’re getting from fans and s and customers out there. Making our cutouts available, which are digital images just like the ones in our videos, came from seeing a number of people us and say is there anyway you can provide images? I’m looking for something like Common Craft artwork that’s going to make my presentation or explanation remarkable.Another thing we’ve been seeing, which I think is really something we’re excited about is teachers are doing projects with students that use a video camera and paper cutouts in what they call Common Craft-style videos. If you go on YouTube and type in Common Craft Style, you’ll see literally hundreds of videos that students have done on biology or history or whatever it is. Those same teachers have come to us and said hey, if you can provide anything at all that would help this process, then it’s something that I think people would love.So we see it being teachers, trainers or anybody that’s just looking for honestly an alternative to stock photography and clip art. People put that stuff in presentations every day, and I think that Common Craft artwork has happened to evolve into its own sort of brand of visuals. I think we have a lot of potential to make it a more useful thing for people.Patrick: Yeah and I just went to YouTube and typed in the phrase Common Craft Style and there’s 1,150 results that come up. A lot of students as you mentioned, Common Craft-style Hunger Games, Common Craft-style Adam’s Onus Treaty, Common Craft-style election of 1824. I can share a similar feeling with the people who take certain things from my book and then use it on their communities, but that has to make you feel a certain way, it’s extremely touching.I don’t even know what the question is, but it has to mean a lot to you to see that taking to your style of artwork and then associating it with you and giving you credit and saying that we want to be like that.Lee: Yeah. I think that we both feel honored by it. There’s a difference between teachers and students doing it in the classroom and some marketing company somewhere selling it to their client. We love the idea of students and teachers being inspired by Common Craft. We love the idea of advertising agencies being inspired, but I think we have a lot better feelings about the students and teachers.I think the students and teachers are much more likely to say that they were inspired by Common Craft and maybe give us some credit for that inspiration, but that doesn’t always happen.Patrick: I know what you mean. Speaking to that, is there a limitation to DIY explainer stuff and what people can do with the artwork?Lee: Yeah. Our biggest one is no re-selling. You can’t become a member, the images and then repackage them and sell them in some other way. That could even mean doing client work as a video producer.Patrick: That’s what I was curious about.Lee: Yeah.Patrick: Which makes sense. Because it’s only $49 a year, like what type of person are you that’s going to do that and then sell it as an explainer video to your clients?Lee: Yeah, it’s true. But there is an exception there where if there is a company that has identified Common Craft-style as they want to make a video in that style, they can become a member and make a video on their own for their product. They just can’t offer that as a service to others. So that’s one take on it.Another take is that if a video producer has a client that’s saying I want to do Common Craft-style, then that video producer can work on that video, but their client has to purchase licensing from us. So each client has to be a Common Craft customer in order to be able to do that video. Then there’s pricing things we have to work out around that, but that’s sort of the basic idea right now.Patrick: Makes sense. I thought this was really smart. Also, it’s really smart to do the Explainer Network when you have this need to stay small, but then you have people who want videos. You just don’t have time because it’s only two people, there’s only so much time in the day, so you identified people who do work at the level of quality that you can recommend and then they pay to be in this network of explainers that you then refer to potential clients.Lee: Yeah. That came out of a very fortunate set of circumstances. When we first started making videos, we made a couple of high-profile videos by 2007. One was Google Docs in Plain English which was seen millions of times and it created a lot of demand for what we do. And even if we grew some it would still be hard to service that demand. We started thinking, if there’s this demand we have to find a supply. That was where the Explainer Network came from.It’s been around for over four years now. It really was just a place to try to find a supply for people who were looking for this kind of video. To our surprise, it works. We just added three new recently who are currently testing it out, but I have faith that they will hang around. We have our first member from Latin America, which I think is interesting who does a lot of work in Spanish.Patrick: Very cool. Do you still do any custom videos? If someone comes to you and wants the full Common Craft, legitimate, here’s a pile of money, we want you. Do you still do those videos?Lee: I think that it’s a possibility, but it’s not something that we’ve done in a long time. We do do custom videos and we’re working on something right now for instance, but it’s because of a very special relationship. Since 2008-2009, we’ve had a relationship with Intel, and specifically Intel HR. They need explanations of what’s going on with their stock program, and what their high-deductible health program and all these things.That is sort of our big customer client that we work with a lot. That allows us to do that business while at the same time having the public face of Common Craft be our hip.Patrick: Okay. Competition, you started something here, I don’t even know if there was someone out there who was doing this before you in a similar way, I just see a lot of companies that came after. I wonder if these companies owe their lives to you. I wonder how you view competition in this explainer space, which from my outside perspective is growing and is very popular and hot right now. There’s a lot of people who want to be in this space and want to make explainer videos. What is your perspective of competition as a whole and this emerging? Do you call it an industry?Lee: I do. Maybe say like a cottage industry. It’s not a big thing, but I do agree that it’s growing, there’s a lot more of an emphasis on explanation and on explainer videos. There’s a lot of companies out there who I think are slapping the label explainer video on videos that are really just marketing. So there’s that side of it where being the person that wrote a book about explanation I have strong ideas about what an explanation is and isn’t and I don’t want it to get co-opted by sales people too much.Explanation certainly has a role in sales, but I worry that we might get away from the actual goal, which is to make something easy to understand. But that’s not really an answer to your question. In of competition, my personal view is that I want to see the industry be successful. I want there to be more explainers. I’m very serious when I say I want the world to be a more understandable place. To get there we need more explainers.I don’t look at these video producers that are making explanation videos as competition to Common Craft necessarily. I maybe look at them as competition to of our Explainer Network, but that’s not my thing to worry about, that’s their thing.Patrick: They’re your children.Lee: Yes.Patrick: You don’t have to agree with me.Lee: I don’t know if I’d put it in quite those , but I think that when we first started making the videos I read a book called Blue Ocean Strategy that’s a pretty well-known business book these days. I still look at Common Craft as a company who is driven, who’s always looking for that next blue ocean. I was doing online community consulting before doing the videos, and the videos came from that. The videos were our blue ocean because that was right before everybody became a social media consultant.Then we started making videos and now there’s a lot of explainers out there. We’re not competing directly with them, that’s become a red ocean. Now our blue ocean is helping people be better communicators. Sure, that’s a red ocean in some ways too, but we have our own way of doing that and our own brand of visuals and know-how and library of videos that I think is unique. I don’t know of any other company right now that’s doing that specific thing. That’s kind of from a higher level how we look at how we’ve evolved.Patrick: I knew you from the online community days and you mentioned the idea of marketers, nothing against them, but co-opting the idea of explanation when it’s really just a marketing promotional video. Even though you’re not as hyper into online community space as you used to be, I’m sure you can see that happening with online community also because I know I do.Lee: Yeah, sure.Patrick: This kind of thing where social media marketing is being called online community and it’s kind of getting into that same kind of realm. So I can relate to you on that level. One other question I want to ask you about business before we move on to something else. You kind of touched on this, but this is something I’m seeing and the wave of cheap explanation videos, okay? I’m very pro-market, capitalism and all that stuff. I like money, I believe in making it. I believe in offering good service and getting paid as much as you can while sustaining the market.But it just seems like more and more there’s a lot of these cheap, cookie cutter explanation video things coming along. There’s someone I know who’s an acquaintance of mine who has this service and he’s moving in and I just look at him like you, how dare you. Don’t do that. That’s not good; just send people over to Common Craft. Is this a trend you’re seeing too? You mentioned people putting out explainer videos that are not really in your view explanations, is this a trend that you see a lot as well as kind of cheapening the videos and these companies and services that are pumping out a lot of cheap, repetitive explanation videos?Lee: You know I kind of see both sides. I think that there’s a lot of talent, hard work and effort that goes into really great video and video production. That’s something that people will always pay for is high- quality work. I think that’s a reason our at the Explainer Network have been successful is they do great work and they are craftsmen and artists and really care about it. But at the same time there are huge numbers of people who are struggling with ways to get their message heard or their ideas understood.They can’t afford to hire a high-end video explanation company. They realize that PowerPoint is just not doing the trick anymore. I think those people are starting to look at what else is out there. There are a number of products that are trying to get the same outcomes that we always depended on PowerPoint for, but doing it in a different way. An example is a start-up out of Israel, I believe, called PalTunes. They’re aiming for the PowerPoint market by giving professionals with mainstream computer skills the ability to make their own animated video.Whether it’s an explanation or not, it’s a platform for communicating. I think that’s a good thing. I think that having a variety of tools and a variety of platforms for getting a message out there that’s remarkable and unique and engaging is good. But there’s also a difference between platforms and skills. I think that’s a big reason why we wrote the book is because the best platform in the world is not going to make you a good explainer. It actually takes understanding what an explanation is.That’s where we see fitting into that world. Yes, there’s an explosion of tools that help you communicate, that’s great, but what about how you communicate? The tools are only part of the equation.Patrick: Makes sense. You mentioned explanations and how some things are not explanations. I was reading the book and I saw that, okay that’s a definition, I’ll that. This is a description, and those are both not explanations. I better keep this straight so when I see Lee next time I want to make sure I don’t use the wrong terminology.Lee: Oh, I think they are much softer than that. I think I follow that section up to say that doesn’t mean that these things can’t be explanations; it’s just that alone they’re not. But anyway.Patrick: Right, I got it. I think I you saying that. I knew you before all this explanation stuff and I love that fact. I Common Craft, the community consultancy and you were an online community manager in the healthcare industry from 1998 to 2003 according to your LinkedIn profile. I site my source because if I’m wrong it’s your LinkedIn profile that’s wrong, it’s not me.Lee: I would say that that is my tenure at that company and for the last three years was when I was the online community manager.Patrick: Got it. Okay, so what I’m leading into here is that industry did exist back before 2005. You’re an example I can point to that and always continue to say that to people that this isn’t in the last couple years.Lee: It’s true.Patrick: Then of course you did some community consulting. I was curious to ask you how important or unimportant has your community building background been in fostering Common Craft to a wider audience?Lee: You know that’s a really good question. One of the first things online or in my professional life that I was really truly ionate about was the idea of online communities. That you could solve a lot of problems by being able to communicate with a group of people that are also ionate about what you do. Businesses could engage customers in all these new ways and I still believe that that’s amazingly powerful and we’ve seen huge change out of that.But it’s a bit ironic that when we looked at Common Craft and Common Craft’s potential to do that, we saw it through the lens of what we can do as a two-person company. What’s going to drive our business? Everything came down to a choice at that time, are we going to get more bang for our buck by doing this or by making videos? Because it’s a constraint, you’ve got to make choices. We saw the potential to use social media to increase the awareness of our brand, to always be out there and talk to people about what’s happening and offer ways to communicate to people about Common Craft, but not necessarily have a goal of creating an online community around Common Craft or around the videos.I think we saw the company having different goals. I’m sure you would agree that that’s what community success depends on, does it solve the goal you’re trying to solve? And our goal was not to necessarily have a big community of people, but to be a successful video explanation company. Being a small company meant that we had to think about that differently.Patrick: Mainly you want to connect with the right people, connect with the people who will like what you’re doing. It’s not about everyone; it’s about your focused audience.Lee: That’s right.Patrick: I just got an idea as I was sitting here because I recently wrote something about how people can use videos to explain features of the community and they could just use your artwork. That would be helpful, they should pay for that.Lee: Sure.Patrick: So a little bit about book writing. Common Craft, as you’ve explained here, is a very independent company. Now you write a book, and you go with a major publisher. Why?Lee: Good question. We looked at that really closely. One thing that I think was part of that decision was a couple of years before we wrote the book Wiley ed me expressing interest. I wasn’t really in that frame of mind at the time, but I saved the information and thought more about it later. Two years after that I wrote back to the same person who was actually the editor of my book, Lauren at Wiley, and said hey I’m interested, are you guys still interested?She said yes, I present on Tuesday. Give me a proposal and I’ll talk to people about it. So I wrote to her and we started going down that path or at least considering that path and I think that for my first book I put a priority on working with a major publisher because of a couple of things. For one, I wanted to know the process; I wanted to know what does it take to work with a publisher. And I wanted to have that be a part of my professional life that I worked with a major publisher on a book, I was a published author.Self publishing obviously has benefits too, but that’s a big differentiator in my mind is that I made it over that bar. The bar of convincing a publisher to actually accept the book. So far I think it’s great. They’ve offered us a number of opportunities that I don’t think would have been possible otherwise. But I always keep the possibility open of going and doing my own thing having done this.Patrick: Yeah I felt the same way when I was coming out with my book and just wanting to be with a publisher that was as big as possible or at least in the best situation possible. For the same reason, it’s a stamp of legitimacy, right? I have nothing against self publishing, we just self- published a book this year that was sponsored by someone, but with the first book, it’s almost like, and it sounds condescending, but if I wanted to I could self-publish a book with the letter K.Lee: That’s true.Patrick: If I wanted to I could just publish a book of the letter K and call it the K Book, have it out and available tomorrow. That sounds really condescending, but my point is that I can put anything I want out there. It’s like I have a blog, okay, whoopdie-doo. What is that worth? There’s tons of great self-published books, but for you to have the stamp of approval that a publisher said hey, we’re going to put 50 grand in money, time, staff effort, 100 grand, whatever it is. Because it takes a lot of staff hours to put a book together.I think my publisher’s process is probably shorter now, they have downsized a little bit, but when I had my book I had four rounds of editors, a copy editor, an associate editor, somebody who reconfigured the organization of the book, the executive editor. There’s all these people, and they’re all spending time on the book, and they all have to be paid. Then there’s sales people, there’s designers, and people I haven’t even heard of probably. Then my advance and everything else that goes into it. That is something worth having that stamp of approval that says hey, I was good enough for them to say we’re going to get behind your project.Lee: Yeah, definitely. It’s slightly analogous to venture funding for a startup. The moment you get even half a million dollars or millions of dollars, that is validation. Somebody believed in that idea. That’s something that helps.Patrick: Right, definitely. And of course the access. That’s the same thing I say, when I talk to different authors, that’s the same thing I say, the same thing you basically said, same thing they say is it comes down to two things, the second thing is access to the bookstores because there’s still that gatekeeper there. That’s kind of the one main middle man thing that major publishers have is my book was in every Barnes & Noble in the country. Not everyone can say that. There is value there that it was in bookstores.In the future I can go on and do whatever I want, but I’ll always have that.Lee: Yes, that’s right.Patrick: Now you’re intellectual property is featured heavily in the book, your drawings. Not just your writing. My book was just my writing in there; you have your writing plus your artwork. How did that factor into your negotiations?Lee: It’s a good question. Honestly, at the point that we were g contracts and everything for the book, it was not fleshed out what the book would actually contain. I think that Wiley has actually been great to work with in of that. From their perspective in of how I use the intellectual property and that sort of thing, they just want to make sure that I’m not offering any competition to book sales. As long as I’m not impacting the potential to sell books by giving things away somehow, then it’s really not a big deal.I was worried about that early on because there’s this thing called the explanation scale. In the book and it’s a really simple idea it’s not something that a big consulting company would send out armies of lawyers to try to protect.Patrick: You haven’t filed a patent yet is what you’re saying you haven’t filed for the patent just yet.Lee: Yeah, that’s right. I was worried about this is in the book, does it mean I can’t use it on my website or I can’t use it in some other way? My editor just said no, don’t worry about that, that’s your copyright. As long as it’s not competing with book sales you can use your stuff, those are your ideas.Patrick: Right.Lee: So that made me feel better about that. I feel free right now, maybe I’ll hear something from them later, but right now I don’t feel restricted at all. I feel like that artwork that’s in the book is something that I can use in a number of ways. Not to mention that those images are black and white, and when you color it, it becomes a different thing.Patrick: Right, okay. I was just curious about that. So let’s talk about explanation a little more, and one of the things I wanted to ask you. Throughout time, who are your favorite explainers?Lee: Throughout time? Wow.Patrick: Throughout time. Like if you could hop in a time machine and see a few different people explain something, and it could be people who are living, who are the people that you look to and say those people, they could explain something.Lee: Totally. I haven’t always looked at the world that way of course. Just in the last few years has it been a really big focus in of who do I think are the best. But I can talk some about what I see today. One of my favorite people, someone I love when I see him on TV is Neil deGrasse Tyson. If listeners don’t know, he’s the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, he’s an astrophysicist, and now a media figure.But he’s one of these incredibly smart, accomplished people who is able to take something like astrophysics and make it graspable for everybody. Not only that, make people excited about it and interested in it. I say that he’s an ambassador to his profession because he’s able to explain things the way he does. I don’t think he would necessarily say that it’s an explanation skill that he has, but that’s how I put it.I think that connects to another person named Richard Feynman who is actually known as the great explainer. He was also a physicist who is one of the most well-known physicists in the world partially because of his ability to take this really hairy physics problem and look at it in the way that a child would. To come at it from a direction nobody else is thinking about and explain it in a way that is not only accurate but makes it fundamentally easy to understand.I love to see these people who are so smart, because that’s really the problem with explanation. We all have the curse of knowledge. We know so much that we lose the ability to understand what that idea looks like to someone else. Getting over that is really hard. When you see somebody who’s like a PhD-level physicist, they have the curse of knowledge really badly. When they’re able to overcome that and invite people to care about what they’re doing it’s a really special thing.Just another quick example. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I think podcasts are a great format. Radio can be a great format for explanations. Couple of examples. Planet Money by NPR’s Alex Blumberg, those guys have been an excellent example of taking things like global finance and explaining it in a way that everyday people can understand.Another one is Radio Lab. The Radio Lab podcasts is one of my favorites, and they take all sorts of different subjects and boil them down and tell stories and do all these wonderful media experiences with sound and voice that create explanations that are really remarkable.That’s a big factor for me. It’s not enough just to make something understandable, the real opportunity is to make it remarkable. That happens through a combination of explanation and media.Patrick: Well put. I like the way you mentioned the curse of knowledge and how important it is to be able to explain. Because in managing communities, one of the things that inevitably happens is you have to block someone or ban someone who knows things. Who actually has some intelligence and has some knowledge but their problem is that they can’t communicate it without being disrespectful or just can’t communicate it. They’re not helpful.The thing that we try to celebrate on my communities and I know other people do too, is you don’t try to celebrate knowledge, but knowledge in someone who can actually offer the people in a way that adds value.Lee: Yeah.Patrick: I think that’s what it’s all about. We’ve all heard about the genius who’s just a jerk, right? Who can’t share his knowledge. That person is a poor explainer.Lee: Something I would say about that is that especially in the academic world there is a real benefit, and it is something that is encouraged to look smart. You want to look smart. There’s incentives around that. But I think that the world that we live in now, it’s more beneficial for people who figure out a way to not only look smart but at the same time help others feel smart. That’s what I really thing explanations do, is to change that equation a little bit from looking inwardly and saying how can I look smart? To looking outwardly and saying how can I accomplish my goals and be successful by helping others feel smart? I think that’s how explanation fits in.Patrick: Very good. I was curious to find out how you think this might extend to the field of entertainment. Specifically, are there any music artists or directors or comedians that you’re a fan of because of how they explain? How far is this explanation thing taken over your life, Lee? The field of entertainment, do you look at that as a field that really benefits from good explanations?Lee: That’s an interesting question. One point that I thought of when you said that is how much has explanation become a part of my life, one of the things that I think is kind of funny is since thinking about writing the book, literally, and I mean that literally, every time someone says the word explanation or explain, my mind starts to figure out okay, what are they talking about? Let’s watch. He says he’s going to explain it, let’s see what’s there. It’s kind of an interesting perspective for that word to be a key word that all of a sudden means this thing in my life.Let’s see, in of entertainment, I don’t know that I have much to say about entertainers using explanations, but there are a couple of examples of music and media being used to make explanations remarkable. There’s a guy named David Holmes who graduated from NYU, he was a part of J. Rosen’s Studio 2.0 project that focused on explanation in journalism. He started a company called Explainer Music, which is now partnered with Pando Daily and his company makes these explanations in the form of raps and songs and things like that that make them remarkable. They make them something that people want to watch and want to listen to.One of the ones that made them well-known was the song that was an explanation of fracking, the natural gas process.Patrick: I’m glad you elaborated on that.Lee: Another one is called EconStories, I believe it’s EconStories.tv that did these awesome really-well produced raps that are about basic economics. Like Hayek versus Keynes in of supply-side or demand-side economics, but it’s done in the form of a rap. It really makes it clear, it’s a very engaging, remarkable thing. I love to see how music and media can be used not just to make something easy to understand, but actually get people engaged. That’s a key thing I think.Patrick: Yeah. It’s part of everything really. I hate to put you on the spot and say entertainment, but explanation’s part of everything. If you can’t explain well, you could get fired. If you can’t explain well, you can get divorced. I don’t want to dramatize this too much, but if you can’t communicate and you can’t explain your actions, explain why something happened, then life will you by to some extent if you’re bad at it.Lee: I really believe that. I think it’s one of the fundamental ideas from the book that we explain every day. There’s this thing that all of us are doing every day that we can actually get better, but very few of us have actually taken a step back and thought how do I explain something? What is my process for explaining something? I think that if people will take a step back and think about that a little bit they’ll see opportunities to get a little bit better.That’s really all it takes is this realization that oh wow, I can actually do this better. This thing that I’m doing every day.Patrick: One of the sections of the book that stood out to me was the one on context. I found myself drawn to it, especially the example of the public speaker, because I am a public speaker. You had the example of a speaker trying to cater to an audience of mixed experiences, which isn’t that every audience? The way that you quantified it in this story, was it Andre? I’m trying to the person’s name for some reason, I don’t know why I want to.Lee: Yeah.Patrick: You said think of it like this. Two people aren’t interested in what you have to say. Six are interested, but they’re beginners, then two are experts. I battle with that sort of thing all the time. What is stressful to me about it and I think to other speakers is that I find that the people who complain the most and the loudest in my experience tend to be experts. Or perceived experts who complain that they didn’t get anything out of the talk.I haven’t had it happen a lot, but I’ve had people say on Twitter well I don’t know what I was here for I know all this stuff already. Or I actually had someone after a talk, and it actually went kind of well. I thought it went pretty well. Some people said they liked it, whatever. Came up to me afterwards right after you hop off stage–I could never do this to someone– and said I don’t know what I was supposed to get out of that. I thought to myself, my goodness, couldn’t you have waited a little while? But I don’t know if that’s just my experience, but it’s difficult to kind of cater a talk in the way you laid out. The way you put it there made me think about it and how I’m going to think about it in the future to try and organize it in a certain way.But that is such a challenging thing, to try to give a presentation at most any conference that actually helps beginners. That’s not the hard part to me, the hard part is doing both. Helping beginners, and then giving the experts something to stick around for that they say that was interesting or I learned that.Lee: Yeah, definitely. It is a struggle, and I’ve struggled with that too. I hope that part of the book helps, but I realize that it doesn’t necessarily fit every situation. The kind of big idea there is to think about it in of cost. Not real quantifiable costs necessarily but you could even say pain or whatever. They’re like what?Patrick: Agony.Lee: What’s going to cause the worst outcome. If you take that group you were talking about with two who are uninterested, six that could be interested and two that are experts, then you have to think about where does my explanation begin? Does it begin at a point that allows all the six interested people to possibly gain an interest? Or does it start at a point where you’re not going to offend the experts by covering the basics?The basic idea about that is that if you’ve ever learned something in class the second time, it may be a little bit annoying, but it really just validates what you know. It’s not offensive to you. But what’s offensive if you’re one of those six people and the explanation from the very beginning leaves you out, that’s a big cost to leave out eight people just because you want to look smart to the two.That’s kind of how I think about it. I think everybody wants to look smart, and that doesn’t mean you can’t start with the basics. Make sure if you just spend a few minutes giving people a way to take that initial first step to understanding and not forgetting that you’re going to leave people if you focus too much on those experts.Patrick: That makes sense. And maybe, just maybe, some of the experts should continue to attend the same conference talks over and over again expecting a different outcome. Just maybe.Lee: Yeah.Patrick: I wanted to ask you about what I think of as the infographic craze. Not that they’re new, because as you pointed out in the book they’re not. Infographics aren’t brand new, but it just seems like they’re a marketing trend. You see a lot of them are sponsored of course, or at least for the book I self-published that I put out this year was not my idea but we did it. I get pitched on infographics for my blog. I don’t know if it’s daily but it sure seems like it. People wanting me to share infographics, it’s just kind of a crazy thing right now, it seems that people are all invested in this medium.I expect that to wane over time and for people to move on to the next thing, but for infographics still to exist as they have or have for a long time. What is your reaction to seeing the constant wave of infographics that we’re subjected too right now?Lee: I don’t have really strong feelings about it. There’s something to it, but they see Common Craft as living in the same world as that. And visual thinking is another thing.Patrick: Smack those people.Lee: I think that we’re writers. Our work, the videos specifically, rely on writing and voice over. That’s a different thing than looking at a graphic that you can hand somebody physically and ask them to look at. Anyway, that’s not what you’re looking for. I think that infographics can be effective. There are lots of examples of both good and bad infographics. I think it goes back to this remarkability factor where people just aren’t reading anymore.They don’t want to look at a thousand word article if they can look at something interesting. The growth of infographics comes from that. I think it’s also being fueled by business where infographics is a form of content marketing that can help SEO. That’s what’s driving a lot of that industry right now is businesses who see it as a way to attract attention. I think it can and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that.That’s a good thing as long as it’s well done and it’s quality work and it has actual facts and is not misleading or that sort of thing. I’m not really that engaged in that world, probably not as much as people think I would be.Patrick: I’m sorry for the terrible question. No, I totally get it. I agree, you’re diplomatic like me. You can see both sides of the thing, I don’t see them as good or bad either. As I was reading your book, one of the things that jumped out at me was, and I’m sure a lot of people feel this way but could use a better explanation is government. I just wonder what you think or what you might see, and I hate questions like this myself, but kind of the future of government and how important it is for the government to explain things to the people who they work for, more or less, or they are supposed to, to be able to explain what are very complex concepts, these bills, these acts that are hundreds of pages. That apparently some of the people who vote on them don’t always read them.Because they’re just so dang long. It would seem to be an essential skill that there should be people in government who can explain. I don’t think every office needs a chief explainer necessarily, but it would help to have someone on staff who was dedicated to disseminating information in a very clear and understandable way.Is there anything coming? Have you seen anything like that? Has anybody in government ed you and said Common Craft is great, we’re doing this? Is that a direction that you think government offices will go in?Lee: I do. We have been ed about that kind of thing. Government is a big organization that moves slowly. Just in the last couple of years we’ve seen the government make lots of moves in new media that weren’t there in the past. I think they’re learning. I see this from a couple of different perspectives. I would love to see government put a priority on creating these explanations, however they do it, in some remarkable way that actually gets people to see.Not the campaign talking points, not the rhetoric, but the rationale behind how everything works. Like Medicare. If you went out to learn about Medicare, you would likely get caught up in the noise of like the doughnut hole or fraud or all these things. I think what’s missing is giving people a way to understand something like Medicare in the context of what is the rationale behind Medicare? Why does the fact that Medicare exists make sense, or why did it make sense to the people that initially designed it?By focusing not on the level of noise and details that you see on TV and focusing on these fundamental basic things, we empower voters to be informed and become higher information voters. We can’t necessarily tell them believe this fact or not this fact kind of thing, we can equip them with a foundational level of understanding that let’s them be informed and judge for themselves what is right and what is wrong and what’s a fact and what’s not.That’s where I see it happening with government. Playing a role of not contributing more noise, but focusing on these fundamental kind of ideas that empower people to be high-information voters.Patrick: I think like you said the talking points, I think that’s where a lot of communication about bills and acts comes down to. Talking points and marketing of those bills and acts. And that’s unfortunate. SOFA and PIPA is a really good example for me because it was talked about online a lot, but the fact was that probably 50 percent of every tweet I saw about it said something wrong. Either in this camp or this camp, someone’s wrong here.I co-host a show dedicated to copyright and plagiarism. Not that I was super expert on it, but I knew enough and I had done my own research enough to the point to know that this person said this and it’s just totally wrong. But this just got re-tweeted seven million times. I guess that’s great, but it’s tough, and I would like to see that happen. Maybe we need another Czar, the explanations Czar.Lee: Yeah, that’d be great. Bill Clinton is known as the explainer-in- chief, maybe they can take some his advice on it.Patrick: This is the SitePoint Podcast, and a large section of our audience here on this podcast is programmers, developers, designers. Obviously those people have to explain things to clients, and sometimes they know what they are doing but they have a hard time explaining their work without coming across as confusing or worse, rude. A programmer has a client meeting tomorrow to explain the direction of the next version of a website. Now to put you on the spot, they have an evening to prepare. When they ask you for advise, what would you tell them?Lee: That’s a good question. Part of it is understanding this idea of the curse of knowledge, that everybody has it. Because of what you know, you find it hard to know what it feels like to hear the words that come out of your mouth basically. It’s a normal part of communicating for that to happen. You have to adjust for that. What the curse of knowledge causes is for a communicator to make poor assumptions about what the audience already knows.Basically that means that you assume too much. You assume that they see the connections that you see. You assume that they see the basic ideas that you see. If you really are focused on explanation, you see the potential to for the bad assumptions. One of the ways you do that is by putting an emphasis on context in the beginning of what you’re going to talk about. If you’re going to talk about some detailed programming let’s say, then the context means what is the world that those things live in?Around that idea there is a bigger world. Ruby is a programming language and a programming language is something that allows software to be built, and we need software to do these things. These are sort of concentric worlds around the idea. What context does is give the audience a chance to evaluate what is he talking about. Why does this matter to me? Where is this headed? In my mind, doing that does something that I call in the book lowering the cost of understanding.That’s the big idea, that when a programmer say is about to walk into a client meeting those clients are going to be evaluating what that person says and thinking am I capable of understanding this person? If the cost of understanding looks too high, especially from the beginning, they’ll tune out and the explanation will fail. That’s what happens if you don’t build context. But if you build context, make some statements in the beginning that frame the idea, come to agreement.We can all agree this is the problem or we can all agree that this is the state of affairs. It takes that cost of understanding and spreads it across multiple ideas to make it like stepping stones to getting to that big idea. Context is the first step, then consider telling a story which doesn’t have to be this big, developed thing, but talk about someone who is impacted or affected someway by this idea and how it made them feel. That gives the audience the ability to say I want to feel that way, or I want my customers or employees to feel that way.That again is one of those stepping stones that makes people feel like they grasp it, they understand, that they feel confident about the idea. Then there’s other parts of that, using analogies and connections, that sort of thing. It happens up front, it’s about that initial direction.One last thing I would say is that explanations are like movie scripts or songs. They start off written. If you write it out, and write about the major talking points, you can see how it flows.For most of us explanations happen off the top of our heads, we don’t ever have a plan. But if we can define something and say you know what? People are not understanding compiling, I don’t know programming that well, but how compiling works, then I’m going to sit down and write out how to explain that. That way I can walk into a meeting with talking points that make that a priority.Patrick: Excellent. Really that inability to explain is how a lot of client relationships break down. That is if you can’t adequately explain yourself, why you have made the decisions that you’ve made and why they work without coming across as condescending, I think this book will be very helpful for that. It’s the Art of Explanation, available wherever books are sold, and for more info check out artofexplanation.com.That brings us to the end of this show. Lee, thanks for coming on.Lee: Great to be here Patrick, thank you.Patrick: Where can people find you online?Lee: At commoncraft.com, I’m also @LeeLeFever, my name at Twitter. Also you can follow Common Craft on Twitter @commoncraft.Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network. I blog at ManagingCommunities.com, on Twitter @iFroggy. You can follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepointdotcom. Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast, leave comments on this show and subscribe to receive every show automatically. E-mail [email protected] with your questions for us, we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice. The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Karn Broad. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 187 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have 3/4 of the , Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #187: Louis Goes to the Horse Race (MP3, 37:06, 35.6MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics such as Instagram’s new look on the web, browser trends, security threats, the position of audio on the web and more! Here are the main topics covered in this episode:Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web! – Instagram BlogBrowser Trends November 2012: Entering Equilibrium? – SitePointNot One Microsoft Product on Kaspersky’s Top 10 Vulnerabilities List cites IT Threat Evolution: Q3 2012 – Securelist and IT Threat Evolution: Q3 2010 – SecurelistReadWrite – The Web Needs An Instapaper-Style “Listen Later” Button For AudioBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/187.Host SpotlightsKevin: Angry Birds Star Wars official gameplay trailerPatrick: Live-in replica of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion for sale – Boing Boing ref. Mansion For sale by Theme Park Connection Modeled After the Disneyland Haunted Mansion AttractionStephan: The United 787 Ready to TaxiInterview TranscriptPatrick: Hello, and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe, and I’m ed today by Kevin Dees and Stephan Segraves. How’s it going, gentlemen?Stephan: Pretty good, Patrick.Kevin: It’s going well.Patrick: Yeah, it’s good to have you back. Stephan, I know you were sick last time, so we couldn’t get you on the show.Stephan: Yeah, it’s good to be back. Even if it’s just because I feel better. [laughs]Patrick: [laughs] Right. It’s just good to be upright.Stephan: Yes.Patrick: We’re without Louis Simoneau today, our usual fourth co-host, because of an Australian holiday, I think.Kevin: Horse races, right? [laughs]Patrick: [laughs] Yeah, it’s not a horse race. This podcast is going to be released on November 9th, and November 10th marks the fourth anniversary of us starting this show.Me and Stephan were a part of the initial lineup, along with Kevin Yank and Brad Williams, and of course now we’ve got Louis Simoneau and Kevin Dees, but, yeah, we’re coming up on four years. You know, Stephan, what do you think about that age of time, [laughs], old man.Stephan: It’s a long time to be a broadcaster. [laughs] No, it’s good.Patrick: [laughs] I mean, a broadcaster. Right up there with Brokaw. Yeah.Stephan: It’s good.Patrick: No, it’s great, and it’s been fun to see how the show’s grown, and, definitely, thank you to all the listeners we’ve had over the years, and all the people who…Stephan: Absolutely.Patrick: …helped us get that .net magazine podcast of the year award, and it’s been a fun run.Kevin: Four years and going.Patrick: We’re going to continue on here, with a news show. Let’s jump right into it.Stephan: Well, I have kind of an interesting story, guys, from Instagram. They’ve decided that they’re going to have web profiles. Instagram has been something that’s been on Android and iPhone…Patrick: Right.Stephan: …for a long time. And now, they’re going to have, basically, a web version of your feed, available online. So they’ve got these profiles, they have a whole announcement on it, and what they’re going to look like, the concept. There’s a few kind of test profiles that you can look at. Nike’s one of them, and some others, like a cooking website, and stuff. It kind of looks a little like Facebook.Kevin: Yeah, I was fixing to say that. It looks a lot like Facebook.Stephan: It’s kind of weird. [laughs]Patrick: Yeah, it’s pretty cool, though. You know, I have to say, the whole Android, iPhone kind of lockout thing, and of course it was first for the iOS stuff, and then they brought it to Android, and there was a big hullaballoo about that, and now you have the web-based profiles.One thing I neglected to do, and I should have done as soon as it went to Android, was to get a name. [laughs] I got a name a while back, but certainly after the whole land rush had ed, so I have PatrickBOKeefe on there. I couldn’t get ifroggy, I couldn’t get my first and last name on there. I had to actually insert the initial. So, shame on me, but I’ve kind of used it to follow a few people, and have been wondering when they’re going to blog some sort of web interface.Have they said anything about opening it up as far as making it easier for people to photos via the web, or is that something they’re still not talking about yet?Stephan: That’s the last section, in their little FAQ that they have about the profiles, and they say that they’re focused on production of photos from mobile devices. They’re not going to be able to from the web.Patrick: Hmm. I mean, I guess there’s an interesting discussion to be had there, of, ‘OK, let’s go as mainstream as possible, or do we have a core focus and be known for something?’ Right? Because if they allowed photo , obviously traffic would increase.Stephan: Yeah.Patrick: I think that goes without saying. But of course with that come, you know, some additional headaches, possibly more copyright issues, and other types of issues, and then, if they go off of that, then they’re less focused on that mobile photo platform. Instagram is really, it’s it. This is the platform people use to take photos via mobile devices and share them online. It’s extremely popular.I don’t know if they were to open it up to allow people to photos on the web, like you went to shoot with your camera on a photo op with, like, a real camera, and I know some of the cameras can to Instagram. Let’s say you ed that to your desktop and ed it via your web browser. I mean, would they lose the niche of their product? Even though it’s not a small niche, it’s still what they’re known for. I don’t know how I feel about that. What do you think, Kevin?Kevin: Yeah, I feel like they’re trying not to compete with Flickr right now.Patrick: Right.Kevin: With having your phone, you’re not exactly going to be ing extremely large photos, either.Patrick: Are you talking about my phone specifically? [laughs] My phone, as we’ve talked about on this show, is cheap, pay as you go, and doesn’t even have a camera on it.Kevin: Right, yeah, your phone, exactly right, Patrick. [laughs]Patrick: [laughs]Kevin: But yeah, I feel like if they introduced the desktop version of ing your photos, it would become sort of like this gallery of Photoshopped files from your desktop, and just all the things that are involved in that.Patrick: Right.Kevin: And like you said, I think copyright’s an interesting thing to think about when it comes to stepping outside of the mobile device, because you don’t exactly … I mean, you can technically photos from your computer, right? You put it on your phone from your computer and then you it to Instagram.Patrick: Good point.Kevin: From your phone. It’s an interesting thing, because I guess you can it from your desktop already. Considering you had to put it on your phone first, right? Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s, I think it’s something to just kind of wait and watch. I don’t feel like they’re going to add a webcam, take a picture from your computer feature, ever. But then again, ever’s a long time, so.Patrick: How big of an Instagram are you, Kevin?Kevin: I’ve taken three photos, I think.Patrick: OK, Stephan, forget you, Kevin. Stephan, [laughs] I know you’re much bigger of an Instagram . What do you think?Stephan: You know, I kind of like the fact that it’s mobile. It’s kind of like a view into someone’s ‘right now’. It’s kind of like the Twitter, it’s like a visual Twitter, for me, at least.Patrick: Right. OK.Stephan: I kind of appreciate that fact, of, you know, someone’s around the world somewhere, I can see kind of what they’re looking at, or what they’re experiencing. That’s kind of like a little niche part that I like about it. I think the web would be, it would be a huge step up, because what it does, it turns into an archivable service, almost, if they go to the Web, right?You’re going to start ing more and more photos that maybe aren’t as good. Like, I know for my Flickr, if you look at my Flickr, I’ve got, I don’t even know, 5,000, 6,000 photos. Not all of them are very good, and some of them were just for me. It’s an archival service. I don’t think Instagram wants to become that.So, I don’t know, I think it’s going to be interesting too, when Facebook integrates them more, or decides what they’re actually going to do with them.Patrick: Right.Stephan: To see which way they go, because I’m looking at one of the profiles right now, that’s kind of got the test profile setup going.Patrick: Yep.Stephan: And if you click on a photo, it actually looks a lot like what Facebook already has. Like, the comment section, and the likes, except it’s not a thumbs up, it’s a heart. So, you know, it looks, it’s already got that Facebook look and feel, almost, so I’m wondering if this is kind of a move to get ready to get integrated into Facebook.Patrick: Yeah, I just wonder how much, you know, because expectations from the start of a product, and as it grows in popularity, those expectations can dictate a lot in the future. I wonder if, even if Instagram opened up to web or desktop , it wouldn’t structurally change how people use Instagram, because they view it differently from Flickr.You know, with the whole follower system, people don’t go on Twitter and then use it in a completely different way from the way you already have been using it that has gotten you those followers. Would Instagram be the same way, where people would continue to take photos of the same kind of things?If they just filled their timeline, so to speak, with all the photos they take in the world, like you mentioned your Flickr stream, and you have thousands and thousands of photos, right?I don’t know if even if it opened up, a lot of people probably wouldn’t make that switch and start using it in that way, you know, for fear of damaging or somehow not living up to that community that they’ve built.Stephan: Yeah, yeah, it’s a possibility. Then again, I don’t know. You never know when you open up a service to people. What’s interesting to me about all of these things, what’s with Twitter, and Instagram, and, it’s such like a little community. We build our own communities, right?Patrick: Right.Stephan: So the people we follow become these little mini-communities.Patrick: Yeah.Stephan: And there’s so much else going on around it. Like, there’s other stuff. There’s people on Instagram that have awesome photos, but I never will see them. Because I don’t follow them, I don’t see them. It’s interesting, that maybe the noise won’t matter, if they do go to the web, because I won’t see it. I don’t know.Patrick: Cool. It’s been a while since we talked about browser trends, because frankly, they’re kind of boring. [laughs] There’s not a lot to say about browser trends, you know? They go up, they go down, month to month, they change. Really the last really big news was when Chrome overtook Internet Explorer. I think that might have been our last substantial discussion about browser trends.But since we’re recording this show in the first week of the month, I thought I’d take a look at the November 2012 browser trends posted on SitePoint by Craig Buckler. These come from the stat counter global statistics. For the month, from September 2012 to October 2012, you have Chrome with a gain of 0.54 percentage points, Safari gained a little bit, Opera gained a little bit, IE falls. Fell again, fell 0.63% in the month.But that’s not really the thing that jumped out to me here. It was that Internet Explorer 7 has fallen below 1% for the first time, to 0.98%. And then you have Internet Explorer 6 is down below .5, it’s been there before, it’s kind of meandering around that 0.5 mark, but it’s at 0.49% right now.Is that a milestone, a big deal? It’s not as big a deal as IE 6, it can’t be, right? But how much do web developers hate IE 7 to the point where, you know, ‘Yay, it’s finally below 1%!’Kevin: Yeah, I think, IE 7 has kind of been doing this slow dip. It feels like IE 6 just two or three years ago, kind of that dilemma of, ‘We have to it because it’s just big enough.’ The thing I have actually found, if you don’t… I think it’s more prevalent in North America, in the past, I’d say year, IE 7 has hovered around, like, 3% to 5%, and it’s interesting to see the global stats go down to below 1%.I think that is huge, I think that’s a big deal, just because I hate Internet Explorer 7. I loved it when IE 6 was out, and that’s all we had that wasn’t IE 6, right? [laughs]But now we have IE 9. And to see that now in North America, go down to 1.17, it’s kind of nice. It feels good to know that all of these things that you had to do to IE 7 are no longer as necessary.It’s interesting, because I’ve been working on a site that deals a lot with payments, online payments, and accepting those, and so still having to those older browsers, so folks can still collect their payments when somebody else is using an older technology has been kind of an interesting battle, deciding what features you want to include and which features you don’t.And just the amount of poly-fills, and different things that you can use to kind of bring Internet Explorer up to speed with some of the newer ones. Now, that’s nothing substantial, or at least not as substantial leap as it used to be, now that we have things like Canvas and all of these other CSS 3 transitions, you can’t exactly port those from IE 7, in an effective way.Seeing that number go down is always something that feels really good, especially, like you said, Patrick, under 1%. I think that’s a big deal.Patrick: And, you know, you mentioned the North America number. 1.17%. IE 6 in North America is 0.2%, so it’s even lower than the global scale. I guess, between the two, it averages out to maybe about the same happiness. [laughs] But still, IE 6 is used a little bit less, here in North America. As far as the overall stats go, you have Chrome is up to 34.77% of the market now, IE’s at 32.08%, these are global stats again.In North America, IE is still the leader, with 39.9% of the market, and Chrome is second, with 26.21%, so a lot of Chrome’s, you know, strongest numbers, come from overseas. And year over year, October 2011 to October 2012, it’s pretty predictable what you see here.Chrome went up 9.78 percentage points, IE went down 8.1 percentage points, so you can see the gain is almost completely at the hands of IE. Firefox also fell, about 4 percentage points over that time, and, you know, the rest probably not as big a deal.So, yeah, I guess the bottom line is IE 7 is down below 1% globally, and IE 6 is down below .5. And I don’t know when the next new release of browser trends will be, but we’ll have it then.Kevin: Yeah, it would be really interesting, I think, to see the stats for how often computers break, and people replace them.Patrick: Right.Kevin: Because I think that has a big impact on the browser market, because some people just don’t upgrade anything until it breaks. And so it would be kind of, it would be nice to see the statistical curve of how rapidly people start to replace their computers after, say, seven years. Like, how much that number spikes down.Patrick: It would be interesting, I don’t know if there are already some numbers out there like that. If there are, please, let us know in the comments at sitepoint.com/podcast. So let’s stay on the Microsoft tip, and talk about the story from the next web.Emil Protalinski is reporting that Kaspersky, the big antivirus software company, has released their IT Threat Evolution Report for the third quarter of 2012. Now, this report takes into statistical data that is gathered from the use of the cloud-based Kaspersky Security Network, or KSN.The statistics were acquired by KSN s, who consented to share their local data. Millions of s of the Kaspersky Lab products in 213 countries took part in this global information exchange on malicious activity.Now, some of the key findings that they highlighted were that 28% of all mobile devices attacked, via some form of vulnerability that they identified, ran Android OS version 2.3.6, which was released in September 2011.They found that 56% of exploits blocked in the third quarter, which is what this report represents, the third quarter of 2012, used Java vulnerabilities, that’s 56%. And finally, a total of 91.9 million URLs serving malicious code were detected, which is a gain of 3% compared to the second quarter of 2012.Now, there’s a few different things about this report that’s interesting, but one of them is that they made a point to highlight that Microsoft products no longer feature among the top 10 products with vulnerabilities. They say this is because the automatic updates mechanism has been well- developed in recent versions of Windows OS. You might be wondering what the top 10 vulnerabilities were. OK, so in the third quarter, they identified 30,749,066 vulnerable programs and files on the computers of KSN s, with an average of 8 different vulnerabilities on each affected computer.Now, the top ten vulnerabilities are as follows, and I’ll just summarize here, than go into a whole long thing. Number one and two are tied to Oracle’s Java products. Various vulnerabilities tied to Java.Then you have numbers 3 through 6, and 9 through 10, so that’s 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10 are different Adobe products, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flash again, Adobe Reader/Acrobat, Adobe Shockwave, and Adobe Flash Player. Then number 6 is Quicktime from Apple, and number 7 is iTunes from Apple. Number 8 is a Winamp issue.Microsoft was not on this list at all, and they made a point to note that, and this story at the next clip does as well, because Microsoft products, as the author said, would normally feature in these sorts of lists.Just to demonstrate that, I went back two years to see what the threat evolution for the third quarter of 2010 said, and Microsoft did feature on the list. They had vulnerabilities with Microsoft Office, Excel, and Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Office Access, ActiveX controls, Microsoft Office OneNote, Microsoft took up five spots on this list.Java, then was Sun, before the acquisition there, was number one. So Java, once again, is taking the cake there. But Microsoft was half the list. Adobe was, it looks like four spots here. I guess, I don’t know, the question I have here is, is Microsoft doing a lot better on security? Do they deserve credit for that? How do you read this report? Stephan?Stephan: It’s a good thing, right? It’s kind of one of those good things that you hate to hear, right? It’s… [laughs]Patrick: [laughs] Come on!Stephan: It’s good for Microsoft, but it’s something that took a long time to do, I think. You said it was what, 2009?Patrick: That was 2010. That was 2010, the report I mentioned that had 5 out of 10.Stephan: 2010, OK. So it’s been a few years, or a couple years, and so I’m glad that they’re off the top ten list. I’d like to know actually where they sit on, let’s say, a list of 100.Patrick: Right.Stephan: I’m sure it’s somewhere in there. But, it really shows that there are serious issues with Java, and the story that you linked to, it goes down to say, “You really shouldn’t have Java installed unless you absolutely need it.”Patrick: Yeah. Because Java was number one in 2010, let’s not forget that, right? [laughs]Kevin: Yeah, it hasn’t moved.Patrick: Microsoft was on the list, but at least they’ve changed, right?Stephan: Yeah.Patrick: I mean, Java was number one. Now it’s number one and number two.Stephan: It’s great. It means less headaches for Microsoft s in the long run.Patrick: Right.Stephan: I say kudos to them. And I say to the others on the list, get your act together.Patrick: Right, because this is kind of a further condemnation of, not only Java, but also Adobe Flash.Stephan: I wouldn’t say it’s a condemnation of Flash, I think it’s a black eye for Flash. I think that maybe it’s a mark on Flash’s record that says, “Hey, not only are you, you know, a system hog, but you’re also vulnerable.” It’s got two strikes against it, and the third, I guess, would be, well, no one really uses it much anymore, so.Patrick: [laughs]Stephan: [laughs]Kevin: Aside from the gaming sites, I think.Stephan: Yeah, yeah, exactly.Patrick: I know Kevin’s a big time Flash developer, so what do you think?Stephan: Sorry, Kevin.Kevin: Yeah, no, I don’t actually use Flash that much. I think it’s interesting…Patrick: I know.Kevin: …that Adobe is kind of taking the same viewpoint and as this article which is, “Hey, Flash, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this so much.” I know they’ve dropped for Linux systems. So…Patrick: Right.Kevin: You know, it’s kind of this trend, and they’re moving more and more towards HTML 5 Canvas platforms, right? As technology gets better in that open-source world, games and that kind of thing will migrate in that direction, and everything will be portable.I mean, you’ll probably still use Flash and all those things to build your site, so just convert it from Flash to whatever, unless the overhead for that is just substantial enough to disagree with what I’m saying.Yeah, I think it’s interesting, I think Adobe will drop off this list in the next three or four years, just because they won’t be ing Flash for much anything. Or, it all comes down, Flash really just has its grip on the gaming community, in my opinion, like video’s kind of moving towards HTML 5. We’ve seen that with Chrome, and with the bleeding edge browsers.I don’t see why people would want to install Flash, outside of playing on the gaming sites. You’re just, basically, you’re not going to be getting that notification to install it, right? I think they’re going to have a hard time with PDF and that kind of thing, but all these products are just third-party plugins for browsers, right? And that’s where you get most of your vulnerabilities, online, outside of like, cross site scripting attacks. But that happens within websites.It’s more of taking advantage of the browsers than the computer. And so, yeah, I think this list will change in the next few years, and we’ll probably see Microsoft back on the list in the next few years, because products change, especially Adobe’s, which are taking up a huge amount of the list right now.Stephan: Well, that’s a good point, though. I mean, this is all in flux, right? This is all changing all the time. So, you know, next week, it could be something else. But for the year, you know this is what they’ve seen. So…Patrick: Actually, the third quarter of 2009.Stephan: Third quarter. It’s one of those things where, yeah, Microsoft could be on there next week. I don’t… [laughs]Patrick: [laughs]Stephan: I don’t know, you know?Patrick: They could be. You’re right. And, you know, the thing to keep in mind with this list is also, it’s based on the percentage of s whose computers had this particular vulnerability. So some of this also has to do with volume, right? It actually has to be on their computer first. Like, they have to actually have installed it, to first have the vulnerability. So of course, its kind biased against the most popular applications.You know, I don’t know whether that’s fair or not, but that is how this list is going to be compiled. I mean, I think that’s a good thing for Microsoft as well, but like you said, it’s always in flux. The final point I wanted to draw from this report is how they said Microsoft products made it out of this list.They specifically cited automatic updates, the automatic updates mechanism, and how well-developed it has been in the recent versions of Windows OS. And, you know, we’ve talked about automatic updates here on the show, especially with regard to Google Chrome, and have gone back and forth on the discussion as far as choice versus taking that choice away.I don’t know, this report just seems to further cement the idea that automatic updates are an important part of programs on the desktop, especially those that connect to the Web. So that’s another way to look at it as well.Stephan: So I have an interesting article, which I’d actually like to talk about maybe the relevance of this, and it’s by…Patrick: It’s irrelevant!Stephan: Yeah, OK.Patrick: Oh, sorry.Stephan: Well, since it’s…Patrick: [laughs] What is it again?Stephan: Spotlights, right? No? [laughs]Patrick: [laughs] No, no.Stephan: So this article is by John Paul Titlow, and it’s on whether or not we really need a listen later button, and he’s actually requesting it. I guess, my question is do we actually need one of these things? So the article’s titled, “The Web Needs an Instapaper Style Listen Later Button for Audio.” If you’re familiar with the web, and I know the folks that listen to this show are probably more familiar with maybe, Jeremy Keith’s Huffduffer, and similar technologies used to kind of create your own feeds or podcasts, and they cover those kinds of things in this article.Basically, his argument is that he has something to, he has like a boxy iPad app to airplay to his HD TV videos that he finds online later in life, and he has Instapaper for his articles, and he can kind of go through all his technology news, or whatever kind of news he cares about, in those two formats. Audio is lacking, he says. So he’s kind of saying, “Hey, the marketplace is open for this, if somebody wants to build an app, hint hint.”Patrick: [laughs]Stephan: I think it’s kind of an interesting thing, because audio is one of those formats that’s, that’s a little more ive than the other two, right? You have to be looking at text, you have to be looking at video, you have to be listening to video as well. Whereas audio is one of those things you can turn on and then, “Oh, I accidentally tuned out, and now I have to back it up and listen,” or you can listen to it in your car, I guess that’s not quite as ive of a way to do it.But audio, I feel like, it’s one of those things that’s used for background noise, sort of like music, you know? Like, you’ll listen to good music while you work, but it’s not like you’re listening to every word they say.Patrick: Right, and a lot of people who try to be productive, I know, swear on music without any lyrics, like instrumentals, and that sort of thing. You know, and this seems like a stupid question to ask, but for those who might not know, Instapaper, what is the difference between Instapaper and bookmarking, or sending yourself a link for later? How is it different functionally in the actual reading of the document?Stephan: It’s similar to Google Reader, in that you, well, it’s not quite. So with Instapaper, you can basically go through the web, and as you find something, you mark a specific article as something you want to read.Patrick: Right.Stephan: Whereas a feed’s more of everything on that site.Patrick: So then it sends a copy to a device, or how does it work?Stephan: Right, so it’ll just simply bookmark that page, and then when you pull it up, it’ll kind of filter through the content, and display it in a way that looks nice. It’s sort of like, I think, ‘Read It Later’, that application was used…Patrick: It’s now ‘Pocket’, formerly was ‘Read It Later’.Stephan: There’s been a lot of apps out there that have kind of done this. Instapaper has been the one that has been the powerhouse that everybody uses. Mainly, I think, because it was on the iPhone, and such, before any of the other ones. And it’s just a clean interface. So, yeah, it’s this idea that you can kind of pick the content that you want. It’s not really… you create your own stream, right? The stream isn’t automatically created for you.Patrick: Yeah.Stephan: I’m sure you could, you could create your own stream automatically by doing whatever you want with Instapaper. But the premise is you create your own stream, versus having stuff just pushed to you. As you browse the web, as you browse Twitter, you can say, ‘Oh, I like that link, I’ll create this feed,’ so it’s sort of this filtration device, where you go through all your stuff, and then you can read it later.Patrick: Instapaper is based mostly on text articles, right? So it’s basically kind of curating your reading experience for later, when you’re in the mood, or in the right spot to be reading.Stephan: For me, it’s travel, right? I put a lot of long-form stuff, like news articles, on Instapaper. And then before I get on the plane, I just them all, and then I read them on the plane.Patrick: Yeah.Stephan: It’s not an archival method, really, it’s more of a, ‘I’m going to read this, here’s my reading list for the next whatever I’m doing,’ and then I get rid of it.Patrick: Right. So there’s nothing like that for audio right now, there’s nothing like, ‘send this clip.’ It doesn’t have to be podcasts, but any kind of audio to this thing, this other app, or document. There’s nothing like that right now?Stephan: There are services that’ll create a stream, such as Huffduffer, well, actually, Huffduffer, you kind of submit your audio links, you create your own feed, so it is similar. Huffduffer, I saw this title, and I was like, “Oh, Huffduffer, maybe they mentioned it in here.” I checked it out, that’s why it’s in this show. Because I have used Huffduffer. So there are services out there like this, but apparently just not any that kind of meet John’s standard.Patrick: Hmm. OK.Stephan: Apparently, from posting. So he names a few that do it, and there’s different ways around it. But just, just not in the format that’s kind of, this elegant, I really feel like he’s asking for an app for his iPod, or iPhone, or whatever.Patrick: So what do you think? I mean, you asked the question, but it is this necessary? [laughs] I mean, do you listen to a lot of podcasts?Stephan: Yeah, so I have a few, not as many as I used to, but I do have a few, and I feel like podcasts and audio are a little bit different than videos. Simply because it’s like the radio, you have these stations that you listen to and you stick to them, right?Patrick: Right, right.Stephan: So if you listen to SitePoint podcast, you kind of stick with that, and you listen to that, or if you… and some people kind of piecemeal different things, but for the most part, I also feel like there’s this other piece to it, which hasn’t been talked about, and which kind of goes into whether or not you need this, right? Which is, audio just isn’t as popular as video.People who are out there create these video feeds and video blogs, and video tutorials on YouTube and the like, just to do it. I feel like, audio tends to be longer, I’ll just leave it at that. Audio, you’re going to be listening to something for 30 minutes to an hour and half.Video, you can get three minutes. And people just don’t do audio really quickly. I know Boagworld, Mr. Paul does his smaller tidbits that you can get on his site, but yeah, I think it just has to do with the format, and the length, and time required to actually listen to that format that creates a necessity for something like an app for it.Kevin: I think, you know, part of his point is, “I want to come back to this audio later, like I want to listen to it later.” I don’t see the need for that, because if I’m going to listen to the audio, I’ll just bookmark it, right?I don’t say, “Oh, well put it in this app and let me listen to it later.” I’m not going to, to me, it’s one of those things since I’m just listening, I wouldn’t want random stuff that I had just bookmarked on the Internet just to come up while I’m doing whatever around the house.Patrick: Right.Kevin: I got my iPod plugged in or whatever, and I’m listening to just random audio as I walk around the house. [laughs] I don’t…Stephan: [laughs]Patrick: Yeah, heaven forbid you might have accidentally ed the SitePoint podcast and heard my voice.Stephan: [laughs] Well, you know, I’ll go from a technology podcast to a cooking show. Do I really want to do that? I don’t know.Patrick: Right. You’re a diverse guy, Stephan.Stephan: I’m a diverse guy, yeah. But, I mean, is that really what you want? It’s different with reading, because I can say, “Well, I’m not going to read that right now, I’ll just skip over it.”Patrick: Right.Stephan: That’s that visual side, with listening, it’s like, “Oh, well now I have to take out the iPod, change the song, because… whatever I’m listening to right now, because it’s not what I wanted to hear.”Patrick: Maybe this is an app that’s not, I don’t know. I don’t know how would it work, like there might be a button on it that would say, ‘Skip for later,’ or something? Right? I don’t know. [laughs]Stephan: I guess I’m kind of with Kevin, like, audio just doesn’t seem that prevalent in short bits on the Internet.Kevin: Yeah, exactly.Stephan: It’s just like, I don’ t know if I can justify an app to do this, based on what content’s out there, in short term, like in short form, I guess. Does that make sense?Patrick: Yeah, and he makes a bold statement, that whoever nails this wins at web audio. I don’t know. I mean, because he mentions a company like SoundCloud or Stitcher Radio adding this type of functionality to their web and mobile apps. Yeah, I mean, I could see that, as like kind of a baseline feature. Like, it might already exist, I don’t know if there’s some way to just, “Yes, I want to listen to this later. Save this. Bookmark. Favorite it.”You know, there might already be that, and that functionality is essentially, I think, what we’re discussing here. It’s possible that, Titlow has kind of a grander vision for that, and maybe there is this part of the web that, or this segment of the people who use the web that really want this type of thing.That said, you know, he mentions that some of the issues about licensing and stuff will come up, which is highly possible, then building a profitable business around this to encourage development.Is this something enough people want, that enough people will pay for, to keep it in business? I don’t know, I don’t want to discourage the development, but for the reasons you guys have discussed, it, I’m not sure.Stephan: I think it’s settled, then, that audio is just irrelevant, and… [laughs]Patrick: [laughs] No, no, it’s not settled at all!Stephan: [laughs]Patrick: You know, subscribe to listen to the SitePoint podcast! That’s… no. Yeah.Stephan: Again, it is kind of something interesting to think about, because of the different types of formats that content shows up in, right? So audio just happens to be one of those formats that you use for a specific type of content that you just don’t necessarily want to bookmark, I guess.I mean, if you do, you subscribe to it, if that makes sense. If it’s going to be short and sweet, it’s going to be a video, and so you’re going to use that format for that type of content.Patrick: Right.Stephan: Or the longer content tends to be audio, because it’s longer, and it’s less bandwidth, and you don’t need video, if that makes any sense. So, the content kind of defines what type of format you’re going to use, reading, watching, or listening, and so based on the type of content, you get these different formats, and the more consumed types of content are the text and video, because of the content that’s displayed on it. So I think that’s kind of where we see this disconnect in application for audio.Stephan: I think that sums it up.Patrick: All right, well, great discussion, and, yeah, let’s dive right into the spotlights. Who would like to go first?Kevin: I will go first. I don’t normally go first.Stephan: [laughs]Kevin: I have this amazing, and epic YouTube video, that I’m sending you guys right now.Stephan: It’s epic.Patrick: And amazing.Kevin: It is epic and amazing, and it’s not, it’s not to do with Star Wars at Disneyland.Stephan: [laughs]Kevin: Just for the listeners who are like, “Great, I’m going to learn about Star Wars and Disney buying Star Wars,” but no. This is even better. This is Angry Birds in Star Wars. The official gameplay trailer, coming in by the time this podcast is out. So, Thursday. The day before you get this, so. But yeah, Angry Birds Star Wars trailer, it’s kind of cool. You get to be a Wookie, you get to be all these different things, so it’s really cool.Patrick: I’ve got to say, I’ve still never played Angry Birds. [laughs] I don’t know why. I’ve talked about that with people and friends, and they laugh, and say, “How can you have not played that yet?” [laughs] But I haven’t. I don’t know.Yes, this is pretty cool, this looks like a pretty, you know, I’ve seen, obviously, Angry Birds before. But it’s like they’ve added a bunch of new gameplay mechanics to it, right? A lot of shooting, and this seems like a much deeper, richer Angry Birds, am I right?Kevin: Yeah, you can definitely tell they’re using all the pieces that they’ve been developing over time, you know. It’s kind of the nice part about making a video game series, if it catches on. You can reuse the code, you don’t have to start over, and you can reuse the graphics, so you can just really, really spend time on the details, and building this immersive kind of experience.Which we see with Angry Birds, right? It’s kind of been one of those iPhone apps, or, yeah, I guess it was iPhone originally, one of those apps that came out that people gathered around and ed, and because of that, they were able to do a lot of really cool stuff that not many other games have the chance to do, outside of the console.Stephan: Looks pretty cool.Patrick: It does make you wonder if this is something that Disney would have signed off on, because this has obviously been in the works before the acquisition. I guess we’ll never know. One thing that I did see, though, on Twitter, Seth McFarlane of Family Guy, he responded to someone who asked on Twitter, ‘Does this mean this is the end of your Star Wars parodies?’ They made these well-known parodies of the Star Wars franchise.He said, ‘It’s probably so, yeah,’ because he can’t see it happening anymore. But, you never know. Why don’t I go ahead and go next since I’m talking about Disney, I just realized that ties into my spotlight, which is at themeparkconnection.com, they are selling a house, and what this house is, is a replica of the haunted mansion at Disneyland in California.You know, there are some exterior changes to it, but it is quite similar, and it was built to be that way. Inside, it’s like a modern home. But outside, it’s a lot like the haunted mansion in Disneyland. And, you know, [laughs], if you ever wanted to own the haunted mansion, I guess, this is your chance.It’s going for a little under $900,000, $873,000, and it was built by a man named Mark Hurt, who is a Disney contractor, and owner of the company Constructioneer. He was able to measure the actual haunted mansion in California, and get the right dimensions and stuff, so it’s a pretty cool house. [laughs] I don’t know if I want to own it, but I wouldn’t mind if it was in my neighborhood.Stephan: [laughs]Kevin: [laughs]Patrick: It’s apparently near Atlanta, Georgia.Stephan: That’s cool.Patrick: Yeah. It’s a pretty cool-looking house.Stephan: Interesting.Kevin: I imagine this launched just in time for Halloween for some celebrity to want to snag it for their party.Stephan: [laughs]Patrick: Yeah, I mean, they say they’ve had parties there, and even a wedding. So, I guess it could make some money as well.Kevin: It’s kind of cool.Stephan: Only kind of, Patrick.Patrick: Thank you. [laughs] Thank you. Very kind of you, sir.Stephan: I’ll go last. I’m going to kind of do a shameless promo. This past weekend, I got to go hang out with a United Airlines, and see the inaugural 787 U.S. flight, that they operated for revenue service. And I got to do a little tour of the airplane and stuff, and those that don’t know about the airplane, it’s pretty unique, in that it’s all composite material on the outside, for the most part.It is, it’s a beautiful plane, and seeing it take off, just to give you an idea of how much composites bend, the wings go from just a normal flex on the outside to above the airplane, and they look almost like bird wings, going up, because they flex so much.It was just neat, and got to do that, so I took some photos and stuff, and I posted them, and I’ll post a link so that everyone can get a look at what it looks like, so.Lot of cool features, it’s actually humidified inside now, and pressurized to a lower altitude, so you aren’t as tired when you get to your destination. Just, it’s really neat.Patrick: Very cool. And that, they had you on there, all because of your cloud score, right?Stephan: Oh, yeah, right. [laughs]Kevin: [laughs] I don’t know how I feel about my airplane’s wings being…Patrick: Bendable?Kevin: Bendable, yeah…Stephan: Well, they all flex, it’s just how much more this one flexes.Kevin: I didn’t…Patrick: Right. They already bend, Kevin.Kevin: I didn’t even know that, though. I didn’t need to know that, Stephan.Stephan: They have to, you want them to bend. If they didn’t bend…Patrick: Right.Stephan: …the plane would fall out of the sky. [laughs]Patrick: They would break off.Stephan: Yes. [laughs]Patrick: Which… that’s another image for you to be thinking about.Stephan: [laughs] Sorry. I’m sorry, Kevin.Kevin: See if I ever get on a plane again, now.Patrick: [laughs]Stephan: [laughs]Patrick: Yeah, and you won’t need to get on a plane to come to IndieCon on November 17th, which is where Kevin… [laughs] which is where Kevin and I will be, in Raleigh, North Carolina, it’s a great con, it’s for freelancers, and lifestyle entrepreneurs, and more, so if you can make it out, you should definitely come and attend. indieconf.com, is the website. And that’s how it’s done, gentlemen.Stephan: [laughs]Kevin: I like it, I like it.Patrick: Thank you, why don’t we go around the table.Kevin: Sure. I’m Kevin Dees, and you can find me at kevindees.cc, and @kevindees on Twitter.Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me at badice.com, or on Twitter @ssegraves.Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe, of the iFroggy network. I taste sodas and sodatasting.com, and I’m on Twitter at @iFroggy, I-F-R-O-G-G-Y.You can follow SitePoint at @sitepointdotcom, that’s SitePoint D-O-T C-O-M. You can visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast, leave comments on this show, and you can subscribe to receive every show automatically.Please email us [email protected], with your questions for us, we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.The SitePoint podcast is produced by Karn Broad. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 186 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) interviews Michael Kimsal (@mgkimsal) of IndieConf about many things concerning freelancing.Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #186: Freelancing with Michael Kimsal (MP3, 39:00, 37.5MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryKevin and Michael talk about freelancing and how his experience in visiting conferences as a freelancer was instrumental in the inspiration of IndieConf. Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/186.Interview TranscriptKevin: Well, welcome to the Sitepoint podcast. I’m Kevin Dees and I’m ed by Michael Kimsal . Welcome to the show.Michael: Hello, thank you very much.Kevin: I have to say, I love your voice. You sound so much more professional than I do.Michael: I’ve become attached to it over the years, thank you.Kevin: That’s good to hear, that you’re not sharing that with anyone else. It’s a very podcast-y kind of voice. You can tell my talking isn’t quite as eloquent, maybe, as it could be.Michael: I think it’s fine. I’m enjoying it so far.Kevin: Thank you. You do do a podcast, right?Michael: I do. I’ve been doing Web Dev Radio, which obviously it’s not radio, it’s just a podcast. Actually for a little over seven years now, started in 2005. Fourth of July weekend, just started doing it. I interview people sometimes, sometimes it’s just me rambling.I had a review on iTunes once and somebody said, ‘I don’t get it. This just seems like some old guy.’ He said something like, ‘this is just like some old guy who just likes to complain about stuff.’ He happened to hit an issue where I really was complaining about rails, some issues that I had with it. I don’t normally complain that much, but sometimes I vent.Kevin: That’s pretty funny. I feel like I’m doing the listeners discourtesy by not letting them know who exactly you are before getting too far into the conversation. I feel like maybe it would be good to introduce yourself. Now Michael, you do a conference for the last few years, you’re also a PHP programmer. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about those two things and then we can go from there?Michael: Wow, yes. How do I start? There’s a lot of background.I have been working with PHP, fortunately in many respects, I’ve been working with software for a long time, but I got into the web in very early 96. I was telnetting and gophering around before that, but got into web development and found this thing called PHP FI. That was I think February 96, January 96.I feel very fortunate because I got into web development very early on in my career. I didn’t have to unlearn a lot of concepts. I’ve been working largely with PHP. I’ve done Perl, ASP, some Java. I like Grails and Groovy a lot these days, but PHP has been probably 70% of my career. It’s been very good to me. It’s been very interesting to watch that grow and evolve over time.You mentioned this conference. I have organized a conference, this is year three for IndieConf, which is for largely initially people like myself, web freelancers. If you do freelance Druple, WordPress, PHP, .NET, Java, whatever it may be. If you work on the web and you’re freelance, you’ve got the same kind of questions that I was looking to have answered. I put it together.Kevin: You know, I went to that conference last year and I have to say it was really good. I’m particular about my conferences, and I like two kinds. The kinds that are really small, or not super-small, you know what I mean. It’s small enough to where you can actually meet people and talk and have these conversations, because we’re all in one group. Then you have these super-big ones like South by Southwest.I really like the dynamic that you have there. Everybody gets to have their conversations. You have opportunities to meet and speak with the speakers, which plays a big part into the size of the conference. There’s this range that just hits it, and I think the size that you had last year was just great. I know you want to grow that.Michael: Some. We had about 130 people last year. I’d like to have about the same number this year in of scheduling and whatnot. If there were 200 people knocking on the door that’d be great, we could accommodate them.Organizationally we’re not set up to be a 500 person conference or a 400 person conference right now, 400 attendee. If the demand grows to that I’d love to it, but I appreciate your view on the size.For me, I’ll just go into a little bit about where this got started if you want to ramble in that direction.Kevin: Yeah, absolutely.Michael: 2007, I started freelancing again. 2007, 2008, this little global economic meltdown happened around the world. It was not really a great time to necessarily have done that, but I managed to stick through it. Through a lot of networking and whatnot certainly kept my head above water and put down some roots in this geographic area. I feel like I’ve got a decent network here now.By 2009, 2010, I started getting people fairly regularly saying, ‘How do you do this? How do you get clients? How do you get paid? How do you this, how do you do that? What do your contracts look like?’ All those sorts of things.I have answers. I can give answers. Some of the questions, my answers certainly helped somebody, but it’s not necessarily the right answer for everybody. Everybody’s background is somewhat different, their financial needs are different, their psychological security needs are different.I started asking around to some of the people that I knew that had more experience and had different perspectives, and realized there isn’t a place that people can go. There’s online resources, there’s a lot of good forums out there, but in of a face to face thing there’s a different dynamic there. That was really the impetus for IndieConf two years ago, 2010.Putting together people that can answer that, but trying to keep the focus largely on software. Certainly plumbers can come to this and woodworkers can come to this and they’d get something out of it, but the focus on the attendees is largely people who work on the web. Developers, designers, maybe content writers.Even if you’re not a developer, maybe you’re just doing Druple sites for people but you’re not coding, you’re still working on the web. You still have probably a lot of the same issues that many of us had if you’re working for yourself. That’s the nutshell story behind that.Kevin: That’s one of the things that I really liked about it last year, which was I’ve gone to a lot of conferences that are about CSS code, design. It always had that subject point, which is the new technology, what’s the next big thing.With IndieConf, it’s much more pragmatic. You can apply what you learn, and you can use it then.Michael: We have someone like yourself. You would probably be one of the more technical presentations. Kevin Dees is coming to present pragmatic WordPress workflow. That’s going to be one of those skills that you can take home and run with right there. I’m not expecting you to get into PHP benchmarks and CSS debugging, things like that.I tell you, even before IndieConf, 2007, randomly I submitted something to Oz Con. Mega conference out in California I think. I was selected to speak, and I went out and talked about Solr. It was great. I love Solr as a search engine, it was awesome, had a good time, and I met some pretty cool people out there. Did a couple podcasts.By and large, I got overloaded mentally. I went out and it was just tech after tech after tech. I coming back, I cried a little bit. Not that I bawled for weeks, but I cried a bit on the way back when I was sitting there and on the way back, because realizing, I’m coming back to a job and precisely zero of the technology I’ve been exposed to am I going to be able to implement.I’m doing maintenance. By the time any of this, I’m allowed to implement it or allowed to integrate it in my work, it’ll be old hat. Whatever. There was this realization.I go to tech conferences. Code Stop is a fantastic conference I love to go to. Used to go to Code Mash, may still get in, but they’re very hard to get into now. They’re very heavy on the code, and it’s great to geek out to. For people that’re working for themselves, that doesn’t put a contract on my table.Most of the clients when you’re dealing with them, they don’t really care what version of CSS you’re using. There’s a different set of problems. I love to geek out to tech, but those conferences were not speaking to the immediate needs that I had.That was 2007, and it’s not like I thought about it right then. That was part of the de-focus on technology that we have at IndieConf, because it’s for tech workers, but it’s not about tech so much. There’s 50 conferences that you can go to to learn all about Javascript and CSS, and it’s great and I think you need to go to those, but you need to go to IndieConf too.Kevin: Right. There’s two pieces to things like Oz Con and South by Southwest. It’s about the technology, and I think those conferences are more tiered toward the start-up culture, which is the new fangled, the people who are building their brand new web apps in Node. I know that was two years ago that that was a big deal, and it’s still a thing, but now it’s Python or whatever.There’s always this new, old technology is now a new technology, right? It recycles its way through, and it’s the start-up kind of culture. The other piece of that is also the networking and the connections you get out of a conference.This is I think why, and I didn’t mean for this to turn into a conference talk . . .Michael: We’ll move away in a moment.Kevin: The thing that I like about the larger conferences is you get those connections and you get that, ‘Hey, what’s the start-up world doing?’ You can really get that piece of the puzzle and really build that, and then you can go to these smaller ones and actually find out something useful.All the new technology’s great for somebody who’s going to write a blog post about it and talk about how they’re going to implement it. Some of these things you can. I know one year at South by Southwest, Type was the big thing. Typekit was just coming out and Font Deck was just coming out. You could use these fonts online, and font embedding was finally there, the legal issues were finally being wrapped up and we could do this thing and it was great.It was a great momentum, and it carried on and actually meant something. Not every talk is like that at those big ones. Whereas smaller ones, like I said, you still make those same connections but it’s a deeper level of connection I think.It just goes to show, like this conversation now, we met last year and now we’re having a conversation again. Just before the conference.Michael: Yeah. I’ve met some great people at conferences large and small. I would say without hyperbole that some of those people that I’ve met at conferences have ended up changing my life for the better.I started my podcast in 2005. 2008, the beginning, I went up to Code Mash in Ohio in January, yes, that’s a whole other story. I knew a few people there but it’s very large, it was several hundred people at that point.I went to the dinner table and I explicitly sat down at a table where I knew nobody. It was about eight or ten people at the table, and I’m talking to somebody. This dude across the table is looking at me. A couple of them, they’d look at me and then they’d look away, and then they’d look at me again.About ten minutes, they said, ‘We know your voice but we don’t know who you are.’ I introduced myself, ‘Oh, you do that podcast.’ Not that I was huge and famous, but some people knew me, they knew my voice anyway from that.We start talking, and it’s a guy named Cal Evans. Who, people in the PHP community, if you don’t know his name you should by now. Go to calevans.com. He’s a fantastic resource for the PHP community, tremendous advocate. He worked at the Zend dev zone for a few years, got that off the ground.He was at Zend at the time. That was January 2008. August, I get a telephone call and he said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for somebody that might want to do some training. Are you interested in that?’ Sure.Through meeting him, I became a trainer at Zend, been doing that for four years. I’ve met a lot of cool people, had a lot of cool students, just have access to some cool technology through Zend. It’s been fantastic, and all that came from going to that conference and sitting at that table and somebody recognizing my voice.I’ve got dozens of examples like that, but it’s this idea of you have to get out and network. Specifically as a freelancer, but I think even if you’re not a freelancer, the idea of getting out and having a social aspect to your career is something that often gets overlooked when people are going to school or choosing a career, getting career advice from people. Very rarely do people talk about the social or the human connection side of whatever your career is.Maybe more specifically technology, because you’re a code geek, you like to do this stuff. It’s very easy to just sit behind a computer, just work on something for another day, another week, another month instead of getting out.Kevin: Yeah. I like what we’re talking about here, because it really does speak to what I would consider maybe the successful programmers out there. They do tend to be the ones that make the connections.I know in my own career, and just the people that I have been around, I work at a place called Co-Work in Greenfield. There’s this collaboration of just people. Just by being in that building with other people, because I’m freelancing, even just by being in that building with other freelancers, even that is a level of networking. Basically being there pays for itself.It does more than that. I get a lot of work from just being in the building. I one time, and I talked about this on a previous podcast, where I was sick one week and I decided to learn how to make HTML5 Canvas video games. I go to Co-Work and lo and behold I’m prototyping video games.It’s one of these things where you have to be doing both. You have to be building things, trying new things, so you can talk about them to the people that you’re meeting. You can’t just show up on the scene and be like, ‘Oh, I’m this person and what do you do?’ ‘Well, I just meet people.’There is a balance. I will say there is something to be said for that connection, and I’m glad you brought that up, because it has been such value to me I know. Just looking back, all the things that have been the breadwinners for me have really been shadowed and foreshadowed by the networking.Michael: Sure. There’s a few things, I’ve been saying them for a few years. I haven’t said them on your podcast, so I can repeat these here. In my mind I’ve been able to crystallize this a little bit more. Not that I’m certainly any sort of oracle or elder statesman of web development, I’ve just been doing it for a long time with software in general.I’ve been doing it long enough that I’ve seen enough changes in technology and what was hot ten years ago, what was hot even five years ago, isn’t quite the same. The problems that we’re solving with technology, some of the problems are different. Sometimes we have new technology, the idea of mobile. That’s a whole new consumer space and business space that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago, certainly not at the level that it does now.By and large the types of problems that we’re solving are not solved by the new hotness, the new hot technology, as much as they are by understanding how to communicate. Colleagues, clients, consumers, customers, whatever they may be. One of the things I’m fond of saying, and I think I got this from Hal Helms or a variation from this, very widely known cold fusion guru, who used to do a great podcast. I don’t think he does anymore.I this, I think it was him that said this, how did he put this? He’s not had projects fail because somebody didn’t know how to write out to a file, or because they didn’t know how to connect to a database. Projects fail overwhelmingly because of lack of communication, lack of understanding, lack of empathy, lack of knowledge about what the problem is.Kevin: Absolutely.Michael: Somebody says something but they mean something else. I have been on a couple projects where they’ve been severely delayed because in fact we couldn’t reliably connect to the database, because we had driver issues, but those are temporary. You can work around those. You can find somebody to solve those.It’s much harder to find somebody who can divine from a customer what they actually mean, or how to get information out of them when they don’t answer the phone or answer email. How do you deal with that?Those are human issues. You can learn that through experience, and you can learn how to deal with those by networking with other people. If you’re a freelancer, you can do that at IndieConf, that’s my little plug there. Even if not, go to Toastmasters, learn how to talk with people. Take classes in acting so you can understand not so much how to fake people out, but empathize. Learn how other people react to the same situation. Put yourself in their shoes.There’s so many non-tech things you can do to make yourself more valuable in the technology field, and they don’t have to do with learning Node or Async programming or whatever. I’m not knocking Node or Async or whatever, they’re great, but they’re different strokes for different folks.Kevin: Yeah, I totally agree with that. When I look back on past projects that I’ve failed on, it’s not even things that I’ve failed on. It was just a lack of communication or a lack of understanding of what the goal is trying to be achieved.As the developer, as the designer or the person in charge of the project, a lot of times it’s easy to throw that blame on the client. You didn’t tell me what you wanted, or you told me this and you wanted that, you changed it and you changed it and you changed it.I find a lot of times that it’s due to this, I talked to Paul Boag a while back about this, this client-centric web design. It comes down to the lack of perspective that both maybe the client have, but also, he was the developer-designer. At least I know I like to look at a problem from the ’s perspective, and what’s going to be best for the .A lot of times, in all cases really, it’s about the business and what’s going to grow that person’s business. The is a big part of that, but at the end of the day it’s still a business. Being able to see and understand not only what your needs to do, because I think as developers and designers we do that very well, but as understanding the business and what that business is about, I think that’s where a lot of that lack of communication happens, where it breaks down.Because the customer’s trying to achieve something. They’re trying to make more money or they’re trying to help more people if they’re a non-profit. They’re trying to achieve a certain goal, and so I think a lot of times we can caught up in this interface, technical, picking the right pattern or what it is.We get so caught up in that space that we forget to express why we’re doing this, and why it’s important for the client to think about it. Then also take in this perspective of the client, like you said the empathy, right? How do I empathize with you?You’re saying it has been this similar experience you’ve had.Michael: Well, I find it’s a tough balancing act. Sometimes it’s easier depending on the client. From my point of view, especially as a freelancer coming into somebody’s business and working with them, there’s a balance to be had between learning what they’re doing but also bringing your experience and saying, ‘This is how this problem should be solved.’Having to, fight is too strong a word, but wrestle with, ‘Well, no, our person does it this way.’ It might, and there may be good reasons why they do that. Sometimes, often times, the reason that they’re doing something in their business is because they’ve never had the opportunity to do anything else. They’ve never had the from competent IT, or maybe they’ve never had dedicated IT people at all that understand what resources are available.Kevin: That’s true.Michael: You need to do this. Well, your real problem is getting real time communication out of people. You want to do this, but were you aware of this other technology? If we do this, and this may be faster, this may be cheaper, it may be more expensive. But if we do this, this is what you can enable your business to do. It won’t solve your problems, but it will help you solve your problems.The other thing I wrestle with is going in and having people say, ‘Our business is unique.’ I’ve done this long enough that I don’t believe that very often. I believe some of their terminology is unique, they may have legal issues, requirements, reporting things that they have to do things.At the end of the day your business is you’re finding people that have a problem, you’re serving the problem, and you’re collecting money from them. You’re fulfilling a need in the marketplace, that’s what your business is doing. You’re not that unique. Every business does that at that level.I realize I’m oversimplifying a bit, but there aren’t too many . . .Kevin: We all have basic needs.Michael: Yes, but there aren’t too many businesses I’ve come across that are extremely unique and the same software that works for other people just does not work for them at all. It just doesn’t happen very often.You may get things in medicine and economic, financial reporting things, that there are legal issues that take them out of the realm of off the shelf software or standard OSS packages, things like that, but it’s pretty rare.Kevin: Right. I like what you’re saying there.Michael: So do I. Oh, go ahead.Kevin: No, because it really speaks to the realm that we live in. Which is this idea that everything I do is going to be special or unique, or I’m going to put this twist or edge on it. I think this is more true for developers than designers, because there are certain elements you can add in design that can . . . I like the word you said, which was crystallize, the brand or the company or the message that they’re trying to speak.Picking a technology, like you said, sometimes you can’t use open source. Sometimes you’ve got to use this other system. You can’t really force your hand on somebody and say, ‘This is what I’m going to use and I’m going to do this.’ When you do that, you can do that, but then you limit the client that you can have.Michael: Sure. I’ll give you another example of this. Maybe a related example. I’m working on a project with somebody, and they’ve had a number of years of, it started out with a Droople system, and they’ve made multiple copies of the Droople system, and they’ve been serving probably 15 or 20 clients with various variations of a few core Droople themes.It’s gotten very ugly and very hairy. They’ve gotten used to, ‘I’m going to do this,’ and people go in and add a bunch of stuff. It’s crazy.We’re starting with another version of things, and I’ve revamped it. I did a very, very basic, almost off the shelf, Twitter Bootstrap theme. I can hear people right now going, ‘Don’t, designers don’t just use that.’ They loved it.Most people in the design community, ‘Well, you can’t use that.’ They loved, it’s primarily black and white with a couple of accent colors out of the box, it’s responsive, and it’s mobile, tablet, desktop, all the same. Very clean. I’m intentionally saying, I got the buy-off with the PM, this is all you have. We’re going to make everything fit into this, and if it won’t fit into this it’s going into a separate page. It’s not going to be on the front page, this is all we get.They’ve taken that to a couple of their broader clients and shown that, and they’ve gotten rave reviews. This is fantastic, this is great. But if I was to show that to another design person, ‘Oh, everybody’s using Bootstrap.’ No, everybody’s not using Bootstrap.I showed them what was possible, and maybe this wasn’t related to what we were talking about before, but I wanted to share it anyway because I like Twitter Bootstrap. OK, end of story, sorry. I went off topic there.Kevin: No, no, it was good, because like you were saying, and I think it really speaks to what we were talking about. Which was, you walk into a project and you say, ‘OK, I’m going to use what I’ve always used.’ You have this pre-built set of tools. They did in that case, but you were able to take that and say, ‘OK, let’s step back away from a pre-determined solution and say hey, is there something better that we can use?’Because when you walk into a room and you sit down and there are all these constraints, there’s timeline, budget, you also have the technology constraints, right? The people in the room are also constraints. How much they’re willing to tolerate your suggestions and their own input, which is a whole other story like somebody trying to put their thumbprint on something that they really shouldn’t be. Like a CEO.Michael: You have your stories, I have mine. Let’s not name names, OK?Kevin: Right, I just say CEOs, that kind of thing. Anybody who’s not in a technology field, put it that way. You can be anybody, you can be a salesperson, a marketer, I don’t care. The marketer probably could fall into that category. At least in a more enterprise standing point.You set up all these constraints versus talking about what the problem is. I think that comes back to what we were talking about before, which was the lack of communication, right? I think this is really the biggest issue, is when you come to a room, I think sometimes people already have their solution already figured out. They’re going to say, ‘This is what we want you to build,’ or ‘this is what we want you to make.’ You become a task person.This is more coming from my side of things. I do the freelance programming side of things, so I think this may apply to me and you maybe more than somebody who’s sitting in an agency behind a desk, and they’re like, ‘I do this day to day, how does this apply to me?’Michael: I think what you’re getting at is it I think it applies across the board a lot more. I didn’t mean to cut you off there.Kevin: No, go ahead.Michael: My term for that is ‘pair of hands.’ You want me to just come in and be your pair of hands. My hands know how to do this, you tell me what you want, I can make it, or we can have a more consultative discussion. I can consult with you.I may do the work, but you can get the benefit of my experience, bring my experience into your world and I can help you solve your problem. Probably in ways you weren’t aware of. If you don’t want that and you really just want a pair of hands, ‘We know what we want, we just want somebody to do this,’ I do that work occasionally. I’m really trying to get myself out of it.Sometimes you don’t know ahead of times. Sometimes it just turns into ‘pair of hands’ work. Sometimes that’s appropriate, but for the type of work I want to be doing for the type of rates I want to be charging, it’s not cost effective for people. I can get you somebody at a third of my price or a fifth of my price to just be your pair of hands. That may be all you need.Kevin: I would agree with that. Now that I think about this more, the situations that I’ve walked into where you can tell it’s going to be a good relationship is when they’ve already tried to solve a problem and they couldn’t. They no longer, they thought they had the solution but they don’t anymore. They’re just like, ‘OK, we need somebody to come and tell us how to fix this. Because we tried and it didn’t work with X, and we need you now.’Now they’re more open to actually listen to what you have to say. The dynamic changes when you control the drama and your client doesn’t control the drama, if that makes any sense.Michael: It does. I refer to that sometimes as sometimes the type of project is I’m being a digital garbage man. I’m cleaning up your mess. If they understand it’s a mess, the dynamic is great. They understand that whatever they did, whatever decisions they made, and it could’ve been maybe the decisions were right and it was implemented wrong, or they didn’t have enough information and they made the wrong decision because of that, but they understand that it’s a mess and they’re paying me to come clean it up and make it better.The times when they don’t even acknowledge there’s something wrong, ‘Just make this do this,’ well, I can’t because this is all broken, those are much harder to deal with.Kevin: So many situations come to my mind that I cannot talk about that I wish I could, Mike. Here’s an example, here’s an example, here’s an example.Michael: We’ve all got the dead bodies. Interesting though, one other thing, maybe touching on the freelance thing about. This is another observation that I’ve had about work in general in the IT world. I’ve worked for myself or in a small, self-directed capacity for probably seven or eight of the past 15 years.I’m a programmer. I’m going to go get a job someplace. I’ve gone into a few of those situations, and the dynamic is really, really different. I’ve had friends of mine that say, ‘Well, I’m going for this job interview.’ I know they’re talented, they could do it.They could do the work, and sometimes they get shot down. Because they go into the job interview, and they’re getting quizzed by three or four other people on the other side of the table. ‘Explain the difference between throw and throws,’ or ‘tell me how Java synchronizes threads. Tell me how Final works.’I’m throwing these out as trivia examples. Maybe some of them are complex, some of them are not, but they’re getting drilled on sometimes minutiae.Kevin: Right. I’ve been in that interview before. I know exactly what you’re talking about.Michael: Exactly. Sometimes it’s adversarial, because the other people, maybe that’s the only time they get to show off or talk geek to somebody else. They get caught up and they’re not really interviewing, or they don’t have very good criteria for that.I contrast that with . . .Kevin: ‘This is what I looked up on Google yesterday and found out my solution to. Now I want to ask you to see if you already knew the thing I found out just a week ago.’Michael: Yes. ‘Why are manhole covers round,’ or the weird questions. Yet I’ve found, and I’ve lost out some job interviews because of that. My frustration at the idiocy, as I get older my frustration comes out much faster in those sorts of interviews. I haven’t done something like that in many years.Kevin: A little cranky then.Michael: Yes. I’m getting old, I don’t have time for this. When I go in, I get introduced through a colleague and I go in and talk to a small business owner, or maybe I’m talking to a project manager.You’re not always talking to the owner of a company, but you’re talking to somebody who has a problem, and you’re saying, ‘Here’s how I can solve it.’ They say, ‘That’s great.’ OK, it’s going to be two months, going to be three months, going to be two weeks, going to be a year, whatever it is. I’m going to come in, solve your problem, you’re going to work with me and then I’m going to be gone.In some cases I’ve been fortunate enough where I’ve worked with some people for three or four years now. In other cases you’re in there for a few weeks or you’re in there for a couple of months and you’re gone.The dynamic of, I’m interviewing them, they’re interviewing me, ‘Can you solve my problem?’ ‘Yes, let’s make that happen,’ is totally different than the dynamic of, ‘I might have to work with this guy for the next ten years, and I need to prove that he’s not an idiot, and I need to let him know that I’m more awesome than he is,’ very alpha male in some cases. Very male driven.That’s a whole other discussion, women in the workplace, women in IT. There needs to be more of them, if only to balance out those interviews, the testosterone in those interviews sometimes is overwhelming.That’s something that, I have friends who are extremely talented, and I wish that they for whatever reason could get past the, ‘I want to have a job.’ I understand why. There’s a lot of reasons why they want to stay in that W-2, fulltime world.I think they could get a bigger, better sense of fulfillment out of the skills and the knowledge that they have by working directly for clients, instead of in that employee model. Yes, there’s benefits to the employee model. There’s benefits to the employee model as well too, but I find that a very difficult life to go through in of interviewing and that sort of thing.I may be overdramatizing this a bit, but I may be under-dramatizing it for some people, too.Kevin: Yeah, I’ve worked in the agency world as well, and it’s definitely two different cultures that exist. Because when you’re in the agency world, it’s you live not necessarily project by project, but you show up and you have a task for the day and you do it, and you’re good to go.Some people, you may take a little bit more pride in your job than I did when I worked in the agency world. But that’s where it was. It was, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to read up on this new thing and I’m going to try and insert it in this project I’m doing.’When LESS was becoming a big hot topic, the pre-processor for CSS, I was like OK, I’ll try LESS on this one project. I tried it on the project and it was fun. It gave me opportunities to try new technologies. You don’t really tell anybody you do those things, you just do it.Michael: Yeah. I hate you, but. Those are the garbage projects I have to clean up sometimes. This guy wanted to learn Rails. OK, but that’s another topic too.Kevin: [laughs] I’m glad we’re friends.Then you transition into the freelance side of things, where it’s because you want to get paid and you have to follow the deadline, you make certain sacrifices along the way. You say OK, I know this set of tools and I’m going to use this this time, and I’m going to deliver. Because you’re actually having to interact with your client. Your PM isn’t running the show and trying to put out fires and that kind of thing.It’s a different dynamic. I can see where, in the agency world I was able to play with a lot of newer things. I’m not saying I don’t play with new things anymore, but you have that afterhours freedom to do things as well in the agency world, running the W-2 as you said.With freelance it’s like, and I find myself running into this, this is where growth is due on my part. Which is you get home and you want to learn something new, but you’re like, ‘Oh, but I could be working on this client.’ So you don’t, and you go work on that client.It is a different thing, because you’re carrying the weight of the client. You’ve got to take the backpack of bricks off at some point and say, ‘OK, me time.’Michael: Yeah. The whole freelancing and ‘it’s a lifestyle,’ somewhat, selling your time for money is a whole discussion. We may be having a talk at IndieConf by somebody who’s broken out of that. A couple people have. One guy has proposed a talk, and we’re going to see if he can come or not.His title is ‘Consulting is Crack.’ It can be very comforting to just say, ‘bill another hour, bill another hour, bill another hour,’ instead of taking that time to say, ‘That can wait until tomorrow. I’m going to invest in some of these other skills,’ what you’re saying, afterhours things.When you are so tied to time for money, you may forgo some of that. There’s just a balance that needs to be found. It’s different for everybody. Sometimes forgetting that there’s even a balance to be looking for in the first place is that first problem you need to get past.Kevin: I , there was this conversation at Co-Work that was taking place at one point. It was around the subject of something that Seth Godin was writing at the time. It was basically, and I probably have the words wrong here but you’ll get the point, which was, ‘Entrepreneur versus freelancer.’Basically as a freelancer or contractor, let’s say the maximum you could ever charge is $200 an hour. For some people it’s higher based on where you live. Let’s say it’s $200 in my case. You can only work so many hours at $200, so you have a cap that you can hit with your hours, and there are a limited number of hours in the day.If you think about the entrepreneurial side of things, like let’s use Space Camp for example, or let’s use Facebook for example. Either one of those are entrepreneurial applications, two different cultural set-ups. Where it’s, I can sell a certain number of product and renew that.Now I work two hours and I make $3,000 per hour, and then I can stop working those two hours and still make $3,000, and while I sleep I make money. Right? I think it’s the difference between just that, which is can I sleep and make money, or can I work and make money?I think it takes a little bit of both to be honest, because it’s like investments. I think as developers, I think this speaks a lot to us, and designers as well. Which is can you develop an application which can become your retirement? You don’t necessarily have to buy into the 401(k) or whatever it is.That’s hard to do, because what’s the percentage of failed projects? the numbers, like 99.9% of all projects fail or something like that.Michael: Yeah, huge number, yeah. Two other names spring to mind, books that I’ve read many, many years ago. Harry Beckwith, ‘Selling the Invisible,’ and Allan Weiss, I think, ‘Million Dollar Consulting.’Both really opened my eyes to the idea of value-based consulting, value- based work. I sadly do not implement those currently. I have talked to a couple of clients and proposed, ‘Tell you what, I will do this for you and let’s just do a revenue split. I believe in your business enough so that I don’t need cash up front. I’m writing the software. I’m going to know the usage, but we can do some sort of revenue split.’A couple people have been interested in it. The smaller the organization the more interested they are in it, obviously from a cash flow standpoint. There’s usually less of an up side. The larger ones that I’ve talked to have expressed some interest because they see some benefit to that, but I think they’re savvy enough that they really don’t want to have essentially an unlimited up side to me. They’d rather cap me.Even if I’m charging them a lot of money. I could charge them $150, $200 an hour, they’d still rather pay that and have there be an end point rather than, ‘Gosh, he’s got profit sharing for the next five years in this.’I think like that, and I’d like to do that with people, but I find it hard to find clients that want to engage in that. Outside of that, the one other option is write your own apps, write your own software.Kevin: That’s what most do, right? You have the Googles and the Facebooks of the world.Michael: Right. I’m not quite there myself. Even people doing smaller apps. Dodd Caldwell, down in Greenville. Do you know Dodd, by any chance?Kevin: Yes.Michael: Bellstrike for example, and his resume service and that sort of thing. That’s an example of somebody who’s using his skills both in tech and personality and sales to think outside that traditional time for money sort of thing. When I meet people like that, it’s inspiring to know hey, I can do this too.Personally, I can share more of my story at some point, maybe when we meet up in November, I’ll give you some of the reasons why I haven’t done that yet. I’m getting to the point where it’s easier for me to say, ‘I want to spend my time on this app or this service and monetize that,’ as opposed to just time for money.Kevin: Right. Well, I feel like we’ve had a really good conversation, but we really are out of time. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you?Michael: Kevin, thank you so much. They can find me around the Raleigh, North Carolina area. They can find me online at michaelkimsal.com, webdevradio.com, jsmag.com, indieconf.com.I’m going to throw this out here. Anybody listening that would like to come to IndieConf, if you can get yourself to Raleigh, reach out to me. We will sort out some sort of a special Sitepoint discount just for you. For you and only you. Yes, you. Not you over there, you in the back.I know that was really corny, but yes, you. I was moving side to side. I don’t know if you’re in stereo or not. Just reach out to me, [email protected]. Love to hear from you on your freelancing efforts and what you’re doing with tech.Kevin: Excellent. Well, thank you again so much, and thank you everybody for listening.Michael: Bye-bye.Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about today’s show please feel free to get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m. You can find me on Twitter @kevindees, and if you’d like to leave comments about today’s show check out the podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast, you can subscribe to the show there as well. This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Kevin Dees, bye for now.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! 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Episode 185 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have 3/4 of the , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #185: CSRF is the New SQL Injection (MP3, 47:38, 45.8MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics such as Google’s new Disavow Links tool, the numbers of different security threats and where they come from, the new ReadWrite site and more! Here are the main topics covered in this episode:Cross-site Scripting Attacks Up 69% – InsiderReadWrite – Editor’s Note: Welcome To The New ReadWriteGoogle Launches Disavow Links ToolBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/185.Host SpotlightsLouis: jq – A Lightweight and Flexible Command-line JSON ProcessorKevin: Debugging CSS Media Queries · Johan BrookPatrick: Not Quite What the Doctor OrderedInterview TranscriptLouis: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Site Point Podcast. We’re back this week with a news and commentary show. With me are 2 of the regular ists, Kevin Dees and Patrick O’Keefe. Hi, guys.Kevin: Howdy, howdy.Patrick: We’re back.Louis: Yeah. It hasn’t been, you know, terribly long since you were here on the last show. Steven unfortunately is away this week. He’s sick. So we’ll hope he feels a little bit better and he can get back with us next time.Kevin: Get well.Louis: So let’s dive straight into this week’s news. Patrick. You had a couple of stories there.Patrick: Yeah. I do have a couple of stories. So Firehost is a cloud hosting provider. They’re renowned for their secure cloud host and they really focus on security and they have published the results of a statistical analysis of 15 million cyber attacks that were blocked from their servers in the U.S. and Europe during the 3rd quarter of 2012.What they found, I see they categorized the attacks into 4 different categories. Those were as follows: Cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, directory traversal and SQL injection. Of those 4 categories, the cross site scripting attacks far and away were the leader and most importantly, they grew by an estimated 69%, those 2 types of attacks.Cross-site scripting represented 35%, cross-site request forgery 29%, directory traversal 24% and SQL injection was just 12%. If you don’t know what those are, you’re like me and you’re really a Layman, the XSS attacks, the cross-site scripting attacks involve web application gathering malicious data from a via a trusted site, often coming in the form of a hyperlink containing malicious content.Then the CSRF or the cross-site request forgery attacks exploit the trust the has for a particular site. Those 2 attacks are far and away the most prevalent, likewise, the United States was the most prevalent as far as the origination of the attacks. 74% or 11 million came from the US. There was a shift though with the 2nd place country which in this quarter was Europe, or I shouldn’t say country, but Europe was 17% of all malicious attacks whereas Southern Asia was 6%. They have previously been the second place leader.This is the part where I just kick it over to you guys to talk about the importance of sanitizing and whatever words you use.Louis: Yeah. Obviously, this is interesting in a few ways. I think the fact that SQL injection represents such a small percentage of the overall attacks, perhaps it’s sort of indicative of sort of development and touring and that they’re probably very few websites out there that are actually vulnerable to SQL injection because it’s one of the first things that you’ll learn if you’re learning any kind of back ground programming is to sanitize data base input.You know, I think that it shows that perhaps, it’s not really as serious an attack factor anymore because so many people are able to defend against it pretty easily and almost every sort of data based connection library you’ll use or object relation or map you’ll use will sort of automatically handle escaping SQL as it goes into the database.So it’s pretty unlikely and a lot of cases that you’d wind up with SQL injection vulnerabilities. Although obviously, if whatever, I don’t know, they said there were 11 million… they blocked 11 million and there were 12% of those were SQL injections and it’s definitely not gone away.Patrick: Yeah. The actual total was 15 million. And just to add on to your point, is it sort of like, I don’t know if you want to call it a consolidation but it seems like for all the different content types of people share, more and more are there are all these prevalent applications like WordPress or blogging and CMS and the other options that are available.Whereas in the olden days, there is more custom solutions that were programmed just for that website. Now you have these tools that people are really focused on and as such, the people behind those tools and the communities behind them are really focused on these areas and they’re really thoroughly vetted and as more and more people up for those commonly solutions, SQL injection as a problem goes down. Is that fair?Louis: I guess you might be able to make that argument. Although, the issue then is that for example, for something like WordPress which has a very open plugin architecture…Patrick: Right.Louis: It’s extremely easy for some random plugin to have an SQL injection vulnerability because all the plugin has to do is try and be stupid and hit the database directly or take input from a form and can catenate that directly into a database query and boom, you have a vulnerability.While that is probably true of people using it as an vanilla word press install or any of these other systems, you know, Magento, Free Commerce or Drupal over for figure CMS type sites, it’s not true as soon as you start adding in these plugins that are written by developers that have maybe less discipline, less oversight, there are fewer people working on the project that’s not as tested as the overall framework is.Obviously, it’s something that if you have an application, you really need to be paying attention to. And if you’re using any kind of plugin and WordPress don’t just sort of, you know, go out there and grab the first thing that comes along.If you are familiar with a bit of how these attacks works, and you should be as a developer, pop out in the code files of the plugin and just have a quick look. In the case of SQL injection, it’s really obvious because database input has to be sanitized.In the case of XSS as well, that’s just the case of looking at any kind of input is sanitized either in the way in or the way out for script tags for example. There are some credence to the fact that did the prevalence of some larger systems might have had an impact on decreasing some of the more common attacks. It’s maybe not as true as you’d first think because there are all these plugins.Kevin: Yeah. I would have to agree with that. I mean, it all comes down to the developer that’s building something, right? Whether it’s you or somebody else. Like with WordPress for example, with the use of the Vanilla Install, sure, you’re fairly secure. But as soon as you start using another developer’s code, like a plugin, right, you won’t have the assurance that you need unless you know that developer or you’ve seen their code. It’s kind of this trust trade kind of thing.Patrick: And just to show where these types of, you know, attacks have grown from numbers wise. Q2 versus Q3. Directory traversal was the number for Q2 with 43%. It’s now 24%. Cross-site scripting, 27% goes to 35%. SQL injection, 21% falls to 12%. Then the big gainer is really the cross-site request forgery which went from 9% to 29% and another anomaly here is that stats that the other 3, all are originating for the most part from North America but for some reason, CSR is coming from Europe. I don’t know what the Europeans are doing with the cross-site request forgery but obviously something is going on there.Louis: Right. Yeah. I mean, CSR is interesting because it’s a little bit trickier and it requires that you really have some way of validating. Ruby on Rails for example has request forgery protection built in but that is not something that’s obvious necessarily if you’re building your own system. I think it’s not as frequently covered in a lot of introductory materials.Whereas, you know, telling a newbie who’s learning PHP that he has to escape anything that goes to that database and that he has to escape HTML output that’s being… that was generated and it’s being sent to the ’s browser, explaining how to prevent CSRF is something that I don’t see as often in most introductory texts or lessons, but maybe as this becomes more prevalent and a more widespread attack vector, it’s quite possible that that will change.Kevin: Yeah. I think one of the things that has always kind of brings up is just making yourself more knowledgeable, specially on the subject of plugins and that kind of thing. There’s this directory of exploits that you can go to. It’s called I think exploit-db.com. Yeah. That’s it. Basically, you can go here and you can just look up any kind of exploit you want. Maybe one for WordPress or Wordplus plugins.Usually the more popular things are on there. If that’s not enough for you, there are a number of tool kits and the flavors of Linux that you can use. I personally used Backtrack Linux to do pin testing for my own sites whenever security is of importance. It has a lot of cool tools in those things that you can check out to kind of help you along the way.As you begin to learn, you can kind of look into one tool, right. XSS attacks maybe, and you can do some pin testing for that and that kind of thing. So there are a number of places you can go to check these things out but I think those 2 are pretty good starting points. Do you use anything for that or do you do pin testing yourself?Louis: Yeah. In my case because we’ve got a fairly… I don’t want to say we have a big team. There are like 5 of us but our Dev OP CIS guy is really focused on the security side of our applications. On the developer side for those of us who just write application code day in and day out and I’m one of those. Obviously, you keep in mind these things but, again, the types of frameworks we’re using, we rarely if ever write SQL queries directly.Almost all of that is handled through the ORM. Outputting HTML obviously putting it through escape but they’re on to a lot of situations in our application where we allow s to enter HTML and then have it. Everything does get escape.Yeah, it’s something you definitely have to be aware of but in of actually testing it, that’s not something that I take care of directly.Kevin: I’m kind of in the same boat. I’ll boot up… if you want to find, it’s backtrack-linux.org. I’ll boot that up every once in a while. Just to kind of see like if I have a questionable plugin or something like that, you know.Louis: Yeah. I guess, you know, if you’re using WordPress with a lot of plugins or if you’re… you know, I think it’s more of a concern for people that either have an entirely custom map where they don’t have the benefit of a big open source community like WordPress or Rails or Drupal with have or they’re using plugins from, you know, smaller single developers or anything like that.That’s not to say that if you’re using just Vanilla WordPress and you’re keeping it entirely up to date or likewise, if you’re using, you know, Rails or any Python library and keeping it up to date, thatyou’ll be safe. But it’s harder to make a rookie mistake if you’ve got a good level of code behind you. I have not seen this backtrack-linux.Kevin: It’s awesome.Louis: Do you want to explain like a little bit how it works? How does having a different distribution help you to do the penetration testing?Kevin: Yeah. Backtrack Linux is basically just, I guess it’s a flavor of Ubuntu. I’m not even sure specifically about the technical aspects of it. But what you do is you install and again, it gives you the command line and you have boot into the GUI from the command line from there. Once you to have that up, it’s basically just a ton of prebuilt tools that help you to pin testing that are all out there. It’s really just gobs and gobs of these open source tools that are out there and I mean, personally, I’m not a pin tester.I just go through the menus, find the ones I want to run or I do Google against the Backtrack and find out which tools I need for certain things, just to kind of test. Overall, it’s really nice because it gives you the interface to kind of go through and pick the things that you want and test the things that you want to.On top of that, like because they’re all in there, you can kind go through and see oh, here’s a new tool that I don’t know about. Let me check that out, do a little bit of investigation. I use it to learn mostly, just to kind of see hey, here’s something new that I didn’t know. Also, to utilize the ease of use that it has for me, you know. Just to be able to turn it on and go and share something.Louis: Very nice. Something to, definitely something to have to look at. Cool. So it’s interesting and the story didn’t come across my filter. I was just going this morning to check out what’s new on Readwrite Web and I noticed that they have launched a new site redesign. I thought that’s interesting to talk about. Not so much the business aspect but from a technical point of view, it’s pretty interesting.It is, first of all, it’s a fully responsive site, which I guess is to be expected from a new technology site redesign at this point in time. I think I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t. But there are a few other interesting technical tidbits. One of them, I don’t know if you guys have noticed this but the way the sidebar scrolls is done so that sidebar sort of scrolls differentially from the main content, if you’re scrolling down the main content.I think it’s set up so that when you get to the end of the article, you also get to the end of the sidebar, which I think is really cool because a lot of time you’ll have a sidebar that’s really shorter than your main content and as you use the scroll, suddenly there’s nothing. There’s this big white space off to the right or the left. And as they read through the content this way, there’s always something there if you want to, and you know, makes your ads a little bit more visible if you rely on advertising or makes your additional content or additional options a little more visible to the . I thought that was pretty cool.The other thing I thought was interesting about this is if you look at the blog post written by the new editor in chief of Readwrite.com, so it actually also changes names but I’ll get to that in a second. And in this blog post, he mentions that the new design was designed sort of with a tablet first approach, which I guess is kind of unique because you hear a lot of people talk about mobile first as an approach to design or you sort of start with a bare bone of mobile view. That gives you sort of the ability to not have to worry about sort of, ‘OK, we’ve got this desktop centered website. Now we have to cram everything down into a mobile view’. Instead, you start with a bare bones, then you sort of add on features.We’ve spoken about this several times on the show before that it provides sort of the ability to have a really fast and lightweight mobile experience and it only add what you need. But in this case, taking a tablet first approach is really interesting. I think for a news site, I think they’ve, you know, I don’t know whether it came from their site statistics. Whether they see, 30% or 40% or 50% of our s are accessing it on sort of a medium sized touch screen.We’ll focus for that. I don’t know. What do you guys think about tablet first as an approach for design for something like this where it’s content and news and that’s exactly the kind of thing that I think most people do to tend to consume on tablet devices.Kevin: I feel like this was a CEO decision. I just get that kind of instincts. Like, I have this iPad and I want it to look nice. That’s what I would do if I was a CEO. I’m not lying either. That’s what I would do. Make it work on my device.Patrick: Yeah. I mean there’s a number of changes that have taken place since it’s been acquired by ‘Say Media’ which happened in December. The rebranding was announced a while back. I they’re mentioning that some change from ReadWriteWeb to Read White, and now have a new design and the new editor in chief, Richard McMan has just departed and Richard is … I met him a couple of times in conferences. Really nice guy. Always very approachable and obviously ReadWriteWeb is a very influential tech publication.He created something with a unique voice and it’s kind of sad to see him go but obviously everything comes to an end. The new editor in chief is actually Dan Lyons who used to be the technology editor for Newsweek and might be best well known as ‘Fake Steve Jobs’. And he’s made the rounds for many different publications. So…Louis: I did not realized that he was ‘Fake Steve Jobs’.Kevin: Yes. This is the one, the only Dan Lyons. As far as my thoughts for the design, I mean it’s nice, it’s clean. I can see the merit of the tablet first approach as you described it. I did noticed that scrolling thing. That’s kind of the first thing I noticed, was how it was scrolling differently and you know, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t know that I love it. It’s just there. It’s nice. It’s very clean versus the old ReadWriteWeb.The advertising is, ReadwriteWeb, I don’t know. I’m trying to think back to the last it’s on but they were… I don’t think they were as heavy as a lot of other sites. And this is kind of particularly add light. Yeah. I mean I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s very clean. It is very appealing and I hope it works out for them. You know, I don’t wish them anything but the best.It’s always kind of weird to see those kinds of brands that are well established with the web and the tech, like ReadWriteWeb could just change name and change domain and I know that they put in all the necessary time picking all those redirects in place. Redirect all the old links and the old stories to go to Readwrite.com. It will be interesting to see how it changes under Lyons.Louis: Yeah. Just a bit more from a technical standpoint. One of other things you’ll notice as you just go around the site and click around the site is that it appears that almost all of the content is loaded in with Ajax. So if you hit a link, you’ll get the frame of the page load straight away and then a little bit of the Ajax spinner as the content gets loaded in with Ajax which is interesting.Now, that was an approach that was also taken as I think one that you mentioned we’re talking about before this show in the Gawker Media Redesigns. There are a few differences here. One of the differences is that obviously ReadWriteWeb or ReadWrite.com is not using sort of hashbang URLs. So the URL is just a regular URL. It’s year/month/date/title slug.One thing I do notice always, that this site feels to me a little bit slower than I would expect. I don’t if you guys are having the same sort of experience. It feels like I’m used to things being a little bit more snappy, clicking through an article for example feels like it’s less than optimal to a moment and I’m sure there’s a lot of optimizations that will be possible. It just seems like they’ve really gone all out on the design and the features of the site and everything really works gorgeously. Like you said, the redirect work which is something that Gawker didn’t do so well on.It feels like in of the speed, there’s definitely something lacking and I think maybe that speaks to an important factor when doing this kind of redesign, you really have to consider the speed as a feature and, you know, it feels like there’s a definite decrease in quality there from the older site. I don’t know if you guys are experiencing that as well.Patrick: Yeah. Actually, I am experiencing what you’re talking about I think. I click link “A”, not so impatient that I just like, “Oh well, screw this site. I’m leaving.” But it is there. I clicked, 1, 2, 3, 4, I’m actually waiting right now. It just loaded. That was just to load one article.Louis: It’s definitely a several second load time.Patrick: Yeah. I see the spinner thing. I don’t actually get a frame myself. I get the spinner thing until pretty much everything loads at the same time.Louis: Yeah.Patrick: I’m just looking at the white screen with that spinner thing until that moment.Louis: Yeah. So, you know. That’s one of the things I kind of wanted to talk about because in this case, I know you want to be critical of the team that was responsible for this redesign. It’s a fantastic piece of work obviously.Patrick: We hate them and it’s ugly. Go ahead, next.Louis: Obviously, it’s a very pretty site. I like the lay out. It gives you this big image on the front screen. Obviously, the responsive notice of it is fantastic as well. It looks great on a small screen. But, when doing this kind of redesign, let’s just say for the sake of argument that from clicking a link to seeing the article or to be able to start reading the article on the old site was, you know, 1.5 or 2 seconds. Then after the redesign, it’s 4 and a half or 5 seconds.There’s a really important question of whether what kind of progress that is and, you know, whether that’s a direction that the business feels comfortable going. Especially given… I mean, we’ve talked about this several times on the show before, the number of studies that come out showing, you know, pretty dramatic results in of conversion, in of engagement with even fairly small changes and performance. It seems odd that it would have gone live without a lot more optimization in of speed.Patrick: Yeah. Just some that you can add to that point is did you know if Gawker is still doing this exactly because their site seem to function a little differently than I when that whole thing first went down.Louis: Yeah. So their weird scrolling, like when the… I think it’s actually come back to more of a normal website style thing now, a little bit. No, they still do the weird scrolling. OK.Patrick: OK. Do they, OK. It kind of all scrolls at once. I’m not sure what… it’s like different now and there’s no like hashbang thing going on and I don’t know.Louis: No. They’ve dropped hashbangs. It used to be that the stuff was just systematically broken. If I would hit a, you know, especially going from mobile because there’s a number of redirects going on because there’s an Australian version of Lifehacker for example. It’s like Lifehacker.com.au. Then furthermore, there was a mobile version. Someone had posted a link to the mobile version or to a full story on Twitter, I click it on my phone and it tries to redirect me to the mobile then redirect me to the Australian version and essentially, I wind up on a home page and the article was just gone.It would happen pretty frequently to me in the months after the redesign where you would click on a link in Google and you get a 404 because the redirects were just not in place or that the hashbang URLs weren’t working. Whereas, that’s definitely not the case anymore and, you know, back button works and everything you’d expect.Patrick: OK. Cool.Louis: And then the other thing that’s striking here is that it seems odd that in of performance, what’s actually happening here, when you click the link, the link isn’t loading in Ajax. It’s actually sending you to a whole new page. The page ships you back down the top frame and all the Javascript. Then, it starts loading in the content by Ajax. I don’t really see the advantage of doing that if you’re going to be loading in the content by Ajax, why not just do it on the page that you’re already on so that way, you save the that extra request and that extra reing all the head content of the HTML.Maybe it’s in progress and it wasn’t quite ready to go and we will see something like that in the near future. But it just interesting to me that for a redesign of this otherwise fantastic quality, things like that and it could be such a significant decrease in the performance of the app.Kevin: You know what. Now that I think about it, I was like I’ve seen this before somewhere where they tried to fade it in to make it seem elegant and I Google did that a while back and they no longer do it.Louis: Oh yeah. Right. That’s sort of, yeah, yeah. When the content first loads, it’s not like boom, here it is.Kevin: Are you talking about the Google search, like as it adds things to the page as you type more words? Well, no. The Google homepage at one point, they had set it up to where it was just a Google logo and the search bar.Patrick: Oh, right. Kevin: Then when you move the mouse, everything would fade in, including like the navigation and all.Patrick: Yeah.Kevin: And they’ve removed that. Looking back on, it was quite annoying that Google is doing that. It just felt, I don’t know. It just had a weird feel to it like, I don’t know.Louis: We’ve been talking about this for long enough that I am going to actually do some real testing here.Kevin: I’m doing a page speed insights with Chrome or for Chrome.Patrick: I’m spinning back and forth on my chair, waiting for your results.Louis: OK. There we go. Now I just got content on the screen at, I believe that was either somewhere in the area of 17 to 19 seconds from a hard refresh that I saw the content on the second. Going back in the timeline, so the initial HTML request, well, there’s a lot of latency there. It takes about half a second for the server to respond to the initial request. Yeah. A lot of this is latency.Even stuff like the, the actual time is pretty limited. The CSS file is a 9 kilobyte GF file which is fine. That’s nice and small. But there’s a 200 millisecond latency before the server even responds to the request to serve it to me.Kevin: Looks like a lot of the things that I’m seeing too are like responsive images.Louis: And there is a lot of Javascript files that are not combined. So I’m getting… well, it’s OK. Some of this is from Discus or discuss or whatever you want to call it. But none the less, that was much worse than I expected. The point at which I saw content on the screen or I saw the article content on the screen was nearly 20 seconds of load time which frankly, no matter how good your website is, it’s pretty unacceptable.Kevin: Yeah. I’m looking through the Google page speed and they’re serving up the…Louis: So that time it took 14 seconds.Kevin: We are working this down, aren’t we? They’re serving up the Twitter.com widgets.html twice and pulling that in twice. I don’t know if that’s due to separate pieces of content. Meeting different things. I don’t know. But that’s a significant… you know, it’s 20 kilobytes.Louis: Well, yeah. I mean it’s not so much that the raw size of most of the things here that I find disturbing. It seems like the server takes a long time to come back with it. So that time was… everything was a little bit faster that time. I still didn’t see content on the screen until about 12 seconds in but I was looking at more along the lines of… we’re now still a few milliseconds of latency for every request including just static files.Kevin: Yeah. It doesn’t even look like their files are minified. I’m looking at CSS and it’s broken up in different lines. I mean there are some basic things that you can do to avoid, especially with a site like ReadWriteWeb. It’s the little things that add up when you have a site of this scale. And if you don’t get those right, you may get the larger items right but, you know, if you’re not compressing and saving every little bite, it can make a big difference specially when you’re trying to serve out a page initially and a bunch of people are coming to it.Louis: Yeah. So again, and this is only based on the latency of getting those CSS and javascript files. But it feels like in order to get in the latency that high, those files would almost have to be served from the application.Kevin: No. This is of course is just a feeling but I feel like a lot of these issues are coming up from the responsiveness of it. Like it needing to be responsive. I feel like a lot of these things that appear to be overlooked may have been those hours, right. When you think about project, everybody has hours internally or externally. I can feel like those hours that they needed to optimize this were eaten by the responsive team if that makes any sense. Like, because there’s a trade offer to make. You have to launch something on time.Louis: Yeah. I mean obviously there’s a lot of time. Yeah.Kevin: I don’t know. That’s just been my experience with the projects working externally with companies and also internally as, you make a trade off because you want to launch a feature because you have, you know, press releases time for all these things. And so you make commitments to get the word about something that you’re doing and you have all these articles written for specific date times and so you have to launch it, right.Louis: Yeah.Kevin: And with responsive, I mean they have like, 3 different versions of the site. I feel like, I think it will speed up overtime, is what I’m saying. I feel like they just haven’t had the budgeted amount of time to launch this.Louis: Yeah. I mean, like I said. There’s a ton of things here. So just, like you said, just looking at the page speed and bytes, there’s definitely a few things that are straight up, sort of easy fixes. Like I said, the latency serving, the static files seems much higher than it would be if they were served by something that was a lot more light weighted. Feels like it might be, you know, trying to load up all app stack if it’s hitting either the PHP upper rails to serve the statics because again, you know, where was I, I can’t even the numbers I was talking about there.Kevin: You know, Amazon went down today. I wonder if they’re having to switch servers maybe because they’d be using… I don’t know but I’m just saying like Amazon did go down today. So…Louis: Amazon did go down today.Kevin: That could potentially be playing into this.Louis: That’s entirely possible. So maybe we’re in… maybe we’re being entirely unfair here. Right. So I don’t want to dwell too long or probably too late for that, on these perceived performance issues because all in all again, it is a gorgeous redesign. I think it does a lot of things really well. Obviously it’s a big step in the direction of responsive taking over the internet and I think that’s really good. I think it’s great to see.And even if it doesn’t work for whatever reason, I think it’s good to have big case studies out there of sites that have gone different approaches. You know. Like we’ve talked about the Gawker media redesign and with the impact that that had on sort of using Ajax as instead of navigation and how it played out and I think it had a lot to do with the fact that virtually no sites do take that hashbang approach anymore.So one way or another, it’s going to be really interesting to see how this plays out but obviously it’s great to see a big project embracing new technologies and trying things differently because it means that, you know, if you’re a shop trying to do responsive, you have this another case study that you can point clients to. And so “Hey, this is the sort of thing that we can do and this is how we can adapt to all the screen sizes that are out there.” So big congrats to the team, you know, all our minor rivals aside.So, perhaps, Patrick. You had another story.Patrick: Negative SEO has been a bit of a buzz phrase here for a little while. And if you don’t know what it is, negative SEO is the thought that competitors or people who want to hurt your searches and rankings would buy links on other sites or acquire links on sites that are not good websites. So that Google views it as bad links, bad websites.And just kind of a phenomena was created because Google made a switch where they started to treat bad links, links and bad neighborhoods as for their own distinction as negative votes against your site rather than just ignoring them as they had done previously.So this whole negative SEO thing came about and to address this concern, Google has launched a new tool. It’s called the disavow links tool. And it kind of like the whole lot of word aside disavow but disavow is the word they chose. And this was announced at the Pubcon Conference by the head of the webspam team, Matt Cutts.And as you can imagine, the tool is pretty straight forward. You can specify particular links, URLs, domains and so on and so forth, URLs and a text file and then Google will probably ignore them and treat them as if they were a no follow up link.Now, I say probably because Google has said that Google, they reserve the right to trust their own judgment. But for the most part, they’ll typically use the indication you provide when they asses links. And Cutts it can take weeks for any changes to go into effect.Now, this article that I’m bringing from here is from Danny Sullivan at Searchengine Land. And Sullivan asked Cutts about why doing the disavow links thing versus just ignoring links as they had in the past and they kind of ignored that and focused on the benefits of the feature.One of which he said was people who have purchased a site or come across a website that has links from bad sites and now they want to create a “clean slate”. So, something for people who buy sites on Flipem, maybe you have a site that has a bad link in.Louis: Thanks. Thanks for the plug there.Patrick: And it allows you to kind of clear that out. So, yeah. I mean that, in a nut shell is what this is about links to what will I’m going to do, will I get to ignore the effect of these “bad links” and hopefully negate the idea or the thought that someone would use negative SEO against you. Now, I kind of turn this around and, you know, Google is obviously very smart. They have a lot of smart people working there. I’m not questioning the all mighty Google per se. But, if you can consider, I mean if this is really even necessary. I mean do they really need to treat links as negative votes. Couldn’t they just ignore them? What do you guys think about this?Louis: So it’s easy to sort of to look at it at that way but I think if you think back, and I don’t exactly when it was but I think there was a point in time and I want to say it would have been around 2 years ago when web spam was really at its worst, when almost any search that you did on Google for just, you know, sort of an informational search, the top results would be these useless filler content websites with tons of ads and pop ups and it was, it was just so much junk.And to be fair, in my personal experience at least, in of doing the searches, I find that Google has gotten a lot better in the last year. And if part of that was, you know, taking people who are doing really over the top SEOs and things are over optimized or that were, you know, link farmed and penalizing those sites rather than simply ignoring the bad and letting them, you know.Because if you’re spamming the internet with links and links and links and links, some of them might be in bad neighborhoods but some of them might be in good neighborhood and some of them might not be flagged as bot links or some of them might. So if you just take a scatter shot approach and just put links to your site absolutely everywhere and some of them happen to be good and some of them happen to be bad, just ignoring the bad ones doesn’t help to reduce the quality of your thing or to reduce your ranking.So what Google wanted to do, I’m guessing, is just take, well if the person is just spamming the entire internet with links back to their site, not only is that an indication that we should ignore some of the links that are in bad neighborhood. It’s an indication that this person is behaving unethically in their attempts to rank their website and even though we can’t necessarily algorithmically identify the links that appear to be in good neighborhoods as bad links, they probably are bad links.They were probably acquired either maliciously or paid for. And so, you have to kind of off set that. So I think it really did a good job. I don’t know if you guys had the same experience but it felt like for the past few years have gotten really, a lot better in of web span.Patrick: Right. I once think that like Sullivan’s point though is that what they did is they created negative SEO, right. They created the idea of it because what they’re saying is they can identify the bad links, algorithmically.Louis: No. I’m saying you can identify some bad links. But let’s say if I have a website and I want to rank it, right? So I go out and put, you know, links all over the internet. I use the malicious script to inject the links in some places. I buy links from Linkfarms. I do everything I can to generate the most amount of links, right? Even if 90% of those can be identified as spammy links. If 10% of them are good, that still might put me ahead of a legitimate competitor who would rank higher based on equality of their contents and the equality of their links.But because, you know, through this scatter shot approach of bombarding the entire internet with links, I managed to get in there that Google’s algorithms couldn’t catch, I still win. The point of devaluating those negative links is to make it so that If I’ve got, you know, 90% of obviously of spammy links and 10% at good links, I shouldn’t just have that 10% for free.There should be a cost to the fact that I’ve got this 90% spamming links. And then obviously negative SEO is a consequence of that. One of the things that I think it might get missed here is that, you know, whereas the idea of going out and getting links and, you know, getting people talking about your content is something that any content creator or business owner can understand. The idea of using this link as a valid tool, the idea of negative SEO is pretty complicated.So if one of your competitor is engaging in these kind of unethical tactics, it means you actually have to go out and find out about how this had happened and all that. I think Google might be, maybe a little bit out of… do you feel like that’s a bit out of touch, like do you feel like it’s maybe out of reach from most people who have websites if they are the victims of negative SEO to know how use this link as a valid tool?Patrick: Well, to me, I think that’s a fair point and I just wonder about kind of the process behind this because it’s one of those cases where like we can talk about negative SEO but I can’t talk to anyone in my family about that. And some of them run a business that have websites, small business and they don’t… that doesn’t with them. That’s not a thing.So it’s tricky where if you have that one person in a market who knows what that is, and is unethical and they used that to their advantage, then how is the people even going to know, right. Because I don’t know a whole lot about this because I haven’t read about some of the things like a legal warning which Sullivan wrote about. I guess there’s some notification but he kind of alluded to not being very helpful to people. And yeah, I mean that’s kind of my concern here because I think I guess there’s a trade off there because like you said, and I don’t know how much I really…It’s Google’s index. They could do what they want. I just don’t know how much I really trust Google identifying this link as bad, this link as good. But that’s what they’re going to do. So I have to live with it. I see the trade off there because you can penalize for the bad links. Let’s assume they’re all bad. Google’s algorithm is 100% right. In that case then, that’s good. They do penalize people who have those bad links. They’ll allow people to rise up. I mean the trade off is then being that it will be used negatively. It’s not if, it’s will be. There’s no doubt about that.And then a lot of people who will be used against won’t have any idea, won’t be able to see and receive the warnings and as such will just be impacted. How much will it impact their business, who knows? I mean obviously we’ve heard businesses that have lived or died by the swing of the Google results. But yeah, I mean there’s a trade off for everything.But to me, I think it’s worth discussing, it’s worth thinking about kind of the negative impact of this but I’m sure Google has done that and it’s good to have a tool to disavow those links. I just don’t know exactly how I’m going to be aware.Louis: Yeah. I think, well, obviously it’s something that web developers should be aware of and I think we’re maybe reaching a point now where Google has provided enough tools and enough information where your everyday kind of, you know, small design development shop can have a little bit of just basic SEO knowledge of knowing how to get your…. and it’s not about SEO like in of, you know, going out and getting links or, you know, doing keywords research and figuring how to rank.It’s just a matter of doing all the basic stuff that you need to get your site the best chance that it can and that means, you know, claiming your local listing in Google local search and local search and other search engines as well. And it probably also includes using things like tools to find out what keywords you’re ranking for and maybe buying ads for those keywords or… and it also will now include, you know, being aware of are there links out there that according to my website, that are negative and how can I do a good job of eliminating that.So it seems like some kind of SEO services that aren’t what we traditionally think of when we think of SEO services. I’m not, you know, I’m not at all talking about. Even if you do nothing in of keyword research or crafting keyword for this content or link generation, if you don’t do any of that but what you do is those basic steps of, you know, keeping your profile with the search engines clean and focused on the important links that are legitimate. I think that’s a really important service for a lot of smaller web developers or small design agencies to offer to clients because it doesn’t, you don’t need to know a lot about search engine optimization and how search algorithm is worked to do that.You don’t need to be an SEO specialist. You can be a web designer. A developer does WordPress stuff and as part of setting up your client’s site, you the local search results. You set up a Google tools and start monitoring these things and just, you know, provide that as add on now. It’s something that you can potentially also charge on an ongoing basis for if it’s, you know, something that you would say “We’ll monitor links and make sure that nobody’s doing any kind of spammy attacks on your search engine rankings in the future.” And it’s something, I think it’s a very white hat approach to doing SEO for clients and I think it can be really good for developers to have that toolbelt. So, it’s good for Google to provide these tools for, maybe if they’re not usable by website owners, they’re at least usable by the people who built the websites.Patrick: Yeah. But you realize how much of a scam that sounds like to an average person like Google creates the problem. So they offer tools that other people can charge the unknowing public to use. It’s essentially to create the problem, create the market and create an extra cost for the average small business. So I mean, I’m just… I’m not saying I absolutely feel that way but you know, you really did explain that out like that, I mean that’s how a lot of people will realistically and honestly fairly interpret it.Louis: Yeah. But to be fair, that problem already existed. That problem existed since the dawn of search engines, right. Before Google did anything to combat web spam, any small web development could say we’ll also provide, you know, get you to the top of Google.Patrick: Right.Louis: And that’s it. It’s the same spam. Except now, what they would do to do that is like I said, buy links, farm links and that reduced the overall quality of the experience for Google’s primary costumer which are the searchers, not to be blowing the websites. So, now I feel like the service that a web designer would be providing is less spammy than it was in a sense that now, what you should be doing is, you know, playing by the rules.If you notice that there’s something wrong, go through Google’s channels to fix it, make sure that everything’s nice and tidy and well organized and you’ve got good quality links but don’t go out there and farm them or buy them. So it feels like that’s a more stand up thing to be doing. All you’re doing is kind of maintaining a good relationship with Google on behalf of your client.And that’s not the same as spammy links in my opinion. I thinks, yeah. I understand it can sound that way if the way, you know, depending how you sell it to your clients but to me, it sounds more legitimate than the situation that we had 5 or 10 years ago with SEO, sort of spammy SEO companies, cheating clients and the same time just creating a huge spam problem for the rest of the internet.Kevin: At the end of the day, if you don’t like what Google is doing, you just switch to Bing.Patrick: Right. I mean we can all say that, but you know. Yeah.Kevin: It’s just that the issue is my e-mail is tied to Google and my documents are tied to Google and…Patrick: Right.Louis: And my maps and my phone and…Patrick: And for a lot of web master web site owners, they represent a majority of the revenue and certainly majority of the traffic. So it’s a powerful stick.Louis: Yeah. Certainly.Patrick: Spotlights?Louis: Yeah. Let’s do it.Kevin: Let’s do it.Louis: Cool. I’ll go first. My spotlight this week is a little tool that, one of my coworkers just happened to cross, I think on Hacker News a couple of days ago, and forwarded it through to me and I thought It looked really cool. So I will, I’ll share it with you today. It is a tool called JQ which is a little bit confusing because you might think it sounds like jQuery or jqtouch or anything like that but it’s nothing like that at all. It is a command line tool. So along the lines of grap or sed or any of those, you know just a very lightweight command line tools that anyone works from a Linux command line will be familiar with and what it does is it processes Jaison from the command line. It’s written in portable “C”.So it has no dependencies. It’s a single binary. You put it in your bin directory and it just works on basically any Unix machine I assume. I haven’t tried it on OSx but we’ll definitely work on that next. And what it allows you to do is just if you go to the tutorial page, you can get an example. So you know, you might have had the experience of, for example you want to look on API that returns Jays on and you want to just get an idea for what kind of thing it returns.And sometimes, if you need to do auth or if you need to do include a key or if you need to do a post request rather than just a ‘get’, it’s not exactly as convenient to run that just through your browser or if you’re going to get a lot of data and you want to be able to search through it and just, or filter it down. Again, using your browser can be really awkward. But in this case, you know, you can URL that you’re targeting to curl and then pipe that through JQ and either get all of the results which get really nicely formatted.There’s none of those sort of backslash escaped slashes, everything’s all nicely printed out and formatted or you can just use a sort of a selector style functions to get just a subset of a result. So if you only want for example one particular node in the Jaison, you can just through some filtering arguments and get access to that. So it seems like for things like investing, Jaison API are working with Jaison in either a shell script or just playing around in the command line. It seems like a really powerful tool. So I thought people could check that out. It is at stedolan.github.com/jq. I’ll put the link in the show notes.Kevin: Very cool. So my spot light for today is on Jonathanbrooke.com and he writes a blogpost about testing and debugging media queries using CSS. It’s kind of a cool little technique. It’s basically CSS pseudo elements and he just kind of uses it before and after elements of course and just post the message to the top of the screen saying what size the browser is. It’s kind of like an interesting little technique.Louis: Cool. I will definitely check that out.Kevin: Now, I send you the link!Patrick: All right.Louis: Go ahead.Patrick: And my spotlight is a blog of sort hosted on WordPress.com. It’s at fakedrpepper.wordpress.com. And I recently came across this and if you’re familiar with Dr. Pepper, the soda, you might also know that there are of knock offs of Dr. Pepper. And so this blog is called ‘Not quite what the doctor ordered’. And all the post were May of 2008. So I’m not sure if it’s just sort of, you know, database or library sort of website here.But no matter, that fact that it’s 4 years old, it’s still from his point of read through. Because you get all just a bunch of the Dr. Pepper knock offs that are out there, what they look like and the different names and, you know, I just found it funny.I was recently doing something with some Dr. Pepper knock offs and I came across Dr. Perky at Food Lion. And I really thought, you know, Dr. Perky. I don’t know if I would trust Dr. Perky, but, you know, everyone has to choose their own doctors. So yeah. This is kind of a quirky little side if you, especially if you like Soda. But yeah. Have a look through all the different store brands and knock offs that are out there or at least a great chunk of them or the Dr. Pepper brand.Louis: Dr. Thunder.Patrick: Yeah. Dr. Thunder. That’s the Walmart brand. I’ve actually, that’s something… one of the ones I had.Louis: Dr. Springtime.Patrick: Rocky Top Dr. Thunder, or Dr. Topper. Sorry. Rocky Top Dr. Topper. That’s weird.Kevin: I mean there’s a lot of doctors out there and there also this sort of thing where some of them use a period after the R, some don’t like Dr. Pepper doesn’t but then some of the doctors use the period.Kevin: Right. I don’t know how that stands grammatically but it does differentiate them to some extent.Louis: Is this actually a thing? It’s like, forgive me from my foreigner question. But in the United States, there’s some kind of law where Cherry Cola has to have the name Doctor.Patrick: No. And you know, Cherry Cola isn’t really what Dr. Pepper’s even viewed as over… I mean, Dr. Pepper kind of markets themself as this unique spiced drink, kind of the spiced genre but yeah. I mean Mr. Pib actually call themselves I think as a spiced cherry… do they use the term cola or not? I don’t know. But yeah. No. It’s not a law, it’s not a rule. Actually, the funny thing about it…Louis: Obviously, I was joking.Patrick: That, was that, you know, Dr. Pepper started in 1880s and Mr. Pib which was the Coca Cola brand competitor started in the early 70s, 1970s. And they started as Pepo, but Dr. Pepper sued them and they ended up with Mr. Pip. Later Coke tried to buy them but were are blocked for antitrust, saying that there might be a monopoly of the quote Pepper softdrinks. So as you could see, it’s actually pretty serious business, the pepper drinks.Louis: Right. Because the base is still, it still taste mostly like Cherry Cola, right? There’s an extra something in there but…Patrick: Yeah. I mean I think for Dr. Pepper, it says there was 27 unique flavors in Dr. Pepper. But obviously different people taste different things.Louis: All right. Well, the Sitepoint Podcast, your number source of information for the web design development and spiced colas. All right. Take it away.Kevin: So I’m Kevin Dees. You can find me at kevindees.cc and @kevindees on Twitter.Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe. I taste soda at sodatasting.com on twitter @ifroggy.Louis: I am Louis. You can find me on twitter @rssaddict. You can find Sitepoint on Twitter at @Sitepointdotcom.You can follow the podcast on the web at sitepoint.com/podcast and you can e-mail us. The address is [email protected]’d love to hear your comments, suggestion and thoughts on the show.So yeah. Go ahead and get in touch and obviously, you can find the show on iTunes as well.That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening and bye for now.Produced by Karn Broad.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 184 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Colin Ihrig (@cjihrig) about the new website from Sitepoint called JSPro.com where Colin is the Managing Editor.Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #184: JSPro.com with Colin Ihrig (MP3, 16:05, 15.4MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryLouis and Colin talk about the launch of JSPro.com, what it’s aims are immediately, and how it aims to move forward. Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/184.Interview TranscriptLouis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. With me on the show today is the managing editor of SitePoint’s latest content site, which is JSPro.com, Colin Ihrig. Hi, Colin.Colin: Hi, Louis.Louis: Hi, and welcome to the show.Colin: Thanks for having me.Louis: Yeah, so we’ve just launched a new site, really, all about JavaScript. Do you want to talk a little bit about what JSPro is and how you came to be involved in it?Colin: Okay, so JSPro is basically the SitePoint network’s new place for everything related to JavaScript. We’re going to be covering things like jQuery, Node.js, native JavaScript — plain old vanilla JavaScript — and just everything on the topic. The way I got involved was I was originally just a writer for SitePoint, and I asked Tom, the editor, “What could I do to be more involved?” And I was originally just planning on writing more articles, but he said, “Oh, well, we have this new site launching. How would you like to work with it?” I said, “Sure.”Louis: Right. So I take it you’ve been working with JavaScript for some time?Colin: I taught myself back in high school and, basically, every job I’ve had since then, I’ve been working with it.Louis: Right. One of the things that was surprising to me when I found out that this new site was being launched, I thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s great — a good, new site by JavaScript — that makes sense.” And then I thought to myself, “Well, that’s funny. I don’t know any other sites that spring to mind as a place to go to find tutorials and information by JavaScript.” So there was nothing off the top of my head, but then even when I looked into it, I couldn’t really find anything. So I wonder if it’s maybe just sort of a sign of a new stage in JavaScript’s development that it’s the right time for a site focused on JavaScript? I was thinking things like CoffeeScript and Backbone.js and Node have only been around for a few years, so does it seem to you like now is a good time for this?Colin: Well, I think it’s a combination of a few things. First, for a long time JavaScript had a bad reputation and it was just something that teenagers would put on their websites to make things blink. And second, there are a lot of blogs out there and random websites that have some content, but JavaScript has evolved to the point where there is so much with so many different libraries and everything — client-side, server-side – that to get everything in one place is just really hard, and we need a site that is collective of real people, or working lists such as JSPro.Louis: Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing the kind of stuff you’ll be covering. Have you worked with Node.js, for example?Colin: Yeah, I have worked with it personally and professionally.Louis: Right. For anyone who’s listening who’s not familiar with Node and what role JavaScript can play on the server, what are the sort of situations you’d want to consider using Node for?Colin: Well, Node.js is really great because a lot of people associate it with just servers, but you can do a lot of other stuff with it like run scripts, like shell scripts, instead of having to use DOS or Perl or something like that. But as far as server development is concerned, it’s really good for sites that need a lot of throughput, so something that needs to scale up to tens of thousands of requests per second, because Node.js has a fundamentally different engine under the hood than web servers like a Apache and Microsoft’s offering.Louis: And for someone who’s coming from a client-side JavaScript background, is it a big shit to start playing with JavaScript on the server- side. Are there a lot of the APIs that are very different?Colin: Well, Node.js has a fairly small core but an awful lot of libraries, so you can go out onto GitHub and find an API guy to do just about anything. And it is still just regular old JavaScript, so you don’t have to learn new syntax or anything like that. And the programming model is all asynchronous and really reminds me of programming for the GUI on client-side. So he presses a button and something happens in the browser window. With Node.js, somebody connects to your server and then something happens, or you connect to a database and then you wait for something else to happen and enable your results to be returned from the query. So it’s a lot different than running VHD. But if you’re familiar with JavaScript on the client’s, not the output.Louis: Right. And you mentioned it is plain JavaScript. That sort of leads me into talking about CoffeeScript. Is CoffeeScript something that you’ve worked with?Colin: I haven’t worked with it. I’ve read a few articles that we’ve been posting on JSPro. Personally, I don’t really care for the compounded JavaScript languages, but that’s a personal thing.Louis: Yeah, I’ve sort of been the same. I always look at it and think, well, it’s sort of pretty, but JavaScript isn’t really that hard. I don’t find that typing those curly braces is really eating into my time that much.Colin: For me it’s also a matter of, you write your CoffeeScript and then you’ll most likely compile it into JavaScript. And if there’s a bug and you need to debug the JavaScript somehow, you’re going to need the Node anyway, so.Louis: Yeah.Colin: And like you said, it’s not the toughest language to learn, at least not the basics.Louis: Right. So you mentioned that there is already a fair bit of content up on JSPro. What are some of the pieces that you’ve liked the most or that you’ve had fun working with in your first little while as managing editor?Colin: Right. So we’ve been up for, I think, around two weeks now, and I’ve been working with a couple of authors: one guy, James Edwards — he goes by “Brothercake”. He is doing some really good work on modular design and things like that, and in the next coming weeks we’re going to have a five- part series from another author, Jeff Pereason… Sorry, I’m pronouncing his name wrong, but he’s going to be, basically, developing an HTML5 game with submarines and missiles and torpedoes — it’s really cool. So, you should be on the look out for that.Louis: Right. I know there are quite a number of libraries that exist for HTML5 Canvas games. Is this something that’s he’s doing from scratch directly with the Canvas API, or is he working with some kind of library?Colin: I believe he’s working with jQuery.Louis: Right, but nothing game-specific?Colin: I don’t think so, no.Louis: Right. While I’m on the topic of frameworks or libraries, is there anything in of JavaScript frameworks or libraries that you’ve encountered recently and that you thought were pretty cool?Colin: A lot of what I’ve been working with recently has been Cheerio, which I don’t believe is very new.Louis: It’s new to me. It’s new to me.Colin: Yeah, so if you’re not familiar with Cheerio, it’s basically jQuery for Node.js. So, say you’re doing web scraping and you’re going out and pulling in all these webpages into your server to parse them instead of trying to use regular expressions or whatever else you would try, you can build up the dorm and then query using the same selectors as you would on the client-side with jQuery.Louis: All right. This is cool. I just pulled it up from the GitHub page. And it can also do, I think, in-place editing of the HTML, as well?Colin: Yes.Louis: So it does the same manipulation options as jQuery?Colin: Yeah. So what I’ve found is that it’s not quite as robust as jQuery, but it’s pretty good and it’s not nearly as old, so I think it’s only going to get better.Louis: Right. Is it HTML only or would it work with XML as well? Or is that maybe something that they’re planning?Colin: I haven’t tried it with XML. I know that it doesn’t parse your JavaScript for you, so I’ve been doing a lot of web scraping lately, and when it comes time to actually parse JavaScript, you either kind of have to go towards another module called VM, which you can parse JavaScript in and execute it. It’s kind of like an eval function but nicer. And at the total opposite end of the spectrum is, I’ve been using headless browsers. It’s called PhantomJS and it’s basically a webkit, except without the GUI, so you can do just about anything with that.Louis: Yeah, I’m familiar with PhantomJS. We use it for a few things, one of which is just running JavaScript tests in a headless mode.Colin: I like it so far.Louis: Yeah. I was on the Cheerio GitHub page, and it does mention that it can parse XML documents as well. So that’s definitely interesting. I’ll put a link to the GitHub page in the show notes. Cool. Another thing I wanted to talk to you a little about is one of the pieces that you wrote on JSPro, which was referring to, I think, a new JavaScript API that’s being added to some browsers, which is the navigation timing API.Colin: Right, right. Originally, I wrote that article for SitePoint. This was back when I was just a writer. And we did content for JSPro for the national launch so we took that and published it on JSPro. The API itself is useful not as much for the webpage experience for the client, but for the developer to see what’s going on with page loads. Until those APIs came around, a lot of people were using date comparisons, which have a lot of drawbacks, for example: JavaScript timing is notoriously inaccurate, but also, we can only time so much of it because you only have from the point that JavaScript loads until the page finishes loading to really test your load times. You have no idea about what’s going on server requests and DNS lookups and things like that. So the navigation timing API is built directly into the browser and it gives you much more fine-grained control over timing numbers.Louis: Right. So does that give you access to a lot of the same information you would normally get by looking at the network tab, like the developer tools in Chrome, for example?Colin: Yeah, pretty much, except this lets you play with it programmatically, and it’s not going to be Chrome-specific.Louis: Right. I’m just having a look down at the list of events which are available — it’s pretty extensive. How fine-grained is it, for example? Can I look at load times for each of the images that are requested as part of the page load, or is it more for the page as a whole?Colin: It’s more for the page as a whole.Louis: Right. And so in practice, I guess, what you might use is… Rather than doing all of your debug locally and saying, “Well, it looks fast from where I’m sitting,” you could, for example, include some code using this API for some of your s and then report back to the server to see what the performance is like for your site in the wild?Colin: Yeah, exactly, because when you’re testing your own page, you’re usually near the server or behind the corporate network. When things go into the wild, any number of things can happen. So this allows you to get a lot more reporting just from somebody on the other side of the world running your site in Firefox as opposed to you running it locally in Chrome.Louis: Right. What is the browser like for this API at the moment?Colin: Oh, I wrote that article a few months ago, so I’d have to look it up on caniuse.com, right now.Louis: Right. Here we are. Just pulled it up. Looks like IE from 9, all the modern Firefox and Chrome, Android from 4, Blackberry 10, and Chrome and Firefox for Android. So it’s missing in Opera and Safari and iOS Safari at the moment. I guess IE 8 as well, but IE 8 doesn’t count.Colin: I think that’s pretty good . I mean, any time you can get Internet Explorer working, that’s always a plus.Louis: So I see there’s more content being published on JSPro, pretty much daily? What’s the current schedule looking like?Colin: The current schedule is Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.Louis: Right. And I also understand you’re still on the lookout for authors, as well?Colin: Yeah, definitely. We’re always looking for more content and more authors. Just go to JSPro.com, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Become an Author” link, and it will have all the instructions you need for, basically, getting in touch with me, and we’ll go from there. If we think you’re a good enough writer, then we send over an article and if you’re accepted, then welcome to the team.Louis: Right. And is there anything in particularly you’re looking for? Is it pretty much anything to do with JavaScript as go?Colin: Yeah. Obviously, it has to be related to JavaScript, but there’s a side menu on our page: jQuery, APIs, Tools and Libraries, Engines, Node.js — we’re looking for all that stuff and more. In particular, right now, personally, I would like an introduction to jQuery article. I have a couple of people sending me articles covering how to write games and how to write plug-ins but nothing on how to get started, so that would be great. I have a couple of people sending me requests for Node.js but, like I said earlier, there’s a ton of different libraries out there, so definitely looking for more stuff on Node.js. And just anything I haven’t covered, we’re still looking for it.Louis: All right. Yeah, so again, anyone who wants to check that out, the address is JSPro.com. And like you said, the link to become an author is at the bottom of the page. I might put a link to that in the show nuts as well.Colin: Just one last thing. If you’re interested, if you’re a reader, on the right side of the page is a box for you to subscribe to our newsletter that’s going to start within the next couple of weeks, so sign up.Louis: All right. Well, thanks a lot, Colin, for taking the time to talk to me this week. If any of the listeners want to keep up with you, do you have your own blog or Twitter, or are you exclusively on JSPro.com at the moment?Colin: I have my own blog. It’s www.cjihrig.com. And I’m also on Twitter: cjihrig. My author link on JSPro should have all that information if you’re interested in following me.Louis: All right. Well, thanks again, Colin.Colin: Thanks for having me.Louis: And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and bye for now.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 183 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have 3/4 of the , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #183: Social (MP3, 35:48, 34.4MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics such as a new paid social network, testing and several typography related topics! Here are the main topics covered in this episode:WebPlatform.org — Your Web, documentedSocial Buttons Aren’t Worth It | MailChimp Email Marketing BlogBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/183.Host SpotlightsPatrick: Official Website – The Art of Explanation, a book by Lee LeFeverLouis: Zeus – a Ruby gem for preloadingKevin: How to destroy angels_ Keep it together_ [official]Interview TranscriptLouis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint podcast. We’re back with our every other weekly roundup of the latest news and events in the world of web design and development. I’m ed on the this week by Patrick O’Keefe and Kevin Dees. Stephan is away this week. Hi guys.Kevin: Hello.Patrick: Click and drag continues.Kevin: Yes.Louis: Yeah, clicking and dragging still.Kevin: Let’s just pull this joke out of the way longer than it needs to be.Patrick: Stretch it.Kevin: Stretch it.Louis: All right, so, Patrick, you were saying you were asking around on Twitter for what stories we should cover and you came up with a lot of people who replied with the same story that I had identified as being something I wanted to talk about on the show. So why don’t we dive right into that?Patrick: Yeah. I asked on Twitter and Dale McGlathery, Joe Anzelone, and Andy Con all responded with the same story. When I saw it I thought very strongly that at least one of you would have it, if not both of you, just because it seems like it’s being talked about like crazy today. So, let’s talk about it ourselves. It’s webplatform.org. It bills itself as an open community of developers building resources for a better web regardless of brand, browser, or platform. In the launch blog post which was made today they said that they aim to have accurate, up to date, comprehensive references and tutorials for every part of client side development and design with quirks and bugs revealed and explained. Now, this isn’t just another online community. This is being backed by Microsoft, Opera, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Nokia, Adobe, HP, and the W3C. They said they wanted to put out this alpha site, which is what they’re calling it, in the earliest possible point in the spirit of release early, release often. So they want to improve it in public with the web community’s help. Now, the organizations I mentioned are called stewards. They’re stewards for the project and it says they’ve enabled the W3C to convene the community and grow the site. Those organizations have put a lot into it and they’re basically pledging to put people, content, money, and effort into this site. But this blog post stressed they’re doing so as peers with the same privileges available to anyone else who builds up trust and becomes a site . Right now, webplatform.org is mostly a wiki. It also has a forum, a chat room, a blog, but their focus is really on the wiki and on growing it to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. So, I know you guys are both web developers. So, how do you look at this site? Is it yet another resource or do you feel like this really has promise?Louis: Yeah, I mean right at the moment, again as you mentioned, it’s a very early release. A lot of the parts of the wiki are not fleshed out yet, so there’s sort of a lot of missing chunks in various sections. But it does seem to have a lot of tutorials, a lot of different pages on just about every aspect of JavaScript and HTML and CSS and SVG that you could imagine. I would love to see this become as good a reference as possible. It’s great to have a place where you can get access to really good quality documentation and guides that step you through everything you need to know ing a particular aspect of the technology. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Rails Guides. It’s part of the Ruby on Rails community documentation effort, which has just been a stellar piece of documentation…Kevin: Yes.Louis: …since Rails 2.3 when they really decided that getting the community involved in the documentation was as important as getting the community involved in working on the code for an open source project. I think that, yeah, it’d be fantastic to see something of that quality for sort of the regular front end open web stack.Kevin: You’re talking about apidoc.com/rails, right?Louis: No, I’m talking about…Kevin: Apidoc.com/rails?Louis: I don’t think so. No.Kevin: Okay.Louis: I think that’s just the API docs. Yeah, that’s the API documentation, which is fine. I was referring to the work that goes on or the content that is available at guides.rubyonrails.org which contains some sort of longer form pieces just sort of explaining each sort of section of rails. So if you have a look at that page and scroll down, you’ll see there are these big… Yeah, pick any of them, say layouts and rendering, and you’ve got this – it’s essentially a book I guess that covers all the content. But I was just bringing that up as an example…Kevin: Okay, yeah. This site is really good.Louis: …of a community documentation effort that I see as sort of a really, really high standard and I would love to see, like I said, this webplatfrom.org thing reach that level of quality. It’s definitely not there yet. But I think it’s good of all these companies to come together and put together a website like this. As I’ve it mentioned, in the past for a lot of these things what you’d wind up doing is you’d wind up on either the Mozilla Developers Network which has extremely good documentation for a lot of JavaScript stuff. Or you’d wind up on Microsoft’s website where they have some content about various CSS3 stuff and JavaScript stuff.But they’re always presenting it in sort of like, “Oh, in IE 10, you’ve got this thing, and it’s awesome,” but not explaining it as a standard. So, it’s really great to see a place where it’s kind of free from any of that branding effort, as they say in the pitch.Kevin: Yeah. I mean the site to me, again, feels very alpha. I think that’s the hard part about talking about a site that’s this new too is the fact that it is so new. There’s just not all the content. The video kind of really, I think, is the best part of it where it explains where they’re headed and what they want to do. But as far as the actual content goes there are a lot of things that can be done to make it better. But they have all the pieces there that show the potential. I think that’s the coolest part of it is the potential that this does have.Louis: Yeah, one of the things that does strike me though – I guess it surprises me a little. I can understand the involvement of some of these other companies or organizations. It seems odd for Mozilla because they’ve put so much effort into making the Mozilla Developer Network site an amazingly useful reference with complete information and cross-browser compatibility information and really making it something that it never felt like it was trying to push Firefox or trying to push Mozilla as a brand. It just felt like it was trying to give developers all the best information. So, I guess it’s a bit surprising to see them also throwing their weight behind this other project although I guess the more options there are the better for the community.Patrick: Yeah, and it’s almost like if they were not there people would wonder why. They’d ask W3C and Mozilla, “Why aren’t you there if Microsoft is there and Google is there? Opera is even there.” Because Firefox is, at this time, the third most popular browser in the world and falling – falling behind Chrome and Internet Explorer with Chrome being number one now. It’s almost like that omission would be strange. I think it would be a lack of credibility for the project in a way but also why isn’t Mozilla coming to the table?Louis: Yeah, for sure.Patrick: Because Mozilla has that reputation of being very community- minded, community-centric, as you said, great developer resources, very good resources in general for using the browser. Yeah, it would seem weird for them not to be involved. So maybe it’s just a guilt trip. But I’m sure it’s more than that.Kevin: Well, on the www1.webplatform.org, it does have Mozilla’s logo down there so I don’t know.Patrick: Yeah, they’re involved.Kevin: Okay.Patrick: But we were just discussing the possibility of them not being involved because they have such great resources already. So, if they spent that much time, why be involved here as well doing the same thing potentially?Kevin: I always have conspiracy theories and that kind of thing. I always like to talk about the subliminal and the unreal.Patrick: Microsoft’s behind it. It’s really just Microsoft. They put their logos there illegally.Kevin: So, outside of that, I actually feel like this could possibly be part of the browsers and these entities trying to – almost the removal of the W3C? I could be crazy for saying that, but if you have a hub where all these entities can come and build a community and get from authors then basically they’re getting the most valuable information they can get, period, which is, “How can we make our browsers better?” Right? So, this community just isn’t about documentation. It’s the old Microsoft technique of, “Hey, we just gave you this error message. Would you like to send a report to Microsoft?” It wasn’t that if something crashed on Microsoft computers it would say, “Would you like to send a report and tell us that it broke?” But it wasn’t that that bug was necessarily being helpful to fix the problem. It was letting them know, “Hey, these are the applications that you are using.” So if the browsers get in here and they say, “Well, here are the bugs and these are the ones that people are complaining about,” it’s like, “Well, these are the features that people are using,” right? So they can start implementing things earlier and earlier and kind of scratch the itch that we have and be kind of more competitive and more rapid in their progression of development. So, instead of having these things on Mozilla’s site and the W3C and over here and over there, they can have this one hub where they can just pull any idea they want and implement it within their rendering engine. So, to me, this almost feels like they’re trying to get information from us so that they can… I mean, this is good for us I guess. But basically kind of take the W3C out of the equation to where they’re going to be like, “Hey, this is what people want. We’re just going to do it, and then the W3C can try to fix whatever we break.” I don’t know. I mean, it’s again a conspiracy kind of thing going on there.Louis: Yeah. I was just going to disagree with all of that.Kevin: Come on, Louie, aliens are real.Patrick: So, the counter to that I guess is that the site obviously goes to great lengths to say that it’s convened by the W3C and it’s made possible by these people. How I view it is that the W3C is saying essentially, “There is so much out there that can be written about these topics and there are so many things that we can write about, so many resources we can provide. We really maybe can’t do it ourselves. So, we want people who have to work in this space, who influence this space, to this project so that we can do it together.” I don’t know that the W3C should be expected to put together what they are dreaming of putting together with this project. So for me it’s just backing for the W3C more than anything else.Louis: Yeah, there’s a big difference between the kind of specification work that they do and the kind of documentation work that’s expected to take place here. It’s never been in the role of the W3C to write educational material.Kevin: Yeah, that’s not what I’m saying.Louis: Yeah. No, sorry, I was just responding to what Patrick was saying there.Kevin: Yeah, sorry.Louis: With respect to your larger point, I don’t know. I’m not sure I buy that. I think from spending any amount of time looking at the bug trackers that both Mozilla and the Chromium project and Opera – and I’m sure also IE but I haven’t looked at them, but at least the open source projects – and seeing how developers request features and how decisions get made about what goes into the next version of a given rendering engine. I find it hard to believe that a documentation website would be the place that a browser maker would want to go to find that stuff rather than relying either on the new specification work that’s coming out of the working group or the direct that they get from developers in their bug trackers and in their issue trackers and feature requests coming in through there.Kevin: I think the point is there is no silver bullet to picking a new feature. You don’t like, “Okay, we’re going to use this one metric and that’s going to decide our features.” It’s a combination of everything.Louis: Yeah. I think by and large, though, at this point the browser makers are more or less implementing everything that the working group presents as a new specification relatively quickly or at least as face as they seem to be able to and as well as that working on any other sort of new experimental features that they want to drive and bring to the open web. But, yeah, like we were saying earlier, the most interesting part of this is going to be if it does get filled out with more documentation overtime and really becomes a useful resource. I guess, like with any wiki or community project, there’s sort of a tipping point or a critical mass that if a lot of people get to it and get involved and start writing good documentation then that brings everyone else to it. That really allows it to maintain a really up to date reference and really good and well- written information. So, it’s just a matter of building up that community and obviously having all of these big backers behind it sort of lends it that credibility that might get people on board initially. If people are on board initially then it can just snowball up to the size where it really becomes the core online reference that you first think to go to when you want to look up, “Oh, wait. How exactly does CSS border radius work? Or how does JavaScript garbage collection work across different browsers.”Kevin: Yeah.Louis: Right now there is no place to go and find all that information and it would be fantastic if this thing takes off. So, yeah, if you’re a documentation-minded individual who knows a lot about how browsers handle things or even just feels like writing up some content to explain how a particular CSS property or a particular JavaScript function works then this is a great blank slate to get involved and start helping out the community, so exciting times.Kevin: Yes, it is. It surely will be interesting to see how these companies operate together and what role they try to set a play.Louis: Yeah. I somehow get the feeling, or at least the vibe I get out of this is that it’s really aimed at being a community project. I think they just want to build up a community and then hand it over to some maintainers in the community as quickly as possible so they just put their name on it and then step back. Maybe people internally in those organizations are going to contribute a lot of content, and that’s certainly possible. But it feels like the kind of thing that they just want to sort of – they want it to exist and they think the best way for it to exist is if they all put their name on it and that lends it enough legitimacy in the wider community that people do get involved and start building it. Then, it becomes a self- sustaining thing.Patrick: Some of the content is coming from these companies, like you said. One of the most obvious examples of this off the bat is on the Microsoft page it says that the Web Platform Docs community initiative was provided with over 32,000 topics seeded from MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network. So, we talked about Mozilla and their work. Obviously, Microsoft has their own major developer resource as well, and so a lot of that content has been pulled into this as well. Though, the Mozilla page doesn’t say that explicitly it wouldn’t be surprising if those resources were also coming over in some form. That’s basically the collaboration we’re talking about. How do we want to wrap it up?Louis: I don’t know. How do we want to wrap that up?Patrick: Okay, wait. Okay, I’ve got it. Stop, collaborate, and listen.Kevin: Hey, I just noticed something really fun about this.Louis: Ice is back with his brand new invention. How can you flow on anything, but that from that, Kevin? I’m disappointed.Kevin: No, I just wanted to point out that I noticed under Home Stewards that they have Apple on this list. But it’s just a hash. There’s no Apple. They have Apple in here, but nothing’s under Apple.Louis: Where am I supposed to go to find this?Kevin: So, Home, and then click on one of the logos at the bottom. Then under Stewards on the breadcrumbs it’ll have Apple.Louis: Oh, right.Patrick: That’s a good point. It’s almost like that page needs to be edited. Someone should fix that wiki.Kevin: Yeah, Apple, come on. Anyways…Louis: Oh, yeah, interesting. So, it’s in the list but there’s no logo and there’s no sort of spiel about what they’re involved.Patrick: That should lend to the conspiracy theorists right there. Apple’s there but they’re not there. It’s sort of like the ghost.Kevin: Yeah, I think these other companies are trying to say something about Apple. I’m kidding. But it’s always fun to say that. Anyways, I’m sorry. I did ruin the awesome segue there.Patrick: Don’t collaborate with me again. Just stop when I say stop with the first. Don’t follow the collaborate and listen part of it.Kevin: Oh.Patrick: I’m just kidding.Kevin: Yeah, I’m sorry. So, to even butcher this segue even more, as I do, because I’m great at segues.Louis: Here it comes.Kevin: Yeah. So, if you’re looking to do these social log-in buttons on your website, you’re doing it wrong according to Aarron Walter. So, social log-in buttons aren’t worth it is what the article says.Louis: Wait. We transitioned a bit too fast there. I think we needed a bit more time.Kevin: Okay, time lapse.Patrick: Bathroom break.Louis: I’m just messing with you. So, what are we talking about when we’re talking about social log-in buttons?Kevin: So, we’re not talking about Like buttons as you had alluded to earlier, Louis. We are talking about the click to with Facebook and Twitter and maybe LinkedIn or Google, or OpenID, or whatever it is. Basically, there’s been this article written, blog.mailchimp.com, and I’m sure the link will be in the show notes.Louis: The link will be in the show notes.Kevin: It’s a post on October 2nd, so that will give you enough context to kind of find it for yourself if you want to while you’re listening. Basically it goes through and talks about how failed log-in attempts were not necessarily crippling MailChimp, but kind of creating this annoyance within them internally like, “Hey, wow, this is a real problem,” right? So, all these attempts happened from April 12th to May 12th, 2012. There were approximately around 340,000 failed attempts. So they thought, “Hey, maybe we should put Facebook and Twitter in here to help lower this number.” So, they pushed a bunch of updates, Facebook and Twitter were part of that, and they saw an enormous decrease in the amount of people that were having these issues. If you read along the story you basically come to find that it wasn’t due to the log-in buttons from Facebook and Twitter. It was actually due to better error messaging, kind of letting people know what was wrong with their log-in attempt. For example, if you typed in a bad it would tell you, “Hey, your is wrong,” not email and . So, they were basically saying, “Hey, instead of obfuscating the error messaging, we’re just going to tell you what’s wrong,” and it really helped people out. So, basically this blog post went on the scene and I believe they tested the social media buttons for about a month is what I get from this article. Then, they removed them because the CEO was like, “Hey, these aren’t really helping us with our log-in attempts.” So they saw a dramatic increase. But the comments in this were actually really, really interesting if you read through the people’s opinions on whether or not social media log- ins should be used, are they secure. There were points in here that, “Hey, we don’t control the security of these log-in buttons,” that kind of thing, like the API and all that stuff. So there was an interesting kind of conversation around all this, and so I was just wondering, hey, maybe we could talk about social media log-in buttons, if they’ve effected sites positively that we’ve made. I guess you could go as far as comments with this. But basically, the whole premise of this was that they didn’t want to have Facebook and Twitter branded on their log-in screen. They wanted to say, “Hey, this is MailChimp. We’re not MailChimp plus Facebook and Twitter. We are MailChimp, and we don’t necessarily want these buttons. You know what? They’re not actually helping us all that much.”Louis: Yeah. The one thing that resonates with me and I think it’s in one of the comments in the updates is that if you can create an with the name and , or you can log on to Facebook or you can log on to Twitter, what inevitably is going to happen to the is they’ll get to the page the third or fourth time, and then their session will have expired. They’ll be like, “Oh, now I have to how I logged in last time,” right? You might think, “Oh, well I probably just used the name and because I do that on every site.” But maybe you didn’t. Maybe you clicked with Facebook. So, unless the is really consistent – and I know I’m not, especially if I’m on my phone and I don’t feel like bringing out the onscreen keyboard and typing stuff in if I want to just hit with Facebook because it’ll be easier, and then I get an created.But the next time I come to the site, I don’t that I did that and I think that’s one of the big struggles here.Kevin: Yeah. I totally agree with that statement.Louis: Yeah. I think to some extent, if you’re working on a service that is or can be tightly coupled with one of these other services in your s’ minds – and a good example of that is something like Klout, which really sits on top of Twitter. So in that case it makes sense to just use Twitter as the log-in because your s will have Twitter s and it’s the only reason they’d be using your service. Likewise, a project that I’ve been working on recently is really sort of an extra dashboard view that sort of sits on top of Google Analytics, and without having a Google Analytics , you won’t really get much out of it. So, we’ve provided only with Google as the only option. We don’t even let you enter a name and , because that is easier. You click one button, you get redirected, and you’re there.Kevin: Right.Louis: So, that’s great as long as you keep it simple, and keep it from being confusing. If you only provide one option, then I think it’s legitimate. But that means you have to be really convinced that all of your s are going to have s on this service, and that’s a rare situation. You don’t want to usually tie yourself to, “Oh, sorry. If you don’t have a Google , you can’t use our thing.” So, I think under normal circumstances, you would need to provide multiple options, and then as soon as you start providing multiple options, you face that difficulty of confusing s. But I think we haven’t seen the end of this. In podcast #173, we talked about this other blog post from a web development company called XOXCO in Austin, who were writing about trying to implement -less log-in, where it’s really just an email reset. Basically, every time you click on a button it sends you an email, and then you click on a button to as if you were doing a reset every time, rather than trying to a . But all this goes to show that this is still a really, really open question and there are a lot of ways to approach it. It’s great when you have a big site like MailChimp with a lot of data come out and sort of experiment with things and provide the results of those experiments, like in this case.Patrick: There are a couple things that come to mind as I see this. You mentioned, how you might not what you used. I, myself, am meticulous about this and it goes back to the SitePoint podcast days with Kevin Yank, where we used to joke about mistrusting OpenID. I just don’t do that stuff. I use a name and . It’s in Kee. Every is different for every site, very meticulous. But I think what is important to consider with this sort of decision is the type of service you are.With MailChimp I almost don’t really see the need for that, because – I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my view of consumer products, mainstream products, versus niche services, enterprise business, more niche tools. I don’t really see the need, the necessity, for MailChimp, a mailing list service provider to provide Facebook log-in and Twitter log-in. I mean, I understand it can be convenience, but I don’t see that as necessary. I don’t want Facebook Connect on Amazon either. I have an Amazon . I’ll there. That’s not to say others wouldn’t want it. But that’s just not going to be as popular as, say, using it with a mobile app that’s brand new where people might now want to create the name and on this throwaway app and they’ll just do a Facebook Connect. I know Gary Vaynerchuk did a talk recently and he said that if you don’t have Facebook Connect on your mobile app he’s not going to sign up. He might be exaggerating a little bit.Louis: Yeah.Patrick: But the point is on that medium people are far more inclined to use your app if you have Facebook Connect. Whereas if you’re more of a, I don’t know, not a mobile app but a consumer facing website, a public facing website, I don’t know. It really depends on what you’re about, what you provide, and who your customers are. With the MailChimp I don’t really see it as being as meaningful as with sort of a generic mainstream website or service.Louis: Yeah, I think that actually does raise a really interesting point. In my mind – and I’m going to try and express this with a thought I just had and you’ll have to bear with me – but for each business, I think you just have to think realistically about how your customers are going to think about their s with you. I think in the case of MailChimp, and I think you hit on this point exactly, MailChimp s expect and understand that they will have a MailChimp because their stuff lives in their MailChimp . That makes sense and it’s not in any way strange. But like you said, for a lot of mobile apps, like, I get some app and it expects me to sign up just so that it can save my data or sync my grocery list to my girlfriend’s phone as well.That is one of those things where, “Do I need an for this? Do I really need a name and to make this work? I don’t have an . I’m not going to log-in on their website and go look at the thing. I just want the app to work.”Patrick: Right.Louis: That’s a situation where it’s hard to create a mental model in the s mind of, “I have an on this site, or I have an with this service.” You might think, as the developer or as the business owner, “Well, of course everyone wants an on my service, and then they’ll come and sign up and change their setting on the website.” But you’ve really got to take a hard look at what you’re doing and think, “Well, maybe they don’t actually want that. Maybe that’s not something that people are going to want to do.” In those cases, that’s a great time to think, “Well, is there, for example, based on my s, do I think that 99% of them are going to have a Google ? If so maybe I should just do log- in with Google.”Patrick: Well said.Louis: That way they don’t have to think about, “Do I have an to sync my grocery list? My grocery list syncing is,” whatever.Patrick: So you don’t keep that grocery list on lockdown, like two- factor verification?Louis: Exactly, I’ve got two-factor authentication on my grocery list app. That would go swell.Kevin: Right.Patrick: Every time you need to add an item to your grocery list, you should have to have a special ID texted to you. Then you have to go to the website, enter that ID alongside your name and just to ensure that that grocery list stays as secure as it needs to be.Louis: Yeah. I wouldn’t want to accidentally have someone hack in there and get me to buy all kinds of unnecessary peanut butter.Kevin: Wow. Modify your… “Why did I buy all of this pizza? I don’t understand. This app has brainwashed me.” Patrick shows up at your place it’s like, “Did you get my pizza?”Louis: All right, I thought we were being a bit too serious so far this show, so thanks for kicking it back.Kevin: Oh, you’re welcome.Patrick: Absolutely.Kevin: Hugs all around. To bring it back serious – boohoo – to further the point that you’re making, both of you, is the fact that MailChimp lets you sign in with Twitter and sign in with Facebook for the comments for their blog. So, it just goes to show that it is based on the context of what you’re trying to do and how far you’re willing to go do some of these things because comments are agnostic, right?Louis: That’s another great example though. Yeah. Comments are great because when you want to leave a comment on a blog that’s not something you think of as requiring an . I don’t want to sign up for an on your blog.Kevin: Right and you’re not. You’re not. I mean, you just punch in a name, email, website, comment – boom, done.Louis: Yeah. But if I can just pull in an avatar and then link off to my Twitter where people can find me, it’s a social thing commenting on a blog, I think Twitter is a great way of doing that.Kevin: Yes, absolutely. I think that it really is what it comes down to and if you read just the title, if you read, “Social Log-in Buttons Aren’t Worth It,” and then you go leave a comment, of course you’re not going to understand. It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to go leave a comment,” and then it’s like, “Oh, sign in with Twitter.” Oh, well, you just totally contradicted yourself from title but you skipped everything in between, and you really can’t do that.Louis: Yeah, there’s a lot of content there and I think unfortunately just the nature of news on the web is that those kind of titles really do tend to get a lot of attention so I think there are reasons why.Kevin: Absolutely, they’re the best. I mean how would we have a podcast without these kind of blog posts? I mean, really?Louis: Well, would it have to have had that title? We’d never have seen it if it hadn’t had that title.Kevin: Yeah, exactly. I would have been like, “Oh, great. Yeah.”Louis: All right, well do you guys want to do some host spotlights? I think it’s around about that time of the day.Kevin: Absolutely.Patrick: Kevin, hop on your segue and let’s hear your spotlight.Kevin: All right, so speaking about MailChimp and log-in stuff, there’s this YouTube video.Louis: You’re not even trying anymore.Kevin: I know. Hey, man, there’s no way to transition that.Louis: All right, let’s see it.Kevin: Yeah. So, I guess I can start off the spotlights today. I have found a wonderful video on YouTube that I have yet to watch. It was shared to me on Twitter by one of my dear friends, though he didn’t actually share it with me. I just kind of found it on his feed. But anyways, I guess I should give credit to Mr. Brad Garrett and it’s just this sweet little video that I haven’t watched yet, but it’s cool. He always sends cool stuff so I know it’s good even without having seen it yet. But it’s How to Destroy Angels, “Keep It Together” Official. It’s a music video.Louis: I’m trying to figure this out. Yeah, it’s a music video. There’s actually very little happening in the video. The entire video is just tape reels spinning while the song plays.Kevin: That’s so hipster. It’s so cool.Louis: This band, How to Destroy Angels, is a new project from Trent Reznor, who most listeners would probably know from…Patrick: “The Social Network”.Louis: What? Was he in “The Social Network”? Oh, he did the soundtrack, didn’t he? That’s fine. No, I think you’re right.Patrick: Yes, he did “The Social Network” soundtrack and he did it with Atticus Ross.Louis: Who is also in How to Destroy Angels, right, also widely known for his work with Nine Inch Nails which was his band – or still is his band. But anyway, so he has a new project, How to Destroy Angels. I had not heard of it before. I’ve now watched the video of some tape reels spinning while some rather somber electronic music plays.Patrick: What’s also interesting about How to Destroy Angels and we were just talking about this on the Copyright 2.0 is that Reznor made a lot of headlines splitting from a major record label. How to Destroy Angels actually represents the return to a major as he signed with Columbia for this project, so proving that there is a lot of diverse routes to take your project just like anything else. Like a book, there are benefits to going with major publishers. There are benefits to going solo. So, it should be interesting especially for fans of his work. I’ll take it from here with my spotlight which is a book. I’m taking us on a trip of enlightenment for this spotlight.Louis: Oh, boy.Kevin: Here we go.Patrick: No, the book is called “The Art of Explanation” and it’s by Lee LeFever. Lee is from Common Craft, who a lot of people will know from their Paperworks videos, “Explaining Things in Plain English”, “Explained by Common Craft”. One of their first really big videos was “Twitter in Plain English”, which was featured on the Twitter home page for a long time. They’ve gone on to build this really great successful business around very high quality explainer videos. So, this is Lee’s first book and I think it’s going to be great. I say that I think because I haven’t read it yet because it’s not out. But what I would say is that Lee is the type of guy and Common Craft is the type of company where it’s not even a point of me needing to read it. I have it already coming.It’s in the mail on the way to me now. Everyone needs to know how to explain and I think that’s where this book is going to help people with a lot of good tips on how to communicate ideas clearly, very good for developers talking with clients for example. But really anyone needs to know how to explain and I’d recommend just giving this book a look if you are someone, as we all are, who needs to communicate with other people. So, check it out. It’s called “The Art of Explanation”. You can pick it up on Amazon.com. You can pick it up wherever books are sold and the website for the book is artofexplanation.com.Kevin: That’s interesting.Louis: Fantastic, yeah.Kevin: You did a very good job explaining that.Louis: Maybe you don’t need this book. That was very clearly.Patrick: Thank you. I’m sure I still need the book.Louis: All right. My spotlight for this week is a little Ruby library or gem as they’re called. If you’re a Ruby developer, especially if you’re a Rails developer, it’s a gem called Zeus which was released quite recently I believe. It’s at github.com/burke. B-U- R-K-E is the ’s name and the project is Zeus, Z-E-U-S, like the god. So, what it is, it’s a gem which will pre-load your entire Rails app in the background, and then once Zeus is started and running, anything else you need to use that requires loading the Rails app, and that includes starting up a console or running your specs or tests, takes place a lot faster. So, whereas usually you might look at that usual ten to 15 second start-up time before your console drops you at the shell or before your tests start running, if you have Zeus running in the background and you try and run these things with Zeus rspec or Zeus Console, the start-up time is reduced to less than a second. So, especially if you’re doing test-driven development and you want to switch back and forth between writing code and then running your tests very frequently… That period of time when you just sort of sit there staring at a blinking cursor before your tests start running is probably one of the more annoying parts of your day, at least I know it was in mine. Zeus especially in combination, he recommends if you go to the page you’ll see some information there. But there’s also a new version of Ruby that you can get. That’s Ruby 1.9.3, but they’ve back ported a couple of performance fixes from the 2.0 release into Ruby 1.9.3. So if you’re running that patched version of 1.9.3 along with Zeus you’ll definitely see those cycles of running specs or starting up a console get a lot faster. I think it’s really good for productivity and for focus because you do get distracted during that time. Even if it’s only 20 seconds, if it takes one minute to what you were doing then you’re a lot worse off. So if anyone is a Ruby developer check it out. The link will be on the show notes.Kevin: Very cool, I’m going to have to check that out.Louis: All right, so I believe that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Who are we? Why are we here?Kevin: Yeah. So, I’m here because I like to do podcasts and I’m Kevin Dees at kevindees.cc and @kevindees on Twitter.Patrick: I am Patrick O’keefe. I taste soda at sodatasting.com and on Twitter @ifroggy, I-F-R-O-G-G-Y.Louis: I’m Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter at @RSSaddict. You can also find SitePoint on Twitter at @sitepointdotcom. That’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m. You can find the podcast on the web at sitepoint.com/podcast. You’ll find all of our past episodes there. You can them. You can subscribe to the RSS. Obviously, you can leave comments, let us know what you thought, and you can reach us by email, [email protected]. We’d love to hear what you think. Thanks for listening and bye for now.Produced by Karn Broad.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 182 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews John Allsopp (@johnallsopp) about the series of conferences he works on, Web Directions and more.Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #182: Web Directions with John Allsopp (MP3, 41:25, 39.8MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryLouis and John talk about the Web Directions conferences, what has been added to them in of startup talks, and his history of the web timeline at WebDirections.org/history using Timeline JS. Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/182.Interview TranscriptLouis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. With me on the show today, returning to the show, is Mr. John Allsopp. Hi John.John: Hey. Good to be back. Thanks for having me.Louis: It’s good to have you back. John is best known as one of the founders of the Web Directions series of conferences of which the flagship event, Web Directions South is coming up in just a couple of weeks, so I really appreciate you taking the time out of what I imagine must be a very busy schedule this time of the year.John: Yeah, it gets hectic. You think you’d have all your ducks lined up, everything ready to go, but there’s always keynote speakers who can’t make it.Louis: Yeah.John: Actually, it’s the first time it’s ever happened, but it’s always very challenging, and, you know, I’m continuing to do “hacky” things that hopefully we can do at the conference, “Well, let’s just see if they work.” So I probably should have put the whole thing to be about a month ago, but, “No, no. Let’s just see if we can build this thing over here that’s really cool that people will talk about.”Louis: Well, that’s what makes those conferences great. I definitely know from the ones I’ve attended that it’s always a great experience. So you guys have got a lot of great speakers this year.John: Yeah, no. It’s a pretty amazing line-up. It gets sort of bigger and better each year. I think we’ve got 65 people this year, and one particular reason for that is we’ve added a start-up track to the conference this year. Obviously, start-ups are the hot, hot thing, and, you know, there’s a lot flying around about the whole kind of starting up your own business thing. We’ve been doing that for a long time and been involved really since the early ’90s, I guess with what’s come to be known as start-ups, and I see a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense out there. What we’re really trying to do is address that by having people who’ve gone out and done it come back and share what they’ve learned. We’ve basically given people the brief to say what they wish they’d known before they started out. So that’s what that’s all about. Then, of course, a great range of people across the design and development kind of world, and then people who kind of think big telling us about what they think is happening out there. So yeah, it’s lots of fun, very challenging to put together a great program year on year, you know, to get people to come all the way out here or across the country, but always very rewarding and a fantastic couple of days, which increasingly, we actually get to enjoy, whereas in the past we’d be so stressed that we probably wouldn’t see or do anything and just run around trying to put out fires. But now I think we’ve just kind of learned to accept that it goes okay, and we can participate as well.Louis: Right. I should mention for anyone listening from outside of Australia, I don’t imagine there are very many people who are going to be able to swing last minute tickets to Australia for a conference that takes place in less than two weeks; however, it’s still pretty much available worldwide because you guys put up a lot of video and audio and slides from all your events.John: We perhaps had one of the first fully-podcast conferences way back in 2005, which included what we believe is a world first which was the world’s first podcast fire alarm which went off right at the end of a presentation by the famous and fabulous Tantek Çelik. If it would have happened to anyone, I’d be happy to tell you, he literally had just finished. So we got audio and slides online from hundreds of presentations back several years, but we started out with video particularly so we have all the video from our recent HTML5 and JavaScript-focused conference down in Melbourne which a lot of SitePoint folks were at.Louis: Yeah, it was a lot of fun.John: So all the videos are online, except a couple of things that didn’t quite work out. That’s always going to happen, and going forward very hopeful that pretty much all the conferences we do will kind of have all the video online and I guess at some point hopefully, for those who aren’t fortunate enough to be here, even live, live streaming video so you can kind of participate to an extent online. So, you know, we’re trying to walk the talk here. We’re trying to kind of explore and use all the technologies, but I guess one step at a time.Louis: Yeah, you mentioned that you’ve got the start-up track for the first time this year. Was it that you got from attendees of previous conferences who said “Oh, it would be good to have some more business-focused content in the conference?” Or was it something you just sort of felt the general atmosphere of what’s being talked about on the web is a lot of people doing start-ups, and so you figured we should focus on that?John: Look, I think it’s more of the second. I guess there’s a cohort of people who’ve been involved coming along to Web Directions for many years now, and I see this natural progression. We’ve watched people from students through their first jobs through running teams. Like I said, we’ve sort of seen this progression, and I think part of that progression for a lot of people is the sense that perhaps they want to go out on their own. So really it’s in no small part focusing on people who have already been coming to Web Directions for a long time, giving them something in addition to the core professional content because we sort of see it as almost like a natural progression. Obviously not for everybody, but for quite a significant percentage of the, you know, the community of people who come to web directions. Now obviously, too, it’s such a hot, hot thing out there. More broadly, you know, people might see it as a bit of a cynical thing. “Well yeah, it’s someone else doing a start-up thing,” but I guess as I said in the little intro, we’ve been essentially running start-up software and now event-focused conferences for nearly 20 years, and we learned a lot, and I’ve been involved with some very successful start-ups, TypeKit in particular. So, you know, I guess we’ve got some experience here, and we know a lot of people who’ve done very well, and we know a lot of people who gone out and tried and done various things. So we kind of feel we’re uniquely-placed to bring all these people together to share what they’ve learned and their experiences. And I guess the other thing is we don’t really have a dog in this fight. You know, we’re not a fund. We’re not any start-up co-working space. It’s not to say there’s anything negative about any of those particular organizations. They have great roles and they really help the ecosystem, but I guess we have no other agenda. We’re not trying to kind of promote our investment fund. We’re not trying to promote, you know, anything other than really bringing these people together and connecting them with each other and helping them learn from each other. So I guess that’s another thing we can kind of bring, as Web Directions, to something that’s focused on start-ups.Louis: Yeah, that’s great, because, I mean, it’s true what you say, the web industry does lend itself particularly well to people going out on their own and being able to start their own thing.John: It’s funny. I look back over all the fantastic speakers that we’ve had over many years, particularly international ones and just off the top of my head I can think of very few who haven’t ultimately gone in that direction, whether that’s starting their own studio, whether it’s starting their own working space, or, of course, so many of them going out and starting more kind of traditional software, technology-focused start-ups. So, you know, it just seems such a natural progression for so many people in our industry that it kind of makes sense, I think, for us to provide an opportunity for people to kind of get more of a sense about that whole world. Now, the other thing, just to say briefly around this particular track, is this is very much focused with people who haven’t necessarily started up yet. Now, that’s not to say that people like that won’t get something from it, but really it’s about helping people make some of the important decisions and think about some of the issues that maybe you think “Oh, we’ll worry about that later,” and of course later comes and it’s a big issue and you haven’t dealt with it. So whether that’s the kind of organization that you create, whether that’s the responsibilities of the various founders, whether that’s of course funding models, you know, do you use Kickstarter, do you get Angel adventure capital, do you bootstrap, do you go through an incubator, all the way through to what about business models? You know, how are we going to actually generate revenue? Those sorts of things are what people really should think long and hard about before they take their awesome idea and make it a reality. But while it might sound strange, for the most part people don’t, I think, think enough about those issues. We, you know, we love building stuff right, so we think, “Wow, I’m going to build this awesome app,” or “I’m going to build this awesome thing,” or “Make this great game,” and we focus on that, but really that’s only a small part of success or more importantly failure. I think unless you make other very good decisions around the business right from the beginning, I’ve said it more than once, people, you know, who followed a plan really do plan to fail. So that’s what we’re really trying to focus on, you know, to help them make really good decisions about the kind of business they’re going to build, how they’re going to fund it, what it’s going to look like and to address, I guess, in the famous words of a former U.S. Defense Secretary, “The unknown unknowns.” Which, you know, I think it was Rumsfeld. He was kind of widely pilloried for that particular statement, but the term unknown unknowns, I think is really important because when you’re venturing into a new world, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know is what’s going to get you. So that’s what we want to at least try and illuminate. What are the things that you should think about you haven’t even thought you needed to think about yet?Louis: Yeah, that’s great, and especially for, like you said, the majority of your audience is going to be more technical or designed-focused people who, as you said, you can become all- consumingly focused on the product that you’re building. Most of us didn’t get into doing web-designer development because we were interested in business; we got into it because we wanted to build things.John: Right. I mean, I look at the experience from my own life that when people ask me what I do these days, you know, I kind of want to talk about all the things I build, and the books I’ve written, but truth is I’m kind of a businessman for want of a better term. You know, I spend my life in strategy meetings and partner meetings and business development and for the longest time that kind of got me down, but I sort of accept that’s a reality now. Like it used to be I saw that stuff as the stuff I had to do but really my core business, my core work was, you know, playing with stuff, building new things, writing fantastic articles or crap ones or whatever, but the truth is once I accepted “Look, really you’re a businessman who does all this other stuff rather than a developer who has to do with a business,” I think it was very beneficial for my own mental health. I think it was beneficial for our business. I think it’s just a natural path we progress along, although I think, I would always recommend people were ionate about building things to keep that space to do that because as much as anything, I guess, unless you keep on top of technology you fail to see opportunities, you fail to see emerging risks and threats. I think it’s no accident that if you look at very successful U.S. companies whether very big or very small in the technology space, they’re not run by MBAs, and they’re not run by lawyers, they’re actually run by technologists or technologists have a very important role to play. And the companies that are, big technology companies that are more run by kind of classic MBA business-types maybe don’t do quite as well. Anyway, so there’s an important place for both those things. You know, I think it’s a reality people shouldn’t turn their back on but in order to be successful at building stuff and doing cool stuff, you know, you need to generate revenue and you need to make sure you don’t waste a whole heap of money. You need to make sure you focus your credit in importing the things that ultimately are going to sustain a great business, so and I guess, over time we recognize that. So that’s really what the start-up track is about is to help, at least over a couple of days, people start thinking more deeply about the business side of things.Louis: Right. You touched a little bit there on not losing touch with wanting to build cool things, and I think your latest project is one that I thought was really cool. You put up this little timeline of the web on the Web Directions website at webdirections.org/history, and it’s just this sort of nice, I guess, slider-style timeline of a lot of major events mostly early on in the web and when things were introduced. Where did the idea come from to build this thing?John: Well, probably the original idea, in some ways, goes back to something that I thought of about eight years ago on my honeymoon on the beautiful Cook Islands where I took with me the first two of The Baroque Cycle by Neil Stevenson, are fantastic. I think I recounted this recently when I was talking with Eric Meyer on the Web Behind as well, but we might have a chance to look at just, spend a couple more moments on it. So basically The Baroque Cycle is just this massive, fantastic, entertaining, stimulating series of novels by Neil Stevenson which are all set in the late 17th and early 18th century. I might be 100 years out there, but anyway, so essentially the rise of the modern world.Louis: I think that’s right.John: So we see the rise of modern economics or modern finance, the idea that we move away from a cash economy to a credit economy. We see the rise of modern science, so natural philosophy becomes science. We see the rise of kind of a global trade system. So it actually addresses these really big philosophical concepts but in a very entertaining way. The characters are everyone from Isaac Newton to Half-Cocked Jack who’s this fantastic, crazy pirate figure who would make Jack Sparrow seem like someone you take home for tea, but what’s really interesting about it to me is its full of an amalgam of historically-accurate information and a whole lot of confected stuff, a whole lot of made-up stuff. So we see the great fire of London, we see the plague in London in 1666-1667, that sort of time frame. We see, you know, Isaac Newton. We see, you know, the founders of the World Society, all sort of amazing historical characters doing historical stuff and woven through that we have these confected, created characters, someone who ends up effectively creating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the backwoods of Massachusetts back in the late 7th to 8th century. So what was interesting to me was to follow the events that happened and think about “Okay, which of these are real and which of these are made up?” So I imagine this project that I termed “WWWWWW” or something, it was the who, what, where, how, when, I don’t know. There’s an H there, but anyway, who, what, where, how, the idea was sort of essentially was going to be wiki-driven theme where you put all these, you know, you could put events in there and then it would pull it out and display that information. So you could sort of track it in various ways.And my idea was “I’ll start with first few hundred Wikipedia style and hopefully other people will come and do it” and I thought, “Well, this is a really cool idea but we could do the whole world history like this” but of course I quickly, you know, I got married, we had a baby, and like many of the other projects in my life it was kind of stalled, but that’s alright. I have a million things in my life that have been like that and, you know, sometimes they re-emerge, they bubble up years later. That’s sort of what happened here. I guess I was playing with a thing called Timeline JS that was a great technology similar to these and I’m not sure whether Timeline JS was built on top of it but it was called the Simile Project from MIT and the Simile Project was a simple way where you could define in comma separated values or JSON or other formats, a series of events and then it would pull it in and display it on a kind of timeline. The Timeline JS is kind of a much richer, more sophisticated version of that. So I sort of came across that and I thought about-and we’re about to launch another project that I’ve done with it. But I just sort of started playing around with it and it very quickly seemed like a very good way of approaching what can otherwise be an incredibly complicated challenge which is trying to keep a sense of how the web emerged through standards, through ideas, through technologies, browsers, editors and things like that. Because, you know, even those of us who were around more or less at the time kind of forget things, obviously, and we lose what came first which, you know, which version of Netscape came out before IE that had this feature. So I thought it was very important to maintain all that information, so, kind of, I guess it was a many-year project that combined various obsessions and interests of mine, and just finally popped out in a few hours, you know, Timeline JS is so simple to use, and really once I got up and running and saw that it was, you know, was worth doing. Sometimes you’ll have an idea and you’ll play around and you’ll actually implement it and “You know what? It’s not very interesting.” We’ve all probably done that, but this one I thought “Well, this is very interesting.” So, it’s great now. All I do it people send me emails with suggested events. I’ll spend maybe an hour every couple of days finding, you know, I’ll think about something like “Oh, I haven’t really got anything about SGML,” so I’ll kind of spend some time researching that kind of history of GML and SGML and add events that way, so it kind of gives me an opportunity to go and do some research, add things, you know, here there and everywhere, and generally, I guess, keep myself connected with where we’ve come from so it kind of serves a lot of useful purposes.Louis: I guess there is definitely a lot of information in some of the early spaces about very early web browsers and specifications and then as it goes on closer to the modern era, it’s a little bit sparcer, but I imagine there’s a lot of information yet to be included in there. But it does, as you were saying, some things do when you look at them, seem surprising in the order of which things arrived or how close together things were. You know, it surprised me both how young Firefox was and how old Ruby on Rails was and that those two dates, the release of Firefox 1 and Ruby on Rails 1 were not as far apart, you know, I would have given a decade between those two things happening because it certainly felt like a decade.John: Yeah. Sort of, about a year, I guess.Louis: Something like that, yeah, it looks like.John: And then between them is AJAX.Louis: Yeah.John: AJAX is so, a term that I guess swept like fire through the sort of web design community. I think we’ve been stumbling around looking for a term that describes what we need, you know, like beyond that first or second generation web design, you know, and suddenly, the term arrived at just the right time, but what, a few weeks after Firefox 1 was released. But of course the online technology was implemented into XWare 5 going back kind of years and years before that.Louis: Yeah, like I said, it’s surprising. You think of Ruby on Rails as a very recent development, something that’s been around for a few years, and it’s kind of gaining a lot of traction now and you think of Firefox as something that’s been around forever, and to see them that close on the timeline. Obviously, it’s really interesting to see a lot of history from well back in the day before I was involved in working with the web and seeing what some of the early browsers looked like and seeing it all on a timeline where it all sort of has a sense of history that you wouldn’t get from reading a Wikipedia page about the history of the web.John: Well, that was sort of one of the things about it. I mean, you might have observed it, but a lot of this information’s available. I mean, you go to a Wikipedia page on the history of web browsers, there’s a ton of information there. But, you know, is it a particularly kind of illuminating way of sort of telling a story about the history of the web and it’s not. It’s really just a database of information, a very valuable one, whereas the idea behind this is very narrative-driven and Timeline JS, that’s what it’s about. It’s really about telling narratives through time. So I think that this is, again, one of the things I’m trying to do as I put the pieces of information there is to sort of add a bit of extra connection between two different dates through time. So the release of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows has XML http requests, which is just kind of something that almost no one paid any attention to, but ultimately gave rise to asynchronous JavaScript because we could then send little pieces of information to and from between browser and server. So it’s beyond simply pieces of information; it’s a story, and it helps me to try and kind of find other threads to connect to the pieces of the story as well.Louis: Yeah, well, I definitely have to commend you on the amount of work that went into it. I know you claim that Timeline JS makes everything nice and easy, but I do still appreciate that you must have put quite a few hours of your own time into this and it’s definitely something to check out if anyone listening wants to see it it’s a webdirections.org/history, and I believe there’s a submission form somewhere to put in ideas.John: Yeah, if you basically just go to the front page I think there’s an email address to me there I think.Louis: Yeah, there’s an email, yeah.John: And then, there is actually at webdirections.org there’s a blog post with a submission form, so maybe we can find that URL and it around.Louis: Yeah, I’ll throw that in the show notes as well.John: If they want to give us detailed information great or just want to suggest something, it’s kind of interesting, people will say, “Well, what about social media?” and it’s like, well, you know the thing is you end up with a map that is a one to one map of the whole world which kind of isn’t a very useful map.” So the point at which I guess there’s an editorial approach. And for me, there might be things like, and I’m not sure I’ve put this in there, but there were these key websites. There were, for example, there was a redesign at Wired Magazine in the early 2000′s which kind of was purely CSS based and sort of, was hailed certainly at the time as this exemplar of the ability of creating commercial, cutting edge websites that, you know, worked across multiple browsers with new standards because, you know, the idea was until then, well basically what about these older versions of Netscape and whatever. We can’t really do this. So while there’s certainly the place for these kind of exemplars, these kind of milestone sites, I guess I’m focusing more on technology than I am on the social currents and so on.Louis: Yeah.John: So I think at this point probably we won’t see, you know, the launch of Boo.com or Facebook.com, but see, who re Boo.com? Do you Boo.com?Louis: No.John: So that was kind of late 90s, probably the exemplar, there’s whole books on its failure. Basically, they got tons of funding and it was supposed to be this massive online kind of high-end retail fashion store, and people forgot it now, but that was, Boo.com was like-you just have to say Boo.com to basically pooh-pooh the entire Internet back in about 1999, and yet we’ve forgotten it now, right?Louis: Yeah. Whereas something like the effect that the Wired.com and ESPN redesigns had on developer mindset and the way developers approached the web going forward was, those are historical, and it’s not only relevant for that company, but for the web at large. I guess you could make the argument that the recent Boston Globe redesign would probably fall into that category.John: Well, I think our friend and somewhat colleague at SitePoint, Cameron Adams, I think he’s heading in that respect. He kind of blogged ing JavaScript before midi queries were out there, or certainly the more modern midi queries. Using JavaScript to create multiple-column layouts based on the width of a browser and, in fact, the City Morning Herald and I guess, as a consequence, The Age and other Fairfax newspapers were doing this style years ago, and these are the things we lose sight of sometimes. It’s not to downgrade the importance of the Boston Globe redesign. Obviously, that’s going to be one of those moments that we refer to, but I think it’s important also to try and keep track of the other less, maybe famous, but in some ways, as significant events. So there are sort of things, I guess, I’m trying to document. And it’s been good to have people kind of write to me and say “Look, what about this thing?” and I thought “Wow,” I mean, usually I’d heard of it, but the very first entry now in the Timeline is the Mundaneum, which was this idea of collecting the entire world’s knowledge in a single building, and basically, you know, it was very analog because the original ideas came from the late 19th century. In fact, it was built in about 1910, and I’d never heard of this despite the fact I’ve been very interested in this whole field for nearly a quarter of a century. So it’s good for people, to like write to me and tell me things and I think “Wow.” So I’ve definitely learned things both by other people telling me or myself thinking “What was that? What was happening around then?” I’ll go and find something. They’ll be a reference in, you know, whether it’s one of the Wikipedia or the W3.org or these other records that I’m going back to and leads me on to something else. So, you know, it’s more than just copying and pasting out of Wikipedia.Louis: Yeah.John: But I’m relying on, it’s a lot on my memory to shape the story, but it’s also starting to take on a life of its own which I think is the best part of it all.Louis: Yeah, really interesting to go back and see the stuff that sort of set the stage for the idea of hypertext well before anyone was thinking of markup languages per se. And I also wanted to commend you really quickly on using a really classic, old-school, under construction GIF as the image to represent the introduction of the GIF format in 1987.John: Oh, it couldn’t go past that really. I was looking, there were a whole heap of them out there. The funny thing is there’s a huge page of them, and ironically, it actually almost pretty much crashes and burns any modern browser or any modern hardware when it’s trying to run, you know, a few dozen simultaneous animated GIFs. So it’s probably a technology I’m glad has past. I was thinking about the one with the guy shoveling stuff.Louis: Yeah.John: Another classic under construction. And then I think there were, didn’t Paul Irish, a couple days ago ask for someone to redesign that using only animated CSS or something?Louis: I didn’t catch wind of that. I’m sure someone must have done it.John: Right.Louis: Because, yeah, the first few times you see something like, “Oh, I’ve designed a whole iPhone using no images and nothing but CSS,” you think “Oh wow, that’s really.” And then, you know, as they poured in over the course of the years, you get to the point where you think, “Okay, well you can clearly do anything with CSS if you have unlimited time and patience.”John: And unlimited divs.Louis: Yeah. There is one thing I did want to discuss with you briefly. I don’t know if you , the last time you were on the show, we were talking a little bit about the idea of what, at the time, were being called hybrid apps. I’m not sure if that terminology is still in use anywhere.John: Yeah, not so much. It’s not used so much is it? I think it’s just apps these days and people will be less concerned about how you build them. But anyway, continue.Louis: Yeah, so you had written, I think, an opinion piece at the time, and that was one of the things we wanted to talk about, and we just sort of discussed what the situation was with what the different technologies used to approach the mobile platform were. I guess your point of view, and mine as well at the time, was that the web is obviously the best choice, and I was wondering if your thinking on that has changed in any way in the intervening time. I know there have been a few things recently. One of them was Facebook’s move away from HTML5 with regards to their mobile apps, and then the other thing is hoards of iOS s move towards the web to access Google maps, and how you feel that plays into what your thinking is on the important of web technologies for the mobile platform.John: I think underlying it all it that we live in a multi-platform world obviously. I mean, it’s a truism, and what that means is both multiple operating systems. So, you know, for the foreseeable future if you want to reach a significant percentage of people you’re going to have to build applications that work across all, either that or build multiple applications in different technologies to reach all sort of operating systems and it’s not just about operating systems, it’s device characteristics. So we’ve seen the launch of the iPhone 5, I think it was. What are they, up to five now?Louis: I think it’s five, yeah.John: Yeah, so I get confused now because there’s iOS 6 and iPhone 5, right? But what you see if you’ve got one of those is that the iPhone 4 apps or the iOS, the apps that were optimized for iPhone 4 have this pretty unsightly black bar across the top and the bottom. So it goes to show that even the simplest changes to form factors of devices, when you use technologies that are completely designed for that device, in this case Objective C and all of that, the Apple’s Cocoa Touch, and so on. Basically, you have to redevelop even if, you know, Apple adds a few pixels to the screen, right? And this is what all those kind of lament about the number of Android, fragmentation Android platform. The truth is there’s always been fragmentation. There’s been fragmentation of devices, of screens, of operating systems, and we’ve always had it. It’s not going away, right? So I think we’ve just got to get used to that. Now, we could even celebrate it as a great thing, but let’s leave that aside. Let’s treat it as just a simple historical reality that is not going to change. So at this point, do you want to reach a whole heap of people with whatever you’re building? You can say, “Look, we’re going to pursue a niche of people and we’re going to go with a particular platform,” and that’s a perfectly valid approach. Or for the most part, whether you’re building something for a client, or you’re building something yourself, that’s a luxury, you know, you can’t afford. You can’t say to a client, “Well we’re not actually going to build you for anything other than this platform because we know this platform, we don’t know the other ones,” right? You know, I don’t think that’s the approach that’s going to work with most clients. So, given that, what are you going to do? Are you going to build something that is optimized for iPad, iPad Retina, iPhone, iPhone Retina, iPhone 5, like suddenly we’ve got five or six form factors, they’re different. Okay. Now we’re looking at kind of all these other platforms. So we’re looking at Android. You know, 7-inch tablets, 10-inch tablets, 5-inch tablet, 4-inch phones and 3.5 inch phones, right? Televisions. We haven’t even begun to see the impact of, I guess, smart TVs, whatever you want to call them, but basically they’re another screen that is going to become increasingly interactive, whereas in the past, you know, the screen was looked at far more than any other in our life is a television screen and it’s always been pretty ive and any interactions with it have been pretty much choosing the next thing we want to watch at this time. But it’s becoming an increasingly important way in which we interact with a whole heap of services. So it seems to me, in the context of all that, and then, you know, I haven’t even mentioned in-car dashboards and there are just going to be screens on everything. That’s something I’ve been saying for a while, but we’re seeing it increasingly. As a consequence, if you’re building something to reach as many people as possible, I just don’t think there’s ultimately any alternative than to use web technologies to reach them. Now whether you package them up and deploy them as native apps or not really comes down to circumstance. So at the moment I’m playing around with some new field communication stuff, you know, NFC, RFID stuff, right? Using mobile devices that have NFC on them. Now I can build something using web technology and phone gap, but I have to access those device APIs, and I can’t do that in a browser. I’m going to have to do that in a native app, whether it’s Android or Blackberry or some other platform which NFC. Now here’s a circumstance in which I can use web technologies, and I can extend them a little bit using technologies like phone gap, and ultimately, I can build an application that is just as capable as if I’d used, you know, on Android I used Java, or on the Blackberry I used C++, or whatever particular approach that I wanted to use. I tend to try and think in the broad swoop of history, right? That’s a luxury I have because, you know, I don’t necessarily have to build things day in and day out for clients, but I do build things day in and day out, I just have the luxury that I do them for me for the most part. So, look, I guess if you look at the history timeline what we’ve just been talking about that is very much about this broad swoop of history. If you look at Type Kit which has been very successful, that came about through understanding the broad sweep of history over ten years of technological innovation around typography in the browser. So I think there’s a place, a very important place, for stepping back a little bit, taking a deep breath and having a look at where things really are headed.So where do I think things are headed in the long run? I think the idea of native apps I think, as Scott Jansen recently talked about, he used the term, it’s kind of a local maximum, right? So if you think about artificial intelligence, or you look at any sort of algorithm that tries to solve a problem, a complex problem, basically, you can keep optimizing around a local maximum, but it might mean you’re missing a much bigger picture outside that. I tend to think that’s true of applications. I think they’re something we’re familiar and comfortable with: the metaphors of desktops applications or desktop computing since the early 1980′s and before that, maybe the history of application- centric. There’s one exception to that, a significant exception, which was Lisa, so, the precursor in a way to the Mac. Lisa was document-centric. You didn’t start applications. You opened documents, and, in fact, it had a rudimentary concept of compound documents. So I kind of think ultimately at the moment we’re getting things backwards when we focus on the application rather than what we’re trying to achieve, on whether that’s a piece of art, whether it’s the letter, whether it’s the book, whether it’s illustration. I know there’s a lot there. I’ve just gone on for about ten minutes, but you knew what you were getting yourself into. So, to me, I think the web isn’t focused on content. Web technologies are about content. It’s very much about enabling different services to work together, and you know, we’re only beginning to touch the surface of that. If you look at the web- intense projects or the INT, EN, NTS, the idea is that it makes it easier to build compound content where, you know, this particular service will handle this particular feature of my application. So I think in the longer sweep of history the web opens up these possibilities whereas native platforms tend to close them down. Although, you know, Android has Intense, Blackberry has Wave in Blackberry 10 and the playbook OS have a way of invoking other applications to do things for you, but I think the web kind of really starts allowing us to build those sort of solutions, and to me that’s where we’re headed.Louis: Right. So for you, something like Facebook’s move away from HTML5 is a bit of a blip on the radar, and I should mention it’s a move away from HTML5 as a technique to build their native applications, but they still get the majority of their mobile usage through their browser anyway.John: Right. And word is, there have been articles in the way they’ve went about building their application, and there seem to be some pretty inefficient uses of networks resources that have a lot more to do with performance challenges, right?Louis: I seem to reading somewhere that they were actually shipping snippets of HTML over the wire and not caching things locally, so it seems like it was more of an organizational failure than a technological one.John: Yeah. One of the challenges I think we have in our industry right now is we’re very opinionated, and it’s a bit ironic me saying that, but I like to think that like at least if we’re going to have opinions, we should back it up with research, right?Louis: Right.John: So I’m very akin to research. So whether it’s somebody kind of-there was quite a bit of critique around local storage going back, like, a few months back, some relatively high-profile people talking about local storage as being dangerous. The problem was, in theory what they were talking about was worth considering, right? But we don’t live in a theoretical world. So what I did was I built some test cases, and I tested it and demonstrated for any practical purpose that you might talk about, you know, they were at least overstating the case. I think it’s really important to have ideas, have opinions, that’s great, but get out there and test them. Now, I do that all the time. I like to think that, you know, I’d like to think that if I have an opinion I’ve at least tried to justify it or at least found evidence for it, and if I can’t find that evidence hopefully, change my opinion as well. So I think that’s one of challenges right now is we tend to take sides. I mean, the whole HTML5 thing is really, it’s kind of largely seen as you’ve got native fans and you’ve got HTML5 fans, and they’re just in camps, and they’re battling it out. The truth is we have to be realistic about the technologies, why we use them, what their shortcomings are. I recently wrote a white paper. It’s called HTML5 for Creatives, and it’s really focusing on creative directive types and people in agencies and people who are responsible for campaigns, right? Now typically at that decision making level, they’re not familiar with the ins and outs of specific technologies, and for the most part that’s fine. But what I wanted to address was a lot of these myths that are out there and the things you might hear about as a kind of creative director, and I go and speak on s and things, and I hear stuff coming out of people’s mouth that is just kind of ridiculously, but I know where I came from. I wanted to try and address all those sorts of things. One of the things that I was looking at around that were the, you know, some of these issues about Facebook performance, HTML5 because, you know, people use these things as a reason to do what they want to do, rather than a way to learn about how to do things better, right? So I sort of challenge anybody who has a strong opinion about these sort of things to go and test it, and I do that. I do that all the time. I play around with technology, and one of the things I found out was at the moment, I don’t think you can use JQuery Mobile in a way to deploy apps that are going to work particularly well for most s, you know, native apps. It just doesn’t seem good enough for me in of performance. There’s other frameworks out there that do work well and that comes down to testing them out and researching them, rather than kind of, you know, saying “Oh, well Facebook didn’t work therefore HTML5 doesn’t work.” That’s sort of, you can make some very bad decisions in that sort of way as far as I’m concerned. You know, you’re going to bet your entire future on somebody else’s kind of opinion that’s based on no evidence? I don’t know. But I suggest it’s really important for people to go out and do research and, you know, if you think this doesn’t work go and give it a try and if you can demonstrate why something doesn’t work, publish it. Show us what the shortcomings are. That’s what I do and a lot of really smart people do. But, you know, opinions, they’re just, I think unfortunately opinions, people latch onto opinions that kind of concur with what they already think, right? And this is why I like a scientific approach because science is all about questioning what you already think, challenging it and demonstrating that it’s kind of on the right track or maybe it’s not.Louis: Absolutely. So I’ll definitely throw up a link to your “HTML5 for Creatives” white paper in the show notes as well. As I mentioned at the start of the show, the Web Directions South Conference in Sydney is coming up in just a little over a week, but I believe you still do have tickets available. So if anyone happens to be in Australia and hasn’t ed that’s still available at webdirections.org. Am I right there?John: That’s right sir. We’re on two weeks yesterday. I think there’s a SitePoint discount code, pretty sure. We can maybe post that. I think if you just sign up with the code SitePoint you might get a couple hundred bucks off.Louis: All right, fantastic.John: So, I’m pretty sure that’s out there. We often get quite a lot of people from the SitePoint family along and quite a lot of SitePoint readers and…Louis: There will definitely be some folks along. I won’t be able to make it this year unfortunately, but there will definitely be a few people there, probably with some books and shirts. So anyone listening who’s going to be attending Web Directions South definitely go up and say hi to the SitePoint folks, and I will, as I mentioned, throw up links to all the stuff we talked about in the show on the website. And if people want to follow you on the web or on Twitter?John: Pretty much anywhere I am JohnAllsopp, so @johnallsopp. I think on my app.net it’s JohnAllsopp. Pretty much go looking for John Allsopp, and you will find me. Please come and follow me. I try not to, I try to have a 90% kind of professionally-focused content out there, and I’ll be about 10% more on the personal side.Louis: You’ve got to put at least, there’s got to be at least 10% toast though, so that doesn’t leave a lot. I think you need to scale it back maybe a little.John: Personal toast or professional? 5% personal toast, 5% professional toast.Louis: Right. I understand a little bit when I spoke with Jeremy Keith earlier in the year, he warned people who might be considering following him on Twitter that it was going to be at least 50% toast so…John: Well he used to be a baker. So maybe that’s where it comes from.Louis: Did he? Well maybe that’s, so maybe it is professional.John: He bakes a mean loaf does Jeremy, so, yeah I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s been a while since he’s made any bread.Louis: All right. Good to know.John: There you go. That’s why he’s probably toast oriented.Louis: Alright. Well thanks very much, John, for taking the time to talk to me this morning.John: Great. Pleasure.Louis: I know you must be super busy getting all your ducks in a row for the conference, so best luck with that and have a blast.John: We shall. Come say hi if you come to the event, so come to the conference people, and we’ll catch you again soon.Louis: And thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’d love to hear what you thought about today’s show, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions just go to sitepoint.com/podcast and you can leave a comment on today’s episode, you can also get any of our previous episodes to or subscribe to get the show automatically. You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m, and you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. The show this week was produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Louis Simoneau, thanks for listening and bye for now.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 181 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have the full , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #181: Solving More Problems Than You Create (MP3, 33:41, 32.3MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics such as a new paid social network, testing and several typography related topics! Here are the main topics covered in this episode:Indieconf 2012 – Web Freelancer ConferenceAdobe Edge Reflow | Edge Tools and Services | Adobe and HTMLW3C Announce HTML5 2014 Delivery Plan – SitePointMyspace teases a completely rethought service, and believe it or not, it looks beautiful – The Next WebBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/181.Host SpotlightsPatrick: GameMaster Howard on Facebook.comLouis: xkcd: Click and DragStephan: World’s Best FatherKevin: Cross domain javascript interfaceInterview TranscriptLouis: Hello, and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast. We’ve got a show together this week to talk about all the latest news and developments in the world of web design and development. So with me on the show today is our full of regular hosts, Kevin Dees, Patrick O’Keefe, and the Stephan Segraves. Hi guys.Kevin: Howdy, howdy.Stephan: Hi.Patrick: It feels like it’s been longer than it has been. It’s actually only been two group shows since we’ve done one altogether and we were talking about this before the show but I think it’s just because we love each other so much. That’s all. That why it feels longer.Louis: Yeah, I thought you were going to say it feels like it’s been more than the three seconds it’s been since the last take of that intro.Kevin: It feels like deja vu in here.Patrick: We’re professionals.Louis: Yeah, we are. So how’s everybody been?Stephan: Been good. How about yourself?Louis: Most excellent. Things are progressing, all kinds of work projects. At the moment we’ve got something on the go at Flippa that we’ll be revealing pretty soon, so excited about that.Patrick: Excellent.Kevin: I have interesting things going on myself. I don’t know if you guys know, but Patrick and I will be speaking at Indie Comp. I’m kind of nervous about it because last time I went, my car broke down, so-Patrick: Yeah, Kevin’s car broke down and thankfully I was there so he didn’t have to sleep outside with the wolves.Kevin: Yes.Patrick: The wolves of Raleigh, North Carolina. Yeah, so we’re going to speak, both are going to be speaking at Indie Comp this year and that’s in Raleigh, North Carolina on November 17th. I’m going to be speaking about how to monetize your website and get the most out of that. Kevin, what are you talking about?Kevin: I’ll be talking about basically booting up, pragmatic WordPress development kind of launching a WordPress site using some tools that are available. I’ll probably end up writing a blog post about it once I have everything together. I don’t want to spoil anything for those who are going to show up to the event.Patrick: Awesome. Well, indieconf is focused at independent web professionals and freelancers, so if you’re in the area, Raleigh, an hour or two away, definitely come check it out. We’d love to meet you. It’s only $99 and you can buy tickets at indieconf.com.Kevin: Yeah, and just a word of advice…Patrick: Charge your car battery?Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Bring your jumper cables. That’s a good idea. That’s just a really good idea.Louis: All right, well why don’t we just dive straight into this week’s news?Patrick: Let’s do it.Louis: I guess the biggest story and both me and Kevin had picked this as the biggest story of the last few weeks is Adobe’s recent launch of what it’s calling the Edge Tools and Services, which is basically all of its sort of web standards-based development tools, all of the stuff that previously was… The one that’s Animation which I think used to be called Edge Preview or something like that, which is now called Edge Animate, and they’ve got a bunch of others tools in there. Including the sort of branded version of their open source HTML-based HTML editor called Brackets which they’re branding as Edge Code, but the Brackets project is still open source, as well as some cool tools for web fonts and responsive design.Kevin: Yeah, Phone Gap’s also in there which is really cool .Louis: Right, right, so Phone Gap build, which they had included as part of the Creative Cloud subscription is now falling under the umbrella, I guess, of the Edge Tools as well.Kevin: Phone Gap is also in Dreamweaver, right? I think you can export to Phone Gap or something. I haven’t done it from Dreamweaver. But I there being a video on it at some point.Louis: I think there was something to that effect, yeah. So the new cool tool that they’ve announced with this set of tools is Adobe Edge Reflow, which is sort of a responsive design tool which is sort of just a… Yeah, it’s a layout and design tool for visual designers, but that lets you test responsive designs and the way they reflow and also export your break points and media queries for use in your style sheet. So it looks pretty interesting. It’s a very early preview. I don’t think it’s actually released yet. But it looks very interesting, especially because that job for a visual designer of making four or five different Photoshop comps for each break point or each different layout you want to do can be pretty tedious. So having a design tool that includes reflowing and the ability to export break points is potentially really interesting.Kevin: Yeah, and to be honest, this kind of solves an interesting problem which is, or it has been for me, maybe smaller sites, which is the fact that you get a PSD and there are no responsive break points. Then they’re like “Make it responsive” and you’re the developer and you’re like, “Okay.”Louis: There’s too much content here. How do you want to shrink this down to 320 pixels wide?Kevin: Exactly. So this is kind of nice in that perhaps you could get the original PSD, chop that up if you want to chop it up, however you want to do it, and then kind of hand that back and say “Okay, now you go in, use this tool and change what I did. So, show me kind of what you want and I’ll tweak it,” right? “But give me an idea of what you want so I’m not the one trying to make these creative decisions. I mean, I can make those creative decisions, right, but you’re the one who’s getting paid to do this,” right? “So you do it”.Louis: Yeah, exactly.Kevin: I’m not getting paid to. So, to me it seems like a really, really cool tool. I have some concerns about it, but to be honest I feel like this solves more problems than it creates.Louis: That’s the least you could expect from a new tool is that it creates fewer problems than it solves.Patrick: Adobe Edge Reflow. Insert your slogan here, “We create less problems than we solve. From the people who brought you Flash.”Louis: Which did, in fact, create more problems than it solves, I think. I think we can all agree on that.Patrick: Poor Flash, you look back at it now and it’s not the same as you looked at it when it first started.Kevin: Walking on thin ice there. Plenty of Flash people I’m sure listen to this.Patrick: Personally, my head started to explode when I heard HTML-based HTML Editor. I just want to know at what point does this become too – I don’t know, too META?Kevin: That’s deep.Stephan: Is this all browser based?Louis: I don’t think all of it is. No, I think Reflow and Animate are desktop tools like the other Adobe products. I haven’t actually used Brackets.Kevin: I’m surprised Muse didn’t really end up in this suite to be honest.Louis: Which one was Muse? I can’t keep up with their names anymore.Kevin: Muse was like – I don’t even know if they still have it to be honest. I feel like they do. I use Creative Cloud by the way, so, disclaimer. Adobe doesn’t pay me. I pay Adobe, so whatever. But basically Muse was sort of like their, “Hey, we know you want to use In Design for web development type things and not Photoshop, so we kind of tried to create…” This is in context of Adobe speaking, which is, “We tried to create this tool that basically does what In Design does for web designers,” and to me it still feels broken.Louis: Right.Kevin: At least the last time I used it, but to be honest I saw that tool as a really, really good wire framing tool. I mean, you could throw together some designs and site maps really, really quickly. I mean it’s a great tool for that. I used it several times for wire framing.Louis: Yeah.Kevin: People have different opinions about wire frames because maybe they should be done with pencils or look incomplete. But to me it was like you could throw together a site map, have a working site really quickly. How awesome is that for a wire frame or at least a workflow of like, “Hey, here are the interactions that the site can have and this is it. We just built it today.” So, I don’t know. I’m surprised it’s not in here.Patrick: Yeah, Adobe Muse is still a thing it appears.Kevin: I think it’s its own tool.Patrick: Yeah, it like you might have to subscribe to the Cloud or at least buy it on a plan.Louis: I’m getting the feeling the Edge Tools are really targeted at sort of open standards style web developers and the Adobe Muse is more of a design tool that happens to spit out some functional code. So, it’s really aimed at people who don’t want to think about code whereas the Edge tools it feels like…Kevin: That’s a really good point.Louis: As we witnessed earlier when we were trying to what Muse was, I find that all their branding is a little muddy and even trying to describe what the Edge series of tools is I kind of ran into some problems there. But I think as a general idea, or the approach that they want to take and try and make some open web projects that are more piecemeal. Someone, I think it was in a piece on the Next Web I was reading, one of the people from Adobe had sort of said that they understand that they don’t have the kind of market dominance in this area that they’re used to having with Flash and Photoshop and Illustrator. So they’ve tried to make tools that are sort of more useable in piecemeal where you can sort of take one or two things that you need and just use those. But there are definitely some really interesting projects coming out of here. Your Reflow, like I said, is the most interesting, but the animation tool for CSS Javascript animation and some other stuff as well.Kevin: Yeah, I’ve heard really good things about Animate as far as people who have used, I think, After Effects. I think it works really similarly to After Effects. I was actually having a conversation over Skype with one of my friends who’s done a lot of Flash development in the past and he’s worked a lot with After Effects and that kind of thing and he said he really liked the Edge Animate because it felt at home with the other tools. So it was really cool to hear that.Louis: Yeah.Patrick: I was impressed that you disclosed, Kevin, that you pay someone else money. I mean, yeah, it speaks to your honesty and integrity but I was like, “He’s disclosing that he gives someone else his hard-earned money.” They are the ones with the conflict of interest, them.Louis: Just full disclosure, I have the conflict of interest.Kevin: Yeah, so I also buy things at McDonald’s and Walmart and K- Mart. Shop where you like, this is where I shop.Stephan: So, the W3C has announced their HTML5 delivery plan and basically, to summarize everything that they’ve written in this long document that they wrote is that HTML5 will reach recommendation status by the end of 2014. So you’re looking at two more years until it’s at recommendation status. So, new and unstable features that aren’t done by then are going to be pushed to HTML5.1 and they will be in recommendation status by the end of 2016. So you’re looking at a two-year road map for most of the features that you’re seeing now.Louis: Right. Two years doesn’t sound too crazy to me because there’s definitely a lot of stuff in the HTML5 specification at the moment that is pretty in flux. I mean, I know we talked to, pretty recently about all of the work going on around responsive images. There was a big controversy about which approach to take there, and there are a lot of other sort of like more Edge features that are still, they feel very, very rough. So, it feels like two years is definitely reasonable. It might not be enough. As you said, it’s likely that there will be some unstable features. But if at least, they can get to some sort of – I don’t want to say lock-down. Because it does raise an interesting question which is that, what difference does it make, because the browsers aren’t actually targeted the published version of the spec anyway. The browsers are just implementing features.Kevin: Right. We all use Web Kit now, right?Louis: I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. But it does sort of speak to the point where, there are a lot of features both in Web Kit and in Mozilla, and in Opera which are sort of very, very much in flux in the specification. But the browsers are just going ahead and implementing them. I think with the very rapid release cycles that we’re seeing with most browsers that aren’t blue is that they can do that. They can just pump in new features whenever in something. It’s sort of like, “Oh, let’s test that, see how this works,” and it goes in and people play with it and then it feeds back in the spec. So I was wondering what you think, Kevin, in of what’s the value proposition here of the W3C having a lock-down? This is HTML5, anything else is in development for another spec. What does it matter that it’s in development for another spec if it’s widely ed and implemented?Kevin: I think this kind of approach actually pushes vendors to work more with a W3C while implementing some of these new tools. But kind of push those more into the W3C because that’s a standard that people know. It’s something that’s safe, that’s comfortable, at least for the standardistas of us. So, I can see this approach, at least for the W3C, giving them more leverage with the vendors, the browser makers. Now, the interesting part of this is features like video and audio where you basically have a standard that’s kind of its own piece. I mean, like an open standard like OGG Theora or WebM or WebP, whatever these new technologies are for images and video, audio, that kind of thing. I think those things are going to cause the more interesting problems, because basically that’s kind of up to the browser maker what they want to . It’s not really up to the W3C.Louis: Well, there was actually some debate about whether or not the specifications should mandate codecs as part of the specification with respect to audio and to video. So I don’t actually know what the current status is. I imagine it doesn’t because there was too much push back from some of the browser makers. I think most notably Apple had no interest in ing WebM and Firefox didn’t want to include H.264, so it’s kind of a standoff there.Kevin: Yeah, it’s an interesting thing when you try to incorporate basically a different type of technology outside of that which is written, like any other type of media outside something that might be text like JavaScript, HTML, or CSS. Because a developer you have a lot more control over that because you write it yourself. Also as far as browser makers are concerned, like, that’s already an open standard. It already exists in the space. You can own it. So, to answer your question, I feel like it comes back to what I said in the beginning, which is I think this is W3C acknowledging that browsers want to move a lot faster than the W3C wants to, and so to do that they’re willing to basically submodule the specification. I mean, they already do that, right?Stephan: I like what Craig Butler wrote, though. He wrote an article on sitepoint.com, and he just kind of flatly says the W3C specifications are irrelevant and I don’t think we can disagree, right? I mean, they’re not going to stop you from editing features to your website, they’re not going to, because the browsers are going to have these features, now they may be different across the browsers but they’re not going to, their specifications aren’t going to set in stone what a browser implements.Patrick: Yeah.Louis: Yeah, it feels like a more documentation after the fact whereas in the past what the W3C specified was then what the browsers want to be built. Whereas now they’re sort of like, “Well, browsers all sort of agree on this so I guess we’ll call it a specification”.Stephan: Yeah.Kevin: Yeah, it’s an interesting problem because, basically you can end up with what we had in the past, like two different versions of JavaScript. Was it VDScript, right? I think, or JScript, however you want to call it, and then Microsoft’s version. Then you had JavaScript. So, it’s an interesting thing, because as soon as you say the W3C specifications are irrelevant, you basically say that, “Hey, let’s move out of this cold war that we’ve been having for a long time pertaining to browsers and let’s just go all-out war again.” So, it’s like getting rid of the United Nations almost. I don’t mean to go political.Louis: Oh man, there’s so much that I want to dive in there with. But I’m going to hold back because this is not a show about international politics.Kevin: Yeah, let me bite my tongue on that one.Patrick: To me, this is garbage because what this means is that my Teach Yourself HTML4 in 24 Hours second edition book published by Sams.net Publishing on November 1, 1997, is going to be out of date as soon as this HTML5 thing happens. That’s what it means to me. This book was released when I was 12 and now it’s going to be out of date. So that, to me, is a shame.Louis: I hate to break it to you Patrick but that book’s been out of date for well over a decade now.Patrick: You just want me to buy SitePoint books.Louis: No, all I’m saying is that… Well, that actually does come back into the point, right? I mean, the fact that there is now an official HTML5 – and it’s entirely true, you could have gone about building websites using HTML4 as your doc type and only using HTML4 features in your sites. But does anyone really do that anymore? I don’t think so. I think everyone’s using some features of these specs that are under development because the browsers all them. There’s stuff that’s extremely well ed and with a stable implantation everyone agrees on it. So like Craig says in this blog post does it matter that the W3C won’t officially endorse this stuff until 2014? Not really to anyone to who’s a developer or a browser maker. So I don’t know who else they’re writing this for.Patrick: Right. I don’t if we talked about or I just haven’t read about it. But the thought that the recommendations would not be final for HTML5 until 2022 was… Now they’re coming back with this 2014.Louis: Well at least 2014 sounds plausible. 2022 was…Patrick: Yeah. At least it’s not a decade away. Half of the people who care about this might be dead by then.Louis: Yeah, 2022 we’ll all be using virtual reality sensory deprivation tanks that browse the internet or something.Patrick: Yes, Google Glass. But HTML5, it’s coming people.Louis: All right.Patrick: Well, speaking of fancy HTML…Louis: Segue?Patrick: Myspace released a teaser video…Louis: Oh, there we go.Patrick: …for its design and the story I found this through was the Next Web by Harrison Webber. There’s nothing to play with. There’s nothing to test. You can’t . You can’t use it. But it’s just a two-minute video of what the new Myspace is going to look like. You can sign up to be notified when it will come out but that’s about it. When I watched the video it’s – videos are nice, actual implementation is hard. But from the video it looks like a very clean interface. It looks like a lot of things that have been learned from Facebook and Twitter and maybe changed to be different in appearance, a little more clean, like, a richer media Twitter or a less busy Facebook, so to speak.Louis: To me it looks like it takes a lot more from Google Plus in its approach than it does from Facebook or Twitter.Patrick: Okay, now we’re just doing semantics. Okay? Don’t drop Google Plus on me. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah. I think that’s fair to say that Google Plus is cleaner than Facebook and so maybe they’re learning from Google Plus.Louis: But also just the size of the images and the way the images are sort of tiled is something that Google does and that Facebook doesn’t really do at all. Facebook still has that very linear view. They don’t do a lot of fancy stuff with layout. So do you know what struck me the most out of this video?Patrick: What?Louis: Horizontal scrolling.Patrick: Right.Louis: That’s not a thing. You can’t just do that.Patrick: Myspace is breaking the law.Kevin: Well, you’ve got to think…Patrick: They’re a renegade. Look out, rebel coming.Kevin: They’re thinking about Windows 8 here. They’re thinking about the new medium that everyone’s going to be on and about.Patrick: Horizontal scrolling?Louis: 2022?Patrick: I didn’t know that was coming.Kevin: Windows 8 man, I mean Windows has just defined it as the next thing by releasing Windows 8, right?Louis: Horizontal scrolling?Kevin: Yeah, or did they remove that?Louis: Are your Word documents going to be sideways now?Patrick: So once upon a time if you had horizontal scrolling that means you designed your website wrong.Louis: Yeah, I mean this isn’t the case of it’s just too wide and there’s a little scrollbar that means it’s over flow. It’s the entire, or big chunks of the interface seem to be laid out left to right.Patrick: Yeah, you don’t scroll up and down, you scroll left to right, at least in the video. To see more updates, to see more photos, to see more activity, you go left to right, not up to down. Yeah, that goes against what people are taught er experience.Louis: Yeah, I thought that was extremely disconcerting. I mean, I think the interface looks really pretty. I’m not sold on it 100% because I think that there’s actually a fair amount of complexity that was shown there and I think that Facebook can get away with that because people know their terminology. But if you’re trying to do something that’s targeted at everyone in the world you really want to make it really simple. It looked like there was a lot of stuff in it and the methods of interacting with photos were kind of unconventional. I know doing unconventional interactions can be cool. It’s like, “Oh, to do this you just circle your mouse around it three times and then it opens,” doing fancy interactions.But I think that with the space of social networks at least where people are accustomed to mostly Facebook and Twitter and to a lesser extent Google Plus, that kind of single page scroll down, click on something to make it bigger, is really the safe approach and I’m not sure how successfully you can be breaking that mold. I’d be happy to be proved wrong if this takes off. One thing, though, I did find really interesting is that it looked like it was, for people who have a Myspace sort of fan page – I don’t know if that’s a thing or whether it’s on Myspace it’s just a regular or how that works.Patrick: Right.Louis: But for artists or brands that use Myspace to promote it seemed like the built-in analytics tools and ways of interacting with fans were really interesting. I don’t know if you caught that in the video towards the end.Patrick: Yeah, I did catch that kind of preview of analytics for, I don’t know what functionality that is. I haven’t used Myspace in while, so maybe this is something new. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is where they’re helping you to identify your most influential fans, where the most fan activity is geographically, and so on and so forth. I think that looked pretty cool.Louis: Yeah, that stuff looks really interesting because at the end of the day if they get brands and artists and musicians using the platform as their main point of with their fans then the fans will follow. To be fair, Facebook fan pages as a way of keeping in touch with artists or Twitter as a way of keeping in touch with artists is pretty limited, right? There’s not a lot of multimedia. You don’t really get much exposure to the music directly and Myspace has the potential to do a lot better at that.Patrick: Right. I have a feeling that you are not going to be happy if someone says, “Louis Simoneau is the man who was proven wrong by Myspace.” I have a feeling you will not be happy if you’re proven wrong.Louis: Well, when you put it that way, no one wants to be the guy who was proven wrong by Myspace. All I’m saying is that with regards to interface if you can do something really innovative and have it work and create a new interface paradigm in some way, if you can make people scroll horizontally as a way to view their timeline that’s wonderful, because that means we have more options available to us as interactions right?Patrick: Yeah, we discussed the sale of Myspace to specific media back on episode 120 in July of 2011 and part of that deal was that Justin Timberlake became a co-owner, a move that I liked and still like, because it spoke to Myspace’s strengths at the time, which is really music and entertainment. They have this great music licensing. I don’t think a lot of people realize that is they did have good licenses in place with the labels, with the right people for music on Myspace, pre-Spotify, pre a lot of things where you could just listen to full albums on Myspace. They still have that and it’s always felt like their strength is in that music area. It’s almost like they hunkered down for a while to focus on that and when I see this video I think of that as them trying to again stake more of a mainstream claim. Not that music is not mainstream, but they were focusing on that for a while which was a good idea. But this feels like more of a play to get people to spend time on Myspace instead of Facebook, Twitter and whatnot. Even though they show clearly that you can import your Facebook friends and it’ll have those connection features, some of which they’ve already started integrating. Yeah, to me it feels like they’re trying to make a play back into that kind of generic social networking space that Facebook dominates and Google Plus is trying to make inroads in, and Twitter kind of continues to creep up with more functionality. So, yes, that was my observation.Kevin: If I could put a word in here, I really feel like – I’m kind of being a jokester, but I feel like all the Apple Ping s are just going to flee to this thing. I don’t know. That’s just kind of my vote.Louis: Aw. All right, that’s a cheap date, but we’ll pay it.Kevin: Okay.Patrick: Ping, none of us really use Ping, right?Louis: Can we have a moment of silence for Ping?Kevin: Yes, please. I shed a tear there.Patrick: Because I was going to – who’s going to jokingly end this silence? I was waiting. Who’s going to be the one?Louis: All right, well I think on that note it’s a perfect time to dive into our host spotlights for this week. Who’s got something awesome on the internet that they want share? I’m sure Patrick does.Patrick: Well I appreciate the vote of confidence. I’ll do my best. So my spotlight is the Facebook page for Game Master Hour, now if you were a Nintendo fan in the 80′s and early 90s and especially if you had a Nintendo Power subscription, you were familiar with this guy, Howard Philips. He was Nintendo’s original game master. That was his title. He played all the games. He knew how they all worked. He advised the company on what games to release in the U.S. and he was Howard in the popular Howard & Nester cartoons that were in Nintendo Power. So, his Facebook page that I just learned about recently contains all these cool kind of nostalgic memories, behind the scenes info, even game prototypes and what they looked like. Like games that weren’t released that he still has, like unlabeled cartridges and what not and it’s just this really crazy journey to the past of, kind of more of the NES but also some SNES days. If you were a part of that time and you played those systems it’s really fun to read through all this information and to see the pictures also.Kevin: Yeah, this is actually really, really awesome.Patrick: Yes, I concur.Kevin: I have a second to this motion.Louis: Oh, awesome. So my spotlight this week is something that I’m fairly certain that every one of our listeners has already seen. But I just want to cover my bases just in case because it’s that bad ass. Can we say bad ass? Do we have the clean tag on iTunes or something? I don’t even know what qualifies as…Patrick: You were talking about the donkey, right?Louis: Yeah, exactly.Patrick: Okay, so it’s clean. It’s clean.Louis: It’s an ill link. Yeah, so it’s a particular XKCD comic strip from I think last week, last Friday or Wednesday. Its simply called “Click and Drag”. I don’t want to spoil it so just if you haven’t seen it yet go check it out, and “Click and Drag”. I apologize if you get RSI you can’t blame them.Patrick: If you get what?Louis: RSI.Patrick: RSI? What’s that abbreviation for?Louis: Repetitive Strain Injury.Patrick: There we go, okay. I was thinking carpal tunnel syndrome but that’s not RSI.Stephan: How big is this thing?Patrick: That’s what I was wondering. We don’t have to give it away, but when do you stop?Louis: I think someone said that…Kevin: It’s an algorithm that draws random objects forever, like, that would be awesome.Louis: Yeah, I know.Patrick: That would be devious.Stephan: That would.Louis: Have you guys seen this comic?Kevin: I have not.Patrick: I have, yes.Stephan: I saw it. I thought it was awesome.Louis: So it measures in at 165,888 by 79,872 pixels, or 1.3 terapixels. The full comic would fit on 4,212 iPad screens arranged in an 81 x 52 grid.Patrick: So is he selling posters of this?Louis: I think it would be something like – I can’t . Someone explained what the actual, like, if it was printed to scale how big it would be.Kevin: I’m going to use this image as my encryption for my server whitewall.Patrick: That sounds wrong. The research department is working on this. That’s why we’re paused right now.Kevin: I found a power plant. I’ve gone a ways and I’ve found a power plant.Louis: Someone here is saying that printed at 300 dpi it would be 46 feet wide.Patrick: Okay.Louis: So it’s pretty huge. It’s massive.Kevin: Found a whale.Patrick: Yeah, Kevin’s accomplishments, it’s like medals. He’s unlocked a whale. Oh, my gosh. You made it, power plant unlocked.Kevin: There’s something shooting a long beam into the sky after the whale, and it doesn’t have an end. It’s like I’m going into outer-space.Patrick: You know what the next episode of the podcast will be? Instead of an interview, we’re going to have Kevin do a walkthrough of this graphic. He’s going to just walk you through the whole thing.Louis: All right, now we’ve lost Kevin. So, maybe Stephen should go with the next spotlight.Stephan: Mine is this photo series by Ingledow Art Photography. It’s essentially a photo series that he made of him and his daughter, and it’s called, “World’s Best Father”. Most people are going to probably find the images just wrong, but I think it’s hilarious. I’m sure somebody’s offended by this, but I think it’s a great way and I think his daughter will love it when she gets older just because it’s so funny. It’s probably, it looks like 25 images, and he took some time to put into these. So, he’s got things where he’s practicing to be a ballerina.Patrick: Yeah, this is pretty cute.Louis: They are very cute.Stephan: It’s just, I think it’s funny. He took that much time to make something for probably not – he’s not going to make any money off this.Patrick: He’s going to make social media money, Stephen, and that is as good as gold.Stephan: Is that priceless?Patrick: Yes, priceless.Louis: I can hear Kevin still clicking and dragging.Kevin: I found the tractor.Patrick: So, what’s your spotlight Kevin, and it can’t be that comic or a thing inside the comic?Kevin: So, my spotlight is the tractor at pixel 25,013.Patrick: Oh, that’s too – that’s like jumping the shark here.Kevin: So I actually have something on GitHub.Patrick: Okay.Kevin: I was meaning to do basically on one of my projects, I kind of cheat because what I’m working on I can use in the show. So, I needed to do basically an iFrame proxy. So, I found this project on GitHub. I haven’t really implemented it yet, but there aren’t many issues and it’s been starred by enough people to where I feel like it’s fairly stable and secure. Again, I haven’t used it yet but it was one of those things like, I’m creating an embed using JavaScript for basically a web app. I need to be able to dynamically resize the iFrame based on if you hit Submit within a form and that form, say, throws a bunch of errors, well that error changes the heights and dimensions of the actual site that’s being embedded so that needs to be reflected to the end within the parent domain. So, basically what you can do with an iFrame proxy is… Well, the way iFrames work in the first place, not to get too technical, is you have a domain, and that domain can interact with any iFrame that uses the same domain. So what happens is, if you embed an iFrame to another website, Wufoo is a great example of this… So let’s say you embed an iFrame that’s Wufoo into your website. Well, Wufoo isn’t the same domain as your website, so Wufoo can’t communicate with your website. But if Wufoo implements an iFrame that points to your website, then the iFrame within Wufoo uses the same domain as your website so those two iFrames can communicate. Since parent iFrames can communicate to their children, you can send it basically from your top level domain to Wufoo, and then Wufoo can send it to its iFrame of your website again. Then that website, which is your website, if this isn’t too confusing, sends it back over to the top level site because it’s the same domain. Anyway, so that’s iFrame proxy stuff.Louis: So you’re saying it’s basically like Inception.Kevin: Yes, absolutely. So if you could imagine your browser having a dream within a dream, this is what Inception is. It’s called Porthole.Louis: All right, we will check links to that, obviously as well as all of our other spotlights and all the stories we’ve discussed on our website.Patrick: I would like to point out one thing about the spotlights, and that is that Kevin was the only one who did a development- related spotlight, so I feel like I’ve successfully corrupted the rest of you to me in the off-top spotlight area. Kevin was the only one…Kevin: I’m resilient.Patrick: …who maintained the topic, so congratulations, Kevin. Welcome aboard the rest of you.Louis: It’s good to be here, Patrick.Kevin: I found an oil drill by the way.Stephan: Oh, my God.Patrick: But meanwhile, I don’t know if he gets full credit because he spent the rest of the spotlight playing with the comic. So, anyway, it’s been a fun show.Louis: It’s been a good show. All right, so who are we and why are we here?Kevin: Oh, thank you. I am Kevin Dees. You can find me at kevindees.cc, and @KevinDees on Twitter, and right now you can find me at xkcd.com. 1110.Patrick: Yes. I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network. I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @iFroggy, I-F-R-O-G-G-Y.Stephan: I’m Stephen Segraves. You can find me at badice.com or on Twitter @SSegraves.Louis: I’m Louis Simoneau. You can find me on Twitter @RSSaddict. You can also find SitePoint on Twitter @SitePointdotcom. That’s SitePoint D-O-T-C-O-M. If you want to find the podcast on the web, go to sitepoint.com/podcast all of our past episodes are there, your can leave a comment, links to all of the stories and spotlights we discussed during the show and you can find a full transcript of the show as well. If you want to email us, the address is [email protected] and of course you can find us on iTunes as well. Bye for now, and thanks for listening.Kevin: I made it to the end by the way..Produced by Karn Broad.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 180 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) interviews David Lee King (@davidleeking) about digital media in a modern library and also his book Face2Face – Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections.Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #180: Face2Face with David Lee King (MP3, 42:19, 40.6MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode SummaryPatrick and David discuss the challenges of digital media for a modern library, like eBook pricing and serving your customers through digital pathways. THey also discuss his book Face2Face and not only how this relates to libraries connecting in a ‘human’ manner with customers, but how this can apply to all businesses.Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/180.Interview TranscriptPatrick: Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Site Point Podcast. My name is Patrick O’Keefe. And we have an interview today with David Lee King. David is a friend of mine. He is the Digital Services Director at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Topeka Kansas. He is a constant, prominent voice regarding digital innovation in libraries. In 2008, he released “Deg the Digital Experience, How to Use Experience, Design Tools and Techniques to Build Web Sites Customers Love.” He has now followed that up with a brand new book, “Face2Face, Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections.” David, it’s great to have you on.David: Hey, thanks. Thanks, Patrick.Patrick: We met, I want to say . . . I know we met in person first at South by Southwest, probably three or four years ago. I don’t know if that was the first time that we met, or if we had talked online before that. It’s hard to keep track.David: We did talk online before that.Patrick: Okay.David: Because of your book.Patrick: Oh, I applaud your memory.David: I think I had a question or something. I was like, I think I’m going to email the author, or something like that.Patrick: Excellent. Well, I applaud your memory, then. But, since then, we’ve kept in touch. I’ve read both your books, and provided advance praise, and like what you’re doing. You were kind enough to have me out to speak at Pod Camp Topeka 2010 . . .David: Right.Patrick: . . . which is a great event. A great un-conference. It’s happening again this year.David: Yes, it is.Patrick: We’ll talk about that a little later. But for now I want to jump in to, kind of, your background, a little bit. You know, looking at your LinkedIn profile, I’ve picked up a few details. Doing some stalking, some Googling.David: Sure.Patrick: But you were the acting Director at the Kansas City Public Library for seven years. And then you became the Digital Branch and Services Manager at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library for about six years, before you were promoted to Digital Services Director. Or at least a title change, I noticed.David: Title change, yes.Patrick: Come, on, promotion. Beef it up a little bit. No, but the question I have is libraries are a constant in your background. Were libraries a specific choice? Or were you just an IT guy who the job was at the library and then you developed into that space? Or was it always, libraries something that you wanted to do?David: It was neither of those things, actually.Patrick: Okay.David: I learned how to use computers in college, honestly, because way back when, I could get, like, 10% extra credit if I typed my paper out on a computer.Patrick: Right.David: And I needed that 10 extra credit. So, I used it. My future wife showed me how to do it. I was like, hey, this is pretty easy. And then I got out of college. Like many people do, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, you know.Patrick: Okay.David: Kicked out of the door and like, oh, shoot, what should I do? I had tried a few things. I worked in the financial industry for awhile as a customer service rep, a phone rep type thing. Didn’t much care for that. I have a music background so I decided, hey, I’ll try my hand at being a musician or recording engineer, that kind of stuff. Eventually moved to Nashville, and did that for a couple of years, realized that it was fun, but I wasn’t really making money in it. Not enough to a family. So, realized, okay, I need to actually do something to make a full-time salary. I started researching a little bit and figuring what it was I liked to do. And I ed way back in college, not so much the writing of the papers, but the researching, I really actually quite enjoyed. You know, finding those little tidbits of knowledge in books and stuff. And then a light bulb went off, and I said, hey, I could do that for a job. That would be pretty cool. I started looking into libraries. That required a graduate degree, which was cool. I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, got my graduate degree in Library and Information Science, right around the time the web hit. I graduated in ’94, ’95. My first job out of library school, I was the Electronics Services Librarian, which meant putting CD ROM’s into the computer so people could get to the databases back then. The library said, “Hey, we want a web site.” And everybody else sort of stepped back a step, and said, “He’s the young guy, let him do it.” And I was like, sure, that sounds like fun. I learned just like everybody else did back then. I learned the 20 different tags that you needed to make a site.Patrick: Right.David: And I’ve been doing that kind of stuff since then. It’s morphed into IT manager jobs and web master jobs, and now a digital branch manager job, where I don’t really code so much anymore. But I hire coders, and do more long range planning and direction for web sites. I work a lot with staff on conversations. You know, on how to get that conversation going in a blog post, how to write consistently, how to use Twitter or Facebook for an organization rather than, you know, for me talking to my mom. That kind of stuff. And it’s been really a fun gig so far. I’ll say it that way.Patrick: Very cool. And you know, you mentioned extra credit for using the computer. There was a time when you had to be motivated to use the laptop or the computer. But now, obviously, that’s . . . I don’t even think that if you gave students extra credit for handwriting the paper, they would bother to do it.David: No. I can’t imagine writing a paper by hand. That would be horrible.Patrick: So as I mentioned, you were at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. And, like I said I had the good fortune to come there in 2010. And, I have to say, I think the library that stands out most in my mind, from my childhood is the Nashua Public Library in Nashua, New Hampshire. Because I lived around that area for about 10 years, and spent a good amount of time at the library there. I’ve got to say, my experience was that it was dark, and there was mean ladies there. As a kid, those were two of the prominent things there. But I came to your library, and it was bright, and the people were nice. Not to slander the Nashua Public Library.David: Oh, that’s an interesting comment.Patrick: I’m sure they’ve changed now. I’m sure they’re different.David: Yeah, probably.Patrick: But, it was funny to see that. I guess, take that as a compliment, but you had a nice library there. I enjoyed it.David: Oh, good. Thanks. I’m glad you noticed. No mean ladies here.Patrick: I didn’t see anybody scowling at me. I was like, what? Am I in a library? What?David: Oh, gosh.Patrick: No, am I expected to tip? No, okay. I want to get into the library a little bit and especially the library website. You know, I noticed a few things about the website that I want to bring attention to and ask you about. I noticed that you not only encourage people to call you, but you also encourage them to text you and chat with you via a website or web- based chat. That’s the first time I’ve seen that, I think. I’ve never seen anybody encourage me to text them, first of all, I don’t think. I’ve rarely ever seen that, business or otherwise.David: Yeah.Patrick: But, it’s certainly the first time I’ve seen a library do that.David: Okay.Patrick: You know this space well. Is that something that you see a lot? Is it growing, that sort of text and chat communication with libraries?David: Yeah, it’s a growing service, I’d say. I think a lot of libraries would really like to do that nowadays. I just saw a statistic that said that almost half of all adults in the United States are carrying around smart phones now. So, obviously they have that capability. And it’s 60%, 70% with younger people. People, customers for the library are wanting to ask us questions, but they’re not always in the library, physically. You know, the bright library with the smiling people, like you said, from my library. They’re, unfortunately, in their cars, hopefully parked. They’re at work, in a meeting, they have a question. Texting provides them a really easy, quick way to ask us a question. Yeah. So, more and more libraries are doing that. It’s a little harder to get the technology. My library, we can futz stuff on our own and figure it out. Other libraries actually have to buy a service that works. So, yeah.Patrick: So you’re able to mess with different things because you have people on staff who are more technically minded. Is that the primary reason?David: Right. I’ve got a staff of eight in my IT department.Patrick: Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever sat down and calculated this stuff, but do you know the volume of the chat and text-based services versus, for example, the phone, and how active it really is with people.David: To a point. I don’t know, I didn’t bring up the numbers of, like, how many walk in questions we get, how many phone-based questions we get.Patrick: Right. Well, I wouldn’t ask you to quantify walk-in questions.David: We have those, though. We have those. We keep stats. For example, in August, chat-based services, we had 346 questions that came through just for one month. That would be . . .Patrick: And that’s just the web-based chat. Or is that both text and chat?David: That’s both text and chat.Patrick: Okay.David: We sort of lump them both together into the same service, so it just counts, whatever it is , as one thing. That’s quite a few. And they can be really quick questions, like, how do you spell this word? Or they can be, sort of, involved, you know, I’m looking for this, help me do this research kind of stuff. That’s good.Patrick: Do people actually text you for spelling?David: Sometimes.Patrick: Oh, come on.David: Well, you know, they’re in their our catalog. They can’t find the hobbit because they spelled it wrong, or whatever. You know.Patrick: Okay. Yeah, I got it.David: It’s that kind of stuff. Sure.Patrick: Yeah, I see. I was curious how you facilitate that. You mentioned that you mess around with different methods, especially the texting. Because I have a decent understanding of web-based chat services and, you know. But as far as texting, is there a specific service or is just sort of a library phone, or how does that work?David: Yeah, some libraries do that. I know at least one library that just bought an iPhone for that service. That’s a really easy way to do it. It sits at the reference desk. We’re a bit more involved than that. You’ve been in our library. It’s pretty big. We have 220 something staff.Patrick: Wow.David: Total. So what we do . . . we started off, when I first started working at the library, we didn’t have a service like that. So we easily turned something on using NEBO. Easy, problem solved, David could check that off his list. After a while, we sort of outgrew that service. Long before it shut down. Then we moved to a library-based service, called Library H3lp. The ‘e’ in help is a 3, if somebody’s interested in looking it up. It had a few more services. But it was a free service for awhile, and then the company started wanting us to pay for it. We didn’t want to do that. Nothing wrong with the company. We were just, like, I think we can do this on our own. So we have moved to an open source product, igniterealtime.org is the company’s name. It’s a product called Spark. It’s basically an open sourced, I guess you could say, corporate communications type thing. And it allows us to have that chat and text service, and then also gives all of our employees a way to have a chat service just amongst each other, too. So if we have 30 people logged in, say, to the public side of our chat reference service, if you ask me a question, and I didn’t know the answer, I could forward that question on to somebody who would be able the question. And it would be seamless on that end, so you wouldn’t really see that happening as a customer, but you’d get your question answered. Then on the back end, for the text based part of that, we’re using Google Talk as a gateway. So that’s how we’re doing the text part of it, just using a Google phone number, basically. Yeah. It’s working pretty well. We’re happy with it so far.Patrick: Another thing I noticed on the library site was the, and this is probably going to sound like a lame bunch of . . . the form to fill out to get a library card. And I mean, oh, yeah. I noticed that and I said, that’s pretty cool. Because I’ve checked my local library, and I couldn’t do it. I could not do it here. I’m on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And our library system is the Albemarle Library System. You can look it up. Anyway, they have a library website, of course. But you can’t sign up for a library card. They have an FAQ page where it says you need to come in, basically it’s like a two sentence answer, you need to come in and see us. So, I kind of like, you have a form there. People can get the form side out of the way instead of sitting at the library, you know, like at the doctor’s office, with a clipboard and a pen. But, I was curious about how much people use that versus the paper forms, which I’m sure you still have to give people. Is it a lot of people? Is it reducing a lot of the paper, what do you want to call it, like, for the environment, so to speak?David: Not yet. For example, last month we got over a 1,000 people who were new card holders at the library, which is actually pretty good. I looked that up just for you.Patrick: Thank you.David: And I thought, wow, that’s cool. Then I asked somebody in my department to look up how many people we had sign up online, and it was 88.Patrick: Okay.David: So, not a lot. But, the cool thing about that service is they get their library card number immediately, so they can put stuff on hold without actually having to come into the library. Or if they want to use one of our databases, like, to look up an article, magazine article or something, you have to have a library card number to do that. So that gives them that number just like that, automatically. So for those 88 people, it was pretty big help.Patrick: Yeah, I can see that as a really good thing, for obvious reasons. But also, it’s probably the type of thing that people have to get used to.David: Well, yeah.Patrick: Because I think we’ve been taught throughout our lives that when you get a library card, you go to the library, you, maybe, bring them a piece of mail or something. And then you fill in the form. You don’t go onto the website. That’s just not done.David: Right. Exactly. Exactly. We’re trying to do it different.Patrick: Right, you’re at the forefront. You mentioned your web team a little earlier. And I was curious to know what that web team looks like, as far as the number of people and how . . .David: Yeah, yeah.Patrick: Not hard numbers, but just a general sense of the team, and do you have in-house developers, do you hire out when you need something done? How does that all work within your team?David: That’s always a hard question to answer because it’s not just, “Oh, we have three.” Because, we’ve got me. I’m sort of in charge of all of that part of what we do at the library. So I do long-range planning. I’ll test out a new tool and then get a group together to start figuring out how to use it, maybe in a pilot project. Just, generally, be the leader for that. We’ve got one full-time web developer, who does all the hardcore coding type stuff. We’ve got one person who is our designer. Used to be, well, still is, not used to be, still is an artist. So that’s why, at least in my opinion, our website looks pretty attractive.Patrick: Right. I agree.David: So we’ve got those two guys that are sort of working on the back end, deg it, developing it, maintaining. Then we’ve got what we call our creative group, which is our marketing department and our web guys all together. We get together weekly and just meet. We talk about marketing stuff and brochures, but we also talk about the website. Figure out how better to do things. We’ll frequently visit a part of our website and try to make it better. You know, that kind of stuff. Then we get to the content. You know, we’ve got a lot of content on our website. We’ve got, probably 15 blogs. We’ve got Facebook and Twitter, and that kind of stuff. Those are all done by different people in our library. So, we might have a team of two or three that are just in charge of one blog. They write the posts. Actually, I work with them to schedule it out. So they’ll tell me, I want to do it two times a week. And so I’ll say, okay, you get Tuesdays at noon and Fridays 6:00 am, so when people wake up, there’s content there. We do the same thing for our Facebook page. We’ve got a team of maybe 12 to 15 people now that are focused on writing content and trying to engage people. So that’s sort of how we break that part of it up. It’s not centralized at all. It’s sort of spread out throughout the organization with leadership involved.Patrick: Cool. I appreciate you taking us through that. So we talked a bit about your library. I’d like to talk a bit about libraries in general now. And specifically an issue that I’ve seen you writing about and something that you’re ionate about, which is making e- books more accessible for libraries. I know it’s probably not the easiest issue to drum down into a sentence or two, but what are the primary issues that are facing you right now?David: Yeah. Well, it’s actually pretty easy. There are thousands and thousands of publishers out there. But the stuff that most people want to check out, at least from a public library, they’re published by six publishers. They’re generally called the big six publishers. They’re, like, Random House, Penguin. You know, those names that most people would probably recognize. Out of those six, two don’t sell to libraries at all. Two of them haven’t, but they’re starting little bitty pilot projects with, like, a single library to test the waters. One of them sells to libraries, but then after it’s checked out 26 times, they make you buy it again. And one has always sold to libraries, but they recently jacked the prices up to three or four times the price of the book, which isn’t really a good model, good sustainable model going forward for libraries. Out of those six, most of them don’t sell the stuff that our customers are actually wanting to check out. It’s a big problem. We have an e-book service and I just heard yesterday that we’re running out of stuff to buy. Really. Because we’re looking at this huge list of books and going, ah, there’s nothing there our customers actually are interested in. What are we going to do?Patrick: Yeah, you’re like “Managing Online Forms?” Oh, crap. No one’s interested in that. Who’s going to read that stuff.David: Oh, boy.Patrick: Well, I noticed that you shared a link on Twitter recently. And it was via Sara Houghton, on Twitter. And it was published by the American Libraries Magazine. And what it is is a price comparison of the cost of e-books for libraries and for consumers, as of September 5th, 2012. So, very recent. I wanted to ask you about this and what this chart actually means. For example, I see “50 Shades of Gray.” Not a piece of literature I have yet enjoyed. But it costs $47.85 for libraries via, the service is Overdrive in 3M. That’s the price for the e-book. And then there’s a consumer pricing, which is unsurprisingly, $9.99 for Amazon or general retailers. Where you buy e-books they tend to be priced in that realm. So, what does the difference mean? What does that mean to libraries?David: Well, it’s highly irritating to libraries, honestly. Because any of us could go out and buy that “50 Shades of Grey” book from Amazon, from Barnes and Noble, pretty easily. Put it on our Kindle or whatnot. But for a library to do that, it costs four or five times as much. If we buy it from, say, Overdrive. They’re the most popular e-book service out there. We’re not actually buying the book. We’re renting it, so to speak. If we decide to move away from Overdrive, that 50 bucks is just gone, and we don’t get the book, which is pretty irritating. So, we’ve paid four or five times the price, just for access. I can understand an online company that’s giving us access to content, you’re paying for a service, not just the book. But, we’re paying for the book, but we’re also paying an annual maintenance fee for that service already. Why is the price jacked up? Mainly for the publishers because they don’t quite trust libraries. They’re looking at the traditional public library, “I can get stuff for free there”. Right?Patrick: Right. Yes.David: But what they’re not seeing, actually what they’re starting to notice, is that we’re free marketing places. In Topeka, there is one book store, Barnes and Noble. And there’s us. We’re bigger. We have more stuff, we’ve got friendly people, like you said. We’ve got a coffee shop. We’re centrally located. That sort of looks like a book store with big displays of publishers’ stuff. Right?Patrick: Right.David: And, unlike Barnes and Noble, we have the backlog of all the other stuff those authors have written. Whereas, Barnes and Noble, they’ll have the newest stuff, if it’s popular. You know, like Stephen King, they’ll have more of his things. Not everything. We have that. So, we can sell the backlog for free. But then we’ve got statistics, and publishers are starting to get statistics, too, that show people who use libraries to check out either print books or e-books, most likely will buy their next book. Which makes sense because if you start a series, you get number 1 here, number two is checked. So what are you going to do if you want to get it? Right? You’re going to go buy it. You’re going to get your Kindle out, click that easy one click button and continue reading. And then maybe check out the third one. They’re starting to realize we’re not that scary, but it’s not there yet. So, they’re saying, let’s make this pricing point higher, so we make a profit. I’m not sure that makes sense.Patrick: Just to dive into that pricing a little bit, $47.85, you’re essentially licensing the work, from what I gather.David: Right.Patrick: Is that per year or is that one-time fee for as long as you maintain your maintenance fee as part of the service. Or how often do you have to pay that $47.85?David: For most of those publishers, it’s a one-time fee, except for Harper Collins. I’m pretty sure it’s Harper Collins. They’re the 26 uses thing, so after that book is checked out 26 times, then we’d have to pay that fee again to access the book.Patrick: One of the trick issues here is the nature of e-books and how someone could duplicate them, right? And they’re easily duplicated. When you have the print book, you have the print book. You take that out and no one else can have it. So, one of the things I was curious about with this pricing, and how e-books pricing works with libraries, is are you limited by the number of copies you can lend out at a certain time.David: Uh-huh.Patrick: For example, when you pay that price, can you send out as many copies as you want, 10 copies? Or, as versus the print, you can only do one. How does that work as far as the number of people who can check it out?David: That’s one person at a time. We’d have to pay that 50 bucks twice for two people to. Then, that sort of varies, you can pay for an all inclusive license on certain books, that sort of thing, so anybody can access it. Costs more, you know.Patrick: Well, that’s was my one way to justify that pricing for publishers. Sorry.David: Yeah, not so much.Patrick: I still had to ask the question. In fairness, to say, that if it’s treated as a license and you can be allowed ten copies, okay. But if it’s just one, and it’s actually reasonably verifiable as one, then obviously the pricing doesn’t match up.David: Not so much. I was going to say, you’d mentioned it’s sort of hard to copy that print book. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, with my first book, every week I can click on a link in Twitter or something like that through my vanity feed, and find a pdf copy of my first book out there. I’ve ed an illegal copy of my book.Patrick: Yeah, I actually have a Google alert set up for that also. And I’m fairly well schooled on the old DMC. I notice it a lot.David: Yeah. Yeah, right.Patrick: It tends for me to be the pdf e-book version that was put out, and it’s not like a scanned version. Is yours a scanned version, like they put it in a copier?David: I think it is.Patrick: That’s interesting so . . . But that’s a different sort of issue.David: Yeah, it is.Patrick: I have had to take down a number of different copies. Not as much as, I’m sure, Harry Potter deals with. So that was an interesting discussion. I definitely learned some things about e-book pricing. I was not aware of that. And I honestly don’t know how my publisher handles it because I’m pretty sure they fall outside of the big six. At least in the U.S. Internationally, I’m distributed by McGraw Hill, but in this country I’m not. It’s AMACOM, the American Management Association. So I’ll have to look into that and see what they’re a part of and what they’re charging. Because I’m definitely curious now.David: Yeah. Definitely.Patrick: I just want to throw a kind of, random question out there, that occurred to me. And really, what brought it up was your latest blog post. Or at least, your latest blog post as of last night. You were talking about Starbucks cards.David: Oh, yeah.Patrick: And how you go to the library all the time, but now you’re going to Starbucks. You’re in Starbucks getting coffee, and you notice these cards, on the counter presumably, that were offering you a free song, the Zack Brown Band, and also . . . What was the other card?David: It was a Yoga app from iTunes or something like that.Patrick: A free app. So, you were talking about how this was good, and how it exposes you to different apps, different songs, and there’s value created for Starbucks, for the artist, for you as the customer, and how the libraries could take advantage of this. That was the point of the post, is to ask people to think about how can you benefit as libraries, since that’s the heavy part of your readership, by this strategy. And, I skipped that discussion totally . . .David: Okay.Patrick: . . . as I sometimes do. And just thought, why aren’t there more Starbucks in libraries? Because, I’ve thought of this before. I’ve seen it before, very rarely. I’ve heard about it. But, it seems to make a lot of sense. Because you go to Barnes and Noble and you see people sitting in Starbucks reading books they don’t buy. And at libraries, you’re supposed to read books you don’t buy. Except if you leave later and buy them at a later date, as you talked about. Libraries can drive sales. So I don’t mean it like that. But, it seems like it makes so much sense, Starbucks to cut in the library, give them a little piece of that, which helps the whole system work, and raises our boat, so to speak. Why is that not so? Is there a competitive business reason why that’s not so. Have you heard much discussion about this?David: That’s a good question. I know in larger libraries, they don’t usually have a Starbucks. But they will have a coffee shop of some type. Even a small library I’ve been in has. So, some do have that kind of stuff. It’s usually more of a franchise, or a ‘I’m a librarian, do I really want to figure out how to run a restaurant’ problem. Because it’s a completely different business. For our library, we actually rent the space out to a guy who knows how to do restaurants. And them, we’ve got a deal going there somewhere. Because we don’t know how to do that. Right? I know how to buy a coffee, I don’t know how to sell it 50 times a day. I think it’s mainly that, probably.Patrick: Yeah, and you know, the thing I was thinking of is not necessarily on the libraries. Though I think it would be a good strategy for libraries to go out there and say, hey, we would have a Starbucks. But I think it would be an interesting strategy if Starbucks went out there. And I’m sure you can make with libraries, trade publications, mailing lists, and what have you, and say, “Hey, we want to start populating libraries with Starbucks coffee shops. And we’ll give you X percent of the profit.” And I bet a number of libraries would probably jump at that if they could.David: Oh, they probably would. I mean, there’s hundreds of thousands of libraries in the United States alone, waiting for Starbucks to come in.Patrick: Waiting. I suggest this as someone who doesn’t even drink coffee.David: Yeah, there you go.Patrick: All right. Starbucks, libraries aside. I want to talk about the book a little bit. “Face to Face” is the name of the book. ‘Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections.’ We’ve kind of talked about that already. That was sort of my goal was to talk about how you’re doing that for the library, through different features and functionality. And I think we’ve done that. But to get a little more specific, your book talks a lot about being human. And for companies and organizations to be human is kind of the overriding theme. Who are some of your favorite human companies on the web?David: Yeah. Well, obviously, the big company that’s usually mentioned here would be Zappos. And they really do a good job. It’s fun to just see what they’re doing, and how they’re connecting to customers. But a smaller company that I know about just from my audio and video stuff, is Rhode Microphones. They make that video mike that you can stick on top of cameras, among other things. They do an amazing job of connecting with customers. For this interview I was actually looking back through some of their tweets and their Facebook . They do some really cool stuff. They do very direct, short and sweet customer and service, through Twitter. They’ll say, oh, my gosh, here’s the link to that thing you need. Or, here’s my phone number, give me a call, let’s figure it out. They do really human sounding stuff there, which is cool to see. On their Facebook , they do that kind of stuff, too. They run contests. But they’ll also do visual stuff. Like show customers using their product out in the wild. Not so a, oh, look, 20 people are using my thing. But to me anyway, it’s sort of cool to see how customers are using these microphones. Because I get idea from that. You know? And say, “Oh, I never thought ing it that way.” And that’s what they’re sharing. They love their product, they’re sharing ways to use their product, through social media. I find that to be a very human type thing. It’s like you saying, David, have you thought about this? Oh, that’s cool. That’s what the company is doing, organizationally.Patrick: That is cool. And what of my favorites is Think Geek. You’re probably familiar with them, as a geek who thinks. They have this great Twitter feed. And just a kind of great overarching strategy of how they communicate with customers via all means, right? The website, email. Social media, though, is kind of, the topic today. On any given day, you can see them tweeting about some exciting product. You can see them tweeting about someone using their product, some sort of geek humor. The Wreck-it Ralph trailer they just tweeted out, it’s amazing. They say the licensing coup, alone, is amazing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that movie, but they’ve got all these video game characters licenses from numerous companies into one film. Anyway, so they just share all of this crazy stuff. I’m just looking at it, just looking at it here without any preparation. Just looking at the feed. “Happy programmers day. It’s the 256th day of the year, aka, two, upper arrow, eight, or pound a values of an eight bit byte. Hug a dev you love.” I have no idea what that mean because I’m not a programmer, but you know programmers know what that means. And that’s the kind of stuff that they tweet out. And they tweet it out like data cupcakes, kids, just different kinds of stuff and products, and geeky references. You stroll through it and there’s just such a personality that comes through the feed, and that’s what I love. I’m not even looking at the replies. Because the replies are also great. I don’t know how much of this I can read. But it’s just so funny, it’s topical, they talk about things with different people. But you mentioned something very important. And that is that Zappos helps people on the space that they’re asking the question. And I think that’s really important. Because there are private things in a transaction that you can’t say out there in public. And there’s perfectly legitimate reasons to take something to email, or take something to the phone.David: Yeah, definitely.Patrick: But, I think one of the ways people make a big difference is when they don’t throw every inquiry in that basket. Not every response is, call 1-800-this. You can confirm basic fact. You can say, oh, your package will be there on Friday. The stuff that isn’t your Social Security Number or your credit card or your name or address, I think that’s really important. That’s how a lot of people are setting themselves apart, is by helping people in the space where they felt comfortable to ask the question.David: Right. I often will tell people, for libraries, and this works well for other businesses, too. Just go where people gather. You do that physically, why not do that online, too. So if your customers happen to be gathering in Foursquare or in Twitter or LinkedIn, or whatever, you should probably be there having conversations with them. I think it’s really important. It’s free, you know.Patrick: Yeah, people. Just people. Power. The power of people.David: That’s right, it’s just people.Patrick: Yeah. Just to close out this Think Geek example because I love mentioning this. But they have also a feed at think geek spam on Twitter. And what that is is their product announcements. They don’t make their product announcements on their main feed. They have think geek spam, and “All new think geek products all the time. Follow Think Geek,” the main , “for contest freebies and warm, human fuzzies.”David: That’s cool.Patrick: And they actually have, this is the Think Geek spam, because their mascot is a monkey. And the Think Geek spam is a robot monkey. And in the Twitter background, they have the robot monkey and the regular monkey fighting.David: Oh, my. That’s pretty funny.Patrick: It’s acknowledging the fact that they sell stuff. But they also have a sense of humor about it. Now, I guess today, how they interview their social media candidates, is, today they do an interview on Twitter with people, just send the person questions, @thinkgeeknewb, and the person answers questions. I mean there’s just so many . . . Think Geek is just . . . I love them.David: Yeah, they have a good time, don’t they?Patrick: They do. They definitely do. I always say if I hit the lottery, I just going to back up just a truck full of money at the Think Geek offices and just buy everything they have.David: There you go.Patrick: Moving on a little bit. A lot of people, I think, ask where do you start with things like this, and “Being human.” And it’s kind of a generic question, so it’s hard to specifically quantify because there’s so much you can do. But, let’s say you’re starting a new small business. You have no established history as a company. So it’s not like you were some 100-year-old company that is now just getting online, and you have all that history and that story to pull from. How do you start being human? Pick any business you want, I guess. It can be a restaurant, it could be a furniture store, it could be, whatever. Where do you start?David: You know, I think in general, and for almost any organization-I took some notes from what you sent me-I was thinking there’s at least four things you can do, sort of universal truths of being human online, so to speak. The first one would be just to be informal and conversational. Have that informal, conversational tone in everything you do online. Whether it’s a video or a blog post or a product review, whatnot, be informal and conversational. Because that’s the way people talk with that conversational tone, so that will pull people into that quote, unquote conversation, even if that conversation is one they’re reading. They’ll fell that the communication has a two way aspect to it, just by that tone. Also, be short and sweet because people don’t want to hear you talk forever, right?Patrick: Right.David: It’s not a Shakespeare’s play. They want, give it to me because I’ve got two minutes. Ask questions, all the time. People like Chris Brogan have taught us that already in Blog Post. Don’t finish the post, so to speak. Say, what do you think? Let me know. We do that at the library. You can do that with pretty much anything. On Twitter, ask, “Hey, we put out this new product. You guys are starting to buy it. Let me know what’s working and what’s not, so we can fix it.” People love that kind of stuff because they can be part of the story, so to speak. And they can help fix something and make it better. Or even help 20 other customers with a problem they’re having, just because they know the little tidbit that somebody else doesn’t, and the company has facilitated that. Then finally, just be friendly. Sounds sort of weird that you’d have to work at that, but I think oftentimes when you let your marketing department get a hold of something, pretty much anything, unless they’re really good, they remove informality, conversational tones, that friendly thing, the friendly vibe going on, and make it professional sounding. And that sucks the life out of conversations. I think if a company or an organization or a nonprofit follows those four ideas, they’ll be well on their way to having that human voice online.Patrick: Cool. Diving into that a little deeper, and speaking of platforms, because there’s lots of platforms. There’s your own website, certainly, and whatever you can do with that, so many different things. The sky’s the limit, if you have programmers. And if not, there’s plenty of platforms out there that you can simply install, whether it be WordPress or something else. And then, outside platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Foursquare, and other ones. Numerous ones, a limitless number, and always growing. As far as choosing a platform, or making the first kind of inroads onto doing something, because once you have the understanding of how you need to speak, how you need to participate, where do you go? How should people make that decision?David: I think it goes back to what I said earlier about going where people are gathering, especially if you’re talking about social media platforms. Just go where your customer base is. What I do, and I tell libraries to do this all the time. In Topeka, when I go to a restaurant or a store, I’ll notice the stickers by the door that say, we’re on Twitter or we’re on Facebook, we’re on some new social media thing that I never heard of, whatever, which probably isn’t true. But if it did exist, and I saw the sticker, I’d be like, ah, maybe I’d better check that out. That’s what I tell people to do. I say, if you see those up, make sure you are in those, because your customers know about that. If you’re listening to the radio, and the disc jockey is saying, hey, tweet me your questions, tweet me your requests. That means people in my area are actually using that so maybe I should be there, too. That’s how I decide whether one platform is better than the other. For example, we are on Foursquare here at the library. We don’t get a lot of use on that, so we’re not spending a lot of time there right now. Whereas, maybe a coffee shop who’s giving a 10% discount to the mayor, maybe they’re getting more use out of that. So, it would work really well for them. Maybe not so much for a furniture store, or something. It depends. Find out where your customers are and then go there.Patrick: So, when talking about those third-party platforms, those platforms you don’t control, that other people control, how important is your home base? Your own website, in the whole grand scheme of going out there and participating on these surfaces like Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else?David: In my mind, your home base is pretty important. If you’re a business, that’s sort of your stuff. Thinking physically for a second, that is your building, and that’s where all of your couches are that you’re selling. Online, it’s sort of the same thing because that’s where your catalog is, right? If you go into the Disney Store, they actually . . . I love going into the Disney Store because they have these signs all over the place that say, our full store is at Disney.com, or Disneystore.com, whatever. And that makes sense. Because it works sort of that way for a library, too. Because we’ve got our library catalog of books that has everything we own. And then if you come into the library, half our stuff is checked out. If you want the full thing, that would be our website. So, in my mind, home base is really important because that’s where our stuff and our staff are. The other platforms, I see those as conversations about our stuff. If you want the stuff, you go to the home base. If you want to have a conversation about that, that can be in any number of places.Patrick: What is your reaction when you see someone who s- and, I don’t know, I’ve seen it in different ways, it could be locally, it could be in this restaurant in the store, it could be a national ad campaign- when all they is Facebook.com/them, and there’s nothing else there. I don’t know, I can see a lot of ways to look at that. I mean, if you have the domain name, Ford is Ford is Ford. They’re going to go to ford.com, they’re going to Google Ford, they’re going to get Ford. Not that Ford has done that, just a kind of random, well-known brand. Not everyone, most people cannot tap into that well known brand loyalty. What do you think when you see an ad campaign that only has Facebook.com/them, or Twitter.com/them, and nothing else?David: Honestly, I think back to statistics. Right now, I think the latest statistic I’ve seen is that a little over 50% of all people aged 13 and up in America have Facebook s. So, if I see somebody really focusing just on Facebook, hopefully they know their customer base really, really well. Otherwise, they’re leaving about half of them out at any given time. Twitter, that’s like 12% of people in America. So, if they’re focusing on persona’s or a certain market segment, that works really well. If they’re not, that’s sort of a mistake because they’re leaving out everybody. It would make more sense to me, probably, to send everybody to a special website, and then, have all of those social media places there to continue the conversation, right?Patrick: Yeah. I pretty much concur with you. But, others may disagree and they may be good. I don’t know. Who know? But, the last question about the book I wanted to ask you because I’ve written two books, now, you’ve written two books now. We want it to be applicable to as many people as possible, right?David: Yes, yes.Patrick: And you want it to reach as many people as possible. But when you write a book, you do have an audience in mind. When you wrote “Face to Face,” who was it that you had in mind?David: Well, I was really focusing on organizations that, maybe, have a website, have some social media presence already, but they’re just not there yet. It’s obvious they don’t quite know what to do with it. When you go visit their Facebook page, it’s obvious they’re not having conversations yet, there. There are a lot of small businesses, mom and pop shops, libraries, nonprofits, that are in that place right now. They have all the stuff, but they don’t know how to use it. When I was thinking about that, before I started writing the book, I was like, well, I’m a librarian. I read a lot of books. And, I tend to read books about websites and social media. There are a ton of books out there that say, yes you should have these things. But they don’t really go into the practical next step so much, of in that status update box, here’s how you connect to people. Just that, what can I start doing this afternoon after I read this chapter type stuff. And so I thought, well, I’ll try to provide that. Because Ford, they don’t need that. The little donut shop down the street, they probably do. And so, that’s who I was focusing on with it. Here’s some practical tips and pointers, and any organization that needs that kind of stuff, have fun and buy my book, please.Patrick: Excellent. I think that brings us to the end of our interview. One thing I wanted to mention is that if you wanted to meet David in person, Pod Cam Topeka is October 13th at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. Podcamtopeka.org is the website. It’s $10. Having attended one and spoke at one, it was a great event and well worth, certainly $10. Much, much more.David: Yes.Patrick: It was a tremendous event. David’s book is “Face to Face, Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections.” You can pick it up wherever fine books are sold, Amazon.com, certainly in Barnes and Nobles, and everywhere else. And David, where can people find you online?David: davidleeking.com is my website. And then on Twitter, or pretty much any other social media tool, it’ll be just davidleeking, all one work.Patrick: You’ve got the brand locked down.David: Yes, I do.Patrick: Well, thank you for ing us today, David.David: Yeah, thanks so much. this has been fun conversation.Patrick: Definitely. And, I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network. You can follow me on Twitter at @iFroggy, and I blog at managingcommunities.com. You can visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show, and to subscribe to us to receive every show automatically. Email [email protected] with your questions for us. We’d love to read them out on the show, and give you our advice. The Sitepoint podcast is produced by Karn Broad. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Episode 179 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have 3/4 of the , Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves).Listen in Your BrowserPlay this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: this EpisodeYou can this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:SitePoint Podcast #179: Mining the Database (MP3, 30:17, 29.1MB)Subscribe to the PodcastThe SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.Episode SummaryThe discuss topics such as a new paid social network, testing and several typography related topics! Here are the main topics covered in this episode:Paypal President Marcus Vows Change at Payments Giant – Tricia Duryee – Commerce – AllThingsD and PayPal president makes house-call (or email) to smooth over customer dispute Digg Archives via Essentials of the Online Business.com – Chris TrynkiewiczPostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 9.2 releasedBrowse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/179.Host SpotlightsPatrick: Amazon.com: Hyperkin SUPABOY Portable Pocket SNES ConsoleLouis: Amazon.com: Year Zero: A Novel (9780345534415): Rob Reid: BooksStephan: BBC News – Jazz junctions – riding New York’s A TrainInterview TranscriptLouis: Hello and welcome to the Site Point podcast. We’re back with the show this week to discuss some new stories and events from around the world of web design and development. With me on the show today are Patrick and Steven. Hi guys.Stephan: Yep, how are you?Patrick: Hey, how’s it going?Louis: Kevin Dees could not make it this week but we will carry on in his absence.Patrick: Yes, Kevin was actually showing me around Minecraft the other day.Louis: Oh, all right. Are you dead to the world now?Patrick: He got lost. I threw you guys right off the bat with that one. Yeah we did a screen share on Skype and he was showing me his server he had set up for Minecraft. It’s pretty cool. My little brother’s playing it on his iPod, and it’s like a pretty neat thing. It reminded me of some things that I played in the past. I’m not an old man per se.Louis: You’re such an old man Patrick.Patrick: But I am older than Kevin. And it reminded me of Runescape in some elements. Even Sim City to some extent. But it’s a pretty cool game. I don’t know if you guys have played around with it at all.Louis: Yeah, I did very briefly. I only played locally, not on a server and at that, only for a few hours. I kind of put it aside and never got back to it. But it was definitely interesting and it’s captivated a lot of people’s imaginations, so it’s an interesting development in gaming. I like the fact that it’s just a purely open world kind of thing and really focuses on letting you just build whatever you want to build.Patrick: You know it’s funny, to give you an inside into my mindset. One of the questions I’m asking him when he starts showing me and he’s on this server he has with a friend and I’m well can the other person destroy what you built? He’s like yeah. That’s like one of my first questions. And he’s like, yeah they can but that’s why I have my own server with my friend. We built things and we built all these little traps and stuff, and yeah it’s pretty cool. But that’s my mindset. It’s wait a minute, can this person come to what I just built and change it? So, I’m very protective.Louis: All right, on that note. I don’t have a segue, unfortunately Kevin, the master of the segues isn’t with us so I think we’ll just have to jump willy nilly from story to story.Patrick: It’s time to mine some stories.Louis: What’s that?Stephan: It’s time to mine some stories.Louis: Oh, ohPatrick: Oh, Oh. Yeah, not good, not good.Louis: That was a little rough.Stephan: You know like you mine data and you mine databases.Louis: Oh, oh.Stephan: Do we have database news this week?Louis: There we go. You did it.Stephan: Hold your applauseLouis: Well as Patrick hinted, my story this week is the release of Post ReSQueL 9.2. Now I know Patrick probably has never had a reason to use Post ReSQueL but Steven have you used it before?Patrick: Yeah, I used it actually at my last job. I liked it a lot.Louis: Yeah, I’ve just had the occasion to really Digg into it for the first time quite recently. I had used it before on a Drupal project some years ago, but never really actually paid much attention to the database and really never did anything that wouldn’t have been possible with MySQL. But on our latest projects we’ve been doing a couple of little experiments that are hosted on Heroku and Heroku’s sort of default database servers are Post ReSQueL databases, so decided to have a play around. At one point I was trying to denormalize out some lines of data and come up with a way of storing it on the database. I’m like, what would be great is if I could put a whole series of numbers in one field of the database, because otherwise I need this massive set of relational tables that are 50 columns wide. And one of my coworkers was like you can use an array type in Post ReSQ, there’s an array type. I’m like oh that looks interesting. It was exactly what was required for the job at hand.So that’s kind of one of the reasons I was really excited to see that there’s a new version that includes some new data types including, most interestingly to me, a range data type; which lets you define sort of a range. Let me explain what’s meant by that. So in one column I can say that it stores a range of dates for example. It could also be a range of integers or a range of timestamps or decimals. But let’s say I decide that I want to store the range from, let’s go with some dates that are current so it’ll make sense. So from Monday the 3rd of September at 10:00 am to Wednesday the 5th of September at 11:00 am, and that’s just a range stored in one field of the database. Then you have the ability to query on that. To queary, oh you know, in comments where the time created is in that range. Which is a really nice piece of flexibility and I mean, it’s not useful for every project but when you need a specific data type, trying to mess around and fake it by having a separate one for start date and end date and then have to use a bunch of operators is a little clunky. Yes some really cool stuff. Also a lot of performance improvements as well.Stephan: Yeah, I was just looking at this range thing that you brought up. It actually allows unbounded ranges too so it can go out to infinity. That’s kind of cool.Louis: All right.Stephan: That’s pretty neat. Or you can start from, you can have it so that you have a higher range. So, let’s say it’s next week, next week’s date but then you want everything from before that you can leave the lower range’s value blank. Which is kind of neat, so like from the beginning of time give me everything. It’s kind of cool.Louis: Yeah, this is from the documentation, the operators that are available for playing with ranges and it includes things like finding whether the ranges are adjacent to each other, whether they extend entirely to the left or entirely to the right, whether they overlap, whether an element is contained within the range, whether another range is contained within the range. So, if your project has a need for this kind of stuff, I can say from my limited recent experience, that being able to have a data type that really accurately reflects what you’re trying to do is much, much more convenient than trying to fake it with a bunch of other relational tables.Stephan: Yeah, this is cool, especially if they’ve done some improvements to get the speed up a little bit. Because I think, it’s been my biggest experience with not using Post ReSQuel. That people that I’ve talked to are, well it’s just slower. We can use my sequel for what we’re doing and it’s faster, the selects are faster. So if they can get the performance to that type of level, that speed, then I think more people are going to use this because this is much more powerful than anything that MySQL’s got, and especially with all the Oracle stuff going on right now.Louis: Yeah. I can give you a one word argument against using MySQL and that argument is Oracle.Stephan: Exactly, so this is huge. I’m actually thinking about doing a couple projects coming up in the next couple weeks so I might just have to pick Post ReSQueL up and do it.Louis: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. It’ll be cool to see once it gets out into the wild a bit and people can really provide more real world evaluations of the speed. Because just in numbers in the announcement post seem pretty impressive from a performance standpoint. Some of the things they’re mentioning here is that it is capable of handling up to 350,000 read queries per second, which apparently is a 4x improvement in speed and a 5x improvement in the number of writes per second. So if those numbers are actually born out by real world use, than that could definitely address that issue if people have been experiencing that.Stephan: Yeah and it looks like they’ve done some scaling stuff as well and it can actually now do cascading replication which is pretty cool if you need to scale your servers for load, the slaves can now replicate themselves.Louis: Oh rightStephan: Which is great.Louis: Does that go on infinitely? Can i just, can I construct, I’m sorry this is such aA:Off topic?Louis: An irrelevant comment but yeah can I just create an infinite chain of replicating slaves?Stephan: As long as you’ve got the servers to back it up yeah, I don’t see why not.Louis: Awesome. No it’s just all replication all the way down.Stephan: This is great news though. I think it really helps Post ReSQ’s case to getting out into more of the smaller markets since it is open source. I think that’ s really been the holdouts. It’s been the word press and things because people know how to set up a MySQL database because it’s so simple.Louis: YeahStephan: I think that this is a huge start to trying to get that out there. Maybe us talking about it will get some more people using it, hopefullyLouis: Yeah. Definitely and it is interesting to know how MySQL has been so much of a default for so long. Even from early PHP development into rails and everything. It’s just sort of, it’s there and it’s automatic and it’s easy. But setting up Post ReSQueL is not particularly tricky. The way it uses s by default everything is scoped to within a specific system so it’s a little tricky to get a hang of, but once you get a hang of it there’s a lot of power in there and people should definitely check it out if they haven’t.Stephan: Yeah and a lot of shared hosts actually have Post ReSQueL but they don’t announce it so.Q:Yeah.Stephan: If you have a shared host and want to use it just your host, they should be able to set you up.Patrick: Actually you guys mentioned the Oracle issue of MySQL and that made me want to ask, is Post ReSQuel, is it your preferred MySQL alternative? I know there are some others out there, MariaDB isn’t floated around quite a bit because of Monty’s affiliation with it but is Post ReSQueL your preferred alternative?Q:In my case definitely. Like I said I hadn’t have much experience with it until recently but the experience that I have had has been extremely positive. It’s widespread enough that it was easy for me to find an adapter for active records so I didn’t have to do any monkey patching myself to get it working with rails. Like I said, it’s got a lot more features and a lot more data types than MySQL, and when you need one of those features it can make your life a lot easier. So yeah, I’ve been very impressed.A:Yeah, I think it really depends what you’re trying to do Patrick. If you’re looking for a lightweight database to just host some blog posts or something, I think MariaDB is probably the best lightweight out there right now, because it’s basically just a drop in replacement for MySQL, right. That’s the way I’ve read it. But I think, if you’re trying to do something that’s larger, that needs a lot of scalability, that needs, like Louie said, that needs more of the data types then definitely Post ReSQuel. That’s what I go to.Patrick: Excellent. Good answers.Stephan: That’s actually why I used it at my last job, was because we were doing a lot of heavy duty financial type queries and Post ReSQueL has a lot of that built in which is useful, and it doesn’t cost as much as Oracle.Louis: Sounds goodPatrick: We talked recently on this show about Betaworks buying the, I guess the assets, the skeleton of Digg, because there were multiple parties that took different pieces, but when it comes to the Digg brand that was acquired by a company named Betaworks and they said that at that time that they would allow people to their Digg archives and I found through a Site Point podcast listener, Chris Trynkiewicz(SP) that they had done so and they’ve made it pretty easy to use. Digg.com/archive. I know probably a lot of our listeners used to use Digg, and now you can just enter your email address, your name and they will send you an archive of your Digg activity, your submissions, your Diggs,your comments, your saved articles. And they have partnered with a couple companies that they say will help you work with your data, KITT, which is a free service and then Pinboard which is a pay service, neither of which I use. But, yeah I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons. I think it’s a reasonable model I guess in some way to follow for sites like this that get acquired and don’t necessarily want to follow the same path and just allow people to their data. I think that’s a pretty good thing. It’s something that should be modeled so, I think this is a pretty good move and I don’t know that there’s a lot to discuss there but I just like the move by Betaworks.Louis: Yeah, I’m very impressed. I think especially partnering with a few of the other, I don’t want to say competitors, but a few of the other options out there for sort of, storing links and stories, and providing you a way to just easily pull your data out of Digg and put it into there is great. Also just showing some kind of commitment to obviously the amount of work and the amount of time that people had spent building up all of their submissions and information in Digg.Patrick: Yeah, and they’ve also, I don’t know if you guys have taken a look at the new Digg.com homepage, it’s kind of a popular stories around the web sort of thing. I haven’t really played too much with it, you can submit a link. I don’t know how open it is opposed to how the old Digg was. But it seemed like they have numbers that are tied to Facebook, Twitter and Dig. Like the top story right now has 4 Digs, 240 Tweets and 131 Facebook likes so maybe pulling into some of that social web data, but hey it’s good to see the brand move on and for them to try something new.Q:Yeah it certainly looks good. It definitely looks more interesting to me than Digg did towards the end, where it was very cluttered and had all kinds of sort of junky stories. These look like a set of fairly serious stories.Patrick: You mean like 7 ways to groom you man-stash.Louis: Sorry.Patrick: You mean like that sort of stuff?Louis: Are you looking at the same page as I am. Oh are you talking about the old Digg.Patrick: No, I’m talking about the old Dig. You said junky story so I don’t know.Louis: Well yeah, exactlyPatrick: That was sort of an example, one that came to mind.Louis: Yeah, I mean that’s pretty much what Digg was all about towards the end anyway.Patrick: No, I’m looking at the new Digg because it’s tailored to me and my manliness. No, I’m sorry, I was talking about the old Dig.Louis: It’s just occurred to me, sorry on a totally separate note, it’s just occurred to me that I didn’t think about it at all when Digg disappeared because I hadn’t used it forever, but then when I came to this Digg archive and it said enter email address and name I was like, oh what’s my name on Digg, and then it occurred to me that Digg was the only site where I couldn’t get the RSSaddict name, where it was already taken when I got there. So that’s it, now I own it, 100%.Patrick: Wow. Victory. Hey,victory delayed is still victory, apparently.Louis: Yeah, it took some time. It’s a terrible name though, I don’t know why I stick with it.Patrick: It’s very descriptive of you. You’re a RSS Addict.Louis: Yeah.Patrick: Actually, you know, let’s pause for just a second; because I was trying to see if I could get my Digg archive and I already submitted the request awhile ago but then it wouldn’t go. So I was just seeing what it sent exactly. Let me see if it’s being held up in spamming, Google.Louis: Your Digg archive request. your archive.Patrick: Yes, it was in spammed. Good job Google. Well played.Louis: So looking at it here, you can import it into KITT. You can, with Pinboard that doesn’t just import it directly via the web but you can the file then create a Pinboard and then go to Pinboard and import it. And you can a JSON file of all of your stuff or a CSV file which would have to be individually either your Diggs, your submits, your comments or your saves. But you can get it as RAW, JSON or CSV. So you can get it in a really raw format if you want to have direct access to it if you want to play with it yourself. Or, you know, somehow set it up in your own website then you’re free to do so, which is great. Like I was saying, I think this approach to data owner-shipping, especially in a post acquisition I think every website should always provide you with an ability to export your stuff but to do so even after sort of they’ve gone away is a really nice gesture to s, and I think something that a lot more websites should take heed of.Patrick: Yeah I just got my email and I looked at it and it takes you to this page where you can just go ahead and immediately import through just a link to those two services and you can also it, like you said to JSON and then CSV files. So I have my Digg history. It’s like in the movie The Jerk with Steve Martin, the new phone books are here. My Digg history is here. It’s like really, I’m not even sure what I would want to do with it but I’m just going to go ahead and it and let it burn a hole in my hard drive until I die.Louis: That’s certainly one way of putting it. Yeah, I mean obviously in the case of Dig, I personally didn’t use it that much and I don’t think there’s much in there that I would be super interested in but there are definitely other things where if Twitter was going away tomorrow I would absolutely want a copy of all my Tweets. Just because I’ve posted so much stuff and there’s a lot of history in there.Patrick: Yes.Louis: So there are things definitely that I think would have value and the ability to have those export tools is a very, very good one.Stephan: Let’s talk a little bit about Paypal. They have a new president and based on some recent correspondence with him and some high profile internet personalities, things are looking better at Paypal I would say. Something that happened recently is Elliot J Stocks who I believe is a Site Point author.Louis: Yep.Patrick: Yep.Stephan: Had his funds frozen on Paypal. And he wrote good riddance, he wrote a blog post, Good Riddance Paypal, and kind of gave a spiel of what had happened and about 24 hours after he posted it he received a phone call telling him that he could access his funds and so the new president, David Marcus, wrote a note on, I guess the Paypal blog and it was in response to what Elliot J Stocks had experienced. Just kind of like a, hey look we’re changing the way we do business. We’re changing our culture internally and if we’re bad at something, we’re going to own up to it and he wants to make the company great again. So it’s a good start to what was really a terrible story of having funds frozen and so I wanted to get your guys take on this because I think it’s good news for Paypal, I think it’s good news for the money transaction business on the Internet.Patrick: I mean, so you always hear those Paypal horror stories, right? And I don’t know if you guys have any or not, but I myself don’t, and I’ve used Paypal for many years and paid for, I don’t know, a thousand ebay items, I’m probably afraid to say. I’ve taken payments for different things I’ve sold like advertising on my websites, and I haven’t had any kind of major horror stories. But, of course, we all know someone who has and we all know the websites that are out there. So Paypal has kind of, they have sort of an iffy name, I think it’s fair to say, especially in certain circles of merchants and of certain industries like events for example. It’s not a new thing, it’s been going on for awhile. So I think some people have this built in dislike of Paypal and I found this story interesting. His response to Stocks, which was at Hacker News and then his response to Andy McMillan of the Build Conference, and it’s refreshing. I think it’s a good approach, I think it’s a good example of good communication in these circumstances. Of course as he says, kind of beating us to our own point, is that the emails, the messages don’t really mean anything, action does. And he’s going to take these stories and use them to change things internally. Now will that happen, I don’t know. But I was fascinated by the story and also his very public and seemingly very candid responses.Louis: Yeah, that’s certainly interesting. As you said you hear so much about people’s experiences with Paypal and in a lot of cases it’s just really hard situations involving either charities or events; where things just fall apart because Paypal puts a freeze on an incorrectly. As far as I’m concerned, I appreciate this openness and as you said the candid way that he’s gone about these communications, but if I was going to start a new project tomorrow I think I would still definitely look for an alternative first and definitely wait to see how these changes actually are implemented in the organization, right. You have to kind of wait and see whether he can actually change the culture to a sufficient degree that people start having good experiences and really talking up good experiences with Paypal.Stephan: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. Actually my one biggest issue with Paypal ever was a dispute on an item I bought on Ebay. It was a magazine I bought and I wanted it because it had an image I might want to frame on it or something and in the picture it didn’t have a mailing label on it, when I got it it did. So I wasn’t happy about that and the seller wouldn’t do anything about it so I reached out to Paypal because it wasn’t as described, and they wouldn’t give me my money back. But I ed my credit card and they gave me my money back. So in the end, all’s well that ends well. But that’s my horror story.Louis: Yeah.Patrick: Quite horribleStephan: It’s one of those cases where time will tell what this really means for Paypal.B:Yeah and this David Marcus, he’s the president of Paypal. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been there since April and previously he was the founder of a company called Zong, which is a mobile payment provider that was acquired by Ebay and Paypal so that’s sort of his in to that company you could say. Then also an adviser to a company called Punchd, which was acquired by Google. So, kind of a serial entrepreneur type I guess. It’s interesting when those sorts of types end up at established companies that are owned by bigger companies. So maybe something will change or maybe he’ll get stifled during the process but it will be interesting to watch nonetheless. And this time I’m the buttoner so. Have you ever seen that clip about thescene buttoner, what’s his name, on CSI Miami. Ever scene that YouTube clip? Jim Carey making fun ofLouis: Caruso?Patrick: Yeah, Caruso. And how he buttons the scene, that’s what he calls it, because he puts his glasses and he walks away and the music playsStephan: Yeah, right.Patrick: We need our own music like that, yeah, after we end a story, that’s it, it’s buttoned, next.Louis: Good times. But I think that is all of the stories that we had for this week. Did you want to dive into some host spotlights?Patrick: Let’s do it. I’ll go first. I found this product recently, it’s not a new product but it was recently discovered. And as the saying goes, if I haven’t seen it, it’s new to me. This is the case.Louis: That’s not a saying that was a marketing sloganPatrick: Yeah, well it was also on Family Guy. Yeah it’s a saying now. It’s very deep. But well, it’s called the Hyperkin SUPABOY Portable Pocket SNES controller. What this beautiful thing is it’s a portable player for Super Nintendo games, and it doesn’t just stop there though. It’s not just something you hold in your hand with a screen. It’s got controller ports on it and AV out. So you could plug this into your TV and plug real controllers into it and play Super Nintendo games through this handheld device, it doesn’t stop there either. It’s also compatible with Super Famicom games. And wait there’s more.Louis: What are you Ron Popeil now?Patrick: And wait there’s more. It’s even compatible with peripherals like the super scope and the super multitap, of which I had one. So yeah, I just thought it was really fun and I love things like this, so that’s my spotlight. It’s $79.99. So not cheap but not enormously expensive either and you can get it from Amazon and it ships directly from Amazon and this company Hyperkin makes weird monster mutant gaming consoles that play NES, SNES and Genesis games, all at the same time so they are doing some interesting things with retro gaming.Louis: InterestingStephan: Only PatrickPatrick: That’s Patrick.Stephan: I’ll go nextPatrick: OK, Steven.Stephan: I have something that’s completely unrelated to web development or gaming. It’s kind of like a video narrated tour of New York’s A train. And the only reason this is relevant to me, at least is, I actually rode their A train just recently. I had to go out to JFK airport. The A train goes out to JFK airport. So I thought it was kind of an interesting ride. You see a lot of people especially during rush hour going home from Manhattan through Brooklyn and it was kind of funny to watch this and listen to this and see the photographs of the history of the train and kind of what I experienced on the train. It was a lot of fun and it kind of matched what I experienced so it’s cool to watch. It’s 5 minutes, 6 minutes long, so if you have time just watch it. It’s an interesting look at a train in New York that’s been around for a really long time. And it’s a 30 mile long train ride. It’s one of those neat little tidbits of info that you know you don’t see anywhere else.Louis: Cool. We’ll definitely check that out. So my spotlight for this week. This might be a first in the history of the SitePoint podcast and it’s a little unconventional but my spotlight this week is a book. Like an actual book with pages that you read.Patrick: Published by SitePointLouis: No, not published by SitePoint. Come on, man.Patrick: I’m just kidding.Louis: Yes so this is a book called “Year Zero” by Rob Reid. I just finished reading it this week and I thought listeners might appreciate it. It’s a pretty goofy science fiction comedy type of book. Rob Reid, the author, was the founder of Listen.com., which eventually created the Rhapsody digital music service. And he’s written a book. It’s his first novel. I guess in the same style as The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in that it’s just very goofy science fiction. The basic premise of the book is that they’re aliens out there. They’ve been monitoring our species and they’ve become really enamored with human music to the extent that their obsessed with it and they listen to human music all the time. And then they suddenly realize that as a by-product of the copyright law that prevails on Earth they owe humanity all of the wealth in the galaxy because they’ve been listening to our music illegally for decades. And all the adventures that come out of that. Interesting concept, a lot of cheeky parody of music and copyrights and stuff like that, so I thought listeners might enjoy this one. There’s a trailer of the book on YouTube, which I will send.Patrick: Very cool. There’s also some sort of video on the Amazon page too I noticed. So, video everywhere that’s a very interesting concept, pretty funny. I think there’s opportunity there for laughter. So thanks for sharing. I like books. I don’t know if I ever spotlighted one or not. I’ve written two, so I kind of like the idea of books. No, I was actually talking about this with someone recently about how they by a lot of ebooks but they keep all their books. I’m ind of, I don’t know how you feel about it. Did you ebook this or did you get the print?Louis: EbookPatrick: OK. Is that how you do all your reading?Louis: Yep. Print is dead to me.Patrick: OKStephan: Print is dead.Patrick: Sure it is. But I like the idea of paper books. I like having paper books. I like reading paper books. But yeah, obviously if you can get 50 million books on your reading device than it’s insanely convenient.Louis: It’s a couple of things. It’s almost..Patrick: Don’t say the dead tree thing.Louis: No, no, whatever. It takes, don’t get me started.Patrick: You wish there weren’t leaves to blow around.Louis: Exactly. I guess part of it is just ease of acquisition. If I’m watchingPatrick: RightLouis: TV and some guys getting interviewed about his book and he seems smart, right.Patrick: If he’s fooled you, yes.Louis: Exactly. But I can just bring up my phone or whatever and buy the book and start reading it in 5 minutes which is huge to me.Patrick: Yes.Louis: And also the books are less expensive. So I find myself less concerned if something, if there’s a new release out that I really want to read, spending $30 or $40 on the hardback is probably not hard to justify, but if the ebook is $10 than yeah, easy, done, I’ll read it. AnywayPatrick: Very good.Louis: And also I’ve been moving around a lot the last few years. I’ve lived in, I think 4 different cities in the last 10 years, and then moved a lot within Melbourne. I just hate the idea, and I’ve told people, I keep using the same joke, you’re sitting there with your moving truck outside and you’re looking at all your stuff in boxes and all of the boxes of books are in one corner, right? And all of those boxes of books collectively take up about 8 square feet and weigh 500 lbs, and you think to yourself, that’s probably like a GB of data.Patrick: That’s a very good pointLouis: And then you spend the next 4 hours sweating and carrying these things upstairs and, yeah, anyway. At one point it just got to me and I left them all back home in Canada, and I’ve been ebook-ing ever since.Patrick: Very good.Louis: So that’s all for the show this week. Let’s quickly go around the table.Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network I blog at managingcommunities.com on Twitter at @ifroggy I-F-R-O-G-G-YStephan: I’m Steven Segraves, you can find me on Twitter at @ssegraves and I blog occasionally at badice.comLouis: And I’m Lou Cimino, you can find me on Twitter at @RSSaddict. You can find Site Point on Twitter at @Sitpointdotcom. Sitepoint D-O-T-C-O-M. You can find the podcast on the web at sitepoint.com/podcast. All our episodes are there. You can leave a comment and you can find our RSS feed as well. You can find us on iTunes of course, and you can email us, [email protected]. Thanks for listening and I believe Patrick, you’ve got an interview scheduled for next week.Patrick: YesLouis: Don’t want to give too much away but stay tuned next week, Patrick will be bringing you an in depth interview, and then we’ll be back with the show the week after that. Thanks for listening everybody and bye for now.Produced by Karn Broad.Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.Theme music by Mike Mella.Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.