August 31, 2010 · Posted in Web technology
I got an email from Sitepoint this morning the subject line of which was “Why is WordPress So Popular?” I was intrigued so I opened it (I open most of their email, actually…great group!). Turned out the topic wasn’t WordPress per se but a book they published on building WordPress themes.
But the question was intriguing anyway so I thought about it for a bit. There are a lot of things to like about WordPress. But I have a hard time with people who think it’s the Ultimate Web Development Panacea. In reality, it’s a very good content management system augmented by tons of well-designed plug-ins that enable you to cobble together something relatively usable with relatively little programming effort. But like all such tools of which I’m aware, it has huge walls at some points. For example, changing not just the UI but the UX is very challenging for most WP users and designers (though somewhat less so for developers). If you need custom DB access in, e.g., a Web app, WP is not likely to be easy to bend to your will.
But I digress.
The singular most important advantage I think WordPress has over its competitors from a technology perspective is its high level of granularity. It is so relatively easy to add major chunks of functionality to your site with plug-ins. For example, eCommerce, full-blown membership site infrastructure, and a few dozen other such things are ready to drop in. They integrate nicely and for the most part relatively easily. If you want or need to custom-tailor them, that’s sometimes a real challenge.
For my money, though, I’m still using NOLOH for everything except heavily CMS-driven sites and I’ll soon be using NOLOH for those, too. It’s a matter of waiting for the NOLOH development team to put together some good editors for their in-place-editing CMS model, which I find vastly superior to and more efficient than the wizard-driven editor approach of WP and other CMSes. No walls. Growing community (though it will probably never be as big as WP’s, which is the latter’s other big advantage).
August 29, 2010 · Posted in Web technology
MG Siegler at TechCrunch has a focused and well-thought-out piece today on how several high-tech behemoths are beginning an all-out assault on the horror that is our cable industry.
"Innovation always tops greed and complacency. Always," he writes.
I want to believe that in the broadest sense. But he made me believe it in the context of cable. I cannot honestly remember the last day I didn't fume at Comcast. Siegler nails some of the key reasons for that; my tech-centric life is filled with dozens of user experiences every day, every one of which is as much better than the cable experience as 3D movies are than radio. And we get to pay premium prices for the crappy experience just because they can make us do so by their near monopolies.
Cable is entrenched. It's not going to disappear next week or next year. But the big companies leveling their guns at that space at the same time are not all going to miss. And any one of them can be the fatal shot.
August 24, 2010 · Posted in Web technology
This morning, for the fifth or sixth time in a week, I had to give up using Skype on a conference call involving 3-7 people because the sound quality dropped to a point of unusability. I used to count on Skype a lot. I pay for an inbound number for the convenience of that. For one-to-one calls it mostly works OK, though the quality of those calls has also been dropping lately, albeit less precipitously.
Am I the only one with these issues? Or is this becoming systemic with VOIP? There is of course no way to lodge a complaint with Skype that actually gets a response.
Sure is annoying, particularly when I'm paying for the service.
August 20, 2010 · Posted in Politics
I live in a State Senate district in California where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 41% to 34%. The area is a large part of the district represented in Washington by Democrat Sam Farr of Carmel, one of the more reliable liberal votes in the House.
This week, former State Assemblyman John Laird, a Democrat, squared off in a special election against a sitting GOP State Assemblyman, Sam Blakeslee. The seat in question had been held by moderate GOP Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, a rising Republican star in the state.
President Obama endorsed Laird while GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman backed Blakeslee.
The Republican won, though he did not receive 50% of the vote.
The warning shot for the Democrats in all this was the incredibly poor voter turnout, a fact that virtually always favors the minority Republican Party, not just here but almost anywhere. If Democrats behave this way in the mid-terms in November, the traditional debacle that ousts the party in power will take place and perhaps be even worse than forecast. This despite the fact that it is really difficult to deny that the current state of the economy — the central issue in this and any other campaign where it's not going well — is squarely and almost purely the fault of conservatives of both parties who drove the economy into a deep canyon and then ambushed the first responder liberals whose plans for rescuing it would almost certainly have had far better results if not for the opposition's Strategy of No
We must get out the vote in November. We can't afford to allow the recalcitrant and purely politically motivated conservatives gain even more influence over the government or we will experience economic stagflation that may well cripple this country once and for all. For which the perpetrators will, as usual, blame liberals and all those people who aren't like them.
August 19, 2010 · Posted in Media
This afternoon presented me with a perfect example of why Rupert Murdoch's dumb idea of charging for access to his media empire's "knowledge" is such a loser.
There was a fake hijacking or bomb threat called in to San Francisco International Airport today. I saw the item on my Google News page. I clicked the headline without paying attention to the source of that particular story (I've often done that) and was taken to the story on Murdoch's once-respectable, now-trashy Wall Street Journal. The generous folks there allowed me to read a two-sentence teaser of the story and then suggested that if I'd just log in they'd let me read the rest of it.
The story they reported on the WSJ wasn't even their original reporting. It was from Fox. I closed the WSJ page, went back to Google News, picked the same story from one of more than 100 additional sources, and read the entire account. For free. Imagine that.
As if that weren't ample evidence of Murdoch's faulty (you should pardon my loose use of the word) "thinking," all I had to do was go to the Fox site and read the piece in its entirety…again, for free.
I can see charging for access to unique reporting or commentary, though I'm not sure that model's sustainable. But when you tell me i have to pay — or even subscribe so you can bury me with spam and claim we have a business relationship — to read someone else's story or general reporting on a topic of broad news interest, I say, "Thanks, but no thanks."
August 14, 2010 · Posted in Business
We must find a way to incorporate into our valuation of businesses the social costs of their policies, particularly environmental and labor. Absent such accountability, companies will continue to destroy the humans over whose lives they have such significant control. And the socio-economic fabric that is America will continue to decay with increasing rapidity until we indeed lose our Way of Life.
There is an old saw that describes someone as knowing the "cost of everything and the value of nothing." There seems to me to be a corollary in big business and, often, in government where leaders seem often to know the cost of labor but not the value of responsible behavior.
This thought has wandered around in my mind gathering new examples and evidence for some time. I was finally moved to write about it this morning by a column by Joe Nocera in the New York Times that my buddy Tony Seton shared with me. In that article, Nocera says that the recent shocking dismissal of HP CEO Mark Hurd had as much to do with the fact that he was universally hated by virtually all of the company's employees as it did with the red-herring sex-and-expense-report-padding "scandal" that was the publicly cited reason.
August 10, 2010 · Posted in Politics
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs may lose his job over his comments yesterday for all I know. But I can say from this "Professional Leftist" perspective that he got us right.
We as a group are ticked off at President Obama for being such a centrist afraid to take chances with bold policy-making on a number of fronts. He inherited a mess but chaos is the only fertile ground for creative change and frankly he blew his opportunity to remake America in a new mold and image that had the possibility of sustainability. Sure, he's done a lot. More than most other Presidents in their first two years in all of our history.
But the fact is he didn't do as much as he could have. He chose not to. He caved. He tried to compromise with the most dug-in, intransigent opposition party in modern American history. He kowtowed to the same interest groups that the GOP has been kowtowing to for decades. He led us to believe that it frankly doesn't matter which party is in control in D.C. Ultimately it's the money.
But, as Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore said tonight, many of us voters on the Left are discouraged but we remain supportive of Obama because he's still the best we can get at the moment. I'd vote for Obama again today knowing what he's done and not done. But if the Democratic Party doesn't grow some cojones over the next two years, he may be a one-term president undone by the base he seems so willing to ignore and shed.
So Gibbs doesn't like what the Left is saying about his boss but he does get the message we're sending. This administration ignores this core of voters to its ultimate peril.
August 9, 2010 · Posted in Politics
An email from Organizing for America today has an appeal from a Pennsylvania teacher urging support for the state and local government relief package Congress is being called back to D.C. to adopt. The appeal is well-stated and it's a position I favor.
But in the middle of her letter, this teacher makes a classic misstatement: "But I'm not a special interest. I'm a teacher." The comment is in bold and also provides the subject line for the email, so obviously it's the OFA's main point.
The fact is, at least in politicians' eyes, every one of is a member of one or more special interests. Any group to which you belong, whether intentionally or by accident of life circumstances, which is represented by one or more lobbying groups, is a special interest. A teacher is a member of the special interests called educators, probably of teacher unions, and therefore probably also organized labor. In her case, she is probably also seen as a special interest called "women" or "women's issues." Since she works for the government, she's also a member of the "government employees" special interest group.
You can't help being a member of special interest groups. They claim you. For example, I'm seen as a senior. In D.C., that means the AARP, the strongest lobby for issues on aging, represents me even though I fundamentally disagree with them on almost every major issue. Doesn't matter. Even though I don't pay dues to AARP, I'm in their claimed membership group.
This is why when politicians complain that special interests are doing this or blocking that or demanding that other thing, I roll my eyes. It's just a stupid way of saying, "I took some money from a lobbyist who alleges that he represents these folks, so I'm voting that way (or my opponent is) purely because of the special interest's position." It's bullpuckey.
August 8, 2010 · Posted in Politics
There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the relative slowness of the recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930's. It is being called a "jobless recovery." Republicans are unabashedly blaming it on the Democrats even though both parties are clearly to blame, the GOP moreso than the Democrats in fact. But both of them completely miss a crucial underlying message. The crash is and was systemic. So long as we cling to the remnants of a long-discredited system of pure profit-based economics and an economy based heavily on oil, we will not recover permanently. All we can hope to do is to delay the inevitable self-defeat of our nation and its present way of life.
This major economic shift is a brilliant opportunity for us to transform from an economy that exploits the environment and plunders the planet to one that works in harmony with ecology and renews the planet. This fundamental transformation must be at the heart of what will inevitably be a long road to full recovery because it is the only way to ensure that that recovery is sustainable. If, when we reach the end of this tunnel (presuming we do), we can look around and see an economy essentially unchanged from what it was two years ago, we will have lost not only our chance for the change the planet is demanding but also any possibility of the human race's long-term survival without cataclysmic upheaval on an unimaginable scale.
Every one of us needs to think locally, act globally. Every one of us needs to do evereything we can — however inconvenient in the near term — to achieve sustainability in our own lives. Every one of us needs to join in the election of leaders with a sustainability consciousness. It has perhaps never been more true for humanity that if we don't work together to sustain our race, we will vanish as an entity as Gaia shrugs her shoulders and rids herself of the most dangerous virus she's ever experienced: mindless humanity.
For ideas for how we can make this fundamental and critical shift, start by becoming familiar with the work of Jeremy Rifkin. That will lead you to many other places and people who are awake and aware of the critical nature of our predicament.
The one who rings the fire alarm is not an arsonist.
August 7, 2010 · Posted in General
Being a big fan of HTML5 and one who believes that smartphone Web apps will get more and more competitive with single-platform dedicated apps, I try to monitor what's going on in the HTML5 universe. This morning, I took time to update the HTML5-readiness ratings on all the browsers I kept track of on OS X.
Safari 5.0.1 on my desktop scored the highest at 208 of a possible 300 points. On my iPad and iPhone, Safari and Atomic Web scored the same, 185 on iPhone and 127 on iPad.
Here are the ratings. I'm surprised how low Firefox has allowed itself to sink on this important feature set. Camino is just about to drop off my radar altogether.
Safari 5.0.1 = 208 (127 on iPad, 185 on iPhone)
Atomic Web (185 on iPhone, 127 on iPad)
Google Chrome 5.0.375.125 = 197
Opera 10.6 = 159
Firefox 3.6.6 = 139
Camino 2.0.3 = 46
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