Why WordPress is So Popular In Spite of Itself

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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).

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

August 31, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Cable Industry Under Attack. Thank God!

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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.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

August 29, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Am I the Only One or is Skype Going to Crap?

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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.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

August 24, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Maybe Post Formatting is WordPress’ Fault, Not Posterous

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I've posted a couple of comments here in recent weeks griping about the fact that when I use email to post to my blog via Posterous, formatting gets munged. In almost all cases, e.g.,. the blank line between the first and second paragraphs gets eliminated. I know that's probably not a big deal to more than a handful of folks on the planet, but for better or for worse, I've spent so much of my life as a professional writer and publisher, that the formatting errors just bug me.

This morning I decided to probe more deeply into what's going on and I'm now convinced the problem is with WordPress or perhaps the editor I'm using in WordPress. I haven't seen this post yet, of course, because I'm drafting it in email, but the immediately preceding post about the Democrats and God was my case in point.

When I posted it, there was a one-sentence first paragraph that just cited the New York Times article. When the post appeared on my blog here, the blank line was gone, though there was a line break at the end of the short first paragraph. So I went into my WordPress Dashboard, edited the post and inserted a carriage return into the WYSIWYG editor. I updated the post and checked it. No change (yep, I refreshed the browser). I re-edited the post, this time using the editor's HTML view. I entered explicit paragraph tags for the second and third paragraphs, updated the post, viewed it in my browser. No change. I wondered if the problem was with the Safari WebKit rendering engine, so I looked at the post in Firefox. Same problem. 

I re-opened the post in HTML view in Safari and imagine my surprise when the two paragraph tag pairs I'd entered at the last step were gone! I replaced them, updated the post, and then re-opened the post for edit to be sure the tags were still there. They were.

Now, I'll allow for the possibility that some of this may be due to my upgrade to WordPress 3.0, but I'm skeptical since I was experiencing these issues long before the upgrade. I had begun using Dean's FCKEditor to replace WordPress' built-in editor but that plugin appears not to have been updated to work with the new WordPress.

All of this really serves to illustrate my long-stading reluctance to introduce seams into my workflow. Here, I'm passing an email to Posterous, which is updating my blog, so I have two seams (email-to-Posterous and Posterous-to-WordPress) to cross. Seams are just places for things to go wrong and get lost. I don't want to give up on Posterous, particularly if WordPress is the issue, but I cannot afford to make yet another blog switch; every time I do, I lose audience share.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

July 3, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Ning’s Charges Seem Reasonable, But Still….

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A few days ago I caused a bit of a tempest in a teapot — and ticked off quite a few Net purists — by suggesting that Ning Networks' recent announcement that they would suspend all free social networks they were hosting unless their owners forked over some money was inconsiderate and should lead to the broader Net community discussing imposing some sort of regulation on free services.

While my idea was widely misunderstood, I'll take responsibility for the poor communication. I wasn't so much advocating government interference as I was saying that it seemed to me that consumer protection had somehow to be factored into the free-online-services mix so people didn't end up with perceptual losses of some magnitude.

In any case, Ning has now announced their three-tiered pricing for paid social nets and they've come in with one plan at $2.95/mo. which seems quite reasonable as a replacement for the old free networks. If you buy a one-year plan at $19.95, your monthly cost is $1.66, hardly a burden for almost anyone interested in running a social network, even one being offered for free.

I applaud Ning for the pricing model and for doing a great job of differentiating their three plans from one another so the differences and benefits are really clear. That is so often not the case with tiered pricing models.

At the same time, I don't think the low price obviates my earlier observation that to the extent that consumers have invested time, energy and digital resources in their free Ning networks and are now being asked to pay for the service or lose it — without sufficient prior notice — their rights should be considered. I'm not sure the best mechanism for doing this. Government regulation may or may not be a solution; I'm not one who believes the government can't do anything well but I am also not one who thinks they need to do everything. But an idea needs to be proposed that would provide some measure of consumer protection in these situations.

Anyone?

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

May 13, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

New Google Side Search Navigation: Do You Like It?

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Google has without fanfare modified search result pages to add a whole new style of navigation in a newly inserted left column. I’m not yet sure how I like it and it seems to me to have a serious design oversight, but I don’t think Jared Newman’s reaction at PCWorld.com is accurate or justified.

Here’s what the left-hand nav looks like when a search results page first opens.

When I click on the “More” dropdown, I see this:

So first of all ‘m not seeing the long display Newman talks about until I request it.

Then I click on the “Fewer” button and I’m back to the original display. Hardly onerous.

Now, if I click on the “More search tools” button, I get to something more closely resembling what Newman complained of:

(The capture stops short of the end of the list.) Now here’s where the design flaw seems to me to appear. See that “Hide options” link in the above image? If you click it, Google does indeed hide the options it just displayed:

But there’s no way to get back to the original view or the second one above. You’re stuck in this little tiny text-link hell. Reminds me of a text adventure.

In any case, though, I think this innovation is something most people will find useful. And the fact that you can minimize it to a small amount of real estate means it ought to work fine for most.

May 5, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Do Free Services Have an Obligation to Users? Should We Regulate Them?

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Many years ago, when the Internet was pretty new, my wife Carolyn
entrusted a couple hundred precious personal photographs to an online
sharing service whose name we can no longer remember. Unfortunately,
she, in her naivete, did not keep local copies of her photos. Mass
storage was relatively expensive and she felt like she had put her
photos into the hands of a professional service. What could go wrong?

At some point, she went to log in to show someone her photos and she
got a 404 error. The site was gone. Dead. No indication of what had
happened to it. No warning. Despite my considerable tech prowess and
good contacts, I was unable to identify any way to recover her
vanished photos. And since the service was free, it’s not clear they’d
have had any legal obligation to help anyway (though they clearly had
a moral obligation to do so). She has understandably never trusted
another free service. She isn’t even comfortable using Google Docs or
Google Calendar.

What do you suppose would happen today if, say, Twitter or FaceBook or
MySpace or LInkedIn suddenly announced the end of their free services.
If you want to keep your stuff, you have to pay up for a fee-based
membership. Even assuming they gave us a way to export our stuff so we
wouldn’t lose it, the hue and cry would be deafening.

Well, that’s essentially what Ning Networks just did. With a reported
2.3 million social networkers hosting their sites on Ning’s services,
the company has announced it is pulling the plug on free services –
except, apparently, those set up by teachers for their students’ use
– this summer. Everyone has to start paying a monthly fee that will
likely be a minimum of $35 or move their network to a different
service. As wired.com said, “Once again — see Tripod, Imeem, etc. —
users of a web service have had the rules switched on them once they
began relying on a service. That’s why it’s important to choose web
services that offer an easy way to grab your stuff and split — a
feature commonly known as ‘data portability.’” I agree but I think
Wired.com is letting folks off the hook too easily. Of what value to
anyone is the collection of their Facebook or Twitter posts absent the
network of people to whom it was addressed and with whom it was
shared? It’s not about data, it’s about relationships and investments
of time and psyche.

So Ning can’t figure out how to monetize free social networking — at
least at a high enough level to satisfy investors — and consumers end
up grabbing the short end of a messy stick. This is abysmal behavior
on Ning’s part. I don’t care if their rules allowed it and they
forewarned everyone. It’s a stinky way to do business and blackens the
eyes of all involved, including, unfortunately, one of the Net’s
really Good Guys, Marc Andreessen. The company says it is facing a $4
billion opportunity, which makes it even slimier to abandon their free
users, the ones who helped them debug, popularize and extend the
platform on which a few people will now become wealthy. If the
opportunity is that huge — and it might well be — why couldn’t the
company keep the free networks around and toss them a few grains of
rice now and then? Why was a total shut-down necessary? There’s really
only one answer: greed.

Maybe it’s time for the FCC and/or FTC and/or other agencies to look
at providing some form of cushion or insurance for free consumer
services so that the little guy doesn’t get stuck holding the smelly
bag of crap left behind by the greed mongers yet again.

In any case, this sucks.

(No, I don’t have an active Ning network. I did create one or two for
experimental purposes but they never blossomed because I wasn’t
impressed with the feature set available there compared to setting up
my own sites using WordPress and/or SocialSAM and/or NOLOH.)

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

May 4, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

It Appears to Me That Posterous Just Gets This Wrong Somehow

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As you can see from the post below, the first new paragraph is not formatted properly. All the other paragraphs are fine. I am confident saying this regardless of what browser you're using because I checked it in Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome on Mac and in Firefox and IE8 on Windows.

Here's the HTML (I've replaced angle brackets with square brackets so it doesn't get rendered instead of displayed):

[div class='posterous_autopost']I've been chasing a display issue with the entries on my main blog for several weeks now. I am posting this in an effort to determine once and for all whether the problem is with Posterous and how it modifies the HTML it sends to my WordPress blog or whether this is a cross-platform rendering engine issue.[p /] NEW PARAGRAPH starts.[p /]ANOTHER NEW PARAGRAPH.

This looks right but all six browsers displayed it incorrectly the same way. So I think it must have something to do with the CSS for posterous_autopost.

I'm done chasing this. And I don't have the time or desire to fix this manually every time I post an entry. So I think I'm going to look for a replacement for Posterous that allows me to do what it does as easily as it does (it's really sweet) without this (admittedly minor but no less annoying) rendering problem.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

March 22, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Blog Rendering Issues: Is Posterous to Blame?

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I've been chasing a display issue with the entries on my main blog for several weeks now. I am posting this in an effort to determine once and for all whether the problem is with Posterous and how it modifies the HTML it sends to my WordPress blog or whether this is a cross-platform rendering engine issue.

NEW PARAGRAPH starts.

ANOTHER NEW PARAGRAPH. What I've noticed is that the posts will look fine in, e.g., Safari, but inter-paragraph spacing is off in Firefox. Generally, it jams two paragraphs together with a newline in place of the paragraph break I'm expecting.

This is the final paragraph. I'm going to view this post in several different browsers, share the HTML generated by Posterous and see if I can dope out what's happening here.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

March 22, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

Another NOLOH Blogger Talks JavaScript-Free AJAX

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A UK blogger named Gary Wynne, who's been working with NOLOH for over a year, has started a new blog about our mutually favorite Web app development tool. This one focuses on how easy it is to get into the habit of writing sexy AJAX user experience code without a single line of JavaScript, all within the NOLOH language syntax. Very cool.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the whole Web App development space. It's clear to me that the coming move to HTML5, which is already farther along than most folks who aren't hard-core developers realize, is going to change things in very fundamental ways. One thing that it portends is the ability with the right development tools to create Web apps that look and behave properly on desktop browsers and on handheld/smartphone browsers. How do I get there with the least friction?

I'm counting on my friends at NOLOH to solve this for me. And I'm betting that they will. Reading Gary's AJAX piece and reflecting on how much I can get done in NOLOH without writing anything but NOLOH code has further convinced me I'm betting on the right horse here. Even though Smalltalk remains my favorite language and even though it is true that for my personal Web projects I can choose any tool I like, I'm leaning strongly in the direction of staying with NOLOH. I figure if they can implement AJAX fluidity as absolutely painlessly as they have, they can make whatever I want or need to do pretty accessible.

Plus, I have the lead developers' home number. :-)

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

February 24, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
　　　　

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