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Episode 76 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Brad Williams (@williamsba) interviews Allan Cole and Jeffrey Way, two of the four authors of SitePoint’s new book, Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes.

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Interview Transcript

Brad: August 27, 2010. We’re talking WordPress themes—creating, planning, frameworks, GPL, selling, and more! I’m Brad Williams and this is SitePoint Podcast #76: Wicked WordPress Themes with Allan Cole and Jeffrey Way.

And welcome everybody to the SitePoint Podcast, I’m your host Brad Williams and today I’m flying this plane solo, so strap yourself in and get ready for a fun and possibly bumpy ride. And today I’m actually joined by Allan Cole and Jeffrey Way, two of the four authors of the latest sitepoint.com book, Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes. Allan Cole is the owner of Fthrwght, a Brooklyn New York based development and design company, and Jeffrey Way works for Envato managing the code marketplace called CodeCanyon, and runs a very popular WebDev tutorial site Nettuts+. Welcome to the show guys!

Jeffrey: Hey Brad.

Allan: Hey, how’s it going Brad?

Brad: Great, real good. So before we get into some of the WordPress topics that everyone’s dying to hear about, let’s talk a little bit about how this book came to be. I’m always interested, being an author myself, about how people really kind of get started in having a book published and writing about something they’re passionate about. So how did you guys both become involved in this project in the first place?

Jeffrey: Well, at least for me it actually kind of fell into my lap, I didn’t even have to look for it. I was contacted by Andrew Tetlaw; I think he’s moved on from SitePoint now, but no I guess he was familiar with me through themeforest.net which is a hugely popular theme marketplace, and he emailed me about contributing maybe a couple chapters for actually taking a finished WordPress theme and profiting from it, and you know that’s what I specialize in, running ThemeForest is determining what kind of themes sell and then what themes don’t, and kind of figuring out what is different about this theme as compared to that one. So, he kind of contacted me and I was very interested in it, and I’ve always been impressed by SitePoint and, you know, that’s the extent of it.

Brad: So what about you Allan?

Allan: Louis Simoneau emailed me shortly after I did a WordCamp in San Francisco, and he just contacted me about contributing a few chapters to a SitePoint book and I was definitely interested, and so it’s not too much different I from what happened with Jeffrey where it kind of fell in my lap I guess.

Brad: Now have either of you had experience writing a book prior to this, or was this the first writing endeavor?

Jeffrey: I do some writing for Envato’s publishing branch which is called rockablepress.com, so I’ve written a Photoshop book and I have a book on coding for Tumblr coming out actually in the next couple of weeks. So, yeah, I’ve done that and in addition to running Nettuts where I’m writing these big tutorials every week so, no, I felt pretty comfortable with it.

Allan: Yeah, I haven’t actually done too much writing outside of just the stuff that I blogged about on one of my other WordPress sites, but yeah, nothing too crazy other than mostly just explaining code and explaining how things work and how themes work just through the blog outlet, but that’s really been about it. So this was definitely an interesting challenge for me, but it was a great experience for sure.

Brad: I’ll bet. Now that it’s all said and done would you do it again?

Allan: Oh, surely, surely. Like it was actually, you know, you kind of learn a lot, you’re basically kind of pulling out stuff that’s kind of already in your brain, and so it makes — I feel like I’ve definitely gotten a little bit sharper with a lot of the coding stuff that I ended up talking about in the book itself. So, yeah, just off of the learning experience I think it’s a great thing that I’d definitely love to do again.

Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely. The greatest thing about writing is that when you have to do it, it forces you to understand what you’re teaching perfectly so you can’t get away with any of that, you know, like “oh this is kind of how it works.”

Brad: (Laughs)

Jeffrey: Or “Here’s the basic idea behind it”; it forces you to know it works because of this, this is what’s happening, and so that’s my favorite thing about writing because you really have to dig in and sink your teeth into some of these concepts and totally understand them, so it’s kind of a learning process yourself when you have to write the book.

Brad: Yeah, using little pieces, hacked pieces of code here and there you just can’t get away with when it’s published material.

Jeffrey: No, you have to dig in. (Laughter)

Brad: Absolutely. So the book’s broken up into eight chapters, and the first one is Introducing WordPress, so why don’t we do that, let’s just dive right into what is WordPress and why should web designers and developers look at WordPress if they’re not currently using it.

Jeffrey: I think basically the biggest reason is because it’s so huge. You know, that seems a little silly but why would you choose a certain framework or a library that doesn’t have huge adoption rate, you know, that would be my main reason for recommending even like in JavaScript a library like jQuery over some of the others is because it’s so much larger the user base is going to be bigger, and that means education is going to be much larger. So you have a larger community, you can learn more from them. That would be my number one reason for recommending WordPress above everything else besides the fact that it’s developed by so many people; just the fact that it’s become so big is a huge reason to choose it.

Allan: Yeah, just to piggyback on that like, it’s huge, it’s a gigantic community, and it’s a great community too, like the people that you meet online and offline that are really involved with WordPress it’s generally like a really good experience like from the WordCamp’s to the various meet-ups that go on all over the world, it’s just a great experience and a great way to learn how to publish yourself and others on the Web. Yeah, so that’s always been my main reason for kind of gravitating towards it, especially in the beginning, like just the huge community of people who — sometimes a little bit tough to get help, but it’s there and if you stick with it you can get to what you need to know. And so, yeah, that part of it is essential for me at least.

Brad: Yeah, just to kind of put a number to that, I mean WordPress 3.0 came out June 17th, so just over two months ago, and it’s already been downloaded over 13 million times which is insane because I believe 2.9, the previous version, wasn’t downloaded that many times already, so it’s already smashed through that within like a few months. So, you’re right, it’s certainly monstrous right now which is great because there’s a vibrant community, there’s great resources like this book out there, and I think that’s only helping WordPress get more popular.

So we understand WordPress is big, everybody loves it, so what advantages does a platform like WordPress have for designers and developers, people out there looking to make a living using WordPress or some other platform? What advantages would WordPress have maybe over the competition?

Jeffrey: You want to go first Allan?

Allan: Sure, well for me when I first started using WordPress I was just coming in mostly as a designer, a front-end designer, I did it— In school I mostly did print design and then when I got out of school I did a lot of, you know, it’s a little bit easier to find jobs that were related to web because it was still fairly, and it is still fairly kind of a new industry. And so when I first got into it just the ease of use I think was the most gravitating thing, outside of the community, or the big support community that’s out there. Just the ease of use and the ease of developing themes, and not really having to deal with too much code. Like for me, you know, coming from a more print background initially I didn’t really want to jump into learning PHP and complex functions and stuff like that; like that wasn’t of interest to me. I knew HTML and I knew CSS, and so I wanted to have something that just gave me the bare minimums, did it well, and then allowed me to expand on it and build on top of it, and WordPress just creates a great platform for doing that.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I’d have to agree. Everyone knows that feeling when you first started working with WordPress where you start building your theme and you realize with 20 lines of code you’ve already built a working theme, it may not look pretty but it works, and that’s such a great feeling when you put 10, 20 lines down and then somehow you already have an index page and you can display full posts, when you know normally by hand you’d have to do pages and pages worth of coding, so that’s such a great feeling. And then the Codex, the documentation’s just insane for WordPress. And you know, again, that’s such a huge thing, and I think a lot of frameworks they don’t take that seriously enough, you know the same thing’s true for, as I said before, with jQuery or even a CodeIgniter or a PHP framework, the documentation is insanely good, and that’s the number one reason why I would choose that over anything else is because with other ones if you don’t exactly know what you’re doing, which none of us do at first, you don’t really have anywhere to turn, but with that Codex it has just every single entry you could ask for.

Brad: And you mentioned creating themes, so why don’t we kind of break it down: what exactly is a theme in WordPress and how does it work exactly?

Jeffrey: A theme is just basically the visuals, how it looks, the way it’s laid out; WordPress is the framework, obviously that takes care of all the backend work of the database access and all of that, and the theme is just the visuals, and that’s what’s great about it is it’s completely separate from the framework, so anyone who knows WordPress knows directly from the dashboard you can easily switch between themes because they’re not dependant upon any specific unique code, it all hooks into WordPress’ function and filters.

Brad: Alright, now that we know we want to use WordPress, everybody uses it, everybody loves it, let’s talk about planning your theme, your first theme. So what advice, and this question actually comes from Andrea Rennick of wptavern.com; what advice would you give to someone looking to design their own themes? Where should they start?

Allan: I always feel like it generally just starts with an idea, and that idea can take a number of different forms, and it is largely based in what you’d like to, I guess, contribute to the Web community, or either your community of network of folks who you’d like to visit the site, or for new folks who might not have any idea who you are but you may have something interesting to contribute. And I think it just starts there, just kind of understanding what you’d like to contribute and put out into the Web or the world really. And then from there there’s just kind of an approach like for me coming from design I’m kind of always backing my, you know, like the many concepts to — just backing them up with design. And so figuring out a way to take what you’d like to contribute and figuring out a way to make that interesting and easy for people to access. And that’s where I think the theming part of it comes in where you are, you know, once you have your idea of what you’d like to contribute or put out into the world using a theme to make that process of on one end you contributing that concept and using the theme to make that part of it easy, and then also on the other end using the theme to make it easy for folks to come in and also absorb that content or that thing that you’d like to contribute. So I generally would start there just figuring out what you would like to talk about or if it’s a client thing what they’re interested in and putting out into the world informing people about. And from there I think the rest just kind of falls in place, the ideas of all of the smaller details of interface and stuff like that just kind of fall into place once you have a good solid idea that you think people will gravitate towards.

Brad: Jeffrey do you want to add anything to that?

Jeffrey: Sure, sure. You know it really just depends on what they’re hoping to get out of it. As Allan said, if you’re building a blog for yourself then you need to figure out what’s your voice, what are you focusing on, how are you going to be different from somebody else? Now if we’re talking about just building your first theme, getting started with WordPress, how would you go about that; I would say pick up our book or just do a Google search for building your first WordPress theme. You wouldn’t believe, there’s dozens upon dozens, I’ve written some myself, you know, building your first WordPress theme I’d say don’t worry about, you know, maybe don’t even worry about the design at all, just figure out exactly what the core functions are, what is the WordPress loop, how does that fit into your code. And you know just take it piece by piece, that’s my big thing that I focus on a lot is stripping out everything that’s not important. So if you’re trying to learn WordPress strip out the JavaScript, strip out the CSS, and just figure out exactly what that one or two or three lines of code do. And then slowly add a little bit more and learn about all the different template files available with WordPress, and then learn about more maybe working with archive pages or creating your own options panels, and then just keep learning more and more, and then eventually you can begin building themes for profit.

Brad: Yeah, now, would either of you recommend starting with say a free or premium theme as kind of a base, or do you think that a new designer or developer getting into WordPress should just open up Notepad and start from scratch? I mean what’s the better starting point for someone who’s just getting involved?

Allan: For me it’s been a lot easier just kind of looking at other people’s code. I think almost the first, actually I don’t even remember the name of the first theme I think that I tweaked; it was one of Ian Stewart’s of ThemeShaper, it was one of his earlier themes, and yeah, just basically cracked it open, looked at the code, figured out what things were generated, because at this point I had no idea what PHP really was, and so I basically just figured out where the — what was generating the HTML and how to change that with the style sheet that was there within the theme file. It’s very much kind of a — I always tell people to get messy and kind of make mistakes and kind of break things a little bit just so you know your way around. Like once you break something and crash your site you’ll know never to do that one thing again, you know. and it’s kind of a thing where you can kind of look at what’s already there and kind of piece together where it fits in with what you’d like to do. Because there’s so many different types of themes that do so many different types of things you can kind of find themes that are fairly similar to what you’d like to do, and take that and then either build on it or strip out the things you don’t need to make it your own. And that’s essentially how I’ve learned most of it myself, and then once you start to come up with ideas that aren’t already out there then you’ll more or less know your way around so you can start to ask the right questions to get the right answers on how to do things that haven’t been done just yet. But, yeah, I definitely suggest just building off of either I think, theme, what is it, Thematic is a really popular one that I use for a lot of my sites, it’s actually a theme framework. Another one is Starkers which is a base theme that’s, I forget the name of the guy who coded that one, but it’s called Starkers and it’s just a very base theme, it doesn’t have any styling or anything other than like the basics, and it just has clean good HTML markup, and you can use that to just kind of play with things and break things and get it to do what you want.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think I learned about the first Starkers theme from I think Chris Coyier, if you guys know him over at CSS-Tricks, he did a big series on converting a PSD to WordPress, those are so popular. And he kind of introduced Starkers which is just a completely naked theme for WordPress, and that would be what I would recommend because it has everything you need and nothing else so you can just break it down to little chunks, as I said before, and you know then begin to build on and figure out, you know as Allan said, break it and then figure out what doesn’t work and then what not to do again, I think that’s really good advice.

Brad: Yeah, absolutely, and Allan I think you mentioned as a perfect segue into the next topic which is theme frameworks, and I know if you ever mention theme frameworks to someone who is not familiar with what they are it sounds a little intimidating, so why don’t we explain that. What is a theme framework and how does it differ from a standard WordPress theme?

Allan: A theme framework is essentially a souped-up parent theme. And what that means as far as WordPress is concerned inside of your theme folder you have your parent theme or framework which will have all of your main code, and there are all of your template files, your main functions, it’s essentially just the core of your WordPress theme. And what you can do with it when you use it as a framework you use it in relation to a child theme which basically you use to build off of the parent framework theme. And what that allows you to do is to make a very dynamic and in some cases complex changes to the framework theme without actually editing the theme files themselves. The advantage of doing it that way is as WordPress gets updated and even the theme gets updated you don’t lose those changes. Generally if you take a theme and you tweak it directly, and let’s say you worked on it for two months and then that theme gets an upgrade that adds a bunch of new functionality, when you go to do that upgrade you basically lose all of your changes, which sucks a lot (laughs), it’s never a good thing when you spend a long time on something and then you go to make an upgrade and all of your changes are gone. And so using this framework model you can basically use the child theme to basically make all of your changes, so your changes are more or less compiled into the child theme, and then the parent theme more or less stays the same so it can withstand upgrades and changes and improvements along with WordPress while you’re styling and, you know, your custom functionality all exists within the child theme separately so that you don’t lose changes. And there are a number of different actual implementations of it, I kind of mentioned them both, and just to kind of clarify really any theme can be a parent theme, meaning you can build a child theme off of any theme, so any theme that you have may have updates or anything, you should just out of the box when you’re ready to tweak it start it off as a child theme. When it comes to frameworks, which is kind of separate deal, frameworks are more or less kind of a, and like I said earlier, a souped-up version of a parent theme that’s just more or less built with custom coding to allow you to do a lot more with your child theme then what you’d be able to do with a generic parent theme. But, yeah, I think they’re really powerful, I use them for all of my client-based work and even some of the themes that I sell are all based on — are all child themes that are built on top of the framework. And, yeah, I think it’s just a really great way to develop, it’s super fast, it makes the whole development process really fast because you don’t have to repeat nearly as much code as you normally would if you had to go back and basically kind of copy and paste code throughout different template files, you don’t have to worry about a lot of that with the child theme framework relationship because the themes are so much more, or because most of the coding is already handled for you, and so any changes you want to make you just do in the child theme and it just kind of changes the framework theme in a way that makes it very expandable. So, yeah, I love them, I use them all the time. That was really longwinded huh?

(Laughter)

Brad: It’s certainly a topic that requires some detail because there are a few things going on versus a standard theme. And so I guess this goes back to what we were talking about a little bit ago which is if somebody is just getting into WordPress theming and creating designs for WordPress, does it make sense to dive right into kind of a standard or traditional theme or should they start out looking at these theme frameworks and maybe find a framework they’re comfortable with and then just kind of master it inside and out? What makes sense for kind of the newbie in the WordPress theming world?

Jeffrey: I think it’s the same for every language, never start a language and immediately jump into a framework; you need to learn the fundamentals, the basics. So personally would I recommend somebody jump into, for instance, the thematic framework? No, I would tell them learn exactly how WordPress works, learn about the loop, learn about all the various kinks of working with WordPress and then maybe even a year, maybe more, after you’ve worked with it then jump onto a framework because you know I would never recommend somebody use a framework without understanding, at least as much as they can, understanding a little bit of what’s going on underneath. The same is true for a PHP framework, for a JavaScript library, I think for a JavaScript library you need to know how JavaScript works, you don’t want to just jump in because then when something breaks it could be just a standard language specific issue that you don’t understand so, no, I would say learn WordPress first. But then definitely then move up, and then at the point when it becomes more about how can I work quickest then jump into a framework like Thematic or there’s a handful of them, I think there’s about a dozen, and then it becomes more of an issue of how can I work as quick as possible, how can I do these freelance projects, or if you’re a theme designer maybe for ThemeForest how can I develop these themes as quickly as possible yet definitely use a framework.

Allan: Yeah, I’d like to add a little bit to that. Like the speed I guess is a thing that you really can only utilize the speed that using a framework offers when you understand what’s going on. Like the whole thing about the framework is that it allows you to — it more or less kind of allows you to kind of create shortcuts to doing things that you normally have to do over and over and over again. But, if you don’t understand that the thing that you’re changing, or if you don’t understand how the thing that you’re changing is being utilized by the framework then you won’t really be able to take advantage of the speed, and so you’ll end up not really learning much and generally the child theme might not come out too great. But, yeah, I think it’s definitely a thing that you definitely have to know the basics just so you can take advantage of all of the cool stuff that frameworks allow you to do.

Brad: Yeah, and your book actually features an entire chapter dedicated to theme frameworks which I thought was a really good chapter, it’s very detailed, and you even go into a working example of making a child theme for Thematic. So certainly anybody looking to kind of dive in and really get a true understanding and grasp of theme frameworks and developing child themes versus parent themes, you know, that chapter’s probably worth the price of the book alone, so I would certainly recommend that.

So moving on, this is another topic that is always a good debate and one that I’m a little passionate about, and that’s theme options. And a lot of people think, oh, theme options, you know, the more options the better. Well, I shouldn’t say a lot of people, some people think that, more options the better; some people think less options the better. So I guess my question is where do you guys stand on that? What do you think about theme options, like how many options are too much and at what point should some of these options maybe exist in a plugin versus a theme? So maybe you can both touch on that.

Jeffrey: I think it really just depends on the project, you know; that’s a big question. If you’re building a basic theme options page I wouldn’t do too many, cover the basics, yeah, that’s a tough one. One of the cool things that are coming out now are people are creating these theme options pages that are dynamic, so they implement some JavaScript where you can create your own keys and values, that way you’re not dependant upon some predefined value within the theme options page, you can create your own. So, if you use like the get_option function you can choose the keys that you want and the values that you want to apply to that. So at that point maybe the length becomes a little bit moot because it can be as extensible or as minimal as you want it to be. So that’s kind of what I’m excited about, I’m actually working on something like that myself; I know the company I work for our head dev, Derek, he’s working on something very similar to that called Option Tree, so I think you’re going to see that especially over the next year or so really become a big thing in the community are these dynamic options pages.

Allan: Yeah, I think that actually sounds really cool. I would love to check some of that out. I was going to say that when it comes to options it’s definitely one of those things where you kind of need to consider who’s going to be using your theme, or who’s really going to be using those options. If it’s a framework or something like that where the developers are generally your end user then your options page will look completely different than if it’s like for a consumer type of thing where everybody is going to be using this theme to do everything, then you’ll have to completely different looking options pages because there’s things that are relevant for a developer to want to go in and change quickly through options, and then there’s things that your average user who just wants to start a blog about dogs or something (laughter), you know, their options page would look completely different. And so that has had a major, or will have a major effect on what things you’d like your users to be able to change through the theme itself.

Brad: Sure, OK. So are there any options that you feel like should exist in every theme out there? Obviously not every theme has an options page, but are there a set of options that you feel strongly should exist in every theme, or is just like you said kind of a case by case basis depending on the theme and who that client is going to be?

Allan: It’s a little bit easier to, yeah; I would say it’s probably a little bit easier to basically not repeat options that are already built into WordPress. A lot of times when some themes that I’ve used before you’ll see things there that are already built into WordPress it’s just that the theme has its own way of doing it. In general sometimes it’s appropriate but in most cases it really isn’t. A lot of times what happens is once your end users get it if they know how to do one particular thing but then when they go to do that thing in the theme and there’s a separate option that does that same thing then they’re confused and it appears that the theme doesn’t work. And so I generally like to, as long as the options aren’t repeated with WordPress or with functionality that you can maybe have WordPress do with its built-in functions, I would try to stay away from doing that. And I find that in general the learning curve is a lot better when there’re less options that have to do with things that are already in WordPress because you know you’ll have users who can generally get their support from the generic WordPress outlets as opposed to just going to your support forums and finding out about it that way; it kind of opens up the support for it to be a lot easier and for people to have access to it. So I’m not sure I would say that there are options that definitely need to be in WordPress, but there are ones that I think can be — that don’t need to be repeated, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think Allan really nailed it; it really comes down to the end user. So if your end user’s going to be a developer or somebody who’s comfortable maybe with the WordPress Codex or researching functions then you have a little more flexibility with them. But what I found in my case is usually the people I’m developing for I have to record video tutorials for them just to show them here’s how to create a post, here’s how to edit a post, here’s how to create a page, here’s the difference between a page and a post; you know, for them, so you need to be much more hand-holding with them. So, what they’re going to be wanting is whatever it is can be accomplished they’re going to be wanting things like how do I change my logo or how do I change my background or just those kinds of things, how do I add a banner image here. So in those cases I’d say make it as easy as possible for them even if it can be accomplished elsewhere just throw it all in there and make it, you know, treat them like they’re a three year old and they’ll thank you for it.

Brad: Absolutely, and I think a perfect example of kind of not reinventing the wheel is the new menu management system that shipped with WordPress 3.0, and I know a lot of themes out there have over the years built their own menu management system because it was an obvious issue that needed to be addressed, their users and client base wanted some easy way to handle menus. Now it’s a part of core so I would expect to see those options eventually being removed, so there’s really no point in competing with the core of WordPress, like you said, so I think that’s a great point.

Jeffrey: Absolutely.

Brad: So let’s talk about money. Everybody here, everybody listening, likes money I hope; I know I do. And a lot of people are going to sit in selling their designs, and WordPress is no different. So I’ve made this awesome theme that’s going to make me millions of dollars and now I want to go about selling it, so what are some of the things I should consider first prior to just throwing it up on the Internet with a price tag? What are some of the topics or issues I should think about before I do that?

Jeffrey: I think you need to think about exactly what you want to do. So if you just want to, you know, you’ve developed a theme and you’re like, hey, maybe I can make a couple bucks, that’s going to be a very different process then if you have been doing this a couple years and you decide, okay, I’m going to build WordPress themes full time. And that’s fully achievable; you would be surprised that the marketplace I ran, ThemeForest, we had guys literally making four and five figures every single month, way more than me, it’s insane the potential for WordPress themes right now. So you have to first decide what am I going to do, and then you have to really invest your time in it. So this isn’t kind of an industry anymore where you can spend a day on a theme, upload it to a marketplace or sell it on your own site and expect to make some money. You might make a sale or two but that’s not where the money’s going to come in, the guys that really make the money here are the guys that it’s a full-time job for them. I reference that in the book a few times, it’s a full, full-time job, so they’re marketing, they’re building the theme, they are selling it on their own site, they’re buying banners, they are creating video tutorials, they’re creating regular WordPress tutorials to promote their name. This is what they do day in, day out, and I see it on Twitter everyday, these guys just don’t stop. And that is why they are so much more profitable than everyone else because it’s not just a little situation where you build a theme and you throw it out in cyberspace and you wait for the money to come in. And then you also have to think about how am I going to bring this money in, so are you going to sell it on your own sites? Well, if that’s the case fine, but then you have to think about how are you going to promote it, are you going to purchase banner ads, are you going to work with Google? And then you have to think how are you going to sell the theme; are you going to use PayPal? So there’s all these different variables that have nothing to do with building themes that you have to factor in. And so that’s why a marketplace like ThemeForest has just skyrocketed, we’re one of the most popular sites on the Web, it’s because it takes all of that out of the process. So rather than thinking of payment gateways and all that we take care of that for you, and then all you have to do is become an author, it’s free, you can then upload your WordPress theme, you can still market it yourself, but then you have a station to sell your portfolio and to advertise your portfolio. Because I know for me as a buyer, you know, if I’m Googling for some WordPress theme and I come to a guy’s website I don’t know how much I’m going to trust him if I don’t know him, it’s a random website. But if you can sell it on a reputable marketplace, whether it’s WooThemes or ThemeForest, or there’s a plethora of them, I think the buyer is going to be much more trusting. Plus, with marketplaces like that the buyer can be rest assured that these things have been reviewed and they meet a certain level, because otherwise you know as well as I do there are hundreds and hundreds of themes that are really low quality, and that’s fine, everyone’s on their way learning how to do this and we’re all trying to make money off of it, but by going with a marketplace you can really count on the fact that it’s going to be a very high quality theme.

Brad: Yeah, that’s great, and I think another important point that we should certainly talk about is the license in which you are going to sell your theme under. And I think everybody knows what’s coming next, and that’s everyone’s favorite three-letter acronym GPL.

Allan: GPL.

Brad: So it’s sad that when you say GPL it almost, anyone that’s familiar with the different debates that have gone back and forth, especially recently, it kind of sends a little bit of shiver down the backs of anybody trying to make money off of open source software. So why don’t we talk about GPL, let’s get it out of the way. So what is the GPL and how does it affect themes in WordPress?

Jeffrey: The GPL is, if you didn’t know what the GPL was a few months ago you do now probably after the huge Matt and Chris debate which was so much fun to listen to. The GPL is pretty much a license that says that WordPress is based on the GPL, and WordPress comes from a framework called B2, and that was based on GPL, so WordPress is; and that means that at the very least the PHP code that hooks into WordPress’ function filters needs to be GPL, so this created all of this controversy on is that true or not. That’s up to the lawyers, not me, but for at least in my sake I’m going to abide by that. So, the basic overview of GPL is if I sell you a theme, which is perfectly fine, I can sell you a theme for $30.00, but according to the GPL you must then be afforded that same freedom, quote-unquote, to sell that theme as well, so you cannot prohibit these freedoms. So that’s really, to break it down to a single sentence, you cannot restrict people’s freedoms. So you are free to charge $1,000.00 for a WordPress theme if you want, but the buyer of that theme technically can then if they want they can go on a torrent and redistribute it because they are then afforded that exact same freedom that you are.

Brad: Yeah, I think the word freedom I think when you hear ‘free’ that’s the biggest misconception about the GPL; when you hear free you think, oh, it’s free, I’m not allowed to sell something and it still be licensed under the GPL when it’s actually not true at all, you can sell it however you want. The free part has to do with freedom rather than the price tag, and I think it’s obviously confusing, but it’s certainly something everyone should, if you’re looking to make money off of themes or to work with WordPress at all, it’s definitely something you should understand. You want to protect yourself and make sure you don’t get into a situation where you are violating the WordPress license, so if you’re not familiar with it you should definitely read up on it, and it couldn’t be a more dry topic but it’s something you should do. And, you know, there’s kind of a second section of this I want to touch on, too, and that’s dual licensing, and this is where it gets even more interesting; dual licensing or split licensing, so maybe one of you guys can kind of talk on the difference between something that’s 100% GPL versus something that’s dual or split licensed.

Jeffrey: Sure. Okay, according to Matt himself, Matt Mullenweg himself, the PHP code that hooks into, as I said before, WordPress’ function and filters needs to be GPL; it’s dependant upon WordPress so if you were to strip out that PHP it would not function therefore it needs to be GPL. But that does not include other assets, so it doesn’t include your JavaScript; a WordPress framework can’t have any control over your custom JavaScript or for that matter your images or your CSS files. So, a dual licensing structure means any PHP code is going to be bound to the GPL. On the other hand any other assets, namely your CSS and JavaScript, you can if you want to you can use a proprietary license. So this is how marketplaces, many marketplaces function, it really depends on the marketplace. So, for example, I believe WooThemes is 100% GPL, so you can take their code, as I understand it, and do whatever you want with it. ThemeForest is dual licensing, so that means you cannot buy a WordPress theme and then upload it to RapidShare or whatever you want to do that’s rude, because they will send takedown notices, and we have the right to send these takedown notices is because, as I said before, these themes are sold with dual licensing and that’s perfectly fine. I believe after the big debate between Matt and Chris, Chris finally relented; correct me if I’m wrong but I think he relented and now they’re using a dual licensing structure for his work.

Brad: Yeah.

Allan: Yep.

Brad: Yeah, he is.

Jeffrey: Yeah, and that’s a simple idea is that WordPress has no control over your JavaScript and your CSS, so if you want to, and you have to first decide is this something I want to do. Many people would say it’s arguable that — Matt would say it even; going 100% GPL is the smartest solution because people will trust you more and you’ll make more money in the end. So it’s really up to you as a theme creator or as the listener to determine what you want your code to do. Do you want to abide by the GPL 100%? Do you want to completely disregard it like some people do and do a 100% proprietary license? I’d personally recommend against that but to each his own.

Brad: Yeah, I think it’s also important to note that wordpress.org will actually feature commercial theme websites as long as they are 100% GPL, which is obviously going to bring a lot of attention to your designs and your service that you’re selling, so it’s definitely a big decision but I think before you sell anything related to open source software I think the licensing around what you’re selling you need to make sure you understand it and you’re doing the right thing. So I’m on the same boat as you, Jeffrey, I think everything should be 100% GPL, I don’t think WordPress would exist if it wasn’t, but to each his own. And I actually have a question from the user ImTiedUp, and I’m not making that up, that’s his username, or hers.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey: Nice.

Brad: They ask, “What do I do if I’m using a commercial product like WooCanvas or Genesis,” as their framework, so a theme framework, “because so much of the underlying code was written by their people I’ve always wondered if it was even okay to consider selling custom themes when I use other themes as my engine?”

Allan: Yeah, that’s perfectly fine. To take it back to Thematic, Ian actually sells his own themes on there, and initially I don’t think he was doing that, but as soon as I saw that that was available I didn’t even consider it. Like after developing a few child themes, just randomly a few of them, I was like, okay, this may be something that I can sell but it might be weird to sell because it’s a child theme, it has all of these extra files and all of this other stuff that might make it more complex or even harder to sell with the GPL and stuff like that. But once he put up his themes that he had on there I was like, okay, let me look into it a little bit more. I read up a few articles about it and, yeah, it pretty much just works like any regular theme it’s just that it just requires the parent theme to work like the way the GPL and everything else works it pretty much just ties in to how it would work if you were to do a theme from scratch, so, yeah.

Brad: And then one last point I wanted to kind of touch on, and this is a nice section in the Selling Your Themes chapter, and that’s that you’re not only selling your theme for WordPress, but there’s a lot of other things that are involved with selling a theme, and I think the primary one is support and probably a lot of people don’t think about this and what’s all involved with that. So maybe we can touch on some of these topics, or some of these items that kind of go along with selling a theme and things that people should think about and make sure they have everything set up prior to releasing that theme for sale. So what are some of the things other than support, we have documentation, so what else should people kind of think about before that’s kind of outside of the theme design but is more that goes along with it?

Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s a good point on support. I think a lot of theme designers first getting started don’t even think about that, is that support is easily maybe even more important than the theme itself, it’s extremely important. You know as developers or designers we forget that a lot of the people who are purchasing these themes don’t know anything about WordPress, they don’t even know what WordPress is, they’re just searching for something that looks pretty, so for them support is huge, you know. So for my marketplace that was something I recommended to authors so much is don’t underestimate the need for support, and a lot of people, you know, and that’s fine if they want to but they can sell a theme and it’s pretty much what you see is what you get, you have a problem, not my problem, you know (laughs). But that’s not really smart, and I can tell you from personal experience the guys who are the most profitable selling WordPress themes on the Web have amazing documentation, so it comes in the form of something as simple as personal emails to having full support forums, even to simple things like maybe if you send them an email they’ll have an auto-reply with a huge frequently asked questions thing for the people who maybe need to have something fixed immediately but don’t know what the problem is. So you can’t devalue the requirement of good support, good documentation, and things of that nature. Then you asked what other things are really important, anything and everything, you know. Things like as simple as color themes, people love color themes, so if you’re going to create a theme why not offer three different three different color themes, why not offer a dozen? Brandon, who contributed to this book, he’s a very, very popular theme designer and you can see with every single theme he launches he has at least a half a dozen to a dozen different color themes. It seems trivial because we know how to adapt it ourselves, but you’ve got to remember that other people don’t. So if you’re going to have red, blue, green, every color under the sun, it’s going to be way more appealing to just a common buyer than not having it. And then we talked about options panels, that’s kind of become the standard lately, I’ve noticed with all the popular themes they all have some kind of backend options panel, okay. Even, like I said, with support people can record video tutorials and things like that, that’s becoming so popular for the people that want a little more hands-on approach. What else? Maybe mobile themes, so, you know, if you look at the charts, the iPhone and Android, the mobile browsing is just skyrocketing right now. So if you can offer a theme and you can add it to your little checklist of selling points that if your theme also has it’s mobile optimized or it has a special style sheet, or what have you, that’s going to be another huge incentive for somebody to choose your theme over somebody else’s. And that’s the huge deal here is there’s thousands of themes on the Web, so what separates your theme from somebody else’s, and it’s all of the above: it’s color themes, it’s mobile browsing, it’s maybe custom fonts, it’s the PSDs, it’s the support, it’s the video tutorials, it’s everything you can think of to factor into it, so it’s like a little package, you know, so the bigger you can make this package the more people want to purchase it.

Allan: And then also another kind of really major one is pricing and how much things should cost and how much you think, or not really even how much you think, but how much you can maybe gauge people needing support and how much time that would take and how that might factor into your pricing. And then also, too, just the development of everything that you just mentioned, Jeffrey, the development and the time that it would take to put all of that together and then figuring out a price that is reflective of that, that’s fair, it won’t scare people away, but won’t seem too cheap to make it seem like the theme is worthless, you know. And that’s been kind of a major one that I’ve experienced on my end in a lot of different ways.

Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think on both ends of the spectrum if you’re selling your theme for $5.00, you know, you get what you pay for, so I think a lot of maybe younger people even think, okay, I’m going to sell this theme for five bucks and then if it sells 500 times I make 2,500 bucks, okay, well that’s not really the way it works. First, it’s probably not going to sell that much at the start until you’ve really built up a reputation, and second, people see through this, so people see a $5.00 theme and they think alright, you know what, if it’s $5.00 it’s going to be worth $5.00, but then on the other end of the spectrum you can’t expect, especially with WordPress themes for some reason, you’re not going to get $300.00 for a theme, it doesn’t matter if you put a hundred hours of work into it the simple fact is themes are selling right around the $30.00 to $70.00 range, and you know that’s just a fact of the matter. You know the same thing was true for the app store, the iPhone app store, is sort of all these apps came out and then all these $0.99 ones came out and there was — they all just kind of went skyrocketed, or the opposite of skyrocketed, they came down to $0.99 and they just killed the profits. So, you have to accept going in that you’re going to make roughly, roughly $20.00 to maybe $100.00 per theme. This can extend depending upon what you’re offering, so you can maybe get a little bit more if you’re going to be offering high-level support and things of that nature, but in general single one-offs, single licenses, you’re not going to get too much, but what you have to think more is rather than is this $40.00 theme worth my time you have to think about the compound effect of, okay, what’s $40.00 times 300 sales or a thousand sales, and then it becomes amazingly profitable, and that’s what a lot of theme designers around the Web are finding right now is don’t rip people off, you know, people want a good bargain, so accept that you’re going to make a decent amount per sale, but then once it sells 100 times you’re making a lot of money.

Brad: Yeah, these are all great points and certainly something anyone who’s looking to make any kind of money off of themes in WordPress definitely needs to consider, and the book does a great job kind of going into each one of these in detail, so, bravo guys, great job on that.

I have a few more questions here. We’re getting to the end; I can see the finish line, so you guys made it, congrats (laughter). I guess I have a couple of real specific questions to each of you because you both have pretty impressive resumes so I had a couple specific questions I wanted to throw your way. So I’ll start with you first, Allan, now you have some themes for sale which are really great, really awesome themes, so you have Basic Maths, which I didn’t even realize that was your theme until today, but I saw it when it launched, that’s an awesome theme. And you also have AutoFocus, and then is it Neutica Plus or Nautica plus?

Allan: Neutica.

Brad: Neutica Plus, and AutoFocus and Neutica are both Thematic child themes. So my first question is: is that going forward, are you going to stick with the child theme route and just kind of keep selling? And these are all paid themes except for AutoFocus which does have a free version, just to note, is that correct?

Allan: Yes, that’s correct.

Brad: Yeah, I was just curious; do you plan on sticking with the child themes? Because I know Basic Maths is not a child theme so I was curious what your plan going forward was.

Allan: Well, yeah, it’s been getting a little tough, like I still think people are more or less kind of new to the child theme, parent theme relationship, and what I’ve been finding is with the child theme, well, with the child themes that I do have that are out there some folks get it, you know, they have to install Thematic for it to work, and then a lot of folks don’t. And so I’ll get a lot of emails and support requests about the theme not working as soon as they put it in, but what happens is they generally just either didn’t read the instructions or missed the bit that’s right under the title that says it’s a child theme and that you need to install Thematic. And so that’s been a little problematic with things, but in general like for me the child theme route has been really just easy to develop for, and so just as far as the speed thing I think that I’ll continue to develop child themes, but I do think that the next run of themes that I’ll probably be doing will be more either framework or just kind of packaged parent themes that had basically all of the functionality that I end up using for the type of design and work that I do, and then just develop the child themes off of that. And how that all is going to be structured I’m not 100% sure on just yet, but I think it’ll kind of be a blend of both themes developed from scratch and then with a little bit of child themes stuff mixed in.

Brad: Yeah, and as I mentioned before, AutoFocus does have a free version, so I’m curious, and if you can divulge this information, but is there — have you noticed an increase in sales by not offering a free version of the other two themes or maybe vice versa, you have an increase of sales with AutoFocus because there is a free version?

Allan: To be honest I’m not really sure. I think that the people — most of the reason that I even kept the free version was more of a thing like the community that’s built around WordPress is just really great. Like initially even before this AutoFocus Plus theme there was this original one that’s just AutoFocus like that doesn’t have the Plus, and that one was on the wordpress.org theme site and it did pretty well there. And I had no idea, that was maybe my, I think, second or third theme that I developed, I was still learning stuff, but the feedback for it was really great. And so I kind of wanted it to be a situation where I wanted to kind of more or less give back to people who supported it and were there downloading it and then asking some core questions and offering suggestions and helping to improve it. And so the free version is more or less there just to kind of give back and not really lock out people who adopted the original version and then lock them out from getting some of the improvements of the child theme AutoFocus Plus version. And so, yeah, I just kind of wanted to keep that free just to cater to those folks. And then the Plus version has its own kind of headaches involved with developing it, and stuff like that, and so it also comes with a bunch of extra features; the development on it is going a lot further, I’ll be pushing it a lot further before the year is out, and so I wanted people to kind of get a lot more out of that one. But, yeah, I don’t think there’s really been too — I haven’t really been able to tell specifically if there’s been much of a difference. The Neutica is kind of in a similar situation in that it initially started out as a regular theme that was on wordpress.org that was just a regular; I think it was based off of Sandbox. And then this newer version is a Thematic child theme that doesn’t have a free version, and I don’t really think there’s too much of a difference as far as sales. I do know that the AutoFocus theme, you know, there were a lot more users that were originally using it, and so there were people looking for that one a little bit more, and so the sales are a little bit higher for that one just because it’s a little bit more popular. But I don’t really think there’s any too much of a correlation between having a free version versus a paid version of it, at least from what I’ve been able to notice.

Brad: Well, yeah, and if you haven’t checked out AutoFocus it’s a really slick kind of image-centric theme, and I love seeing themes that kind of do different things with WordPress that’s not the standard kind of blog layout or even the CMS layout which is almost getting standard at this point. And this is a great example of how you can kind of take your images and make them front and center, so it’s a really nice theme, definitely check that out, and we’ll certainly have links in the show notes.

Jeffrey I’ve got just a couple questions for you too. So you work at codecanyon.net which is a pretty cool site, and one I wasn’t super familiar with. So it’s as I understand it you basically sell code, scripts, and snippets for all sorts of different languages. So I was wondering if you could explain how exactly does that work?

Jeffrey: Okay, sure. It’s codecanyon.net, so the company I work for, Envato, we have two branches, so in one branch we educate people, so we have this big string of tutorial sites like if you’re familiar with psd.tutsplus or Nettuts, the one I run, or we have a huge number of them, AudioTuts; anyhow, on the other side we have our marketplaces, and this is where we help people sell digital goods for a range of things, video, audio, themes, in this case WordPress themes. So I ran themeforest.net for a long time and that’s what would appeal to the people listening to this podcast, is it’s where you can develop WordPress themes and then sell them and they make fantastic money. But then we decided at one point on ThemeForest we thought you know what, what if we sold scripts and components, and what if we sold like .NET components or PHP scripts. So maybe for two dollars somebody could buy a really cool Ajax contact form that’s really tested and cool and it’s cheap. So we launched that and it just skyrocketed and we realized, okay, you know what, we need to develop a whole marketplace for this because there’s obviously a huge community for it. Okay, so this is where CodeCanyon comes into play and so I moved over from ThemeForest over to CodeCanyon, that’s what I run now, and we sell components, scripts, snippets, everything you can think of, PHP, JavaScript, .NET plugins, so also people focus so much on premium WordPress themes that they forget that there’s a lot of money to be made with premium WordPress plugins, and that’s something that’s really seemingly beginning to take off right now. So, for example, we launched a — I don’t mean to advertise but it is applicable, we launched a premium WordPress plugins category and it’s going like crazy. For example, the best seller in the last couple months generated like $10,000.00 worth of gross sales, and this is for a plugin. So, maybe myself included at first kind of thought you know what, the plugin market’s kind of saturated right now, there really isn’t any money to be made there because there’s so much fantastic stuff. But what we’re finding out is that’s not really the case; you can find more niche-oriented plugins or more just really in depth plugins that you can’t find elsewhere, and then again you factor in the support, so somebody can get a plugin, they can pay, I don’t know, $20.00 for the plugin, and then they get free upgrades for life, of course, and then they get the free support, if they don’t know how to use it the author will give that to them for free. So that’s the basics of CodeCanyon, it’s a place where authors can sign up, for free of course, and then sell whatever they create whether it’s something as simple as a cool contact form up to a massive extension for WordPress or Expression Engine or Magento, anything you can think of.

Brad: Yeah, I was just going through the WordPress plugins list and there’s some pretty impressive ones on here, in fact, a few I’m going to have to check out like this calendar plugin (laughs).

Jeffrey: The Calendar plugin’s awesome.

Brad: That’s certainly a void that needed to be filled because unfortunately the calendar plugins out there aren’t the greatest so, yeah, this is really cool. And when I first saw it kind of researching for this show I made a note that I wanted to go through here and spend a bit of time to learn more about it. So definitely if you’re unfamiliar check that out. And then the last question for you, Jeffrey, is you also write for Nettuts+, which is a really, really popular web developer and designer kind of hub with some awesome tutorials. So I’m curious how you got started writing these great tutorials.

Jeffrey: I got started writing these tutorials years ago, and you know what, I was writing these tutorials that I had no business writing (laughs), you know unfortunately that turns out to be the case moreso than not where you’re reading tutorials on the Web and the truth is the author is probably just learning it and they’re like, hey, I learned this, I’m going to show other people. So that’s why Nettuts is awesome because we’re taking people that really know their stuff, so it’s net.tutsplus.com by the way. So you take people that really know their stuff, and every single day we have a new tutorial. So the way I got started in it is a couple years ago I would just write these, or a few years ago maybe, God, time goes by so fast, I was writing these articles and I think it was on .NET because I was learning that at the time, and it’s amazing, it just seems like the community, the Web development community’s so huge; I would write a couple articles, maybe submit them to a few sites, that’s the way it worked back then, I’d submit them to cssglobe.com and any of these aggregators you can think of, and I started getting all these page views. And I remember even the first time I got a couple thousand page views in a day I thought that was insane, you know. So I came across Envato and Collis and Sian who are the CEO’s, and I contacted them about writing for them and they were very open about it, they’re great people, and so I wrote a couple articles for them and I was very nice to them, and then they offered me the job of actually running the site. And I’ve been doing that ever since and the site’s just skyrocketed since then, we started with a good number, maybe 7,000 subscribers, and now we’re up to well over 70,000 after a couple years. And I love it because, like I said earlier in the show, when you have to write and teach people how to do stuff it forces you to really sit down and learn exactly what you’re doing, so I’ve learned so much in the last couple of years because of it.

Brad: That’s great. So before we go today why don’t you both tell us where you can be found online, websites, blogs, Twitter; why don’t we start with you Jeff?

Jeffrey: You can find me at net.tutsplus.com, codecanyon.net; on Twitter you can find me @nettuts, or you can visit my personal site at jeffrey-way.com.

Allan?

Allan: Yeah, for me most of my WordPress themes are available on fthrwght.com, but it’s a weird spelling, it’s fthrwght, it’s basically the word featherweight without any vowels. And the same goes for my Twitter handle, it’s just @fthrwght, you can follow me there, and then also my personal site is just allancole.com.

Brad: Great. Well, thank you guys both so much for being on today and taking time out to talk some WordPress and about your new book. Again, that was Jeffrey Way and Allen Cole, co-authors of Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes, it’s a new book from SitePoint and it can purchased on sitepoint.com, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and wherever fine books are sold.

And that’s it for another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. You can follow me on Twitter @williamsba, and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Karn Broad, and I’m Brad Williams. Peace!

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.

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Episode 75 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Brad Williams (@williamsba), and Kevin Yank (@sentience).

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• SitePoint Podcast #75: Awesome Overkill (MP3, 63.4MB, 1:06:01)

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

1. Google Wave Post-mortem
2. Facebook to Remove Boxes This Week
3. The Official Tweet Button Launched
4. Adobe Fonts Come to the Web with Typekit
5. IE9 Beta Coming September 15th, Despite PR Fail
6. HTML5 Boilerplate Makes Web Development Easy, But Look Hard
7. jQuery Mobile Project Shines Light on Smartphone Browser Landscape

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/75.

Host Spotlights

• Brad: Internet Explorer’s 15th Birthday
• Kevin: HTML Sanitisation: The Devil’s In The Details (And The Vulnerabilities)
• Patrick: Bleep Bloop: Drone Robocopter
• Stephan: Double Rainbow 404

Show Transcript

Kevin: August 20th, 2010. Facebook boxes, Twitter buttons, Adobe fonts, and jQuery charts. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #75: Awesome Overkill.

And it is a packed episode of the SitePoint Podcast this week. We have so much news queued up I think I tempted fate by talking about our non-technical show a couple of weeks back, and tons of stuff to talk about, a lot of it technical, Brad why don’t you lead us off.

Brad: Sure, to lead things off we actually have another entry in the good old dead pool, and that is Google has announced that they are ending development of Google Wave, so everybody wave goodbye to Wave.

Kevin: Oh, goodbye Wave.

Brad: Yeah, Wave was actually debuted in June 2009 so it’s really just over a year old, and I believe it came out of beta in May of this year, so it was only officially a product for a few months prior to Google pulling the plug.

Kevin: There is a SitePoint connection to Google Wave as well. SitePoint author Cameron Adams, who I co-wrote Simply JavaScript with, and he also contributed to a couple of our other books, he was one of if not the front-end designer for Google Wave. And I don’t know if you guys used Wave much, but during its early days every week or so they would take the app down for maintenance, and the maintenance web page you saw said something like “Chill out, Wave will be back in a minute,” and it was a guy’s feet on a beach and the clouds floated by. And Cameron Adams feet, that’s what you were looking at when Google Wave was down. (Laughter)

Patrick: Trivia! Very nice.

Kevin: Trivia, yep.

Patrick: You know when I saw this announcement I was a little bit surprised by I guess the negativity on Twitter about it, at least with the people I follow, about Wave, “Wave, oh well, good riddance, I didn’t use Wave anyway, what was it good for,” etcetera. I was a little surprised by that because, and I’ll confess that I, myself, didn’t really get into Wave right away, but I did find its usefulness or its power, thanks to my friend Wayne Sutton @waynesutton, and he swears by it, and he’s sorry to see it go because he used it for a lot of collaboration. And I was involved in a project with him and still am, and we were using it to talk and to share information and data and spreadsheets and whatnot, and it was very useful, so I could definitely see its usefulness, and in a way I am sorry to see it go.

Stephan: Yeah, we used it a lot at one of my projects, actually exclusively; we write a bunch of stuff, and there’s like six or seven of us that contribute and edit and things in Wave, and it’s been really nice and a pretty failsafe system until now.

Brad: One thing I wasn’t a huge fan of Wave from the start was the realtime aspect of it, and I guess my feeling is if I’m writing a message or I’m writing an email I like to make that email or that message as perfect as I can get it before I send it, so I don’t want who I’m sending it to to actually look at the message I’m getting ready to send them as I’m deleting words and spellchecking and things like that. I want to make sure its right before I send it in the first place. I mean I could certainly see instances where this makes sense just like it would maybe in a chat room if you’re talking with a team of people, but I never really liked that aspect of it so I never really got into it.

Kevin: I think there was at least in the original demo I seem to remember there was a feature where you could turn off the live update, if you wanted to work on some text without it being transmitted live, and then when you were happy with it you could switch the live update back on. That’s one of those features that may have fallen by the wayside during the design process, I kind of feel like they went back and forth on the level of complexity they wanted in the user interface. But yeah, certainly the odd mix between a realtime communication medium and a document-authoring environment I guess it’s what made people so excited about it to begin with.

Brad: Was it ahead of its time? Should this launch five years from now, would it do well, is it just too ahead of its time?

Kevin: I feel like Google needs to — they often are very good at the undersell, but lately they’ve been overselling things a little bit. Like when you think back to Gmail and Wave’s launch was very much a replay of the Gmail strategy that they launched this thing in beta where you needed to get an invitation from other people who were already invited, and so this closed beta environment that they hoped to turn the service’s users into their marketing force for it. But what you saw with Gmail was that it was kind of this thing that was barely even announced, and the first time I heard about Gmail was through people who were using it and saying check this out, I’ll even send you an invitation. Google, they took the wraps off of Google Wave at their big Google IO Conference, and with this hour-long video it was amazingly impressive, and then the next thing they told you was, no, you can’t use it yet. So I don’t know if that’s what sort of planted the seeds of the negativity that Patrick was talking about that we’re now seeing around this cancellation that, “Oh, yeah, I knew it was bound to fail all the time!”

Patrick: Well, I think it was a niche tool, and in some ways I would say how different is it from Google Docs, right; because Google Docs has a live aspect to it too if you’re sharing documents. I know because I worked through some documents there and there’s always, oh, xyz is editing this as well, okay well obviously if you want to control the document or it’s a message to a particular person then you might not want to do that there, but I could maybe see them rolling some of Wave’s features into Docs maybe optionally, right, maybe not necessarily a default feature but something people could use. And the blog post on the Google blog notes that central parts of the code as well as some protocols behind Wave’s innovations, that’s their words, like the drag and drop and the character by character live typing are already out there in open source, so customers and partners can play with those and continue to innovate upon them. So I don’t know if we’ll maybe see Wave in some other form from someone else, but they do say that they’ll provide some tools to get our data out of Wave as well, of course.

Stephan: If it reincarnates into Docs I’ll be really happy. Like if they do some of the features in Docs I’ll be really happy, the way the document management is and stuff like that; I’ll be happy if they do that.

Brad: You know who I feel sorry for the most is probably the developers that have actually worked with the Google Wave API and spent hundreds or thousands of hours making these cool apps that integrate with Wave and now they’re essentially useless. And I think if this trend continues, because we saw Google Wave, we saw Pownce go down, if this trend continues developers are going to be a lot more hesitant to dive right into a new API until they know that service is established and they’re not just wasting their time, which in turn may not help the new service or app grow, so I mean if this trend continues it could certainly be bad for developers in the API world.

Kevin: This topic, it’s kind of old news as we discuss it because the cancellation of Wave was announced just after our last news episode. And I think this is a milestone for us, guys, podcast listener Chris Trynkiewicz from Poland wrote in and he actually wrote in with his opinion on something that he predicted we were going to be talking about. I like this; this is initiative from our listeners. Chris writes: “My guess is that the marketing epic failed as Wave was released to public on the 18th of May 2010, that’s only two and a half months ago. Given the time that Gmail had to get its share, one can figure that this decision came too early; also there wasn’t even a solid way to connect Wave and Gmail or any other email account for that matter. What the heck were they thinking was going to happen in two months?” So, let’s talk about that for a bit. That two month period, was that Google Wave’s proving time?

Stephan: I hope not. I hope they thought about it a little bit more than that. I mean just recently they’re releasing features like you can invite anybody without a Google Mail address to a Wave document just like, I don’t even know how long ago it was, it was like six weeks ago maybe, and now they’re killing it off. Well, I hope no one sent out their stuff to people who aren’t going to be able to access it when it’s done. So I don’t know, it seems like it’s a really short time period for them to really prove the technology, maybe it just really was one of those Labs things where they said from the beginning this probably won’t survive, who knows.

Kevin: What struck me about the original pitch of Wave is it was announced at their developer conference, and really they saw Wave as the pipes underneath, and the user interface that they had built was really just sort of a proof of concept for them. They wanted developers to get on board and start building on top of this platform that they had assembled, and I feel like that public release two and a half months ago may have been sort of their last ditch attempt to gain the popularity that they felt this thing deserved, that after that closed beta period they kind of went, well, that didn’t work; maybe if we release it to the public that’s going to work instead, and so it was their last try at getting it the popularity they wanted. I don’t know, it’s hard to say, I for one have used Wave from time to time, I think I’ve written one document of significant size in the thing, and certainly I was inspired along with everyone else when watching their original demo, but it never really quite took off, it never really fulfilled the vision they wanted. And maybe it’s because their vision was so big and world changing, I mean they were taking on email and instant messaging. It feels like that’s the sort of revolution that would take five years even on the Web today, and maybe they were just pushing it too fast or trying to do too much at once. I’m sad to see it go and part of me is still hoping that because the Wave technology is open sourced maybe the mysterious benefactor with a longer timeline in mind will come along, rescue the technology, and we may yet see Wave rise from the ashes. Call it wishful thinking but I think Google had some good ideas.

Facebook, I don’t know if they have good ideas, but they are removing boxes from their application API this week. I don’t know if any of our listeners have written for the Facebook API, but for a while there Facebook was the app platform, it feels like, I don’t know, that Apple’s app store kind of stole its thunder a couple of years ago, but right up until that point Facebook was where web application developers were thinking of moving their skills to next. Rather than building a web app that sits on its own on your own website that you hope for people to discover you could build apps within the Facebook ecosystem and every Facebook user that installed that app would be displaying a box for your app on their profile page, and just by visiting your friends’ profile pages you could discover the apps they were using and hopefully install them yourself, and this was a way of promoting apps within this social environment. Well, that’s all going to change this week because boxes are going away. And depending on who you ask this is either a huge deal or no one actually cares about boxes anymore. Guys, when is the last time you actually remember seeing a Facebook box?

Brad: I have some.

Patrick: I would say recently.

Kevin: Recently, yeah?

Patrick: Recently. I can’t place a specific date and time necessarily, but I guess recently when I looked at someone’s profile. I think another question is when is the last time I actually installed a box, now that was a long time ago; I don’t even remember the last time I put a box on my profile.

Kevin: People are arguing that profile pages are starting to be a bit irrelevant on Facebook at the moment, that people live on Facebook through their newsfeeds and through the apps that they use full screen. And the idea that going to someone’s profile page and checking out their apps, their boxes, what it is they’re trying to say through their profile page, is kind of a thing of the past on Facebook.

Patrick: I think that’s part of Facebook, though, is visiting and seeing what people did to their profile. I don’t know, I know there’s this sort of aversion to the MySpace that we think of as the music playing and glitter graphics and all of the sort of eye-catching things that area annoying to a lot of people, but Facebook has done a good job I would say of mitigating that through their different style requirements I guess I would call them where the boxes they look like they fit into the site, they match the same color scheme, you know it all kind of works together and looks fine. Now I just wonder, you know, if Facebook profiles are just a few things, let’s say, you can just have a box of your friends, you can just have your relationship status and your birthday, etcetera, you can just have your status updates. Then every profile will probably look the same unless they themselves step up with some sort of deeper customization options, because that was your option to customize your profile, to add boxes and to move things around. Now if that’s changing it’s going to be tabs, you know that’s not really much customization.

Kevin: I feel like Facebook has always tried to avoid customization, it’s something they’ve done grudgingly because they want to differentiate themselves from the ugly days of MySpace when everyone customized their page so much it was just a free for all and there was no MySpace look, the MySpace look was utter chaos.

Brad: I think that was probably a good idea. MySpace was fun for the short amount of time that everybody was on it, but then you’re right every page you went to blaring music came on and everything was flashing and you went into a seizure, I mean it was ridiculous (laughter).

Patrick: Did this actually happen or is this figurative?

Brad: I speak from experience. No, it’s figurative of course. But then when everyone started looking at Facebook it was like wow this looks so clean compared to what we’re used to seeing over at MySpace, so I think the fact that they didn’t allow that is the reason Facebook is as big as it is today.

Stephan: You mean you don’t like twinkling star backgrounds? I mean come on.

Brad: I can only handle so many dancing babies.

Patrick: If you buy into the fact that your profile should be a reflection of who you are then sparkling backgrounds are maybe who you are and who you want to be seen as. Whereas if you’re like me and you look at my MySpace profile, because I never really got into it, it’s just the very default things and one song and a little bit of information, and that’s about it. But Facebook, I don’t know, uniform individuality, is that a fancy phrase I just made up or is it an actual thing? Because that’s what it feels like.

Kevin: I feel for the developers here who have crafted experiences and designed their apps around a certain interaction model, that their apps could expose themselves to the user’s social network through this small box on their profile page, and now the standard user interface for an app to advertise itself is an entire tab. And what I’m seeing at the moment is that a lot of my Facebook apps that I had installed I can now put them on tabs, but they are still designed to be about the size of a small box, and so now you have this whole tab on your profile and when you click it you just get this teeny, tiny bit of content at the top of the page. This is like a fundamental change in the user experience, the user interface standards for the Facebook API, and what’s this doing to their app ecosystem? Is this how long we can expect a platform to last and remain stable on the Web? It’s two years, and if I was now considering building a Facebook app would I have to do that understanding that Facebook could be completely different in two years time and it’s a moving target that I’m targeting?

Brad: Yeah, you said it right Kevin, this is going to force Facebook application developers to really rethink how their apps not only work but how they promote themselves, because I mean one of the primary focuses of any app is to get people to install it; you want as many people to install it as you can and send it around virally and share with their friends. Now that it’s kind of hidden on a tab and less noticeable and a lot less people are going to see it these developers are going to come up with more creative ways to get that content into your newsfeed to promote their app because there’s really no other way to do it. So I would expect to see a lot more kind of spammy looking kind of posts of the newsfeed and things like that.

Patrick: Well, many bloggers out there use the TweetMeme Twitter re-tweet button on their blogs, myself included. Those days are numbered, let’s say, because Twitter has launched their own Tweet button and you can embed it on your blog today.

Kevin: They’ve gobbled up TweetMeme.

Patrick: Yep. they’ve licensed the technology from TweetMeme basically, and TweetMeme, while it’s still online obviously and even growing through August, they’re now going to switch their focus to other endeavors and let Twitter, I guess understandably given the fact that competitively speaking Twitter will crush them based on their traffic alone and the link on their own website, so TweetMeme has just gracefully ceded that entire market to them. You can embed, like I said, the Twitter button from twitter.com/tweetbutton and it looks different from the TweetMeme button, pretty attractive, you can specify things like accounts that can be suggested to the user to follow after they’ve Tweeted the button. So yeah, what do you think?

Kevin: Well, this is the same thing that we saw happen with Bit.ly and the URL shorteners. There was this ecosystem of URL shorteners out there, there were ten of them that people used and suddenly overnight Twitter gave their blessing to Bit.ly, and just like that Bit.ly was the only game in town. And now we’re seeing the same thing with TweetMeme, I mean there are alternatives out there and one that I’ve recommended a lot is backtype.com; if you go to backtweets.com they have this BackTweets Pro service that you can sign up to and pay fifty bucks a month to monitor people talking about your content on Twitter, but they also had this free widget that was pretty much the same thing, this button that showed you how many times the URL of the current page had been Tweeted about and gave you a retweet button. And suddenly all of these competitors I think are going to slowly disappear because TweetMeme is where it’s at. On the surface this looks bad for TweetMeme even, but it looks like they’ve done a deal with Twitter where Twitter gets the tweet button technology, and TweetMeme is getting inside access to stuff that’s going to let them improve their service, it looks like they’re going to be partnering with Twitter to provide services based around the Twitter Firehose, this high performance API for accessing everything that is posted on Twitter in real time. So it should be exciting, I’m interested in seeing what the next chapter for TweetMeme looks like here now that they’ve handed over the Tweet button to Twitter, what is their business going to look like exactly?

Brad: I really like this, I mean I feel like the sharing or the Tweet button it feels like a service that should go hand in hand with Twitter rather than a third-party service, it feels like something they should offer; I’ve always thought that, now that they are doing it it’s great, I mean they’ve made it extremely easy to integrate, you drop like a line of JavaScript, you don’t even have to pass the URL, it does all that dynamically for you and it works, and it’s super easy, so you don’t have to be a hardcore developer to figure out how to integrate this. And they’ve also hooked it into their API, so if you are a hardcore developer you can integrate this however you want so you don’t have to use the provided code that they give you. So I’ve actually hooked this up on a few client sites, played around with it a little bit, hooked it up on my site, and I think it’s great, I really like how they did it.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean who wouldn’t want to embed something hosted by Twitter, you know, what’s a fail whale? They don’t seem to have any problems with that so why wouldn’t I want to embed something from them.

Kevin: (laughs) Ah, Patrick, cynical as always. (laughter)

Stephan: Smart aleck.

Patrick: No, aw cynical? I do like this; it’s very nice, very slick. The one thing that jumped out to me, though, that I liked about some of the services I’m already using is that I have to use t.co, the Twitter URL shortener, I can’t use my bit.ly API, I can’t track that traffic anymore. I don’t like that.

Kevin: I think it should still, the number of tweets that it counts includes URLs that have been shortened with other services, so that’s not an issue, but yeah, if you like your Bit.ly stats you’re not going to get them through Tweets made through this button.

Patrick: Yeah, but there are some improvements like the following, you know, you can enter a couple of accounts and after they Tweet they’ll see “Here are some accounts we suggest that you follow,” so that’s a benefit.

Kevin: Yeah. That’s really interesting to me because I think suddenly now blogging platforms like WordPress and other content management systems are going to be scrambling to include a field for all of their authors to put in their Twitter account because when someone clicks the Tweet button on a page you want to be able to suggest to them not only that they follow, say, the Twitter account for the website as a whole, but also maybe the Twitter account for the author of the particular piece of content that you clicked the Tweet button on.

Stephan: Plugin idea Brad!

Kevin: Yeah, exactly, if it’s not already done, yeah, you want to suddenly be including the Twitter account of all of your blog authors in there so that can be integrated in there through the Tweet button. The race is on.

Adobe fonts are coming to the Web with Typekit, and this is another service just like TweetMeme that I feel like they’ve suddenly got a leg up on the competition through this unexpected announcement. Typekit hasn’t been the only player in the online fonts game, there have been a few competitors out there, but Typekit always seemed like the leader, and they have cemented that lead by partnering with Adobe. Suddenly all of these fonts that you’re used to getting on your system when you install Photoshop or Illustrator or any of the Creative Suite apps, all of these fonts are now coming to the Web, and this really closes a gap for me, this is something that I asked Jeffrey Veen, one of the co-founders of Typekit when they were first announcing their service. If you buy access to a font through Typekit you can certainly use it in your CSS on your website, but you can’t use it in Photoshop to do mockups for that website. And at least originally using it just on your development server to test your layout before it went live was something that wasn’t easily done either. And so Typekit while it was a revolutionary service it often meant that you had to find other ways to get the same fonts, access to them in development. But now by bringing the Adobe font library to the Web this is the set of fonts to some extent that many designers have been waiting for because these are the fonts that they’re used to, the fonts like Myriad, this is the default font in Adobe Illustrator, Myriad, is a beautiful font, and people will often just sort of start mocking stuff up with that font and then to be told that the new age of fonts on the Web is here but you can’t use any of those fonts that you’ve been using in your creative apps it was a problem, and that problem is now being solved. Adobe is going above and beyond here, guys, they’re not just converting over these fonts dumbly, they are going through them one by one, character by character, and hinting them for screen use. This has been a common criticism of web fonts in the early days was that the fonts that people were using were designed for print and they didn’t look so great on the Web, or on the screen, especially at smaller font sizes. And it looks Adobe is going to the trouble of updating their fonts one by one so that they also look good on the screen. So fonts like Adobe Garamond, Myriad, as I mentioned, Dominion, Cooper Black, all of these fonts are now available on Typekit with more to come. Guys, have you been holding off on embracing these web fonts?

Patrick: (chuckle) No. But I will say this is a cool service, and I just pooled through the pricing real quick and it looks like you can get access to all of the fonts released here for $49.99 a year as part of the Portfolio package. The personal one, $24.99, allows access to some but not all, so the $49.99 one per year is the one that you’d want if you want access to all of them. And this is an interesting service, I haven’t really looked too much at it, but let’s say you’re signed up with Portfolio, right, you have that package and you develop a site for a client, right, you have the license yourself, it’s yours. So you give that site to your client are they good or do they have to buy another license?

Kevin: The Typekit service, the license applies per site, so you buy the license for that particular client’s site and then the next site you have to develop you buy another license for that.

Patrick: Okay, the Portfolio package it says unlimited websites, so I guess that would give you free range.

Kevin: Ah, yeah, then you get this bundle that, yes, you apply your Portfolio package subscription to that site and, yeah, as long as you continue paying the bills your client continues getting the fonts.

Patrick: Cool. That’s interesting. I guess if you’re as detailed as I am you’d probably want your own license, not to have your designer control it, but that’s very cool.

Kevin: Yeah, probably, but it becomes another bill you pay just like your web hosting, I would say, if you want to be independent of your designer.

Patrick: The font hosting bill (laughs).

Kevin: But, hey, you can even try this stuff out for free. The Adobe Garamond font is included in their free trial plan, so if you are a particular fan of that, and that is a very nice font, it’s a serifed font, it’s a clean body font, so if you just want to give the main text paragraphs on your site a slightly different look from the everyday you can sign up for a free Typekit account and take advantage of Adobe Garamond. It’s a really nice service.

Patrick: So the Techcrunch office has received an interesting package care of Microsoft, some markers, some crayons, some clay, sketch book, basically a complete art package. What was missing, though, was the website that that package promoted which was beautyoftheweb.com. When a Tech Crunch reporter, Jason Kincaid, went to visit the site it was down with a 401 error. Eventually, though, he discovered that this package was meant to promote the September 15th debut of IE9 beta.

Kevin: You know, Techcrunch, they have their style, and I was reading this story and this is the kind of story that makes me feel bad for Microsoft. Just this starting out by saying it was a sweaty guy on a bicycle that came and delivered this package, I mean is that really necessary? (Laughter)

Brad: Yeah, sets the stage, set the mood here. (Laughter)

Kevin: Let’s give Microsoft some credit here. This site, beautyoftheweb.com, which does now work even though it wasn’t working at the time it should have been for Techcrunch, it is a demo really of the <canvas> tag and what it can do; you go to beautyoftheweb.com and it invites you to find a secret word by typing letters, and those letters are arrayed on your screen, and I’ll give you a spoiler: the password you’re looking for is “native,” and as you type out the word native the puzzle pieces fly in and slowly make up this invitation in the middle of the screen. And credit to Microsoft this page is written in HTML5 using the <canvas> tag, the JavaScript that runs it has the fallback code for browsers that don’t support <canvas> tag like IE8, for example, so it works cross-browser, but it even includes HTML5 tags like <header> and <section>, things like that, so they’ve got the necessary the JavaScript code in there so that those HTML5 elements are styleable in Internet Explorer 8. They’ve gone out of their way to eat their own dog food here, whereas when I first landed on this page and saw the animated password form come up I thought, oh, here we go, I bet this is Silverlight, but it’s not, it’s <canvas>, it’s HTML5. They haven’t gone quite all the way with it, I do have some criticism, which is that this page is basically a blank page if you disable JavaScript on your browser, and there is no content really here for screen reader users, so it’s pretty inaccessible; if you land on this page on a screen reader you’ll hear it read out “unlocking the native web, type the letters below to unlock your invitation,” and that’s it. And there is no hint of what letters you should be typing or what it is you’re seeing in response to typing those letters.

So, the exciting news I suppose that Microsoft would want us to be talking about here is that Internet Explorer 9 beta is coming out on September 15th. So September 15th is that magical date when regular ordinary users may start hitting your websites using an IE9 browser, so the call should go out for you to start testing on the current developer release. But, you know there’s a reason Techcrunch can write snarky stories like this, and I feel like the reason is that Microsoft doesn’t know how to build AAA quality websites. They’ve clearly gone out of their way with this demo to try and build a top quality HTML5 page that will be impervious to criticism and yet they’ve still fallen short. I wonder, is Microsoft’s biggest problem when it comes to Internet Explorer that they don’t have any truly talented, passionate web developers in-house that are going to push this browser to put its best foot forward.

Brad: Well, you don’t want to know how long it took me to get to the word “Native,” there (laughter). It took way longer than it should have.

Kevin: Yeah, me too, I stared at those letters for a long time before I came up with native, and I think I clicked the “skip intro” button, and then it shows you the answer and then I went back and typed it myself just to see what would happen.

Patrick: You know I agree with you about Techcrunch kind of, though, because when I saw this I thought well you know what, just donate art supplies to a school and call it a day. I don’t know, there’s an effort here, and maybe they didn’t take care of every last result, and I don’t know why that is, but let’s not just get on the bash-fest, I guess, of Internet Explorer, that’s far too easy.

Kevin: By all reports IE9 is shaping up to be a really good browser. The tech demos have been solid, not only have they added huge amounts of support for CSS3, HTML5, all of the stuff that developers are craving, but by all reports the browser is flying compared to previous versions. Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a lean, mean thing compared to the sluggish, bloated previous versions of Internet Explorer. We have yet to see what the user interface holds for end users, the focus has really been on the Web platform work, so I’m wondering how much of this September 15th release will unveil a new look and feel or a new user interface or whether they’re going to be sticking with what they set up in IE8. But it’s feeling like browsers, especially led by Google Chrome, have really been pushing forward a minimalist interpretation of what the user interface should be, and if Internet Explorer doesn’t get on that bandwagon they’re going to look more and more obsolete even though their rendering engine may be right up there with the others. Brad I know you’re a Chrome fan, could you ever see yourself going back to the toolbars of Internet Explorer?

Brad: Um, it would take a lot. I mean I feel like any developer or designer, pretty much anybody that works on building websites in some facet, has a little bit of a hatred towards IE mainly just because of IE6, I mean 7 has its issues sure, 8’s obviously a lot better; 9, like you said, is shaping up to be great, but you know just when you hear the word Internet Explorer the first thing you think is, oh God, it’s just — and I don’t know what it’s going to take to get past that for me personally. If they come out with some groundbreaking feature that nothing else has I’m always open, I’ll give it a shot; I never thought I’d switch off of Firefox and I did, so you know, I try to keep an open mind when new versions come out.

Patrick: I know what it’ll take: Hello, this is Jim Smith over at Microsoft, is this Brad of Webdev Studios? We’re looking to have some development work done, can we pay you money? (Laughter)

Kevin: Internet Explorer 9 with a $20.00 bonus payment to everyone who installs it. (Laughter)

Stephan: We’ll pay you to use the browser.

Patrick: Cash back rewards. Hey, don’t joke about that, Google with the AdSense platform paid those referrals as far as Firefox; they were all hooked in there, so maybe Microsoft needs to do something like that to incentivize publishers to promote IE again. I mean would that be a funny thing to see where a publisher was getting paid for downloads of Internet Explorer? I don’t know.

Kevin: Yeah, they need an affiliate program.

Patrick: Yeah, exactly, take a page from the, I guess the Firefox book of how they caught up to Microsoft and go back to that kind of grassroots approach even if they do currently have the leadership role overall it’s declining, and maybe they need to take that approach of the underdog.

Kevin: SitePoint marketing manager Shayne Tilly has an infamous blog post on SitePoint from I guess it’s nearly a year ago now, and I think it was an update to a previous blog post where he was calling for the “inevitable death of Internet Explorer,” and he shows basically a graph of Internet Explorer market share declining as all of the others rise, and when you do that the Internet Explorer market share line is a surprisingly straight line downwards, and he’s just sort of extrapolated that line out and said, yeah, the year Internet Explorer dies is 2013, I think he said, at that rate. And obviously that got a few upset comments, but he’s sticking by it, and he was just telling me yesterday that he’s been updating the numbers for another year, and the line continues downward unabated. It will be interesting to see whether IE9 can make a difference.

Patrick: What I want to know is what Shayne’s thinking, because haven’t we — I know I have heard before, I don’t know of the scientific numbers, but IE uses click more ads and maybe even spend more money than other users, so as a marketing guy here let’s think about this a little bit. I think we want those IE users and we want them to grow, no, I’m just kidding, but yeah, that’s what I have heard before so from a marketing perspective if you want to take that as being the more casual user, you know, that’s a reasonable claim to make I would say, and so they click more ads, but it’s just the way it is right now.

Kevin: That sounds like a good marketing angle for the Microsoft affiliate program, “Marketers get more valuable visits to your site by getting your users to install Internet Explorer. And we’ll pay you twenty bucks.”

Patrick: This web page best viewed in IE9.

Kevin: If Microsoft would like some tips to build their next <canvas> HTML5 driven invitation page for their next browser beta they could do worse than visiting html5boilerplate.com. This is a site that I’ve seen tossed around for the past week or so, and it purports to give you a ZIP file that you can download and it contains everything you need as a starting point to build a modern, HTML5, standards compliant website. And depending on what type of developer you are this is either going to dazzle you or horrify you. You know, I’d like to consider myself across a lot of the things that belong in a brand new website these days, obviously I went to Microsoft’s invitation page and started picking holes in it, oh they didn’t do this, they didn’t do that, why didn’t they include this bit of code. And html5boilerplate.com seems like the ultimate expression of that, they have combined all of these nitpicks, these things that if you took your web development seriously you would include this line of code on every site you build, and they’ve put all of those lines of code together into this set of files that you can use as a starting point. And you can just scroll down the page and they have beautifully syntaxed highlighted versions of all of these code files complete with comments explaining what everything does, and man it amounts to a lot of code. I think you can hit page down 20 times before you get to the bottom of this code on a typical screen size.

And this is just the code that you need to have before you have before you start writing your website, so all this will give you is an extremely standards compliant well-performing blank website, and your work starts from here.

Stephan: The .htaccess page is probably the funniest one. It’s 183 lines, and a lot of it’s white space.

Kevin: (Laughs) Yeah, this is the, for your Apache server it tells Apache the special ways to treat this website when serving it. And, yeah, it’s 183 lines including comments of stuff. And this is code that does things like serve HTML5 video properly, it also serves cache headers so that any static file, so images, fonts, CSS, JavaScript, these types of files are all served to the browser with the message ‘you can cache this for a month’, ‘I don’t plan to change this for a month’, and what this does is increases the likelihood that these files are cached by your browser and increases the performance of your site. As a developer if you do want to change one of those files and have your users see those changes you need to refer to them with URLs with a query string that says last updated on this date, or something like that, which forces the browser to re-download the files that it would otherwise continue to cache for a month. But yeah, that’s just one example of the dozens of little tricks that are scattered throughout all of these files. And in many cases they are barely documented, like let me just have a look here, here’s one line of code in their CSS style sheet that says it normalizes monospace sizing, and then it’s got a link to Wikipedia regarding some sort of teletype style fix for Google Chrome. (Laughs) This is the ultimate in pedantry I think; yes, every single line of this does something useful. Do you need to understand all of this to be a web designer today? I remember the days when I sat my dad down and he wanted to build a simple web page that had a few family photos on it, I said well you start with an <html> tag and then you have a head tag, and when you’re done with the head tag you have a body tag, and here’s how you put images on a page. And in the space of half an hour he felt like he could build web pages for the real world. This mass of code is something that you’ve got to be really dedicated to the science of web development in order to even get through reading the thing, let alone using it on all your projects. Is this making web design too difficult is what I’m saying?

Stephan: I don’t know if it’s making it difficult. I think it’s making it a little intimidating.

Kevin: Yeah. Patrick is this the nail in the coffin that you read this and you decide that’s it, I am never writing code ever again?

Patrick: I love how I’m the go-to. I know my place on this show for that sort of stuff. (Laughter) You know I have to say with my limited knowledge I kind of already knew this was the case which is why I just don’t even try to get into this stuff. I almost think that was the purpose here. I almost think that the purpose here was to create this to say, you know what, here is everything, here’s every last thing that we can throw at this, okay, this is every last detail, every single thing we can do. It is a little pedantic maybe for some, but that’s the goal I think is for it to be that detailed, that specific, that pedantic, if you choose to describe it in that way, to say here it is, it’s all in front of you, it’s all on the table. And I don’t really see necessarily how that’s a bad thing, I guess, I think it might serve to educate some people; it might serve as a good starting point, a good template for people to use. You don’t have to use it, it’s better than Geocities homepage builder, right, so just look at this as sort of homepage builder for that HTML5 loving web designer.

Kevin: Stephan you describe yourself as a recovering programmer from time to time (laughs), is this your nemesis? Is this the kind of code that makes you never want to be a programmer again?

Stephan: Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t say never again, but this is pretty intimidating for someone who hasn’t touched some of this stuff. I mean I can’t imagine coming in here and looking at, one, the .htaccess file without understanding anything about Apache is really intimidating. And the CSS is blank for the most part, but it’s a lot of stuff, I mean there’s a lot of stuff in the CSS that I mean I’ll be honest, I don’t understand all of it, but I don’t do CSS all the time, so to me it’s a little overwhelming and I feel like I’d have to go in, and maybe Patrick’s right that I would have to go and do some serious reading to really get into the CSS in this thing which is probably a good thing, I need to get back into it.

Brad: Yeah, this is intimidating for someone like me that does this on a daily basis; I mean there’s a lot of stuff here. But, having said that I think it’s a great reference, I mean there’s things in here we don’t use on websites, but it’s interesting to see if this is something that should be in there, and maybe we’ll do some research and see if it makes sense. I mean going as detailed as having an apple-touch-icon link in your header, stuff like that is very kind of obscure, but I think it’s kind of neat, I’m anxious to kind of take this download the stripped out version which gets rid of all those comments and slap it on a WordPress team and see if it is truly a great starting point or if it’s just more than what’s needed I should say. So I don’t know; you know I eat code for breakfast so this is kind of cool to me.

Kevin: Some of the cross domain stuff in there is going a bit far for me, and it’s some of the most intimidating stuff when there’s a comment in — there’s this crossdomain.xml file, which is a file that a typical web developer if you haven’t done any hardcore JavaScript you will have never even seen a file like this before and you won’t even know what it has to do with. And there’s a comment in that file that says “If you host a crossdomain.xml file with allow access from domain = * and don’t understand all of the points described here, you probably have a nasty security vulnerability.”

Stephan: But then they have the line in the code.

Kevin: Yeah, and then they have the line, so you’re whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, does that mean that out of the box this code is a nasty security vulnerability? This is the stuff that’s going to scare people away and go oh, oh, oh okay, um; I don’t think I can do this. It’s a strange duality, you land at the site and it says it’s going to give you “A rock solid default for HTML5 awesome!” and “why is it awesome” and “why is it awesomer,” and “future awesome coming soon.” It sets you out to get all excited about this and then kind of beats you over the head with it. I would have liked to have seen— You know every one of these files, let alone every one of these files, every line in these files, it feels like you could have a whole article written about it explaining it. And if you went to the trouble of reading every one of those articles you would have a really solid foundation in web development. Maybe that’s a job for someone to do is to document all this stuff in detail.

Patrick: SitePoint! Get a few authors on that, stat.

Kevin: Yeah, just the HTML5 boilerplate book I could see it, I could see it, and we might be talking about that later at the office today. One last story before we close off here and that’s the jQuery Mobile Project. This is something John Resig, the creator of the jQuery Library, has been talking about on the conference circuit for a few months now, but it seems like they’re finally ready to do it. He’s been researching whether it’s doable, and now they’ve announced that they’re going to do it. Rather than develop a whole new JavaScript library just for mobile browsers, they are going to add support for mobile browsers to the existing jQuery library, they think they are able to enhance jQuery with support for mobile browsers without harming it as the top library for desktop browsers. And then on top of that once they’ve done that work they’re going to build a user interface widget toolkit for mobile phone browsers so that you can build these web apps for iPhones and things like that using jQuery, and it’s really exciting. It will be a while yet before they have something that’s really practical to use, but they’ve got some big names behind them supporting them, they’ve got Palm with their webOS platform, they’ve got Mozilla, who are working on Mobile Firefox, and the Filament Group which is one of the big names behind the jQuery UI library for desktop browsers is supporting the development of this as well. What really caught my eye about this story, though, was their chart showing— the Mobile Graded Browser Support chart which lists all of the major mobile phone smartphone browsers and the level of support they believe that they can give to them in this upcoming library. And if you thought supporting desktop browsers was difficult, well, take a look at this chart. In some ways it is less expansive than I would have expected, but I think it’s just because they have limited themselves really to modern smartphones.

Brad: I’m glad I’m not doing this. You know we develop for five or six different browsers and some different versions, but this is insane, you’re talking, what, eight different mobile browsers on 10 to 15 different platforms, I mean multiple versions, and I mean it’s crazy. And it’s being developed at such a fast pace, and this is something we’ve talked about on some of the previous episodes, how the Mobile Web is still so young compared to the regular Internet that these browsers and new versions of the operating systems and the software they’re running is being developed so fast that it’s almost impossible for developers to keep up because it’s evolving so quickly. So it’s certainly an interesting project, the first thing I thought about when I read this is something that you mentioned, Kevin, a few episodes back about how the Web isn’t really built for mobile especially with the drag and drop type of stuff. And I think it was with Flash and the iPhone topic that we talked about, so I’m curious because a lot of the jQuery elements that I’ve seen on websites I wonder how well they would work on a mobile site if they actually worked how easy would it be to kind of drag down a menu or use some of the drag and drop features. Some of it makes sense, but some of it I’m not sure would work at all, so.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that’s what we’re going to be seeing happen here because right now it really doesn’t work very well at all. I know Google Analytics, for example, is a very JavaScript heavy web application that does not work at all in mobile smartphone browsers, and we’re talking even on Apple’s iPad it is virtually unusable, not just because they use Flash to display graphs, but as soon as you get into customizing a report in Google Analytics the user interface is all about dragging things from the left side to the right side and dragging them up and down in the order you want, and none of that works in a touch-based user interface. And so the work that jQuery is going to be doing on their library here is really to bring those touch user interaction events into the library as first-class citizens, and then building widgets that respond to those types of events just as well as desktop-like click and drag events that you get from desktop browsers. And so, yeah, that’s where I think a lot of the work is here. Now that they’ve done this survey of the landscape it seems like you can read this graph and see they’ve made some decisions. For example, they’ve decided Opera Mini, they’re not going to be supporting; Opera Mini is entirely marked as a C grade browser which is to say it is an extremely low-quality browser with high market share. To some extent that’s a rough judgment on Opera Mini because really that browser is designed to be very simple, and it has almost no JavaScript support whatsoever by design, it’s sort of designed to give you a static, non-interactive view of the Web, but the speed increase and the bandwidth savings you get from that is kind of the point of that browser, so I’m not sure I would’ve even put Opera Mini in this chart, but nevertheless it shows there so users can see what to expect. Opera Mobile, however, their first class, fully interactive browser for smartphones, it looks like it hasn’t been very good right up to version 9.5, but the version 10, which is out for Symbian Series 60 phones and coming soon on Android and Windows Mobile 7, that one’s looking pretty good, and it looks like they do plan to support that. And then there’s the whole native column, which I think is shorthand for WebKit because all of these phones that have native browsers marked A-grade here are the same phones that tend to use WebKit. So those seem to be the two browsers they’re going to be mainly supporting is Opera Mobile 10 and WebKit, and if you’re lucky enough to have a smartphone with one of those browsers I guess towards the end of this year you can expect to start seeing rich websites built with jQuery that have full support for touch interaction. It’s exciting; it’s really ambitious. I agree with you Brad, I enjoy writing JavaScript, but I am glad this isn’t my job to make this work. And so kudos to the jQuery Project for taking on what is obviously a difficult problem.

Before we get to our host spotlights I wanted to go through a piece of listener feedback that dedicated podcast listener powerpotatoe sent through in response to Podcast #73, our last news show. Guys did you check out this big comment on the blog?

Patrick: I did.

Stephan: Yep.

Kevin: So, let me just run through it here, you guys can give your quick reactions to powerpotatoe’s thoughts here. We were talking about validation and whether it is still relevant, powerpotatoe says, “I still use the W3C validators mainly for troubleshooting. If something is not working in the code I’ll run it through a validator and check for any typing mistakes or other human errors. I once as a very young developer thought it cool to post the validator icons on my sites proving I was a master at web standards. But then I realized that running a validation for the whole site and adding the icons to each page was not worth the effort.” Brad what do you think, validation?

Brad: Yeah, I agree, I think it’s in the long run it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re going to be spending a lot more work than it’s worth to validate every page across your site. I used to use it a lot more when I was younger too just so I could talk about it a few years ago, so I’d certainly agree with that point.

Patrick: Yeah, I don’t think you were alone. I wouldn’t be surprised if SitePoint or Webmasterbase or Webmaster-Resources at one point had those icons too.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely. Powerpotatoe goes on to talk about paywalls. He says, “I have yet to pay for any service I use on the Web,” which that is a big call. I don’t know, I think even most people by now have put their credit card into some sort of website I would think. In any case he says, “In terms for news it makes sense to me to pay for a printed newspaper, but I feel taken advantage of if I have to pay for the same content online. This is due to an internet spoiledness, web content has been free since the beginning mostly. Take SitePoint, for example, if I had to pay to access the blogs, articles, or this podcast, I would quickly move on.” Oh, you’re crushing our dreams powerpotatoe.

Patrick: There’s our model. Aw.

Kevin: (Laughs) “Even knowing the benefit of this site for me I do not think I would stick around if I had to pay. However, every time a new book comes out I take a look at my budget to see if I can afford the purchase. I will pay for the books because I do not consider them a part of the site content, rather they are another product of SitePoint.” Patrick this goes back to some of the stuff you were talking about during that show, right?

Patrick: It’s the web publisher challenge because you have the paid newspapers, they have costs, paper, ink, printing, etcetera, but so does the Web; servers, hosting, domain names, etcetera. So, how do you get over that? I think what ESPN did, like we mentioned a couple of episodes ago, was a good example of paying for premium content. And like I told powerpotatoe in the comment thread I think when it comes to revenues strategies there’s one simple truth: that everyone wants to make as much money as they possibly can in a manner that’s appropriate for them. So if anyone has an idea everyone’s ready to listen and jump on it, but you get money in one of two places: either you get it from the people who consume your stuff, or you get it from the people who want to reach those people.

Kevin: Powerpotatoe goes on to talk about advertising and how he would love to see alternative revenue models work on the Web. I encourage you, listener, to head over to sitepoint.com/podcast and chime in on that comment thread; it’s a really good discussion. And that is it guys, let’s dive into our host spotlights, Brad?

Brad: Yes, well somebody had a birthday and I wanted to make sure I mentioned that, and that somebody is … Internet Explorer (laughter).

Patrick: Oh oh oh. I was like, did I forget? Was it Kevin’s birthday?

Brad: Yeah, Internet Explorer actually turned 15 just a few days ago on August 16th. Internet Explorer version 1 debuted on August 16th, 1995; can you believe it’s been that long?

Kevin: Say what you will about Internet Explorer, for a piece of code to be running, and not only be running but still the most used browser on the Web, 15 years later is a remarkable achievement.

Brad: Yeah, I would agree, whether you love it or hate it I think we can all agree that Internet Explorer kind of helped launch the Internet into the mainstream, it really made it accessible, easy to use, and you know, whether like I said you love it or hate it today we can at least respect that it did help shape what we all know and love, so happy birthday Internet Explorer.

Kevin: Happy birthday.

Kevin: My host spotlight is a big article called HTML Sanitisation: The Devil’s In The Details (And The Vulnerabilities). This is a must read if you are a PHP developer, especially if you have built or are considering building a site where users can type in HTML code that will be displayed to other users on that site. This is where you need an HTML sanitization library, certainly if you are thinking of writing one yourself reading this article will make you think twice and then throw that idea right out the window. It is a delicate science, and HTML can contain all sorts of dangerous things that you don’t necessarily want people to post on your site, not the least of which is JavaScript code that can be the source of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. So in this article the author has gone through and surveyed the four most eligible HTML5 sanitization libraries, these libraries that you can feed it a piece of HTML code and in theory it spits out a version of that code that is safe for you to publish on your site. And he finds frightening vulnerabilities in at least two of them, the third one is built into WordPress, and he was able to find vulnerabilities which were then fixed in WordPress 3.0.1, but it is interesting nevertheless to see that such a long maintained and heavily used library can still have a vulnerability of this type in it. And then the last one, HTML Purifier, I’ll give you a spoiler now, is the only one he recommends as a rock solid solution for this. But in general if you can get away with using some other formatting language like BBcode, which is common on forums, or Markdown which is common in many blogging platforms, these are generally better solutions than risking HTML, but if you have to use HTML you definitely want to read this article so you know what you’re getting into. Patrick?

Patrick: My spotlight is a video that’s part of collegehumor.com’s Bleep Bloop series which focuses on video games primarily, but this one is for a product called AR Drone, and it’s called by the company The Flying Video Game; ardrone.parrot, like the bird, .com, and it is the first Quadra Copter that can be controlled by an iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, so wrap your brain all the way around that because I’m not into that sort of robotic stuff, but it was really cool to see this four blade thing flying in the air and being controlled by an iPod or an iPhone or an iPad, so I definitely think it’s a product for our listener base.

Kevin: This is one of those products that I was afraid it was going to be Vaporware, like it did the rounds about a year ago, they were sort of demo-ing it and they said you’ll be able to — we’ll be opening up pre-orders at some point next year. And you can now finally pre-order this thing, and I don’t know the exact price but I remember checking and going, wow, that is surprisingly affordable.

Patrick: Yeah, you can buy it from brookstone.com for $299.99 pre-order.

Kevin: Yeah. And when you think about what they charge for a remote control helicopter that you just know you’re going to fly once and crash it into the side of a building, those things you think of as being pretty expensive toys, this is remarkably affordable. So, yeah, it’s basically a remote control helicopter that you control with your iPhone, and it has a camera on the front so you can go and fly up to the roof of your house and have a look at what’s going on up there, you know.

Patrick: And there’s some sort of ability to play with other people through Wi-Fi, I don’t even know how that would work, but it’s possible to quote-unquote battle.

Kevin: Oh dear. AR Drone chicken.

Stephan: Alright, I’m getting one.

Kevin: (Laughs)

Patrick: This sounds like a worthwhile investment for SitePoint, get a few of these flying around the offices.

Kevin: Yes, yes, absolutely. Stephan what’s your spotlight.

Stephan: So I had a hard time this week, but Patrick showed me the light with his link to the blippy.com 404 page, I think it’s hilarious just because it hits on a subject that I think we all enjoyed recently, the double rainbow YouTube Meme.

Kevin: And I’ll have to include a link to that in case any listener has not seen the double rainbow.

Stephan: Yeah, if you’ve seen it it’s pretty hilarious three minute video, and the Blippy 404 page is a fantastic take on it. So just click on the little guy down at the bottom left and have yourself a nice laugh.

Kevin: (Laughs) So, as predicted a massive episode this week, but we have come to the end of it, and guys let’s go around the table.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from Webdev Studios, and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network, ifroggy.com, on Twitter @ifroggy.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, badice.com is the blog, and you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves.

Kevin: And you can follow me on Twitter @sentience, and follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. Visit the SitePoint podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast, we’ve been getting some great comments in response to episodes, comments like the one that we read from by powerpotatoe this week. Why not send us in a comment and make yours the one we discuss on our next episode?

The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye, bye.

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.

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Episode 74 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), and Brad Williams (@williamsba) interview Nathan Rice, the lead developer of StudioPress, and Cory Miller, the CEO of iThemes.

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• SitePoint Podcast #74: WordPress Themes with Nathan Rice and Cory Miller (MP3, 23:05, 21.2MB)

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Interview Transcript

August 13th, 2010. We chat with a couple of prominent figures at two of the most popular premium WordPress theme companies. This is the SitePoint Podcast #74: WordPress Themes with Nathan Rice and Cory Miller.

Hello and welcome to another edition of the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Patrick O’Keefe and this is our final interview show from our live show at WordCamp Raleigh. Today our focus is on WordPress theme developers; joined by Brad Williams and Stephan Segraves we’ll be speaking with Nathan Rice, the lead developer of StudioPress and Cory Miller the CEO of iThemes. Let’s go.

Patrick: So we’ll go ahead and bring on our next guest, Nathan Rice.

Brad: So Nathan Rice is the lead developer from StudioPress. Hi Nathan.

Nathan: Hey. Applause, yeah.

(Applause)

Brad: So StudioPress recently released Genesis which is a theme framework, so I was wondering if you could kind of tell everybody about Genesis and why it kind of differs from the competition out there.

Nathan: Yeah, basically there’re two types of themes available right now even in the free and the commercial markets right now there’s what I call a traditional theme, and then there’s theme frameworks, and Genesis is a theme framework that essentially offers more options, and basically when we compare ourselves to the classic themes or the traditional themes you’ve got — Genesis has things like layout options so you can choose sidebar on the left or sidebar on the right, or two sidebars or no sidebars, and that sort of thing. The markup structure is really well done; we thought it through months in advance before we actually ever released Genesis. And then the SEO options we have included as well, which a lot of people don’t know, but the markup structure that you have in your theme actually really does affect your SEO. A lot of people say well I can use a regular theme and I’ll just use All-in-one SEO Pack, and that’s very good, we integrate with All-in-one SEO as well, and we love Michael and the plugin that he did, but a lot of people don’t know that the markup structure matters a lot to SEO as well. And as far as the other theme frameworks in the market we do things like we have automatic upgrades, so you can click just a button in the backend and you upgrade immediately. We had a security audit from Mark Jaquith, which if you don’t know he’s one of the lead developers on the WordPress Project, and also we have 18 child-views with designs from all across the spectrum from different designers and stuff.

Brad: Awesome. Yeah, and so 1.2 is releasing soon; what new features can we expect to see in it?

Nathan: 1.2 is mostly a compatibility release for WordPress 3.0; custom navigation is going to be included as compatibility with that. Also we’re speeding things up a little bit, just a few extra options in the backend, stuff like that. So it’s a minor release but it has a major release cycle number, but it’s mainly to be compatible with WordPress 3.0.

Brad: And I’m assuming you’re going to wait and release that after 3.0.

Nathan: Yes, we’ll put a beta out as soon as — I think either as soon as or as soon after the WordPress 3.0 release gets released.

Brad: Cool. So Genesis is obviously the project you work primarily on. Is that all you work on at StudioPress or do you work on some of the other projects as well?

Nathan: Well, I do a lot of the support for Genesis as well, so especially the stuff, the more advanced stuff, that some of the moderators can’t handle I’ll step in and maybe do some stuff like that. But we’re also planning on after 1.2 is released Brian Gardner, who’s the owner of StudioPress, and most of you know that name, he is going to have me work on some plugins, some free plugins for everyone and also some Genesis specific plugins to really extend the functionality of Genesis and make it a little bit easier to use, especially for non-coders, and that’s really where we want to focus our attention. So, right now 90 percent of the time I spend developing Genesis, new features, upcoming releases, things like that, but yeah, in the immediate future I’m going to start working on some plugins for StudioPress.

Brad: Great. So what big things do you have planned for Genesis? Can you fill us in on any coming features?

Nathan: Brian just Tweeted out that if you’re a Pro Plus member of StudioPress, so if you’ve purchased that level you can go in and download a beta of the new Genesis default child-theme which is going to include some design controls, so you can control your link colors and your background colors and shadows and borders and stuff like that, so that’s something really big that we’re working on. That’s just in beta but it’s going to be a full-blown release, and that’ll be free, most likely, with Genesis, if you’re a Genesis member. Other big things, we really want to explore the idea of custom post types and taxonomies.

Brad: That’s good to hear.

Nathan: Yeah. It’s a big deal to us, and what we’ve always committed to do at StudioPress, and we probably always will, is to really tightly integrate with WordPress features—post thumbnails, threaded comments, 3.0 navigation, all that kind of thing. We really want to be right there, not reinventing wheels and doing things differently than WordPress intends; we really want to be there doing themes that don’t look foreign to WordPress and use all of WordPress’ built-in core functionality. So we really want to explore the idea of custom post types and taxonomies and see what we can do as far as building niche-specific themes; we already have, for those of you who don’t know, if you’re a real estate agent we have AgentPress, and I think we’re going to reexamine AgentPress with custom post types because it makes sense, listings are … could be a custom post type.

Brad: Exactly.

Nathan: And that kind of thing can apply across the board to other types of niche-specific themes, car dealerships and churches and things like that, so we really want to dive into that at some point.

Brad: Now, are all StudioPress themes running on Genesis now, are you converting them all over; will I be able to buy like a traditional theme from StudioPress in the next few months or will they all be gone?

Nathan: Probably within two to three months they’ll all be converted over.

Brad: They’ll all be Genesis.

Nathan: All StudioPress themes will be converted over to Genesis. And the reason we do that is because we trust Genesis; I mean like I said, we had a security audit done so we’re very confident that there’s not going to be any glaring vulnerabilities in your theme that could make it — expose you to hacking, getting your site hacked. And so we really do try, and it’s the same markup structure across every single theme, so you can change your design; once a week if you wanted to, but your markup structure’s never going to change because it’s the same from theme to theme to theme because it’s Genesis running it all. You never have to re-input settings, you never have to go back through and change the layout and stuff like that for a specific theme, which by the way, layout settings apply on a post- and page-specific basis, so you can go in and you can have your site, the home page has your content and a sidebar and a sidebar, but on a specific page if you don’t want sidebars you can turn it off. And so all that kind of stuff that applies across every single child-theme, and for us that’s a major benefit of Genesis, so of course it makes a lot of sense for us to convert every theme over to Genesis. Right now I think we’re probably somewhere like three-quarters of the way through.

Patrick: Does anyone have a question for the gentleman seated to my right about StudioPress or Genesis? Okay, I guess you were first by a hair, go ahead.

Audience Member: I actually had a question and praise. (inaudible) …and first I wanted to ask is WordPress considered more of a blog or can I just call it a website?

Nathan: I think you can call it both. At this point that was my major beef maybe three years ago with WordPress is that it was, and even from the leadership it was this is blogging software. I think now, especially with 2.9 when they really introduced the custom post types concept, it really has become this can be your site that has a blog and not necessarily a blog that you have to like mutate into an actual website.

Audience Member: (inaudible)

Nathan: Really, OK!

Patrick: And I should also say that you’ve just won a license to the StudioPress theme of your choice, so— You can give it away. You can give it away if you want. You don’t want it? Someone else—

Audience Member: (inaudible) …and I really liked it.

Nathan: You bought both, the combo pack? Okay.

Patrick: So you do want it, because they’ll take it.

Audience Member: Either way.

Patrick: Okay, fine. Final question and you get it; just fill your name on a piece of paper over there with the gentleman right there.

Audience Member: HTML5 and typography, how much of that is going to built into Genesis?

Nathan: HTML5 is something that at some point when it becomes an adopted spec, when it becomes and officially adopted spec, we are going to I think make an option. So essentially in the theme options, the theme settings page, you’ll choose from a dropdown what type of — well, it is the markup structure but also the DOCTYPE. We’ll change where you can choose HTML5 as your DOCTYPE, and if you do that the theme setting will go through and change your markup structure to be compatible with HTML5 using the nav element and the header element and the aside element, all that stuff. Okay, now that will not be compatible with child themes because the child themes are very much, well, it may be; if we can make it compatible with child themes we’ll do that, if not you may have to roll your own child theme for an HTML compatible with Genesis. What was your other question?

Audience Member: Typography.

Nathan: Typography. Again, we try to abstract most design stuff out of Genesis and leave that to child themes. We believe that there’re two separate layers that should never, well, very seldomly mix, there should be one on top of the other. And so we have someone involved with the StudioPress community who’s a typophile is what — they’re good at typography, and I think we’re going to start focusing in the coming months on expanding our library of designs to include not just pretty colors but also really fine-tuned typography as well.

Brad: Thanks Nathan. So where can everybody find you online?

Nathan: I’m nathanrice.net, studiopress.com if you want to get Genesis, and I highly recommend that you do, and @nathanrice on Twitter.

Brad: Cool, awesome, thanks for coming.

Nathan: Thanks.

(Applause)

Patrick: Keeping with the premium theme segment, our next guest is Cory Miller; Cory is the CEO of iThemes, welcome Cory.

Cory: Hey, thanks guys.

(Applause)

Patrick: Glad to have you.

Brad: Cory, so you recently launched pluginbuddy.com, so can you tell us what plugins you offer, what plugins we can look forward to in the future, and what exactly are the services that you’re doing?

Cory: You bet. So the first plugin, well, we started PluginBuddy, iThemes has been around for 2½ years now. We started PluginBuddy out of a need we saw in the WordPress community, and that was the same reason people buy themes we feel the same reason people would want a premium plugin also. So PluginBuddy was launched in March of this year to fit a need, we felt like we had some staffing, we had some people on our team that could build some rockin’ cool plugins, so our major plugin there is called BackupBuddy, and what we did was look at WordPress and said what’s the need? And the need was how do we have a backup, migration, and restoration for sites? So a developer, for instance, they build their site on a sandbox playground site and they want to migrate that to a live domain; that was a need we had personally. And so we thought, well, can we provide a solution? And that was our blockbuster first theme that we’re very proud of, we’ve heard some good comments, I think Brad you’re a customer.

Brad: Oh, we are. I do have the BackupBuddy dev license actually.

Cory: And have the shirt? Need to get you a shirt.

Brad: No, what shirt? I didn’t get a shirt. Gotta get a shirt now.

Cory: Got to get him a shirt.

Patrick: Off your back.

Cory: So Backup Buddy was our first plugin that we rolled out through PluginBuddy. The second called up was about a week or two ago was called Mobile, and again, just trying to fit a need; there are good existing solutions out there just like there’s backup solutions out in the WordPress market right now. We’re not saying — there’s good ones out there, we’re not saying we’re the only choice, but we felt like we could offer our community a good, solid solution, and so Mobile was the second thing we did. Basically Mobile helps you build an iPhone version, for lack of a better term, of your website; so it’s not just your website branded, or it’s not just your website that just happens to look somehow similar, you can actually recreate your site for a mobile platform. And I think right now we have ten platforms that are supported, so for instance, I don’t know if you have a browser on your phone, but –

Patrick: You don’t want to use it. You really, really don’t want to use it. It’s a pay-as-you-go phone; it’s the worst phone in the room, so, continue.

Cory: So we support Android, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, so WordPress sniffs out what browser, what platform, all that kind of stuff something’s coming from, and so somebody looking at it from an iPad you can tell it which theme, it comes with three themes, that it’ll show on the site. So, real quickly, Mobile is create your own header image that you can upload, okay, and then style it with the built-in style manager so you can rebuild anything you want toward the mobile application. And that’s our two really big plug-ins that we have at PluginBuddy.

Patrick: So you also run webdesign.com. Can you tell us about that and the training and certifications that you offer?

Cory: Okay, so good businesses provide solutions to problems, right? And so we looked at BackupBuddy, we said there’s not a good — we didn’t feel like this total all in one solution for backup restoration, migration, okay, same thing with training is there’s awesome training content out there, right, you can go to all the blogs, Smashing Magazine, and I’m forgetting some, WP Beginner, Weblogs Tools Collection, all that. What we wanted to do was say how can we provide some solid training to the WordPress community, video-based training, where we have Benjamin Bradley’s our instructor, he’s in the back in that white shirt there, anyway, he’s our technical trainer over there, and we just saw another void to say how can we help? Three and a half years ago when I started WordPress I had to bum advice off my good friend Brian Gardner; had to bum advice and plead and beg and all that kind of stuff and you know every resource I could. So that just came out of our own experience of saying how can we provide a solid, ongoing, good solution for helping people build awesome WordPress websites. Because we see that, we’re all here today because WordPress is a kick-butt solution, right, I mean it’s up and coming, it’s continued to be better and better by people that contribute back to core, and all that kind of stuff, so trainings just saying there’s a void and we wanted to help try and fill it. Now, your book and stuff is the other key component of it, right?

Brad: Professional WordPress.

Patrick: Nicely done!

Cory: Professional WordPress. Funny story real quick: okay, Brad says — I was mentioning, so I go read through the whole thing, I go buy it instantly, of course, I have to, right; and I’m looking through it and everything and I said I got to make a plug for Professional WordPress.

Patrick: So webdesign.com is an insanely good domain name. How did you come to own it?

Cory: Okay, you go to Go Daddy and you type in web design.

(Laughter)

Patrick: Is that all it takes?

Cory: And when you see that “Buy Now” button on the dot com you fork out your credit card right there.

Patrick: When did you do that, 1987?

(Laughter)

Cory: It hadn’t been registered in 15 years.

Patrick: Wow.

Brad: I don’t believe that.

Cory: That never suffices as the right answer, so here’s the other one: so that’s the laugh, everybody gets to ha, ha out of it, so the other is, and I dumb it down until people keep mobbing me with questions, but being at the right place at the right time and having the right business model with the right partners. Does that work? We got yes’s over here, no’s here, maybes.

Patrick: So was that listed for sale online or did you get introduced to someone who was introduced by someone else who knew the guy who owned it and wanted to sell it? Was it a broker or anything like that?

Cory: There’s a saying that — and I always butcher it, that most people think — they walk up to the plate, I always butcher this, and hit a homerun in baseball, when they’re really born on second. So born on second thinks he hit a homerun; does that resonate with anybody? I’m a guy that understands he was born on second and had a lot of help getting that homerun out of it, so I had good partners that had secured the domain name, and when the time was right we presented the business plan for it and we’re able to do what we do. So, I didn’t register it, I’m not the most brilliant guy, intelligent guy in the world, and I won’t claim that; I was at the right place at the right time with good partners, and that really is the summation of the story.

Stephan: Cool. What is iThemes excited about in 2010 and going forward in 2011?

Cory: You know overall WordPress consistently is getting better and better. I think I started it around the 2.0 version with the blue dashboard and thought it was the best thing since sliced pie. We built our business, you know, we have 14 people not all full time on our staff, we have an office in Oklahoma City, we’ve built our business around WordPress, okay, so we’re not doing Joomla or Drupal. We believe in WordPress because we use WordPress, we love it, that’s the most exciting theme is that platform continues to get better and better. Bob Dunbar’s here today and he’s one of the core contributors, whatever you call it, Brad can help me out with the terminology. I love it because there’s so many people trying to make WordPress better, and you know what, we’re trying to provide solutions so exciting-wise, iThemes-wise, is our Builder theme; it’s basically, again, thinking through what we would want and what we try to do is say you don’t have to code, you can use a wizzy-wig interface-type thing that looks so similar to WordPress that it doesn’t need to say the Builder, it’s just synched in with WordPress and how it looks from the icons all the way down to help build that. The trainer opportunities we have at webdesign.com are awesome, we hope to continually to do that; we’ve met a number of people in our community here that really value the training that James Dalman and Benjamin Bradley are providing, and then PluginBuddy, I think that’s fun. The best part of my job is I get to innovate, but I’m not that talented, I have to hire people to do that, you know. So, but I love rolling out solutions that we meet people here at Raleigh and it’s fun talking shop and hearing people, you know, they gripe at us too, and that’s okay because I get to (inaudible), but the other thing is the affirmation that we’ve helped people do something in their business, and so that’s the most exciting thing is to continue to do that and get better at it.

Stephan: Cool. You sound fired up, it’s cool.

Cory: Well, there’s this thing is light yourself on fire and people will watch you burn, so I ain’t got nothing else but I’m gonna light myself on fire and if you guys get entertained by that maybe you like it, you know, maybe you have fun.

Patrick: So, speaking of iThemes Builder, does anyone have a question for Cory?

Cory: Oh, look at the time.

(Laughter)

Patrick: We’ll give it away whether or not you’re here. No, go ahead.

Audience Member: (inaudible)

Cory: Yeah, the question was about — for the podcast, was about PluginBuddy Mobile, it comes with three starter themes that you can say I want this theme to go to this particular mobile platform, so for instance, our guys are gamers so we have a couple games built-in, I don’t even know them, a Sony-something Wii and all that kind of stuff, Playstation; so you can this theme, one of three themes, and we’re going to put more in. Matt Jenner’s in the back, he’s going to help continue building cool themes (inaudible). You can say this platform goes to this theme; does that answer your question?

Patrick: Excellent. So you’ve won a copy of iThemes Builder, $127.00, technically the most expensive prize we have, I think, is that the right price?

Cory: If that’s the way you think, Patrick.

(Laughter)

Patrick: I said my book was the cheapest, and it is; $24.00, so give me some credit.

Cory: In the giveaway, okay, yeah, it’s the most expensive.

(Laughter)

Patrick: So now you’re thinking what have I — I didn’t have to do that.

Cory: I’m giving you the most stuff for the giveaway, right.

Patrick: Monetarily.

Cory: Monetarily, ah, there you go, Patrick.

Patrick: So where can people find you online?

Cory: My personal site is corymiller.com, but I’m all about the brand and our team, and so ithemes.com is our main brand, it’s 2½ years old. And, oh, Twitter, @corymiller303, that’s it; sounds like AOL.

Patrick: Excellent, thanks Cory.

(Applause)

Patrick: Well, it was great to have them on. And now let’s go around the table and close out this episode of the SitePoint Podcast.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com, and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and my blog is badice.com.

Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, ifroggy.com, I’m on Twitter @ifroggy. You can follow our usual co-host, Kevin Yank, @sentience, and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. You can also visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions for us, we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

This episode of the SitePoint podcast was 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.

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1. Livestream Today: SitePoint Podcast at WordCamp Raleigh (1-3 PM ET/GMT -4)

Episode 73 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Brad Williams (@williamsba), and Kevin Yank (@sentience).

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• SitePoint Podcast #73: Cease and Desoup (MP3, 48.6MB, 53:00)

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

1. Cookie stuffing officially illegal
2. Speedy browser updates an excuse not to upgrade?
3. How important is code validity today?
4. Content paywalls: dead or just mostly dead?

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/73.

Host Spotlights

• Brad: What The F%@k Is My Social Media Strategy?
• Kevin: Canto.js
• Patrick: Why the 3/50 Project Can’t Save Small Businesses
• Stephan: Permatime

Show Transcript

Kevin: August 6th, 2010. Can browser updates come too frequently? Is code validation still relevant? And paywalls: dead or just mostly dead? I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #73: Cease and Desoup.

And welcome, welcome to the SitePoint Podcast! We’ve got a full house again here today. Hi Stephan, Brad, Patrick.

Stephan: Howdy, howdy.

Brad: Hello.

Patrick: Good day.

Kevin: Patrick, why don’t you kick us off with the first bit of news.

Patrick: Sure, so back in 2008 some listeners may have heard that eBay filed a civil suit against Shawn Hogan, Brian Dunning and Todd Dunning; Hogan is know for being associated with Digital Point. And the suit was about click stuffing, or cookie stuffing I should say, cookie stuffing is more or less if you think of you visit a website, right, and you visit that site, you get the cookies for that site. But maybe there is some code working behind the scenes that is actually logging a visit to another site like eBay through an affiliate link, and all of a sudden that cookie is now on your computer, so if you buy something on eBay in the next whatever period of time until the cookie expires you give credit to that website or that person who set that script up without even knowing it. You didn’t click a link with sites –

Kevin: Right, it’s like an affiliate program fraud, right?

Patrick: Kind of, yeah.

Kevin: You’re claiming responsibility for sending someone to eBay even though you never actually did that really.

Patrick: Yeah, or it wasn’t visible. I mean I don’t know how that would work, but there are scripts out there that will allow you to do it. And I would imagine some sort of iframe thing could go on, but I mean that’s probably a crude way to do it. Anyway, eBay, it became such a big problem with eBay regarding Digital Point and regarding the sites that these three people ran that they actually came out and filed a civil suit, but the stakes have been raised because revenues.com reports that it’s actually an indictment now with the FBI investigation by the Cyber Crimes Department where they were indicted with wire fraud and criminal forfeiture. Hogan was given ten counts of wire fraud and Denning was given five counts of wire fraud. According to the documents they could face a penalty of up to 20 years imprisonment, maximum fine of $250,000.00, or twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater, three years of supervised release, and $100.00 special assessment per count. And I don’t have the count number here in front of me, but I would guess that every time that they did this to a visitor it could count as one count, so when you do the math you have a lot of money at stake here and also, of course, your personal freedom. So it’s gone from just a civil matter to an actual serious legal matter. And from what I’ve read there are a lot of people who engage in this, probably much smaller than Digital Point and Hogan and these other people, but still people who rely on this for some income, and I think this is probably a serious wake-up call.

Kevin: Yeah, the story you sent round from ReveNews sort of concludes that the general feeling out there, at least until this case has been tried, was that all’s fair and love and affiliate links. That’s almost an exact quote from the story actually! But yeah, this was a flaw in the technology that if people like eBay wanted to use web technologies in order to run an affiliate program then they had to take the good with the bad; that this technology was flawed, it wasn’t designed necessarily to do this sort of thing, and so if there are loopholes then people can take advantage of it, and that’s eBay’s problem. But I guess wire fraud can mean any form of making money surreptitiously using electronic communication I guess. And so based on this case a lot of people are going to have to change their minds about this stuff.

Patrick: Yeah, and that quote comes from Linda Buquet of fivestarffiliateprograms.com. But I was going to say that, yeah, I think there are a lot of things you can do out there to increase your affiliate conversions that are fine, upfront or white hat or legal or however you want to look at it that you can do, but this just isn’t one of them. And I don’t know; I think that there’s something to this that at least to me would strike me as unethical without needing the law, right? But, of course, if something isn’t in black in white in the public eye and marked as illegal people will still do it until they’re told not to. So maybe this is an opportunity for a lot of people to clean up and cash out before they get caught.

Brad: So, new versions of Google will be flying out of the Googleplex now. Google actually just announced that they plan on releasing a new full version of, or I should say a new major version of Chrome every six weeks, as if they weren’t already releasing new versions fast enough, they’re actually kicking it up a notch. There’s a few different reasons why they plan on doing this, one of the reasons is they’re creating new features so quickly that they don’t want those features to basically become stale, they want to get those features to the users as quickly as possible. They’ll also allow Google to have more firmly set schedules for Chrome, and it will also take the pressure off engineers to finish new features, because if they can’t quite get a feature finished they know they don’t have to wait months and months and months for that feature to show up in Chrome; they’ll only have to wait six weeks to do that. So it’s a pretty interesting take on new releases, and we’ve talked about this a few times; I remember kind of joking around that Chrome version 10 is going to be out before the end of the year, and it’s not too far off, we’ll probably be looking at Chrome version 8 or 9 by the end of the year.

Kevin: Six weeks seems a bit arbitrary and a bit fast. I mean it might be appropriate for the times at the moment, that web technology is moving fast, we’re getting a lot of updates to specs like CSS and HTML, and Chrome, after all, is the browser that was created to experiment with this new stuff and hopefully lead the way for other browsers to follow suit. But I don’t know if it’s reasonable to think that we could, we should even, see our web browsers having major updates every six weeks for the next however many years. If we’re still doing that in ten years time what are these browsers going to be like, and what company will be able to afford to keep up with that pace of innovation.

Patrick: They just want to catch up to AOL 9.5 and soon enough IE9.

Kevin: (Laughs) Yeah, I see that.

Stephan: They’ll be operating systems. (Laughs)

Patrick: But I mean it’s just a testament to how loose version numbers can really be and how different they are from company to company.

Brad: Yeah, Google actually said that they basically stated don’t read too much into the version numbers because they are releasing them so quick. Going from version 5 to 6 isn’t going to be like you would expect when Firefox 3 came out and they had all these new features and this and that. It’s going to have a few new features, but it’s not going to jam-packed with just endless amounts of new things, it’s going to have six weeks’ worth of new features.

Kevin: You’re my poster child as a Chrome fan, Brad, and you yourself were saying that you’ve lost track of the updates that you receive to this browser because they happen transparently. But are you even actively aware anymore of what version of Chrome you’re running? And if not, are version numbers, not only are they completely arbitrary, but are they completely meaningless? I mean does anyone even need to know their version number anymore?

Brad: Yeah, the way Chrome’s doing it you almost don’t need to because, you’re right, the updates happen in the background, there’s no confirmation asking if you want to update, it just happens when a new version comes out, but I believe Chrome’s one of the only browsers actually doing that. And when we compare those graphs on browser usage you could see how when Chrome 5 came out, Chrome 4 browser usage went down to zero within a matter of weeks or months or whatever it may be. But, yeah, I think in the case of Chrome it is almost arbitrary because it’s not so much what version you’re on; the only reason you need to look at what version you’re on is if you’re trying to see if you have maybe a particular new feature that came out or to see what your version supports, but as soon as that new version releases it’s going to update whether you like it or not.

Kevin: So this links in for me with a story from SitePoint blogger Craig Buckler who is updating us on the status of a petition by web developers, well UK web developers, let’s put it that way, who demanded that their government, that the British government, get around to updating and getting all of the government computers off of Internet Explorer 6. Apparently that is the baseline standard within the British government still to run Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6 on it, fully patched of course, but nevertheless this is an old browser in terms of its web standards support if nothing else. And this petition that got 6,223 signatures was demanding that the government upgrade, get itself into the 21st Century. And the petition has failed. But it’s failed in kind of an interesting way, they did get the government to respond to it, which may be a victory in itself, but the response is not the one that they were hoping for. Reading a few snippets here from the official response they’re saying, “Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There’s no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully-patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure.” Craig contends that one of the reasons this petition may have failed was because it may have engaged in a bit of scaremongering; it tried to get … the main case it put forward for getting off of Internet Explorer was one of security vulnerabilities, when we all know why web developers would really want them to upgrade would be so we’re not stuck supporting the archaic rendering technologies of Internet Explorer 6, but they thought, you know, the case for the government is going to be a security one and so they said you ought to get off IE6 because of the security flaws. It seems that was not convincing. And so they’re deciding to stick with it. Craig goes on to say, though, that maybe we’re expecting too much from this government and that even if we did get our way, even if we got them to switch to Firefox or Chrome, that then we would be demanding that they keep up to date with the release schedules. And this is where it links back to Google Chrome, can we expect an entity the size of a government to be applying browser updates every six weeks?

Stephan: Not if they happen in the background (laughs).

Brad: Well, the main issue is there are so many applications, and it’s obvious they must have some kind of system they use, or multiple systems that require IE6, I mean they must or there wouldn’t be this much of a pushback. But, you know, now with the new browser technologies and the way that people actually all the browsers kind of work and follow the standards, well, they at least try to anyway; applications aren’t built like they used to. They’re not built for one single browser, they’re built to work in as many browsers as possible. So I think once they get past the IE6 hurdle then it will be much easier for them to upgrade going forward because it won’t be stuck into that closed box where everything has to work in IE6 because that’s how it was built.

Stephan: I wonder if it’s really they have these applications that run only in IE6 and they don’t want to lose that functionality, or if it’s a security issue and that they’ve put all this time into making sure that IE6 and Windows XP and their installation is locked down and they don’t want to spend the time where they know it’s going to be time consuming to move forward to Windows 7 and IE8 or Firefox or whatever it is.

Kevin: Hmm, yeah. They say that, well, Craig reports that the departments in the government that are receiving upgrades to newer systems, they are being moved to Internet Explorer 7 at the moment (laughs) even though IE8 is out there and is available for any system where Internet Explorer 7 will run. It’s like the government still is taking a very careful approach to this stuff and will not deploy something that hasn’t been out there and proven for five years, which is tough if the average browser release schedule is a year going on six weeks.

I like that fact that what we’re seeing here with this petition and the response from the government is what’s going on behind the scenes in corporate settings all over the world where web developers who sign on to work — I know my first job as a professional web developer I was working in the Information Department of a company and I was hired to revamp their internal website for that department. And I was asked to develop it without access to the server. They said, yeah, make a bunch of files in a folder and when you’re done email those to the sysadmins and they’ll take care of the rest. And I was supposed to be building a site that would be easily updatable everyday. I ended up writing giant Word documents saying, okay, if you want to update this page you have to go to line 26 and change this tag to that tag; it was silly. But this is the sort of thing that’s going on behind the scenes at corporates all over the world, and now we are seeing it on a grand scale in the public eye with this petition in the British government. It doesn’t seem to be getting us any further, but at least there’s a sense of shared frustration rather than it being something that’s just going on between you and your boss. Craig suggests that if you’re a web developer and this sort of thing frustrates you, you should really be looking for work outside of the corporate juggernauts of the world. Do you think that’s true? Do you think one web developer can’t make a difference?

Stephan: I mean I think, from my personal experience, I think that there are large corporations who have been affected by developers who have said this is not the way we should do things and they’ve eventually made a change. But overall, yeah, I don’t think — well, and I think some places people live in a, they kind of live in a shell in some of these big corporations because they just do their job and they do their 9 to 5 and they go home.

Kevin: More and more the computers that are provided by these companies that are running these ancient software platforms just become that one-purpose tool to access the company’s internal application that relies on IE6, and then people do their personal web browsing on their smartphones, right?

Stephan: No firewall, no things like that to deal with on the corporate level.

Kevin: The times are changing.

Stephan: So then there’s something else new in town, it’s a new validator from the W3C, and it’s called Unicorn. You guys seen this?

Kevin: Yeah! Well, I ran one of the sites I work on through it, and it was –

Patrick: Fail.

Kevin: Yeah, it failed. (Laughs) It failed, and I made sure to pick the site that I thought would be least likely to fail, the one that I had gone out of my way to make sure was valid, this validator found a bug in the latest version of the content management system for that site; it was putting an invalid attribute in some of my image tags, and I was kind of crushed. The CSS was valid.

Stephan: What all does it check?

Kevin: It checks HTML, it checks CSS, it checks your RSS and Atom feeds, if your site has any, and it will also reportedly even check the mobile-friendliness of the site. So it runs a check called mobileOK. And, yeah, it does this all at once; you just provide it one URL and it checks the whole thing. Which is nice because I know when I used to do validation I would go to the HTML validator and if it was happy that was enough for me; I can’t say I’ve ever really validated my CSS code with any regularity. But I guess the fact that my site that I thought was valid failed indicates that I don’t validate my code much at all anymore.

Stephan: Do you validate yours Brad?

Brad: No, I don’t. (Laughter) I’ve yet to find a site that can pass this thing. I mean I’ve typed in like some very popular sites, some smaller sites, Google, Twitter, I mean they all fail, everything fails. I don’t think anyone validates anything anymore.

Kevin: It feels like validation was in its heyday five years ago when we were all trying to convince Microsoft that Internet Explorer 6 wasn’t good enough. And it was like we had to make sure that we had crossed our T’s and dotted our I’s before we could demand more of the browsers because otherwise the browsers would go, “Oh, that’s not working? It’s probably just because your code isn’t valid.” So we all made sure to validate our code so that we could prove conclusively that we were all coding to the same standard, and then we could go to the browser developers and say “Look! Look, you don’t have to support 20 ways of doing things, just please support these standards that we are all validating against, and if you just do that everything will be great.” And now they’re kind of doing that mostly; for the most part if you write valid code now you know what to expect. And so still, especially for beginner web developers, when something isn’t working for them I think directing them to a validator like this one is still a great first step because it’s likely to pick up coding mistakes that you’re going to make if you’re not too familiar with HTML and CSS. But maybe it’s not necessary anymore if you know what you’re doing to make sure your code is valid because if it’s invalid then more often than not it will be invalid as a conscious choice, maybe you’re using some new experimental CSS feature that’s only supported by a particular browser and that’s the kind of thing that a validator will baulk at but it is not a bad thing.

Brad: I mean even Google’s come out and basically said that there’s no priority given to sites that validate, I mean it’s not one of the 200 factors or whatever to figure out if a site’s relevant; validation is not one of them. So if Google doesn’t care why should we?

Kevin: (Laughs) I know developers have demanded that of Google. They’re like you know what we should get more because we put more TLC into our code. I think that may just be, you know, they’ve spent all this time validating and they go, oh, okay, I need the green check–

Patrick: I need some value here!

Kevin: Yeah, I got this checkmark, now what?

Patrick: I get the icon, right? I can copy and paste this code and hopefully it still validates.

Kevin: I’m seeing a fair few checkmarks on html5test.com at the moment which is this new site for validating your browser against HTML5 support. And it’s kind of like an Acid test but a little less fancy. So these Acid tests, there’s was Acid, Acid2 and Acid3, that tested cutting edge web technology support in browsers and the idea was you visited this site with a browser and you either saw the picture you were supposed to or you saw some corrupted version of it, and that’s how you could tell how well your browser passed that test. But this is a little more useful, I think, because it doesn’t just display an image, it actually displays a list of all the different features that its testing and whether your browser passed or not, and it does come down to a score which I think some people object to because maybe not all of these things are of equal value, but my Safari 5.0.1 browser is getting 208 and seven bonus points. How are you guys doing?

Brad: The best I could get was on Chrome 5, I got 197, yeah.

Kevin: 197!

Brad: Yeah.

Stephan: Yeah, on one Chrome too.

Brad: Yeah, Safari beat Chrome, that’s surprising.

Patrick: On the latest Firefox I got 139 and four bonus points, and then on Opera I got 129 and four, and IE8 got 27 with no bonus points. It’s a route!

Brad: That’s 27 more points than 6.

Kevin: In webmonkey.com’s test the leader was Chrome Developer Channel, so if switch Chrome over to the bleeding edge version so you’re getting their beta versions you get 217 plus 10 bonus points, that seems to be the best performer out there at the moment. And whether it’s fair to be using a beta browser or not is an open question. But just looking down the list some of the things my Safari browser doesn’t support are, well, most of the HTML5 parsing rules; it supports the DOCTYPE, but I thing everything supports the DOCTYPE out there, even Internet Explorer. Canvas is fully supported, that’s great, video is close, it doesn’t support subtitles, Ogg Theora or WebM, WebM being that new open video format from Google, so hopefully that will change soon if we can twist Apple’s arm, but Safari might be the last browser to support that. Audio, similarly it doesn’t support Ogg or WebM, hmm, local devices zero out of 20; you guys getting any love for local device support in your browsers?

Stephan: And what’s weird is I’m in Chrome and they didn’t, it doesn’t have WebM support.

Kevin: That is weird. Pick it up Google, pick it up! Microdata also not supported, WebGL, so 3D graphics not supported; this is no longer part of HTML5, these are related specifications, WebGL, file reading support not at all supported, but that’s about it. You know, it’s further along than I would’ve thought. You hear stories of HTML5 isn’t going to be finalized until 2018 because it requires at least two browsers to fully support it before they can do that, and you think oh, well, HTML5 it must be just one of two features that are supported, and we’re waiting for the rest, but to look at this table its not doing so badly.

Patrick: Well, if we think of this as a letter grade system, right, and let’s say the best one is Chrome with 227 in developer channel mode, what is that, that’s 75 percent, that’s a C. That’s a C. Barely a passing grade, no I’m just kidding.

Kevin: (Laughs) I take your point.

Brad: And the site does not pass the Unicorn validation test either.

Kevin: (Laughs)

Brad: There’s only one error so that’s probably the best I’ve seen so far.

Kevin: What’s the error?

Brad: Unrecognized Link element or XML style sheet, so it’s pretty minor.

Patrick: I found one site that would validate, it’s a site a friend of mine set up, it’s just a vanity site, isjaredsingle.com, and it does validate because it’s very, very simple.

Kevin: Does it say yes or no?

Patrick: Right now it says no because he’s not single (laughs).

Kevin: Well done, Jared, congratulations.

Patrick: That’s @jaredwsmith on Twitter.

So there’s a lot of paywall content going up online these days, content you have to pay to access. Well, The Times, the UK based publication, has been experimenting with their online readership recently, at least for the last three weeks, trying to convert them to a pay model; charging them a few pounds a week to access their online content, and they have some early returns here as reported by The Guardian, and they don’t look good or at least it depends on your perspective, but to most people they don’t look very good because the article is suggesting that according to the data that is out there they have lost about 90 percent of their online readership. There’s a couple numbers bounced around, somewhere between 84 percent and 93 percent. Experian Hitwise is saying that they have managed to convert 25.6 percent of users who they redirect to a special bounce page to sign up, and 25.6 percent are signing up, the rest are just leaving. So what do you make of this?

Kevin: Like you say, there’s a lot of percentage numbers here with decimal points after them that leads you to a sense of accuracy, but the claims that are being made about this story and what it means are — they’re pretty crazy. I’m hearing stories that The Times loses almost 90 percent of online readership, this is from The Guardian, so they may have a horse in this race, but nevertheless, putting all these numbers together and saying, oh, they’re losing 90 percent of this traffic, I’m not sure it’s justifiable because they’re measuring different things like the bounce rate on a particular page that’s asking for money and translating that into overall traffic numbers, which I think they’re making a slight leap here, but I think what we can all agree is that this is definitely having a significant, if not huge, impact on the traffic profile of sites that are trying it; sites that are trying to convert from free content to — and it’s not even very expensive, the paywall page asks someone who is trying to read The Times website to pay either one pound for immediate 24 hour access, so that’s on a bad day $2.50 U.S., probably closer to just $2.00 these days. Or you can pay that same one pound and gets 30 days of access and then it’s two pounds a week. So the most they’re ever going to charge you is about eight bucks a month for access to this site. And that is not an expensive site, especially if you are a regular reader of this content. You compare that to a print subscription for a newspaper, that’s not so bad.

Patrick: Am I the only one that thinks that 25.6 percent of users signing up and proceeding to a Times page is actually a pretty good number?

Kevin: That sounds pretty good to me.

Patrick: I mean I thought that was a pretty high number of people converting when you consider obviously the challenges here are serious with the amount of free content out there, and free news content, to even introduce this sort of model. We’ve seen it kind of, I guess I hate to use the word fail, but fail a lot, with a lot of different publications, and someone’s obviously trying it here, but that doesn’t seem like a bad number at all to me.

Kevin: The 90 percent number I really can’t fathom how The Guardian gets that. Other numbers I’ve seen tossed around is that they’ve lost two-thirds of their readership which seems to make more sense to me because according to those Hitwise stats they’ve dropped from 15 percent of UK browsing, or UK browsing of newspaper sites, down to 4.16 percent, so they’ve lost more than two-thirds of their traffic there. And so that seems to be the sensible number to me. But that’s not so bad if you’ve gone from giving away your content to 100 percent of the people to getting 33 percent of those people to pay for it that seems like a success story on the surface of it, but what you have to consider is that these sites are not just making money from people paying from their content, they’re making money from advertising, and losing two-thirds of your audience when your main revenue stream is advertising is disastrous. I know if SitePoint lost two-thirds of its viewership within the space of three weeks we’d have to go out of business.

Patrick: We’d have no more podcast.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely not.

Patrick: But I think it really depends on how you make your money, right, I think obviously they must not be happy with their ad revenue or at least they want to experiment or they’re not happy enough to just try an experiment. And there is a number that’s being thrown out there; The Guardian article cites a reported beehivecity.com, and they say, and I don’t know exactly where this data is coming from, but this is their analysis of the figures is that 15,000 people have agreed to pay money. Now they upgraded the story to say official sources say that the number is, in fact, is somewhat higher, but if you take that 15,000 number as The Guardian did and you multiply that by the two pounds a week, that’s 120,000 pounds a month or 1.4 million pounds a year. Now, if you cut your viewership by 66 percent I would think they could sell ads for that amount, but then again I’m not in their shoes.

Brad: You know not only are they losing their current readership, but they’re also probably not gaining many new readers because I mean they’re killing themselves in the search engines by what they’re doing. I mean if you look right now they’ve apparently lost their page rank, I’m assuming they had one, and they have a page rank zero right now which a site at this level should be much higher than that. They have just a few thousand links indexed in Google, but if you check the cache they’re all blank, so I would imagine those are going to drop out eventually. So they’re going to go down to having just their home page indexed in Google and essentially kill any kind of search traffic they were getting which would essentially turn into new readership.

Kevin: I didn’t even believe they did that, when I first read this story I thought surely they’re doing what the New York Times, for example, is trying which is that they let Google through the paywall and they ask everyone else to pay. And if you’re smart enough to reconfigure your browser so that it looks like the Google Spider well then good luck to you, you get to read everything for free. But, no, if that’s to be believed, if they’ve got blank pages in Google’s cache, man, they’re just basically taking themselves out of the search engine ranking game, and they’re saying we’re going to find our traffic some other way.

Patrick: And there’s a case to be made on both sides, but Techdirt published a story by imafish, I believe is the name, that’s the author on this article, but basically imafish goes kind of point, counterpoint, in a way, with a story written by someone over at the bigmoney.com, Marion Maneker, talking about why arguments used against pay walls are illogical. I guess his three main points that are cited here, the first point is that even with ad revenues, even if they are coming back, as we’ve heard ad revenues are coming up a little bit, they should still diversify and try charging anyway, try other revenue models. The second point is that charging for content has always been a part of the news outlets’ overall long-term strategy. And the third point in there is that any media strategy should have the idea of charging content as part of it. And, of course, there are rebukes for all three of those points here.

Kevin: They all kind of sound like the same thing. They should charge because they should charge.

Patrick: Right. So the idea of a paywall or pay for content its not all depending on this one case, I guess is what I’m trying to say here, where there’s a lot of cases out there where charging over content is working. It really depends on what you’re charging for, you know, the audience, and then what is out there competition-wise, and how much you’re charging. I mean I would cite an example like ESPN, if you ask the average person, at least in the U.S., who the leader is in free content online for sports, I bet a high percentage would say ESPN. But, ESPN has the ESPN Insider feature where they have a lot of content behind a paywall; they have a lot of content by some of their premium writers, writers that people are coming to the site to see, that is behind this paywall. And they’ve bundled it with their ESPN magazine subscription; they have besides that article access, they also get access to extra tools that people can use, fantasy sports tools, and so on, and then they get the ESPN magazine subscription, they can sign up for $39.95 a year or $59.95 for two years. And they get that Insider access; you can’t visit that content any other way besides having that subscriber access. And they also maintain their print advertising base by doing that because they can sell ads in the newspaper, they sell ads on the website, but they also have that premium content. So that’s a good example of a mix right there, paywall and non-paywall, working very well because ESPN could be seen as a leader in sort of both regards.

Kevin: So there’s a balance to be struck, and it sounds like The Times, as an experiment, they’ve tried one extreme give it all away online, they’re trying the other extreme, don’t give anything away online, and maybe there is a balance to be struck there. Maybe, as you say, the news should be free, the editorial, the stuff that’s written with personality by recognized names that people will seek out maybe that’s what you pay for, and you can pay for that online rather than in print if you want to. I guess I’ve always, I’ve had this certain amount of respect for outfits like The Times who are willing to take the risk and try something out because someone has to. We can’t just, the content producers of the world can’t just allow that expectation that everything that’s online is going to be free to sail through unchallenged, we need to try some alternatives and figure out what’s going to work best, what’s going to produce the best content for the most people, and it’s nice to see experiments like this being tried.

Patrick: I agree. I really agree because, and this is something that I’ve seen Techdirt do before with someone experimenting because, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Common Craft, but they introduced a model where there is a web license for displaying their videos on your website. They’re very high-quality produced videos. So it’s definitely an experiment, but they wrote an article that was just scathing about it, but if no one experiments we never really get better and we’re always stuck just doing what we’re doing now, so I definitely agree with you.

Kevin: Yeah, so The Times, you know, do it for another couple of weeks and then maybe reevaluate (laughs).

Patrick: Thanks for the experiment.

Kevin: Thanks for the experiment; I’m glad it’s not my money.

Patrick: I would compare even the SitePoint courses in a very small way because it wouldn’t be crazy for me to think that at one time SitePoint may have considered, or it may have even published, can’t read every article on the site, basic course material; I mean obviously popular articles have turned into books. I know your article about database driven website stuff did that a long time ago.

So SitePoint’s charging for this course material, charging for paid content on top of offering free content on the same things, and people are clamoring for it as well. So I think that’s the same kind of balance right there, you know, you, Kevin Yank, are the high-profile writer that people want to pay for.

Kevin: They need to master the up-sale, The Times, they need to get their free content out there, and at the end of every single one, “Want to read more? Check out our online video series by noted author such and such.”

Stephan: They need to do what the Wall Street Journal does which is just like what you said, they have free content and then they have articles that are — you get like a little blurb and then down at the bottom it says you can read the entire article by subscribing. And I guess it draws in people because the Wall Street Journal’s been doing it for a while now.

Kevin: Just to put a little button on this story before we go to our host spotlights, speaking of Techdirt, that’s a site that I read pretty much daily because I appreciate their enthusiasm for these things. But they posted an article that has dredged up a letter that was sent to noted pop artist Andy Warhol, who you might remember from his many paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, and Marilyn Monroe on Campbell’s Soup cans, and Campbell’s Soup cans on Marilyn Monroe, but the Campbell’s Soup Company on May 19th, 1964 sent this letter, this typewritten letter, to “Mr. A. Warhol” saying, “Dear Mr. Warhol, I have followed your career for some time. Your work has evoked a great deal of interest here at Campbell’s Soup Company for obvious reasons.” And if I was reading this letter today you’d go, alright, the legal threats are about to start, which lawyer’s firm is this from? But, no, it goes on to say “At one time I had hoped to be able to acquire one of your Campbell’s Soup label paintings, but I’m afraid you have gotten much too expensive for me. I did want to tell you, however, that we admired your work, and I have since learned that you like tomato soup. I am taking the liberty of having a couple of cans,” see, I couldn’t even read this without my mouth wanting to say “cease and desist.”

Patrick: Not just cans but cases, cases!

Kevin: Cases! — “cases of our tomato soup delivered to you at this address. We wish you continued success and good fortune. Cordially, William P. MacFarland, Product Marketing Manager.” There you go. That would never happen today.

Patrick: You know, I don’t know, I like to have a positive outlook on things, and I think there are some people out there who would do this. Now maybe they would be a lot less today, but I still think there are people out there who maybe would have this tone and see the value of it. I have hope for humanity.

Stephan: There is actually a really good book about this type of thing, it’s called The Death of Common Sense, it’s by a guy named Philip K. Howard, and he actually gave a TED Talk on this topic as well. But the book is really good; it talks about how law is suffocating America and things, and I’m not going to go into the politics side, but his basic premise is that as we’ve gone forward we’ve gotten lawsuits and people have to protect their trademarks and their copyrights and things, and to do so they have to enforce cease and desists on people.

Patrick: I’m a big fan of common sense enforcement of those things, and that’s probably what the book talks about because that’s in the title, but I use the example of fan groups and fan sites online, and the need to sort of defend the trademark when it comes to different presences and domain names and whatnot, and then having the presence of mind to do a kind of a risk and reward analysis of how valuable this is and what we’re doing. And instead of sending a cease and desist maybe just licensing it, you know, or making it okay rather than just threatening. That’s definitely the way to go these days with a lot of these cases where people just send out a boilerplate.

Kevin: That’s a great point, Patrick. I was reading a story yesterday similar in theme; it was the latest episode of Mad Men, the fourth season of which is hugely popular at the moment. But the latest episode had historical nuts up in arms because the character Don Draper, and I may be setting us up for a cease and desist of our own just by talking about this, but the character Don Draper in a scene was watching TV on a Sunday night, and the sound you could hear of the show he was watching was a football game, and the historical folks were up in arms because Sunday Night Football didn’t start until 1970-something and the story is set in 1964, I believe. And the producers of the show went, yeah, we wanted to have a hockey game on in that scene, but we couldn’t get the rights to use the sound of the hockey match, and so we had to use the football game instead. And some people say, yeah, that’s alright, that’s not actually going to affect the show, what sound was on in the background in any particular scene, but, yeah, where’s the common sense? I think this story was on Boing Boing where I read it, and they said what harm would it actually do to the company that owns the rights to that hockey game to have had their sound played in that scene? Nothing. And so if we could convince these companies instead of sending cease and desists, send free licenses. Say we were made aware that you were using our copyrighted material in this thing, here’s a license just so it’s on the up and up, so that the next time we want to fight a copyright infringement that is actually harmful to us we can say, look, we were aware of that thing, we defended it by licensing it for free.

Stephan: Yep. I’m actually surprised they were able to use the NFL sounds as the background of the game.

Kevin: Yeah. I guess the NFL has more liberal copyright policies on their archives.

Patrick: “Without the express written consent of the National Football League.”

Kevin: Alright, well, yeah, it feels like we’ve been on a mini host spotlight for the last ten minutes, but I enjoyed that. Let’s get around to our actual host spotlights, Brad, what have you got for the fine people today?

Brad: Yeah, I have a fun little website like I always like to have, and it is actually called whatthefudgeismysocialmediastrategy, only I didn’t say “fudge.”

Brad: No.

Patrick: So you’re actually spelling the wrong domain name. You’re sending people to a dead link.

Brad: Yes. So, register that and you’ll make millions. (Laughter). But the site’s really funny, it’s clever; it’s basically like three pages big and this guy put this site together and essentially what it does is it mixes words, there’s a column of verbs and a column of nouns, and it takes one word from each to form sentences that make simple things sound more complicated than they are. And voila, you have a fancy sounding strategy that you can put in your presentations. As an example, the first one to load up for me was “Maximize buzz by driving word of mouth from relevant influencers,” which if you read these they ultimately make no sense but they sound very intelligent.

Kevin: (Laughs) I got “Drive breakthrough conversations with an engaging viral.”

Patrick: “Harness social currency to drive buzz.”

Brad: Yeah, you can keep refreshing to get more and more, but it’s pretty clever and I think anyone that has anything to do with social media or social marketing or I guess the Internet in general, has probably come across some of these terms and phrases that really make no sense at all, so you can go to the site and get a quick social media strategy for your next presentation.

Kevin: Nice. My spotlight is Canto.js, and I’ve been waiting for this to come out since I saw Dmitry Baranovskiy who’s the author of the Raphaël Library for doing cross browser vector graphics with SVG. But he did a conference presentation about the <canvas> tag, and this was at The Edge of the Web Conference last year in Perth. And it’s a shame that that session was not podcast because it was hilarious. People know Dmitry as an expert in web graphics, and so they said, oh, we’d love to hear him give a tutorial about the Canvas tag and tell us about all its hidden features that we don’t know about. And instead he got up and gave a presentation called “Why Canvas Sucks”. And his core point here was that we as web developers have been so starved for meaningful graphic support in browsers that we will lap up anything they give us, and the actual JavaScript API, the programming interface that you have to write code for in order to use Canvas is abusive to web developers, it’s like designed to be the most painful thing that keeps you writing boilerplate code over and over again, and it is completely developer unfriendly, and yet we love the thing because we’ve wanted to do web graphics for two decades now, and so we’ll take anything we can get. So he was saying, he was making a call to action that developers shouldn’t take this lying down, that we need to demand more from the browser makers than just something that works; we need something that makes our jobs easier. And Canto.js is it; this is a JavaScript library that makes Canvas usable from a programming perspective. It sits on top of the ugly Canvas APIs in the browser and gives you a pleasant one. And if you’ve ever switched from writing plain JavaScript to writing something like jQuery code where developers have filled in all the rough spots of the JavaScript language with pleasant-to-use features that make your job easier, this is like jQuery for the Canvas tag. It is really, really slick, you can chain function calls together, you can tell it to draw a whole bunch of things and then set the properties of those things all at once, it is really, really nice in a way that the Canvas tag API is really, really not. So check it out if you’re thinking of doing graphics with the <canvas> tag, it’ll save you some hair pulling.

Patrick what have you got?

Patrick: Well, my spotlight, which I chose a long, long time ago, many days ago, no, I’m kidding, but is a post by Brandon Ely who is SitePoint book co-author and SitePoint Tribune co-writer. He wrote a post on his personal blog titled, Why the 3/50 Project Can’t Save Small Businesses, and this was the first I heard of this. But apparently there’s a project called 3/50, that’s 3/50, aimed at helping local businesses, your local economy. The 3 comes from think about three independently owned stores you’d miss if they were gone, stop in, say hello, buy something, etcetera. The 50 is just if half of the employed population spent $50.00 a month in independently owned stores those purchases would generate over forty-two billion dollars. And then that’s the 3 and the 50, and they have some more numbers from there on, but his post kind of goes over why there are other factors involved in this, how it’s not just good to go to any local business and throw money at them when they don’t offer good service or they don’t try to price their products competitively, and why it’s more complicated than just saying go to the local store because then the money stays here. Obviously companies these days, large companies, have many presences in many areas and the money flows all around. So, anyway, longwinded but it’s a nice post and I thought it was pretty insightful.

Kevin: I like to think that the local businesses worth saving are going to be supported because they’re good businesses, so I kind of agree with him. Stephan?

Stephan: Well, during the last show I was out of the country and I had to get some stuff done with some people and I needed to figure out time zones and stuff, but I was just on my iPhone, it was all I had, and it was much more difficult than it actually seems because you think you can just go into the clock and figure out what time it is in a different place and stuff. But trying to send an email and tell people here’s when we’re going to meet, or whatever, is much harder. And then I get home and I go on to sitepoint.com and there’s a post by, it’s in a dark dungeon part of the forum, by Black Max who’s an advisor, about a service called Permatime. And it’s just a simple website that — it’s permatime.com, and you set your location and you give it a time and it creates a link and it will — you send it out to whoever you want to send it out to and it conforms to their time zone.

Kevin: Oh, so it’s like a permalink, that’s why it’s called Permatime.

Stephan: It’s like a permanent link to a time, and so it’s actually really useful and I could’ve actually really used it while I was overseas and I wish I had known about it, but it’s a neat little service if you have to do stuff across the globe.

Kevin: Are you able to tell what time the time you’ve picked is in another time zone using this?

Kevin: It looks like you can set your location after the fact, so you can pick a time in your own and then change your location, so that would probably work.

Stephan: Yeah, and then I just send you the link and if it’s — yeah, you can move it around and then add another location, and yeah you can see what time it was then.

Kevin: Beautiful. Aw, I dig it. I dig it. This is something you will need if ever you have a podcast of your own listeners. (Laughs) Because it’s always changing and, yeah, especially if you’re dealing with people in the northern and southern hemisphere, the differences between time zones change at different times of the year. So, thank you Permatime, and thank you Stephan.

That’s it for this episode. Our hosts this week, guys, I understand you’ve got some things coming up, so maybe as we go around the table talk about where you’ll be in the next couple months. Patrick?

Patrick: Sure, thanks. Well, I will be at a couple different locations, briefly, September 9th-11th I’m in Atlanta for Modern Media Man Summit, October 1st-2nd in Greensboro North Carolina for Converge South, October 14th-16th in Las Vegas for BlogWorld and New Media Expo, and November 13th in Raleigh for Indieconf; presenting at all those locations, speaking, so if you’re in any of those areas please stop by and say hello. I’m on Twitter @iFroggy, and I run the iFroggy Network, iFroggy.com.

Brad: I’ll actually be at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic on 9/11, and I’m also going to BlogWorld Expo so we’ll all be there to hang out so you can track me and Patrick down.

Patrick: Stephan will be there as well.

Brad: Oh, all three of us, so track us down. And then I’m helping co-organize WordCamp Philly which is October 30th on the day before Halloween so that should be fun, and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Stephan: And this weekend is WordCamp Houston, so if you’re in Houston and you want to say hello I will be there. I’m Stephan Segraves and my blog is badice.com.

Kevin: And I’ll be at Web Directions South again this year in Sydney, so if you are an Australian listener be sure and stop by and say hello. You can follow me on Twitter @sentience, and follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. Visit us at the SitePoint Podcast website which is sitepoint.com/podcast or you can just go to sitepoint.com and click the fresh new Podcast tab, we have one at last. Leave comments on the show and be sure to subscribe so you get every show automatically.

The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye.

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.

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Episode 72 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), and Brad Williams (@williamsba) interview Gregory Ng, the Frozen Food Master at Freezer Burns, a popular web video show focused on frozen food reviews that can be found at freezerburns.com, and Wayne Sutton, the Business Development and Marketing Strategist at TriOut, a geolocation based startup that’s focused on the Triangle area of North Carolina.

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• SitePoint Podcast #72: Web Video and Social Media with Gregory Ng and Wayne Sutton (MP3, 30:25, 27.9MB)

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Interview Transcript

Brad: July 30th, 2010. It’s all about web video and social media as we play host to a couple of experienced and respected practitioners. This is the SitePoint Podcast #72, Web Video and Social Media with Gregory Ng and Wayne Sutton.

Hello and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Patrick O’Keefe and we’re glad to have you today as we share more interviews from our live show at Word Camp Raleigh. Today, joined by Brad Williams and Stephan Segraves, we’ll be discussing social media and web video with Gregory Ng and Wayne Sutton. Gregory Ng is the VP, Creative Director at Brooks Bell Interactive and the Frozen Food Master at Freezer Burns, a popular web video show focused on frozen food reviews that can be found at freezerburns.com. Wayne Sutton is the Business Development and Marketing Strategist at TriOut, a geolocation based startup that’s focused on the Triangle area of North Carolina. He’s also a partner at Our Hashtag.

Our next guest is Gregory Ng, Frozen Food Master.

Stephan: Where’s the Frozen Food Master? (Applause)

Patrick: Thanks for joining us.

Greg: Thanks for having me.

Stephan: How are you doing Gregory?

Greg: Good.

Stephan: Gregory is the VP and Creative Director of Brooks Bell Interactive and the Frozen Food Master at Freezer Burn.

Greg: Self-proclaimed. (laughter)

Stephan: Which leads right into the first question.

Patrick: If we had to vote on Frozen Food Master I guarantee you would be named by this room Frozen Food Master.

Stephan: You’d get my vote. Where did you come up with the idea to blog about frozen food? What struck you to do that?

Greg: So, I’m kind of a self-proclaimed disciple of Gary Vaynerchuk and loved what he did with his wine shows—everyone familiar with his wine show, Wine Library TV?—and I wanted to get involved with video and I wanted something that wasn’t just about— I mean a lot of people talk about passion, but I wanted to also talk about monetizing that passion. And so I wanted something that I could own, a niche that I could own, something that’s backed by big business, and I kind of arrived at the frozen food category because as you know it’s backed by huge business.

Stephan: Yeah. Con Agra one of them.

Greg: Con Agra is one of them, yes.

Stephan: So you mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk, who are some other video blogging inspirations that you have or other people that you watch that you like?

Greg: Rocketboom; I watch Rocketboom religiously, Ze Frank, when he did The Show, which is like the ultimate in dedication; a show a day for a year is amazing. I watch Zadi at Epic Fu, those are obviously the biggies.

Stephan: The big ones, yeah.

Greg: But, you know, I like obscure shows as well, Old Jews Telling Jokes, do you know that?

Stephan: (Laughing) I haven’t heard of it, no.

Brad: Sounds interesting.

Patrick: Sounds interesting already! Should we cancel the show and pull that up?

Greg: It’s a great show. There’s a show called Project Rant which is amazing, and so I try to consume a lot of video.

Stephan: Cool.

Patrick: So, I was at your talk earlier, most of it. I’m sorry I came in and walked out; I felt like an idiot when I did that the first time. But I listened to how you spoke about competition and how you chose something that you felt was open and that you could just, to use Gary’s language, to crush; any competition you wanted to scare them away, you didn’t want anybody to feel like they could enter this space and play with you.

Greg: Right.

Patrick: So, I guess the question is what if you are passionate about something and there’s already a show about that? Do you discourage someone from going into that or how do you look at that?

Greg: I mean I think it takes a lot of dedication to do a video show, a lot, I mean any type of show, right, you guys know that. And it really depends on what you’re in for; are you doing it because you need a creative outlet, that’s great, that’s fine. If you’re doing it to monetize that’s also good, but it really depends on what your end goal is. And Gary has said this in a lot of his talks, you know, you don’t want to do a wine show, right, because he owns that. But, you can start slicing and dicing that into super-niches within wine; I’m waiting for someone to come and do a frozen pizza show, for example. Do I review frozen pizzas? Absolutely, but I review everything; someone could totally own frozen pizzas and have their own show, but it really depends. I used to review Apple products, they’re a dime a dozen, right, you need some sort of hook, some sort of catch.

Patrick: Do you think that personality creates niche? So, for example, Gary Vaynerchuk’s personality is very particular. Now, if you come in, if you were doing a wine show, and you were the opposite of his personality, let’s say, I mean is that in a way creating its own niche? Because as much — I love Gary, but he’s probably not for everyone, right?

Greg: Yep.

Patrick: And no one is for everyone. Like this podcast isn’t for everyone, your show’s not for everyone; people just gravitate toward other personalities; would you consider that a niche in itself?

Greg: Absolutely. You know I have kind of a wry, really an acquired taste for my humor, and some people really dig it and some people really don’t. And my wife unfortunately doesn’t.

Patrick: YouTube commenters don’t, right?

Greg: YouTube commenters do not. But, you know, it depends. People sometimes get really, really into Gary because of his energy, great, but if you don’t drink wine, like myself, you’re only going to watch so many shows, right? So it really depends what you’re interested in.

Patrick: And just to give an example of a niche show, I don’t know if they’re still doing it because I think Kipp moved, but Jeff Cohen and Kipp Bodner used to do North Carolina Wine Show, right?

Greg: They’re still doing it, yeah.

Patrick: They’re still doing it, okay. That’s an example of a niche show.

Stephan: I guess this is the question that you probably get the most is: what’s the best frozen food you’ve ever eaten?

Greg: I get that all the time.

Patrick: Let’s list the top 11, go ahead.

Greg: Great. It really depends on what type of stuff you want; those of you who are local, anyone here local from North Carolina?

Patrick: What’s your palette like?

Greg: Um, my palette is scarred. (Laughter) Physically scarred. Bella Monica is a great Italian place here in Raleigh, off of Edwards Mill Road. A lot of people don’t know they have their own frozen flatbread pizzas that you can get at Whole Foods specifically, they’re gluten free and they’re amazing. And they’re actually the ones that you order off the gluten free menu that you can — they actually serve those and they are really, really amazing. And that’s kind of the one I use as a perfect example. Small, local company starting to build locally then regionally then nationally. Good products.

Stephan: On the flip side what’s the worst most terrible thing you’ve ever eaten?

Greg: If I’m talking overall brand, we were talking about this over lunch, I really cannot stand Banquet Foods. I— What’s that?

Audience Member: (inaudible)

Greg: Right, that’s right, you’re a fan of the show I can see. I did review frozen dog food once. (laughter)

Stephan: Now wait; we gotta go deeper into this because this is interesting.

Greg: Called Frosty Paws (laughter) and Cool Claws, which is the cat version, FYI.

Stephan: Was it a dog tasting this or was it –?

Greg: No, it was me; it was me tasting it (laughter). That was the worst, but probably the worst from human consumption overall –

Patrick: (Laughter) Human consumption, how many different consumptions are there? Is there like cow consumption and dog, cat?

Greg: It is — I don’t know, there’s a lot; if you go on my site and you search by half-star ratings you’ll find there’s quite a bit. I don’t want to necessarily call out.

Patrick: So, you mentioned in your talk your kind of ultimate goal is getting on TV.

Greg: Right.

Patrick: And I’ve heard you say that before. It’s great to have goals, but has anything ever — Do you see that coming, I guess? Have you had anybody comment to you with any bites? Have you started pitching people? Are you going about it, do you have representation, you know, how are you going about attacking that goal?

Greg: Well, you know the first thing is I don’t know if anyone’s ever read Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, it’s a great entrepreneur business marketing book. And they also talk about something called your BHAG, which is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and mine is to be on TV. So everything that I do, every show, every decision, is pointing towards that, and that is to get a show on television. Not necessarily frozen foods, although if it comes around great. And that’s one of the benefits of owning a niche is I’m owning a niche because no one else is doing it, which is great, because no one wants to compete against me right now, which is great, but also because it gives me the best chance of success to stand out in the marketplace. Because it’s now not about hey did you see that guy reviewing food or cooking food or doing a recipe show, which I could rattle off 30 of them right now, it’s hey did you see that guy who does frozen food, there’s really only one person right now. So it’s more of an exposure thing. I’ve gotten some bites, I don’t have representation yet, some people have approached me for potentially doing pilots and what I need to stress is this isn’t my day job. So it’s really gonna be a tough decision; when it’s right, it’s right, but as long as I’m moving towards my BHAG that’s kind of my overall goal.

Patrick: When Brandon Ely was up here, I think you’re in similar positions really because you work at an agency, he works at an agency, he’s creative director, so are you. He speaks at events, so do you, and obviously he has an ecommerce business, you do this show, he has kids, you have kids, so he said “don’t sleep,” and from your talk you said you were up till 2:00 a.m. So is that the motto, don’t sleep?

Greg: Well, you know, I mean it’s a matter of priority, right? I sleep about four hours a night, it’s good and bad, when I get sick I get sick for ten days, when I don’t get sick it’s five hour energy drinks and –

Stephan: Getting yourself sick! (Laughs)

Greg: And trying to stay healthy, right? So it’s about priorities. Yes, when I, at eight o’clock when I put my kids to bed, I then start working on my show until about 2:00 a.m. I carve out time every week to go out with my wife. I carve out time every weekend; I build around my schedule to hang out with my kids in the morning and stuff like that, so it is very regimented, vacations screw — can I say screw?

Patrick: Yes, you can say screw.

Greg: Vacations screw me because it throws my process off incredibly, I gotta double-time, you know.

Stephan: Cool. For potential video bloggers out there, bloggers in general, what’s a tip that you would give as encouragement to keep going?

Greg: So I actually covered this as my final statement in my presentation this morning is patience. It’s don’t let negative comments or no traffic deter you from keeping on, staying on focus and continually putting out content. It took me about 250 episodes to feel like I was gaining popularity. For the first 60 episodes I would get one comment maybe, right, and it’s tough sometimes to keep on doing it and saying, okay, when’s the traffic coming? So, that’s what I would say, patience.

Stephan: Cool. So where can people find you online?

Greg: So personally @gregoryng, that’s NG, or @freezerburns, that’s plural, and at freezerburns.com or my lifestream site which is followgreg.com.

Stephan: Very cool. Thank you very much for coming on.

Patrick: Thanks Greg.

Greg: Thanks.

(applause)

Patrick: Well, our next guest is Mr. North Carolina, Wayne Sutton, and Wayne is the Business Development and Marketing Strategist at TriOut as well as partner at Our Hashtag. He says he’s a geek so that’s the simple title. Wayne, how’s it going?

Wayne: It’s going good.

Patrick: Thanks for joining us. Glad to see you here.

Wayne: Thanks for having me.

Patrick: So tell us about TriOut.

Wayne: Well, okay.

Patrick: How many people know what TriOut is? Okay, how many people are on TriOut, are you all on TriOut as well? Okay.

Wayne: How many people found out about TriOut this morning in the session? Ah-ha!

Stephan: That’s why you’re here.

Wayne: Well, TriOut is a location-based community startup here in the Triangle area founded by Lawrence Ingraham who joined me in the session this morning. He came up with the idea back when FourSquare was exclusive to only like Austin, New York, San Francisco and everybody was like well we want it here, and one of my friends Dennis (inaudible) who’s like slowly rolling it out to various cities, and Lawrence was like well we have the community here, which I think Forbes has proved it that the Triangle area is the most wireless city in the county. And so we have the community here, we have the ecologists here; we have the people here so we can launch our own FourSquare similar app in the Triangle. And it started out with an iPhone app and we launched a social network, trioutnc.com, and so we’re a mix of Yelp where we have reviews, BrightKite where you can load photos and also FourSquare with the checkins and the leaderboard, and where they have mayors, we have keyholders. And also I like to call our website CitySearch 2.0 to where you can find local businesses, there is user generated content submitted by the community in the Triangle.

Patrick: Excellent. Someone, oh, I know who it was. Oh, Steve Knight, are you in the room? In the back, he checked in to TriOut for here and there wasn’t a photo, and you took one, right Steve? Or not. You took a photo or did you let me down? You didn’t. Thanks Steve. (laughter)

Wayne: Did you check it? Because of course with all these location based startups there’s two things that happen, one or two things that happen, is that you have to worry duplicate locations. And like we don’t necessarily create — we create an event in the app, but the event is always tied to a real location. So what happened is that there is the Raleigh Sheraton that’s in TriOut, and then somebody created it WordCamp Raleigh. So somebody could’ve, he could’ve, checked into WordCamp Raleigh and saw there was not a photo and uploaded there or he could’ve checked into Raleigh Sheraton. And so that is one of the problems with a lot of location based social networks popping up is we’re gonna keep the database valid and try and keep the community honest.

Patrick: So you recently left the agency space, right Wayne?

Wayne: Yes.

Patrick: And you know we’ve had some Agency people up here who do other things too.

Wayne: Yes.

Patrick: And I guess what I wanted to ask you was that you know there are a lot of people in the social media space who work for agencies or who look to do so or who want to do so. It seems like a certain number of Twitter followers maybe you could work at an agency.

Wayne: (laughs) That’s funny.

Patrick: But I guess what’s your take on that whole sort of — the idea of working for an agency and whether or not it’s something that you yourself would want to return to in the future.

Wayne: Well, repeat the first part of the question.

Patrick: So, social media people and entrepreneurs going to agencies, like yourself, and how you feel about that, your own personal perspective and whether or not that’s something you’re going to look to go forward and back to in the future.

Wayne: Okay, the agency space is very competitive right now because of the whole economy, agencies have to prove their value. I call myself a geek because of Twitter and so forth and social media, a lot of people put me in the market, but I will constantly tell people that I’m a marketing guy, I’m a geek, I’m a former network administrator, a blogger-type guy, little gadgets and technology, but entered the marketing space because, like I say, social media. So, in the social media space a lot of agencies, people say their agencies had to catch up to be — to the whole roulette way of marketing and PR. And as far as the — I’m more of an entrepreneur as well. So joining the agency space was interesting because it kind of felt like the agency that I joined last had a startup vibe to it, and I said wow we can really take this and do something big with it. But I feel like I was doing TriOut on the side and fell in love with it and continued to fall in love with its potential and said pursue my passion, which the previous three or four speakers came up here and talked about; about how pursuing a passion is important, so that’s what I decided to do. I think anyone looking at joining an agency now should look at what clients they have, maybe sign on and do a contract first before just going full time, possibly working part time with the agency. And also look at — make sure there’s no work for you not to do for one single project but to continue on six months, a year down the road. Would I join agency again? My goal was always to have my own business, you know, from the time in I was in high school to now I owned my own business and I worked with a couple startups that some failed, some are working out, but I believe in TriOut, I believe what were doing at OurHashtag, what we use online, and then marketing to promote events and we have some concepts we’re gonna start doing as well, so I believe those two are in my future.

Brad: So we’re in North Carolina for WordCamp Raleigh, obviously, this past October was the Social Media Business Forum that you had a part in helping out with or organizing. Are there plans to do that again this year in 2010?

Wayne: Yes, yes, Social Media Business Forum was a social media conference that myself, Jeff Cohen, Rian Bowden, Kipp Bodner organized. We had Patrick spoke there and a couple others, Greg Ng spoke there, and we had a good turnout, it was the first one. I have been blessed with the opportunity to travel and speak at various conferences throughout the year, past couple years, and meet all these different people across the United States. And with the conference I wanted to bring some of the people, some of the knowledge, some of the conversations I’ve had across America to the Raleigh-Durham area, and so that’s why we planned the Social Media Business Forum and we’re looking to have another one in September. The date is not one hundred percent set, but it’s late September 2010.

Brad: Awesome.

Stephan: Cool.

Patrick: It’s a great event.

Stephan: Beyond you being here, why is North Carolina such a great place to be in the social media area and tech and stuff?

Wayne: Well, (laughter) it’s not me, it’s the people. The community here is what is a great place. I would be nothing, you wouldn’t know about Wayne if it wasn’t for the people in this community. I mean I went out to a lot of networking events, met awesome people, networked, and when we just came together and got to know one another. And I made it a goal of mine a couple years ago to say let the world know about how great the Triangle area is. And that became my under, you know, kind of my underbelly passion so to speak. And it bothers me when I read stuff from TechCrunch, Mashable, CNN, New York Times, and I know they work with startups, I know they’re friends with startups in their own backyard, and we got great people, we have great startups; we have everything here in the Triangle that the Valley has, that New York has, that Austin has, that Boulder Colorado has. We may not have the VC, the YCombinator, funding, incubators, but we have that now, we didn’t have it in the past, but we have launched (inaudible) Digital, no affiliation, but we have, with TriOut, we have a location based startup. There’s a site called (inaudible), no affiliation with none of these other companies, but they’re like our own Groupon, you know, we have developers, a great development team, we’ve got a lot of designers here. And I just feel like this community is awesome and we don’t get enough respect in the tech space as we deserve. Yeah, we have this SitePoint podcast and all.

(laughter)

Patrick: The first ever live SitePoint podcast. Does anyone have any questions for Wayne? Questions about TriOut? Entrepreneurial ship, anything?

Stephan: Got a couple over here.

Audience Member: TriOut is just the iPhone app at this point (inaudible)

Wayne: Yes, right now we launched with the founder Lawrence Ingraham, he’s an iPhone developer by trade, so of course we launched with that platform. We have a mobile version that works on any smartphone, any web-enabled app phone, m.trioutnc.com, which I’ll allow you once you set your password on trioutnc.com you can check in, log in and check in. We’re working on HTML5 mobile version next, after that we’re looking into Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Droid versions as well.

Audience Member: (inaudible)

Wayne: Wow, I’m probably not the best person to talk about privacy.

Patrick: To repeat the question, just talk about privacy, Wayne Go!

Wayne: Um, yeah –

Patrick: Wayne doesn’t have privacy, everything’s online.

Wayne: That is kind of true, almost everything online. But you should be concerned about privacy depending on what type of content you’re posting, what type of career path, that’s kind of been my philosophy. Don’t post anything online you wouldn’t want your mother to see or a potential job opportunity come up for them to hire you, or be questionable or something that would be controversial that could land you on the front page of Digg and so forth, and you’ll be that poster guy for something that you thought was fun or somebody sent you an email or a comment about. So, with the whole Facebook situation privacy is huge, but you got to think about it, it’s something that we don’t talk about that much but how many people have a Gmail account? Almost everybody in this room, right? Yeah, alright, do I see anybody deleting their Gmail account? Anybody thought about it? But Google has access to all your information based on your login; in Google using a Gmail account access to history, your searches, also what type of content, you know they scan your email and so wherever you login has that data. So is Google an open or closed network like Facebook? Think about it. But, all the fuss right now is talking about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg because that’s where the main tech blogs and everybody is talking about. Of course Facebook is a closed data network, they don’t let people access the data to get it out but they have all your data. But, they let their advertisers access that data to get information to advertise to you inside of Facebook. So the privacy concerns you got to think about it, it’s on the Web, don’t post content that could get you in trouble. People got to make money, we’re in the Web business, web businesses revolve around making money; advertisers got to make money by eyeballs, got to make money by clicks. Facebook is not gonna sell your data to somebody that’s gonna take advantage of it, they’re gonna work with partners to get eyeballs to make money. It’s all about privacy, it’s all about users, it’s all about eyeballs and clicks. So, the Web is run on dollars, dollars run on eyeballs around users, you know, create a profile, be smart about it, delete your cache, your cookie, don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see.

Patrick: And I can testify to that because even though I know Wayne is out there, like really out there, everywhere talking about a lot of things he’s doing, there is, and I’ve witnessed it, I can attest to it, the restraint, the seriousness, the responsibility that you have for what you put online, and how maybe there’s something that someone said that wasn’t that great, but you’ve let it pass because Wayne is a nice guy. That’s all. Wayne’s really a nice guy.

Wayne: Thanks Patrick. Patrick’s also nice. We’re having — this is bromance up here guys; this is bromance (laughter). But I don’t get to see Patrick that often but we communicate online on back channels, but thanks Patrick, and you and your team, Brandon, and the whole SitePoint podcast, are great guys as well. But, you know, we have to take actions for what we do online, and being out there in the public, being — I didn’t say this earlier in the brand session but I wish I had, but everybody has a brand, whether you realize it or not. No matter, it’s not about the Twitter followers; if you have five or if you have 3,000, 30,000, somebody’s listening, you have a brand. Anybody remember the story about a lady who posted something on her — she Tweeted about a place she moved out of and the rent and so forth, and they ended up suing her and so forth? The lady had 200 followers. Some people said oh she only had 200 followers; and they came to sue her, and it became this huge social media case about whether or not you should post or complain on Twitter. I mean she had 200 followers, does that make her less of a person or less of a voice or less as an individual; did her matter increase or decrease because she only had 200 followers? No. She’s an individual that had a voice, a brand, had a message. So, everybody has a brand, everybody watch what they say and do as a brand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be yourself, just be smart about posting content. And if somebody attacks you negatively or positively deal with it the appropriate way. There are some times when you’ve got to ignore stuff. Somebody told me a long time ago two things: they said that people get to you sometimes, they just want to see you struggle, people get jealous, sometimes people just want to get under your skin. Don’t ever let them see they get to you because then they know they got you. And then somebody told me also dealing with the Internet you’ve got to have thick skin. Somebody could say, well, I don’t like the way Wayne talks, they might say — I monitor what people say about myself online, I’m always conscious about trying to do the best job. Am I expert? No. Am I a lucky guy? Yes. Do I try to hustle? It’s funny listening to a lot of people talking about how late they stay up at night, and you know what I call that, that’s vampire moves; you stay up late at night to get stuff done. And so you know you always got to be careful of what you say and just be prepared for criticism, but it’s how you handle that criticism is kind of what people leave with in their mindset and their heads of how they feel about you and your perception.

Patrick: And just the idea of having just 200 followers; I had a friend of mine who he commented about his job on his Facebook page, and public profile, private profile, it doesn’t really matter because his was private and he mentioned something. It was fairly harmless, workday complaints, nothing about a particular person, but it was a stressful issue for him because one of his co-workers saw it. And he has a private profile but he has 200 friends, or however many friends he has, even if it’s 10 friends, your privacy in that case is only as strong as the network of people that you allow access to your page and that you add as a friend because every friend that you add is a potential, has the potential to then share that information with someone else.

Wayne: True. And also just something that happened last week in Charlotte was a lady, she went on Facebook, and she works at a bar or a restaurant, and some people left her a tip and she wasn’t happy about it, went on Facebook and called them a couple of profanitary languages and words and she got fired. They had a policy though; they had a social media policy about what you can and cannot say online. How many of your companies have a social media policy? How many people have read it? (laughs) Alright. Because regardless of it they do or don’t, you know, ask them can I have that conversation? A lot of times we don’t want to talk about it, but in today’s world I mean bloggers are sitting out there waiting for somebody to mess up, somebody to do something so they can go and blog about it and get traffic for it and make you the news story out of it and then your company may not have had a policy but it created such a bad vibe or misrepresentation for them, then they may lay you off for that. I mean it could just set you back. So, think about your company’s social media policy, maybe work with your company developing a social media policy, and get one in place. Because being online in today’s times everything is critiqued, everything is judged, everybody has an opinion, and my little personal rant is let’s try not to complain so much on social media sites and use them as far as just really helping one another out. And a lot of people are using social media for good causes now, so let’s see what we can do for that as well … Patrick!

Patrick: So, Wayne, where can we find you online? And do you want to host, I mean do you want to host? (Laughter)

Stephan: He can host the show, yeah.

Patrick: He’s our fourth host, Wayne Sutton, sorry Kevin in Australia, we have a new host; no. (Laughter)

Wayne: You know I love you guys, I’m just messing with you.

Patrick: No, no, no. So where can we find you online Wayne?

Wayne: You can find me on my blog socialwayne.com and Twitter and every other social network as Wayne Sutton.

Patrick: Great, Wayne, thanks.

Wayne: Thank you for having me.

Stephan: Thanks Wayne.

(applause)

Patrick: Well, it was great to have them on. And now let’s go around the table and close out this episode of the SitePoint Podcast.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and my blog is badice.com.

Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, iFroggy.com, I’m on Twitter @iFroggy. You can follow our usual co-host, Kevin Yank, @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. You can also visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions for us, we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was 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.

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• SitePoint Podcast #71: The Revolving Internet (MP3, 47.7MB, 52:01)

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

1. WordPress vs Thesis: The GPL and WordPress Themes
2. Google Monitoring Mouse Movements?
3. The New York Times Calls for Government Oversight Over Google Search
4. Reddit Questions Analytics Used by Advertisers
5. MSNBC Redesign Sacrifices Pageviews For Usability

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/71.

Host Spotlights

• Brad: The Revolving Internet
• Kevin: humans.txt
• Patrick: Crush the Castle 2

Show Transcript

Kevin: July 23rd, 2010. A war of words in the world of WordPress, Google might monitor your mouse, and the search for sensible traffic stats. This is the SitePoint Podcast #71: The Revolving Internet.

And welcome to the SitePoint podcast! A strangely non-technical show this week. I’m usually the one who contributes all the code-y technical subjects, guys, and then I look at them and I go there’s no way we can cover that in a podcast; no one wants to hear me read out code on a podcast. But there’s none of that this week, it’s all this search stuff, there’s analytic stuff, and Brad, there’s a legal issue.

Brad: There’s a storm a brewin’ in the WordPress world as they say, and it’s actually between the WordPress platform and a very popular WordPress theme called Thesis. And basically what it boils down to is WordPress itself is released under the GPL license, version 2 specifically, which essentially states anything that is a derivative work of WordPress also has to be released under GPL, that’s essentially how the GPL license functions. The problem is that Thesis is not licensed under the GPL; it’s actually under a different software license, a proprietary license, so WordPress and more specifically Matt Mullenweg who’s one of the founders of WordPress, one of the original developers, has actually gone on the attack against Chris Pearson who is the developer of Thesis, essentially trying to get him to switch his license over to be GPL compliant.

Kevin: And he’s having none of it.

Brad: Absolutely none of it. And this all started basically with a battle back and forth on Twitter as they normally do these days.

Kevin: This issue of selling themes, it’s something I’ve heard come up now and then. So this isn’t a new issue, it’s been a few years this has been debated, right?

Brad: Yeah, and just to be clear, and this is just reading a lot of the blog posts, and there’s a lot of them about this topic, this isn’t specifically about selling themes or making money from themes or making money off WordPress at all, it’s all about the license. So you can certainly have a GPL compliant theme or plug-in and sell it and be completely within your right under the GPL.

Kevin: You can?

Brad: Yeah, absolutely. The only thing that it states is if you do sell it you have to provide the source code, the original source code, with that like.

Kevin: Ah.

Brad: So then if I were to purchase your theme I could turn around and modify it however I want without worry about breaking any kind of software license, and I could redistribute it if I want. So it’s definitely a tricky topic because there hasn’t been a lot of court cases around the GPL, there’s been a few but no kind of definitive this is the answer. So what it really boils down to is a theme in WordPress, or any other platform, is that considered a derivative work of the WordPress platform itself? And that’s really what the argument is.

Kevin: The two perspectives as I read it is that on Matt Mullenweg’s side he considers a theme to be a piece of software that uses WordPress as a library. And so if you install Thesis on your WordPress blog then someone comes and wants to view a particular blog post, Thesis fires up and says, oh, WordPress I need the text of the post, WordPress I need this, WordPress I need I need that. And every time it asks WordPress for something it’s using a piece of the WordPress functionality, and if you do that sort of thing with a piece of GPL code it is well accepted, if not necessarily tested in court, as you pointed out, but it is well accepted and understood that if you do that, as you say, you have to release the source code of the software that you build. The opposing point of view from Chris Pearson seems to be that themes are not pieces of software that use WordPress; rather WordPress is like a runtime that runs themes. Just like if you buy a record player and you set your vinyl LP on top of it and it starts spinning, that LP is not built on top of the record player, the record player is a tool for playing LPs and therefore if the record player were constructed under GPL you wouldn’t have to release your vinyl record design. I know I’m stretching the metaphor terribly here, but that’s kind of — that’s what he is proposing. And it doesn’t seem like he has the force of the masses on his side with that one. I know I’ve contributed to one or two open source projects over the years, and GPL code, well, if you’re working on a GPL project GPL is taken very seriously. And it seems like it’s taken even more seriously when you’re not working on GPL code. I contributed to a project that was released under a much less restrictive license than GPL, and every time I contributed something you had to sort of sign an electronic waiver that said, yeah, none of the code that is in my contribution is licensed under GPL. Because if it were, they call it a viral license because if you use anything in your project that is GPL licensed your whole project has to be GPL licensed.

Brad: And that’s one of the points that after the big blowup through Twitter and Andrew Warner of Mixergy actually had Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg on live to kind of battle back and forth almost, all of the core devs of WordPress and some other developers actually dove in the Thesis code, and they found full chunks of WordPress code that was almost line for line pulled directly from WordPress and then used within Thesis.

Kevin: Ouch. Yeah.

Brad: So that’s obviously a clear infringement on the GPL. Now without that is, you know, if that code hadn’t existed, and Pearson states it won’t exist in the next version that he’s working on, but even if it doesn’t exist is it still considered a violation of the GPL if his theme is not a part of the GPL? And this is, I mean this is a really interesting topic especially if it goes to court because there’s a lot of very popular open source platforms like through Drupal and Joomla that are all licensed under the GPL. So this could really set the precedent on what — is a theme part of the GPL; there’s a plug-in or module considered that has to fall into that GPL. So it’s certainly one we’ll keep our eyes on.

Kevin: It’s something that can be blundered into, I think, as a naïve software developer. It’s usually, you know, when you set out there to build your very first WordPress theme I suspect that software licenses are not the first thing on your radar. This is something that Mullenweg has said, that if you want to contribute to a blog platform and the core beliefs of the GPL, the culture of the GPL, is not something you agree with then you should be looking somewhere elsewhere than WordPress. And I kind of agree with that. There are open source projects out there that are in the GPL world and then there are those that aren’t, and there’s kind of a really strong wall between those two. If you want to play in the arena of GPL software like WordPress, if you want to be a developer in that, you have to respect the hundreds and thousands of other developers who have given of their time to build a complicated software product like WordPress, and all of them did that with the understanding that their code was being contributed to something that was protected by the GPL so that no one could benefit from their work without paying it forward, so to speak, without releasing their further work to further benefit the masses. This is the theory of the GPL that if everyone is working agrees with this then everyone is working towards the greater good, but for someone like Chris Pearson to come along, build Thesis and say, no, I’m drawing the line here, my work is mine to benefit from and I don’t care whose shoulders I’m standing on top of, that’s I think what the emotional issue is here and why so many people are upset about this.

Patrick: I’ve been running phpBBhacks.com for ten years, so I’ve seen far, far more open source politics than I care to see in my life.

Kevin: (laughs)

Patrick: And they can get very, very highly charged, very political, very nasty at times. I mean you think open source you think flowers and roses and things, but that’s not exactly how it always works out. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that’s happening with regard to WordPress and how they’re handling this necessarily, I think maybe some of this is a disservice; they’ve been on sort of a crackdown lately. And I really started to talk about it and think about it at WordCamp Raleigh in May just because of different things that had been happening around the WordCamps where they actually said that if you ran a non-GPL theme you could not speak at a WordCamp in the world period. So that was an interesting thing. I think you can go too far; when you’re an open source project you have to be careful how you exert control. I think this is a subject that a lot of people can rally around, but there are a lot of gray area subjects where applying the GPL in letter, in spirit, is maybe not the best thing to do because when you are so open and you are so freely available, when you do exert that control finally you have a group of people who is used to doing whatever they want for the most part and now they see you as controlling them. So you have to be really careful. On this particular issue I do think that — I don’t think Pearson is correct, and this is what we’ve always done at phpBBhacks.com as well, and phpBB is GPL and a very popular GPL project at that, we’ve always treated the code of the style as GPL, graphics and CSS not necessarily, graphics not by default certainly, because graphics obviously work on their own, they don’t appropriate any of the phpBB code, so those have always been treated by us at least to be copyrighted elements, whereas the theme code itself is usually using some form of phpBB code, it kind of has to to function, so that’s always been GPL. We’ve always gone beyond that standard with our database and always asked author permission as well and treated that as very sacred. But code GPL, CSS and graphics not by default I would say, so that’s what I expect to happen here. Now will it take a lawsuit, I think it’s an interesting thing because they have been talking about this for years, as you said, and I was talking to somebody at WordCamp Raleigh, I said at the end of the day talk, I get sick of talk, like are we gonna talk about this forever? Are you guys gonna go in the street and fight, you know, have a fistfight? Are you gonna go to court and file a lawsuit? Just go ahead and do it already because you’ve been talking about this for years and at the end of the day you’re just kind of wasting a lot of people’s time here. So either we’re going to do it or we’re not and we just move on. So I don’t know what the end result is here, but I would like to see an end result.

Kevin: Yeah.

Brad: Along the same lines Matt Mullenweg actually talked with the Software Freedom Law Center to clarify whether WordPress themes fall under the GPL. And their conclusion was actually that the PHP, like you said Patrick, the PHP files that leverage WordPress’ copyrighted code are protected by the GPL; however, images, CSS, JavaScript are not, so you can actually have a split license on a WordPress theme and still be completely within the GPL and still not have to worry about any type of a lawsuit. So it’s, you’re right Kevin, if you’re getting into WordPress themes I mean this is something most people probably never think about until it’s too late and maybe a lawsuit’s in their face. So you can read about this stuff all day and all night, but we’ll see if something happens, if WordPress and Mullenweg step up and actually take this to court which it looks like the next step because there certainly wasn’t any kind of resolution on the Mixergy interview.

Patrick: And you know the thing about it is the Software Freedom Law Center I don’t know them necessarily, but from their title I’m gonna guess there’s a little bit of bias there maybe toward open source projects, maybe, maybe.

Kevin: Maybe.

Patrick: So everybody has their opinion in this, and like I said, opinions have been heard for two, three years now; I mean something has to come to a head sooner or later. Let’s start suing each other or doing something other than browbeating each other using our communities of thousands of people to attack one another, let’s do something else.

Brad: Sue or get off the pot.

Patrick: Basically, yes, but one other thing I wanted to say was that part of the Thesis thing, and I will say I have a Thesis license, I don’t use it, I won’t use it, I just don’t want to use it at this time, but I have purchased it and I’ve looked at it, and part of the allure of Thesis is that the backend features that it has for easy customization. So those tie right into the WordPress admin area so they of course will most likely be GPL. I mean that’s part of the allure of the theme. It’s not a really image heavy theme. Yes, the CSS is part of it is powerful, whatever, but I mean the main part of Thesis that makes it so great to people is that coding, are those features in the admin area. I mean, yeah, it’s definitely a powerful thing. That’s why people buy it — not for images.

Brad: It’s the framework.

Kevin: Yeah, Thesis is one of these themes that it gives you groundwork, a foundation that you are then expected to skin yourself, right Brad?

Brad: Yeah, absolutely, so it’s a theme framework so like Patrick said, I mean even though you can place your CSS and JavaScript in a separate license, technically Thesis there’s probably maybe five percent of the code base behind Thesis would actually fall under that. I mean the majority of it is PHP code, you know, it’s a framework, it’s made so that there is a ton of backend options that you can easily point and click to change your site around. But it isn’t very graphics heavy, it’s not like you’re buying a stylized, designed theme, you’re buying a framework that allows you to kind of develop the theme however you want. And I think that’s probably why Chris Pearson is a little concerned because he can’t really do a split license, it’s not really gonna benefit him the way he wants it.

Kevin: That ruling, quote/unquote ruling, from the Software Freedom Law Center, dates back to July last year, so that’s how long this has been going on in earnest. And the question really is, is Matt Mullenweg gonna jump or is he going to let it slide, and it feels like he’s been letting it slide for at least six months now, or at least a year now. The question is what effect would it have on the ecosystem for Automattic, the owners of WordPress, to go suing a member, a prominent member, of the WordPress development community. But Patrick I tend to agree with you, the damage that’s being done of the arguing back and forth and the uncertainty seems just as bad to me. So perhaps selfishly I would really like them to go forward with the lawsuit; I can say that because I wouldn’t have to pay the lawyer’s bills.

Patrick: Right, and that’s a question I was wondering; who’s going to file for this exactly? Who pays for the lawsuit? Is it money from the WordPress Foundation I guess? Brad you’re probably well-versed on this than I am, but where’s the money gonna come from?

Brad: Yeah, I mean that’s — I can’t imagine it would come from the Foundation because a lot of that money was via sponsorships to various WordCamps and kind of if a WordCamp has extra money they would put it into the Foundation. It’s still a fairly new entity, it’s only been around — I think it was announced back at WordCamp Boston in January, so it hasn’t been around that long. Yeah, and that’s a good question; I don’t know who would pay for it.

Patrick: Right. You have one person in the community who’s visible who disregards the license, let’s say, let’s leave any allegations; let’s just say it’s a certainty he violated the license, he’s spitting in the face of WordPress, whatever. So is that worth suing over and spending that money and spending the time on there? I mean if we just say okay you know what, he’s doing that, we’ve exposed it, people know it, the people who feel strongly don’t like him, good, we got it, he’s been browbeat into the ground. Now, is there, I guess is there some reason to still go forward with the lawsuit? Is it such a firm principle that, okay, we are offended by this, we’re disrespected, we’re gonna spend $200,000 on a lawsuit, or whatever it is, and that’s a good use of our resources and our time. Rather than just saying okay he’s done that, let’s move on, let’s continue to make good stuff. I mean I could see an argument either way, but I’m just saying there’s a lot of time and resources being spent on this by WordPress developers and by people who are instrumental in the creation and maintenance of WordPress itself, so I don’t know if this is — I don’t know if this sort of thing is the best use of resources when we’re talking about an open source, freely available piece of software. Usually these sorts of things are reserved for when people are actually making money and their money is being affected, then people spend money to defend that money. Don’t get me wrong, there’re a lot of people making money here who are involved in this argument on both sides, but I just don’t know that it’s the best use of resources to go forward with that step as much as there may be people wanting that to happen.

Brad: You know even if a lawsuit doesn’t go forward, even if this is the last we hear of it from Matt Mullenweg’s side, you know a lot of damage has already been done towards Thesis. I mean I’ve seen a lot of users coming out that have been using Thesis for a while and had no idea it was in violation of the WordPress license. They had no idea until Matt Mullenweg publicly started talking about it. And now they know and a lot of them I’ve seen have been jumping ship. Now I’m sure it’s a small percentage because there’re a lot of Thesis users, but a lot of people just had no idea there was a conflict with the licenses, so now that they know they’re jumping ship. So maybe that was the intention just to get the information out there and then let people make the decision whether they want to go with Thesis or not.

Patrick: Yeah, and Mullenweg is definitely exerting his influence here and trumpeting every time someone leaves Thesis. And maybe that’s not a big number, but I mean he’s definitely embarked on a campaign of sorts even saying that he will buy another premium license for you if you switch from Thesis. So, you know, that’s how serious it is that we have a license in the ecosystem, or a style in the ecosystem, that is disrespectful to the license let’s say, and that’s how serious it is that his Twitter stream is full with pages and pages of him talking about it or re-tweeting other people switching, or offering to buy themes for other people. It’s just ugly I think and I don’t know what the end result is, like I said, but I don’t enjoy watching it, and I’ve been involved in some minor conflicts myself with regard to phpBB and it’s just an ugly thing, and there’s not really a whole lot of winners in that sort of situation.

Kevin: Is Google monitoring your mouse movements? There was an email that went around at SitePoint HQ last week — because the search engine optimization blogs it’s not something I usually do with my spare time, I don’t read these a lot — but an email went around going just when you thought you had some sort of grip on your search ranking it looks like Google might be monitoring the mouse movements of people who do a Google search, land at a search results page and then are poring over that list of results. A patent has been granted to Google according to seobythesea.com for doing exactly that. The idea is if you hover your mouse over a particular search result on that results page chances are you are reading it, taking it in, and as a result that can be considered a more valuable search result than the ones that you don’t even spend half a second glancing at. The theory that’s advanced in this article is that you might actually find the information you were looking for in the little snippet that’s displayed on the Google search results page, and so even though you never actually click through to that search result it’s still to be considered a high quality result that could be further prioritized in future searches for the same thing by other users. This all sounds well and good, but I got curious and went looking on the Google search results pages and digging through the code, and I can’t find any evidence that they’re actually doing this. But would it be a good idea?

Patrick: Well, I’m on Google right now doing a search for Kevin Yank and circling my mouse over kevinyank.com repeatedly over and over and over again trying to add to your juice there. No.

Kevin: You do that. Just put your mouse there on my homepage and go away for awhile.

Patrick: Go have dinner.

Brad: That’s what I see these SEO firms just doing vigorously like moving their mouse over their own websites and their client’s websites.

Kevin: (laughs)

Patrick: That’s going to be a job listing we’re going to see explode: Mouse Mover, SEO Corp.

Brad: After I read this article I wasn’t sure actually if I used my mouse when I’m reading results.

Kevin: Yeah.

Brad: So I actually went to Google and did a couple searches just to see if I could try to figure out if I was actually doing that, and I don’t think I am unless I’m subconsciously telling myself not to because I’m trying to do this test. I usually just use my scroll wheel.

Kevin: It’s one of those things you can’t actually test it.

Brad: Yeah, you can’t really test it if you’re thinking about it, and if you’re not thinking about it you’re not testing it, so it’s a tricky one, but it’s –

Kevin: Yeah, yep. No, I think so too; I think I’m a scroll wheel guy now.

Brad: That’s primarily what I did. You know what this reminds me of is I remember hearing about how grocery stores would kind of track people’s eyeball movement as they went up and down the aisles at the store and kind of see what they’re looking at and see if their line of sight– It kind of reminds me of that, like a line of sight thing like what are you actually looking at while you’re viewing a web page, but obviously they don’t know where our eyeballs are at but they certainly can look where our pointers are at, so, it’s weird.

Kevin: There was a developer who used to work at SitePoint and to watch him read a webpage was really interesting. He actually highlights every piece of text as he reads it, and I was talking to him about it once and he said it’s a habit that he got into because he worked in an environment — and SitePoint is an environment like this — where it’s very open plan and you can get interrupted at any moment by someone needing your help, and it’s good to be able to just turn away from your monitor in the middle of reading something safe in the knowledge that when you get to come back to it the piece of text that you were reading will be highlighted there on your screen. And so, yeah, just watching him read any web page he would just highlight it sort of one sentence or one paragraph at a time, read it, and you could actually watch him read; it meant he did a lot of extra clicking, but yeah, I wonder, maybe Google should be monitoring people highlighting text, that would be a really meaningful method.

Patrick: And after that conversation you said ‘cuckoo’ and that’s why he’s no longer there.

Kevin: (laughs)

Patrick: No, but you know actually it’s funny you should mention the highlighting because there is a service called Tynt that you may have heard of, I think we have talked about it maybe before, but basically what they do is you sign up with them and hook it on to your webpage, insert some JavaScript I assume, and they will track everything that’s highlighted on your website; articles, pages, I think it’s an option where you can actually have them add a link also to the bottom of any quote so that when someone highlights it and copies it–

Kevin: Ooh, I hate that.

Patrick: — and pastes it they get a link. But I think you can also turn that off and just track highlighting. So in some way that can already sort of be done if you’re interested in that sort of data and you have a developer who does that on your website.

Kevin: I’ve always imagined sort of a social browsing experience where you could see all the other users who were reading the same page you were. And there have been attempts at this in instant messaging clients and things like that before, but imagine you can see little people’s avatar icons moving down paragraph by paragraph through the same article that you were looking at and sort of faded highlights appearing as they were highlighting things. Probably not something you’d want turned on all the time, but man –

Patrick: Sounds like something out of Harry Potter.

Kevin: (laughs) Yeah, it would bring the Web alive. I don’t know if it’s a good use of JavaScript resources, but yes, definitely a strange one. It’s just one of those things that Google got a patent for, they thought yeah it might be a good idea, let’s make sure that we’re the ones who get to do that if we decide to do it. But I don’t think they actually are at this point.

Patrick: So the news media versus Google storyline continues in a way with a report at businessinsider.com by Nick Zane. He says that the New York Times wants the government to start regulating Google’s Search Business. What they mean is that they want the government to watch how Google manages its algorithm so that when they make tweaks to it they are doing so strictly to improve the quality of the search results and not to help Google’s other businesses and their rankings. The Times does say that it would be challenging or impractical to have the government be in charge of approving it every time that there is a tweak, but nonetheless they’d still like the government to be involved with Google’s algorithm changes.

Kevin: And I agree with Business Insider in that this is an insane notion. (Laughs) Business Insider goes on to make a bunch of points about why this is a bad idea, and I think I agree with most if not all of them. But the key one is that at least in what is supposed to be an open market like the United States the government should not be interfering with business decisions of a company like Google, especially if Google does not have a monopoly. And so before, as a first step, I feel like the government would have to decide for itself that Google had a monopoly on search before they would even be able to start looking at the algorithm that Google uses for search. Do you agree Brad?

Brad: Yeah, I mean the last thing we need I think is the government getting involved in Google’s algorithm. There’s got to be a very small percentage of people in the world that would even understand the algorithm, and I’m certainly not one of them, so I can’t imagine there’s that many government types that would be able to even kind of comprehend how it all works, so I certainly don’t think that needs to happen. I agree, if they had 95 percent, 99 percent market share okay then they might have a point, but at this point it’s 63 percent market share, Yahoo! and Bing both creeping up eating into that, you know, if you’re worried about Google don’t use Google. I think it’s just maybe the New York Times is a little bit turned off. You know what’s funny about this article on Business Insider, if I actually click through the link to New York Times it forces me to create an account to view the article; I can’t view any of the article.

So what I did, I took the title of the article put it into Google which promptly found the article for me and then I was able to click right through and it didn’t require me to register. So had Google not found the right result in the first place I wouldn’t even be able to read this article without creating an account; just a little bit of irony I think, but I thought that was kind of funny.

Kevin: This feels like the New York Times didn’t know– This is their editorial so it’s not even attributed to a particular author, in theory this is the voice of the New York Times expressing an opinion, which is weird enough as it is, but it feels like they had a spot to fill for an editorial and they didn’t know what to talk about so they cooked up this half-baked thing. It really isn’t very definitive about anything. To hear it discussed it would sound like the New York Times was saying “For the good of the Internet the government must step in!” But reading the article it’s more like “I think it might be a good idea for the government to have a look at the Google search algorithm.” And it’s so vague and half-hearted you can tell that they’re not even that convinced by their argument. It’s very strange. But the contention that Google would be doing the wrong thing by making a change to their algorithm that would benefit only Google, this is another one of the core points that’s made by Business Insider; Google is a money-making business, that’s the business they’re in. If they can change their search algorithm in a way that makes them more money that’s what Google’s gonna do because they’re out there to make a profit. It just seems like lucky for its users the best way Google has found to make more money is to deliver more relevant search results, at least for now, sponsored results aside and all that.

Patrick: What they should do is put in big red text anything that’s related to the search term that you just put in that they run, so when you search for news at the top there should be a huge red box that takes up 400 pixels by 400 pixels and says Google news, click here now, and then farther down is the rest. But actually right now Google news is fourth for a search for news on Google, so.

Well, speaking of Google, the popular social bookmarking site Reddit put out their Google Analytics numbers on their blog on July 15th. According to the screenshot that they posted, from June 14th to July 14th they had 429 million page views with 36.6 million visits. The reason they did this was because of the inaccuracy, in their opinion, of the numbers provided by some of the stat companies that advertisers sometimes trust when buying ads such as compete.com, Quantcast, Alexa, and Nielsen, to illustrate the disparity between their actual Google Analytics numbers and these numbers on Compete, Quantcast, etcetera. I just gave you the numbers that are in analytics, like I said, 429 million page views, 36 million visits. Well, Compete shows them as getting around 927,000 unique visitors a month; that’s less than a million when analytic shows 36.6 million. Quantcast shows, well they show, let’s see, 13 to 10 million visits a month, that’s visits, so unique visitors most likely. Alexa just shows some weird chart-y thing about daily page views percentage that nobody really understands. And Nielsen finally shows their online market size estimate to be 652,000. This is something that I struggle with myself not being big enough to attract the attention of most of these. I will say with Quantcast you can hook up your site directly to it and be quantified as they call it, so Reddit might want to look into that, I do it myself. But beyond that it seems like a guessing game with what these other sites use to count your tracking numbers.

Kevin: For a while there I was convinced that any one of these services would be fine as long as you just take it as a relative measure against itself. So the fact that you’re number 100 on Alexa doesn’t say anything by itself, but the fact that you’re 100 and your competitor is 90 on Alexa says pretty definitively that they’re ahead of you. That’s what I thought. But over the years my confidence in that has eroded as we’ve heard stories of this week Alexa changed its– I’m not saying it was this week, but a couple of years ago I feel like I heard a story where Alexa changed its algorithm to favor sites with technical content a little more. And that very day you could see Alexa’s graph, the Alexa ranking of sitepoint.com jump, whereas some of its competitors dropped that very same day.

Patrick: But it was a great day!

Kevin: It was a good day for us, we were happy to be on that side of the algorithm change.

Patrick: Drinks all around.

Kevin: But that day I kind of went, oh okay, they’re all just making it up, and it’s a shame.

Patrick: And it’s really based on the toolbar installations, right?

Kevin: Yes. And it’s a shame that advertisers, the data that is available to advertisers, it seems like the more publicly available the data the less reliable it is. According to Reddit, the best numbers they’ve been able to find are through Google analytics which is something that only they have access to.

Patrick: You brought up SitePoint which is a question I was gonna ask without saying too much, I know this isn’t even your area, you’re not really in advertising, but is this something that SitePoint battles with or struggles with, do you know, the rankings in these sites and working to get them to be as accurate as possible?

Kevin: It’s something that when one of these sites isn’t telling a story that agrees with our internal analytics — very much like Reddit, Google Analytics is the final arbiter for us. And our internal traffic numbers are higher than Google Analytics, but by a consistent margin that we put down to browsers with JavaScript disabled that won’t show up in Google Analytics, search engine spiders, RSS feed readers, all of these things that create requests that are services but that Google Analytics doesn’t see. But as long as that margin is fairly consistent, and it tends to be, Google Analytics is what we use, and these other things, the Competes, the Quantcasts, the Alexas, whenever they spit out a favorable number we’ll be sure to include that number in any press package that we’re putting out there, but when we get down to discussing with a potential advertiser, the numbers that we’re talking about are all Google Analytics pre-sale, and post-sale once we’ve signed an agreement to serve up an ad, the numbers that we are following are not, oh, how many page views has Google Analytics told us we’ve gotten this month, it’s all about ad impressions that are measured through our ad delivery software. And that’s something the advertiser can log into and see a report of. And so as the process continues I feel like the numbers that are involved are more and more sensible and more and more true to life. But, you know, it is a shame that a potential advertiser might stumble across SitePoint, see that we have ad space that might appeal to them, and the first thing they might do is go to compete.com, check our Compete ranking against some of our competitors; although the numbers there seem to tell a story, just how meaningful is that story? Looking at Reddit’s numbers it doesn’t seem that meaningful at all.

Patrick: But other thing I noticed was comScore isn’t included in this, and they’re another one, like Jason Calacanis, for example, just railing against them and how they handle their business to verify those numbers. I feel like Quantcast tried to do this, tried to be the one agency that would make it easy for you to verify your numbers because you can sign up with them, you can give them code, you can check my sites and they’re all quantified. I guess is there just no money in this sort of thing for someone to come out and say, okay, we’re going to be the most accurate one, we’re going to work with publishers to get them to sign on to our system and become the definitive source. Because it seems like there might be some room here for someone to come in and be that service; obviously it will take some server power, but beyond that this isn’t the first complaint I’ve heard about these sites. I’ve heard plenty of complaints about these types of services before, but I don’t know, I guess it’s just not an attractive enough business for someone to actually come into and go at it 100 percent right.

Kevin: It’s surprising that Google, you know, if we’re all saying that Google has a really accurate and useful analytics package, it is surprising that Google hasn’t opened up the opportunity to publish some portion of your analytics publicly. If I could tick a box in my Google Analytics package that said release my traffic graph but not with any actual numbers associated with it, release just the relative graph so people could see that, I might choose to do that. What we end up doing and what I guess a lot of people end up doing is once they’re in negotiations with an advertiser, if the advertiser is saying “well Compete is saying this and you’re telling me that,” what you have to end up doing is getting their email address and granting them access to your Google analytics so that they can take a look for themselves and be satisfied. And it’s a terrible situation because that’s not a pleasant thing to have to do.

Patrick: That’s a great point.

Kevin: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s a business opportunity, Patrick, it’s a business opportunity.

Brad: I’m just glad I don’t have any sites that get real traffic (laughter).

Patrick: This is not a concern for you.

Brad: Yeah, but on the other hand I do have clients that get a lot of traffic, and I can tell you that pretty much every client we have that is getting 5,000 or more hits a day, they typically run multiple analytics package for this very reason just to kind of compare two or three different tracking packages and try to get a good average that they can use in their marketing efforts to bring in advertisers. So it’s certainly a challenge, and you’re right, it would be nice to see somebody kind of come out and say this is — these are the definitive numbers and this is how we’re getting them. But hopefully that will happen.

Patrick: You know it’s possible that Google could go in this direction because on the last episode of the podcast, on episode 69, we mentioned the story of the top 1,000 websites shared by DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google, and essentially it’s Alexa top 1,000 but just done by Google. So, you know, maybe they’ll make some headway into that market, I think they really could.

Kevin: I read a related story to this late in June, and I’ve put it on the list for today because I think it’s really interesting. This is from Mike Industries, and this is a blog that has been speaking out against page views as a metric of traffic. And he’s spoken before about the fact that everyone looks at page views, page views, page views, especially the advertising industry wants to know how many page views you have, and as a result users suffer. And he has written one or two scathing essays on this subject before, but now he is applauding msnbc.com for their recent article page design because essentially it is all Ajax; if you go and view a story at msnbc.com you get to this page and the entire story is on that one page. Not only that, but related content when you click on it in that page it loads in place inside that existing page. Effectively you can spend your whole afternoon reading and viewing content at msnbc.com and only ever make a single page view. And he’s saying that this is a landmark change, it represents the fact that MSNBC has seen fit to throw out page views as a meaningful metric of their traffic, and he wants to see more people do this sort of thing. I’m not sure it’s that big a deal because as he points out the ads are also loaded dynamically as you visit the page, so as you’re scrolling down additional ads are appearing, as you access other content related ads are pulled in and displayed alongside them. The fact that it’s all done with Ajax and the address in your browser bar never changes isn’t that big a difference. You would have to get your advertisers on side by saying yes we have much fewer page views than our competition but look at our ad impression numbers.

Brad: I’d love it. I mean I think it’s an interesting design. You certainly can’t say they don’t make good use of white space, you know, it’s very clean. I think it’s great. There’s nothing more frustrating for me than you see maybe a top ten list on Digg or Reddit or whatever, and it looks interesting and you open it up and it’s every item on the top ten list is a separate page you have to load. I mean it’s so annoying, it slows down reading it; anytime I see that I immediately close the list, I’m not going to click through ten different pages just to see this top ten list. And you know it’s exactly why they do that just to pump up the page view counts when it’s really unnecessary, so it’s nice to see a huge player kind of — whether they’re taking a stand or not it’s nice to see them go a different direction. I really love the image galleries. I’m just looking at this image gallery of the oil spill and there’re 63 images and it’s neat, you hover over the little icon, it shows you a little thumbnail, you click on it, it scrolls to the image, it’s very fluid, I mean I think it’s a nice design.

Kevin: I don’t think it’s that controversial. I do think it’s more work to implement something like this, but even Google Analytics would let you measure interactions with a page like this as page views. You could say that opening the image gallery, count that as another page view; you can ask Google Analytics to do that for you and they will. And so you can even generate page view graphs that look just like you would’ve had before using a design like this. Where you’re going to suffer is in those Alexa’s, those Compete graphs, those Quantcasts, those ones that we were just talking about. And I guess MSNBC decides that they’re a big enough name that if someone is interested in advertising with them the fact that they have a low Alexa score is not going to impact them that negatively, especially if they can go yeah well whatever our Alexa graph is we can guarantee you this many impressions in the next month. And that’s generally how it goes.

Patrick: I agree with everything you’ve said, Kevin, I don’t really see this as a huge deal, I think it’s cool, it’s a nice looking site, and the user experience is nice I’m sure, but right now it works like my blog essentially; you’re on the page, you click to an article, guess what, it’s all there, there’s no pages, any content is embedded. So I don’t have any pages or any of that. We all know sites that go to the extreme like Brad talked about, top ten lists, or I’ve experienced like top thirty or fifty lists where each page is one item, and sometimes I might stick around, sometimes I’ll leave. I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that big a deal; I think there are plenty of sites that do this responsibly, and also what’s good for MSNBC might not be what’s good for the small publisher or the smaller publishers as well. MSNBC might be able to more reasonably afford to do something like this than a smaller publisher would where maybe cutting their page views, even if they’re already being responsible with pagination, and they’re already handling it in a tasteful manner. If they cut their page views by 33 percent how does that affect them selling ads and being able to provide for their staffers and their writers and to have a feasible operation? So as much as down with page views is I don’t really care that much about page views; that’s fine, I’d be happy with that metric going away. It’s something we have to live with and smaller publishers are less equipped to deal with a drop in page views. So I can see it from both sides, and if MSNBC does well and they change the perception that advertisers have then great and I think others will follow. But right now you have to look to those leaders to do those sorts of things.

Kevin: Let’s wrap up this show with our host spotlights guys. Brad, what have you got for us?

Brad: My spotlight is definitely a top contender for the strangest site on the Internet this year, and it is called therevolvinginternet.com. It’s a very strange site because as soon as it loads, and maybe we can bring this up to hear the audio that plays, as soon as it loads a song starts playing and the page actually starts rotating just like you would expect revolving. And it lands on Google and you can actually search, it’s fully functional, you can search Google, you can click through, and the entire time you’re on this website the Internet is revolving so it’s kind of a fun, weird little site, but for some reason I got a good laugh out of it.

Kevin: I’ve got a fun one too, it’s called humans.txt, and this is a little practical joke by a friend of the show and jQuery: Novice to Ninja co-author Earle Castledine, who’s also known as Mr. Speaker. He has decided that it is time for these CAPTCHAs that check that you’re human to come to an end. Obviously we are moving from the Web 2.0 world into the Web 3.0 world where websites are no longer designed for human beings to consume them, they’re designed for marauding software agents to read them and build interesting information and plots against humanity. And so he’s decided that what we need is not a test to verify that you’re human, but a test to verify that you’re a computer, and he has built exactly that. If you go to his humans.txt page which is linked in the show notes, it gives you a fairly easy looking math problem to solve, 1 + 1, and if I type in 2 and then click Start, it starts a counter. I now have 5,000 milliseconds in order to answer 150 further math problems. The first one being what is the bitwise and of 73 and 12 (laughs), and I’ve just ran out of time. It has decided that I am ‘one of them’, one of the filthy bandwidth-wasting humans and it is going to kick me off the site. If you want to see what the machines see there’s an ‘act like a machine’ checkbox that you can check and your browser will automatically solve all the math problems for you, and then it will say ‘one of us’. So if you’re building your next site for computers be sure to include humans.txt to keep those nasty humans away.

Patrick, what have you got?

Patrick: My spotlight is a Flash game. It’s called Crush The Castle 2, it’s on armorgames.com, it was programmed by Joey Betts with art by Chris Condon of Con Artist Games, and it’s a sequel to Crush The Castle, it was a very popular, still is, on armorgames.com, a very popular game where you try to, of course, crush castles with stones, boulders, and different objects. The second game has more castles, more objects, and it’s just a really fun game; a good way to take a break, let’s say, from programming or something along those lines. So, yeah, check it out if you enjoy Flash-based games you’re definitely — it’s a couple of hours I would say to beat it from start to finish, but it’s a lot of fun.

Kevin: I haven’t seen this game. Is this a top down view or is it a side-on view of the castles?

Patrick: It is, it’s side-on, and you basically have a catapult on one side and a castle on the other, and you start with a crude object like a piece of wood and you move all the way up to something that creates a vortex that sucks everything in; that’s the last thing you get after you beat all castles because that demolishes everything in sight. And it’s just a lot of fun, a lot of fun options in it, and you can even create your own castles and play other people’s castles online in your browser. So you can definitely get a lot of replay value out of it as well.

Kevin: That’s great. I’m still waiting for someone to make Rampart, does anyone remember Rampart?

Brad: I remember Rampart, that’s been awhile.

Kevin: I love that game. I love that game, where you and your friend would each design a castle and then you’d have to bomb the crap out of each other basically.

Brad: It was real; it wasn’t a video game, it was a board game, right?

Kevin: It was a board game!

Brad: You’re like flinging boulders at each other across the room.

Patrick: See, I didn’t even know what that was until I Googled it and I got Rampart the arcade game by Atari.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I remember. We’re gonna have to play the real thing, Brad.

Patrick: If we ever get together, the four of us, we’re breaking out Rampart. (laughter) And streaming it live.

Kevin: Excellent. I think that’s the end of the show guys. Who are you and where are you?

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from Webdev Studios, my blog is strangework.com, and I’m Twitter @williamsba.

Kevin: That blog isn’t powered by Thesis, is it?

Brad: No, I can promise you that.

Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network. I blog at managingcommunities.com; find me on Twitter @iFroggy.

Kevin: Your Alexa ranking is looking especially good this week, Patrick.

And I am @sentience on Twitter, and you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. Visit the SitePoint Podcast at http://www.sitepoint.com/podcast, leave your comment on this show, you know, let us know what you do for traffic numbers. And be sure to subscribe to receive every show automatically.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye, bye.

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.

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