Had a chance to sit down with Jeff Kibler of Infobright to talk about their column-oriented database offering, and how it can improve data reporting efforts.
File Download (28:31 min / 20 MB)
Episode 135 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Raena Jackson-Armitage (@raena) and Mick Olinik (FBmick.com) the authors of the upcoming SitePoint book WordPress Anthology.
Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below:
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
Louis, Raena and Mick discuss the WordPress community with all it’s diversity, the advances in WordPress and how the book ties into those.
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/135.
Transcript to follow
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
Episode 134 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Brad Williams (@williamsba), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).
Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below:
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
Here are the main topics covered in this episode:
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/134.
Louis: Hello and welcome to the SitePoint Podcast, we’re back with a full panel show this week to talk about the last couple weeks of news and happenings in the Web world. I’m joined by the usual panel, Patrick, Brad, Stephan, hi guys.
Stephan: Howdy.
Brad: Hello.
Patrick: Hey, Louis.
Louis: Hey, how you guys doing?
Brad: Great.
Stephan: Doing alright.
Patrick: Doing good, doing good; had a fun weekend but I’ll talk about that during my spotlight.
Louis: (Laughs) Now I’m concerned.
Brad: Is that your spotlight your weekend?
Louis: Now I’m worried.
Patrick: More or less it is.
Louis: Are we doing like here’s what I did on my summer vacation for spotlights now because our show’s going down hill.
Patrick: Why not, it was that good.
Louis: So, hey, I’ve actually got a lot of stories to cover this week. The first thing that struck me is something I saw just this morning is a story that I found on Hacker News, it’s a press release on Nginx.net. So anyone who doesn’t know what NGINX is it’s a web server, it’s an open source server, it powers a lot of very high traffic websites, it originated in Russia so it’s more popular in Russia than in the rest of the world; however, it has become increasingly used by high-scale websites because it serves — it’s very good at serving a lot of traffic very quickly unlike Apache which has a big memory footprint when you get a lot of connectivity. So in the press release it mentions it’s used by websites like Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, Hulu, TechCrunch, Dropbox, WordPress, so, big websites, and –
Patrick: Who?
Louis: What?
Patrick: Who was that? (Laughter) Who were those people?
Louis: Alright. So NGINX has I guess started as a company now and they’ve announced three million dollars in the Series A funding, so I guess reading into this I guess it’s kind of like how MySQL or other open source projects also have a sort of commercial arm where they provide support and consulting. So it’s a big move for something which was — I mean if you went to nginx.net you can go into the Internet archive and look at what the website looked like a few months ago, and it really looked like some hacker’s in his basement open source project, it really looked like a website that wasn’t of a proper company, and now it’s revamped and it’s out there with commercial support now, yeah.
Brad: Does anyone else think that three million seems low? I mean obviously that’s a lot of money but for Series A, and maybe that’s all they’re asking for, I don’t know all the intricate details of this, but it seems low. You read on a daily basis on TechCrunch or other sites where these really weird random startup ideas, you know, they’re throwing 10 million here and 15 million there, whereas this is a proven –
Louis: Yeah, exactly, it’s already in use by high profile websites.
Brad: And maybe that’s all they wanted but who knows, the first thing that caught my eye was three million, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot but maybe it’s enough.
Patrick: So for someone who’s not involved in this sort of server space and doesn’t know a lot about it, I have a couple questions. The first is how are they making money? You mentioned how it’s a low amount of funding, what is the business model for them to justify them receiving 10 or 20 million dollars? I did notice on their website that it has a four commercial entity section, and that references annually paid flexible support options as well as consultancy services for large scale web installations based on their web server. So, I guess that is the primary way that they’re making money, their support packages.
Louis: Yeah, support and consulting; I mean it’s not the first time we’ll see an open source project go down this route. As I mentioned already, MySQL before the Oracle purchase had sort of a commercial arm, Canonical that provides support and consulting for Ubuntu servers, so there are other examples out there of companies involved in this kind of thing.
Patrick: So you mentioned how NGINX is more efficient in handling load than say Apache. What is stopping NGINX in being more widely used?
Louis: It’s not so much load as it is concurrent connections.
Patrick: Right, yeah.
Louis: So it’s useful as — a lot of people use it as a reverse proxy sitting in front of Apache, so your initial connections hit NGINX and then its static resources will be served directly by NGINX, and then if you need to actually hit PHP then it proxies that over to an Apache server with PHP running behind it.
Patrick: Ah.
Louis: So that’s a common use case, there’s a bunch of other different ways you can use it, for a while I was playing around with actually running PHP under FastCGI and then using this weird setup to get it working with NGINX directly. I wrote an article about that on SitePoint about that a while back. But I guess there’s a lot of hosting companies out there that come with Apache pre-installed, Apache has these modules that are built in for PHP, for example, so getting up an Apache server to serve a PHP app is a matter of a few minutes, just sort of you install a relevant module, activate them, create a virtual host and you’re done. Whereas doing the same thing under NGINX is at the moment still a little trickier, I don’t know whether with this increased focus on maybe documentation and making it more available whether you’ll see, for example, different hosting companies moving towards NGINX. The other thing is it doesn’t have any kind of — I don’t know, Patrick, do you know what HTaccess files are, yeah?
Patrick: Yes.
Louis: Right. So NGINX doesn’t have the ability to use HTaccess files, you have to define everything in your actual configuration files which I guess makes it less appealing for shared hosting because you can’t let people sort of override settings on a per directory basis.
Patrick: Right. So it sounds like right now NGINX is more complementary toward Apache but that could certainly change, especially with the funding where they could –
Brad: Yeah, this could certainly be the boost they’re looking for.
Patrick: — take that market share.
Louis: Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, there are definitely applications out there that use it at different places in the infrastructure. A lot of people, for example Ruby on Rails application, use it as the main front web server that then passes to these little Ruby application servers either Thin or Mongrel or Unicorn running in the background. But, yeah, there are a lot of different ways to use it, it’s really flexible and this is impressive; well, I mean I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of this, whether it will mean a lot of development in the open source project and maybe more attention to it.
Patrick: Very cool. Congrats on the funding.
Brad: Alright, there is a new boilerplate out there, and we’ve talked about the HTML5 boilerplate a few times.
Patrick: You love boilerplates.
Brad: Boilerplates, I just like saying it, it just sounds cool (laughter). So the HTML5 boilerplate was just updated to, what, 2.0 not too long ago. Well, there’s a new one out there and it’s iOS boilerplate, so it will actually make iOS apps. A guy by the name of Alberto Gimeno has developed and released this on GitHub and it’s exactly what you would expect, it’s basically a base of code to start with for developing iOS apps, so apps for the iPhone and iPad. So if you never dove into it it’s certainly pretty cool looking, it integrates http requests, integrates the image manager, it has UI table view in cells so you can easily pull up cells and swipe-able cells pull down to refresh; all the familiar movements and controls you’d expect on the iOS platform, it integrates maps and everything, it’s pretty cool looking. So if you’re into iOS apps or just thinking about getting into it this would probably be a good place to start because it will kind of get your feet wet and kind of hold your hand a little bit while you get started. But in reading through this and reading some of the comments out there about it, it kind of reminded me of the various conversations we’ve had about Responsive Web Design over the past few months, it’s certainly been our buzzword on the show lately. But it got me thinking like is the trend of this kind of segmented web where every time you launch a site now you have to build an app for it on every phone out there, and now you have to build an app for it on every social network out there. That’s certainly the trend now which a lot of people have kind of dubbed “segmenting the Web.” Is this going away or are we going to keep seeing more apps or are we going to start seeing a lot more responsive designs so you can kind of go back to where we started focusing on one mobile site that’s going to work across various mobile platforms or even tablets for that matter, it doesn’t have to be mobile, but, what do you guys think; do you see the segmented web kind of moving forward and staying stronger or do you think we’re going to go back to our roots?
Patrick: It’s definitely not going to be me, so, Stephan; you have to add something in this spot.
Stephan: I think we’re going to stay with the segmented web personally. Why would we move away from it, is there any incentive to move away from it?
Louis: One of the things that keeps coming back in every discussion about this is it really is going to be, and it will continue to be I think, a case-by-case basis depending on the site or the application; I think for a lot of sort of content driven sites it totally makes sense to do one site and just adapt it to different screen sizes and contexts using the techniques of Responsive Web Design. And there are other contexts where it might be a better idea to have two different websites but still serve everything through the Web, and there are probably yet other situations where you need sort of hardware functionality that you can only get by developing native apps and developing a couple of different native apps for each different platform.
Brad: Yeah, and a good example I like to show people that I think is done really, really well as far as going away from the various apps is Basecamp, so I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Basecamp or if our listeners are, but it’s basically a very popular online project management software for businesses or anybody really that needs project management. So you load in projects, you load in your to-do lists, your tasks, you users, whatever, and you can kind of track your projects. Rather than going with apps — they don’t have a single app for any phone out there. What they did, they built a very, very solid mobile site that works across all devices and it works really, really well; it works better than most of the third party apps that people have been developing, so I can pull it up on my Android and iPhone, whatever it may be, a Blackberry, Windows 7 phone, and it works and you can do pretty much everything on the mobile site that you can do on the Web itself. So rather than going with four or five different apps they have to support they’ve stuck with kind of the true and tested way of having a very strong mobile app, mobile presence, which I think is — I mean it’s a great example and it’s something I’m kind of leaning towards doing rather than looking at building these different apps for clients is to kind of go back to the roots and build a really strong and flexible mobile sites and designs that are functional.
Louis: Absolutely. I think if you don’t need any of the — for example, there’s some stuff that is still very limited access via the Web. For example, if you want to access the device’s camera to a lot of people to upload photos that’s something you can’t really do via mobile web app at the moment. Now, there are a bunch of specs in HTML5 to make that possible, and some browsers have started very preliminary support for this but it’s still very limited, and it’s something you can’t really do whereas you can do that in a native device app very easily. If the listeners haven’t read it that’s a really good example of the Basecamp mobile, but there was a great blog post when they first launched their mobile web app back in I think February of this year or was that February of last year, it just say February; yeah, February of this year. And, yeah, it’s great because they explain that for one of their other apps made by some company, this is made by 37signals, one of the other apps they do is Highrise which is sort of CRM tool, and for that one they did have someone come in and develop an iPhone app, but this was sort of before Android started really making a run in gaining market share, and then when they came around to doing the same thing for Basecamp they though well, look, we can either bring in external people for all these different platforms and have all of these different code bases to maintain or we can just try and use our existing skill set and build just a really good mobile web app like you were saying.
Brad: Yeah, there’s definitely this trend out there and it’s like — and I’m to blame, too, it’s kind of like where he builds it up in our head if you don’t have an actual app you’re not a serious company or whatever your service is, you’re not serious if you don’t have an app up there; if I look for your app on Android and I don’t find it you’re not serious. A lot of people think that, sometimes I think that, I’m trying not to box companies in like that. My bank, for example, they do not have an app and they’re a very large bank. So at first I was like every other bank out there has an app except for my bank, and then I actually went to the mobile site and I was able to do everything I needed to do right through the mobile site, so they went the same route, but the first thing I did was go look for an app, so it’s kind of like kind of breaking that mindset as a user, like you don’t have to have an app for it not to work good. I don’t know, it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves over the next couple of years especially with HTML5, like you said, bringing in a lot of these features that it wouldn’t have been able to do short of Flash or something like that. But if you want to check out the iOS boilerplate the website is iosboilerplate.com, so if you want to stick with apps and keeping our Web segmented have at it.
Louis: Yeah, that kind of leads into another one of the stories I wanted to talk about. So anyone who’s been listening to the show for a little while I think back sort of six months ago maybe we had Max Wheeler and Myles Eftos on the show talking about their mobile book they wrote for SitePoint. And one of the things that was covered in the book was this toolset called PhoneGap, and what PhoneGap is it lets you build sort of a web app using web technologies, HTML and CSS and JavaScript, and then it has a toolset to package that up into native apps for each of the platforms, so for iOS and Android and Blackberry and Windows phone. Now, the new story this week is that Nitobi, which is the company that’s behind PhoneGap is being acquired by Adobe.
Patrick: Funding? (Laughter)
Louis: I don’t know what the status of funding is but they are being acquired by Adobe. And that’s not the only company being acquired by Adobe this month, they’ve also acquired Typekit which is a — most people are probably familiar with Typekit, but it’s sort of a pay to play hosted web font service so you can license and directly have web fonts hosted by their service for a fee on your websites.
Patrick: Yeah, I’m definitely more familiar with Typekit and I think we’ve talked about them numerous times over the life of the show. But one thing that stood out to me in the FAQ about the Nitobi acquisition was that they are pursuing, this is their words, “A contribution of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation to ensure open stewardship of the project over the long term. As part of that process it will be renamed to a new Apache branded name, Callback. Adobe fully supports this contribution and will continue to host the PhoneGap community site with full participation from its contributors as well as the PhoneGap build service.” The build service they say “Incorporated additional proprietary code allowing developers to build their apps from anywhere without installing mobile platform SDKs,” so PhoneGap code is going to Apache but they’re going to build some more or less add-ons, I suppose, that are commercially viable.
Louis: Yeah, I was impressed to see that they were — I’m not sure about the name of it, I think Apache Callback is a little ambiguous, it doesn’t really explain what it’s about and it’s kind of a very generic term, so as a name I’m not sold on it, but I do like the idea of taking all these kind of hooks from JavaScript — from the JavaScript in the web view into the device functionality for all these different platforms and open sourcing them under the Apache Project. So what do you think this is going to mean, though, in terms of the future of these companies and the services? I imagine Typekit might be one of those ones because it was probably already profitable if it won’t change under Adobe.
Patrick: Right. I mean they are — that’s what they do is they sell something. They do offer a free level but if I recall correctly, yeah, they offer a free level at the 25,000 pageview a month mark which is fairly limited, a lot of small personal websites would fit into that, but if you do more than that then you’re paying $25.00 a year or $50.00 a year or $100.00 a year, for a business that generates millions of pageviews even more than that. So they obviously a company making money, I think that’s part of the reason Adobe went after them, and I think that they’ll continue to offer that service and be successful with it because I don’t know that there’s a lot of competition for that, it’s sort of a niche thing, and it’s interesting to me that it’s big enough for Adobe to care about really, more than anything else I think that’s kind of an interesting point because not that Typekit’s not a really cool service or that I haven’t seen it in numerous places, but it’s not like it’s a mainstream tool that you see on a lot of websites, it’s definitely still very much, you know, a nice service that people who love to use that custom typography or who love fonts or are committed to the idea of having a really unique looking website.
Louis: Yeah. It’s worth pointing out that Typekit would have had an existing relationship with Adobe even before this acquisition because it had fonts licensed from Adobe’s library of fonts available for use on Typekit, so there would have already been a business relationship in place there.
Patrick: Right.
Brad: No, I think Adobe’s pretty smart, especially with the PhoneGap, I mean rather than putting all of their eggs in the Flash basket, they haven’t done that, and they’ve supported HTML5 which is a lot of people would have considered a direct competitor of Flash, and PhoneGap is just one more step in that direction to kind of support — no matter what direction you’re going down it looks like Adobe wants at some point to be a part of that when you’re building apps. It looks like a pretty cool service, I’ve never actually worked with it but just the overview kind of explains how you can take advantage of HTML5 and CSS and write it with JavaScript code and then you can hook in their available plugins so basically features that they’ve already built you can hook into your apps, launch them, and then they’ll work across all these various mobile platforms.
Louis: Yeah, and like you were saying that can be a big boost, right, you’re saying users have this sort of intrinsic, I guess, training to when they to find something they go look in their app store or the marketplace, right. So if you can use your existing web development skills but build apps that are available in those platforms that are installable apps on the platforms, that can be a big boost in terms of at least consumer awareness of your product. One of the things, I don’t know, do you expect that this kind of PhoneGap, that you’ll have sort of the PhoneGap project as a preset in a future version of Dreamweaver maybe, that you’ll be able to just start a PhoneGap project and it’ll contact their build servers and deploy it automatically without it needing any extra installation? That sort of seems like what the logical progression would be.
Brad: Yeah, and that would be the smart move for sure, yeah, absolutely.
Stephan: Don’t they already kind of have that functionality?
Louis: I don’t know. I don’t pay enough attention to Dreamweaver (laughs).
Stephan: I don’t either but on their blog they have an Adobe Dreamweaver 5.5 supports PhoneGap post.
Louis: Oh, right, and when was that?
Stephan: That was April 12th of this year.
Louis: Alright, so obviously it’s something they’ve been paying attention with already, and maybe they thought that they could make it better by having that build service under their control, that way it’s easier for them to control the end-to-end if you can click on the build and deploy button in Dreamweaver and it will contact the servers which now Adobe owns and send your app out to the world.
Stephan: Yep.
Patrick: If you are a small company, or relatively small, offering some sort of tool for developers and Adobe establishes some sort of small business relationship with you, there is a fair chance that you will end up as part of the company (laughter).
Brad: I’m just looking at this and it looks like the only revenue model for PhoneGap at the moment is support, so I’m curious — as far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be anything — I mean you can download it, you can integrate it, you can run it.
Louis: Yeah, I think Nitobi, correct me if I’m going to be wrong about this, but I was under the impression that Nitobi was a sort of development and consulting company that did actual client mobile web development, and PhoneGap was something they build for internal use and then open sourced. So if you go to natobi.com the homepage it still looks like they’re a company that sort of builds mobile web apps for people and maybe that will change now that they’ve been purchased by Adobe and they’ll focus more on building these tools.
Patrick: That’s what it sounds like.
Brad: Very cool.
Patrick: So all of these Adobe-flavored announcements are coming out because Adobe just held their annual conference, Adobe MAX. And so they are making tons of announcements, doing demos, there’s a lot of presentations going on and so forth, and one of the more interesting things that came out of the event was a demonstration of a new unblur feature. Now, I was reminded of this story by Matt Mickiewicz, co-founder of SitePoint, and he linked me to 9to5Mac, but the story is with The NextWeb and they have a video of the demonstration, it’s a little shaky, but if you press play on it and you open it up full screen and put it on the 720p HD you can pretty clearly see what’s going on; the gentleman demoing this feature which is not scheduled to be shipping yet, it’s called a sneak, they don’t commit to a timeline, they don’t tell you it’s coming at all or in what version, but it’s something they’re working on. He takes a photo that’s blurry and shows how this feature will find the projection of the camera. They try to estimate how the camera moved to create that blur and then using that information they fix the photo, and in this case fix means to un-blur it to sharpen it so that it looks like the blur wasn’t there at all but it’s a clear photo, and it’s really an amazing demo. I don’t know if you guys have played this video at all but it’s something to behold to see blurry text go clear and a blurry photo of a crowd clear itself up.
Louis: So, yeah, anyone should definitely check it out because it is an amazing video and, you know, like the crowd absolutely goes nuts when he hits the button and the thing unblurs and goes sharp.
Patrick: Yeah, it’s fun to listen to the crowd.
Louis: And the guy who’s on stage with him like presenting it, I don’t know who the guy was but he obviously was not a –
Patrick: Rainn Wilson who is on The Office TV show.
Louis: Oh, okay, right, that’s why he didn’t seem to be too technically savvy.
Brad: It’s Dwight!
Patrick: Yeah, Dwight.
Louis: So, anyway, he was just like, no, that’s impossible, you didn’t just do that (laughter) which is pretty much how I felt about it but, yeah, I guess it’s going to be pretty impressive, I’m looking forward to the next version of Photoshop believe it or not.
Patrick: You know what came to mind when I first saw this, well, one of the things that came to mind was I run Photoshopforums.com and I forgot what member said this, but, people post blurry pictures all the time and they’re like, help, can you do anything with this? And oftentimes they’re just terrible, and of course there’s really not too much that you can do — yet anyway — depending on how bad it is because as the member put it you can’t polish a turd. Well, now it appears that you will be able to polish it, at least in one form or another if this feature comes out. So, I’m looking forward to seeing that; this will reduce the amount of requests that people post on forums asking for help I think.
Stephan: Yeah, so in Europe the BBC is reporting that they’re starting to outlaw pre-ticked checkboxes on shopping websites, so they just approved this legislation. So those checkboxes on let’s say an airline website that signs you up for insurance and it’s already checked when you go through will now be against the law in Europe. Interesting because it’s a common practice, it’s fairly common here in the United States; I don’t know if it’s common where you’re at, Louis.
Louis: Yeah, well, I mean I think it’s common everywhere, right, I mean any –
Patrick: Yeah.
Louis: Look, I mean I sit right next to the marketing guy in flippa.com, and every time we roll out a new feature that’s exactly the kind of thing, he’ll be like, ‘oh can you make the checkbox pre-ticked?’, that’s the kind of request we get from marketing. So I think it’s something that will happen on any website really because you’ve got the pressure of people wanting to try and make more sales, and one of the ways to do that is to make it so that if people don’t realize they’re buying something they’ll buy something.
Stephan: Yeah, yeah. And this also included some legislation, or it also includes the wording that online traders will have to disclose the total cost of a product including all fees, so this is another common practice with other industries where they will not disclose all fees until the very end or all taxes until the very end.
Patrick: Until the final checkout process.
Stephan: Yeah. So people get through thinking they’re going to pay a set price and at the very end they’re paying double or some ridiculous number. It’s interesting, it’s going to change the way that people do business in Europe.
Brad: Yeah, I hope this catches on everywhere.
Stephan: Yeah, it’d be nice. I’m interested to see what you guys think about it; do you think this is the right way to go or do you think that people should just do the right thing to begin with (laughs), that’s the way I feel.
Louis: Obviously people should just do the right thing, but that’s not what’s gonna happen.
Brad: Good luck with that!
Louis: (Laughs) It’s a matter of catching up, right, I mean there’s a bunch of rules about how you can see products in your physical store, and those rules have been on the books hundreds of years in most countries, and it’s just a matter of sort of the rule-making body sort of catching up with online commerce and what the things are they need to be protecting people from.
Stephan: Well, what I find interesting is say here in the state of Texas there’s an 8.25% sales tax, but you don’t put that on your price tag in the store, you know, you just put the price. But what we’re asking companies now to do is put that price out front on their web store, and I think that’s kind of one of those things that comes back to the Amazon issue, you know, not charging sales tax in other states and not because they’re not located there and things like that. So, it’s a whole new dynamic and I think that finally legislators and politicians are finally realizing that this is a new way of doing business even though it’s been around for how long now.
Patrick: I guess that depends on the case and the particular use. I think online it seems like it’s easier to deceive people online, Louis was mentioning in-store sales have different laws and rules that govern them. I think that’s a part of it but it wouldn’t be terrible if when you saw a price at the store that it included the sales tax.
Stephan: No.
Patrick: Just because the stores already collect the sales tax, so maybe it could just be switched around so that they get the sales tax percentage of the amount brought in and it could just be factored by the business and pay through their taxes as they already pay it. But instead of having to factor it after the fact and us see it on the receipt we can see it on the actual tag in the store.
Louis: Yeah, that’s how it works here in Australia, and it was the main thing I notice when moving from Quebec to Australia where, you know, and Quebec has huge sales tax, I don’t know what it is, something like 15%, something crazy like that.
Patrick: Wow.
Louis: And coming here all the prices are higher obviously because they include the sales tax, but it’s definitely much more convenient and you don’t wind up with these awkward prices; if something is $20.00 you pay a $20.00 bill and that’s how much it costs, not $21.50 or $21.67 or whatever.
Patrick: Right, yeah, that would be interesting to see. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in real life — real life (laughter) — to a checkbox, I don’t what it might be to a checkbox.
Louis: Well, and equivalent would be like if you walked up to the store and you had a thing, you brought it to the checkout aisle and they put it in your bag and they also put something else in your bag behind the counter and made you pay for it.
Stephan: Or this whole notion of not using credit cards or debit cards for anything less than, you know, you have to make a five dollar, ten dollar purchase before you can use your credit card, which isn’t illegal but it is against the terms and conditions of the credit cards, so that’s another one of those little things; you walk in, you don’t have any cash on you, you want to buy, I don’t know, something, and you can’t.
Patrick: I actually have a story about that. I don’t know even know if it’s happened to me more than once, but the one time I remember is with Brad at South by Southwest. We went into this little convenience store, I think him and Brian, his business partner, were looking for souvenirs and I wanted a bottle of water that was like two dollars and they wouldn’t take a credit care, like, what? Oh, okay, so I had cash, but, yeah I know exactly what you mean.
Stephan: It’s to get you to buy more, right; I mean they want you to buy more because they have to eat the fee.
Patrick: Right. And it’s because they can take the — they don’t get that full cash amount, there is the merchant charge and that’s — I mean I would think that and to get people to pay more but the merchant charge being taken out of it.
Stephan: That’s the big thing.
Patrick: But still to me that’s a part of the price of doing business, but obviously some particular stores, especially smaller ones, are going to do that sometimes.
Louis: Yeah, but I mean if you’re paying a whatever, let’s say a fifty cents merchant charge and your margin on something is 10%, anything less than five dollars the merchant charge is costing you more than the profit you’re making on the goods you’re selling right?
Patrick: Right.
Louis: Now, you know, I agree with you, I think it’s the cost of doing business, you know, you just deal with it, especially when the credit card company has terms and conditions that explicitly say you can’t do that, but it’s gonna keep happening. Anyway, I think specifically coming back to the checkbox thing and actually coming back to the Internet, (laughter) just got a little bit sidetracked here, no, I think it’s a great idea. Look forward to similar legislation everywhere. Yeah, alright, so the last story this week is a bit of a strange one. It’s something that went down about a week ago. Mark Pilgrim, who many of our listeners will know from his Dive Into website, so Dive Into Python, Dive Into HTML5, his GitHub, Reddit, Twitter accounts all suddenly went offline, he turned off all his email accounts, so if you try and send an email to any of his accounts it bounces straightaway, so he just suddenly disappeared from the Internet. And I’ll give away the ending right away, he apparently was located, there was a bit of a panic on web designers’ and web developers’ fear of Twitter and other social networks; where’d he go, what happened, is he alright? And he was located and said he was annoyed that people called the police, but that’s all we know at the moment, no one’s had any extended communication. So it’s interesting for a couple of reasons, there are a couple things I wanted to talk about with you guys. One of them is more of a technical issue is when all his websites that he hosted personally were returning an HTTP 410 error code, HTTP 410 is gone. So what that means is it’s basically permanently offline, the resource is gone. So rather than just taking them off and letting them 404 or redirecting to something else, he actually put in 410 which means it’s gone and it’s going away. And in a quote from his blog in 2003 that Eric Meyer brought up in his blog post initially when Mark went missing, there’s a quote from Mark Pilgrim saying, “Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.” So I wanted to know what you thought about the inherent geekiness of going offline and using the correct status code to represent your absence, first of all, and second of all do you think that the Internet really is impermanent and is 410 something we should all be seeing more of?
Stephan: I still want to know why he did it. I was actually trying to download some Python stuff and get some stuff working, so I went into Dive Into Python, I guess the date has happened and it was dead and I couldn’t find — I just thought maybe he was down temporarily and then I looked at the code and was like, crap, what’s going on. So, I just want to know what happened.
Brad: He needed to unplug.
Stephan: I guess. Permanently.
Patrick: I think the Internet is somewhat impermanent. We always talk about how when you put something out there you can never get it back, but mostly that just applies to celebrities (laughter).
Louis: Well, it’s interesting. People have put up mirrors of almost all of his content, so Dive Into HTML5, Dive Into Python, all this stuff has been scraped off of archives and copied to other places and put back online. So the stuff is all there, it really is all there, it never goes away, you’re right.
Patrick: But is it his personal stuff or is it just the, I want to say, the knowledge sharing, the techie stuff? I didn’t know much about him; I didn’t really know him but I don’t know if he had a personal website or not, or some other kind of social profiles where he was not the geeky coding person all the time but also someone else. I don’t know, I didn’t know him but I mean it’s an interesting thing; I personally am one of those people who say, you know what, you can’t flip it all of. You can’t control the Web and you can’t control what people will disseminate, or scrape in this case, or the Wayback machine has on file or whatever, but I think you can step away and then can leave it behind, and that’s apparently what he did. It definitely piques your curiosity but at the same time I’m more or less like, well, I guess if he’s okay and everyone who cares about him is good then that’s all that really matters.
Brad: And I like to think if I shut down all my sites and deleted my social network accounts and just disappear that you guys would come looking for me.
Patrick: Well, I do have your phone number.
Brad: I’d like to hope you guys would come looking for me.
Patrick: So that would have been my first start (laughter).
Brad: Send the police.
Patrick: I would.
Louis: So the other thing I wanted to maybe — so there’s this bit about the error code which is one thing I thought was kind of cool and geeky about it, his disappearing but doing it in the technically correct fashion, but the other thing is a lot of the stuff was educational resources, right, that’s stuff that’s used by thousands of people out there teaching themselves HTML5 and Python, for example. I don’t know, how do you feel about the decision to sort of turn all that stuff off, even though I guess on some level he must have known that people would be able to resurrect it.
Patrick: Right, yeah. I mean me personally I share a lot for free, I put a lot out there, I answer a lot of emails and whatnot about community, and I don’t necessarily think anyone’s entitled to the things I provide forever, I mean if you buy a book that’s fixed, that’s fine; if you buy an eBook that’s fixed, that’s fine, that’s a little different, but as far as a website or what I put out online I don’t necessarily feel that it’s — it’s inappropriate to remove a site — where his sites free to access?
Louis: Yeah.
Patrick: Okay, I mean I don’t necessarily feel it’s inappropriate to remove a site that was free to access. I can understand how someone might be frustrated because they referred to it a lot and now there’s a lot of dead links or because they enjoyed the information, but, I almost feel like you have to appreciate what you have while you have it and not expect it to be there forever.
Stephan: I think if it was like personal blog posts, yeah sure, fine, but it was essentially a reference tool; if Wikipedia, which is crap anyway, but if a site like that (laughter) was taken off — someone’s personal site was taken offline and other people were using it as a reference tool and you knew it was being used that way do you feel it’s right to take it offline?
Patrick: I mean right or wrong is kind of a different question. Do I feel it’s right or wrong? I kind of don’t feel it’s either because, again, I kind of go back to the thought of it was shared freely, it’s not something that you’re entitled to I guess is my thought. I don’t know; Brad, what do you think?
Brad: Like you said, if it’s not something that people are paying to access and there’s some kind of certain commitment then there’s really — there is no commitment whether that stuff’s going to stay online. Like if I decide to — I’ve had my blog up since 2006, if I decide to take it down that’s my prerogative, I can do that, it’s my content, it’s my site, I can do what I want with it, so if he wants to take it down I have no problem when people take their sites down. Now, like you said, if it’s a resource that I liked and used on a weekly or daily basis I would certainly miss it, but there are ways to find that stuff through archive.org or other various resources.
Stephan: I guess I just don’t have the time you guys do to go searching places like this (laughs).
Patrick: You’re just too entitled.
Brad: I’m not saying I wouldn’t miss it but who am I to say that they don’t have the right to take down their site with all their content on it that I can get to for free, you know?
Patrick: (Laughs) when you put it that way.
Stephan: I guess I’ll just go by the book is what you’re saying.
Louis: Look, it’s all back online now. If you do a Google search for Dive Into Python or DDive Into HTML5, somewhere on that first page are mirrors of the content with the full content available from other places, so it’s all there, it’s all back. But, yeah, I mean I guess I’m kind of on the fence as well, I feel like I can understand, so I guess it’s sort of almost a psychological question like how can you on the one hand want to make all this stuff free and available and help people learn stuff and then decide that you don’t anymore? Like I don’t — I don’t know.
Patrick: Yeah, it’s tough. Obviously something happened.
Louis: But, look, it’s no criticism. Obviously there was so much good work done and, you know, Mark was an amazing help to a lot of people, I think probably half the people in the world who write Python learned it from Mark, and likewise for HTML5, there was so much good quality in there and it’s still out there and really, really fantastic work, and huge respect for the guy no matter why he chose to do this or whatnot, I think he was a massive, massive contribution to the Web. Yeah, I guess we can move from that somewhat more introspective note to a somewhat goofier note in spotlights.
Patrick: I’ll go first with goofy. I want to talk about my weekend, this weekend I went to see Weird Al Yankovic in concert at the Durham Performing Arts Center in Durham, North Carolina. And I’ve been a Weird Al fan for a long time and never seen him live in person, it was awesome! It was a great show, a lot of fun, I went with my two brothers and that’s my spotlight it Weird Al, WeirdAl.com. If you are a fan of Weird Al in any way, shape or form, even in a minor way, I would urge you to go see him perform live when he comes to your area. He tours somewhere regularly, internationally even, so there’s a good chance he’ll be coming near you; he was about four hours from me, and it was a great, great show, I loved it. So that’s my spotlight. I don’t know; any of you guys Weird Al fans?
Louis: I think there was a time it would’ve been, man, it would’ve been like going on like 10 years ago now when I was like really, really into a couple of those records. But, yeah, it’s been ages since I put that stuff on.
Brad: I was a big UHF fan back in the day (laughter). Do you remember UHF, the movie?
Patrick: Yeah. It’s funny we’re thinking about how long he’s been around and been successful, like if you go and look at his albums and where they chart and how well they do, he’s been really successful for a long time and he has a diverse fan base as far as age, like there are people, I don’t know, from every decade there for the last 80 years maybe. And it was really interesting to see someone who isn’t necessarily a mainstream star, but yet if you go down the street so many people will know who Weird Al is even if they don’t necessarily have his music or like it or whatever, just because he has that level of notoriety. So it was a great show, I really enjoyed it.
Louis: I think “It’s All About the Pentiums” really struck a chord with us geeks.
Patrick: Yeah, he actually didn’t do that song. But of course he’s done all the — how many geeky songs can you do (laughter) I mean all of his songs are geeky. He did do White and Nerdy, and the encore was the two Star Wars songs, The Saga Begins and Yoda. So, you know, he is — I would say he’s one of those acts that is predisposed for the geeky side of us all.
Brad: My spotlight this week is actually WordPress related, surprise.
Louis: I’m shocked, Brad, I’m absolutely shocked.
Brad: Hey, I got to keep you guys on your toes. WordPress 3.3 beta 1 has been released. It seems like we were just talking about 3.2 and guess what, 3.3 is getting ready to come out, they’re shooting for the end of November, but the beta is out there and there are some pretty cool new features. We got, let’s see, so far we got the new feature popup, so they made a system where kind of like when you install a new application and you fire it up for the first time there’ll be various little hints and tips as you navigate through the software pointing to different things giving you a tip of what that button does or what that menu might do. Those are built-in now and actually plugin and theme authors can hook into that and add tips to their plugins and themes which is pretty cool.
Louis: That’s a really good idea because I find that a lot of — especially the themes that have a lot of options, like you activate it and then there’s a bunch of other stuff you need to do before it gets going but you don’t know where that stuff is really, so just having stuff where it’ll be able to show you in the menu, hey, go here to pick a background image or whatever.
Brad: I haven’t actually played with it yet on the plugin side but I’m anxious to try it because, you’re right, it something especially if you have a more complicated plugin or theme it would be extremely handy to point new users in the right direction. And there’s a new admin bar revamped, so they kind of darkened it up and rearranged the icons a bit and the dropdown; a new flyout menu so when you hover the menu’s they’ll kind of pop out and show you the submenus underneath there so it makes navigation a little bit quicker. And probably the most notable change is going to be the new media uploader which they’ve integrated Plupload; I don’t know if it’s Plupload or PL upload, Plupload just doesn’t sound right (laughter). I’m going to go with Plupload.
Patrick: Good old Plupload.
Brad: It’s made by the same team that does the TinyMCE editor which a lot of people, a lot of developers I’m sure are familiar.
Patrick: Tiny Mickey.
Brad: Tiny MCE, Tiny Mice some might say, but essentially the new media uploader you click upload media and you can just drag files from your desktop, so you don’t have to select files and go into the browser, you know, the select file dialogue; you literally just grab however many files, whatever files you want off your computer, drag them over to the website, drop ‘em and it’ll upload them for you. So it’s kind of based on the Google+ image uploader how you can just drag your images, and it’s actually a really cool — this Plupload is actually pretty cool because it supports Flash, HTML5 and Silverlight, so before the image uploaded for bulk uploads was all Flash based, now that it supports HTML5 that opens up the door to kind of use it on different platforms and make it a little more native which is pretty cool. So the beta’s out, you can download it, install it, bug test it, provide feedback, it’s always fun to play with a new version before it goes public and everyone else gets to see it, so there’s a great article on WPTavern.com that has screenshots if you don’t feel like installing it you can check out the screenshots and the various explanations about the different new features, and then if you go to WordPress.org they have a link, you can download the beta, so download it and help provide some feedback.
Louis: I’ve really enjoyed the last pretty much since 3.0 every point release has been really good stuff in it. I’m loving the way the interface works now, like that admin bar is really useful, yeah, just really impressed by the work they’ve been doing.
Patrick: And speaking of WordPress, WordCamp Philly is coming up November 5th and 6th in Philadelphia, I’m looking forward to heading up there and Brad’s co-organizing that, so if you’re into WordPress and in that area definitely check it out.
Brad: It’s going to be the event of the year, you heard it hear first (laughter).
Patrick: Mark your social calendar.
Brad: The event of the year. Patrick’s speaking; I’m speaking, event of the year, WordCampPhilly.com, that’s all it takes.
Patrick: My gosh.
Louis: Awesome.
Stephan: I’m a big South Park fan and there’s a new documentary coming out called Six Days to Air, it’s the making of South Park and it talks about how they kind of just make the show up at the last minute, and it’s pretty good, so there’s a trailer out for it and it looks really good.
Louis: Yeah, it sounds good. It’s always been I think South Park’s strength really is that what they lack in polish they have in sort of topicality because they’re always right on top of any news story.
Patrick: Just like our podcast.
Stephan: It’s like a news, you know, episode that’s put together and well thought out before its run. Like Jon Stewart, he’s fairly relevant because it’s nightly and once a week or whatever it is, but it’s news, right, he’s just reading the news and writes some comedy, he’s got a bunch of writers; this actually has to be animated and there has to be a storyline and things, so it’s interesting to me.
Louis: Interesting indeed. My spotlight this week is a post from The Big Picture Blog on Boston.com, I don’t know if any of you are familiar with The Big Picture.
Stephan: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Louis: It’s a really fantastic photography blog that just sort of takes some of the better photography from news stories from a week, or whatever, so any major news story there will often be a special post on The Big Picture with some of the best photography about that story. Now, this week there was a post about the Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition, so it’s a competition of I guess microscopic photography, and they’ve got some of the best photos that were submitted to that competition as well as some other photos that they’ve really liked in the genre, and some of these are absolutely amazing. I don’t know, I got really kind of a geeky thrill out of seeing sort of all this stuff really up close and how weird living things look when you’re really close to them, I don’t know, what do you guys think?
Stephan: It’s really cool.
Patrick: Yeah, some of these are nightmare worthy.
Louis: (Laughs) Yeah, the last one.
Patrick: I hope I don’t wake up like tonight and think, Louis! What did you do to me?
Louis: Some of them are gorgeous, though; you see number 33 which is a butterfly egg, it’s just absolutely gorgeous, it looks like something out of, you know, science fiction.
Patrick: Yeah, gorgeous science fiction alien baby, sounds wonderful (laughter).
Louis: The other one I really like is the one of sand because it looks like most of it isn’t actually sand, it’s number 15.
Patrick: Okay, there we go. Yeah, it’s cool.
Louis: It’s sand but it’s like most of it, I mean there’s two pieces of what definitely look like – Silicon oxide. But one of them is a –
Patrick: Is that a tooth (laughs).
Louis: — tooth of some kind of little animal and then there’s like a shell and some pieces of coral, so I guess what we think of as sand isn’t actually mostly just plain sand but a bunch of other microscopic –
Patrick: Garbage.
Louis: Garbage (laughs).
Patrick: It’s a bunch of garbage. That’s funny.
Louis: But, anyway, it’s really beautiful, the colors, just the amazingness of living things. And that’s my spotlight for this week. Yeah, let’s wrap it up!
Brad: I’m Brad Williams from Webdev Studios and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.
Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network; I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.
Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and I blog occasionally at badice.com.
Louis: And you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m; if you go to sitepoint.com/podcast that’s the place to find all of our episodes or leave a comment on this show or any of our previous shows. You can find me on Twitter @rssaddict. Thanks for listening!
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
Episode 133 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy), Brad Williams (@williamsba) and Karn Broad (@WebKarnage).
Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below:
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
This episode of the podcast is all about paying tribute to Steve Jobs, and the profound effect he has had on the technology landscape that has changed the web and how we access it. The Panel discuss the effect his work has had on them, and look at some of the fine tributes other have paid.
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/133.
No transcript this week for the extra show.
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
Episode 132 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Ethan Marcotte (@beep or @rwd) the designer widely credited with originating the term Responsive Design. He was also part of the team to put this into action for the first time on what could be called a ‘mainstream’ site, The Boston Globe.
Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below:
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
Louis and Ethan get to grips with how the Boston Globe design job came about, how the idea of Responsive Design appeared and the question “is everything that’s not responsive simply behind the times?”.
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/132.
Transcript to Follow.
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.
Paul Matthews
With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn’t always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we’ll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.
Edit: Paul’s slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/paulmatthews86/search-with-solr
Like it? Share it!
Episode 131 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week the panel is made up of Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Brad Williams (@williamsba), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy).
Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below:
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
Here are the main topics covered in this episode:
Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/131.
Louis: Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the SitePoint podcast, I’m here with the regular panel to talk about the news on the Web this past week, hi guys!
Stephan: Howdy, howdy.
Brad: Hello, hello.
Patrick: Hey!
Louis: How you all doing this week?
Patrick: That too loud for you? No, I’m just kidding (laughter). I’m doing good actually, I’m in the middle of web hosting nightmare day, but other than that I’m excellent.
Louis: Oh, web hosting nightmare day, is that like programmer’s day?
Patrick: Yes, exactly, it’s a made up holiday.
Brad: I don’t think it’s as fun as programmer’s day.
Patrick: Don’t think it’s as fun but it’s caused by programmers sometimes. No, just kidding, one of those days.
Louis: Well, we’ve all had ‘em.
Patrick: Yeah, well, hopefully you won’t lose 10 days of content when it happens to you.
Louis: Oh, that hurts!
Patrick: Yes, it does, thank you (laughter).
Brad: Starting the show on a bright note today.
Patrick: Yeah. This is actually the highlight of my day. I don’t know if that’s sad or that’s good, but I mean — I don’t know.
Stephan: So the people in their cars heading to work today it’s like a wake-up to them to double check their backups, is that what you’re saying?
Patrick: Right. Well, no, I have backups but, you know, I don’t have backups to the second, I have backups every two days that I take and there’s like a system of backups and, yeah, maybe I’ll lose five days, I don’t know, but anyway, losing content, yeah, is never good.
Louis: Did the server just die?
Patrick: It’s a complicated issue. No, the server didn’t die, in fact, there were probably too many servers and the wrong one was cut, so, yeah, it’s been fun today, all day, and last night quality of sleep was up there for sure.
Louis: Alright, well, let’s try and shift your mood a little bit by kicking into the news. Does anyone want to go first? Let’s not do Stephan’s story first because that will not improve anyone’s mood.
Stephan: It’s a real downer.
Brad: I’ll go first. I don’t know how exciting it will be for Patrick being a non-developer, but, if you are a developer there’s a new API out there and it was released about two weeks ago, but it was a couple days after our last live show so I thought it was important enough to bring it up, and that was the Google+ API has been released, the first version, obviously it’s a very limited API but they finally got it out, and it’s a restful API design so it basically uses standard http methods to retrieve and manipulate data. And currently the API only allows you to access public information, so if you post something on Google+ and you’ve made it public you can access that via the API, however, if you post something to a specific circle that is not available to it through the API. So I think it could be really fun to see how developers kind of take this and see what they can start doing with it, and if people really kind of stick with Google+, especially after some of these apps that they’re used to seeing on other social networks start showing up on Google+.
Stephan: The way I measure success is when Scrabble shows up or Farmville.
Brad: It’s the games; it’s all about the games, right?
Louis: They’ve all got games like two days after the initial launch.
Brad: You have to launch some games unless I mean or else no one will show up. It looks pretty cool, it basically returns JSON, so there’s a couple interesting little tidbits, it returns JSON only, so there’s no XML option, it launched with OAuth2 support for authentication, which apparently the only thing you can actually do when you authenticate at this point is get the nice user name instead of using their Google ID.
Louis: It’s a pretty limited beta here.
Brad: Pretty limited but considering they got it out pretty quick, I mean it’s been, what, I think they said three months and people were kind of hammering at the door like why isn’t there an API, which I thought was a little ridiculous, that’s pretty quick to get an API out.
Louis: I’m sorry; I’m going to join the chorus of people saying why isn’t there an API. Look, the infrastructure is there, you’ve got your database schema, you’ve got — your web version is just an API, right, you’re just pulling data out, and for something like this, just rest returning JSON, that’s not hard; it seems like for something you want to get early adopters, and early adopters include a lot of developers who are going to want to try and play around with this and see what they can build on top of it, I don’t think there’s any reason why they couldn’t have launched with an API available from day one.
Patrick: I hope they take the API away now because of this.
Brad: I think you’re right, they could have launched with it, but reading some of the articles about the release of this it sounded like Google wanted to get Google+ out there and get people using it to see how they would actually use it, because they weren’t — they had a good idea of how people were going to use it, but you never really know until millions of people show up on your site and they start using it. So I have a feeling that is probably helping shape the future of the API even though what they released is pretty limited right now I’m sure they’re working hard on the next version of it, and I’m sure that watching how these tens of millions of people, I think they’re up to around 30 million now on Google+, how they’re using the service is going to really help shape how this API evolves.
Stephan: Well, maybe it wasn’t about how they were going to use the service but if they were going to use the service (laughter), that’s the real question.
Louis: Yeah, I mean on the plus side to speak positively of this I have to say you know it’s great to see API’s this cleanly designed, obviously there aren’t a ton of methods available yet, but having a nice easy rest API that returns JSON and works with OAuth is great having had to work with a couple of let’s say less elegant API’s over the years, I think us as developers we can all agree that this is refreshing.
Stephan: This leads me to my question; do you guys prefer the JSON method rather than XML?
Louis: Absolutely, no question.
Stephan: Okay, got it.
Brad: I mean I work with both, especially like a lot of the CMS’ really support both, open source CMS’, so to me I could go either way, it’s not like I require one over the other, but I think everything is kind of leaning towards JSON now, so I think that’s where, you know, I better start getting used to it I guess.
Stephan: Yeah. That was just a question I had.
Louis: One of the things I like about the JSON is it’s kind of self-documenting, you know a lot of API’s out there if it’s from a small company that hasn’t released a full service they can just give you an example of what the JSON returns, and it’s much more readable I find, so it’s easy to look at and be like, oh, I’m getting a person with a username and a password and whatever, XML’s got so much cruft around it that it’s harder to read for humans.
Stephan: Yep, I agree.
Brad: You know going back to what we talked about and how they took a little bit to release it, I think another thing, and we’ve discussed this on the podcast, it’s been a while, maybe six or eight months ago, but we talked about how developers are getting very frustrated with these API’s that are being released and then changed every six months; Facebook’s notorious for that. The Facebook API since it’s launched has changed a ridiculous amount of times, and it can be extremely frustrating for developers if they have to keep going back and changing the methods that they’re using, changing the code that you would expect to be not necessarily locked in but not something you have to change every six months. So, by them taking their time and, like you said, coming out with good standards using things like OAuth and JSON right out of the box it’s comforting to look at this and think as it stands right now I know it’s very basic, I wouldn’t see this changing any time soon.
Louis: Yeah, I definitely look forward to seeing what can be done with that. Google+ reminds me in a lot of ways of FriendFeed in the way that it works in terms of comment streams and public and private posts, and I remember when FriendFeed came out with its API like there was so much innovation around that, so I’m really as excited to see, and this has got a much bigger audience obviously which includes a lot of developers, so it’ll be really cool to see what people do with it.
Patrick: Yeah, you guys aren’t really too active on Google+, I just pulled up your profiles just to see. Brad has one update since August 8th, Louis has one update in September, one since August 26th, Stephan, of course the worst of everyone, has two updates overall, July 4th and August 6th, so it’s not because there’s no API; why is it that you guys just haven’t spent too much time over there, I guess Brad first?
Brad: The biggest thing for me is probably that it doesn’t support Google apps, and I’m logged into Google apps all day long, so for me to log — I basically have to switch accounts in the middle of the day to get on Google+, so it’s a bit of a — a little bit of an inconvenience, it’s not like it’s that hard to switch accounts, but it is a big enough inconvenience that if I do get on it it’s usually like in the evening on the laptop, and I guess I’m just not — I haven’t really — it hasn’t become a habit for me, whereas Facebook and Twitter are kind of habits for me at this point, they’re sites and services I check throughout the day multiple times, and Google+ just hasn’t got there yet.
Patrick: Yeah, you make a great point because — and for me it’s kind of opposite because my YouTube usage has dropped because I associate it with the wrong account, and now first world problems, white wine, whatever you want to call it, I don’t want to switch, I just don’t bother to switch the accounts. And a friend of mine, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, he’s not on Google+ yet because of the Google apps thing because he merged his accounts and he can’t use it yet, and it’s funny they’re prompting me to merge my account now or to separate it, and he’s like “Don’t do it, never do it!” Because they have locked out people who use a Google apps email address and he’s just out of luck right now, and it seems like such a strange problem, I don’t know why they’re doing that.
Louis: The stuff is getting better. Look, I understand they’ve had massive problems with the Google apps issue before, but it used to be, you know, like a friend of mine posted on Twitter something about playing Google apps roulette, and whenever you went to Docs you’d be logged into some random account, like you’d click on a link in an email –
Brad: Docs is the worst.
Louis: – in your Gmail, and then when you arrived at Google Docs you’d be logged into a different account suddenly and it’d say you don’t have access to view this document when I just clicked a link in an email that was sent to me.
Patrick: Yeah.
Louis: It was really random. And it has gotten better, the new account switcher I use it in Gmail and I’m logged into all three of my, you know, two Google Apps accounts and my personal Gmail account all day and it works pretty well, there’s only a few little tweaks, it’s getting better. Yeah, as for me, why haven’t I used Google+ more, there’s a couple of things, one is I find the stuff that people are posting less interesting than on other networks. And I don’t know it’s maybe just the people I’m following, but it seems like people are trying to post more blogg-ish content and trying to like not just sort of offhand, hey, here’s what I’m doing; it doesn’t feel like a casual social environment, it feels very like I’m trying to get people to comment on my stuff, and maybe that’s just because the early adopters are very much in the sort of blogger and tech-focus kind of person.
Patrick: Yep.
Louis: The other thing that bugs me is, like I said, for me it reminds me of FriendFeed but then it’s missing some features that I really like, so it always feels kind of awkward because I feel like I’m in that environment and then suddenly I’m not. So, for example, you don’t have friend of a friend, so if somebody that I follow Like something or Plus1 something that someone else has posted I don’t see that, so I only see the stuff that’s posted directly by people I follow, so there’s less serendipity, like I won’t randomly see stuff by new people and get to discover new people, and the other stuff is stuff doesn’t float to the top as it gets Liked or as it gets commented on, it’s all sort of in chronological order of when it was posted; it just doesn’t feel as good an interaction to me as, you know, like I know FriendFeed’s dead, I know nobody uses it anymore but it’s still what I like best.
Patrick: You’re like on the street corner impassioned; give me back my FriendFeed Zuckerberg! (Laughter)
Louis: You know, look, that’s how I feel about it.
Patrick: Yeah. And Brad I saw just updated his Google+, thank you, Brad.
Brad: You called me out, that’s my status update for the month (laughter).
Patrick: Stephan, what about you?
Stephan: I just don’t have time (laughs).
Patrick: Okay, insult the rest of us. I’m too busy.
Stephan: If it had an iPhone app I probably would, yeah, just because I could download everything real quick and then read it later.
Brad: There is an iPhone app.
Stephan: Oh, there is?
Brad: It’s pretty good, too.
Stephan: I’ll have to look that up then. Alright, so maybe I will get addicted now.
Brad: Yeah, check it out. It’s not perfect but it’s considering how new Google+ is it’s pretty far along I think.
Stephan: I’ll have to check it out then; I haven’t even looked at it so I’ll do that.
Patrick: Yeah, Brad, you’re a little like Zuckerberg because he has zero updates and like a million followers and people in his circles, you have 10 and 500, so that’s like an update for every 50 people that follow you.
Brad: I should update more. I hope they’re not expecting much.
Louis: I’ve got a really weird story that I don’t really — I’m not sure I 100% understand it but I’m going to throw it out there because in theory it sounds pretty cool but it also sounds kind of messed up. So what it is is it’s on the Mozilla blog and it’s from I think about a week ago, and they’ve launched something called the Open Badge Infrastructure Project. So, they describe it as an effort to make it easy to issue and share digital learning badges across the Web.
Patrick: It’s the gold star API!
Louis: What’d you say?
Patrick: It’s the gold star API.
Louis: It is literally a gold star API. Now, I’m just going to stop there, I can go in more detail about some of the technical stuff behind this a little bit later, but I just want immediate reactions from you guys on this idea.
Patrick: I think you can insert the obligatory, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges” quote in here.
Louis: I was kind of expecting that.
Brad: Because I guess maybe I don’t quite get it, so you get — badges are for what, for like — it looks like learning like languages on the Web, learning different — I mean is a kind of like a certification, is that what we’re talking about here, it would be a badge instead of a cert?
Louis: I guess it kind of is. So let’s say, for example, that I have an online set of tutorials or I teach webinars on something, right, and then when people attend my webinar or once they’ve completed my course I can give them a badge. And this provides an API to sort of sign it, so what it does is it embeds some JSON metadata into the PNG file that I issue to them, and then you can verify that against Mozilla’s API at openbadges.org and sort of add it to a badge backpack and display it on other sites and it’s certified via this API. So the idea is you’ve got this sort of consistent standard for issuing badges and displaying them on your sites.
Stephan: This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen (laughter).
Brad: I was waiting for someone to say it.
Stephan: What’s even dumber is that I read down here at the bottom of this article that they’ve got a million dollar grant to do this, Mozilla did, to work on this infrastructure.
Louis: Yes, from the MacArthur Foundation.
Stephan: Yeah, from the MacArthur Foundation.
Patrick: Money’s money.
Stephan: Yeah! I’ll come up with some badges for a million bucks, sheesh.
Patrick: See, when I get a badge I always download it and upload it to my server so I don’t suck down their bandwidth, right, but this throws that idea completely on its head.
Louis: No, no, no, it does work like that.
Patrick: Okay.
Stephan: (Laughs)
Patrick: So I still have to download stuff?
Louis: As an issuer of a badge, right, you just — you sign it with this JSON encoded in the thing, right, and then you can just sent it to the person via email or whatever and they can display it on their site or whatever, but it’s been signed with this API so if you have a plugin for WordPress, for example, you can report back to the API and get the metadata and get links to where this badge was issued from and all that from the PNG.
Patrick: And I know Mozilla probably has different projects they’re interested in beyond just Firefox, but this is on the Mozilla Firefox, I mean there’s a logo for Mozilla Firefox on the top left of the page, so I’m just going to associate it with Firefox and say is this what’s supposed to halt Firefox’s continued market share loss, the open badges?
Louis: Well, I don’t think, I’m going to be fair, I don’t think this specifically has anything to do with Firefox because there’s not implicit or explicit link with the browser, you don’t need Firefox to use it, sorry to shoot you down there.
Patrick: No, I get it but I just wonder…
Brad: To me this just seems like a lot of these kind of arbitrary certifications you hear of or people put on LinkedIn and you’re just like what is that certification, you know it doesn’t — it’s from some strange website that no one’s ever heard of.
Stephan: Well, that’s the beauty of it, Brad, that’s the beauty of it; now you’ll know, now you’ll actually know, you’ll be able to click on it (laughs).
Patrick: It’s standardized, Brad.
Brad: I promise if someone hands me a resume with badges on it (laughter) I’m probably gonna laugh for a little bit but I doubt they’ll get the spot.
Louis: I’m going to read a quote from the press release from the MacArthur Foundation, the quote is from Julia Stash, Vice President of U.S. Programs at the MacArthur Foundation: “Digital technologies are helping to re-imagine learning, and badges are emerging as a new way to both encourage and demonstrate the acquisition of knowledge and skills of all kinds in formal and informal settings. Badges are simple, easy and if done well can present a more nuanced picture of what an individual knows and can do, there’s much more to learn and we expect that this competition will continue to developing a badge system that could change the way people share information about themselves, businesses make hiring decisions and organizations support the acquisition of skills important to their mission or to the larger society.”
Stephan: So, well we know where $50.00 of that million dollars went, to write that.
Louis: (Laughs)
Patrick: That’s how much copywriters go for, wow.
Stephan: I think so, yeah, it took about an hour. So, I just don’t get it. It’s like Call of Duty badges for the Internet (laughter).
Patrick: Oh, man, but if you could flash right in front of your face, right, like HTML5 unlocked! Wouldn’t that be awesome.
Stephan: I really look forward to putting this on my resume.
Patrick: So they have a flowchart on openbadges.org, which is the website for this effort, and it’s at the bottom so you have to scroll all the way to the bottom, but they have like I guess the evolution of your badge, so badge issuers they show after-school programs, online learning, job training then it goes to badges then learner who has a badge backpack who then embeds those badges on the website, social networks, blogs and resumes, I guess online resumes and employment sites, and then from that they get jobs, educational opportunities and they unlock new privileges.
Louis: I don’t know who drew this thing.
Stephan: That would be new attachment for your gun in Call of Duty (laughter).
Louis: Yeah, man, look, I definitely had kind of the impression when I saw this like, “what, really?”
Patrick: And there’s a whole FAQ on their website that helps to, I don’t know, I don’t know if it helps or not, but.
Louis: I don’t think it really helps.
Patrick: What I kind of got was they’re going to have to tighten who can issue these badges, right, I mean it’s not going to become something that you can every — you don’t go to Brad, you know, Webdev Studios and say, Brad, we need to develop this open badge!
Brad: Hey, give me a million dollar grant I’ll make a badge system for you.
Louis: But I think that’s it, I think the idea is not controlled, right, if I’m any kind of website I can issue badges to members or whatever.
Patrick: Geez.
Stephan: You’re going to have a set of hackers who look like they’re the Mensa Foundation (laughter).
Brad: I’m trying to find a list of all the badges, is that not available?
Louis: See that’s it, this is just infrastructure, it’s not like — they don’t have badges, it’s just an API that any website can use.
Brad: I just want to see the badges!
Patrick: Yeah, interestingly if you click on user stories on their site it takes you to a blog that actually has posts from March of this year, it’s a post from March of this year I should say, “Badges in the Real World,” and it says, “How do we explain Mozilla’s Open Badge Project to beginners,” and it goes from there talking about different people, students, and how badges benefit them. And this is from March so I guess this has been in development for a little while.
Louis: Yeah, it’s in very early days, and if you look at they’ve got a version of the code to interact with the API on GitHub and the documentation is somewhat incomplete, for example, he talks about he wants to eventually do sort of public/private keys for signing the badges, but that’s not done yet so all you do is embed the metadata directly in the thing rather than embedding the private key, so it’s a long way from being what they want it to be I guess. I’m definitely going to read this article about Badges in the Real World from this blog just to read about these user stories, I mean if people have compelling experiences learning stuff and teaching stuff with the help of badges then I guess more power to you. But, yeah, call me skeptical off the bat, that’s kind of where I sit on this.
Patrick: If you’re a badge holder leave a comment at sitepoint.com/podcast and let us know.
Louis: Yeah, absolutely. Look, if people want to email us and tell us in any kind of story about how — I’ll be fair, like there are computer games that I’ve spent longer playing than I would have if it hadn’t been for achievements and badges, you know, like I’m done, I’ve had my fun and I finished the game so I would just move on, but it kind of sucks me back in with, oh look, I can get an achievement if I do this or whatever. And you know I can see that maybe you could apply that same whatever psychological motivation to other context that are more productive than Call of Duty, yeah, I mean, look, if it works I guess.
Patrick: I don’t want to unlock new achievements, I want to unlock higher pay grade (laughter).
Louis: Yeah, well, I can’t see it; it’s hard for me to imagine a situation in which this would be applicable in that kind of context, in the context of a resume or in the context of unlocking new privileges which is what they said which is weird, but it’s hard for me to visualize a future in which an employer would look at an online resume and say, ooh look there’s a badge from the school of web something, you know.
Patrick: Yeah.
Louis: I don’t really — I don’t get it.
Stephan: Hey, if you’re applying for a job at Mozilla then maybe.
Louis: Well, maybe, yeah then it’s all about the badges.
Stephan: So let’s go down the depressing road, and there’s a story coming out today, Oracle announced — it actually came out the 16th of September, Oracle has announced the availability of commercial extensions for the MySQL database, MySQL database. These new extensions are only being added to the Enterprise Edition and will further differentiate the commercial edition from the community edition. So, this is the beginning of the end, I think, or part of the end I think.
Louis: I think everyone when Oracle picked up Sun had sort of fears that this sort of thing might happen down the track.
Stephan: And Monty, Michael Widenius, the guy who originally invented, started MySQL, has a pretty good blog post on his blog about how this kind of spells the beginning of the end and why the open core, which is the model they’re going with, is kind of the wrong way to go. And it’s a really good read, it talks about you’re depending on one vendor now for your project, you can’t really do any bug fixes yourself and you really can’t contract anybody to do them for you except the original vendor, and things like that, so it’s a really good read if people are interested on what this means in the future, so check it out and we’ll link to it. What do you guys think?
Brad: I wonder what this does to the actual MySQL license because MySQL released on the GPL, and obviously you can certainly sell software under the GPL, but if it’s not freely available as part of that then that would essentially break the license.
Patrick: Uh, oh, WordPress developer among us, everybody run!
Brad: (Laughs) Well, I mean anytime you talk open source there’s always debates on the software license behind it and what exactly it means, and this is that. But at the end of the day if it’s released under the GPL then introducing something that’s not actually open where they charge for it, they can charge for it all day long if they wanted, that doesn’t void the GPL, but if it is encrypted code, for example, then that would. And there’s no specifics in these articles, so I’m curious if they’ve mentioned that or if maybe Enterprise comes under a different license.
Louis: Yeah, well I image it’s probably the core still has to be open because it’s GPL, as you’ve mentioned, but I guess these extensions are probably just sort of separate code bases that are under different licenses and that sort of plug in to Oracle.
Brad: And that’s a whole nother argument you could have is whether — and this is any open source project, if anyone’s listening that has worked with one knows especially on the licensing, that it can get extremely tricky when you say what’s — you know like a plugin in WordPress, is that considered a part of WordPress because it has to have WordPress to run and if it’s a derivative work of WordPress because it’s a plugin for WordPress, I would kind of consider that the same for MySQL if it’s kind of like an add-on for MySQL that you have to have MySQL for it to work, it’s not going to work if you just run it by itself. I could be totally off; I don’t know anything about these plugins or the commercial extensions they’re starting to sell.
Stephan: Well, something interesting that they’ve done here is that, just reading through Oracle’s press release, they have kind of thrown in some of the Oracle features that are out there now for commercial, their commercial use, which like VM template which is something that they have for Oracle already, and the Windows clustering they already have that for Oracle. So, I’m wondering maybe they’re trying to merge the two a little bit and trying to get some of their MySQL customers to move over to Oracle or, I don’t know, I don’t know what the future holds.
Patrick: So let’s say we agree now MySQL, like you said by the way, both MySQL and MySQL, just so that one day Google can index audio we’ll get both of those (laughter). That’s like genius foresight. But, also let’s say MySQL is dead now, everyone hates it, we want to get away from it; what do people do now understanding that it is, you know, in wide use on a lot of lower priced especially hosting accounts let’s say, what do people switch to, what do hosting companies switch to tomorrow?
Stephan: MariaDB?
Louis: PostgrSQL.
Patrick: Is that a smooth transition?
Louis: Probably not.
Brad: Well, I mean there’s various database platforms out there that are open source, MySQL’s obviously the most popular for web based, Postgress or PostgrSQL, I can never say it. I’m not familiar with it but I know it’s an extremely popular one as well.
Louis: I’ve worked with it before. Now, interesting I was working at the time in Drupal5 which didn’t have support for PostgrSQL, I don’t know if that’s still the case in current versions of Drupal, so I had to do a little bit of hacking around in the core actually to get that functionality working because there’s a few slight syntactic differences between PostgrSQL and MySQL. I don’t know; I think WordPress does have out of the box support for PostgrSQL, though, doesn’t it?
Brad: It has basically a database API so you could hook in, and I know there are plugins that will basically overwrite the database class so you could hook it into PostgrSQL, you could hook it into SQL server, so even commercial database platforms you could hook it into. I think a lot of the CMS’ out there kind of have the same setup where it’s essentially a database class or API that could tap into and hook it into whatever system they want to.
Patrick: So I guess what I’m saying is that I guess we’re relying on it to some extent right now. I know Monty has MariaDB 5.5 which you mentioned, Stephan, I don’t know; have you worked with that at all?
Stephan: No, but from what I’ve read it’s pretty much a drop in replacement, so you could drop in MariaDB and it’d work just fine.
Patrick: So he’s positioned himself in a good spot right now to pick up some users.
Louis: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, I guess it’s probably worth briefly discussing what these extensions are, because if there’s things that most people won’t need then it’s not really super relevant, right, if the community edition still does exactly what you need it to do for your purposes then there’s no need to worry about it all, you can still get the community one which is open source and which you can freely use on your database. So, what we’ve got here is a thread pool which offers improved performance on 16 core or larger systems, so I guess this is mainly improvements for extremely large servers, so they’ve got a graph in the press release where it shows sort of a performance graph between the MySQL Enterprise Edition with the new thread pool and the Community Edition without the thread pool, and it only really drops off at around, what is that, about 500 simultaneous database connections, anything below that the lines are really one on top of another. So I guess it really depends on your use case for MySQL if you’re running a fairly small site or even a fairly large site but running it on commodity server infrastructure then it’s really not an issue. But I guess it does open the door to eventually adding other features to MySQL which are only available in the commercial edition; I guess that’s what people are concerned about.
Stephan: Yeah, I mean if you’re using large scale MySQL implementations then I think some of these features, like thread pools, that would be great because you could have a 16 core or bigger system, one box; I see the appeal but I don’t know if it’s enough to make people move to Enterprise unless you’re doing high-end stuff.
Patrick: So on September 22nd Facebook held its annual F8 developer conference keynoted by none other than Mark Zuckerberg, and if you have a chance you have to check out the video with Andy Samberg of SNL opening for him and pretending to be Mark Zuckerberg, it’s on YouTube on the Facebook official channel and it’s –
Louis: It does kind of look like him, doesn’t it?
Patrick: (Laughs) And he even played into it even more, like made himself look even more like him as far as like hair and wearing the zipper hoodie, or whatever it is, and yeah, and coming out to All I Do is Win by DJ Khaled which is a pretty good clip, so check that out. But they did make a number of meaningful announcements, especially to Facebook users, and I thought I’d talk about a couple of them. The biggest one to me was the introduction of Timeline, it’s not out there yet for everyone but it will be soon and right now if you do a little hack around, so to speak, and you can get a developer view of it and actually get access to Facebook Timeline which is the new format for profiles on Facebook. Have you guys done this?
Louis: I started it out by trying to go through this developer workaround and I kind of lost interest about halfway through, but then a couple days later they just said, hey, you want to check out Timeline? So I have seen it, yep.
Patrick: Okay, and what do you think?
Louis: Eh, I don’t know, I haven’t been really interested in anything Facebook has done for like four years now.
Patrick: You’re still on FriendFeed.
Louis: Basically since they bought FriendFeed it’s just been –
Brad: He’s bitter.
Louis: It’s all over (laughter).
Patrick: Stephan, Brad, have you played around with it at all?
Brad: I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen that a lot of people are posting screenshots and obviously it’s been all over the news and tech sites, the screenshots, but I haven’t actually had hands on it, no.
Patrick: Cool. So, I mean the way they look at it is that it is a better way of showcasing the content that you assimilate over the years, it’s easier to look back at things you did years ago and to pull them back up and to look at them in this Timeline format which organizes the content you’ve added to Facebook by years and then months and so on, and even goes further back, for example, to include your birth date if you included that. So, everyone needs to go Like my birthday right now if you have access to that, Like the fact that I was born, or else. So, yeah, I found it to be interesting, it’s an interesting kind of evolution to the profile page, I’ve seen a lot of complaints about Facebook changes over the past, you know, every time they change.
Louis: Well, let me just ask one question. So, it’s originally available through this Facebook developer’s linkup.
Patrick: Yeah.
Louis: Maybe he sold it this way at F8; what’s the pitch to developers, like as if I have a Facebook page for my company or I integrate Facebook into my website, what does Timeline give me that I didn’t already have?
Brad: Yeah, it didn’t come off more really as a developer feature to me unless there was some kind of new hooks within the open graphs that you could work with.
Patrick: Yeah, it’s a better way in their eyes anyway to showcase the content and to make it easier for people to get in depth with profile pages. Matt Hicks who used to work at Facebook as the community manager I’ve recently met him at a conference, and he was talking about how some people spend so much time on the news feed of Facebook where this has the potential to shift that I guess imbalance, so to speak, and you’ll see people spending more time on individual profile pages just scanning through the history looking at the different things there are to look at just because the content is more accessible, it’s there, there’s more of it, it’s not just one update, one update, one update, you know, it’s not update, update, littered with then Like, Like, Like, Like, Like, commented on this; it’s cleaner and maybe easier to use. And I don’t know how that impacts developers right now, that will probably become more apparent as people use it. But speaking of developers, one thing they did put out there is some new actions that people can take beyond Liking. Commonly cited ones are things like listened, watched, read; Zuckerberg said, “You don’t have to Like a book you can just read a book, you don’t have to Like a movie you can just watch a movie, you can eat a meal, you can hike a trail, you can listen to a song, you can connect to anything to any way that you want.” And so they’re kind of going to break out of that standardized verbiage of Like and Liking everything on every page on the Internet pretty much it seems like where you can Like there will be some languages and context that apply to a specific type of product or a web video or an eBook, or those sorts of uses where people can talk about how they — or just say they consumed a product versus saying I Like the product. And I’m probably not smart enough to figure out how developers will use that, but there is already some — I think there’s a book social network; the name of it escapes me right now, that is already building into that ‘read’ functionality. So, maybe there’s a better opportunity to share content.
Brad: I saw like Spotify’s on there, so if you listen to Spotify it’s hooking into what you’re listening to and Netflix is on there now, so if you are watching movies or shows it will say what you’re watching.
Louis: Aw, thanks for bringing up all those cool U.S. only services. (Laughter)
Brad: Oh, sorry. But I mean it just goes to show that they have expanded a little bit to where these services are getting in. Now, I don’t know if those are available to the general public, but I know they’re certainly coming if they’re not. But maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’m a hippie but it seems like it’s getting like too much, it’s too much information in one spot, it’s almost getting overwhelming.
Patrick: You don’t have the hair to be a hippie.
Brad: When people post what they’re up to and what you like, or whatever, that’s kind of straightforward kind of easy, but now it’s like it’s feeding everything, and it’s been going on this way for the past few years anyways, you’re feeding everything into one spot, so it’s like the amount of data going into Facebook from your friends is ridiculous, you almost can’t even keep up with it because Susie’s listening to this, and Brad’s reading that, and like it’s almost too much to me.
Patrick: Who’s Susie, Brad? Does April know about Susie? (Laughter)
Brad: I don’t think I know a Susie.
Patrick: I was going to say something about the U.S., there is one thing, it’s a small, extremely small consolation, but they also announced a lot of big name partnerships and one of them is with Netflix who has been beat around big-time lately, but they have integration with it where you can easily share even automatically I think what you’re watching on Netflix and it will work in 44 out of 45 countries, the one exception is the United States where a bill, some sort of law prohibits the disclosure of one’s video rental information. So, we are the only country I guess as far as Netflix is concerned that cannot share our watching habits with Facebook right now. So you have that, Louis.
Brad: That’s weird.
Louis: That is weird. Well, I’ll not touch on that. I just want to say, though, so there’s a couple things, first of all I did see this alternate verb thing because when that little sort of hacker workaround for getting the Timeline involved setting up a new app, and when you set up a new app in the Facebook developer interface it asks you to create a verb for your app, so either ‘read a book’ or ‘watched a movie’ or whatever, and I had a look at the interface and I thought that’s actually pretty interesting, I can sort of tie this in. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that I really like this, no pun intended, I really like this because I’m sure everyone’s had this situation where someone will post this article or call for donations relating to, for example, a humanitarian tragedy or like this awful news story and your only option on Facebook is Like to show support for this, which I’ve always found like no I don’t like the fact that there’s a famine in the horn of Africa, I want to point out that yes I support this charity or whatever, right.
Patrick: Right.
Louis: I think that that’ll be — at least sort of solve that cognitive dissonance that you always feel when you go to click the Like button on something that you actually don’t like.
Patrick: Definitely. And the one other thing I wanted to mention quickly is the ticker which we’ve kind of been exposed to I would say before F8, the ticker to the right side where things are streaming down, there is a lot, a lot more activity there to be seen from pages and from user profiles as well. So, Spotify’s a great example; my ticker I’ve noticed since they made that announcement and availed it has been showing a lot of listens from Spotify, xyz is listening to this song on Spotify right now. And I’m sure I can disable that; I think someone said if you hide enough Spotify stories they won’t show up anymore, but, there’s a lot of power there to be brought up in this sort of chronological fashion because the newsfeed is Facebook decides what you want to see based on your usage habits, that’s the newsfeed. And with companies and with pages and with apps and whatever else you have that publishes to the newsfeed, they determine that based on edge rank, which is a semi-mysterious calculation or algorithm where they take into account the relationship between you and the page or the user, and then how much you guys interact and then factor for a degrading of time; the longer it’s been on there. So, on the right side, though, this ticker is essentially content as it happens, so as people are using your apps, as people are Liking your page or Liking something you post, that is appearing in this ticker for their friends on Facebook. I don’t know; I, myself, like it, I’m finding myself discovering a lot more things randomly than I previously would have just going on Facebook’s curated newsfeed, but I could see how some might feel this is just kind of too much and adding to an already busy space.
Louis: Yeah, I kind of feel that way whenever I use the Facebook app on my phone. I don’t know why but somehow it’s different, like what I’m getting on the phone is the real time and not the curated or something, because I’m seeing a bunch of news stories from pages that I’d forgotten that I followed that I never see in my newsfeed when I go to the website.
Patrick: Yeah.
Louis: So probably something similar to that. But then a lot times I’m just like oh wow this is all noise, I just want to see stuff from my friends, but, eh, well, whatever. I guess for people who have Facebook pages it’s valuable.
Patrick: Right, right. And someone did tell me, because I asked that, I’m like well what if you don’t want to see this? And someone told me, I’m not sure how true it is, you can click on the item and then click on the little dropdown and click hide story or report story or spam, and if you do that enough it learns from what you hit, that’s what I’ve been told, I don’t know if that’s 100% sure but it would make sense.
Louis: Awesome. I think we’re coming to the end of the show; you guys want to jump into the spotlights?
Patrick: Yes! I’ll go first. I DJ’ed with DJ Jazzy Jeff on Turntable.fm this last week or so, that’s not my spotlight, I’m just throwing it out there; I thought about making it my spotlight but, yeah, I added it to my bragging rights on my Google+ profile.
Brad: Did you get a badge?
Patrick: No, there’s no badges on Turntable, they have to hook in with the Open Badge API to make that happen though. I want to be an expert DJ.
Brad: That would be one you might put on your resume (laughter).
Patrick: Sure, when I apply for a job at Webdevstudios.com I’ll be sure to include that badge. Yeah, but my real spotlight is a website called Garbage Horror. Now, are any of you guys horror movie fans?
Brad: I am.
Louis: Sort of. Let’s just say I used to be before I moved in with Gretel.
Patrick: (Laughs) What about B movie fans?
Brad: I looove B home movies.
Patrick: Okay, so you’re gonna love this site then, garbagehorror.com is a video show, it is — I don’t know what their publishing schedule is, I thought it was about weekly, but they’re putting out even more video reviews of low budget horror films. So, it is a fun show, it’s co-hosted by my friend Jonathan Bailey and his significant other, Crystal Rami, and they review a different, like I said, low budget horror film every episode. Latest ones are The Nude Vampire, Birdemic, Vampaggedon, It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To, Rabid Grannies.
Louis: I do particular like Birdemic because it looks exactly like The Birds.
Patrick: Right, right.
Brad: I’ve seen more of these than I want to admit to (laughter), surprisingly.
Louis: Rabid Grannies is another –
Brad: I’ve seen Rabid Grannies; I’ve seen Boy Eats Girl.
Patrick: Wow, I’m surprised! So, yeah, you should hook up with Jonathan and watch this show then because they look at it from a fan’s perspective and they have a lot of fun with the show, yeah, so definitely check that out if you’re either a horror fan or a B movie fan or both this is a great show to subscribe to.
Brad: Yeah, I dig it. Alright, I’ll go. So my spotlight is a blog post by a gentleman named Mahdi Yusuf and Mahdi actually programs in a lot of different languages on a consistent basis, and a lot of the pretty common ones, a couple strange ones, but you know JavaScript, Java, C, C++, Ruby, and he was curious what keys he was hitting the most for each language, so he actually took some of his code that he would write for the day and dropped it into this keyboard heat map website and it actually shows on the site, in the blog post he has screenshots of the heat map of what he was basically coding on for those languages and how you can see they differ, which I thought was kind of interesting. So there’s PHP’s on here and some of these languages were a little different than what I expected, so can you guys, well, you’re probably looking at the post now, but what do you think?
Patrick: Yeah, we’re cheating.
Stephan: I haven’t looked at it yet.
Louis: Why are there so many E’s?
Brad: E is the number one key in everything except for Lisp.
Stephan: I haven’t looked at it yet, but I would say curly braces in PHP, is that a big one?
Brad: It’s not as big as you would expect.
Stephan: Ah, dang it!
Brad: It is in there though. I’m assuming e with PHP because of the echo. It looks like E and then T is the number two and then R and S are kind of a close third and fourth there.
Stephan: Interesting.
Louis: I guess well those are just common letters in words, so you’d have to do a bit of math on this and try and extrapolate out the keys that are common, because basically all your variable names like shopping cart, or whatever, or whatever variable name you use will have letters that are common in the English language, so that probably E, R, T, S thing is probably just a by-product of the fact that he’s writing code in English.
Brad: Yeah, and he actually if you read the post he does mention that. With variable names and tabs and spaces obviously are not accounted for, but that would probably be the number one, spaces obviously. Yeah, but there’s actually a link at the bottom of the post, and we’ll make sure to put it in the show notes, where the heat map JavaScript file of this guy set up a website where you can just paste in whatever code you want and it will heat map it for you, so if you’re curious you can take a code snippet or whatever, any kind of text for that matter, drop it in here and it will actually heat map it on a keyboard in realtime so you can see what letters are actually hit the most, you can even swap out the keyboard layout so if you’re any crazy dvorak fans or even crazier Colemak fans you can have all sorts of fun on this thing.
Louis: I had a friend in university program that keyboards in dvorak and spent like two months not being able to type anything (laughter).
Brad: I actually know five or six Dvorak programmers and they swear by it, I’m just not patient enough to do it. But it’s pretty neat, so you can paste anything in here and apparently the JavaScript framework that’s available he mapped out JS which is kind of cool, I might play with that, so kind of a fun website but it’s kind of neat to skim through the different programming languages and see what keys are being pressed.
Patrick: Yeah, and your spotlight made me curious, though, what — is there like a general understanding of letter frequency in I guess language? I was looking for typed, the most commonly typed letters, but the quickest thing I found was a Wikipedia page for letter frequency which cites a study I think in 2000 published by Wiley, from what I’m seeing in the footnotes, for just letters, and the most commonly appearing letter in the English language is E.
Stephan: R
Patrick: Why did you guess?
Brad: Makes sense that’s number one.
Stephan: Why did I guess that? Because R S T L N E, I mean come on it’s Wheel of Fortune (laughs).
Patrick: No, that’s good. But E is the only one that is double digit percentages, 12.702% of the English language is E followed by T, A and then it gets a little hazier, O and I. So, those are the most common letters and I guess the gibe with the keyboard, all except for Lisp which is numbers, 9 0, yeah.
Louis: Those won’t be the 9’s and 0’s, those will be parentheses which are above 9 and 0.
Patrick: You’re a smart man.
Louis: (Laughs)
Brad: Yeah, both parentheses are the number 1 and 2.
Patrick: The only lisp I’ve heard of is the spoken lisp.
Stephan: Mine this week is not appropriate for children and possibly if you’re sensitive to harsh language (laughter).
Patrick: But didn’t you just hear what we did earlier, this is a family friendly show.
Stephan: It is SL Ipsum and it’s Ipsum text that is Samuel L. Jackson quotes.
Patrick: Oh, goodness.
Stephan: So you can imagine where this is going. It’s pretty awesome though.
Louis: It looks like it’s mostly Pulp Fiction dialogue?
Stephan: Mostly Pulp Fiction, yeah.
Brad: I don’t think I’ll be using this on client sites any time soon (laughter).
Stephan: You don’t think so? You don’t think they’ll appreciate it, I don’t know why.
Brad: I use placeholder kitten pictures all the time, but this is, uh, –
Patrick: This is how developers should speak to their clients; you want a “beep” header tag? Yeah, I’ll take a “beep” H1.
Brad: This is funny.
Stephan: It’s pretty funny.
Louis: Yeah, it’s funny. I like the fact that all these — I mean it seems to be a sort of a trend of Lorem Ipsum generators that use various alternate languages or dialects, so it’s a lot of fun to see new ones. And this is particularly good because it’s coherent, it looks like they’ve taken whole paragraphs of text rather than –
Stephan: Just pieces.
Louis: Rather than just randomly generating words, so it actually — it’s readable which is kind of cool because you get sucked in to the content a little bit more than you usually do with Lorem Ipsum.
Patrick: And you notice the one you’re sent to by default is Slipsum Classic, not safe for work and he’s holding a gun, but if you click on Classic Ipsum he’s holding a — like, oh, gosh, rolls of paper, scrolls, and if you click on Slipsum Lite he’s holding a bouquet of flowers, a much less offensive placeholder text generator.
Louis: What is Slipsum Lite? I just want to see what Slipsum Lite is.
Brad: It says it’s a much less offensive placeholder text, so maybe that one is a funny site.
Patrick: Yeah, it’s less offensive. The one I got is, “I’m serious as a heart attack, now that we know who you are I know who I am, I’m not a mistake,” so, yeah, that’s how it starts.
Louis: These are also Samuel L. Jackson quotes but maybe from other movies that were somewhat less — yeah.
Patrick: Except for the classic one, the classic one is just the normal type of Lorem Ipsum text that you get on other generators.
Louis: Yeah, it’s just regular.
Patrick: The scholarly Samuel L.
Louis: But really there’s not point to go to this website if you don’t want that Pulp Fiction stuff.
Patrick: I think every website should have a filter at the top that he’s either Samuel L. Jackson-ified or lite or classic to just filter the whole website through. No one else likes that idea, sorry.
Louis: (Laughs) Well, I’ll let you take care of generating the WordPress plugin to translate our websites into Samuel L. Jackson speak, and if you do that –
Patrick: I’ll be the creative lead and Brad will develop it.
Brad: It’s at the top of my to-do list.
Patrick: We’ll get on that.
Louis: Cool. My spotlight for the week is a website called FutureFriend.ly which is sort of a I guess manifesto for an open web, and I know this is sort of a tired topic for a lot of people, but if anyone’s been following sort of the web developer/designer Twitter this week and there’s been stories about sort of a big argument that broke out between sort of Joe Hewitt and everyone else on the Web this past week. So there’s this story about it in ReadWriteWeb, a story about it on Bruce Lawson’s site sort of talking about this big debate where basically Joe Hewitt said something about how –
Patrick: He said the Web sucks.
Louis: He said, “To thrive HTML and company need what those other platforms have, a single source repository and a good owner to drive it. A standard’s body is not suited to perform this role, browser vendors are innovating in some areas, but they’re stalled by the standard’s process.” So he’s just kind of blasting on the standards process, and a lot of people, Bruce Lawson, John Allsopp and others have come out sort of in defense of this, but one of the things I’m not sure if this has been a response to this debate or whether it was around or it came out around the same time as people were having this debate. So it’s futurefriend.ly, and it’s just sort of an open letter or manifesto I guess about the standard’s process and how this stuff comes about and the changes in devices and changes in modes of access, and the way we’ve been going is an open Web with open standards is still a good solution, still the best solution, and it’s got a resources page that includes a lot of cool texts and ideas and other articles about how to approach the modern Web, multiple screen sizes and all that. So it’s a really nicely simply designed website that I think a lot of designers and developers will get a kick out of.
Patrick: I demand that they allow either you or Kevin to sign this thing; I don’t really care which one as long as it’s somebody that’s been on the podcast. I’m just kidding. Why is it asking me to allow storing data for offline use?
Louis: I don’t know.
Patrick: Does it want me to sign it? I’m going to click allow.
Louis: Mine didn’t do that.
Patrick: I don’t know, prompt at the top, allow to store for offline use, I clicked allow and nothing really happened.
Louis: What browser are you on?
Patrick: Firefox, the latest version.
Louis: Maybe Chrome doesn’t prompt you for that; maybe Chrome just accepts offline storage.
Patrick: That’s the Google way (laughter).
Louis: Yeah, I don’t know, a lot of websites just use offline storage now. It’s got a cache manifest. After the call, because I don’t want you to cut your Internet connection now because then we’ll just lose you, but after the call you can cut your Internet connection and try browsing back and forth between the pages and then my guess would be that it’ll still work.
Patrick: Excellent.
Louis: He’s using a cache manifest and some offline storage stuff from HTML5.
Patrick: It’s feature friendly so when we live in a day where our Internet is cut off it’ll still work (laughter).
Louis: Exactly, after the zombie apocalypse.
Patrick: Totally future friendly.
Louis: That’s what future friendly really means, will your website survive the zombie apocalypse, that’s future friendly. Alright, we’ve been running a little bit long, let’s wrap this up.
Brad: I’m Brad Williams, Webdev Studios, and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.
Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network, I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy, i-f-r-o-g-g-y.
Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves; you can find me on badice.com and I’m on Twitter @ssegraves.
Louis: You can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, that’s sitepoint d-o-t-c-o-m; you can follow me on Twitter @rssaddict. We’d love to hear what you think about all these stories, so you can email us at podcast@sitepoint.com or you can go to sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on the show, so we’d love to hear about your alternative databases for when MySQL goes commercial about your experiences with Facebook pages. Thanks for listening.
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.
