Thoughts From Eric Archive

As I mentioned a while back, my friend Dave is running, biking, and swimming in the Strawberry Fields Triathlon this coming Saturday.  For those who missed the original post, the short version is that he undertook this effort to do something constructive in response to his wife’s battle with Stage II Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  His fundraising efforts have been eminently successful: as I write this, he’s up to $10,325.00 in donations, exceeding his original goal of ten thousand dollars.  He’s raised the goal to $12,000, so if you wanted to make a last-minute donation and push the donation thermometer over his stated goal once again, then now’s the time.

To do so would be a fantastic way to help Dave and Kim celebrate a wonderful turn of events.  As Dave wrote last Thursday:

It’s official — Kim is cancer-free! Her scans have come back completely clean and according to her doctor, she requires no further treatment! Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and kind words and generous donations throughout this process. Next Saturday is the triathlon and the closing of this chapter of our lives. Neither one of us will forget the kindness and support we’ve received from treasured friends and total strangers alike — thank you all so much!!

Dave’s told me that the generosity of meyerweb readers was an important part of his meeting his original fundraising goal—so to his thanks, I add my own heartfelt appreciation.

• The Home Stretch was published on Monday, March 7th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Dear DVD Industry,

Stop with the repetitive time-wasting soul-killing animated menu transitions already.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Eric

P.S. Special note to whoever designed the mystery-meat “special features” menus for the Harry Potter DVDs: I hate you.

• Stop Hurting Us was published on Sunday, March 6th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Talking with attendees and hanging out with the speakers at Search Engine Strategies was quite fascinating. 

In the first place, they’re all pretty fascinating people, from where they’ve been to what they’re like now.  In the second place, they’re all working in a field that doesn’t really interest me, except in indirect ways.  A lot of the “white hat” search engine friendliness has to do with strong text copy, building traffic, and all that good stuff.  But to spend my days picking apart search engine behavior?  Not interested.

Of course, a lot of people would find what I do eye-wateringly boring, so I’m not casting stones here.  Just saying that it’s interesting to spend time with people who are smart, funny, motivated, and gladly doing something very different from what I’m used to doing.

That said, I observed some interesting differences between the search engine crowd and the Web design/standards crowd.

• There’s a dark side to the search engine business that just doesn’t exist in the standards crowd.  The “black hat” SEOs, the ones who are comment spamming and keyword stuffing and link farming, don’t just lurk in the shadows.  They’re right up front, sitting on panels and buying booths in the exhibit hall (not to mention doing a little in-person spamming).  They don’t pretend to be anything but what they are.  The honesty is refreshing, but it’s something that doesn’t have a direct analogue in Web design.  The closest we get is coding to a specific browser, and that isn’t evil so much as it is amateurish and short-sighted.  I don’t think there’s really any comparison.

  The existence of that dark side creates an entirely different dynamic in the search engine field.  People are always watching to see if someone’s white hat is covering up a black hat, to see who’s shifted from one camp to another.  From what I heard, people have gone both directions; some black hats have gone to white over time.  And vice versa.

  This fact also seems to have created a gossip stream that completely dwarfs anything I’ve ever encountered in the standards design field.

• In a similar vein, there’s an incentive to keep one’s knowledge to oneself in the search engine business.  Suppose you’ve uncovered something about search engines that nobody else has figured out.  That’s a competitive advantage, and there’s a financial incentive to keep it to yourself.

  In the standards design field, it’s almost the other way around.  If you come up with a new technique, you’re better off publishing it and adding to your reputation.  You could keep it to yourself, of course, and that would stay secret until the first time you used it on a public site.  At that point, the secret will be there for anyone who views source to figure out and use for themselves.  Writing it up instead and sharing it with the world adds to your reputational capital, which might lead to more work—so there’s a financial incentive to share.

  That’s not to say that everything search engine experts uncover is kept secret: they do plenty of publishing and sharing, and consultants in the field are constantly referring clients to each other as needs change.  That’s sort of a flip side to what I’ve observed in the standards design field, where referrals seem to be (comparatively) infrequent.  I’m not complaining, mind you.  Just observing.  But when someone creates a unique approach, it’s more likely to benefit them by being held close to the chest.

• The field is dominated by the search engines.  Whatever they do, the experts have to adjust to keep up.  If Google alters its algorithm, a top-ranked site can drop to 100th place in an instant, and a ninth-page site can vault to the first results page.  The playing field is always shifting, always in flux.  Slow flux, but flux nonetheless.  It’s actually a lot like Web design was back in the late 1990s, when browsers were updating their rendering engines on a regular basis, instead of in cycles that can be reasonably measured in fractions of decades.

  So there’s the threat that today’s winning strategy is tomorrow’s loser.  In the standards design space, not really the case; or if it is the case, it’s only on much longer time scales.  Sure, CSS will likely be a discarded relic some day, but it’ll probably be quite a while—several years at the very least.  Comment spamming could become obsolete next week, were the engines to figure out a way to programmatically detect and penalize it.  (nofollow doesn’t quite count, but it’s a start.)

• On a related note, there’s a lot more mobility in the search engine space.  People work as independent SEOs, then go to work for a search engine, then shift to an SEO firm, leave that to work for a large corporation… and so on.  Not everyone, of course, but enough to add lots more grist for the gossip mill.  In the standards design space, most of the leading names are working for themselves, and show few signs of changing.

• The last observation is perhaps the one that drives everything that I’ve mentioned: the money.  There’s a lot of money on the table in SEO, way more than in standards design.  Sure, a big design job can be worth many thousands of dollars.  An effective SEO can make many more thousands, possibly millions if he or she gets the right job.  They can increase a company’s traffic, and potentially their revenue, by large percentages.

  Certainly, standards design can save companies money, and it can increase revenue by making a site more responsive due to smaller page weights.  That’s useful, and it’s important.  But the money being thrown around on SEO is… well, it’s a lot.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, none of this is meant to be a condemnation.  Sure, the spammers are loathsome parasites, but there are a lot of SEOs who aren’t spammers.  They get companies better rankings through the basics I mentioned before.  In a lot of ways, they seem to be content, usability, and community-building consultants all rolled up into one.  Those are all useful, needed services, and it’s kind of interesting to me that all those things are hiding behind the term “search engine optimization”.  Well, not hiding, exactly.  You see what I mean, though, right?

The last observation is more personal: it was quite an experience attending a conference where I was largely unrecognized.  There were developers there who knew my name, and who were on the standards bandwagon, but the majority of attendees were not developers and had never heard of me, or Zeldman, or Shea, or Bowman, or any of the other names known in our field.  Which is only to be expected: I had never heard of most of the big names in their field.  So I was largely an outsider, and that was a refreshing change of pace.  It served as a (possibly necessary) ego check, and let me look at the Web from an entirely new angle.

So my thanks to Danny, Chris, Grant, Shari, Amanda, Tim, Matt, and the other folks who helped orient me to this new arena, discussed points of common interest and divergent aims, and made sure I didn’t feel too terribly out of place.

• Search Engine Strategies New York was published on Saturday, March 5th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been six replies.

I just got back from Search Engine Strategies New York—more on the conference later—and had a fascinating encounter there.

What happened was I decided to check out the exhibit halls (they had two).  As I looped around a large booth, a well-dressed man standing in the aisle said, “Excuse me, sir. Are you a webmaster?”.  He had the kind of smooth English-Australian accent so favored of infomercial hosts and lower-grade movie villains.  I admitted that I was, and he informed me he represented an online casino firm that was looking for “revenue partners”.  He was very keen to sign me up so I could start making money.

That’s right: I was being spammed in person.

I was so stunned, I could only tell him I wasn’t interested and walk away, shaking my head.  It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that I should have gotten his contact information and then passed it on to Jonas.

• Spam, Part Two was published on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been eleven replies.

I recently started receiving, for no readily apparent reason, bloated HTML e-mail from Dakota Air Parts, whose site is as lovely as their unsolicited e-mail tactics.  Anyway, I noticed that the mail was coming from what appeared to be a single human, and given that the message also included their 701 area code phone numbers, mailing address, and so on, I could reasonably go ahead and respond with a removal request.  I sort of had to, since there wasn’t a dedicated address for unsubscribe requests.

So off went my response, stating that I’d never asked for the mail and would like to stop receiving it pronto.  Not a few minutes later, I received a new message.  Here’s how it started out:

K.C. here,

I'm protecting myself from receiving junk mail.

Just this once, click on the link below so I can receive your emails.
You won't have to do this again.

http://spamarrest.com...

So in order to stop receiving junk mail from K.C., I had to prove that my mail to him wasn’t junk.

Ah… the sweet, sweet taste of irony, mixed with bold hints of utter cluelessness.  So delicious.

• Spam, Part One was published on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been twelve replies.

See, that’s why presentational class names are such a bad idea.

• Keep Your Classes Clean was published on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the (X)HTML, CSS, Humor, and Standards categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

So I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 over the weekend.  Unfortunately, the “famous 5-minute installation” was, for me, about two orders of magnitude longer.  This is not really the fault of WordPress or its crafters: my site is a fairly unusual case.  I had pretty heavily modified the templates in WordPress 1.2 by changing the markup, rearranging PHP, that sort of thing, so I had to make sure the upgrade wouldn’t wreck the site.  I was also using a number of plugins, many of which I’d written, and I wanted to be sure none of them would get broken.

At first I was planning to modify the WP 1.5 files directly, but then I realized that with the new Themes feature in WordPress, I could convert my markup into a new, separate theme.  That took me a while, as I was learning the new structure of WP and figuring out what pieces of my markup needed to go where.  Had I never messed around with the original WP markup, I could’ve skipped this step entirely, and saved myself a few hours of work.  But then I wouldn’t understand the WP internals as well as I do now.

This thematic conversion was, it is to be expected, a one-time investment.  From here on out, I can twiddle with stuff in the theme files, and not touch the WP core.  This is a vast improvement over 1.2, and illustrates why themes are a huge win for power users as well as novices.  Whether you want to just install and start blogging, or you feel like completely redoing the markup to suit your own twisted ends, WP’s themes will make your life much easier.  It will also make it a lot easier to upgrade in the future.  I used to fear upgrades because of all the hacking I’d done.  Not any more.

Once I’d upgraded the core WP files, it was time to find out what it would take to upgrade my plugins.  Basically, very little.  I had some magic-quotes routines that had become redundant and needed to be stripped out.  That was pretty much all that needed to be done.

However, thanks to new features in WP 1.5, it’s possible to greatly improve the way plugins operate and to very easily extend WP’s feature set entirely from a plugin (once you fix a bug discovered last week).  Take WP-Gatekeeper, for example.  In WP 1.2, installing Gatekeeper meant installing a plugin file and activating it, adding a file to the wp-admin directory, and modifying two WP core files as well as the comment template(s).  Not exactly plug-n-play, which has probably limited its appeal to many WP users.

In WP 1.5, though, it’s possible to add administration pages dynamically—no files have to be edited—and to attach actions to comment form processing.  So even at this stage of its overhaul, my development copy of Gatekeeper requires only the installation/activation of a plugin and editing of the comment template.  By the time I’m done, it should require only installing and activating the plugin, with no need to edit any files.

Awesome.

All in all, despite the fact that it took so me long to line up all the pieces, I’m really glad to have upgraded to 1.5.  I suspect I’ve only scratched the surface of what it has to offer, but what I’ve seen so far has been impressive.  The combination of theme organization and plugin power makes this a much more modular, extensible, robust system.  In 1.2, I felt like I was bending and rearranging a basic system to meet my specific needs; in 1.5, I feel like I’m working within an environment that has everything I need to do anything I want.

That’s why I’ve changed the site footer, which used to say I was using a copy of WP that I’d “hacked like it was attacking my family”.  That’s no longer the case.  Sure, I’ve added a number of home-brewed plugins (most of which are freely available) to enhance various things, and yes, I’ve created my own templates.  But that stuff is all out of the core files and into separate packages, as it should be, while the core of WP is basically untouched.

Of course, I have a few quibbles here and there, as I do with just about any system I use (I’m a relentless customizer).  The Dashboard doesn’t really do a whole lot for me as it stands, and I have some things I’d like to change in both the advanced post-editing interface and the plugin management page.  This time around, though, I’m going to offer my changes as contributions to the WP code base, to be accepted or rejected as the developers see fit.

I doff my cap and bow in gratitude toward the WordPress team, and all the members of the WordPress community who have helped it grow and improve.  A good tool is now a great tool, and I can only imagine where it will go from here.

• Taking The “A” Train was published on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005.
• It was assigned to the WordPress category.
• There have been twenty replies.

Since Dave recently shared his upcoming conference schedule, I feel strangely motivated to do the same with my schedule.  Memetic infection or just a case of “me too, me too!”?  You decide.

• Search Engine Strategies New York — I’ll be appearing on the panel “CSS Myths, Mistakes, & Reality” with Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey, as well as representatives of Yahoo! and Google.  My role is to quickly explain the benefits of standards to an audience that may have ltitle to no knowledge of said benefits.  The session will be 90 minutes, to provide plenty of Q&A time.

• SXSW Interactive — I have three scheduled appearances in Austin, none of which have anything to do with CSS.  The first is Emergent Semantics, a look at how to add semantic information to the Web today using already-available features of XHTML.  The second is the panel Where Are the Women of Web Design?, an exploration of why there are so few female “leaders” in the Web design space, and how we might encourage more.  Last, I’ll be one of the performers at Vox Nox, a New Riders event that features several authors performing pieces that aren’t technology-related.  It will unfortuantely overlap a bit with 20×2, but not too badly.

  The SXSW folks have also scheduled me to do two book signings, one on Sunday and the other Monday.  If you’re going to be at the conference, bring a book to sign, or buy one there and get it signed.  Just think—the signature alone will add at least a dime to the book’s worth, although the personalized inscription will knock it back off.  That’s how it goes.

• NOTACON 2 — held right here in fabulous Cleveland, Ohio, I’ll be giving two talks.  One will be The Construction of S5; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM, about the evolution of S5, looking at various design decisions and the joy of DOM scripting.  The other talk is Humanely Wielding a Clue By Four: Reflections on Managing a Massive Mailing List, an overview of what I’ve learned as List Chaperone for css-discuss, and what I think makes a good community manager.

• WWW 2005 — and away I go to Chiba, Japan!  For the conference, I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial on standards-oriented design trends and techniques.  I may also be presenting a poster, if it’s accepted by the poster committee, but I won’t know for a few weeks.  I’m also planning to speak at the Tokyo PC Users Group, and am still scouting for consulting opportunities while in Japan.  If you’re interested, please let me know!

Looking further into the future, I’m currently scheduled to speak at conferences in September and October.  I’ll have details on those as the time draws closer.  You can stay up to date with my public speaking schedule over at Complex Spiral Consulting, and yes, I really should turn it into an RSS feed.  Some day…

• Upcoming Events was published on Saturday, February 19th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Tech categories.
• There has been one reply.