WordPress version 3.0 was released at the end of last week. It’s a little later than the intended May 1 release date, but WordPress is one of the most popular blogging and content management systems on the planet, so it was better to be late than cause issues for thousands of websites.

The update is the result of six months’ work by 218 dedicated contributors, culminating in 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. So what can you expect from WordPress 3.0?

New Installer

WordPress has always been easy to install but it’s become even simpler. Few administrators will have to fiddle with the wp-config.php configuration file: all the MySQL settings can be specified within the installer panels now.

The new installer also allows you to specify the administrator ID and password. I suspect few people ever bothered to change it from the default “admin” in previous versions, so the facility to create your own ID will aid security.

New Interface

The WordPress 3.0 administration panels have received a polish. It’s hardly a radical change from version 2, but it’s lighter and feels slicker.

There are few obvious changes to the interface until you reach the Appearance section.

New Default Theme

RIP Kubrick: you’ve served us well and many websites use you to this day. Kubrick has been replaced by “Twenty Ten,” a new theme that has built-in support for child themes, background alterations, header customization, and drop-down menus.

The theme’s look and widgets can be customized within the administration panel, so I expect many people will never venture beyond the Twenty Ten theme. For those that do, there’s a new “Install Themes” tab that allows you to search for templates by color, type, and features.

Not impressed but then again, if they made a nice one, I’d be out of extra work!

WordPress Multi-user

WordPress MU was a fork that allowed hundreds of blogs to run from a single installation; it has now been merged with the main version 3.0 application. It’s disabled by default, but can be switched on by adding the following line to your wp-config.php file:

This could be the most important feature for web developers: you can create a number of websites using just one installation of WordPress. Updates are easier and hosting space is drastically reduced.

Custom Post Types

Pages and Posts were available in previous versions of WordPress:

• Pages were normally used for static content such as About Us or Contact Us pages.
• Posts would commonly be used for date-stamped news, articles, or blog posts.

WordPress 3.0 supports custom post types. For example, you could have a Product type that’s specifically used for items sold on your website. Product pages can then be treated separately; for example, have their own menu or search box.

Custom post types are configured using PHP rather than within the administration panels. Watch out for a full tutorial on SitePoint shortly.

Other Features

Where do I start? I suggest you visit the WordPress 3.0 Codex page for a comprehensive list.

Should you upgrade now?

I have no hesitation in recommending WordPress 3.0 for a new installation. But what if you’re upgrading from WordPress 2.x?

I’ve rarely experienced problems with the WordPress automated upgrade; it’s a quick one-click process that just works. However, my first attempt failed abysmally and I was left with a broken site. You should note that this was a test installation of 2.8.6 with lots of dodgy code and plugins, but you need to be wary: some themes and plugins are certain to break.

I would recommend updating a local test version of your site before attempting to upgrade the live server. Remember to back up your files and MySQL database, and you can’t go wrong.

If past experience is anything to go by, the WordPress team will almost certainly release 3.0.1 within a few weeks. If you’re especially nervous, you might be advised to wait a little longer …

From ZDNet

The discussion comes amidst an ongoing war of words between Apple and Adobe over over Apple’s refusal to support Flash Player on its iPad and iPhone devices. In April, for instance, Steve Jobs outlined his criticisms of the Flash development platform in a blog post.

In addition, this is not the first time Adobe has sent out a warning to users over an Apple update. In September, the company said that an Mac OS X update issued in August was shipping with a superceded version of Flash Player. It also noted that the Apple’s update was downgrading people with more recent versions of the player to the earlier edition.

That does not appear to be the case with this week’s Apple update, according to Adobe security response programme manager Wendy Poland.

I still can’t say that I am a Maconvert though Jen has me spinning the apples all over the house.  As a developer, I can’t say I’m in love with Flash either.  What I can say is that there are very specific rules that good web developers and designers abide by, one of which is that cross-domain requests are a very real and very scary threat.  Having taught a semester’s worth of web security and really digging into the issue of XSS, HTTP vulnerabilities and phishing schemes, and all the while developing Flash apps that have these apparent holes, it is easy to think that a malicious developer could easily design around this problem.  So kudos to Apple if in fact they really did fall back to plug up the problem.

I probably shouldn’t take sides.  Adobe has been well aware of the problem but it’s difficult at best to plug up every vulnerability across every platform out there.  Apple is doing what it can to protect its users.

So what’s the point?  The point is – be aware that there is a problem and that it is your responsibility (assuming you’re a developer) to cover it – not just the product makers.

Though quite honestly I don’t use ExtJS in favor of pure handcoding and maybe a smattering of minimal jQuery, it’s still a real formidable framework, though Ext’s (sorry, Sencha’s) exploration into HTML5 and CSS3 is probably the best collaborative work on the web so far.  The best part of it is the basic open source system and Ext Designer, which I only recently tried out for the first time.  jQTouch and Raphaël will still both remain MIT licensed.

According to the post on its site:

We’re choosing Sencha as our name because it evokes next-generation software development and it’s easy to remember, spell and pronounce. Sencha — the name of a popular Japanese green tea — is in the tradition of Java, and represents a new level of development. It feels memorable to us.

I’m real intrigued with Raphaël after my recent batch of Advanced Scripting students churned out some really fantastic HTML5 vector graphics.  Will have to try and carve out a few minutes to play around with it.

In any case, best of luck to the new venture – sounds like a real winner in the making!

Background: I’m a 22-year-old university student with aspirations of practicing rural medicine. I’m also a freelance web/print designer. It’s my sole source of income, and it’s what I do to put myself through school. I don’t have much of a social life because I balance a full-time university schedule with twenty to thirty hours a week of volunteer and paid design work.  I wouldn’t change a thing here. I’m happiest a-codin’ and designin’, and I count myself as pretty lucky to be able to make a living from my hobby while I’m working towards my doc dreams.

I’ve always been a nerdy and creative kid, so I got into computers and art at a fairly young age. I knew I liked designing and I spent a lot of time playing with Python to pick up on basic programming in middle school. In high school, I designed posters and crappy Geocities websites for nearly every extra-curricular club around. So when I was fifteen, I was really excited when my dad asked me if I’d be interested in doing some design work for a good business acquaintance of his, whom I’ll refer to from now on as CFH (for Client From Hell – what else?).  The job involved developing some simple layouts and promotional materials for an industry-specific print career guide. Armed with Publisher and Photoshop, I got to work.

The pay seemed pretty damn great for someone my age, and the idea of getting paid to do something I loved from home seemed pretty attractive compared to the notion of finding a summer retail job, an experience that had bored me out of my mind the previous year.

I did the job, CFH was happy with my work, and I continued working on small projects for him every now and then, past graduating high school and entering university.

In early 2009, I received a scholarship to study abroad for a semester. When CFH heard, he gave me his heartfelt congratulations, attended a goodbye party my parents had for me, and even gave me a generous monetary gift for my travel expenses. He’d become a very supportive family friend at this time, and was often the only non-South Asian face at family gatherings. I was really grateful for his support and thought the world of him. When I returned six months later, CFH let me know that the website I had designed for him had been voted into the global top ten of its field and that he would be branching out to cover a greater range of clientele. I knew that it was making him boatloads of money and I was happy to have been involved in a project that had achieved such status. He asked me if I’d be interested in taking a lead role in helping out with the company’s growth. I agreed enthusiastically, and got to work.

Fast forward to September, when I started as CFH’s primary web designer. The work was substantial, and took up much more of my time than previous projects had, but it was completed on time and he was thrilled with it. Prior to starting, I had let CFH know that I’d be changing our previously casual business relationship, and that I’d be invoicing him all Official-Like from now on since I was going to be using my work as my primary source of employment, and needed to keep good records for tax purposes. At this stage, CFH had started outsourcing all his back-end development work to India because it was cheaper than hiring Canadian-based developers, so I think my invoice took him by surprise as he had thought that web work would be ‘cheaper’ and ‘easier to do’ than print, for whatever reason.  Keep in mind that I was asking for what was essentially cents above minimum wage per hour of work not including the many hours I spent on development, consultation, edits, etc. because I was a little insecure in my legitimacy as a designer due to my lack of formal education in the subject. I now know this to be BS, as my current clients continue to hire me, citing the diversity of skills I offer and the highly creative and efficient nature of my print and web work. Nevertheless, I decided to give CFH a very steep discount because we hadn’t pre-negotiated the terms (even though he was aware of how much time each project was taking me). He took his sweet time with my invoice but finally, and begrudgingly, decided to pay up.

Things get a little ridiculous here.

CFH became increasingly imposing. His phone calls to me became increasingly longer and unrelated, bordering on uncomfortable.

He started demanding additional amounts of work to be done ‘immediately’, and when I’d ask about payment, he’d get irritable and tell me that it was ‘all about the money’ with me, and that he’d pay me as soon as I sent him an invoice via snail mail. Everytime I would mail out an invoice, he’d complain about some charge, and insist that I send him an updated invoice with this or that detail changed. This continued. I didn’t see a cent. I was even paying for stock photos and fonts out of pocket and not being reimbursed like I had earlier been promised. Keep in mind that I was in a particularly delicate position given that this person was my father’s good friend, and regretfully, my pride got in the way of actually saying anything to my father at the time. At the time, I didn’t think things would (could?) get worse.

They did, so in January, I put my foot down. I told CFH I’d no longer be working for him as he had become unbearably imposing, and had unreasonable expectations of me. Primarily, I was concerned because I hadn’t seen a cent from any of this work I’d done since September. He countered this by telling me that I was a rip-off and that he’d found a “professional design agency” that was better equipped to meet his needs. I wished him the best despite the fact that I was disappointed at having let go of my biggest client. I tried not to think about the many hours of work I wouldn’t be seeing a cent for anymore. At the same time, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to put up with his borderline psychotic behaviour, or compromise the quality of my work anymore to meet his increasingly ass-backwards demands (white text on beige?).

Two days later, I received a phone call from CFH. He apologized profusely right off the bat, said that he’d pay his complete owing sum, and that he needed me to come back. He told me that he was extremely unhappy with the quality of, and the speed at which his new designers were completing his work. He begged me to come back, saying that this time he’d be more considerate of my time and reasonable in his expectations of me. I hesitated, but agreed to come back on the terms that he had to agree to the estimate I gave him prior to starting each job. Since my prices were ‘too steep’ for him and he didn’t want to contend with the fact that I could only work in the evenings due to my class schedule, we worked out a system where I would design the main graphical elements and primary pages, and his “professional design agency” would use these elements to develop subsidiary pages for the back-end. He agreed, and I got to work. As a sidenote, I should mention that his “professional design agency” pulled out when they realized the extent of work that needed to be done and his unreasonably demanding nature, but I digress.

So I hadn’t realized that my new agreement with CFH would otherwise translate into a one-way ticket to hell, with him reigning as chief Satanic commander.

His behaviour become fairly unbelievable at this point: he’d call me at 11:30pm and asking to have something by 7am the next morning. He’d whine when I’d decline. He’d have me sit on the phone for hours while directing me to this stock photo or that website to “get inspired by” (i.e. steal). At the time, I was under a lot of stress because I was experiencing a flare-up in an existing neurological condition that was putting me in the emergency room almost every week. I mentioned at one point to CFR that I was scheduled for an MRI in a couple of months, and he suggested that I pay out-of-pocket to get it done privately to avoid the wait. A private MRI has to be done out-of-province, and runs upwards of $1500. I explained that this was not an option for me given that a recent astronomical increase in tuition costs, and my student aid being cut substantially due to the increasing conservatization of my post-secondary institution.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t ‘get’ it, telling me to bug my parents for the money or ‘something’. For the record, I’m completely financially independent, and have no intentions of harassing my parents for money I’m perfectly capable of making myself. My lifestyle ain’t so lavish that it requires a lot of  dough either: I’m a herbivore, don’t go out much, share an apartment with two other people, and ride a bicycle or take public transit everywhere. I use open-source software and recycle hardware whenever possible. Textbooks (which I generally buy secondhand) and tuition are my major expense, so while my living costs might be minimal, they’re still there. I wasn’t sure what part of this CFH couldn’t comprehend. Surely, he’d understand, having himself been a student forty years ago?

April was the final straw. I hadn’t seen a cent since September despite many false exclamations of  “the cheque is in the mail!” and what I now knew to be CFH’s lavish income from MY work.

He even had the nerve to call me to share his excitement about his new ‘keyless’ car, which he eagerly explained cost about as much as a house.

A myriad of other reasons followed, and you should tell me if I’m being a bit too sensitive here: Rape jokes? check. Racist remarks about his Indian developers DESPITE the fact that I’m South Asian too – but ‘not like one of them’, according to him? Check. Pictures of, and forwarded emails from women he was sleeping with? Check. Pervasive questions about my sexuality and personal life? Double-check.

I quit. I fucking quit. I sent a politely-worded e-mail explaining that I would not be working for him anymore. I don’t believe in leaving people in the dark about their behaviour, so I explained very clearly exactly how his behaviour had influenced my decision to leave. CFH responded by saying that he hadn’t “bothered to read my e-mail” but that “as a professional, [he] anticipated that [I] would provide [my] assistance in bringing the new resources up to speed..”. Regarding my invoice, his exact words were: “It shall, of course, be paid, in full, upon receipt” (all those commas, must be, compensating, for, something) seeing as how he was continuing to use my work. I had no problem with this, and made the remaining incomplete files available in their raw form on my server, alongside a detailed explanation of what the new designer/s would need to know. I’m not a vengeful person, so when the new designer got in touch with me, I was quick to direct him to where he needed to be. I just wanted to get paid and get CFH out of my life already.

Things seemed like they were ending on a slightly more positive note. A few days later  I got a call from my father. CFH had taken him out for drinks and then gotten him call me to “tell me” to come back to work for him. CFH had explained to him that I was upset about my pay (I didn’t realize zero dollars was pay?) but that he had ‘forgotten’ that I was now a grown-up with financial responsibilities, and not that same fifteen-year-old who was estatic about getting some spending money from his hobby.

He told my dad that I had left him hanging despite having given me a pretty decent deal; apparently my ‘mental health issues’ and ‘greed’ were getting in the way.

Clearly, this wasn’t just about the money for me anymore, and I realized that CFH’s new designer had probably bailed on him as well as a result of his.. loopiness.  Naturally, I declined. This upset my father initially, though he changed his mind later when I gave him a (heavily censored) account of what had actually happened.

Besides, hadn’t CFH mentioned that he’d be paying me for the work I’d already completed? The invoice was in the mail for the fourth time. Of course, I didn’t set my expectations too high because on May 11, I received  the following message:  “Let me be quite clear about things. Unless you immediately finish the projects you started for [Company Name], we shall not pay your invoice. Enough is enough!”

So now I know better than to expect any pay at all. Over 300 hours logged since September, and not a cent.

CFH continues to use my work and profit from it. I have no legal backing because (1) CFH happens to be a retired lawyer, and (2) I never drew up a physical contract because of the sporadic nature of the work and our long-standing business relationship. My own fault.  The best part? I have to defer my next semester at university to work more, because I couldn’t come up with my minimum tuition payment in time this year – seeing as how my job didn’t pay me, and I had to use my existing funds for things like rent, medication, and food. CFH is well aware of this. Sucks, but I’m not one to dwell in the past recognizing my own mistakes. I’m also far too grateful for things like a roof over my head to feel sorry for myself.

I learnt my lesson and since then, I have had no problem putting what I’ve learnt into practice with my current clients. Keep in mind that these are primarily charitable organizations and student groups with very limited funding – yet they have no problem respecting my time, signing contracts without complaint, agreeing to my terms and putting down a 50% deposit before I do any work.  These clients believe in my right to make a living wage from my work, and that’s exactly how all clients should treat their freelancer.

In closing, please don’t make the same mistakes I did with CFH. I don’t care if you’re making invites for your neighbor’s son’s friend’s girlfriend’s baby shower: always draw up a physical contract, regardless of whether the work is for-pay or not.

It’s a sad fact, but there is no guarantee of sanctity in a long-standing relationship regardless of how long you have had your client. There are people out there whose only motivation is to make as much money as possible while taking credit for your work and screwing you over in the process. A contract gives you some legal backing, and at the very least ensures that both parties understand the terms of service. Deposits are great too, because they ensure that both parties are invested in the project to some extent. Lessons are better learnt earlier rather than later.

And finally, to CFH? I trust Karma.

Amongst them include an upgraded enclosure to unibody aluminum – much beefier than the plastic job my old one has. And the body has a new panel on the base giving it access to the memory slots. Plus they’ve added HDMI which makes it soooo much easier to connect it up with my HDTV (rather than having to put the MBP flipped open right next to it).

But of course the killer one that caught my attention – not because I am so into the 3D idea but simply because of iStream’s involvement with it – is the addition of Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics, one of the foundations for Nvidia’s 3D Vision. Killer.

Posted on TUAW
Buy the base model for $699 or the SL Server version for $999 at Apple Store

Photo courtesy of Andrew Chen via 52 Weeks of UX

Do you ever feel that your design has become stale and that despite your making lots of little changes to it over time without any big overhaul there is just no way to drastically improve it?

If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”. The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…it is as effective as its ever going to be in its current incarnation. Even if you make 100 tweaks you can only get so much improvement; it is as effective as its ever going to be on its current structural foundation.

The local maximum occurs frequently when UX practitioners rely too much on a/b testing or other testing approaches to make improvements. This type of design is typified by Google and Amazon…they do lots and lots of testing, but rarely make large changes. (Except, of course, Google’s homepage background change this week, which was quickly reverted)

While a cycle of smaller improvements is better than the dysfunctional design processes most of us are stuck with, one of the criticisms of this type of extreme optimization is that it’s always and only incremental: you can only make a few small changes at a time and therefore your design evolves slowly. And if you’re doing rigorous testing, by only changing one variable at a time, then you’re only changing one small part of your application in each iteration. This work cycle becomes dependent on how fast you can run tests. For Google and Amazon, who are blessed with millions of visitors per day, this is no problem because they can run tests extremely quickly. For most people building web sites, low traffic volume can be a huge hurdle because it means that tests have to run longer and thus slows down rate of iteration.

To illustrate the notion of local maxima Chen uses the example of a photo upload application, pointing out there are many ways to improve an offering by optimizing what currently exists. You can A/B test the current photo upload page, send out more emails reminding people to upload, add more calls-to-action to upload, etc. It’s easy to both design and test these options.

But after a while these low-hanging fruit get few and far between and as UX designer you have two choices: continue to try ever-increasing alternatives (optimize) that are small enough to test or to try and make a bigger, structural change that really shakes things up (innovate).

Chen points out that other approaches to improving a photo app besides optimization would probably have a higher return. These include:

* Repositioning the product for a stronger value proposition
* Going after a different kind of audience to target their needs
* Recalibrating the “core mechanic” of the product to make uploading photos a natural part of using the product

Because these changes are much larger than a single design element you can effectively test, making a change to them requires making a daring design decision. Someone has to step up and take a chance based on their intuition: what they think will work instead of what testing has proven works.

In order to design through the local maximum we need a balance between the science-minded testing methodology and the intuitive sense designers use when making big changes. We need to intelligently alternate between innovation and optimization, as both are required to design great user experiences.

One strategy we might employ is to optimize until we reach a point of diminishing returns: design until changes just aren’t having a big effect. Then, stop optimizing and return to other kinds of analysis to figure out the next steps. Conduct interviews. Do user testing. Give surveys, ask questions. Find out the biggest existing pain points instead of focusing on tiny design elements at this stage. Focus at the activity-level. What are people trying to accomplish? What are their higher-level goals? What aren’t people doing that we want them to? What big hurdles keep them from taking the next action? This level of insight will allow you to make those bigger changes.

And when the time comes to make the bigger changes, when you decide to jump from your local maximum to some other design possibility, make the decision with conviction. But don’t forget that the optimization has only just begun.

Rather than take a traditional page-design approach, we architected the database and interaction to be slim and exchangeable. First, the database was managed by use of two .NET-based Web Services written in C# that ingested via POST marking transaction success with 32-character IDs, output via XML and with multi-purpose edit functions using switches and variable inputs. Next, the authentication was built on a combination Basic and session-based approach using ASP – quick and efficient and easy to modularize should the system need to be moved to another platform. Finally, the front-end was built on a single HTML page with jQuery and jQuery UI to support the large number of Ajax exchanges and interactive features.

The result is a clean, easy to use, transportable DAM-CMS capable of complex transactions (multi-tiered, synchronous updates), hooks to a Silverlight-based rough cut editor from Southworks, and most of all, easy and quick to modify without affecting the production environment. By deploying a single jQuery-based controller separate from the parser and presentation components, new objects could be introduced to the interface based on a modifiable, dynamic XML document at login (or pushed in real-time, even after the user had logged in).

Some of the things we learned seem pretty silly but in fact were critical to the project completing in such a short amount of time.

First, segregate all the processes – by constructing the database, the web services, and the interface separate from each other, different developers could rapidly deploy all of it and mesh together quickly at stop-points each day. Chandler and I (with a big assist from Srini and Mio) were able to work independently and merge as he completed parts of the web service, or make changes as parts of the interface came together. Likewise, during testing, changes to the interface and sequence could be done in real-time and re-tested within minutes instead of having to go back to the drawing board. This was eased by the fact that issues could be easily attributable and divisible to interface or back-end, and handled separately.

Second, it’s the little things that make a difference. Providing small visual cues – update notifications at the top of the page that disappear, Ajax loader starburts, highlighted labels and input boxes – all give the user information, information that helps them get through difficult or tedious and complex processes (for example, in creating a VOD asset, a user had options that might require upwards of 50 different pieces of information – eliminating unnecessary components on the screen made it easier to get through).

Finally, architect it but be flexible. Changes happen, and while developers and project managers all try to keep scope creep from happening, we all know that in the real world, so does feature change. It is unrealistic to assume that projects will get started 6 months before the deadline. It is also unrealistic to assume that, in such a project with a short deadline, that you’ll remember to include everything. Likewise, it’s also unrealistic to assume that during the process you’ll realize that the planned interface will work – prototyping is great but it takes time and testing that you may not always have. Being able to be flexible by following a basic interface design, using modular builders (in jQuery UI or other framework) and XML-based instruction sets, and providing error catching systems in both the front-end as well as the web services makes the project continue to move, even when not all the parts are correct.

In the end, we had a lot of hiccups and it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped but it did get done and delivered on-time. The client goes to training in 9 hours and there will likely be another round of changes, but that we were able to post a full-featured DAM CMS in such a short amount of time gives us new methods and targets for the future.

by Christopher Mims via Technology Review
How the Internet Porn Business Works>: Researchers set up adult Web sites to study how the industry makes its money and spreads malware.

A first-of-its-kind analysis of the online porn industry reveals the economics, and the vulnerabilities, of the shady world of online adult media.

If you want to know how the online adult industry works, you must become a part of that industry. That’s what five security researchers from The Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and UC Santa Barbara did in an attempt to get a handle on how the adult industry makes money online. And they found that it’s exposing everyone who consumes its wares to previously unsuspected levels of malware.

Peddling Porn in the Name of Science

By setting up their own adult websites, the researchers, who will present their paper on June 7, 2010 at The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Harvard University, discovered that 43% of the clicks that arrived at their own adult website belonged to users whose browsers were vulnerable to a known exploit in either Adobe Flash or handling of the Microsoft Office or Adobe PDF document types.

Lead researcher Glibert Wondracek and his colleagues spent a total of $160 to acquire 47,000 clicks from sellers of adult traffic, known in the industry as traffic brokers, of which 20,000 could have been exploited to build a botnet, according to the researchers. The researchers discovered that they easily could have leveraged their investment for a hefty profit by serving as the vector for a Pay-Per Install affiliate program, which in one instance offered $130 per 1,000 installs to drop malicious code (malware, adware etc.) onto exploited machines.

To assess how much malicious code is being injected into users’ browsers by adult websites, Wondracek et al. custom-built an automated web crawler to download the content of almost a half million URLs spread across thousands of adult websites. Incredibly, 3.23% of those pages “were found to trigger malicious behavior such as code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads,” five times the prevalence of malware discovered by previous research on the subject.

In a back of the envelope calculation, multiplying 3.23% by the percentage of internet users who view porn (42.7%) or even just the percentage of men who view porn while at work (20%), by the frequency with which porn is accessed, suggests that internet porn is a major vector for infection of vulnerable machines.

The Peculiar Economics of Online Porn

A likely explanation for the high rates of malware on adult websites is the almost total lack of policing or enforcement by the brokers who move traffic between adult websites. According to Wondracek et al.’s analysis of the economy of online porn sites, 9 out of 10 are “free” sites that host image or video galleries and make money by directing traffic to pay sites or even to one another. This traffic is monetized through traffic brokers – the majority of which do not even visit the sites in their affiliate networks, according to experiments conducted by the researchers.

Unlike online ad placements by Google and affiliate marketing schemes by Amazon, adult sites do not rely on code that resides on the sites sending them traffic that could help verify that traffic is generated by humans and not click bots. As a result, the researchers found that it would potentially be quite easy to defraud not only users, but the traffic brokers and for-pay porn sites that enable the vast ecosystem of free adult media sites. (No users or brokers were actually harmed in the course of this research, which was vetted by the legal department of the Technical University of Vienna.)

The intricacies of the elaborate system of traffic arbitrage that have grown up around the world of porn traffic direction on the web are way beyond the scope of this blog post, but it’s possible that the rest of the media world could learn a thing or two from the way that for-pay adult sites have created a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.

On the other hand, it’s just as likely that these techniques wouldn’t work for traditional media, because users don’t appear to be as motivated to read news as to find porn. How else can we explain the fact that in the course of the experiment, users clicked many times on single links that were randomly directing them to anything but the media they were apparently after – a practice widespread among free porn sites?

For years, the only other options were to use images (which then lose the semantics and made it difficult to update over time) or sIFR (which still rocks and can provide much more extended support for very unusual fonts).  Now you can add Font API support with:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

body { font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; }

Produces (though this is an image):

According to Google, the back end system converts the font into a format acceptable to the browser (including MSIE6), serving up only the weights and styles you specify, and can be cache headered in order to optimize/improve performance over the span of the site.  They also work with HTML5 and CSS3, so transformations like rotation and drop shadows still works.  Currently support exists only for Western European languages (Latin-1) but I’m pretty sure that will expand quickly once it takes hold.

Nice job!

Read the Google announcement here.
See the fonts available in the Google Font Directory.

I’d love for fifteen or twenty minutes to go by without my Google Reader barfing out yet another piece of software patent or “HTML5 video codec war” news, but that’s how it is. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the video tag didn’t become standardized until HTML6 or 7.

One serious downside to the lack of consensus is the fact that your browser may very well not have built-in support for some video files embedded with the tag. Firefox, for example, is running with Ogg Theora and won’t be bolting on H.264 support. Apart from patent issues, there’s a $5 million price tag to be paid to MPEG-LA if Mozilla did want to support the codec, and they still wouldn’t be able to include that code in their open source.

But developers love to spin remixes of the Fox, and it only makes sense that someone would take matters into his or her own hands. Enter Maya Posch, who has launched the Wild Fox project on SourceForge. The plan: add H.264 support to Firefox’s stable branch using libavcodec or GStreamer.
Posch feels “that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world.” He continues, “The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries.”

That sounds useful, right? A nice, pre-packaged Firefox build with H.264 support? Sure it does, but there’s a potential pitfall.

While you would probably be able to download and install Wild Fox even in the U.S. and Korea (two of the patent-encumbered countries), Thomas Holwerda of OSNews warns that you’d be doing so at your own risk, saying “MPEG-LA has clearly stated that it will sue unlicensed users (and is clearly not afraid to do so).” Their director of Global Licensing, Allen Harkness, has said “where a royalty has not been paid, such a product remains unlicensed and any downstream users/distributors would have liability.”

Yes, that means MPEG-LA could come after you if you choose to browse with Wild Fox. However, it’s infinitely more likely that they’d target Posch and Wild Fox.

I have always told my students that the best way to get backup help is to go to the bookstore, site down, and read 10 pages out of each book on the topic, and find the one that “speaks” to them. A teacher’s recommended text, the school’s required textbook, it’s rare that student find them legible or helpful (I think my logic teacher went out of her way to find the most confusing book on Earth). Find the book that they understand and start working. Work every day. Work at least 15 minutes or 30 minutes every single day, doing the exercises over and over, changing little things, until the whole concept is solved.

But not every great book can be found at the store. Of course there are the online standard – w3schools.com for example – and the plethora of smaller resources. But it is always a treat to find an online resource that has both extensive resources and is also an easy, if not opinionated, read.

Such is “Eloquent Javascript,” authored by Marijin Haverbeke. I remember coming across it a few years ago but a posting on DownloadSquad reminded me of it. It is available in its entire text online (in HTML) as well as via downloadable PDF. As with most good resources, I recommend grabbing the PDF (and if you’re ambitious, a local copy of the HTML) before the perishability of Web documents steals it away.

[authored by Matthew Carpenter at Six Revisions, images courtesy of Six Revisions]

When it comes to expanding per-project revenue, service businesses are at an immediate disadvantage. As our “product” is essentially our time, increasing income on a per-project basis almost always comes with extra work and an increased time commitment. Office hours increase, personal time slips away, and before we know it, the “extra” $300 weekly income has turned into little more than lost time.

Product-based businesses have a distinct advantage when it comes to increasing revenue. Rather than increasing per-hour costs or per-project estimates, all that’s required is an increase in scale. Expand your operation, ship more units, and earn more money. While service businesses can take a similar approach–more employees, more projects, and relatively more income–scale can again become a problem.

These ten approaches to per-project earnings could help you boost total revenue and profits. Of course, they’re not foolproof, and some businesses will inevitably invest time into a strategy only to have it prove ineffective. However, they do work, and with the right balance of time investment and experimentation, they could become the changes that drastically increase your per-project, per-client, and per-hour revenue.

1. Don’t take on stressful or high-risk projects

Risk is a part of business. While service businesses operate at a slightly lower level of risk than a major product-based business or global company, they’re still taking cost-related risks whenever they accept a new project. The amount of time required could surpass expectations, the project’s complexity could be deceptive and surprising, or the entire project could be a stress-test disguised as something simple.

Whenever certain revenue is the goal, take on projects that offer security and relatively smooth income. Increasing revenue can be as simple as taking on more work, which is made easier when you’re not juggling complex projects.

2. Keep a network of contracted designers for project overflow

There are hundreds of reasons to network with other designers, and managing work overload and excess projects is just one of them. As with any business operating at 100% capacity, there are going to be times when your clients will expect you to take on work that’s simply not possible. Rather than scrambling to find new designers, managers, or developers, it’s best to keep a relatively wide network of professionals ready to offer contracted work to.

This selective and optimized outsourcing also gives you an opportunity to increase overall revenues. While your design team works directly on clients projects – earning on an input basis – outsourced design teams can bring in a relatively stable per-project income for you.

3. Use affiliate programs to help clients with hosting

If your design business specializes in local businesses and low-tech companies, it’s not unlikely that your clients will need their own hosting space or dedicated server. While it’s unwise to take care of hosting entirely on your own – problems can often arise, and client support is not a business that you want to be involved in – passing clients on to an affiliated hosting company is never a bad idea.

A range of hosting providers offer affiliate programs, some of which are more lucrative than others. Whenever possible, aim to provide hosting that meets a clients needs, not those of your business. It’s worth eating a small commission to keep a major client, and it’s never worth selling out a client for a one-off hosting kickback.

4. Don’t use a reseller hosting program for clients

Reseller hosting programs are often viewed as an ultra-simple passive income solution for web designers. Unfortunately, they’re about as far from passive as anything can be. Whenever you take responsibility for web hosting, you also inherit every problem that would otherwise be directed to the web hosting company.

Every second of downtime becomes your concern, every connection speed issue becomes a phone call  to your office, and every time a client forgets their cPanel password, you’re the person that’s called for support. Focus on low-maintenance revenue increases, not income streams like reseller hosting which require ongoing support.

5. Market yourself as a premium provider

Don’t want to deal with clients that pay poorly? Then don’t market to them.

Whether you’re a freelance designer or part of an established design business, the audience that you market your services to is by far the largest influence on your per-project income. Audiences that have come to expect low-cost services will expect the same from you, and explaining a premium cost structure instantly compromises your ability to offer services.

Study the market that your business operates in, and approach premium clients with your services. Most businesses don’t mind paying a higher price for high quality services, and if you can back up your promises, those clients can be great long-term assets.

6. Network other creatives and online professionals

Networking gives you an opportunity to hand off work to extra designers in the event of a quantity crisis. It also gives you an opportunity to market your services to other online workers, increasing your professional network and creating another stream of incoming clients.

However, there’s another benefit to networking, one that can do wonders for per-project earnings. Most online services businesses are happy to pay for business leads, or at least offer a commission for valuable projects. Create a professional network between yourself and some online marketers, copywriters, and other service businesses that are beneficial to new businesses.

That way, when you’re approached by a new client, you can offer them extra value through related services, and yourself more per-project income through related commissions. Win-win.

7. Offer extra services in project updates and pitches

There’s nothing wrong with a friendly, non-pushy upsell. By including an ‘extra services’ rate card or list of related products or services with every project email, you’ll find your business increasing and your professional relationships extending. Most clients want your web design services to increase their long-term business income, and extending projects to incorporate long-term marketing, design, or website upgrades can often do just that.

8. Aim for ongoing business relationships

Short-term projects can be a hassle. While they’re often worthwhile from an earnings perspective, the amount of stress and unnecessary headaches that come with them can drive a sane business owner crazy.

There are two ways to deal with short-term projects effectively. The first, and most effective method, is to ignore them completely and focus entirely on long-term projects and ongoing work. The second method is to make your short-term work more immediately profitable and effective. Charge higher rates for short-term projects, let your clients understand that you work with other clients too, and create accommodating timeframes your yourself.

9. Prioritize clients that have long-term growth potential

When seeking out new clients, it’s tempting to fall for the “take all” approach where you let accept almost any project, so long as it meets your income criteria. While this strategy is great for filling out a schedule, it almost never works effectively for maximizing per-project income and total revenue.

Opportunity cost is a true nightmare for a service business. Product-based companies can pass over opportunities only to focus on scale, but service businesses with set resources and time allotments are always stuck with the projects that they’ve taken. Taking each and every project that’s offered to you leaves you with no room to focus on the most profitable and valuable clients.

Whenever possible, prioritize new clients that have massive growth potential. The brand new marketing firm with a dedicated owner is more likely to need your ongoing services than an aging local business with relatively low online needs. Give time to clients that have huge potential to expand, and you’ll end up getting it back again in projects that are lucrative, long-term, and very secure.

10. Say “No” more often

Saying “yes” wins you clients, opportunities, and information, but it also locks you into deals that might not work in your favor. Despite the old “customer is always right” maxim, the reality of service businesses, particularly design businesses, is that the client often isn’t right. Design is subjective, and when a project comes coupled with a client that just doesn’t know what they want, things can become a major headache.

Increasing per-project revenue isn’t just about optimizing what projects you do have, but making sure you pick the right projects not to have. Every potential opportunity can be a drag for your business – an ongoing annoyance that brings in income but leaves you shut out of more lucrative products. Fight away per-project time-killers by saying “no” more often. It hurts at first, but the more you do it, the more effective your business will become.

Have you ever experimented with different revenue streams or per-project income strategies? There are hundreds of ways to increase per-project earnings, and we’ve just scratched the surface!

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

So now Google is in the data storage, ISP, mobile device, hardware, software, and now the energy market.  For all the resources that Google provides that I use and inasmuch as I like how much they make my life easier, this may have been one step too far.  Any thoughts?

[more here on CNET]

But I thought you weren’t supposed to mix apples and oranges.

[posts here, here and here]

To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

So I set up a WP instance for her to play around with and it looks like she’s digging it. She’s worried that she’s going to lose some of the benefits of using the Google-based platform but I think that with the stats she has (trust me, she’s way beyond what MatSays will ever do) she doesn’t really need to worry.

The one downer note – the import function works great but it puts Blogger tags as WP categories so you might have to massage the DB by hand a bit. Wonder if they are aware of that little bug.

Scratches on discs happen. After one of our favorite DVDs started to skip after receiving a few too many scratches we started to look for a solution to salvage it. Sure there are DVD scratch removal devices that you can buy, but why waste money when there is a solution to be found right in our own homes? Using toothpaste, a banana, a rag and window cleaner we will show you how to remove scratches from a DVD and with any luck the unplayable will become playable.

What You Need

Equipment:
toothpaste
clean rag
banana
window cleaner

Instructions

1. The first thing you do is apply toothpaste on the scratched surface of the DVD. Next, rub the toothpaste gently into the DVD using the rag. Let this sit for about a minute.

2. Remove the toothpaste from the DVD using the rag. Then take the cut banana and in small circular motions rub the banana into the DVD. After you have applied the banana to the DVD, you will then take the peel and use this to rub the DVD in small circular motions.

3. Clean the DVD using the rag. Make sure to remove all the traces of the banana and peel. Spray window cleaner onto the surface of the DVD and continue cleaning the DVD. If you are lucky, your formerly unplayable DVD has now been salvaged!

Additional Notes: We experimented with using just toothpaste and just the banana, but we received the best results from using the toothpaste first and following it with the banana.

I’ll give it to the Quince company – they make nice interfaces. Really nice interfaces. Smooth, sleek and all that. But when it comes to devices, it’s sometimes a hit or miss. Google, on the other hand, well…they’re still playing a lot of catch-up. Google is a great big brother data collection/aggregation company but for all the work put into Android, especially into v2, it’s still just not the same.  Jennifer, a long time Mac-head, battled with me for the better part of 11 years.  If you walk into our home/MadeByGirl offices now, however, it’s nothing but one-bite fruit machines all over the place.  And though I hate some things (ok, code-writing is just an abomination and I STILL can’t get used to the command keys, something about Ctrl and Alt just fit my fingers well). And I suspect that the next few objets d’art that materialize will also be sleek and ringing “ta-da” when turned on.

Take the Kindle.  Now that’s a device with purpose.  Why is it so popular?  Because it has one purpose and one purpose only.  And it does it well.  Hey, if they added on a couple of other features, awesome, but it’s when it becomes overbuilt, that’s when it starts to become pointless.  Just like that, the iPod.  One purpose from inception, super design, awesome and intuitive interface, good UX, sells millions billions.

My G1, on the other hand, I am quickly learning that I wish it were just a freakin’ phone.  My very first Sprint mobile (circa 1993) was a somewhat bricky Samsung with a rocker switch and I loved it.  Hell, I wish I still had it – the roller switch was just so easy to use (compared to this pinhead sized trackball thing).  And for all the touchscreen love, I still miss that the phone was just to make calls.  Yes, I post from my phone, send text and all that other crap, but at some point I just started deleting apps because there really was no point to it.  Which is my point.

The iPad brings in a new level of “I really don’t know what I want to be.”  On the one hand, it’s very limited, but at the same time it’s pretty extreme.  I, like a lot of people, don’t seem to know where it will fit in.  Maybe I just need to use one for a while.  Or not use it as it sits idly on my coffee table, eventually becoming a very expensive coaster with a nice user interface.  Jobs had a lot of failures in the past but maybe we just don’t understand the impetus   crazy, drunken idea   motivation business model behind it quite yet (like Lisa).  Maybe the idea behind “just leave them all over like computerized notepads” really does have something behind it.

So back to Google – are we just plunking that idea on a browser?  As if every time Jennifer tells me to put the freakin laptop away while she’s trying to watch “Millionaire Matchmaker” and share a moment isn’t bad enough, but to have Google in my pocket, on the laptop screen, on my neighborhood gas pump (ok, that hasn’t materialized in my neck of the woods yet), and now on my coffee table too?  Right next to an iPad?  Does this mean that in 5 years, all the books in my custom-made bookshelf will be replaced with digital tablets (that I have to label with a Brother p-Touch – now there’s a device with purpose – one job, one UI, no complications)?

The age of computerization is nice.  It is.  But put the shit   screen   thing down and pick up a book.  A real book with paper and ink.  Enjoy it…it’s the original UI.

Great SOTU speech by the Man last night IMHO.  It was clear, detailed, lucid, and the GOP response was, well, pretty lackluster and inexplicit.  But whatever.  Exactly what O-man said about dropping the partisan issue and changing the way of political thinking…it’ll never happen.  Lobbyists will still continue to bust the hopes of the rest of middle America (amazing, aren’t they American’s too?  Don’t they leave their cushy jobs at night and go back home the same as the rest of us, just with better pay?).

But I digress, here’s the report…

It’s a nightmare that anyone with a Twitter account is vaguely afraid of, but no one before the year 2005 would have ever dreamed of having to worry about: Major Garrett, Fox News’ White House correspondent, accidentally tweeted the wrong link to his 13,059 followers. He intended to send out a shortened link to a transcript of last night’s State of the Union address. Instead, the link that went out was one to a Las Vegas call-girl website. Gawker managed to nab the series of tweets before he took them down:

“To overcome the numbing weight of our politics” and other Obama SOTU excerpts http://bit.ly/d6W Wed 27 Jan 18:22

Horrified, he deleted and explained:

I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu Wed 27 Jan 19:21

The link just posted works. Any frequent visitor here knows that is not my style. Sorry. Shld have caught it sooner. Wed 27 Jan 19:23

Enraged, he admonished and ordered:

For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that’s not good enuf, take a hike. Wed 27 Jan 20:18

As Gawker observes, it’s extremely unlikely that bit.ly would make that kind of error. But why would Washington-based Garrett be looking up a Vegas-based website like that?

If Garrett joins the press corps on Obama’s trip to Vegas later in February, we guess we’ll have an answer.

Maybe he should re-tweet it – might as well ride the wave, eh!

Last week, YouTube announced beta HTML 5 video support: once you’ve activated the beta, you’ll see videos using a native browser element rather than the Flash plugin. The new player only works with a recent version of either Safari or Chrome (or Chrome Frame in IE), as the video is encoded with the H.264 codec, which isn’t supported in Firefox. A day after YouTube’s announcement, Vimeo made a similar one. They also now provide preliminary support for the HTML video element with a new HTML player.

Superficially this seems like a victory for the “open” Web, right? A few major sites, representing a significant percentage of online video, begin to move away from a proprietary technology (Flash) and towards an open standard (HTML 5). But when you look a little deeper it turns out to not be so simple. Both YouTube and Vimeo have chosen to provide their HTML video encoded with the H.264 codec, which is patent-encumbered. Apple has a big stake in H.264, so Safari supports it, and Google has paid a licensing fee to include an H.264 decoder in Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand, doesn’t support H.264: it will only play HTML video encoded with the Ogg Theora codec. This is partly for ideological reasons, as the Theora codec is open source and therefore inline with Mozilla’s principles. But there’s more to it than just ideology. In reply to YouTube’s announcement, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering, Mike Shaver, published a blog post explaining why Mozilla is sticking to its guns with Theora. He points to H.264’s licensing fees not only as a justification for Mozilla’s decision not to support the format, but also as a more dire threat: “[...] if H.264 becomes an accepted part of the standardized web, those fees are a barrier to entry for developers of new browsers, those bringing the web to new devices or platforms, and those who would build tools to help content and application development.” Mozilla’s Open Source Evangelist, Christopher Blizzard, also had a lot to say on the topic, likening the situation to what happened years ago with the GIF format (and, to a lesser extent, with MP3).

It’s important to remember that the current level of browser support for web standards comes, in large part, from Firefox’s ability to compete on a level playing field with other browsers, and from the Mozilla team’s dedication to open standards. When big sites like YouTube begin positioning a proprietary format as the de facto standard for HTML video, they significantly impede the ability of free-as-in-speech browsers like Firefox to rival their competitors in functionality, which hurts interoperability and innovation on the Web as a whole. Meanwhile, though Chrome and Safari may be excellent browsers, and while their support for modern standards-based HTML and CSS should be applauded, in this respect their choice of a proprietary video format is more reminiscent of IE, circa the mid-90’s.

The fact that YouTube and Vimeo are trumpeting their new HTML 5 video support as an open standards victory is misleading to say the least. And it does lead to confusion: as pointed out by Christopher Blizzard, more than a few people on Twitter seem to think that Firefox’s lack of support for YouTube’s HTML 5 video should be taken to mean that Firefox doesn’t support HTML 5!

YouTube stated that it was launching the new feature in response to a user survey in which “Support HTML5 open web video with open formats” was the most requested feature. It seems that YouTube might only have been paying attention to the first half of the sentence: HTML 5 video, yes; open formats, eh, not so much.

So what do you think? Is it the job of YouTube and other sites like it to lead the way in providing video in an open format? Or should Chrome and Safari lead the way by supporting those formats first? Or are Mozilla being hopeless idealists?

Despite people’s expectation of change and movement on the screen, CSS and HTML have few controls that allow you to design interactivity, and those that exist are binary.

A link is either one color or another. A text field is either one size or another. A photo is either transparent or opaque. No in-betweens from one state to the next. No transitions.

This has led to most web pages feeling abrupt, with elements shifting and changing ungracefully.

Yes, we can use DHTML and leverage the jQuery library for transitions, but this requires a lot of code for something that should be very simple.

What we need is a quick and easy way to add simple transitions to the page and in this article you’ll find useful information about CSS transitions and how to use them.

[MatSays: some rambling by the author omitted]

CSS transitions are being introduced right now in CSS Level 3 but have already been added as an extension to Webkit. Right now that means they work only in browsers based on Webkit, including Apple Safari and Google Chrome. [MatSays: so use a "real" browser but don't forget your graceful degradation for MSIE and stuff]

Where CSS Transitions Come From

Transitions have been a part of Webkit for a while and are the basis of a lot of the cool things that the Safari UI can do that other browsers cannot.

But the W3C CSS Workgroup resisted adding transitions to its official specs, some members arguing that transitions are not style properties and would be better handled by a scripting language.

But many designers and developers, myself included, argued that these are in fact styles— only dynamic styles, rather than the traditional static styles that so many of us are used to.

Fortunately, the argument for dynamic styles held the day. Last March, representatives from Apple and Mozilla began adding the CSS Transitions Module to the CSS Level 3 specification, closely modeled on what Apple had already added to Webkit.

[read the complete tutorial here]

If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

The jury is still out on why I would need an iPhone app (though I guess it would make it simple for presentations maybe?) but I’m sure I’ll eventually fall into that one (of course, I still have to be convinced to get an iPhone in the first place).

Anyway, I admit that my only issue is that the box could be a bit larger (2GB on the free version) but face it, it’s still a business and it still has employees to pay so they can’t give away the farm. And it probably keeps me from storage too much digital crap that I don’t need.

PS: double bonus if you need a quick web page

For my students and UNLV colleagues: if you had never heard of the DreamSpark program, you should jump on it.  A program launched in 2008 by MSFT (don’t groan) can get you free software.  Yes, free.  Yes, I’ve gotten some of it.  In a blatant (and conducive) attempt to move budding developers and IT staffers to the Redmond dark side, they’re offering Visual Studio (2005 & 2008), Windows Server 2008, Expression Studio and more for free.  So while the university’s alliance program is broken and paltry, you could have just headed straight to the source and gotten legit, keyed copies.

Now the new stuff: just released by MSFT – WebsiteSpark.  Like it’s older brother, the new program is aimed at small companies – no more than 10 employees – and offers:

• 3 Visual Studio licenses
• 1 Expression Studio 2 or 3 license
• 2 Expression Web licenses
• 3 users license for WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008
• 4 processor license for self-hosting WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008

That’s a buttload of very expensive stuff for nothing.  The caveat is that you must launch a new web app (that’s app boys and girls, not a paltry PHP site) and if you hit it big, you have to exit the program and pay a $100 fee.  That’s peanuts compared to the value.  Or you could go to a bunch of MSFT seminars and collect copies but that takes a lot of time and snoozing through 4 hours of demos.

[via Android and Me]

Everyone’s favorite Android hacker appears to have angered someone at Google. We just received word that Cyanogen has received a cease and desist letter from Google. Details are scarce, but it appears Google is not happy about Cyanogen distributing their closed source Android apps (Market, Talk, Gmail, YouTube, etc). CyanogenMod is easily the most popular custom Android rom with over 30,000 active users.

Relevant bits from the chat log we received:

Hopefully, the two parties will be able to work something out. I’ve been using CyanogenMod on both my Android phones for several months and they are awesome. If you want to show your support for Cyanogen, you can always visit his site and place a donation for all the countless hours he has put into improving the Android platform.

* Seamless curved screen, which eliminates bezel and screen gap issues for increased productivity and decreased frustration (according to Center for Human-Computer Interaction – Shupp et al, presented at Graphics Interface 2006)
* 2880 x 900 double WXGA native resolution
* 200 cd/m² brightness
* 0.02ms Rapid Response
* 10,000:1 contrast ratio
* Wide color gamut with 100% coverage of sRGB and 99.3% coverage of Adobe RGB
* Single link DVI-D and HDMI 1.3 input connectors
* USB 2.0 connectivity for easy use of peripherals
* Front panel controls
* On Screen Display (OSD®) and software-based GUI, which enables advanced display control options

Several sites are reporting that a major attack on Wordpress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of Wordpress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever’s behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.

How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on Wordpress offers two possible ways to find out:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as
example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/.
The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

Wordpress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. Wordpress.com users aren’t affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you’ve already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in Wordpress’ FAQ.

I’ve already done the upgrade and it is the same, painless upgrade as usual.  Just be sure (especially if you’re using FireFTP) that you set the transfer options to Automatic Mode (Tools > Options > Downloads/Uploads : top fieldset).

If you’ve ever read David Weinberger’s ”Everything is Miscellaneous” (ISBN10: 0805080430) as well as a host of other books and articles on Wikipedia, it’s almost as if Wikimedia is doing a 180 on its own founding principles.  Since the beginning, the founders strongly defended and imposed the concept that the community itself was the police and at no time should an editor be the final say…this to extent that a founder removed himself as an editor for changing an article without the consent of the community (consent being reached by culminating responses and critique any time an article change was made or requested).

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Not that I am necessarily opposed to having these types of sanctions, but at the same time, it gets to the core of defeating the point of the community based system.  The community, as I’ve often maintained, can rarely govern itself over a long period of time.  If it could, governments wouldn’t exist.  But by the same token, where does the power and authority end?  Should the Wikimedia board not consider that instead of a single editor, at the very least, possibly three or more editors should have to consent to the alteration first?

Advocates of the system point out that [it] provides an extra layer of insurance to prevent false posts and improve the overall accuracy.  But once again, at whose expense?  Is historical information not fact riddled by the opinion of the observer?  Who is to determine what is accurate?  While editors are, for sure, carefully chosen, aren’t VH1 game show contestants screened as well (ok, bad analogy but you get the idea – substitute radical terrorists in place of game show contestants and it’s a bit more frightening).  There is much at stake in this issue – freedom of speech, importance of historical record, observation and opinion – more than just the fact that Wikipedia could potentially end up more like Encyclopedia Brittanica (a system it sought to avoid) than the incarnation we’ve all grown to love over the last eight years.

Fortunately the gods have prevailed and though I’d been goodie-goodie (meaning resistant to) about rooting my G, I finally decided to after some prompting (and a well made video showing how easy it was to do).  And damn, it works, and yea, it was easy and quick.  Nice work!

Sources:

• Five Great Reasons to Root Your Android Phone on Lifehacker
• Get Root Access in Android with One Click on Lifehacker
• Android Rooting in 1-Click from RyeBrye

While is why I am extremely proud of the evolution of the CMS that I designed and built for the Wimbledon Live player (see this post).

To understand the complexity behind designing the UX it’s important to understand the nature of the data and the critical effect of the workflow. First, video was being supplied from six sources, some to us using Saviant direct to our servers, some we pulled via FTP, and then of course the live streams (some HD and some SD). Then there were multiple parties…NBC (as the news reporter) needed editorial control over metadata, while iStream’s Managed Webcasting team needed to control the timeline over when items went to publication. My team, RnCS (Research & Creative Services) needed to insure that everything was tested before going live so we needed to throw the whole thing through a staging server before hitting a production server that then fed a cluster of edge servers on Akamai’s network.

So we structured it in several parts. First we put automated bots to determine when new assets had been dropped, specifically seeking out XML files that held the initial metadata, and dropped that into the CMS DB. Once there, the appropriate parties were notified by email (or in my case as PM, by SMS) – to update metadata, insert images, begin video transcoding, etc. Through the entire process, we designed screens to make it as easy as possible to follow the flow of assets, provide enough ability to each staff person so that overlaps in duties existed but that checkpoints assured data integrity throughout.

The grid above, for example shows the visual layout of the thumbnails that would appear in the cover-flow style playlist inside the player. Deep linking was provided so editorial users could create pointers on the MSNBC/NBCSports sites. Drag and drop allowed us to reorder objects to maximize the visibility of prominent players.

Each level of user had various modal windows to insert data. Even imagery was uploaded first to the staging, processed for size and then sent to production.

Because of the nature of edge servers, we also had to purge the cache after any update, so we provided a three-section grouping that allowed us to send the feed XMLs to production and clear the cache in one shot. And to make THAT process even easier, we built it so that it was accessibly by mobile phone so even if I was in transit, I could still update the CMS in a timely fashion.

Finally, the live streams had the ability to be toggled on and off so that the matrix of available feeds, particularly the Smooth HD stream, was optimized and prioritized. To be sure, there was still much room for improvement but given that the whole CMS was built in 6 days and now, five days into Wimbledon, has eased us into a steady, smooth workflow, speaks volumes for making it easy to use, intuitive (for example, the color designations on the player match the ones in the CMS, big text and extensive micro-transaction Ajax created an interactive environment), and overall a good experience.

Starting June 27, it will also feature live feeds including up to five simultaneous live feeds (of course the UK being 8 hours ahead of me means some extremely early morning admin).  The live feeds (and subsequent VOD archives) will feature at least one Smooth Stream, Microsoft’s new adaptive streaming technology that will bring you hi-definition video at 2950k (it looks really sweet).

The 2009 Wimbledon runs through July 5th.

[insert Dr. Evil laugh here]

OK, seriously, nothing against it but to this day I still don’t really see the point and despite incredible efforts and even more incredible simplification, it’s still confusing. So nah nah nah!

And to my students (and former students) who’ve put in invites…this should obviously signal why I am not on it. It’s also a violation of school policy to engage in fraternization. And yes, virtual still counts. See you in class instead!

Grads, catch me on LinkedIn instead.

WordPress is often thought of as just a blogging platform. But it’s capable of so much more. Even WordPress’ documentation includes an entire section on using WordPress as a content management system. Because WordPress is such an easy-to-use platform, it makes sense to consider using it as a platform to build just about any kind of website, a portfolio website included.

Whether you’re a photographer, graphic designer, Web designer or any other kind of visual artist, WordPress makes an excellent starting point for developing your online portfolio. And with the wealth of plug-ins and ready-made themes available, you can usually get a perfectly presentable website up and running in a matter of hours.

So get on the bandwagon, listen, learn, try, play and get some stuff done!

Excellent article on a consistently overlooked problem for most web designers – help elements.  A help element is anything that provides the user with assistance in completing a task.  They come in many shapes, sizes and formats but the primary goal is to be unobtrusive but noticeable and, well, helpful.  Most designers/developers look at help elements with trudgery but in many cases it can actually enhance the user experience.

The place we frequently see help elements is in form completion and validation.  Why we somehow can’t provide scripts that reduce error rates in the first place is beyond me, but I suppose in a lot of cases you still have to provide visual cues and alerts to help some users out. 

In HCI we consider that a standard free-form entry is the most volatile of inputs and sure enough, that’s where you’ll encounter the most errors, but don’t neglect the other visual aspects, including external labels, internal (low contrast, like the one shown below) labels, direct manipulation (such as calendar popups). 

The extremes of direct input error handling might be dates and telephone numbers, but here you may need to also consider flow; if within the form you require country, simply provide formats that the user will be more familiar with (such as auto-complete country codes).

From Matt Cronin’s post:

Usability is the Key

With any website design, one strives for usability. Usability is the key factor in the success that a website achieves. Usability is simply about making things easier for your users — and help elements certainly do that. But are your individual help elements themselves usable?

Don’t Confuse the User
Confusing the user contradicts the purpose of the help element, so avoid it. Only put in content that is appropriate to the element. The way you organize content within the help element affects usability. If the element contains a lot of content, use lists and highlight keywords so that the content is easy to scan.

Placement Has a Major Impact
In Web design layout, placement of objects is a top usability consideration. Likewise for help elements, placement affects usability.

Many designers make the mistake of making help elements (i.e. buttons, links, etc.) very small so that they don’t get in the way of the website’s main content. The problem is that they become hard for the user to find. Sure, their small size leaves room for more content, but that won’t help a confused user. Find a balance between subtlety and accessibility.

Also remember that help elements should be optional for the user, not required. Allow the user to choose to get help, instead of immediately showing the element.

Next time you’re designing your site, put some extra consideration into the help elements and see what ideas you can come up with.  Send me some examples of your clever solutions via comment.

Probably one of the best stated defenses I’ve read for UX comes courtesy of this post in Smashing Magazine.  In talking about the brand loyalty of Apple users…

How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.

How true. This week I’ve been tossed back and forth between clients and bosses struggling with all the wants and demands and needs and the bottom line came down to making sure everyone realized that it has nothing to do with personal preference and like and dislikes, it’s about experience, and more than that it has to be tangible, palpable and reach the emotion of a human in a way that makes it memorable, or at the very least engaging.

I first encountered Silverlight 2 years ago when it was first released at NAB as version 1 (the Javascript version).  Quickly iStream assimilated into the Silverlight army and helped push several products into the forefront with Silverlight 2 over the last year+ including several prominent public jobs and some to be released shortly.  Now, just 23 short months later, SL3 promises some great stuff.

For all those that say Flash still kicks SL in the ass, maybe true, but with a 10 year head-start I would’ve thought they’d still be leaps and bounds ahead.  The fact that SL is quickly catching up and becoming a prominent player especially in the business forefront says something about its acceptance and viability.  Don’t take me wrong, I too still develop plenty of Flash apps and here at iStream we take strides to develop interfaces concurrently on both platforms but the sheer speed at which SL has come to adolescence speaks volumes about what it may bring in the near future.

In the resulting manifesto, entitled “Information Management: A Proposal“, Berners-Lee suggests the we “should work toward a universal linked information system.”  Every student of web design should read it and understand the origins of the industry.  It is an amazing path that the Web has taken in its course to ubiquity and utility but it all started, like most great inventions, as just an idea in someone’s head.

“Site conversion” is a very dry and unexciting way of saying “how to get more profíts from the same amount of website traffic.” Isn’t that a more upbeat way of expressing it? Who doesn’t want to get more profíts from the same number of visitors?

Increasing your conversion rate is a straightforward, even dramatic way of positively impacting your bottom line. It really cannot be emphasized too much that any improvement at all in your conversion rate means additional revenue that is total profít.

Remember this fact when you are told that the way to “make more money” is to invest in more traffic-generating schemes (and dreams, at times). Before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic, you need to do as much as you can with the traffic you are already getting. If you keep the horse ahead of the cart in your planning, you will have an efficient, stable, measurable conversion rate from which you can extrapolate x amount of additional profit from y amount of new-traffic generation.

The following tips are not in any particular order (except for Number 1), and can be modified and reordered to suit your particular situation. Take ownership of the change and improvement, and make sure everyone involved understands the importance of maximizing every revenue source, beginning with the existing ones!

1: Before you can repair or improve something, you have to have a good way of measuring where you are, what you’re doing, where you’re going, etc. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account and use other low- and no-cost tools to develop your “analytics” and “metrics” – essentially fancy words that tell you how you’re doing with numbers.

2: Create landing pages that are both keyword- and campaign-specific. Try separating any related pay-per-click keywords into smaller and tighter groups, and then create the landing pages for each of those new subgroups. Conversions will almost certainly be better if keywords, advertising approaches and landing pages are thematically related and tightly integrated.

3: Test different headlines and copy writing. This might be the most effective way of quickly showing improvements. Therefore, you need to write compelling copy or find someone else who can do it for you. There is plenty of free advice about this (much of it worth every penny you pay for it), but the importance of copywriting as it affects site conversions cannot possibly be overstated. This is key.

4: It is very important to test your pricing, as it really does make a huge difference in conversions. If your goal is to maximize customer value, then the highest converting price may not actually be the optimal one. In other words, if you raise your price by 50% and only see a 10% reduction in conversions, you will more than compensate for the drop. Going the other direction, if you lower the price 15% and this doubles or triples your ratio, your gain compensates for your price reduction. Test your prices, and test them in both directions.

5: Website load time has become an oft-overlooked item in this age of “broadband everywhere.” Load time is critically important in reducing your “bounce rate” on landing pages. There are various online services that will measure your load speed (websiteoptimization.com), and when you know what it is, you can reduce it by compressing images, removing redundant items, optimizing your style sheets (CSS) and HTML code, and so on. The referenced website will also give you advice on other ways to improve your site’s load speed.

6: Clearly identify the sales path(s) and discard any points of resistance, or bottlenecks. Even if you have just a single product, there may be a number of different “paths” that lead to a sale. Perhaps you have a landing page to acquire visitor contact data, which then takes them to a sales page, thence to an order page, and so on. Check your metrics and analytics carefully and you should start seeing patterns in how your visitors navigate your site. If you can see when, where and how visitors are leaving the site, you can delete unnecessary steps, enhance the sales copy or the “call to action,” insert a few testimonials, emphasize your warranty or something else to capture that business. Do everything you can to keep the sales process simple and straightforward. The less confusing it is, the less resistance visitors will display.

7: Let your praises come from others’ lips. Sometimes talking about oneself can sound egotistical, and it has been clearly proven that third-party testimonials boost conversions. In marketing it is called “social proof” when you bring in statements and assessments from others to buttress your message. If you add testimonials – short blurbs, highlighted quotes, letters – to your various landing pages, sales pages and even shopping cart pages, you will almost invariably notice an improvement in your conversion rate.

8: You need to understand the mind of your market, and your customer’s experience with your website. Place an order on the site yourself as you step into the mind of a first-time visitor. Identify the hang-ups, inefficiencies and confusing or missing components that hinder your conversions. In concert with step #6 above, you want to identify why you are not converting, so that you can make the necessary improvements, whatever they may be, to improve your ratio.

9: Some people believe passionately in the power of media on landing, sales and order pages to raise conversions considerably. Others are not convinced, and there is not much hard data from controlled studies to consult. You should consider testing this idea yourself. You should try pages both with and without automatic play engaged. The idea is to lower buyer resistance, and if media helps, all the better. Music, motion graphics and video do add life and personality to your website, but there is a “sweet spot” (balancing point) and the fact remains that different age and cultural groups respond differently to the media. You need to make changes here in the context of your site’s demographics. You wouldn’t put rock music on your page of ladies’ perfumes, probably – unless you have a 20-something demographic and it’s a signature fragrance from U2 or some other chart-topping band.

Aren’t most of these lists called the “top 10″ this or that? You can count this tip as a bonus, then: Keep track of everything you do! Nothing “goes without saying” anymore, so you are hereby reminded that all your hard work can go for naught if you do not keep good records of what changes you are making, when, where, why and how. Chart your progress, review it regularly and don’t be afraid to make continuing refinements as you move along your strategic path.

Finally, as a “super bonus tip” – use some kind of sales accelerator, “offer intensifier” or other method to move people faster through the sales process. It could be a special “one time” or “limited time” offer, a limíted quantity offer or even a “special event” promotíon. Research what’s going on at other sites in your industry and others, and stay abreast of what seems to be working. Add your creativity to the mix, tailor things to your company’s situation and you should start seeing increased conversion rates in short order.

A longer version can also be found here.

Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.

Because of the significance of communication with visitors, it is an essential consideration for every designer and website owner and the responsibility of both. Unfortunately, communication is sometimes overlooked and takes a backseat to the visual attractiveness of a website. Ideally, the design and other elements that do the communicating work together to create a clear, unified message to visitors.

In this article, we’ll take a broad look at the subject of clear communication in Web design. We’ll start with a discussion of the primary methods of communication for websites and typical challenges that designers face. From there, we’ll move on to look at what specifically should be communicated to visitors and tips for implementing this in your own work. At the end, we’ll look at some of the goals that should be established in terms of communication when developing websites, as well as some of the results of having a website that communicates effectively.

[read the entire article at Smashing Magazine]