Tag Archives: websites

Thoughts

The future is the past is the future

Back in late 2008, I heard of a technology that was touted as new: instant price matches, made available by scanning the barcode of a product in a store, through an iPhone app called Checkout SmartShop. I chuckled. This idea wasn’t new at all.

BarPoint

I worked for a company called BarPoint for a few months in 2000 or 2001, I can’t recall exactly. As you can see if you visit their domain name, it’s up for sale now. Back then, it was working just fine, and they were working hard to put together an online directory of products whose prices could be instantly matched from many stores. They even had gizmos with little barcode scanners you coud buy and carry with you to a store; they were little Palm PDAs outfitted with small add-on barcode scanners. These gizmos would connect back to the BarPoint servers via built-in dial-up modems, and would quote you prices from other stores.

BarPoint Wireless Devices

They had investors lined up, had cleared about two rounds of investing, had bonafide employees, etc. Unfortunately for them, it was the end of the dotcom boom. They were still burning through the cash and not generating any profits, because they didn’t get off the ground fast enough. I left as they started to cut employees. Other co-workers hung on through a company move from nice offices in downtown Ft. Lauderdale to a warehouse in Deerfield Beach (both in South Florida), and many efforts to revive the company. Things didn’t work out for them. You’re welcome to follow the site’s progress and slow death on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

What is obvious now is that they had two things going against them: the idea was ahead of its time, and the market crashed. Back then, this wasn’t so obvious. People thought the idea was cool and wanted to make it work. I thought it was cool and even thought they might somehow pull it together and start making profits, even after I left. I bought some stock in the company, only to watch its price sink to very near $0 over time.

The interesting thing about the iPhone is that it’s truly a game-changer. It penetrated the market quickly, and app development for it is so easy that you don’t need an army of people, like BarPoint did. You also don’t need to sell the devices, or worry that device adoption is reserved for a very small segment of the market. The iPhone is practically everywhere. I don’t even know if Kigi Software, the makers of the Checkout SmartShop, is a real company, or a dba name for one or two smart developers working from home. But that’s what’s cool about these times. The price for bringing an interesting product to the market is no longer prohibitive, like it was for BarPoint. Almost anyone can do it if they want to, nowadays. And the end product is something that kicks BarPoint in the rear quite effectively.

You simply enter the barcode into the iPhone using the numeric keypad, and you get instant price matches. Voila.

Enter UPCGet online price quotes

You can even find out where the product is being sold in other local stores, or read online reviews. It does everything the BarPoint product would have done if it could have gotten off the ground.

Get local storesGet reviews

Very nice indeed.

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Reviews

PictureSurf, a new gallery plugin for WordPress

PictureSurf Plugin

PictureSurf is a new WordPress plugin that launches today (February 10, 2009). It aims to make it easier for bloggers to upload galleries to their WordPress sites.

I spoke with PictureSurf’s founder, Alan Rutledge, via chat this morning, and I wanted to find out what makes his plugin different from the standard WordPress functionality. You may or may not be aware of the fact that WordPress offers an Image Gallery feature that’s built into the core WP install.

From Alan’s perspective, the PictureSurf plugin differentiates itself by offering:

  1. An enhanced user interface, because it lets you drag and drop photos to rearrange them, label multiple photos at once and,
  2. A little more SEO juice, because of better permalinks and conditional nofollow tags on the thumbnail links. The nofollow tags are activated when there’s too little content on the photo page — for example, your description of the photo is too short, etc.

As I told Alan, I don’t see enough of a difference between this plugin and what WordPress already offers to convince me to use it myself. The PictureSurf website claims that it’s faster to build a gallery with their plugin than with WP, but I ran into a glitch when I tried to use it. I couldn’t upload any photos. The upload engine froze and even though I hit Cancel and tried to re-upload the photos a few more times, I wasn’t able to do it. Still, that’s not too important. I’m sure that if I had more time, I could have gotten it working properly.

The thing is, I built a WordPress Image Gallery for this review in under 30 seconds. Each thumbnail links to its own photo page, very much like PictureSurf does it. I was able to choose how many images I wanted in each row. And I was also able to drag and drop the images to change the order in which they appear in the gallery. You can see the gallery below.

Another claim made by the PictureSurf plugin is that you can monetize your blog much better when an image sits on its own page instead of displaying on a blank page. I’ll agree with that, but I’ll also add that WordPress lets you do the very same thing. In WP’s Image Gallery options page, you get to choose where the thumbnail links go: they can go to the images themselves, or to something called attachment pages, which are pages that WP generates dynamically for each photo, using your blog’s own theme. So I ask again, what is it that differentiates PictureSurf from WP’s built-in functionality?

As much as I love WordPress plugins, I’m a big believer in built-in functionality. I don’t want to be stuck in a situation where I need to stop using a plugin, for whatever reason, and have my post archives become unusable because the plugin is no longer there. I ran into that issue with a video plugin I used in the past. It stopped being supported, and then I had to modify all of my old posts where I embedded videos, in order to make them playable again. If the long-term survival of your content is not a concern for you, then don’t worry about it. It is a concern for me though.

Last, but not least, I found PictureSurf’s design somewhat rough. It just doesn’t integrate as well as it should into the WordPress Editor. Furthemore, if it aims to take over the image gallery role, then it should fully take over that role. If I install PictureSurf, once I click on the Image Upload button in the WordPress Editor toolbar, it’s the PictureSurf AJAX window that should open up, not the WordPress Image Uploader. And when I access an old post that uses an image gallery, written before I installed PictureSurf, it should automatically take over that gallery and display the images using the PictureSurf gallery settings. But none of this happens. Old posts remain the same. I’d have to modify each and every one, manually, in order to get PictureSurf working there. As a publisher and writer, that’s a labor I’m not willing to undergo.

For me, the PictureSurf plugin does not differentiate itself enough from the standard WordPress functionality and does not offer enough added value in order to make it to my roster of active plugins. I find the WordPress Image Gallery feature quite adequate and necessary, and therefore, using the PictureSurf plugin becomes a matter of preference, not need. I myself do not need it, therefore I won’t use it. Your situation may differ. Feel free to try it out and see what you think.

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How To

New Gmail buttons and shortcuts

Gmail's new buttons

I woke up today to find new Gmail buttons. At first I thought it was just Firefox playing tricks on me, but no, the buttons look the same in Safari. The Gmail Team announced the change on their blog yesterday, on 2/3/09. As expected, the change took a while to propagate to all of the Gmail accounts.

Along with the new buttons, they introduced two new keyboard shortcuts, “l” and “v”, which will allow you to label and label/archive messages on the fly. The “l” key opens a drop-down menu which allows you to label emails. You can navigate the drop-down menu using the arrow keys and mark a label using the Enter key. The “v” key does the same thing, and it also archives the message at the same time, removing it from the inbox.

Don’t forget that while you’re in the Gmail inbox, you can select multiple message by using the Shift key. Left-click on the first one, then Shift-Click on the last one, and all in-between will be selected. You can then use “l” or “v” to apply labels to all of them at once.

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Run WordPress by itself or cached?

I’ve been running an experiment for the past three months. I wanted to see how well WordPress would do if I ran it by itself, without any sort of caching. So far, so good.

About four months ago, my web server kept getting pummelled into the ground almost daily, and I couldn’t figure out why it kept happening. After researching the issue, I found the prevailing opinion to side with the need for a caching plugin. People were complaining that it’s just not optimized well, and must be run with the aid of such a plugin, otherwise higher levels of traffic will bring the web server down. Trouble was, I already ran my WP install cached, using WP Super Cache, had been doing so for over a year, and my server still went down. (I should specify it had only recently started to go down.) What was I to do?

I posted a message in the WP forums asking why WordPress doesn’t generate static files. Were there any plans to do so in the future? To my surprise, Matt Mullenweg (WP’s founder) replied to my post, and told me that while there are caching plugins out there, WordPress.com doesn’t run any, and they’re doing just fine hosting millions of blogs. Others chimed in as well, and their replies got me to make the following changes:

  1. Made the switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with SliceHost. Four months later, I’m still very happy about that move.
  2. Doubled the RAM on my web server (to 512MB from 256MB).
  3. Turned off WP Super Cache and started running my site by itself.

Each step followed the other in succession. I wanted to make gradual changes so I could see why my server kept having issues. Switching to a VPS host was good, and it was needed, but for my traffic levels, it wasn’t enough. Doubling the RAM was good and it was needed, and while the new RAM is enough for now, I’d still be having problems if I didn’t also disable my caching plugin.

Here’s where I think the crux of the caching/non-caching issue lies: it has to do with the load placed on the server as cached versions of the pages get created. Normally, that’s a non-issue. But as I monitored my server carefully, I discovered that it went down only as it started to get indexed heavily by search engines. Their bots visited my site in spurts, with traffic peaking, then falling back down. They spawned multiple threads, over ten at times, following links and slurping up the content. It’s when bot traffic peaked that an incredible load was placed on the web server. It kept generating cached versions of pages it hadn’t already cached, RAM and CPU demand increased to unsustainable levels, and it went down.

No amount of tweaking the Apache and MySQL config files helped with this sort of scenario, or at least it didn’t help me. You see, the difference between peak traffic levels with search engines vs. people is that people will go to a single article or a group of articles that are in demand. A caching plugin works great for those sorts of situations. There’s a limited number of pages to worry about caching, and those pages get served up time and time again. The load is acceptable. When a search engine bot starts indexing your site, it’ll call up any and all available pages that it can find. That can place a huge load on the web server as it scrambles to serve up those pages and build static versions for the caching plugin. I believe that it’s too much for most medium-sized servers to handle, and they will usually go down.

In my case, disabling the caching plugin and making sure no traces were left in the .htaccess file were the only things that helped. Now, I might have up to four different search engine bots crawling my site, each spawning multiple threads, and my server will usually not go down. Sure, there are times when the server will get dangerously low on RAM, and will be unresponsive for 5-10 minutes, but that’s an acceptable scenario for me. And if I should all of a sudden get huge amounts of people traffic to a post, it’s possible that the web server will also become unresponsive, at least for a time. But the great thing about running WordPress by itself is that Apache will usually take care of itself. As the requests die down, Apache will kill the extra threads, the available RAM will go back up again, and the server will recover nicely. That wasn’t possible while I ran the caching plugin. When it went down, it stayed down, and that was a problem.

I realize that what works for me may not work for others. I have not tested what happens with WP Super Cache on a larger server, for example one with more RAM. It’s possible that the larger amount of RAM there will offset the greater demand placed on the server as it builds static versions of the pages, although I’m not sure what to say about the CPU usage. That also peaked as the caching plugin went crazy. Not sure how that’ll work on a more powerful server.

WP Super Cache has some options that allow you to cache more pages and keep them cached for longer periods of time. Perhaps fiddling with those options would have allowed me to keep running the plugin, but I wanted to see how things stood from the other side of the fence. Like I said, so far, so good. Caveats aside, running WordPress by itself was the cure for my persistent web server outages.

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Flash Player 10 breaks teh internets

Shortly after upgrading to Adobe’s new Flash Player, version 10, I noticed I could no longer upload photos to my blogs. And I also noticed that FriendFeed’s image uploader didn’t work the same way. I didn’t relate that to the Flash Player upgrade at first, and tried to rule out problems on my own machine. Then I did a bit of research and discovered that others were in the same boat.

Quoting from this thread on the WP forums:

“The new Flash version 10 is incompatible. The latest version 9 of Flash is what you want. There will be a workaround (ugly hack) for this in WordPress 2.7. But since the problem is actually with Flash 10 itself, stick with Flash 9 for the time being. Hopefully, WordPress 2.8 will get rid of the Flash altogether, since Adobe has made it clear that they consider this problem to be a security fix.”

On FriendFeed (FF), people complained about image uploader issues as well. In that same FF thread, I found out that Adobe archives their old versions of the Flash Player, something which is not readily apparent on their site, nor easy to find. I also found that I need to uninstall Flash Player before downgrading — should I decide to do it — using Adobe’s Flash uninstaller.

Now, we’re faced with an issue: stay with Flash 10 and a non-working image uploader on WP sites, or downgrade to Flash 9? I’ll let each of you decide what to do about that. Since there appears to be a security issue in Flash 9, it’s not something you should take lightly, but at least you’ll have options.

You may think I’m joking in my post title when I say that the new Flash Player broke the internet. Not necessarily. When you consider that there are about 3.8 million blogs at WordPress.com, and at least a few hundred thousand self-hosted WP installs from WordPress.org, that makes over 4 million websites whose WP Image Uploader broke when Flash 10 was released. I’m not sure how many FriendFeed (FF) users there are, but there should be 100,000 or more by now.

The FF developers came up with an alternate image uploader fairly quickly when they discovered the problem with Flash Player 10. WP is going to release a workaround in WP 2.7, then possibly do away with Flash for the Image Uploader in WP 2.8. WP also has an alternate way to upload photos, through the old, form-based browser uploader, where you can only do one photo at a time. That’s what I’ve been using while I wait for the new version of WP to come out.

Still, when you consider that over 4 million internet users were negatively impacted by this new version of the Flash Player, that’s not a number to take lightly. I do wish Adobe had worked with WordPress ahead of time to make the transition smoother or to offer them some sort of workaround. I found out about this the hard way, and my guess is you did, too. That’s not the ideal way to do business when you’ve got Silverlight nipping at your heels.

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