Press & Render

Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) linked to Google PageSpeed Test which appears to be very similar to YSlow.

I’ve been using YSlow religiously for a few months now, and having another tool for input is incredibly important.

You have to realize, that you might only have one chance to make an impression on a visitor, and you have to make the best impression. You need to “convert” (ugh) that visitor into a reader. And even though we live in a world of broadband, there are a large number of people that use mobile devices for browsing. So in a way, it’s like going back to dial-up in that you must make sure your site loads quickly. These tools won’t help you in terms of visual critiquing, but if you want to learn where the possible bottlenecks are, either (or both) of these will help you get started.

Ben Nesvig had a post about how “You’ve probably read enough“. And he’s probably right.

All the time you spend on Hacker News could be spent hacking, or whatever it is you need to do to get your project going/finished/updated/out there.

But there’s one thing that I think Ben ignores that can have a profound impact by reading one more article. Inspiration.

You can come across something that gives you the motivation, the click, the pizazz to get you going better/faster/more than ever before.

And Ben, if you’re going to get into video editing, I suggest taking a look at this video. It might be worth the extra 6 minutes.

There has been a lot of ramp up towards WordPress 3.3. and so I’ll be taking some time to check the current version of the Press & Render Software against the RC2, and make sure that everything is still hunky-dory.

For the rest of you, I recommend checking out WordPress Development Updates and WordPress 3.3 Field Guide for Developers.

CATS 1, KIDS 0 found via Hacker News. CONTAINS A NSFW IMAGE.

So to recap:
$ They allowed me to use a donate button, and got a portion of the donations
$ Then made me return the donations, and kept a portion of the fees on the donations
$ They allowed me to use a Buy Now button to sell gifts individually, and got a portion of those sales
$ Then made me return the sales, and kept a portion of the fees on the sales
$ They processed the toy purchases, and made fees on that

PayPal Thinks I’m a Terrorist found via @neilhimself.

How do unlock the account? All I have to do is furnish PayPal with several different proofs of my identity. They already have a credit card number and a bank account number, mind you, but that’s not sufficient, now they want copies of my passport, my birth certificate, and a utility bill.

These are just two of the many stories you can find of customer service mishaps by Paypal. The frustrating rules, the terrible attitude of the customer “service” reps, and the overwhelming fact that you can’t do a single thing to stop them from doing whatever the hell they want. On the other hand, Paypal is a great service. It makes things super easy and the fees are fairly reasonable all things considered.

But Paypal doesn’t put a focus on customer service. And it shows.

Sourced from the Hacker News Twitter Account.

Dylan James posted on ruli.us a good article on something that a lot of people (myself included) miss Make a Good Bio Page.

Not to sound too creepy, but I like knowing about people because it helps me identify who you are and what your interests are. This of course allows me to see how closely they align with mine, which allows me to see how interested I am going to be in what you have to say/make/buy/sell/waffle.

In developing the first version of the Press & Render software I needed to keep things simple. And by not developing support for WP Comments, I was able to bypass a lot of code. But as P&RS went into closed alpha testing, I had started to put together a list of tasks of what to do next. Features I wanted to add, bugs I needed to fix, things like that.

And I thought about comments, I didn’t really want to add support. I don’t like them. Comments are messy. Trackbacks or “Notes” are clutter and noise. My experience has been that people rarely comment on a site to move forward with discourse. It’s to argue, disagree, and troll. Unless you are building something specifically for dialogue, such as a community site or forum then there is absolutely no need for comments.

Most people also add comments for the same reason they add pagination. For additional page views.

But as I’ve mentioned before you can’t rely solely on your own thoughts.

In order to obtain a different perspective, I needed a set of sample data. Something that I was unaffiliated with, but is still having valid content / design. Luckily I’d somewhat recently found Read & Trust. As their site says:

Read & Trust is committed to gathering together the best independent writers available—the ones recommended by the writers you read and trust.

Note: You would not be making a bad choice if you based all your blog choices off the combined wisdom of Read & Trust.

Read & Trust currently has 21 members and as I polled their sites I got the following results:
No Comments Allowed (13)
Stephen M. Hackett of 512pixels.net
Jorge Quinteros of folio.jorgeg.com
Chris Bowler of chrisbowler.com
Adam W. King of b.aking.ca
Ben Brooks of brooksreview.net
Kyle Baxter of tightwind.net
Shawn Blanc of shawnblanc.com
Patrick Rhone of patrickrhone.com
Aaron Mahnke of aaronmahnke.com
Marco Arment of marco.org
Brett Kelly of nerdgap.com
Dave Caolo of 52tiger.net
Matt Gemmell of mattgemmell.com

Comments Allowed (6)
Christian Ross of christianross.net
David Chartier of windonaleaf.net
Jonathan Christopher of mondaybynoon.com
Brett Terpstra of brettterpstra.com
Randy Murray of whowritesforyou.com
Iain Broome of writeforyourlife.net

For those of you who were counting, that’s only 19 of 21. I removed Ian P. Hines as the link for his site resulted in just a Splash Page. And I wanted to also clarify that James Shelley of jamesshelley.net had a very creative half-method which had a comment link that directed to twitter.

And there you have it. A completely inconclusive result as to whether or not you should run comments on your site. The biggest thing that should matter to you is personal preference. And with that bit of backtracking, I added support for Disqus into P&RS.

In somewhat humorous fashion, in the process of of checking these sites for whether they or not they accepted comments, I came across Comments Off, a post by Matt Gemmell on essentially the same thing that I’ve been trying to say with this post.

And before I go, I ask you to take a moment and look at Read & Trust and see about signing up for their newsletter and support independent writers. Mr. Adam King makes a compelling argument for it here.

Iron to Iron – One Year Later by Johnathan Christopher on Monday By Noon.

This is a great retrospective on the first anniversary of Iron to Iron. How things went according to plan, how things didn’t. The fears that were valid, and the ones that weren’t. The things that were expected and the things that weren’t.

I can imagine that a lot of you would read this post and say “I know all this already”. But if you haven’t struck out on your own yet. What’s the point of knowing stuff if you’re never going to use it?

Be Careful What You Publish by Randy Murray of First Today, Then Tomorrow.

When building something, you generally have an idea about what you’re making, what it’ll be used for, and how people will use it. But things change. Once users get involved, a lot of that can be thrown out the window. (If you haven’t read it yet, Rework has a bunch of great examples of this, as well as a metric ton of other useful information, I highly recommend it.)

So even if you have a clear idea, it’s always good to get feedback. Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow are prime examples of excellent communities that can give you good feedback. However, you shouldn’t limit yourselves to those.

It’s always possible to get context and assessment from sources outside the development/startup/computer communities. I find a lot of times, when dealing with perception you have to look outside the development community to get a clear picture. I find myself viewing everything based on knowledge of intent when it comes to the things I create, which can land you in some hot water.

While listening to a back-logged episode of the Nerdist podcast, I found a great example of what I’m talking about. The episode deals with Chris Hardwick, founder of Nerdist Industries, talking about his experience with Wikipedia, Contributors, Editors, and the entire process of dealing with a community the size of the Wikipedia user base.

Wikipedia has been used as a prime example of this phenomenon many many many times. (Another great example of that can be found here). And the people on both sides of the argument believe they are correct. It’s the same argument as the second amendment (if not as serious, or maybe in some ways, more so).

When you make something and relinquish control, you will never be able to predict the outcome.

Note: This podcast features adult language and is rated with the EXPLICIT tag.

Relevant Links:
Nerdist Podcast Episode 142 – The Peter Problem [Webpage]
Nerdist Podcast Episode 142 – The Peter Problem [Direct Download Link]
Nerdist on iTunes [Webpage]

P.S. To add some more relevance, nerdist.com is powered by wordpress.

Registering a domain is incredibly easy, but if you’ve never done it before, you might not know how. Below I go over the steps, as well as give my recommendations.

Step 1) Pick a domain registrar.
I personally prefer directNIC. I’ve been using directNIC since 2000 and have not regretted a single moment of my time with them. You will find cheaper places to register a .com address (like godaddy) but I find that the directNIC registration process, site, and tools are all incredibly well designed. That’s worth the $5 difference to me. I have over 30 domains registered with directNIC, and I have absolutely no plans to switch to another registrar.

Step 2) Picking a domain.
First off, I can’t tell you how to choose a domain. You can google “how to choose a domain name” and get responses back like this one, but please don’t ask me if I think “nomorechinups.com” is a good domain or not.

For the sake of argument (and a glimpse into my psyche), I’ve decided to register monkeyhustle.com. Now that I’ve picked a domain, let’s check to see if it’s available.

Well shucks. Before I see if I want to register a .net/.org/.me extension of monkeyhustle I check to see if the person who has registered monkeyhustle.com is actually using it. As it seems to be an active site with a post that’s less than two weeks old at time of writing, I can see that it’s in use. Since it’s in use, I can do a quick google search on “monkey hustle” and see that not only does it show up on the front page, there’s also a movie by that name. Since I don’t want to fight Amazon and IMDb for SEO rankings it’s probably best if I choose another domain.

Moving pass the selection process again, I’ve decided my next choice for a domain is coyotehustle.com. Searching for that I find that it’s available. Now that I’ve got a domain that I want and it’s available I’m going to go ahead and hit the checkbox and then proceed to checkout.

Step 3) Register the domain.
Now I’ve got a view of my shopping cart, and since that’s the only thing I’m going to be getting at this point, I’m going to click “Continue Purchase”.
Note: I will not click “Add Hosting” as we’re going to go over that later with a different provider.

Now directNIC is asking us to make an account. This is a good thing, as directNIC has a great account manager and we’re going to have this domain for at least a year so let’s go ahead and run through that step now.
Note: It in your best interest to enter valid information in these fields. I can understand not wanting to give out your personal information but we can do something about that on the next step.

After you enter your information you’ll be taken to another screen to verify your information. Do a double check to make sure you’ve got it all in there right (especially your email address) and continue. After that you’ll be emailed an activation code (mine was “kitty”). Take that code, enter it on the screen that asks for it and you’ve got your account. Now your domain should be in your shopping cart still so we’ll click the “continue purchase” button again. You might be prompted to log into your account so go ahead and do that. Then you’ll be asked to review the terms of service. Hopefully you’ll agree to those and you can hit the checkbox and then “continue”.

On the next screen we’ve got the organizational contact information. This information is what is provided by the info you entered when you signed up for your account.

Below that is an offer for directPRIVACY.

In short, your contact information is available for anyone who runs the command: “whois domainname.com”. So if I do “whois monkeyhustle.com” I can see that it’s registered to Mr. Fenderson from Richmond, VA. directPRIVACY is essentially a go between that will stop a lot of spam. It’s only $5 a year (which is .416 cents a month or .013 cents a day) and I find it to be completely worth it.

After you decide whether or not to add directPRIVACY, there is the section for Domain Nameservers. We’ll fill this out with some entries, but if you want to know more on Domain Nameservers (DNS) you can see my post on How The Internet Works.

For this post I’m going to set the DNS for Linode, but if you’re planning on hosting with another service you can read the “How to Host Your Domain” article.

After clicking continue you’ll have another TOS if you opted for the directPRIVACY. Read this over as it shows you the limitations of directPRIVACY (for example: it won’t keep you from a search warrant). When you agree hit the checkbox and continue to checkout.

Now we’ve hit the checkout page, we enter our payment information and click “Purchase”. Our last page will show us a receipt that you’ll want to print to PDF for your records (and to save some trees for something you’ll probably never look at again anyway).

And that’s it. We’ve created our account, registered the domain and maybe signed up for directPRIVACY. We’ve got our DNS pointed so now we should get on to hosting your domain.