Msnbc.com Acquires EveryBlock… Welcome Brother!
News that has been brewing secretly for the last several months finally broke this morning: Msnbc.com has acquired EveryBlock, the most interesting (in my opinion) startup in the hyperlocal news space. It is with great joy that I welcome my colleagues Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, and the rest of the EveryBlock crew to the msnbc.com family to help re-imagine, re-invent, and re-volutionize local news online. You can read several other accounts and descriptions of the acquisition here (msnbc.com, New York Times, EveryBlock, Lost Remote) but I thought I’d provide some color from the standpoint of a founder whose company, Newsvine, was acquired almost two years ago by the same company.
First let me say that the acquisition of EveryBlock is an excellent fit for both companies. Msnbc.com’s focus has always been on national news, a concentration that has made them the most visited news site in the United States for over a year now; more than CNN, more than Yahoo News, and more than most local news sites combined. Leading the national news race is a great accomplishment to anchor your company around, but local news is where most of the disruption is occurring these days, and thus it is fertile ground for innovation. Local newspapers find themselves rich with great journalism, but crippled by legacy distribution and operational costs. Community news blogs enjoy tremendous grassroots energy but very little means to monetize their content. There are a million gusts swirling around in the local news tornado right now, and when the dust finally settles, the landscape will be much different than anyone could have imagined even five years ago.
The organizations that succeed in local news will be the ones who respect all of the great journalism and increasingly available data in cities and neighborhoods across the world while creating better ways for people to consume it. If you’re a organization in the local news space — big or small — and you’d like to be a partner in this future, we’d love to work with you.
Another reason I’m excited to welcome EveryBlock into the family is that I think it’s a great family to join if you’re an entrepreneur. When we signed on with msnbc.com almost two years, it was a leap of faith considering that other suitors would have provided different experiences. We knew msnbc.com was the closest to us geographically, so that part couldn’t have been matched, but you never know how you’ll be respected, used, or abused until you’re part of the family. When I read about incredibly smart and likable people like Joshua Schachter selling a great service like Del.icio.us to Yahoo, only to see Yahoo marginalize the product and send Josh fleeing the company like a burning building, it saddens me.
In addition to things going horribly wrong between acquirers and entrepreneurs, a perhaps even more common case is when entrepreneurs leave on good terms the day their contract period is up. For background, when you sell your company, you are usually required to stick around for some period of time until you receive all of the acquisition proceeds. This happens all the time, the most recent of which (that I can recall) being Dick Costolo at Feedburner. Dick’s a great guy, he sold a great service in Feedburner to Google, but he left more or less when his contract was over. There’s nothing wrong with this all… he made a truckload of money and probably wants to blow some of it on gold chains and petrified walrus testicles.
I think when you’re an acquirer though, your real hope is that the employees you are welcoming into the family *want* to work for you after they no longer have to… and that is the situation we find ourselves in right now.
Things, for the most part, are going swimmingly. Although building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being, Newsvine now serves over 4 million uniques a month; almost four times the traffic we did, pre-acquisition. We’re also distributing more revenue to our great community of writers than ever before. Additionally, there has been some nice cross-media collaboration in the form of Newsvine members appearing on national television and gaining press access the political conventions in 2008. We also have people like Retired Colonel Jack Jacobs and NBC Correspondent Chuck Todd popping in to write articles and answer questions during important events. All of this and we feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
There’s plenty of unfinished business to do when it comes to building out the Newsvine, msnbc.com, and now EveryBlock communities, and we’re just thrilled to be around to do it. I look forward to working closely with the EveryBlock team in the coming months and welcoming another passionate group of people into the company.
Breaking Ground
344 days ago, I bought my first house. Today, I began demolishing it. You can view the live cam of the progress on the newly installed House by the Park Live Cam here.
Before: A charm-free 1953 house that’s never been updated, on a great plot of land.
After: A rendering of what the new Northwest Modern house will look like.
It’s been a long but fun road getting to this point, and both my design/build firm — Build LLC — and I are extremely happy to be breaking ground. Throughout the design and construction process, I’ve kept Mike Industries mostly free of updates, instead opting to chronicle everything on A House by the Park. After all, I don’t want to stray from this blog’s laser focus on web design, remixed infomercials, and tasty beverages. So far, it seems that decision has been a good one, as Mike Industries averages about 10,000 RSS subscribers while HBP has only 547. It is not surprising that most people are uninterested the ins and outs of homebuilding.
That said, the design and construction process — and the in-situ documenting of it — has been extremely educational to me and I want to share a little of what I’ve learned so far:
The site itself: A House by the Park
I am not building the best home in the world and I am not the greatest writer in the world, but I honestly believe that HBP is the most complete and useful first-hand journal of custom homebuilding online today. There are updates on every aspect of the process, from finding the property, to negotiating, to choosing an architect, to homing in on a design, to the difference between a G.C. and a C.M. Every step of the process is in there, with costs attached. The cost thing is a bit controversial and several people have asked me why I’m exposing how much I pay for everything. The answer is simple: costs are the murkiest aspect of design and construction and if I’m going to demystify the process of building a home, it is essential to expose them. There is no sense in detailing interesting things for other perspective home builders only to leave them in the dark about what something similar might cost them. This blog is about transparency, and everything I can reveal, I will reveal.
HBP is also a great marketing tool for people and businesses involved in my project who do a great job. I plug Build all the time because they deserve it, and I also mention and/or link to contractors, consultants, and others who help along the way.
The economy
When the economy dropped off a cliff last October — right in the middle of design stage — I wavered as to whether or not I wanted to go through with construction. While mostly (but not completely) out of the market at the time, a sinking feeling that the U.S. financial system was about to implode got me briefly curled up in a ball like the rest of the country. I contemplated delaying the project until the economy recovered (if it ever recovered) both for my own mental well-being and because with real estate values plummeting, it seemed like a bad time to be investing more in real estate.
I jumped back and forth between wanting to build and wanting to delay, but in the end, what got me over the hump were a few things:
- This is the house I want to die in. I never want to sell it, so its paper value means less to me than its intrinsic value. This fact lessens my interest in turning any sort of profit and heightens my interest in getting it done as quickly as possible so my girlfriend and I can enjoy it before we are old and decrepit.
- The best time to build is when everyone’s business is slowing dramatically. If you build on the upswing, contractors’ bids and availability reflect the fact that they are in high demand. If you build at the bottom, many contractors and subs have already gone out of business so the labor pool has shrunk to match demand. But if you build on the downswing, the available pool of contractors is gigantic and the rates are lower as a result. So far, we are getting extremely competitive bids… a rarity in recent times, I hear.
- I feel a certain patriotic pride that I am helping put people to work at a time when our economy needs it most. My architects told me I’m one of the few who have “gotten out from under the covers” and I feel good about that. I feel we overspend quite a bit as a nation, and I don’t think people should just go out there and spend willy-nilly to stimulate the economy, but if you have the means to make a purchase right now, whether house, car, education, or other things, there’s never been a better time to do it.
The people
The number one thing that will determine whether or not a home building project is a success is what group of people you choose to work with. You can hire the greatest architect in the world, but if you aren’t on the same wavelength as him or her, your project will turn out horribly. Similarly, even if you make it through design stage with flying colors, the wrong contractor can bring the project in well above your budget level. When I interviewed two general contractors before moving forward with Build as my construction manager, one of them provided me with a “low estimate” and a “high estimate” to account for if things went well or poorly. Their low estimate was almost twice the total cost of the project when going the design/build route, and the high estimate was almost three times! An uninformed client would be out several hundred thousand dollars or more with the wrong decision there.
So far I have not hired a single person on this project that I regret hiring. Everyone’s been great and that has contributed to an ultra-low stress level for me.
Cost structures
I am procuring flat fee bids for every service I possibly can. Build charged me a flat fee for design and a flat fee for construction management. The electrical, plumbing, framing, and other bids are all flat bids as well. As a client, I love the flat fee system because I know exactly what I’m getting and I know exactly how much I’m paying for it. I don’t care if it takes someone longer or shorter than they estimated. I just want the work done and I want to pay a certain amount. As a designer, I also prefer this system. If someone wants a logo designed, I’d rather charge $5000 up front and agree to spend as much time as it takes to get the job done. If I kick ass and produce a great logo in a few hours, woohoo for me. If it takes me longer than expected, my effective hourly rate just decreases a bit. Not a big deal.
Anyone who agrees to pay an architect 15% of the cost of construction should think twice about how their interests are aligned. If the architect makes an extra 15% if he or she convinces you to use a material that is more expensive but not that much better than another material, how is that good for you? I’m not implying any sort of dishonesty here… just misalignment of interests. If I charged that way, I would also naturally gravitate towards the most expensive items my clients could afford.
I have a huge amount of respect for the fields of architecture and construction. I just want to be charged in a way that aligns my interests with my providers’.
Being green
The easiest way to “be green” is to live in a windowless, heavily-insulated, unlit, underground bunker. You’ll barely suck any energy from the grid and you can brag to your friends at parties that you have less of an impact on global warming than Ed Begley Jr. Of course if you do this, you will eventually complete your transformation into the Unabomber and not be allowed at parties — let alone in society — anymore.
The best way to think about building green is to figure out how to have as little of a negative impact on the earth as possible, whilst maintaining the reasonable level of comfort that an atmospheric parasite such as yourself is accustomed to. Does this mean giving up your beautiful west facing view for the sake of completely eliminating solar gain? No. But it means making other smart decisions along the way.
For me personally, it meant donating nearly 55 tons of material such as sandstone and teak to The Re-Store so it can be re-sold instead of shoved into a landfill. It also meant building a smaller, better insulated house than what is currently on the property. And finally, it meant not blowing $100k on environmentally questionable photovoltaic panels or drilling into my hillside for geo-thermal energy, but pre-wiring my roof for 5 or 10 years from now when we can unroll solar panels like beach blankets.
Tumbling as window shopping
I created a Tumblr at tumblelog.ahousebythepark.com to clip all of the interesting things I see on the web which may work well in the house. From appliances, to siding materials, to furniture, it’s a great place to store stuff you want to remember later. No more “where did I see that cool lamp?”. It’s all on the Tumblr. My architects can also monitor the Tumblr to get a feel for what sorts of things interest me and what they may have to design for along the way.
Onward…
Almost a year after beginning phase one, we now move onto phase two: construction. Phase one may be the make or break phase for curb appeal, but phase two is where bank accounts go to die. I don’t expect more than a small percentage of Mike Industries visitors to follow along, but if you’re interested, head on over to HBP and help shape decisions along the way.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
The House Comes Down Today (Right Now in Fact)
I’ll have a more complete post on this later, but the live construction cam of my house demolition is now online. Click here for the latest image (the image will update every minute).
It’s going quick. Watch now while there’s still something left, if you’re interested…
What affects the taste of tap water?
The tap from the Waitsburg cemetery. Even the dead people get to benefit. (photo by J.C. Westbrook)
I don’t drink a lot of water, mainly because I’ve never really loved the taste. That, and I’ve always thought the whole “8 glasses a day” thing is bullshit. On a trip to Walla Walla wine country a couple of weeks ago, however, we stopped in a quiet little town called Waitsburg that is a dead ringer for Radiator Springs (from the Pixar movie “Cars”). We had a delectable dinner at the phenomenal Jimgermanbar but perhaps the most amazing part of the meal for me was the tap water. It was the first time in my life I ever remember thinking to myself how great a glass of water tasted.
Pure, zero flavor wetness without even a hint of aftertaste. Even at room temperature.
I asked our waitress about it and she said people comment about it a lot so I had her pour me two magnum bottles full and I brought it home (well, Tiffehr brought it home). Upon arriving back in Seattle, I had a few co-workers taste it and they also had positive reviews. Then I did a blind taste-test at home and it won with flying colors.
I’m now reasonably sure this is the best water I’ve ever been in the presence of, so of course my curiosity continues to grow. In researching the peculiarities of water taste, I came across this great but suuuuuuper fugly article explaining how minerals and other things affect the taste of water. Hint: use this readability widget to decrappify the layout.
Lots of interesting stuff in there. I’m convinced this water is extremely pure and contains very little mineral content, and now I want to have it tested. Anybody know what the easiest way to do this is? Are there local labs that will charge you a few bucks to quench your obsessive curiosities? If so, I’m all over it… and will report the results back here of course.
Newsvine is looking for a web developer
There’s no better place to be during an economic downturn than a solid, profitable company with a long track record of success. Come to think of it, there’s no better place to be during an economic boom than that sort of place either. Msnbc.com, proud parent of Newsvine, is just that sort of place. The most visited news site in the United States for the past 12 months and running, msnbc.com is hitting on all cylinders and is expanding the Newsvine team by one talented web developer.
As co-founder and CEO of Newsvine, I can tell you that this is a great place to work and retains the best aspects of a startup atmosphere while inheriting the equally great aspects of working for an established media organization like msnbc.com. If you’re interested in joining the crew, please read the job description below and send your stuff to msnbcjobs@msnbc.com. One caveat, however: We are specifically looking for someone who is passionate about writing code. Javascript, PHP, HTML, etc. This is not a design position and the only UI work involved will be on the implementation side, from a coding perspective.
Job description
The Newsvine Team is looking for an experienced, self-motivated, and passionate front-end developer to join us in building products and services on the Newsvine platform. Your primary responsibility will be to design and develop site features and functionality in a multi-tier web environment using PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and the YUI JavaScript library. Additional responsibilities include daily site support and maintenance. The ideal candidate is able to work on small teams under tight deadlines with little supervision. A computer science degree or equivalent is a plus, but experience, skill, and attention to detail are more important.
The ideal candidate will have a strong command of the following knowledge areas:
- X/HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript
- PHP or similar scripting language
- Mastery of web standards and cross-browser compatibility
Preferable Job Qualifications:
- Experience working on large-scale, high-availability web sites
- Successful industry experience using latest DHTML and ajax technologies
- Experience with SQL and relational database implementations serving as the backend to production web applications
- Experience with, or an interest in, working with the YUI JavaScript library
- Familiarity with Subversion a plus
Examining Typekit
Last week brought word of a promising new type solution for the web called Typekit. Created by Jeff Veen and the smart folks at Small Batch, Typekit aims to solve the problem of custom typography on the web once and for all. Unlike sIFR, Cufon, and several other stopgaps before it, Typekit does not attempt to hack around the problem, but to solve it in a permanent way, which is exciting.
As a co-inventor of sIFR, I’ve been getting a lot of emails this week asking what I think of this new effort. In evaluating its promise, it’s important to examine the following characteristics, in order of importance: compatibility, functionality, legality, ease of use, and hackiness.
Compatibility
Compatibility is the most important aspect of any new web technology. If your shiny new method only works in 10% of web browsers, it’s nothing more than a proof-of-concept. It is this reality check that keeps me from getting excited about W3C meetings, Internet Explorer extensions, or anything else that doesn’t apply all browsers in the here and now… or at least the right around the corner.
Compatibility was also what pushed sIFR over the top in terms of popularity, working in over 90% of all systems and falling back gracefully in most others. It also came out at a time, 2004, when there wasn’t a whole lot of tolerance for leaving certain browsers behind or having things look ideal in a few browsers and not so ideal in others.
Typekit appears to be doing ok on the compatibility front, targeting current versions of Safari, Chrome, and Opera natively, the next version of Firefox (3.1) natively, and all versions of Internet Explorer via a “backup” EOT solution. Here’s what the browser share landscape looks like today:
- Works in:
- Internet Explorer: 66.1%
- Safari: 8.21%
- Chrome: 1.42%
- Opera: 0.68%
- Firefox 3.1 or greater: 0.18%
- Doesn’t work in:
- Firefox 3.0 or lower: 22.3%
- Miscellaneous other browsers: 1.11%
So you can see right off the bat that Typekit will work in just over 76% of browsers. Not quite as high as some of the methods that came before it, but it’s extremely important to recognize that the one group that’s keeping Typekit from almost universal compatibility is Firefox. I have no evidence to support this, but I imagine that Firefox users are among the quickest to upgrade, which would seem to suggest that this compatibility gap could be closed relatively quickly. Data shows that Firefox 3 is already used by 11 times more people than Firefox 2, and considering it was released just short of a year ago, this sort of upgrade pattern is encouraging.
Given the above data, combined with how often Firefox seems to annoy me these days with upgrade notices, I expect Firefox 3.1 or greater to be the dominant Firefox version in use one year from now, thus pushing Typekit’s compatibility percentage into the upper 90s fairly soon.
It’s also important to praise what Small Batch has done here on the compatibility front: their killer concept was involving type foundries in web-only licensing and propagating the font files through the standards-complaint @font-face CSS declaration, but they realized their solution would be academic if it didn’t work in Internet Explorer, so they made sure their backup implementation using EOT files took care of all IE users. The lack of this sort of practical thinking is what keeps a lot of great ideas from gaining traction on the web.
I also think that designers these days, self included, are a lot more amenable to things looking great on “most systems” as long as they at least work reasonably on other systems (as long as they look great on the particular system the designer uses). This is a bit of designer bias, of course, but it also represents an increasing desire in the design and development community to leave the old web behind. I still remember how much crap I took at ESPN from validatorians when we decided to leave Netscape 4 — with its 1% marketshare — behind. Now it’s all the rage… and I love it!
Functionality
By all accounts, Typekit will be more functional than any method that came before it. This is quite obviously because it uses a browser’s native font rendering technology. There are some concerns about reliability gaps stemming from downloading fonts off third-party servers, but I believe this fear will prove unfounded. Additionally, I imagine both the @font-face and EOT versions of fonts will come in larger files than sIFR font files (because usually you only embed a subset of characters in a sIFR font file) but with broadband penetration being what it is today, this too will prove immaterial. Additionally, even though sIFR font files may be smaller, the noticeable delay in rendering them probably more than makes up the difference.
Legality
I put legality in the middle of the pack and not at the top because, to my knowledge, there haven’t been any serious legal dust-ups over the use of technologies like sIFR and Cufon. So far, the burden has been on designers to buy the fonts they use before embedding them using sIFR or Cufon, but at the same time, there’s been no clear blessing or condemnation of this practice by foundries or type designers.
The nice thing about Typekit is that it specifically involves foundries and type designers in the process of licensing their fonts for use on the web. When you use Typekit, you know with certainty that what you’re doing has the direct blessing of the people who created and/or marketed the typeface you’re using. This is a nice piece-of-mind upgrade as well as a way of further compensating type designers for giving us the building blocks of web design.
Ease of use
Typekit promises to be easier to implement than either sIFR, Cufon, or any other font replacement technology. I guess we won’t know until we start using it, but it would shock me if it took more than a few minutes to implement, including licensing the font you want to use. sIFR’s second most common complaint other than “it uses Flash and Flash kills puppies” is that it’s a bit difficult to implement. Typekit’s improvement on this front will be more than welcome.
Hackiness
First let me say something I’ve said many times before: the entire world wide web is a hack. Get over it. Secondly, however, any technologies or methods — that work — which serve to dehackify it a bit are welcome. Typekit certainly dehackifies custom typography on the web by leaps and bounds. It was the solution we all knew would come eventually when we created sIFR as a stopgap five years ago. Just about the only things hacky about it are that it falls back to EOT (which, as discussed earlier, is great) and that it uses Javascript to handle the licensing nuts and bolts (meh, big deal).
Conclusion
Typekit is likely the best thing to happen to web design since the re-emergence of browser competitiveness. It will be embraced quickly and fervently when it is released this summer, and its creators should be loudly applauded for doing it instead of just talking about it. There are too many talkers in the world and not enough doers. The team at Small Batch has done an excellent job of taking a problem that a lot of people like to talk about and solving it in a practical, equitable way. It’s a welcome solution to a real issue and a significant step towards a leaner, Veener web.
The Sorry State of WYSIWYG Web Editors
We got into a heated discussion in the office about WYSIWYG web editors today. While heated discussions are nothing new to us, neither side even being happy with their own argument was. When people are arguing over things they don’t even believe in, there can be no positive outcome.
My side was as follows: All web editors — including TinyMCE, YUI, and FCKEditor — are broken in different ways, and the only software I’ve seen which can satisfactorily desuckify one of them is WordPress. Because of that, we should deconstruct what WordPress has done to TinyMCE and apply the same duct tape to our own editor on Newsvine (we use TinyMCE currently, but are in the process of moving to YUI).
Our development staff’s side was as follows: All web editors — including TinyMCE, YUI, and FCKEditor — are broken in different ways, and because of the crazy amount of ridiculous cleaning, converting, regexing, transforming, and other shenanigans WordPress has to do to their editor just to get it to the state it’s in right now, it’s not worth spending the time to recreate such a mess, only to have it remain imperfect and possibly break in upcoming browser releases.
There are several things wrong with each editor but the particular problem we are trying to solve is that when you’re in HTML mode, you can’t create paragraphs just by putting double newlines between them. Some people say that because you’re in HTML mode, you shouldn’t expect an editor to do this for you, but I’ve been using blog software for six or seven years and that is the behavior I — and I believe most others — are accustomed to, so I couldn’t imagine releasing something without it. As mentioned above, the WordPress team has craftily hacked this functionality into their WYSIWYG system, but other platforms like Typepad have not.
I could go on and on for another hour about details, but after going through all of the WYSIWYG editor machinations we’ve gone through, I’m left wondering why the web development world still hasn’t figured this out yet. We can write an entire e-mail application, a replacement for Excel, and whatever the hell these things are, but we can’t replicate a toolset we’ve had in MacWrite since 1984?
Think of how much has happened in the last 25 years, and we haven’t been able to nail that.
TinyMCE circa 2009: Millions and millions crrrrrrrrazy features. Doesn’t work satisfactorily.
Microsoft Word circa 1991: Just enough features. Works plenty fine for most people.
I know hard-core coders like to hand-code html even when writing web comments (self included), but 90% of the world would rather not be bothered with that. What’s it going to take for this problem to go away? If you’re involved in WYSIWYG editor development, I’d love to know. Is it the disappearance of old browsers? Is it something that should be Flash-based? Is it just that no one’s really worked full-time on the problem yet? Why isn’t WordPress’s crazy hackery built into TinyMCE in the first place? So many questions…
So far, the one effort I’ve noticed that seems to take the cleanest possible approach is the WYSIWYM Editor. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean essentially translates to “the HTML code associated with what users type will semantically match what they intend”. Meaning, if I type two blocks of text separated by a double newline, I get two properly <p>d paragraphs out of that… not just a blob of text separated by <br> tags. Or if I bold some text, I get <strong> tags instead of other ridiculousness.
Sadly, the WYSIWYM Editor seems to have been in development since 2006 and is only at 0.5b, but happily, there appears to be a healthy flurry of activity around it lately. I really don’t mean to disparage the hard work that’s gone into all of these imperfect WYSIWYG editors in the past, and I do realize that browsers are the core culprits here, but it’s 2009 already and I’d prefer a solution to this longstanding real-world problem over almost anything promised in HTML 5, CSS 3, or any of the other specs we’ve been eagering awaiting for the last several years.
Beverage Roundup
I’m not so adventurous when it comes to tasting unfamiliar foods, but beverages are another story. As long as it’s free of sucralose, I’ll sample just about any new bebida I can get my hands on. This habit drives me frequently to high-end specialty markets and obscure mini-marts in search of new elixirs. Below are some of the best drinks I’ve tried in the last several months:
- Zevia Soda: I’ve never been into diet soda. Something about sugar substitutes just never does it for me. Zevia, however, is the first widely available (in the U.S.) soda sweetened with Stevia, a 100% natural sugar substitute. The sodas don’t taste quite as sweet as sugar-sweetened drinks, but I kind of like that. The orange flavor is particularly good.
- Jeff’s New York Egg Cream: I’ve always been a huge fan of the good old-fashioned New York egg cream; the drink that paradoxically contains no eggs and no cream. They are tough to find outside of authentic New York delis, but “Jeff” bottles them up and will ship you a case for a reasonable charge. I got a little overzealous and ordered six cases so I’m slowly working my way through them, but they are great. I recommend the chocolate and vanilla flavors.
- Jones Gaba Tea-Juice: Just tried these for the first time last week. Very, very smooth. They are like a less sweet version of Snapple Iced Tea, with plenty of amino acids and other things that are supposed to make you operate better.
- Sence Rose Nectar: (Pictured above) This one is tough to describe. Imagine a glass of slightly sweetened water with rose hips infused into it. Pretty good stuff. May also mix well with vodka.
- Hi Ball Soda: I’ve mentioned this one before. It’s like Pellegrino with a bit of caffeine. Refreshing.
- Kaboom: Kaboom is an organic energy drink with much more wholesome ingredients than most energy drinks and plenty of vitamins. Tastes good too.
- Red Bull Cola: This is the biggest shocker of the bunch. I don’t even like Red Bull, but Red Bull Cola is different. It’s not even made by Red Bull, apparently. Not only is this among the tastiest colas I’ve ever tried, but get a load of the ingredients — water, sugar, vanilla, mustard seed, lime, kola nut, cocoa, liquorice, cinnamon, lemon, ginger, coca leaf (!), orange, corn mint, pine, and clove. Wow. Lots of good natural flavors in there… and it’s evident in the great taste.
- Pinot Noir Wine: Ok, Pinot Noir is hardly new or even novel, but I’ve recently gained a taste for it as my red wine of choice. As a merlot convert, I appreciate Pinot’s mildness immensely. Cheap Pinot, however, seems worse than cheap merlot or cabernet, so my wine bill may be in for a sharp increase in the coming months.
What other novel beverages out there am I missing? Anything new and exciting on the market?
Last Rites
Last week was a sad week to be in the Newsvine offices. While we were toiling away, our friends upstairs at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer received their unemployment orientation in advance of being laid off two weeks from now. The conference room in which these talks occurred is right next to Newsvine headquarters, so during the course of entering and leaving the office throughout the week, I caught multiple glances of the scene and the people affected by it.
People losing their jobs is always a sad thing but I feel like this is the true beginning of the end for almost everyone who works at a newspaper. If you work at one and you aren’t intimately tied to the web operation, you should start making future plans as soon as possible. And honestly, even if you are intimately tied to the web operation, I wouldn’t feel too safe either.
The death of the newspaper is a depressing thing to absorb, but what’s much more disappointing to me is that I feel like news itself has been devalued. There’s an oversupply of news-“ish” information on the web, and people have decided — usually without realizing it — that free “news snacking” is a better value proposition than paying for in-depth reporting. As one who is surrounded by news snacks everyday in the form of Newsvine, RSS feeds, instant messages, and other inputs, I’m as guilty as anyone of this mentality. At the end of the day, I just feel like through my various short-attention-span news inputs, I will absorb most of the news zeitgeist without any cost to me.
Cost is a funny word though. It is generally used as it was used in the paragraph above: to denote the expending of money. Lately though, I’ve noticed there are many non-obvious costs associated with us becoming a society of news snackers:
- Our attention spans are shrinking below even the levels caused by the television explosion of the ’80s and ’90s
- We are consuming more and producing less (no, sharing or reblogging does not count as producing)
- We value timeliness of information more than depth of coverage, or even truth in some cases
- We are driving most kids completely away from journalism as a profession
- We’re uncovering more of the whos, whats, whens, and wheres, but less of the hows and whys
I suppose we’re saving some trees and removing some friction from the publishing flow in the process, but all of the above are very bad things; things that will probably take us awhile to fully realize the effects of.
A lot of people have been asking me lately how the P-I (and newspapers in general) could be saved and even whether I’d like to be a part of it. In fact, if you want to see a live session about it and you live in Seattle, I’ll be doing an event at the UW Business School on the subject next month.
I have several modest ideas but none of them involve saving the actual paper. I’m a lot more interested in saving the future of long-form and local reporting than I am in saving the newspapers themselves.
Rarely are one’s ideas completely original so I’m sure these are no exception, but here are the three most promising in my opinion:
Getting smaller and staying local
Many privately held businesses and all publicly held ones require growth. It isn’t enough to turn a healthy profit every year. If your business isn’t growing, your management is questioned and your stock declines. The first step in keeping local news viable is realizing that it may not be much of a growth business, and it may be quite a bit smaller of a business than it has been in the past. These two factors do not bode well for the prospects of publicly held local news companies in the future. Imagine the P-I as something more along the lines of what Cory Bergman has built with his network of neighborhood blogs like My Ballard. I would argue a fully built-out neighborhood blog network like this is more valuable than what the P-I currently has. Nothing against the P-I’s website… it’s great… but it doesn’t pull me in as a citizen of my neighborhood. It’s a conventional mix of local stories that usually aren’t that local to me along with national stories I prefer to read on sites like msnbc.com instead.
Local news companies need to concentrate on creating communities of people who talk to each other, not just people who read the news and leave. Where you can connect people, you can make money.
Make something that’s worth paying for again
I may not pay for every author I happen to read on a daily basis, but there exists a collection of more than a few people on my blogroll who I would pay $5 a month to read, if it were exclusive. I’ve always been bearish on paid content as a model, mainly because you could usually do better with advertising, but with CPMs dropping through the floor, I’m not convinced that is necessarily the case anymore. What I’d like to see attempted is positioning a publication as more of a “discussion club”. Heck, maybe you even can read the content for free, but in order to join the discussion, you need to be a paid club member. With membership also comes social events around town, swanky garb, and other niceties to help you rationalize your modest membership fee. I always thought the New York Times should have done this with Times Select.
Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting just throwing up a pay wall. That would not work. The idea is creating bits of value — in addition to content — that people would gladly pay several bucks a month for.
Partner with your people
As a great business, your customers should be your best partners. In the case of news agencies, this doesn’t need to stop at readers evangelizing your publication for you. In many cases, they are actually willing to help you run it. Why have a staff of 150 when you can have a staff of 15 and engage your community to help produce a lot of the content? People like doing things that benefit their community. Make sure your business is seen as a way to do that.
The future of journalism may be in pro-am publishing.
Anyway…
Overall, I’m not super optimistic about the future of a lot of these newspaper companies, but I really would love to see them at least replaced with something better. I still have a hard time believing that a 146-year-old company like the Seattle P-I is moving out of their own building before we are. I don’t see that as any sort of victory for Newsvine since we are much more of a news platform than a news agency, but rather an indication of what happens when you have everything to gain and nothing to lose versus everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Presto Chango
After almost five years of running Mike Industries, it’s time for a change! The fact that I made it this long without redesigning is either a testament to the majestic timelessness of the original design or my general uncomfortableness in doing “self identity” work. Since we know there is no such thing as timelessness on the web, we can therefore assume it’s the latter.
This redesign had five objectives, in order of importance:
- Make shared items such as found links, video, and photography more a part of the overall content presentation. I still write original posts 1-3 times a month, but it’s nice to keep things fresh in-between as well.
- Refresh things visually with a wider layout, new typography, and a fuller footer, among other elements.
- Modernize and completely rewrite the code that was brought over when I switched from Movable Type to WordPress a year ago.
- Offer more feed customization, including full-text RSS.
- Don’t break old pages with the new design.
… and away we go:
Bringing multi-source aggregation into the fold
It’s easy to take posts from other places like Delicious, Tumblr, and Twitter and display them in various places around your blog. It’s a bit harder to ingest those same posts into your blog’s publishing system and then output them as actual native blog posts that people can comment on. And finally, it’s incredibly hard to do the second thing in a way that’s flexible enough to display many different types of content in many different contexts.
Getting to the first stage would have been easy via a few lines of javascript, and in fact, I already got there with the previous design, embedding my Delicious links in the Mike Industries sidebar.
In trying to make it to the second stage, I tried several different “aggregation” plug-ins for WordPress, but eventually settled on a wonderful little creation called FeedWordPress, by the one they call “Rad Geek”. After installing the FeedWordPress plug-in, you simply give it some feeds to suck in, tell it how to categorize and tag items from each feed, and then let WordPress templates do the rest.
I was originally going to move over all of my link-saving from Delicious to Tumblr because I love Tumblr’s posting interface, but since my Tumblr account got hacked within a couple weeks of opening it, I decided to only use the Tumblr account to post fun stuff like videos. My initial reflex was to move all “collecting” to one platform, but since everything is getting pulled directly into the main blog anyway, I’ve convinced myself that the use of multiple platforms is actually a strength. I’m essentially pulling my Tumblr and Delicious feeds into the “Shared” column and my Twitter feed into the “Overshared” column.
I am unconvinced that Twitter will be a permanent part of this blog, since I still don’t enjoy either publishing or reading many tweets, but I’m giving it a try to see if it sticks. Twitter’s rising popularity continues to amaze me to the point where I’m almost ready to officially consider myself “too old”. On the one hand, I totally understand it because it’s so easy. But on the other hand, I totally despise it because it enables such laziness and extravagance of expression. Anyway, that’s a conversation for another blog post.
The single hardest part of the entire redesign was writing a script that ensured no items in the Shared column would render wider than the column itself. Since there will be plenty of YouTube video tags in there, it was essential to resize them all as the column renders, but not permanently in the database, so that they can render at full size when viewed from the permalink pages. I am no Wolf with regular expressions, but after hours and hours of hackerations, I came up with this:
I cribbed part of the short scale_image_240 function, but the rest was from scratch. Beforehand, I searched for quite some time on Google for a function to do exactly this and couldn’t find it, so hopefully this post will help some future searchers in their own quests to resize content.
Even though running these computations when the sidebars render isn’t too computationally ferocious, I went ahead and “widgetized” my sidebar in WordPress as well, so I could make use of the excellent WP Widget Cache plug-in. WP Widget Cache writes your entire sidebar out to disk so that it can be served up quickly and statically.
Ok, now that the geekiest part of the redesign has been explained, on to hopefully more interesting matters…
Separation of different content types
As much as I love what Doug and Dave have done with their superb redesigns, I just don’t like displaying original posts and peripheral content in the same column. I may not be the most prolific original post writer, but when I write an article, I want it front and center, and not pushed down by links or other distractions. With this redesign, the flow is simple: the most important stuff is on the left, the semi-interesting stuff is to the right of that, and the barely-interesting stuff is to the right of that. Size also flows according. The wide column is important, the medium column is semi-interesting, and the narrow column is barely-interesting.
Typography
sIFR lives on in the new Mike Industries — of course — in the form of Trade Gothic Condensed. While I don’t think sIFR should be used in every project (we don’t use it on Newsvine), I still find it an invaluable method to really shine up blog design. The first version of Mike Industries used Agency Condensed rendered with sIFR 2, while the new version uses the aforementioned Trade Gothic (a Stan favorite) and sIFR 3.
By the way, I don’t usually like to call fellow developers out, but I will say this about sIFR 3: it’s beautiful and it’s been ready for at least a year, in my opinion, and yet it’s not officially “released” yet. I find this highly unfortunate. When you’re developing software for the web, it’s never going to be perfect. As long as your software generally works and isn’t causing any damage, release it. The entire web is a beta. The entire web is a hack. It always will be. Don’t fight it. If you’re on Release Candidate 436, that’s a sign you may need to let go a little.
Aside from the Trade Gothic, Mike Industries now uses Helvetica Neue for body copy and downwind headers. I am certainly no devotee of Helvetica, like 90% of the people in the film are, but with anti-aliasing so much improved in the last decade, it does make for some good readability these days. Plus, I just needed to get off the Lucida Grande/Verdana bandwagon for awhile at least.
Grids, shmids
I feel like grids are the new web standards. What I mean is that they are a potentially useful tool to achieve a noble means, but they aren’t the second coming of the messiah. If grids help you do great work, then by all means learn them, love them, and live them. But if you’re perfectly happy eyeing layouts as a drunken painter eyes a canvas, then eye away. I’m no painter, but I’m plenty happy creating layouts without the use of grids or any sort of sizing heuristics. I don’t make sure my main column is sized according to a golden-ratio and I don’t make sure every line of type lines up vertically with every other.
I just do what feels right… and that’s plenty good enough for me. You should do the same, whether or not that involves the use of grids.
Feeds revisited and reloaded
Due to popular demand, I am now pushing out full text RSS feeds. I would still rather not publish these because of content theft and other reasons, but in the end, my reticence should not trump the will of my subscribers. I’ll try it out and unless I notice widespread plagiarism on spam blogs, full-text feeds will probably continue.
Also, after running this poll about a month ago, I’ve decided to include original and shared items in the default RSS feed (the one you’re probably already subscribed to). According to the poll results, most people want to see interesting links and other stuff in the main feed, so that was the justification. If, however, you find the shared items superfluous, please switch over to the Articles Only feed. I hate the idea of anyone unsubscribing entirely because the main feed is now updated too often.
One thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to correctly enable the “all” feed in WordPress. For all of you WordPress gurus out there, I basically applied a filter to my existing “/blog/feed” feed to remove the Overshared/Twitter categories. It is as follows:
function exclude_category($query) {
if ( $query->is_feed ) {
$query->set('cat', '-473,-281');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');
That correctly takes the stuff out of the “main” feed, but I need to provide another feed with everything in it. Something like maybe “/blog/feed?all”. I figured I should be able to just modify the line above to:
if ( $query->is_feed &! $query->query_vars['all'] ) {
… and it should work. It doesn’t. If anyone has any ideas, I’d love some help on that one (or another way to do it entirely).
Big footers are in
My footer now contains a lot of what was previously in my sidebar and more. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, I like big, informative footers. But on the other hand, I don’t like burying such potentially important stuff so low on the page. If I end up getting rid of the Overshared column, some of the footer content may end up replacing it.
Backwards compatibility
Originally, I wanted to find a way to keep old blog posts in the old theme and style new blog posts with the new theme. I like this idea because it preserves the context in which posts were originally written and it also doesn’t break heavily designed posts like this one. In the end though, I was able to keep my main content area the same size as my old one, so the new theme really didn’t break any entries, so I have — for now — decided to move everything to the new theme. This decision is definitely subject to change though as I really don’t want to be tied to a 450 pixel wide white column for the rest of my life.
So anyway…
So anyway, that’s it. I’m pretty excited to get this rolled out, but at the same time there are still details that need some shining and bugs that need squashing. If you see any, give me a holler in the comments. Thanks!