Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

A New WordPress Plugin: Clean Notifications

HTML email gets a deservedly bad name mostly because it’s used to send out spam and marketing and also because it’s tough to work with from a design and code standpoint.

However, under controlled conditions and in limited circumstances, HTML mail can be a whole lot cleaner than plain text email. In converting Mike Industries to WordPress recently, one of the things I noticed right away was that the e-mails WordPress would send me when new comments and pings came in were extremely verbose. Since WP sends out plain text emails, all of the links get spelled out as raw, unstyled URLs and the emails end up containing probably twice the amount of visible characters than they need to. This is especially frustrating when you’re trying to read notifications from a mobile device like the Jesusphone.

What could possibly tighten WordPress’ email notifications into more aesthetically pleasing hyperlinked missives? A plug-in which sends out better formatted mail!

Enter “Clean Notifications”. A plug-in that took only 30 minutes to write but is capable of providing digital pleasure to people all around the world.

Here is what a WordPress email looks like before Clean Notifications:

… and here is after:

Note the economy of characters. Only the info you need, spaced for readability, and requires no configuration.

Download Clean Notifications and love WordPress just a little more.

Permalink

Goodbye Movable Type, Hello WordPress

A few months ago, I silently moved Mike Industries from the aging Movable Type platform to the quicker-developing WordPress platform. I didn’t even plan to change platforms, but after more than a week of trying unsuccessfully to move from Movable Type 3.0 to Movable Type 4.0, this blog was in such a state of disarray under the covers that I began to wonder if switching to WordPress would be quicker altogether.

You see, Movable Type is a platform designed to be static, and only through hackerations with .htaccess files and “bootstrap loaders” can you simulate a truly dynamic publishing system. Part of my move to version 4.0 was designed to use these new dynamic abilities, but in the end, it mucked up so much of my (admittedly custom) setup that I just wanted out completely.

WordPress, in contrast to Movable Type, is designed from the ground up to be dynamic, and through smart caching, it can be made to scale like a static site. This is much the same as how we designed Newsvine to be. As a designer and developer, it just feels a lot cleaner.

So after many years with Movable Type, more than a week of MT 4.0 upgrade attempts, and much assistance from MT’s good shepherd Anil Dash, I called the whole thing off and plotted a WordPress migration instead. Less than two days later, Mike Industries was live on WordPress with only a handful of edge-case issues to resolve (mostly related to inline javascript and php, mime-types, and other custom things I do around here).

Three months in, and now on the newly released WordPress 2.5 (great job on the interface, Happy Cog!), I couldn’t be happier to have made the switch. WordPress certainly isn’t perfect, and if I was starting from scratch, I might have chosen ExpressionEngine instead, but it sure is nice to be on a platform where if I don’t like something, I can just write a few lines of PHP or download a plug-in to address my needs.

Speaking of plug-ins, I’ve already written one of my own that I will release in a few days, but these are the ones I’ve had to install so far (shocking that some of these are even necessary, but oh well):

Raw HTML – Best plug-in ever. Allows you to wrap PHP/HTML/JS/etc codeblocks in special comments which prevent WordPress from reformatting or encoding them (shocking this is necessary, but a very welcome plug-in)
Domain Mirror – So that I can use subdomains like “mobile.mikeindustries.com”
Mint Bird Feeder – So that I can use run my feed through Mint redirects
Periods in Titles – So that I can use periods in my URLs
Ping/Track/Comment Count – So I can separate comments from trackbacks from pings
Subscribe to Comments – So users can receive e-mail notifications when there are new comments
TextControl – To control how WordPress encodes and adds linebreaks
WP-Cache – To reduce load on the database and increase scalability

So anyway, that’s about it for now. If you’re on a publishing platform that you don’t love but you’ve got too much inertia to convert to another, take it from me: spend the few days necessary and get it done… it’s not that hard… and I’ve got custom stuff all over the place.

Permalink

Not Just Another NCAA Bracket Game

If you haven’t filled out an NCAA bracket yet (or even if you have), head on over to the Newsvine Cinderella Bracket Challenge and pick your teams before Thursday’s tournament tipoff.

The grand prize this year is an XBOX 360, and once again, we’re proud to present you with what we believe to be the best NCAA Tournament game in the business. Instead of taking an hour to pick an entire bracket full of teams only to see the people who pick the top seeds score the most points, the Cinderella Bracket Challenge gives you a limited budget of 300 credits to pick as few or as many teams as you want. Top seeds cost the most and weaker seeds (“Cinderellas”) are cheap.

Your goal is to pick the basket of teams you can afford, given a fixed budget, that will net the most total victories in the tournament.

So if you’re interested in the NCAA Tournament, head on over to the Cinderella Bracket Challenge and you can fill out up to three separate entries. Make sure to either join an existing group or create a group of your own and invite your friends in. We don’t encourage gambling at Newsvine, but what you do behind closed doors is your business. :)

Permalink

SSSS Equals No SXSW

“SSSS”. The mark of the beast.

Ever wonder why sometimes, airport security personnel (TSA) ask you for your boarding pass immediately after you pass through the metal detector, considering that you just showed your pass to a TSA agent right before you got to the detector lines? Furthermore, do you ever wonder why some people get comprehensive searches and others don’t? Well today I got a tough lesson in security and airport incompetence which has caused me to finally give up and cancel my trip to Austin for SXSW.

First, some quick background.

Tom Watson, Jeff Croft, Ben Tesch, and I were supposed to fly to Austin via Dallas yesterday. I had instant status alerts set up through one of my new favorite sites FlightStats.com and made sure everything was A-OK before leaving for the airport. After checking into my flight and waiting near the gate, however, the entire thing got cancelled due to snow in Dallas.

American Airlines couldn’t get me on any other flights that day so they put me on an Alaska flight through San Jose for the following day (today). Fair enough. Weather shit happens. I get that.

Here is where it starts to get absurd though.

So, Tom, Ben, and I show up today a full 90 minutes before our flight, we check in, we go through security, and then at 12:50pm, five minutes after boarding has begun, we try to board. The person at the gate scans my ticket and says:

“Sorry sir. You need to go back through security. You need to get back on the train to the main terminal and tap a TSA agent on the shoulder and show them your boarding pass.”

I say:

“What??? Why? My friends too?”

She says:

“Yes, so sorry. Hurry.”

iPhone Enterprise Hooks: Will They Reach Mail.app?

Gelaskin by Giselle Silvestri

So I watched the iPhone event today and I’ve read as many blogs as I can on the subject, but I still haven’t seen any information about whether all of the great enterprise capabilities to be released in June will also make their way into Apple’s desktop e-mail client. I think the iPhone SDK, the games, and all of the other stuff announced today were great, but as I’ve said before, there’s really not a whole lot I need to do on my iPhone today that I can’t already, except for interact with Exchange.

I predicted in December that Apple would take a dual path strategy towards supporting both open-standard enterprise protocols like IMAP/iCalendar and proprietary Exchange protocols, and it appears this is now coming to fruition, but in all of the announcements today, there was no mention of the desktop version of Mail.app.

To those of us using Macs in an Exchange environment, this is kind of a big deal. Yeah there’s Entourage 2008 which can tunnel into certain Exchange functions via Outlook Web Access protocols, and there’s Mail.app’s crippled Exchange-Over-IMAP capability, but seeing as OS X lives both on the desktop and in the iPhone, why shouldn’t the desktop version of Apple Mail get all of this great new ActiveSync Exchange stuff too? Currently, the only way I’m able to sync all of my devices, calendars, contacts, and email together, whether it be Mac, Exchange, or iPhone is by using Entourage as a conduit into .Mac and then propagating everything out this way. I’ve been doing this since early in the Office 2008 beta and it works *just* well enough to be useful, but it’s very hacky and seemingly dangerous at times (like when entire calendars get duplicated or deleted).

Anyone heard anything on the Mail.app Enterprise support front? In all the fuss about the iPhone today, this pretty important side issue got zero airtime.

Permalink

Friday Golf at SXSW Anyone?

After skipping last year’s SXSW because of panel and conference burnout, I’m heading back down to Austin for this year’s get-together. I look forward to throwing back beers with anyone who happens to also be going.

Before the conference gets started though, my MSNBC colleague Ben Tesch (B-Tizzle in the inner circles) and I are heading out for a round of golf at Falconhead. The tee time is at 11:12am this Friday and we have two extra spots. Anyone up for some hackery?

Permalink

Where to Find Great High Resolution Wallpaper

I’ve never been big into custom wallpaper/desktop pictures on my computer, mainly because I’ve never found a really good repository of them. Today, via a random Google search though, I came across Interface Lift’s great wallpaper section.

Holy crap there’s a lot of good stuff in there. All super high-resolution. All unwatermarked. Sunset Beach is workin’ nicely right now:

Apparently the site has been around for at least a couple of years, but hey, it’s new to me, so I figured I’d spread the word to any of my fellow rock dwellers.

Permalink

Someone Predicted this Credit Mess Five Years Ago

Normally, I think of The Motley Fool as one of the most worthless financial sites around, spouting off attention-grabbing, sensationalist headlines just to pull readers into their abyss of mediocre financial articles. Here is a sampling of some typical headlines that have popped up over the past few weeks:

You get the picture.

However, today, a Motley columnist pointed to what may be the most prescient piece of content ever to appear on the site. Fittingly, it came from a reader on a discussion board and not an actual Motley Fool employee.

Here is the discussion board post. It’s quite amazing. It’s essentially a dead-on calling of the collapse of the bond insurance industry almost exactly five years before it happened. (For those who aren’t following, the bond insurance industry — specifically MBIA and a few other companies — has crumbled over the last few months and is threatening to take other pillars of the economy down with it… mostly because of bad subprime debt).

To have called almost this exact scenario five years before it happened is pretty amazing. I’m sure this person wasn’t the only one waving a warning flag, but it’s an incredibly interesting read.

In looking at the S&P chart below over the last five years, however, it’s clear that as bad as this development is, and as accurate as the prediction was, pulling out of the U.S. economy — at least so far — would have been a bad idea. “So far” being the operative qualifier there. :|

UPDATE: On a related note, this animated primer of the subprime mess is hilarious.

Permalink

Slam Dunk Startups

I often hear people say things like “if only I thought of YouTube a year before YouTube did, I’d be rich”, implying that given first-mover advantage, that person could create a company as great as YouTube. A statement like this completely disregards just how difficult YouTube was to build, from having the balls to allow brazen copyright violation, to building a great user experience, to scaling out the ability to serve millions of video streams a day. In other words, 99 out of 100 people who may have had the same idea at the same time would have failed to create anything remotely as successful as YouTube.

Other startups fall into the same class. Companies like Google and Amazon owe most of their success to great engineering, great execution, and great scaling.

But which are the startups of the last ten years which really do owe most of their success to someone simply having a smart idea first and acting on it quickly? Perhaps an easier way to ask this question is “if you could have one business idea from the last ten years as your own, which idea could you most assuredly turn into a success?”

In trying to think of good examples, the best one that came to mind for me was HotOrNot.com. Super simple idea. Developed by two people. Very low expenses. Millions of dollars in revenue per year.

Any better examples out there? What are the most slam dunk ideas of the last ten years?

Permalink

Completing the Cycle of News

I gave a talk today at an all-company meeting over at MSNBC on the subject of “news ecosystems” — the main point being that in order to produce the best news experiences in the world, you need to think of your audience as much more than just a passive sponge for your content. Passive news consumers can turn into active news participants if you give them the right environment.

This month, we launched a feature on Newsvine called “The NBC Nightly News Discussion Club” (available at nightly.newsvine.com). In concert with MSNBC’s new video player, the Discussion Club is the first and only example of a network news agency making every single segment of their 6pm national news broadcast available for instant viewing and discussion online. So if you’re watching the news and you see a segment you want to talk about with other people, you’re no longer limited to whoever else happens to be on the couch. There’s now a universe of people to discuss it with online.

It would be interesting enough if that was the end of it. However, we’ve also included the ability for users to submit questions to Brian Williams and have them answered in video form, right on the site. The first example is below:

So what we have so far is:

News agency broadcasts the news -> audience discusses the content -> audience shoots back questions to the anchor -> anchor answers (select) questions right on the site

Maybe I’m biased because this is partly my baby, but I just think that is super cool, and super significant.

I also think it’s great that Brian — probably the most recognized face in U.S. National news — answers all questions off the cuff, with no teleprompter, and with a level of frankness you don’t often see on national news broadcasts. In responding to one of the questions, he even mentions his political affiliation (independent), which is rare for news personalities to do.

Permalink

← Newer Posts | Older Posts →

Subscribe by Email