greenpoint design

DARPA Probes Social Graph

This past Saturday DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, lofted 10 weather balloons around the United States and challenged internet sleuths to find them.

Participants were given nine days to pinpoint the locations of the 10 balloons in the DARPA Network Challenge, but a team put together by MIT did it in about nine hours. The $40,000 put up as prize money by DARPA drew 4,000 balloon hunters. The challenge was issued to mark the 40th anniversary of the internet ( see Arpanet Turns 40 ) and as a way of benchmarking the utility of social networks in society.

“It’s a huge game-theory simulation,” Norman Whitaker, of DARPA’s Transformational Convergence Technology Office, told the Washington Post.

Some participants set up websites and Facebook groups, like John Cannell, which collected the usual noise. Twitter yielded similar results.

MIT’s innovation was to put a bounty on verified information. MIT’s team set up an elaborate information-gathering pyramid. Each balloon was allotted $4,000. The first person to spot one would be awarded $2,000, while the people who referred them to the team would get smaller amounts based on where they fell on the info chain. Any leftover money, after payment to spotters and their friends, will be donated to charity, the Washington Post reported.

It seems that, while information wants to be free, free information is worth about what you pay for it.

WordCamp NYC Report

Generally, I make a point of avoiding industry conferences. Most of the conferences I’ve attended are stages for self-promotion and breeding grounds for idiotic jargon. Also, I suck at schmoozing and conferences leave me feeling somehow socially deficient.

My curiosity, however, was piqued by WordCampNYC. I’ve been working with WordPress for the last five years, more or less successfully, but my participation in the WordPress community has been limited to venturing into the forums to ask or answer a few questions.

When I saw that this year WordCampNYC would be held at Baruch College, just across the river in Manhattan, and that the admission was only $45, I ran out of reasons not to go.

There were approximately 700 attendees at the two-day event. The conference was broken up into eight tracks, or user-interest areas. The tracks last weekend were: blogger, CMS user, WordPress MU and BuddyPress, beginning developer, advanced developer, academic, newbie, and open source. For the most part, I attended sections about using the platform as a CMS and sessions for the beginning developer.

WNET Case Study

The first session I saw was one of the best. That was the WNET.org presentation. WNET.org is the parent company of Channel 13 and WLIW21, public television stations here in New York. WNET’s TV productions are well known — POV, Nature, Bill Moyers, Great Performances and The News Hour — and each show has a web representation. A few years ago this was a loosely affiliated archipelago of websites.

When Dan Goldman got to WNET he had a vision for another type of web management. Goldman was the new executive director of interactive and broadband at WNET.  Goldman wanted to move 50 of the station sites to a single CMS, issue standard templates, and manage all the content centrally.

The pattern of website development at PBS was similar to that of television production. The site would start with a lot of talk about what it would be, how it would be different, and how it would look. Eventually the site went into development, with the project team reaching a crescendo of activity just before launch. Launches were pegged to air dates for the programs and therefore absolute. After the launch of the site, there was little or no maintenance. The development teams were typically working on the next project and couldn’t be bothered with post-launch updates.

Goldman wanted to change that too. The launch, he said, should not be the end of the website, but the beginning. He wanted the sites to act as a content library that would continually expand with new information and link to the other WNET sites.

To help him realize this goal, Goldman hired New York web consultancy Tierra Innovation. Tierra principal, Jamie Trowbridge, initially suggested Drupal as a platform. “WordPress is not so flexible in terms of freely associating content types,” Trowbridge explained.

Goldman, however had a strong preference for WordPress. He hoped to get non-technical staff involved in the update of websites and he felt that the simplicity of WordPress would trump any additional functionality provided by Drupal. In order to support the multi-site architecture, the team chose to go with WordPress MU.

Once they agreed on a platform and broad architecture, the team got to work on data migration. Tierra built a custom app in Python to strip out the images and videos from thousands of pages of flat HTML sites before importing the text into the system. WNET editors decided which images and videos would make the cut.

WNET created two families of templates — vertical and horizontal. Vertical templates would be used for television series; horizontal templates would be used for television stations. In effect, each TV show would have a blog that fed the uber-blog, or the station site.

Tierra created a number of custom applications for the project. The web team built a custom player in Flash and a photo gallery based on the jQuery library. Tierra also built tools to monitor database queries issued by the WordPress plug-ins as well as a plug-in that enabled posts to be sorted by category. Tierra has made several of those plug-ins public with the WordPress CMS Toolkit.

In the end WNET moved its disparate sites to one centrally managed platform. More importantly the WNET development team was able to create 5 to 8 sites per month on the new platform where previously they were lucky to build one or two sites per month. Accordingly, the cost to build dropped from approximately $30,000 per site to about $8,000 per site.

PODs

Another impressive presentation in the CMS track was about custom content types. Primarily it was about the PODs plug-in, which behaves something like CCK in Drupal. The speaker was Scott Kingsley Clark, one of the developers of the PODs plug-in. PODs creates separate tables in the MySQL database for new content types and can export information in packages or as a standard SQL dump.

About six months ago I evaluated the PODs plug in for a project I was working on. Although it had some intriguing features, I eventually decided that it was too much code overhead for the simple tasks I needed to accomplish. The plug-in is now on a rapid development schedule, according to Mr. Clark, and it has an active collection of user forums. So perhaps it is worth a second look.

About Child Themes

Alan Cole’s presentation about child themes was interesting and well attended. Cole explained that, as a front-end developer, he did not want to spend a lot of time creating themes from scratch. His preferred solution was to adopt a parent theme or framework and make his modifications in a child theme.

Popular parent themes, or frameworks are: Thematic, Theme Hybrid and Carrington. Sandbox was also a popular parent theme, but the project has come to a halt.

Child themes can be constructed with nothing more than a stylesheet. This confines the theme modifications to CSS, which is much easier for front-end developers. The stylesheet of the child theme must have three elements to relate back to the parent theme. Those elements are: the name of the child theme; the name of the parent theme; and an import URL calling the parent style sheet. Child themes may also have template files written in PHP and/or function files. With a handful of files and the built-in functionality in the parent theme, developers can achieve some impressive results.

The other major advantage of using child themes is that it can help future-proof the site. Because modifications to the parent theme are relegated to a few files in the child theme, the parent theme can be updated without greatly effecting the child theme. This allows theme frameworks to update and change functionality without breaking websites.

When evaluating themes and plug-ins, Mr. Cole suggested, you should look for robust and active forums as well as a frequent update history.

Two examples of projects that Cole built on child themes are mvmt.com, which was built on WPMU and Thematic,  and Basic Maths, a child theme of Subtraction that Cole built in concert with Khoi Vinh. You can find more on Allan Cole’s site.

The jQuery Library

jQuery makes JavaScript easy was the message that Jim Doran brought to his seminar on the popular JavaScript library. jQuery is bundled with WordPress in recent versions and can be summoned for many useful tasks.

The production version of jQuery is only 19 kB — it’s been “minified” — all the spaces and superfluous characters removed. However, Doran recommended that new users go to jQuery.com to download the development version, which is well commented.

jQuery is compatible. It works with IE version 6 and above, Firefox 2 and above Safari 3 and above as well as Opera and Chrome. It supports CSS versions 1 through 3. jQuery also has a large user community; there are over 20,000 members in the jQuery user group on Google. jQuery also works with JSON, JavaScript Object Notation.

Doran ran through a series of neat effects that can be achieved with the jQuery library, including: rounding corners, writing scripts to the header and rotating images. For more see Jim Doran.net.

More Stuff

Other notable presentations at the NYC WordCamp included: the Harvard Gazette case study; Gannett newspapers’ use of WordPress MU and the BuddyPress package to create hyper-local news sites; WordPress security by Brad Williams; and the After the Deadline plug-in for proofreading.

Throughout the two-day event there was much discussion about plug-ins. The core WordPress platform provides basic functionality — it allows users to create, edit and publish information in a structured way. Plug-ins provide additional functionality. Some plug-ins are really popular tools that find a broad base of support; most plug-ins are the product of a single developer and are abandoned after a few months of work. For the managers of the WordPress project, finding the best way to evaluate and recommend best-in-class plug-ins has become something of Holy Grail.

Currently, there is no system to definitively sort useful plug-ins from plug-ins that have a limited use and lifespan. WordPress users can only look for signs of utility — a broad user base, active support forums and ongoing development.

Matt Mullenweg

The highlight of the second day of the conference was Matt Mullenweg’s question-and-answer session with the audience. Mullenweg was one of the original coders of WordPress and he has stayed on to guide the open source project to its present state of ascendancy.

This user was reassured by Mullenweg’s emphasis on simplicity. Future versions of WordPress, Mullenweg said, would “keep the core small, light, fast and modular.”

“There’s no such thing as a killer feature, Mullenweg explained. “There are 1000 killer features and you get to pick your own 20.”

One of the key reasons I chose WordPress over Drupal is continuity. Drupal is a coder’s experiment — each new version is created anew in pursuit of some Platonic ideal of the database. Therefore, upgrading your Drupal site to the latest version is a major project. WordPress builds upon a core of 10 database tables. This makes upgrading to newer versions of WordPress relatively painless.

The good news is that upgrades to the WordPress platform will continue to be well managed. “We are modeling the upgrade mechanism on the Firefox upgrades,” Mullenweg said.

Looking ahead, Mullenweg said that tools to sift information would gain prominence. “More content is produced on the web in 10 minutes than you could ever consume in your lifetime,” Mullenweg said, “so filters are going to be really important.”

For more on WordCamps, see WordCamp Central.

ID Check

To verify this site, here’s the ID:

K5HBKDJN87QS

OK?

BigPond Bails on 2nd Life

Australian national telco, Telstra, and their ISP, BigPond, have decided to terminate their experiment in Second Life.

Like a lot of other big businesses, BigPond jumped into the virtual world in 2007 when it looked like flying avatars and pixelated real estate might be the Next Big Thing. Or as the Sydney Morning Herald reported, “There is a lot of pressure for organisations to appear innovative and to be seen using the latest web based technology, often adopting it before any real value has been ascertained.”

The true story, however, is in the numbers. BigPond logged 100,000 users  signing up for Second Life through its service over the past two years, but only about 2000 visited Second Life on a regular basis.

This pattern of rapidly increasing enrollments and dwindling usage is typical of social media services and other walled gardens on the internet. Users are attracted to the new service by media hype, cool features and snowballing enrollments, only to find that the club they joined starts to seem sort of limited after awhile.

I was going to use BigPond’s experience with Second Life as an object lesson in the utility of walled gardens on the internet, but Jeff Atwood has already stated the case so well in his essay, Avoiding Walled Gardens on the Internet, that I’ll just link off and call it a day.

Arpanet Turns 40

And the Guardian.co.uk commemorates the occasion with a People’s History of the Internet. It’s a nice use of the medium and way more attractive than Hobbe’s Internet Timeline.

Happy birthday, Arpanet !

Arpanet in September 1971