Tag Archives: ideas

WordPress feature request: sharing links

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I wish sharing links with WordPress from mobile wasn’t so darn complex. It’s be nice to make it a one- or two-step action, instead of: write a title, choose tags, choose category, find the link, prepare body post with the link, think of something interesting to say about the link, and hit publish. Half of the time, all I want to do is reblog what was already written (while obviously fitting it within the aesthetic of my site).

One way we could get there with the mobile app is by offering a bookmarklet to auto-fill a new post, a la Tweetie.

The Setup: An Interview with Amber Case

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I sometimes run a very old version of The Sims to optimize living conditions for two people with busy lives who want to achieve maximum happiness and self actualization. I run simulations of floor-plans and then try to find places that are similar to those floorplans. It took two years to find my current place of residence, and not only is it cheap, but I can run Sims whenever something seems odd in the house. Turns out that an errant chair or a table configuration might cause undue friction and, over time, decrease joy and happiness. It’s difficult to step outside of life and watch it from an isomorphic architecture view in 30x speed, but the Sims allows you to do that. It’s kind of my version of debugging life, and it’s another reason why I have a PC lying around. I don’t play the game unless I’m trying to figure out a more optimal living condition. I don’t use this religiously by any means, but as more of thought experiment.

Amber Case — The Setup

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Idea: make learning best practices, coding standards, etc. more engaging by converting standard documentation into interactive quizzes and games. This would also provide feedback to the instructor on which topics were understood and which need reinforcement. We could use this as a part of the onramp process for new Code Poets to reduce the number of basic issues (like validation vs. sanitization vs. escaping) we’re currently communicating over and over.

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Thought: One of the most valuable features of Twitter as a publishing platform is that the writer has a much better sense of who they’re communicating with. There’s a “Following” list which puts names and reputations behind a readership. Furthermore, the writer can indirectly assess the likelihood of their content being consumed based on followers’ account activity. “Blogs” and older publishing platforms don’t have this vibrance; they have pageviews, time on site, and other metrics distant from the purpose of publishing.

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Based on a bit of documentation I’m writing now for work, here are two features I want for Edit Flow:

  • Task list (similar to Basecamp) – Identify the points I need to cover when they come to me, and then make sure I cover them.
  • Editorial markup – Highlight a bit of text to record I need to fact check the statement, expand the idea, or eventually clarify further.

Notes from livecoding the ONA11 website

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This is a quick post I’ve been meaning to do about the work we did this year on the ONA11 conference website.

Background: last year, I was late on getting a conference pass and ended up volunteering for an entire day in the student newsroom. ONA’s student newsroom produces stories, video, and other coverage related to the conference. I had so much fun that I volunteered to do it again this year. I planned to work on it over the summer, but 90% of the work ended up being done in the last week.

The goals for the website varied depending on the context:

  • Before the conference, the focus was convincing journalists to purchase tickets and attend.
  • During the conference, there are two audiences: those who are physically at the sessions and those who want to participate virtually. The former probably want a backchannel for conversation and capturing the highlights, whereas the latter probably want to participate in realtime as much as they can.
  • After the conference, everyone wants to access a historical archive of the content presented in sessions, either to catch those they missed or find the link they heard referenced.

With this in mind, we worked on making the website dynamically reflect these needs. It was helpful, although somewhat distracting from the experience, that I was working on the website during the entire conference.

What worked this time:

  • Session pages as a custom post type. This gave us a structured database of all sessions and allowed us to easily build a session listing, etc.
  • Using Posts 2 Posts to associate posts and presenters with session pages. Our realtime curation crew could easily publish content from the WordPress admin, associate it with a session, and have it automatically pulled into the session page. Furthermore, every presenter had a dedicated profile page and their information could automatically be pulled into other contexts on the website.
  • Auto-showing the livestream player on an individual session page based on timestamp. Every session was associated with a track and I had a bit of logic to pull in the correct livestream based on current time, session start, and session end.
  • Showing the session updates in reverse chronological order during the event (because the user is most likely refreshing the page and wants the most recent updates at the top) and then flipping to chronological order 15 minutes after the event.
  • Leveraging the Zoninator on the homepage for featured stories and events. Editorial loved that they could have full control over which stories were highlighted. WordPress normally lists headlines in reverse chronological order, and developers hack this with “featured” categories, etc.
  • Post formats presented content exactly as it was intended to be presented. I was particularly proud of my gallery implementation, even if there weren’t the visuals to go with it.

Next time I’d like to:

  • Get started earlier so these features are actually fleshed out before the day of.
  • Build an interface for posting updates from the session page so it’s brain dead simple to update (no associating with session post, choosing post type, writing a title if you don’t need to, etc.)
  • Allow for “featured” session updates a la NY Times Editors’ Picks for commenting.
  • Guest session update submissions with a moderation queue.
  • Live update the session page so it’s essentially liveblogging with rich media.
  • Show the bylines/avatars for people covering the event, so you know how well it’s going to be covered (e.g. one person versus five people participating)
  • On the all sessions page, show the number of updates an event has, whether it’s currently live/being livestreamed, etc.
  • Order content on the single session page based when it was published (e.g. you can assume everything 30 minutes after the session is coverage of it, whereas during the event is realtime updates on it).

Lastly, I have one more idea I’d like to pitch: a way of indicating who you want to meet at the conference. Every attendee that registers get access to a page on the website listing every other attendee. Then, they can go through and indicate whom they want to meet at the conference. It’s a double win; you get to notify who you want to meet that you want to meet them, and you get to see in advance who wants to meet you.

For archival purposes, I’ve captured a gallery of screengrabs from the website too.

Scaling GitHub’s Employees

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Another thing GitHub does well is automate tedious — and important — tasks. There’s a very strong culture of building mini-apps and Hubot scripts if it helps with automation.

There’s two reasons for why we push hard on this. The first is most obvious: you’re letting a scripted process save you time so you can focus on doing real work. The second is more subtle: automation reduces institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge leads to a minority group inside of the company retaining answers. That forces new employees to bother those few in order to make impactful changes. It becomes a very verbal, synchronous process, which we try to avoid.

Zach Holman — Scaling GitHub’s Employees.

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It should be much easier for developers to contribute code back to inactive or abandoned WordPress.org plugins.

For instance, Inline Google Spreadsheet Viewer is still a perfectly valid plugin, but hasn’t been updated since September 2010, has WP_DEBUG as true at the top of the file, and needs user input sanitization for it to be secure. These things I’ll fix for my own site; there should be an easy way to contribute these fixes back to the community.

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Idea: make it easy for readers to submit their comment as a guest piece based on its length (e.g. suggestion interface after it passes). Like YouTube offers video responses, dedicated community members should be able to work their way into more empowered publishing positions.