Nick Denton: Blog Maven / Thief

Design, Web Standards

Every once in a while someone you hear a story that makes your blood boil. Sometimes it happens to someone you know. Joe Clark has the complete details, but here’s a rundown of the events as I understand them:

  1. Noel Jackson redesigns Fleshbot using CSS and XHTML, all in perfectly compliant code. I talked with him for a bit of this, sent some screenshots. He worked really hard on it and the result was, if I may say so, gorgeous despite the questionable content.
  2. Joe contacts Nick Denton on behalf of Noel saying what a neat thing Noel had done and recommending they hire him. Joe can be a nice guy like that.
  3. Denton responds that they can’t really afford anything like that right now.
  4. Noel’s design shows up on Fleshbot, a few days later they remembered to credit him for it.
  5. Later Noel’s exact code, right down to an empty div he had to add to get the layout to work just right, shows up on Gawker and Gizmodo. Some colors are changed, and likely due to incompetence of the implementor the other new designs have numerous mistakes added.
  6. Noel steams quietly for a few days, then talks to Nick Denton. Denton doesn’t see what the big deal was using Noel’s copyrighted work on several other sites. It reminds me of people who rip off other’s designs and then don’t understand why you’re mad about it. The copies are not as high quality as the original, as well.

Smells rotten to me. Personally I was quite fond of Gizmodo, as it really is a high quality blog, but I’m not going to visit it anymore and I’ve delinked it because I don’t want to support a company with such low ethical standards. I encourage you to consider the situation and come to your own conclusions. All I can do at this point to support Noel at this point is let more people know about what’s happened to him, in the hope that possibly this could end on a more positive note.

Update: Denton has emailed me and is telling everyone that he has posted chat transcripts that clear everything up. I applaud him for putting more information out there, but it doesn’t seem to help his case much. I suppose anyone can claim ignorance as the reason for a mistake. Some will believe that, some won’t. What makes the difference is actions from here on out, now that everything is “clear.”

Sting

Music, Personal

I’m in the midst of finals, so there is not a lot of time for extra-curricular writing here. Things have still been busy. Most notably, I am now a member of the Web Standards Project, and you can see where my bio will eventually go. A friend in San Francisco told me the other day that whenever I come up in conversation it’s as “Photo Matt,” partly because no one can remember my last name. This was exciting to hear because it puts me a single word away from one-word celebrities such as Sting, Prince, Common, Madonna, Ludacris, Seal, and Poe. I suppose I’m in the less-exclusive two-word celebrity club with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Puff Daddy (P. Diddy?), Big Boi, and Andre 3000. Right. The reason I think it’s all funny is that the filename of my bio is photomatt.html, breaking the convention of every other bio on the WaSP site. I guess Molly forgot my last name.

Once again, sorry for the unexpected break in posting. As my schedule settles things should return back to normal, whatever that may be. Besides, all the action is on WordPress anyway, which is fast-approaching its version 1.2 release. Version 1.0 was a big deal and made a lot of necessary architectual changes that we really needed to move forward, but I think 1.2 is the one that’s going to make waves. As a welcome side-effect of WordPress’ recent surge in popularity, there has been a lot more activity with volunteers sending in patches and working on documentation, both of which are sincerely appreciated. The official chat channel has been busy too, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net. I currently have two bots running in the channel, wpbot and pressbot. Wpbot is based on the interesting Mozbot package, which has great logging features and a few other nicities, but just wasn’t what I was ultimately looking for. What I really wanted was JiBot, and that’s what pressbot is. It was more involved installation than Mozbot—I had to download and compile Python, SQLite, and a number of Python packages—but it has been totally worth it. I have been doing a number of development-related setups lately, especially on Windows, and I can’t wait until I get a free moment to write about them. My productivity and organazation has improved several-fold as a result of a few pieces of well-connected open-source software.

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

From Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are.

Feature Creep: PowerPhlogger

Ideas, Tech

It’s always sad to see a good project go a direction that you’re not going to follow it in. Case in point: Power Phlogger. It’s a neat stats application that I was always partial to because it gave information like user resolution and color depth that you don’t usually get from stats programs. It is called through javascript or a backup “image” so you only get “people” in your stats, not bots. It makes it easy to view your stats in terms of actual people visiting your site, what pages they went to, how long they spent on each, information that I find a lot more useful than “X number of people came to your site in May, here are the browsers they used.” Most web logs (not weblogs) have a lot of redundant information that can be easily abstracted in a relational database. (Okay, weblogs too.)

However it’s been half a year since the application has been updated, and much longer since there have been any significant upgrades. They basically stopped working on it to focus on PowerPhlogger3, which is going to be built from an entirely new codebase. That should have been my first warning. Part of the reason WordPress has been so successful when other PHP blogging applications that started about the same time haven’t is that it built on the b2 codebase rather than rewriting everything from scratch. The old code had a lot of problems, but it’s something we’re improving incrementally with each version. (The old code also did a lot of things right.) What if the Firefox developers had decided they needed an entirely new rendering engine and we had to wait 3-4 years for the first release of Firefox? The release date for PPhlogger has fallen back again and again, and no code is currently available to the public. It went from requiring PHP 4.2 to not working on anything but PHP 5, which hasn’t even been released yet and is a long way from being available on most hosts. Along the way they created yet another PHP5 framework. Whenever version 3 comes out it will run on a dozen different databases (11 more than I need). Everything is object-oriented now.

I’m sure all of this is very exciting from some sort of computer science standpoint of code purity, but on the other end there is an impatient user. The situation is made worse by the fact that, as I have found on wordpress.org, PPhlogger 2 does not scale well, to the point of slowing down everything else on the server. I ended up just removing it. I’m going to have to turn it off on this site soon. To some extent logs become useless when your traffic grows; you just can’t watch stats like you used to. That’s why services like Technorati are popular amoung high-traffic bloggers—they extracts meaningful data (who’s linking to me?) out of the noise of web stats. I’m looking for another program that will do this.

PowerPhlogger’s first release candidate will come out “no earlier than July 2004,” a date that has been moved several times. I hope I am wrong in thinking the project has jumped the over-architected shark and they release an amazing product that is fast, useful, and stable.

Gamification

Ideas, Quote, Tech

I like neologisms. We need new words because we have new ideas, and ideas are the only things that break the law of the conservation of energy. Where once there was nothing there now is something, and the history of the neologism is a history of those moments of pure creation. ‘Gamification’, that said, can go take a long walk off a short pier.

Can’t play, won’t play by Margaret Robertson. Hat tip: Paul Kim.

USPS and Speaker.gov

WordPress

Jim Amos just wrote in that Campbell-Ewald launched a new WordPress-powered site for the US Postal Service, called Deliver Magazine. Congrats to Jim and Naoko McCracken! Ryan noticed the other day that Nancy Pelosi has a WordPress blog at Speaker.gov called The Gavel. Cool domain name, and good to see WP being used in the political realm, especially since none of the Presidential candidates for 2008 are using WP (yet). If you come across or instigate WordPress being used someplace cool, be sure to write in.

XML-RPC Vulnerability

Tech

To clarify for all the confused people WordPress is not affected by the recent XML-RPC problem that lots of other apps were. We use different, more secure libraries for XML-RPC. The problem was discovered by the same guy though, I imagine he was auditing our code and found totally unrelated, which we fixed in our recent release. Of course you wouldn’t guess that from the title, “PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits.” Let’s go down the list: PostNuke – content management; WordPress – blogging; Drupal – content/community management; Serendipity – blogging; phpAdsNew – ad serving; phpWiki – wiki (not blogging); phpMyFAQ – FAQ management. If it bleeds it leads, right? 😉