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Japh
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Japh
Frustrated and Looking for a Solution
Alternatively titled: An Open Letter to Salvatore Capolupo and WordPress.com
As anyone reading this will most likely know, I go by the name “Japh”. This is a shortening of my full first name (Japheth), and I pronounce it “Jafe”.
Unfortunately for me, “JAPH” is a fairly long-time used acronym for “Just Another Perl Hacker” and other miscellaneous things, so I don’t always get to use it as my username.
Probably you’ll also know that I’m pretty interested in WordPress. I’m involved in the community, I run a tutorial blog focussed on it, and I contribute to WordPress core and other things for Envato. So I was really hoping to get, and use, japh.wordpress.com.
As you can see, it was already taken. From what I could tell, nothing has happened on this site since 2008-ish. So I contacted the email address shown on the site, sayhem at gmail.com, in March of 2010 asking if the person was still using it and if not could I please have it?
I got a reply from Salvatore Capolupo, who said he wasn’t using it anymore (moved the site to a different domain) and “no problem for me, just give me time to recover access data.”
Then we had a couple more emails back and forth. It seems Salvatore was unable to find his access data to get into the site in order to transfer it to me. But he’d let me know when we found it.
I didn’t want to hassle him, so I waited about a month, and contacted him again in April 2010. We tried working through a few account resets together over chat, but we couldn’t get me access.
I submitted a support ticket to WordPress.com asking how I could claim an unused blog URL if I had the current owner’s permission. Of course, support got back to me and said it’d be best for Salvatore to contact them.
Other than me emailing them back again including chat logs with Salvatore and getting the same reply, this is where the process has halted. Even to this day.
I’ve contact @salcapolupo on Twitter now and then to ask how he’s gone finding the access details, and no luck. I recently offered him money to please get this resolved.
Still nothing!
So, as annoying someone over the course of 2.5 years and offering them money doesn’t seem to be working, what else can I do? Suggestions welcome!
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Amy
Classic I.T problem, unless its important enough to them they will never do it, even if it takes him an hour of work and the money you offer is worth that to him.
I had open calls in the helpdesk from 2007 because the vendor just DID not care!
If its only one guy and he’s not beholden to anyone above him its pretty hard to get things moving.
I remember one thing I urgently needed to do by COB and a person was pretending to know what was happening and what to do but he didn’t really, I kept hassling him on the phone until he said ( maybe a little tearfully) ‘I never set up the mailbox in the first place!’ –
“well, who did!” I demanded.
“So and so” he said meekly – I extracted his email address and moved on.
Maybe you could suggest if he doesn’t know how to do it, you could help
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Japh
You’re right, this sort of thing tends to happen a lot in the I.T. industry (maybe others too?)
I could try your suggestion, but I think there’s very little I could do to help, as the whole point really is that he needs to access things to prove he is who he says he is.
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Robert Aaron (@RobertAaronCo)
I’ve had a similar longstanding issue. You are lucky to have received at least some correspondence and cooperation.
Here’s a suggestion: Get famous – support tend to respond quickly to famous people when it comes to redeeming internet real estate.
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Japh
Haha! Just get famous, nothing too difficult then!
I should clarify, my frustration is not at all with WordPress.com, I completely understand that they need Salvatore to verify his ownership to regain access and hand it over to me. My frustration is that I don’t know how to motivate Salvatore to actually contact support and do this! Support are there and happy to help if he would get in contact with them.
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Robert Aaron (@RobertAaronCo)
It sounds like he needs some motivation. Perhaps something more valuable to him then money might be a problem he needs solved which you could help with. A bit of mutual back scratching… a bug he can’t solve etc… perhaps not now, but maybe a get out of jail free card for the future.
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Japh
Interesting! That might be worth trying, but how to word it more powerfully than “I’ll owe you one!”
I hope he comes and reads this blog post, maybe that will help him see that while it might not be important to him, it is to me.
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Robert Aaron (@RobertAaronCo)
Sometimes showing a willingness to part with your money can create barriers. ie if you are willing to part with money easily to solve this problem, it could position yourself as being in a better off position then he/she is. This can psychologically create a reluctance to help you now. For some reason sometimes people like to help strugglers, and on the contrary hold people back that are doing much better.
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Japh
I hadn’t thought of this perspective… you could be right! I may have come at this from the wrong angle, and now I need to backtrack a little.
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salvatore
Japh, I can just imagine that my old blog is REALLY important for you
I would be happy to help Japh and give it my blog to him… I don’t want money for making this of course, and I know that passed many years (almost 3!) but can’t really do nothing for this till now. WordPress is very hard for these things, and support does not give hints or help for specifical cases.
In this moment for what I can remember – hope is right – I had to change my official email because I didn’t want to be linked to that blog anymore… so I create a fake one, inserted into japh.wordpress and as a result can’t recover that. Really sad for my friend and his hopes, but this was a collateral effect I could not even predict.
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Japh
Hi Salvatore, thank you so much for taking the time to reply
Andrew from WordPress.com contacted me today to say they’ve emailed you, and hopefully we can get this all sorted out.
There will be a huge party at my house once this is all sorted!
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salvatore
ahah good, so please drink a toast to me
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Kaiser
Glad to hear this and hope you get to that point soon. Maybe you want consider to extend your “authors test” with some plain php questions like »What does the following do:
'foo' === $var || 5 <= $bar AND $baz = 'sigh';«
salvatore, and 3 others are discussing. 
Japh
Problems with themes on ThemeForest, are problems with themes
This morning I got up at 5:30am to attend the WordPress Dev Chat, as I do every Thursday. I had a bunch of notifications from Twitter, which usually means people are excited about something. Here’s the tweet from @carlhancock that got the discussion started:
Fucking ThemeForest.QUIT GLOBALLY REPLACING CONTENT OUTPUT AND BREAKING OTHER PEOPLES CODE YOU ASSHOLES. !@$@#%
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) September 5, 2012
It went on from there, mainly with Carl, @pippinsplugins, and @michael_silva talking about ThemeForest themes including bad code that breaks plugins (Pippin specifically trying to make it clear that not all ThemeForest developers write bad code).
The problem is essentially WordPress theme developers include code that removes or overrides core WordPress functionality that WordPress plugins may rely on.
Specifically, things like removing wpautop and wptexturize with a shortcode, which is a strange thing for a theme to be doing in the first place. It seems to have been promoted in Step 3 of a tutorial on adding a column layout with shortcodes.
Because quite a number of ThemeForest authors are including this code in their WordPress themes, it’s causing big problems for plugin developers like Carl (founder at Gravity Forms). Having this code in a theme breaks plugins.
So what can we do about it? If this is a problem with themes on ThemeForest, then really that means it’s a problem for themes anywhere. There is already a great plugin called Theme-Check that theme developers can use to check their themes for issues or bad practices, so I’m hoping we can create a ruleset for Theme-Check to stop these issues in any theme, including on ThemeForest.
I spoke on Skype briefly with @iandstewart, who seems to think it’s a good plan, and will be getting some discussion happening on the Theme Review mailing list to make sure it’s a good idea and to get help making it happen.
So that’s been my eventful morning, and it’s only just hit 9:00am!
This post is mainly to get my thoughts out, but if you have any thoughts of your own t contribute, please feel free to leave a comment.
[Update:] To clarify, as my wording above is a little ambiguous, the ThemeForest review team do currently use the Theme-Check plugin. However, it doesn’t currently cover the specific issues being discussed.
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Pippinsplugins (@pippinsplugins)
One of the things I think would make a huge difference (for future) themes is requiring that every single theme that gets submitted to Theme Forest pass the theme check plugin, and require that the submitter give proof of it. Even if the author has 15-30 themes already approved they should still required. I can think of 3-5 authors off the top of my head whose themes wouldn’t even get close to passing a theme check, and they’re all elite authors and all get their submissions approved without question.
To me that’s part of the major problem: there are certain authors will produce tons of shitty themes, but because they are elite and have sold so many, their submissions are automatically approved. I’ll name the authors if you want me to.
The problem also needs to be worked on for existing themes, and it needs to be worked on NOW. As Carl has pointed out, plugin developers are faced with fixing problems in bad themes every single day. I spend at least 2 hours per day on support tickets, and most of it is due to bad themes (not all of them from Theme Forest, but a lot of them).
The way that I would address it is to setup some sort of scan that can go through every theme on the marketplace and check for instances of known issues (like the one Carl mentioned). Every theme sold on the marketplace exists on Envato servers with zip files, so I know it’s possible to automate the checks.
Another way that would at least help to alleviate the issue is to review every single theme that has greater than 500 sales. Once that’s done, review all with 100 or greater. Honestly it is the themes with the most sales that cause the most problems. I very rarely come across a problem in themes that have a low number of sales, simply because there aren’t as many installs running them out there. So get the “big boys” taken care of first.
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Japh
Great feedback, Pippin, thanks!
Firstly, I’ll have to look into the issue of elite authors getting themes submitted without going through the Theme-Check plugin. The ThemeForest review team do use Theme-Check, so that shouldn’t happen. I don’t think naming the authors here would serve much purpose, but I’d certainly appreciate an email so I can investigate further.
Reviewing existing themes is certainly the biggest issue. There are a lot of them, and significant portion wouldn’t have been through the review standards we have in place now. While we obviously have the ZIP file with themes, they’re stored on Amazon S3 servers, so I’m not sure if that adds complexity to an automated scan. That’s just logistics though, really. This is one of the good reasons for ThemeForest adding a theme-only ZIP file to uploads too. Easier to scan that than a package that could contain a theme anywhere.
“Big boys” first makes sense to me too.
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Pippinsplugins (@pippinsplugins)
I have a feeling some of the reviewers are simply more lax with the elite authors. This is totally fine, but only if the author is known to always produce good work, both in code and design.
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Japh
Yeah, it’s bound to happen, you expect a certain quality from an elite author and so you don’t feel you have to look as hard. Automated checks should still happen though, I would think.
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Konstantin Kovshenin
requiring that every single theme that gets submitted to Theme Forest pass the theme check plugin, and require that the submitter give proof of it
That’s easy. They should run theme check upon theme upload, like WordPress.org does, and if there’s at least one required-level error, it should just never make it to the review queue, like on WordPress.org.
I also think it needs rules that triggers errors for: more than one call to
add_shortcode, at least one call toregister_post_typeand at least one call toadd_menu_page, andwp_add_dashboard_widget K
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Japh
At the moment it’s a manual run through of Theme-Check, but good point. No reason to do a manual check if a “required” test fails!
I definitely think we should at least also add automated checks for loading bundled JavaScripts from external sources. Even though we might want to add the triggers for shortcodes, post types, menu pages, and dashboard widgets
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Konstantin Kovshenin
Oh right! Look for
wp_deregister_script( 'jquery' );and immediately ban this person from the whole network. I hope I’m not too harsh…-
Japh
Hahaha!
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Pippinsplugins (@pippinsplugins)
Seriously, a theme that uses a non-included version of jQuery should never, ever be allowed.
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Japh
You’re absolutely right, it shouldn’t be allowed, and it isn’t. Themes submitted to ThemeForest doing that, are rejected. I was just laughing at Konstantin’s “I hope I’m not too harsh”.
However, at the moment, this is a manual check by our review team. It would be better if Theme-Check also checked for that, especially if it should never be allowed anyway.
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Maor Chasen
I completely agree with Konstantin. As harsh as it may sound, this is a major cause of many issues.
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Japh
Thanks for your comment, Maor. However, this is something themes are already rejected for.
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Frank
But I have very often this also in plugins: `wp_deregister_script( ‘jquery’ )` Is always a problem. The users like lists with features, not solutions, and also not solutions on the codex of WP.
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Frank
So much often I have this problem on customer install, bad source on themes and plugins. Maybe we can ban the user also on plugins. Yes, it harsh, but usefull and the user can change the source and recheck in the plugin or theme. Example on svn of wp.org
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Ryan Duff
I absolutely agree that something should be done… whether theme check or manual based off a set of hard rules (although I don’t see much of a reason to deviate off those rules) resulting in a suspension of the theme until the issues are resolved.
It may sound harsh, but it’s for the betterment of the community. 3 years ago I would probably disagree, but now there are standards in place and really no excuse to be coding themes that way.
Ultimately its up to you and TF leadership, as well as other marketplaces to determine how you want to handle it. Going forward any new themes obviously, but how do you handle a theme that’s 3 years old? Some leniency or a time period to update? Either way a theme that’s 3 years old probably has other issues like depreciated functions that should be addressed, but like I said, it’s up to you do decide exactly how to handle it.
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Japh
Exactly. ThemeForest does have a process for exactly that. In fact, we recently suspended a theme for including an out-of-date version of TimThumb until the author could resubmit with an updated version.
There was a cull on ThemeForest after WordPress 3.0 was released where all authors were notified that those themes not updated within a certain time period would be suspended from the marketplace. I also like the idea of maybe something like the plugin directory uses for plugins older than 2 years.
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Ryan Duff
Yes, I meant to mention the plugin repo… some themes are still making money which is nice for the author… but when it hasn’t been updated in 2 years it hurts everyone else.
Just some things to think about in the big picture.
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Carl Hancock
I just wanted to preface my eloquent tweet that is quoted above by saying I tweeted that after spending 4 hours providing support to 9 Gravity Forms users who had either installed or upgraded to the latest version of Gravity Forms only to encounter problems with the plugin due to the RAW shortcode issue.
I was extremely frustrated at the time and unfortunately pretty much the remainder of my entire day was spent assisting these users, working with our development team to review the issue and implement a workaround and then release an update of Gravity Forms to workaround the issue. It’s frustrating to have to include workarounds for issues that shouldn’t have to be worked around.
It’s not an exaggeration that ThemeForest themes account for 90+% of the theme conflicts we encounter and a significant number of support hours assisting users with issues that are directly caused by poorly coded themes and NOT a problem with the Gravity Forms code. It costs us money, the man hours that have been involved to date are not insignificant.
ThemeForest needs to do more to address the issue. I know that you (Japh) are proactive and always reach out when you are made aware of an issue, but I think Envato as a whole needs to be more proactive.
I was under the assumption that when issues were pointed out that made it into the ThemeForest theme standards that these standards were being retroactively applied to existing themes and not just new themes.
After reading the post above, I see that this was an incorrect assumption… and a major problem that is detrimental to the community as a whole.
Some of these “standards” aren’t just best practices, they are things that theme devleopers simply shouldn’t do because they break WordPress. Ex. the RAW shortcode.
Only applying standards to new themes going forward means you are still selling numerous themes where major problem still exists. That doesn’t solve the problem.
What you guys need to do is in situations where a significant issue exists, the RAW shortcode being a great example, you need to find a way to retroactively review all existing themes to make sure NO themes are being sold that introduce this problem.
In situations where a theme isn’t caught, as soon as it’s reported that the problem exists… PULL THE THEME FROM THE MARKETPLACE immediately and require the developer to update it before it will be permitted to be sold again.
It shouldn’t matter if it’s a theme that has sold 400 copies or a theme that is a best seller. If it’s got bad code in it, it should be fixed ASAP or pulled from the marketplace. Allowing sales of that theme to continue with the problem still in place does a disservice to the WordPress community and the customers you serve.
You guys seriously need to extend your standards and theme development requirements and reviews to ALL themes. New and existing.
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Japh
I think your initial tweet really shows just how frustrating this is.
I completely agree with you that as standards are improved, they should be retroactively applied to existing things too. We’re very aware that this needs to be done correctly too, and with over 2,000 WordPress themes on ThemeForest now, it’s a non-trivial task.
We’re doing more than it may sometimes look like we’re doing. With over 2,000,000 items across all the marketplaces now, it may look like we’re focussed on everything but WordPress themes, but it takes time to implement a good solution that works for everyone involved.
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Tom McFarlin
Dig that you shared all of this, Japh.
I’m not necessarily entering into the ThemeForest part of all of this, but I did want to offer my thoughts as someone who builds themes, plugins, and applications on top of WordPress, and as someone who has had a theme audited my Automattic for sale in the premium marketplace
There’s a handful of things that I always do whenever I’m working on themes and plugins and it’s something I recommend to fellow developers:
Install the Developer Plugin by Automattic. It’s a bundle of several of the most powerful plugins.
Install Theme Check like you’ve mentioned above.
Use the WordPress Theme Unit Test and load it into the theme to make sure all aspects of themes are covered (formatting, comments, pings, post types, menus, galleries, etc, etc, etc).
Have the Coding Standards open to make sure they’re being followed throughout development
Install the RTL Tester for internationalization testing
Learn the database schema. This is something I’m still doing, but it will change the way that you write your code – you’ll know when something should be a taxonomy, post or user meta data, custom post type, custom meta data, etc, etc.Additionally, there are other rules like making sure the parent theme does not include any
!importantin the CSS (because it makes it difficult to the child theme), that calls toget_template_directory_uri()are used rather thanget_stylesheet_directory_uri(), and so on. The list of requires gets quite long.These are a must. For themes being added to the WordPress.com Premium Marketplace, if any of the above fail, then it’s likely that the theme will not be approved for sale and will be returned to the developer until the issues are addressed.
The problem with having such a vibrant community of developers – and I use that term loosely – is that people are getting away with churning out poorly architected “products” and being rewarded for them through payment.
This gives them incentive to continue creating something even if its at the expense of building a quality product. The customer is none-the-wiser. If the theme looks good, nothing else matters.
But as programmers and people who care deeply about the WordPress platform and the code behind the products built on top of it, I believe that we’ve got to hold ourselves to a higher standard than simply “getting it to work.” This rings true for both plugins and themes.
The thing is, this is a beast to tackle and I’m not certain it can be done completely, but we can improve vetting of plugins, themes, and products if we adhere to much stricter standards.
Anyway, a bit of a rant and this is definitely not targeted at any area in particular. Just offering my thoughts and observations on what I’ve seen for the last couple of years.
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Japh
Thanks, Tom! Well put too, I wrote a post for Wptuts+ late last year to encourage theme developers to do just the things you’ve mentioned.
Using the Developer Plugin is really a must, and now that it includes Theme-Check too, you might as well.
I believe the ThemeForest standards are very good these days, and constantly getting better. It’s the existing themes that really need revisiting.
Also, I really appreciate everything I see you doing around the Internet for WordPress development. You’re the kind of WordPress developer that others should aspire to be like. So, thanks
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Tom McFarlin
Of course!
And you know that one of my goals at WPTuts+ is exactly that – to help evangelize the absolute best practices in order to get the word out to more budding developers.
Personally, I can’t speak to ThemeForest (which is why I didn’t mention it much in my previous post) because I’ve not really sold or bought anything through it, but I do applaud higher standards and more critical reviews.
And likewise to you, as well. It’s because of posts and discussions like that this that can ultimately help better the WordPress community.
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Jake
The !important thing is tricky. I’m guilty of putting that in my themes’ stylesheets to overwrite !importants that plugins include in their stylesheets. Drives me crazy.
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Donna Fontenot (@DonnaFontenot)
Coming from a non-theme-developer, but someone who uses WordPress a lot and has mucked around a time or two with making themes, I have a question. If removing wpautop and wptexturize is such a problem for other plugins, then how do you deal with the problems that wpautop cause? What’s the better solution for those situations where automatically inserting paragraph tags is an issue? Instead of just saying don’t do it, what’s the preferred solution?
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Justin
“Don’t do it” doesn’t apply to everything. We’re specifically referring themes not doing it. You can create or install a plugin that removes or even changes up how paragraphs are formatted (there’s probably even some out there). It’s simply not the place of a theme to be mucking around with this sort of thing. They should be leaving this to developers who know what they’re doing.
So, in terms of themes, “don’t do it” is the solution.
If you have a specific issue with those two filters, I’m sure there are any number of developers who can create a solution based on your needs.
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Sridhar Katakam
I wrap the (usually form code like Aweber’s) code which WordPress messes up with [raw] and [/raw].
See http://www.wprecipes.com/disable-wordpress-automatic-formatting-on-posts-using-a-shortcode
Otto
If you guys do come up with anything for consideration with Theme Check, then my email address is always open, and I’d be happy to take a look and work with you on improving Theme Check to catch just these sorts of things.
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Japh
Hey Otto, thanks for replying here. I recently emailed the Theme Reviewer’s mailing list with a suggestion specific to
wpautop(), and there was some good discussion about it. Not sure what came of it though, if anything. I’ll give it a bump
TheOtherJaybles
Propaganda perhaps…? I’ll fuel that machine, hell, if I could build themes using Mr. Tadlock’s Hybrid, then sell them on ThemeForest, I would! ‘Cause that sh*t just works. But seriously, set the standard, then enforce it. Good job Japh, Pippin, Justin, you guys are setting standards just by “reminding” devs how to do what they do. And now specifically to you Japh, keep posting posts like this, maybe, just maybe, some of the authors on ThemeForest will pay attention, yes, even the so called “Elite” authors, and start doing things differently. Best practices are what’s important to the WordPress community as a whole. Green theme devs start by reading posts like this, they go on to produce their own themes, they keep in mind all the ideas that have been shared, and in turn end up releasing some good themes. Plugin devs are happy, less support crap to deal with.
Troy Dean
So refreshing to see this kind of conversation happen in public and I must say, Japh, you would have to be one of the most diplomatic operators around. I hope Envato know how lucky they are to have you working the WP community for them.
Well done and keep up the great work.
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Japh
Thanks, Troy! I’m really pleased with the reception this has had, and I feel like the community is more understanding these days that we know we’re not perfect. We do want to be though, and are trying to make it happen!
Kaiser
A little late to that party, but I still want to leave my two cents here.
The thing that most annoys me with TF themes isn’t that much that tons of stuff is included that shouldn’t be (from post types to shortcodes and even worse things), as I can move those later into plugins.
The really annoying thing is that I haven’t encountered a single theme so far, that I could throw in my local dev environment, turn it on and just start working. The default is ~200 notices for undefined indexes. How the heck should one find his own errors in between this mess? One author told me that he will “fix” this with one of the next releases (his themes have been up for more than one year). The end of the discussion was me telling him how to do the basic things in PHP. The thing I’d really, really want to see from TF themes is the requirement for clean code without errors/warnings/notices – force them to set an error level and error display. If it throws out something: Please reject it.
Thanks.
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Japh
I agree, and I’ve had that happen myself with ThemeForest themes. Again, these are issues with existing plugins more so than newer ones coming in, which are checked more thoroughly.
We’re overdue for a re-review of the whole library to ensure everything is up to our current standards. But this shouldn’t be too far off.
Japh
Japh
Crowd-Funded and -Directed Blogs: The Future
The Scene
I was browsing KickStarter (as I’m prone to doing lately) looking for interesting things, and I saw the listing for “Penny Arcade Sells Out“. This is rather fascinating, and something I had never thought of. The basic premise is that they want to reduce the advertising and other activities that are purely for financial sustainability, so they can focus on just making content people want.
It’s like taking content back from advertisers. No longer will content be a vehicle for advertising, but rather people will pay to get their content without advertising. Not a wholly new concept, but a new way of applying it to blogs and similar content people want to consume.
It also allows users to actually direct the content in some cases. Penny Arcade, at certain pledge levels, are offering users the chance to have some influence over the content they create. Another recent KickStarter listing by @ChrisCoyier was to screencast the complete re-design of his site, CSS-Tricks. His project was 2,562% funded! Now that’s a resounding “Yes please, we want that content” from his users, and also money that allows him to really go to town making it awesome.
Penny Arcade are asking considerably more initially than Chris, but with 35 days to go, they’re already 60% funded (at the time of writing this post). They’ve made it clear they’re testing to see if this is something that might work dependant on the reaction they get… looks like it’s another resounding yes so far!
The Seed
@JasonImms, a friend of mine and excellent writer himself, also wrote a blog post about a conversation he had with colleagues. The conversation was on starting a site that would be completely crowd-funded and community-driven, so I wanted to put down some thoughts about this. Read his post first… I’ll wait.
Done? Good, cause some of this won’t make sense unless you read that.
I think a platform for crowd-funded content, also contributed to by the community (in the sense of ideas, direction, and content), is excellent. Clearly this is something a lot of users can get on board with, as indicated by Chris and Penny Arcade’s case studies above. Who wouldn’t want the content they love, without all the advertising and detractors they hate?
The balance, I think, is that the community is given some control and extra emotional buy-in in exchange for their financial buy-in.
Jason’s current approach was suggesting almost complete control to users. The site itself would serve as a neutral platform for publishing content, and the content could be on essentially any topic nominated and voted through by the users. I feel like this has potential to end up too open and thus never going anywhere. There’s no topic to be passionate about. As a contributor, your content could get lost in amongst other completely unrelated content, readers who are there for other content aren’t interested in what you’ve written. Also as a user, the same goes, you can’t guarantee what you find is anything you care to read. This is where I would suggest a different approach, so what follows is my suggestion.
My Thoughts
Disclaimer: It’s quite possible the things I’m about to suggest are things Jason already thought of, or intended, but I didn’t read them in his post so wanted to get them down somewhere.
The site, isn’t just one site. The site is actually a network. It may start out as one site, it may start out as two or three, but each site is focussed on a particular broad topic. For the sake of argument, let’s say three topics: Gaming, Comics, Tech Industry. True, I’ve chosen topics where there’s a lot of cross-over, but if the network had a fairly generic name, there’s no reason you couldn’t spin up a new site on any topic.
Having a topic gives each site a purpose. Contributors know what general content is expected, and readers arrive with a specific expectation. There’s also the benefit of organic growth by having a cohesive theme running through the posts on a site: users know they can read and contribute there, the name becomes associated with that content, and the more automated consumers (such as GoogleBots) also have an easier time of it.
At some point, this network would have many sub-sites, and be covering such a wide range of content that it would essentially be that neutral platform for publishing content. But I feel having more focus in the beginning will give it its best chance to get started and grow big enough to handle that.
In Summary
This whole concept actually really excites me. I think it could be amazing, and from various things I’ve read around the web industry, it’s definitely the direction things are moving.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Feel free to leave a comment here, or over on Allegedly Interesting, as I’ll be keeping tabs there too.
Jason: Aren’t you glad I didn’t leave this big post as a comment on your post? ;)
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Jason Imms
Man, SO glad!
Great response, and some fantastic thoughts there. Like you, I mostly wanted to get my thoughts down so that I had them *somewhere*, and so that I had a convenient link to send to people from whom I actively desired feedback.
The idea was born from thinking on users truly taking control of the content that they want to consume, to *actively* take control of it. Not just by looking at ads, or buying the odd t-shirt. I, as a consumer of content, want to be able to say to editors and other content creators “Hey guys! This. MORE OF THIS.”
Twitter has certainly been a boon in this regard, but many sites remain slaves to their advertisers, and SEO experts. Even if they seek to deliver the content their audience craves, that desire plays second fiddle to the whims of faceless, I don’t know, guys that throw money in the air, cackle, and smoke cigars during film montages.
I’ve left the concept open for now because, frankly, I’ve not made any decisions about where I would focus if I had the choice. Leaving the concept open in these very, very early stages allows more people to have a voice in the discussion, without feeling alienated by specified topics in which they have no interest. You’re right though, some focus would definitely need to be applied. I just don’t know where, or how to apply it yet.
Seriously, the idea only came to me today! I’ll continue to think on it. Your feedback and input, and that of your readership, would be greatly appreciated!
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Japh
I think it’s a really interesting idea with legs! In fact, even though this is a fairly new blog, this is the first post I’ve bothered even tweeting about. That’s mainly because I’d love to hear what more people have to say about it
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Jason Imms
I was wondering why I didn’t already know about this new to-do.
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Brent
I really like the idea of crowd-funding content. It’s a user-pays system like the paywall, just without the wall. It’s especially cool when you add a feedback mechanism for readers to steer the direction of the content like you & Jason are proposing.
At the risk of hijacking the discussion, what are your thoughts on crowd-funding FOSS? In a way, it’s just another form of digital content. I occasionally dream of a system like the one you’re talking about, but for software – users demand a certain piece of software, fund its development, then it’s published free for others to enjoy.
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Japh
Quite right, Brent, it’s a lot like a paywall without the wall
I actually thought much about it being applied to FOSS, but this is another thing I’ve seen happening on KickStarter too. It makes sense to me. The trouble in the past is that if people were handing over money, they wanted ownership or a return on their investment or something. With KickStarter, it seems if you get enough people paying a small amount to simply be involved and make something happen, you can actually do amazing things!
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Japh
Thinking about this a bit further, I can see how such a platform would work really nicely with another WordPress-based idea I’m really interested in. The “GitHub for Journalism” concept posted about by Ben Balter.
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Joshua Lamont (@joshualamont)
I had a not-quite-the-same, but similar idea to this last year. It was around the concept of a crowd controlled philanthropy fundraising system. i.e. People voted or suggested on a need they felt most passionate about or connected to. Then that community then spends the next 6 – 12 months raising money through personal events with their friends for that top voted need. The site facilitates this process, and the process recycles over and over again.
The idea was born out of being frustrated by so many organisations approaching me for money, I was much more inclined to raise money for issues I cared about, if given the choice.
Crowd funded content could work, and you’re spot on Japh. It needs the right framework to make the content purposeful.
Japh
Work are sending me along to WordCamp Sydney! This is very good news, and I can’t wait to go along and pitch in, catch up with everyone from WordCamp Gold Coast and WordCamp Melbourne.
These are hugely fun and educational events, if you can make it along yourself, do so!
Japh
Creative cooking
I’ve always loved cooking, but have never really done very much of it. Finding the time to do it properly just hasn’t happened until our recent purchase: a Thermomix. I won’t go into all the details on what a Thermomix is and does right now, suffice it to say, cooking properly is now much quicker and easier.
So, one of my favourite foods for putting together creative and interesting flavours, is French macarons. I’ve never made them before, but I now have all the equipment and a few recipe books to get the basics sorted. Next weekend I’ll do my first batch (by the book), and then it’ll be time to get creative. If things go well, I may even see if a local café is interested in selling some of them! But that’s probably getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, I’ll be sure to post some of my flavour experiments in the future.
Japh
Testing, testing… is this thing on?
I’ve been wanting to get into Unit Testing my WordPress projects for a long time now, but there’s a severe lack of documentation online for actually getting up and running with it. I’m in the very fortunate position, that if there’s something I don’t know about WordPress, there’s a good chance other people want to know it too! Then I get to pay someone to write about it, and everybody wins.
@TomMcFarlin has written two brilliant articles on this for me. One getting things set up, and two actually using the setup for plugin development. I started working on this, but thought I’d try it for theme development, and found the process might be a little different. Tom will be getting an article together on this soon
I think Unit Testing is extremely important for working on projects you’re going to be releasing, or if you work in a team. I mean, ideally we’d do it for every project, but writing tests take time and on a small personal project there may not even be enough code to warrant them. It’s a subject that doesn’t seem to be taught much though (unless you’re a Ruby / Ruby on Rails dev, in which case lucky you!).
I’m looking forward to getting more into testing. TDD just makes sense to me.
saddington 11:56 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink |
love that pic of you and matt!
Japh 12:02 am on December 29, 2012 Permalink |
Thanks, John! I was pretty stoked to get it