Garrick van Buren – Page 73 – About time. And product. And being more deliberate.

Say ‘Hi’ Auggie.

Maybe you’re reading a book, or watching a movie, or working on something with your full concentration – and you realize you’ve been holding your breath.

You have no idea how long you’ve been holding your breath. How long you’ve been focused solely on this one thing. But, it’s been a while. And you snap out of it and return to the world.

Three weeks ago, we welcomed the newest addition to our family, baby Augustus. He’s been very patient and accommodating as the rest of us figure out what being a Family of Five means.

Turns out I was holding breath for, best I can figure, all of 2010.

Totally worth it.

How to Consistently Un-motivate Yourself

“Less blogging, more jogging,” my friends.” – Alex Tabarrok

The above quote is from an excellent post on how incentives – both their creation and manipulation – negatively influence motivation towards a goal.

Feels like part of this phenomenon is covered by Goodhart’s Law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) and part of it about defining non-distracting success metrics.

Also related:
I’ve mentioned in numerous, offline conversations about my output patterns: “I can either build stuff, or I can write about stuff, I can’t do both simultaneously.”

JustType.de’s Kernest.com Interview With Garrick

Sebastian Brink from JustType.de interviewed me about Kernest.com. I took the opportunity to spell out some of the principles guiding Kernest’s ongoing development.

I’m taking the liberty of re-posting this here for archival purposes.

What is Kernest? What do you do?
Kernest is an font directory and web font serving engine. The web font serving portion is powered by the open-source Fontue web font server.

When did you begin to work on it?
I wrote Kernest’s founding document: ‘A Proposal to Create the YouTube of Typefaces’ in March of 2008. Then, after a summer of conversations with type designers and web designers, I mapped out how I wanted it to work and started building toward a mid-July 2009 launch.

How many sites are using Kernest right now?
Kernest serves thousands of fonts each day. Designers can also download fonts from Kernest to host themselves. The @font-your-face Drupal module also provides easy access to the fonts within the Kernest via Kernest’s API.

How many font families are currently available?
As of July 2010, Kernest offers more than 1200 individual fonts across more than 230 families.

What part of Kernest’s development have you found to be the most problematical?
One of the biggest opportunities I see is making it easier to find the right font. This problem isn’t unique to fonts on the web. It’s not even unique to fonts. Finding the right photo, color, layout in a world where there are thousands of good options is a challenge.

Are you working together with type foundries or font designers to provide their fonts via Kernest?
Absolutely. Chank Diesel has been a huge supporter Kernest.

I’m always open to working with designers and foundries to make their web fonts available, whether through Kernest or working with them to set up their own web font server. Earlier this year, I open sourced Fontue, the font serving engine powering Kernest.com, under the X11/MIT license in an effort to make it easier for companies, foundries, and designers to set up their own web font servers.

How do you protect them from piracy of their fonts?
Traditionally, foundries and font designers wrote up their own, distinct license on how their work could and could not be used. More often than not, those licenses explicitly excluded web use and redistribution. Kernest currently recognizes 63 font licenses ( http://kernest.com/licenses ), of those, 5 (OFL, GPL, X11, Creative Commons Attribution, Apache) are preferred. These 5 licenses — and a few others — allow designers and developers to maintain freedoms — redistribution, modification, unrestricted use — that may be considered ‘piracy’ in other licenses.

My conversations with font designers have confirmed that obscurity is more of a concern for their work than ‘piracy’. For some more writings on the obscurity vs. piracy issue, I highly recommend:

Lastly, from a technical stand point, Kernest and Fontue are architected to conserve bandwidth by only serving fonts to web browsers supporting @font-face.

Do you think “free” fonts often lack in quality compared to retail fonts?
Every font has a range of appropriate use. For some fonts – like a humanist sans serif — this range is wider. For other fonts — like Chank’s recently released CoCo Flowerfont — that range is narrower.

The benefit of openly licensed fonts (vs. simply free fonts) is that designers have the freedom to modify a font to make it more appropriate to their project. These modifications could be tweaking existing glyphs to better match a design, creating new glyphs, or adding a new weight or style to the family.

For more on this, I highly recommend listening to my podcasts with David Crossland and Ben Weiner:

Not every font works that well on the screen. How do you decide which fonts to include into the library?
It’s very simple.

I read the font’s license to confirm that it supports web use and redistribution (and hopefully commercial use). Ideally, the license is one of the 5 preferred licenses I mentioned earlier.

After that — I imagine if a web page set in that font would make me smile. If so, I run it through Kernest’s font optimization engine and add it to Kernest.com

Many of these fonts, I’ve characterized as ‘web native’ — meaning they have letter forms with large x-heights and open counters and are openly licensed. More on Web Native fonts in Kernest — ‘Web Fonts – Identifying a New Species’ and Kernest’s ‘Web Native’ style tag

Some webfonts have a much smaller x-height compared to usually used fonts like Arial. If you define the font-size based on the webfont this will result in a much larger font rendering if the fallback font from the stack is used. In this example the x-height of the Rabiohead font is much smaller compared to Arial and it’s barely readable. I noticed that this is not the case with the fonts I tried from Kern?est?.com, Titillium in the example. Are you doing anything to equal the x-height of the fonts?
Currently, Kernest doesn’t modify the letterforms of the fonts. Though, fonts with thin serifs, small x-heights, or high stroke contrasts may not be consistently readable onscreen, it may be the appropriate choice for the overall design. If the fallback is used — that most likely means the browser don’t support a number of web technologies that will impact how a website is presented — not just the @font-face declaration.

I encourage designers to design the most appropriate experience for all of a site’s visitors. Sometimes that means designing very different experiences for different browsers and devices; increasing button sizes for touch inputs, different layouts, and specifying different fonts.

What else are you doing to improve the font rendering? Specifically about the font rendering issues in different browsers?
The bulk of the rendering issues across browsers are at the operating system level. The browser can only render fonts as well as the underlying OS can. Some browsers still don’t support @font-face (Android, Kindle — just to name 2). Devices with web browsers are getting increasingly diverse, from my perspective — good web design provides the most appropriate presentation for a given devices capabilities. Some devices support more appropriate fonts, other don’t.

Some developers are concerned about the reliability of font services. What will happen if your service goes down? What’s your response to this?
As I mentioned earlier, designers and developers can download fonts from Kernest to host on their own servers.

What about the future of Kernest? If an embeddable font format like WOFF will become a standard on all browsers do we still benefit from using Kernest?

Kernest has served WOFF files to Firefox for quite some time now (since October 2009) and cross-browser font format compatibility is just one of the conveniences Kernest provides. There are a number of ongoing projects related to Kernest in the works. There’s still lots of work to do in web fonts.

Now that designers can use custom fonts on websites, what will be the next step to sophisticated typography?

I foresee the development of web-native typographic styles.

Three Things Wrong with Heath Care

Earlier this week, at a local medical facility for a basic checkup – I was presented with a ‘Consent for Treatment’ document.

Here are 3 brief excerpts from that document I feel highlight the incentives healthcare provider have to perform increasing costly services thus inflating healthcare costs.

“I agree to any care (tests, treatment, medicines, etc) my care team believes is needed…”

“…unless I check the boxes below, I agree to let my medical records be used for research…”

“The total charges for my visit will not be known until my care has been completed. I should contact the clinic manager if I want an estimate prior to services…”

Put these three together – and it reads like the clinic is conducting research financed by their patients’ personal healthcare dollars.

And that they’d prefer individual patients didn’t provide a balance, just a check.

Unbelievable.

In my world, where things are rarely a matter of life and death – no one signs away their wallets like this.

Thesis’s Next Opportunity: Un-WordPress Itself

A long running controversy in the WordPress community was resolved this week when the popular, commercial theme Thesis was re-licensed making it compatible with WordPress’s own GPL license. This re-licensing confirms WordPress themes and plugins must be released under the GPL. This is great news for the WordPress community for it reinforces the type of culture and ecosystem around the WordPress codebase it’s maintainers intended.

From my perspective, Thesis had 2 resolutions available – adopting the GPL was the quickest way to resolve the issue, and I suspect the impact on commercial side won’t be as significant as feared. Unfortunately, this decision means Thesis will always be just a WordPress theme.

The second resolution, available to all WordPress developers, is to divest themselves of all WordPress code. Every line, every call, every function – remove it form the Thesis code base. Then hire a team of PHP developers unfamiliar with the WordPress codebase to custom develop the application from the ground up – interacting with pre-existing WordPress database structure.

A complete clean-room developed, drop-in replacement for WordPress.

Licensed and distributed however the project sponsor wants.

This solves a number of increasingly irritating technical issues I have with WordPress;

WordPress is increasingly an attack target resolved with seemingly endless codebase updates,
the WordPress admin UI continually less about writing,
the WordPress theme templating structure encourages redundant code.
Most importantly – the self-hosted, reliable, usable, website engine space needs some innovation.

This approach confirms Thesis is, much more than a WordPress theme (one of the controversial points), but a mature, stand-alone WordPress replacement ^[1].

This approach is far more interesting to me and I think has the opportunity to foster greater energy, excitement, and innovation in a very stagnant feeling space.

P.S. I say all this someone who; has written a bunch of code to interact with WordPress, currently maintains a number of WordPress blogs, continually recommends WordPress the starting point for all publishing-heavy web projects.

Elsewhere:

“Because my relationship with WordPress has been souring for longer than the recent problems, I’ve been working on a replacement for WordPress…” – J Wynia

1. Yes, this was the idea behind my PressOnRails project – an effort to use Ruby on Rail to interact with a pre-existing WordPress database.

Adding Custom Fields to an Existing Post via XMLRPC in WordPress

If you’re having difficulty adding custom fields to an existing WordPress posts via XMLRPC’s metaWeblog.EditPost command, try including a dummy entry in your code.

It worked for me.

I’m working on a project where we’re programmatically adding WordPress custom field data to thousands of posts, seemed like a great job for XMLRPC. I had assumed a simple Ruby call like this would work:

result = server.call('metaWeblog.editPost', wordpress_post_id, name, pass, {"custom_fields" => [{"key" => "note", "value" => "loves you"]})

It doesn’t – it gives a less than happy Error 500 ‘Sorry, your entry could not be edited. Something wrong happened.’

I read through WordPress’s xmlrpc.php file and noticed that the update post command is run (line 2460) before any of the custom field data is recognized (line 2476).

So, I added a line to not change the Post’s title, and new custom fields were added as expected.

result = server.call('metaWeblog.editPost', wordpress_post_id, name, pass, {"title" => POST_TITLE, "custom_fields" => [{"key" => "note", "value" => "loves you"]})

Real Time Red Herring

Over the past few years, I’ve worked on a number of projects exploring the the value of capturing & sharing a fleeting moment in ‘real time’.

These projects included;

Cullect; which proved to me how infrequently ‘real time’ ever passed into ‘relevant’.
RE07.US; which was a URL shortener that self-destructed after 5 minutes
iTunes-to-Twitter; where I continually sent my iTunes playlist into Twitter to no one’s enjoyment.

While these efforts hinted at the uselessness and annoyance in focusing on ‘real time’ for goofy side projects. I needed to find out if there was significant business value in focussing on ‘real time’.

So, I landed a project with a client in an industry I assumed would convincingly show me the need to focusing-heavily on ‘real time’ message delivery and communication.

In a round of customer interviews, I asked – “how frequently do you want to know the status of X?”

“90% of the time, within 4 hours.”

Turns out, more than 90% of the time – everything is work as expected. That remaining 10%, when additional coordination is needed – the parties involved pick up the phone and talk to one another in real time. And that was the constituents who looked at the data most frequently.

In my email today, I received a ‘Thank you, I needed that.’ for a message I sent 2 months ago. The message referenced a podcast I recorded 4 years ago. The podcast was a retelling of an experience I had 8 years ago. An experience about patiently waiting for the right moment.

All this makes me wonder when Google will stop indexing the ‘real time’ web ^[1] in the name of spam-prevention and focus their attention on the under-appreciated “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

This pursuit of ‘real time’ is a distraction. A distraction from building and sharing relevance and timelessness. A distraction from being present.

Elsewhere:

“The breaking news mindset isn’t just annoying, it may be distracting you from what really matters.” – Seth Godin

1. I’m holding on my prediction that by March 2011, Twitter – the company – is no longer relevant.

What Does a Successful MN Tech Firm Look Like?

“The region has just a few large tech operations left (Lawson, Digital River, Seagate), and venture capitalists say most local software startups are tiny and will never grow into market leaders or large companies.” – Dan Haugen.

Most businesses, local or otherwise, are tiny and will never grow to market leaders or large companies. Minneapolis’ thriving restaurant, music, and art scenes immediately come to mind. Not to mention – my 2 favorite auto repair shops aren’t owned by large companies (though – they are market leaders within this 10 block radius).

I don’t hear many stories of restauranteurs struggling to get venture capital funding for their newest dining concept. Nor do I hear similar cries from other ‘industries’. Yet, the local zeitgeist in the web tech community defaults to getting early stage funding for ideas that aren’t capital-intensive or significantly innovative at a changing-the-world level (changing-our-world level: yes, that’s entirely different) ^[1].

“But not all industries are as capital efficient as the Web or Information Technology. Biotech, medical devices, semiconductors, communications and CleanTech require significantly more capital to build and scale before they can generate profits. It’s in these industries that the lack of a public market has taken the heaviest toll on entrepreneurs and their startups.” – Steven Blank

Re-read that statement from Blank. His list of industries hurt by the non-existant IPO market is a list of all the industries Minnesota is, or wants to be, known for.

From this angle – the acquisition of ADC Telecom is a success story. They beat the odds. Minnesota’s tech community should be celebrating. ADC found a $1.25b exit in a tough market.

Congrats.

In a world where IPOs and acquisitions are non-existant, the question isn’t – what local entity will grow to fill ADC’s shoes (assuming it vanishes from MN’s landscape)?. The question is – What does our tech community look like where everyone…

“…can find 2,000 people to pay … $40 a month for a product … make $1 million a year. The economics of that are liberating. When I can build a company that costs nothing to operate, that changes the way I can live” – Dan Grigsby

Grigsby paints a very compelling vision of Minnesota entrepreneurship. A vision less reliant on state policies, big funding, and big exits and more on a sale-able product to a global market. A vision that resonates with me, and I suspect many of you.

P.S. There’s been chatter over on Minnov8 on this topic as well, where Minnesota’s ‘risk-adverse’ culture (as compared to where?) is brought up as a negative.

If anything, it’s a list of positives.

If you want to have it all; raise a family, bootstrap startups while making a living contracting and consulting – Minnesota is the perfect place.

I’ve had enough conversations with people that have moved elsewhere to get funding for their company, find developers, and build businesses to know – it’s not any easier anywhere else. No place guarantees success.

1. The most recent example comes from Gene Rebeck, Twin Cities Business Senior Editor
“But one thing’s for sure: Start-ups are going to need access to capital.”

RESTful Blogging via Email w/ Sinatra?

Somewhere in my travels I thought I saw a project that uses Sinatra and some very RESTful URLs to do blogging via email. Now I can’t find it.

If you’ve seen this as well – leave a message in the comments.

If I can’t find it in a couple of days, I think I know what my next project is.

🙂

Update 13 Dec 2010
Anil Dash asked for something like this almost 8(!!!!) years ago.

Twitter’s a Memory Hole

“…it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

This weekend, I opened up my Twitter account and read each message I had posted.

Then I deleted it.

And I kept reading and deleting until Twitter stopped showing me my messages – sometime around October 2009.

I started with more than 7200 ‘tweets’ and according to Twitter, I’ve 6,587 remaining.

Now if you visit /garrickvanburen you won’t see any of them. Seems as though Twitter has decided that anything I’ve written prior to, say, October 2009 is no longer available ^[1]. But – if my profile says I have 6,587 ‘tweets’ – where are they?

I even searched for them via search.twitter.com;

” Older tweets are temporarily unavailable.”

If they’re not accessible – shouldn’t the number be 0?

I’m completely fine with Twitter being temporary. I think it should be (that’s why I mass deleted them anyway). I don’t think Twitter should be indexed by Google or Bing or any other service. The question is – how long should a give ‘tweet’ be accessible?

Nine months seems as arbitrary as 140 character limit and killing off basic auth in August.

So, how long should a ‘tweet’ live?

If Twitter’s goal is to capture the zeitgeist in real-time, how long does it take for a moment to pass?

5 minutes? 1 hour? 24 hours? 1 beat?

Update 25 June 2010: As of this morning, my Twitter account reads ‘0 tweets’. Makes me feel that Twitter doesn’t see any value in keeping the old stuff around and accessible. Feels very Logan’s Run. Not sure how I feel about this yet.