A Cultural Difference?

Here's a hint: If I wanted my name linked to my code, I'd do it myself.

The problem? In the US having your name on free code samples increases your skills and adds to your CV. In the UK this costs you jobs and reduces your market value.

The idea among recruitment agents over here is that if you work for free - even if you've done it for yourself, for a charity, or as a coding challenge - then you must not be worth much. Among consultants you are valued as highly as your last role - and if that was coding for free, expect to get agents taking advantage. This is unfortunately exactly what happened to me the last time I built a set of widgets.

Since I don't really want to go through explaining again why I won't hand my code over for free/build a full infrastructure for minimum wage/work for you if you claim my copyrights outside working hours/etc., I tend to keep my professional life and hobbies seperate. (The other thing I don't want to do again is end up explaining to a Head of IT that Java is not the same as Javascript.)

I hope that answers the rather pithy comment I got about the widgets going on my CV: they won't be going anywhere near it, and I reserve the right to refuse to discuss a hobby with people who phone me about a job.

In memory

April 14th

Second World War veteran, mechanic, aviation buff, pilot, computer whizz, gardener, painter, and much more.

Dearly beloved.

Rest in Peace.

Taking a break

I've got a few new projects on: an ebook directory, a new site, and the seashore game migrating to a database (if I can find a reliable database dev).

Which is when real life delivered a few body blows, in the form of a very ill (and dearly loved) relative. I may not be blogging for a while. Projects may be delayed. Sorry.

Life under SOPA

In summary: someone claimed copyright over one of my holiday snaps on Zazzle. I just found out the hard way that there is no way to contest a copyright claim with Zazzle, despite owning the original image.

I was going to write a long rant, but frankly the above speaks for itself.

Anyone supporting SOPA or ACTA should consider carefully what it means for the web. Images, Videos, Articles, Ebooks, even your holiday snaps can be claimed by third parties. And you have no right of appeal.

Given this I've reacted as most content creators will: I've pulled the rest of my aircraft and dinosaur content off Zazzle - even the model shots, which I set-up, snapped and photoshopped - simply because there is no way to defend against this type of claim. The cat photos are still there, but I own the cats as well as the images, so if Zazzle accept an unproved copyright claim the issue of model releases comes up, which means I have every right legally to find out who claimed to own them.

Sadly there won't be any more Vulcan images, since the model I used to pose them was donated to the Vulcan to the Skies charity at the Salute wargames convention where we sponsored them.

The other implication is for the games I was working on. Since a digital watermark and base psd files are apparently not proof, it is going to be nearly impossible to prove ownership of photoshop-created images. This severely affects merchandising, one of the major revenue streams for free games. Since there is one game where this is a major feature, we may need to re-think how that one works.

On the other hand I've got two more sites going live soon, one being a repurpose of the original SmashingReads ebook directory software we wrote. By the way, for anyone who is interested in running an ebook directory, this software is easily customised/tweaked, so let me know.

The other one? Lets just say it's my version of a very targeted social network.

A cultural difference

There's an interesting difference between the UK and US, regarding volunteer work. I've run into it before, but I've just encountered it again.

The US company wants to know why our names aren't all over the tools we built, since it would be great promotion and a boost to the CV. In the UK in certain industries like computing, doing volunteer work or even hobby coding is not a boost to your CV. In fact, it has the opposite effect.

For example, an agent who became aware I'd built them promptly offered me a lowered rate for my next role on the grounds that I must be desperate since I'd done work for free. It is a sadly common attitude.

I wrote a small chat program for free for my own use as few years back, only to have a later potential employer say that since I could do that for myself, I could give it to them for free, uncredited. They remained a potential.

In general volunteering isn't viewed by the value of the code or the experience or the skills it demonstrates, just the price tag: the classic "price of everything, value of nothing".

This view also has the side effect of stifling innovation. After all, why try to develop something in your spare time or do coding research, if the company will either a) dock your pay or b) demand the rights? It is generally not good for anyone.

The problem right now is how to communicate this politely to a US company, where the idea that displaying useful and effective coding skills could be a liability on a CV seems to be rather alien.

(For any coders not put off by this, IT4Communities is a useful place to find charities who need help.)

Amends and expansions

Making a few tweaks to the code for the search in the game, so that users will be able to search even if their pockets are full, they just can't take anything.

An extra bit will be needed to click on events when they occur to interact with them, so highspeed clicking through the beach won't get you anything (currently it gives you a good chance of only missing curios).

Regarding the Smashwords tools, animation is still the most requested item. We still don't have a Flash dev onboard, so we are looking at options. The php option is not currently on the table as our server doesn't support it, but the java dev says he can create a standalone app that will generate animated gifs for users to download and save. With Java we timed it - the app takes 2 seconds, but the plugin that supports it takes 20. While this is a problem for an e-reader, for a banner generation app it might be less of one.

Hatchery and game

I'm rather happy. There was only one problem with the game over the weekend, a login issue. For an alpha that only just went into testing one bug isn't bad. And it wasn't my code! The login database, the only thing I didn't create because I have a longstanding string/array preference, had a corruption problem and went down. If you signed up for the game at the weekend and now can't get in, please drop me a note through the comments on this blog entry and I'll fix it. I won't publish your comment.

It does make me wonder though, since the only reason I was looking at moving to a database was robustness, and the database is so far the only component that has failed. The knock-on effect? I'm looking for a flatfile forum to wire in. For the moment, there's a remotely hosted Nabble forum available on the site at Beach cafe.

Mentioning forums, by the way, the forum for the hatchery has gone. Dealing with the spammers was too much of an overhead, since there were so few legitimate users, so we've taken it down to save bandwidth and storage space.

Voice control?

tESTING OUT - sorry, testing out a freeware voice control mod for web navigation. The basics are fine, but there are a few glitches. On Squidoo's control panel is actually easier to go directly to a workshop that try to negotiate through the mouseovers that make the links visible.

I'll update if I can get this working, but since hotkeys still require keyboard use and my hands are killing me after all the coding recently, I really want an alternative.

Interestingly, it's breaking on squidoo's dashboard. When I ask it to load that it keep hanging until I turn the Viavoice on and off.

So I cut out the dashboard (use the invaluable lens list off squidutils) and removed half the problems. The other set are to do with American software and a British accent...

I think I've got it - the trick seems to be to avoid the dashboard, speak very slowly, and wait until each page has loaded completely. Just because I can see it doesn't mean the voice access can find it.

Game into alpha

This is a spin-off of another project I was working on, which ran into a (temporary) deadend - the hoster doesn't have the right modules installed. While we wait on the ticket to get that fixed, I put this together.

http://www.sea-shore.co.uk

It's a fairly basic collection game, with a few easter eggs. Collect items on the beach, clean 'em up, don't break 'em and build your collection. You clean items by displaying them on forums etc. Get too many hits in two short a time, or two many hits altogether, and the items break. This version is backed by flat files while we get a database optimised for the beta version - since I built it as an experiment in file handling, the only thing I need to see now is how it runs with more players.

Feel free to give it a go.

The other thing you might notice is the ad at the bottom - it's not (currently) a pay ad, just me testing out a new widget for the Smashwords Tools which are now at http://www.smashingreads.com. Click through for a minisite.

Pinterest Links

Pinterest just hit the news and not in a good way.

What Affiliates and Merchants should know about Pinterest
Pinterest Modifying User Submitted Pins

Basically, Pinterest are modifying user's submitted pins to add affiliate links. Now monetising links site-wide is fine, if you tell people. Overwriting users' own affiliate links with your own on the other hand, is not. If the user doesn't want this, then they have to go into Pinterest's edit screen and change it - but users haven't been told about it, so they don't know they need to.

I have heard people take the line that if you pin your own unique content, Pinterest can't make funds off it. If you pin a review or upload it, any links will be overwritten, so you can spend time reviewing a product and now get no return for it.

"It's free" isn't a good excuse. So are the Smashwords tools, and the fact there is an embedded affiliate link to cover bandwidth is on the front page of the site!

Having had, on one of my sites, the reference link to the Wall Street Journal article I quoted replaced by a link for the Wall Street film DVD, I'm not a fan of systems like Skimlinks. To me, this would be like writing an article and then finding the links redirected to the owner's sites on the topic.

What really worries me is in the comments for the article here:
Pinterest Links.

Apparently merchants using Skimlinks lose a degree of control over where their affiliate links are placed. Publishers appear to have limited control over which products they are endorsing when Skimlinks highlights words or swaps links.

Not only does this have the copyright implications above - when the link altered is a legally required attribution link - but it means that you don't have full control over what is endorsed on your page. Unless they are offering full insurance in case of legal action over content I would be cautious.

I can put an affiliate link on Wizzley and Squidoo and have it served unaltered. I can put a link on Redgage and get paid for views. I can put a review on Dooyoo or Ciao and get bonuses for ratings. I won't be putting anything on Pinterest - they don't offer me anything.

Me? I'll stick to obvious banners with the ad network name below them so objectionable ones can be reported and removed, and endorsing (with referrals) sites I actually use.

Zurker

Yep, I just joined zurker. It's a new social network where users are also owners.

So far it hasn't done the Facebook or Google thing of asking for too many personal details. I've left most of my profile blank - I don't discuss my hobbies or interests with people I work with face to face, so why would I want to talk to them about it online? - and it hasn't complained.

I will be curious to see how they handle single valid addresses though. If they use the US thing of one-computer-one-IP, instead of one-network-one-IP, they could be in for a shock. I signed up from a multi-user, multi-PC site with one exposed IP - a proxy. How they handle it will be interesting.

It does seem to offer circles and some basic connections. I won't be putting my IP (intellectual property) directly on there, simply because it doesn't offer me anything for it, unlike squidoo etc and I have bills to pay.

Have a look here: zurker.

If you are more sociable than me it might work for you.

A cynical and cheesed-off morning.

I'm facing today with a feeling of extreme cynicism.

Squidoo want me to change my lens images to 250x250 squares. I've carefully sizes the rectangles to fit in most cases. Product Images can't change size, and the chances of me getting the rights to images in that format for some of my other topics are 0. I can find a couple of lenses I don't care about and resize it, I suppose, but I'm not sure it will be worth it.

Regarding the game, the wireframe is in place and mechanics all working and backed by ASCII files. I'd actually prefer to keep the ASCII over the database - not just for flexibility, but because of arguments with the database developer, who wants to abandon the spec he was given and build something more conventional. (Yes, I know you follow this blog - now follow the spec!). This would involve changing the entire course and focus of the game, so it isn't happening. The text files are structured for a reason - the structure can be replicated in a database table...

The debate: Items v. collections. Individual items have no data or meta data linked. They only exist while they are in a collection, and are attributes of the collection. The collections have metadata and additional data. I want things keyed to collections as items are created and destroyed frequently. He wants all data keyed to the items and the collection given as an additional metadata field. Sounds great until you realise that the item method requires a join of two tables or an awful lot of duplication, which runs a lot slower, because the system calls everything by collection. A single item is never called from the database.

The hatchery update seems to be working: there are a lot fewer adults showing up on the admin screen than there were.

And finally the ongoing contact with Braun. They haven't phoned me back in the suggested 5 days, which is wonderful customer service. My current opinion of their company? Make crap product and then fail to honour guarantee.

I could keep politely chasing them, but it is a sad comment on the state of the world that politely chasing them will get me nowhere but bad-mouthing them through a Twitter account with 10,000+ followers has a better chance of getting the problem fixed and take less of my time and effort.

Websites, networks and more

A new social network, a new articles site, new this, new that and new the other.

I'm not going to be really picking up on these for a while, since today is likely to be bugfixing. This morning we fixed a small database issue with the Squidoo science pages. This afternoon I have a bug list to tackle on the Smashwords stuff and if I get some of those done I need to work on a game engine which is proving tricky (read bloody awkward).

The hatchery is doing well though, and we have no integrated the adult check into the page so it runs slightly slower, but prunes adults a lot more often so eggs get to the front faster. It's also started producing more adults and fewer dead eggs or hatchlings leaving without growing up.

And right now I have a website to build for the widgets...a coder's work never ends, at least not if they want to pay the bills!

Updates, ereaders and lousy customer service

Down with tonsillitis, so my coding is slower, and blogging much vaguer. (After fifteen years of this, I have tendons like piano-wire anyway so a slowdown might be a good idea).

The hatchery will be getting an automatic adult remove after I finally figured it out last night. 3am fever dreams are good for something :)

The Smashwords Reader in php may end up being the real one, since the next bit of feedback was "What have you sent to T? He's sitting in front of the computer clicking and giggling and clicking." I swear, I only sent him a Reader link with his book in it. Which doesn't mean that was what he was looking at, but is still promising.

However being ill does allow me time to be a complete pain to certain deserving individuals:

I got a gift for Christmas - not something I'd have chosen to buy, but with a thirty day guarantee "if it doesn't work for you, money back". When I went to return the product - it was dreadful, ineffective and badly designed - it turns out that not only has the giver well overspent on the agreed amount, but the company in the small print stopped the guarantee right after christmas. A mis-selling case, perhaps?

I've spoken to them. The first CR said I could return it, the second said I couldn't and then said she'd escalate it to Head Office and I should expect a phone call. It's been five days, and my rating on the product has gone from 1-2 stars (it's really not good) to -1 from trying to deal with their customer service.

Braun - a faster way to get 2mm designer stubble is just not to shave: it's cheaper and you don't have to deal with their customer service reps.

Ereaders and updates

I haven't been blogging recently because I've been too busy coding. My major project has been a lightweight php e-reader that takes Smashwords samples and displays them.

It's now up and running and I've got feedback, ranging from " cool!" to "I can't fault this."

The tricky bit was the launcher - since I wanted it to open from a link and run whethre or not the user had javascript, be useable by Wordpress users and others whose hosts were locked down, and run at a reasonable speed. And it had to be code easily used by non-coders. Let's just say there's a lot that goes on in the background, and leave it at that.

The real problem, and the reason another coder is building a java version is bandwidth. Parsing and sending the sample is almost 250K or our bandwidth each time it is hit - careful coding reduces the impact on the viewer, and the host offering it uses virtually none - but it's still costly. We've got the affiliate link hard coded in, which should help to offset the costs.

On the other hand I mght try and convert it to a desktop app which can read in files. It is already capable of reading in full (free) ebooks from Smashwords, the bandwidth becomes prohibitive. If it's a desktop app then anyone who wants to can run DRM-free epubs in it. It just wouldn't have a library or anything like that.

Right now I'm working on another coding project, this one at the exciting stage where all the variables are being written out on screen when it runs so I can see what the program is doing - or isn't. The problem for that project is going to be artwork and design - I can code and write, but my drawing? Not so good.

Talking Money

This is ridiculous. I hadn't realised this until it came to the crunch, but I have a complete aversion to discussing monetary figures. I may have to ask someone else to write the sanitised (and more detailed) version of this for the Smashwords Tools blog.

The issue is the referral links on the Smashwords widgets. It's actually causing a few disagreements on the team, and some users wanting to know why they can't add their own - with varying degrees of politeness.

The hard truth: 500Mbs of bandwidth per day costs money.

While the developers are volunteers and donate dev time, and the processing power and server space are provided by a publisher, the bandwidth is an ongoing cost. And the tools aren't even out of beta yet.

Since we want the widgets to be free to use, we can a) put an ad on the website (which doesn't cover the costs) b) ask for donations (creating legal and tax issues) or c) add a referral link. At least with a referral link a user only contributes when the widget actually gains them a sale.

The worst current offender is the store - which doesn't take a referral link - but some of the widgets in the pipeline are larger (and fortunately faster). They are going to have to have hardcoded referral links, because otherwise the hosting cost will be prohibitive.

Oh well, away from these depressing thoughts and back to work on a search box for users who have webhosts who only take basic HTML - links and images only. I love a challenge.

You know you're a little geeky when...

...after a day of PHP coding and trying to get putty and ssh to work together despite two networks that don't want to talk (for a closer analogy, doing the PC equivalent of two computers standing in the corner with their fingers in their ears shouting la-la I can't hear you) you relax by looking at chess problems.

And then wonder what it would be like if you played a video of the 1851 Immortal Game to the theme song of Mortal Kombat.

The answer?

In a techy kind of way, very cool indeed.

The Game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoJkiz4f2p0
The Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAwWPadFsOA

Start the music first, the game immediately afterwards, and enjoy. If you get it right the moves in the video are pretty much on the beat.

And now back to digging up imagemagic from wherever the shell put it.

Tools - an unexpected level of interest

Last night I checked the usage stats on those tools. Then I checked again. Then I dropped an email to a friend asking if they saw the 500% upswing too. And then google produced this:

http://www.smashwords.com/about/beta

We're in the status update on the front of Smashwords itself.

The only thing I would like to mention is that this isn't the sole work of one independent developer. This is more because of the owner of an independant publisher (who happens to also be a technical consultant) bemoaning the lack of smashwords widgets, and grabbing a few friends in the same field to correct this - and then making the widgets available to other people with Smashwords' permission.

This isn't, from our point of view, a money-making exercise due to hosting costs and supporting the backend engine. If someone else wants to use that engine to produce a widget with their own referral link embedded that would be fine with us.

The other thing this has given me is a rather extensive list of fixes and suggestions to deal with today, among the work on my own projects and this bits that pay the bills. But, after that update my most nerve-wracking job today is definitely going to be a scheduled and major upgrade to that back-end engine.

Wish me luck!

Smashwords blog

A blog for the Smashwords tools is up, at http://smashwords-tools.blogspot.com/. This is partly to record our dev work, but also to give a single place where users can leave feedback.

Over the next few days I'll be adding posts for each of the gadgets as a place to leave comments, and possibly tying those posts in to the website through a feedback button.

Meanwhile what started as an online link directory for Smashwords books has grown into something more after we got feedback on the site that indicated it might be a useful tool for authors. It's now something between a bookstore, an author's personal site, and a link directory. Submission? Stick your Smashwords book number in.

We're looking for other authors who might be interested in an alpha, although the site's backend is still under development. No explicit content - this is strictly UK 15/PG-13.

More work done...

The database problem is fixed, so I should be going back to the front end to get the rest of the functionality built. Here's an ethical issue - when there's less than 10% of the original code left, can I change the licence information to read "based on"? After all, anyone downloading the original package expecting the custom work we've just done is going to get a nasty shock.

And a new wizzley page: Since the hatchery gained a twitter account and a Unicreatures hatchery over the last few days, I thought I'd also add it to wizzley for a few more hits.

• http://wizzley.com/pet-hatchery-a-hatchery-for-virtual-pets/

My next project? Tweaking the blog templates to swap the Adsense under each post for a Project Wonderful ad - it's a better position for advertisers, so it's only fair it goes to the advertisers who support the blog.

ETA: Adding the Project Wonderful banner was surprising painless - all I need to do now is work out how on the template how to count how many times it shows on the page and cut it down by a few so it isn't so overpowering.

This blog is being used as my live testbed, so apologies if it looks a bit odd during testing today.

ETA AGAIN: YES! There is a tag for it! Now I just have the other four blogs to do. It won't improve revenue, but hopefully it will give the advertisers a bit more exposure.

Coding and more Coding

It's odd. Last year my resolution was to eat healthily, clean up my lifestyle and so on. This year, I'm back on the sugar and caffiene and I've probably got more done in the first few days than most of 2011. It seems nature doesn't think I'm naturally a health nut.

On the other hand, I've spent this morning wrestling with a directory - only to find the underlying database (which isn't my area and I can't access it) is fragged. Did I mention how glad I am that this isn't my problem :) ? On the other hand, the twin site's PHP, front end and basic non-database operations are all done.

The hatchery's going great guns - I've just had to refine the adult remove because too many creatures were growing up too quickly. Magistream is definitely gettinmg more use than DC. A full-scale DC rotator is in the works, but at the moment we don't have enough dragons to merit it and the mini rotator works fine.

And I spent the last five minutes creating a small scratch-off image game.

I can't believe it's only half-three. What do I tackle next?

When purely positive feedback isn't always good...

Yes, this is about the Smashwords Tools again with an update.

Over Christmas, the tools went into open beta. The feedback on the tools has so far been either dead silence or positive (I'm ignoring the website, since it's a glorified link collection right now).

While we don't track useage in anyway, our bandwidth stats do show us when someone is using the tools. We have significantly more users than we've had feedback - including a few using multiple copies, so I think that means they are happy with it (?). The same just happened with the alpha we made available two days ago.

The problem is that without feedback we don't know whether to continue development, what direction to take the tools in, whether to create generators or if people are happy with them as they are.

Please, if you are using these, let us know. Even if it's "I've been using this for six weeks without problems" or "I can't make it work for my account." Sure, tell your friends, but please also tell us. What we don't know, we can't fix.

(And if you're waiting for the production version, we can't take the tools out of beta until we've had feedback. That would be irresponsible.)

One very good piece of feedback however came from our error log: without going into details the system fails very safe - unexpected in a beta version.

Embeddable stores
The embeddable version of the mini-site is now available in alpha. This means if you use it live, tell us so we don't start developing on that version!

A demo

Areas which we really need feedback on include: third party links, author data, the myspace link (none of us have profiles to check it works), general useability etc. It's good from about 350px to 650px so it should embed cleanly in most blogs. It's packaged here as an iframe.

Here's the link to find the code:

- http://www.raggedangel.net/smashwords-tools/booksite/index.php

Future plans:
Depends on feedback, literally. Our java coder is stalled because until we know if these are useful there's no point in rolling out an AWT applet. We are wondering about amending the generators to have the "About this widget" link to get more feedback.

If the widgets are useful, then we'll probably wrap them in an "addThis" wrapper to make them easily shareable.

Other projects
Now I'm back to looking at another project, which would be a manually-curated e-book directory, and checking on the Project Wonderful Network Ad I'm trying out.

Embeddable Stores - First Alpha of 2012

Part of the joy of having a blog is gratitously testing alpha code, and then sometimes inflicting it on my readers.

Like this: Mini-site and bundle of joy.

Ok, my thought processes weren't exactly enlightened (along the lines of "Why does Amazon have embeddable stores and not Smashwords?") but the end result looks kind of OK.

Why is it an alpha? The print and audio book links don't work. The Amazon links are dead, and may be removed - I'm not sure how Smashwords feels about Amazon at the moment. There needs to be a version for Smashwords users who don't apply for premium distribution. The site doesn't collapse width-wise gracefully for smaller blogs...

The version here is the minisite, not the embeddable version. Firefox, for example, will break it where it is embedded in this blog, due to width.

On the other hand, it looks pretty cool. And there isn't currently an alternative.

Why do I think it's needed?
- To stop authors losing sales from readers who aren't smashwords users, but are on Sony/B&N etc.
- Because not everyone is web savvy enough to have a homepage, or webspace.
- To give an alternate URL. I'll probably get shot for this one, but Smashwords adult content means it is blocked at many of the places I've worked, and through child-safe filters. This is a problem for children's and YA authors, as well as anyone after sales from lunchbreak readers. In the US this stuff may be deemed OK for 13-year-olds, but in the UK it's strictly eighteen-plus and the responsibility is on the provider to enforce it. Yes, this would mean registering a family-friendly URL for the minisites. (Our hoster's rules are equally strict on this, so we don't have a lot of choice.)

In practice if there is a lot of interest, this would be more likely to become a directory of family-friendly Smashwords books rather than an ecommerce store. All this depends entirely on whether anyone else wants to use it, and if anyone is interested.

Testing, feedback, or general comments on the alpha all very welcome here.