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Making the Move to Mobile Web Design

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After taking eight of the previous twelve months off from the haphazard blogging I do here on Ditchwalk, I knew when I picked up the mouse again that I needed to redesign the site to reflect a broader but also more personal focus. Less platform and profession, more craft and art. Less business and commerce, more being and seeing.

What I did not fully comprehend until I took up that task in February was that a sea change had taken place in computing over the previous two years, and that I would need to factor that change into the redesign of Ditchwalk. (I had noticed aspects of the change, but because I can be fairly slow on the uptake I didn’t perceive those dissonant experiences as part of a fundamental metamorphosis in computing.)

In retrospect, the loudest and most prominent signal came from Microsoft with it’s release of Windows 8. Unlike previous versions, Windows 8 came with a default desktop environment that emulated the screen of a mobile device, including touch-sensitive tabs perfect for use on tablet displays — then an exploding technology. As someone who has never owned a smartphone or tablet I reacted with a practiced and oblivious roll of the eyes because Microsoft is always trying to drive computing in directions that favor its various monopolies, often with disastrous results. What I did not realize was that the decision to try to kill off the desktop PC was not a sign of active corporate idiocy, it was a sign of reactive corporate idiocy.

During the two years following the release of Windows 8 Microsoft first denied it had made a mistake, then belatedly began trying to undo the damage it had done to its own brand by once again attempting to force everyone that used its products to adopt another self-serving interface metaphor. Watching this ritual inanity play out further convinced me that Microsoft’s initial decision was just another blind lurch by a company that cannot perceive its own meaning in the marketplace, but that was a mistake on my part.  [ Read more ]

It’s Not About the Money

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Last week author Tony Horowitz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his tragicomic experience writing an e-book:

Last fall a new online publication called The Global Mail asked me to write about the Keystone XL pipeline, which may carry oil to the United States from the tar sands of Canada. The Global Mail promoted itself as a purveyor of independent long-form journalism, lavishly funded by a philanthropic entrepreneur in Australia. I was offered an initial fee of $15,000, plus $5,000 for expenses, to write at whatever length I felt the subject merited.

At the time I was researching a traditional print book, my seventh. But it was getting harder for me to feel optimistic about dead-tree publishing. Here was a chance to plant my flag in the online future and reach a younger and digitally savvy audience. The Global Mail would also be bankrolling the sort of long investigative journey I’d often taken as a reporter, before budgets and print space shrank.

Alas, things did not go well. If you’re eying the e-book boom Horowitz’s piece is a must-read because it comes from someone in the trenches, not someone selling you a shovel that you will eventually only use to dig your own grave. Based on the totality of his experience I don’t begrudge Horowitz his eventual retreat, but if you’re new to the writing game I think it’s important to understand what has and has not changed during the past few years of publishing upheaval.

Making money as a writer — to say nothing of making writing a career, even for a few years — has always been brutally hard. If you’re passionate and lucky and plucky and willing to do whatever it takes, and you meet the right people at the right time, and you have the chops, and you’re less trouble than you’re worth, you can, maybe, get a gig. If you do a decent job and meet your deadline you might get another gig, or even an actual job with regular hours and benefits and somebody else paying two thirds of your social security taxes. But it’s hard. Always.

While the e-book craze is in large part being driven by people who hope to profit from doing so, and it’s always nice to make a buck, the real value of e-books, and by extension, self-publishing, is the fact that you no longer have to ask someone for permission to write what you want to write. You may not make any money following your bliss, but when was that ever guaranteed? The best you could usually hope for was to write for hire, to get someone to pay you for services rendered, then use that income to cover the cost of personal projects. Even if you were a literary lion your high-dollar advance came with expectations and limits.

If you want to make money as a writer you’re looking at a hard life, but it was always thus. What’s changed — what the e-book revolution and self-publishing are really about — is that everyone now has access. So while you’re right to think about how much money you can squeeze out of the marketplace with your talent and guile, take a moment to ballpark the opportunity cost of the self-publishing and internet distribution options currently available. What would it take to replicate those opportunities if you had to pay for them yourself? A billion dollars? Ten billion? A trillion?

The e-book market will sort itself out in time, at which point it will become just another market you can sell your services to if you aspire to be a working writer. What you no longer have to do is wait for someone to say yes if you’re willing to bet on yourself, and I see that change as priceless.

— Mark Barrett

Hachette vs. Amazon

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I have refrained from commenting on the ongoing dispute between Hachette and Amazon mostly because it’s boring. Watching two for-profit companies compete with each other for the right to exploit authors as much as legally possible is not my idea of entertainment. If anything, such efforts have become routine in both market segments as evidenced by the Justice Department’s conviction of Apple and a gang of publishing houses on price-fixing charges last year. Because Amazon’s market position is so dominant it doesn’t need to conspire with anyone to fix prices, but that’s the only way to describe what Amazon is trying to do with Hachette, and what it tried to do several years ago with MacMillan. (Detailed explainer here. Latest update here.)

To be clear, Amazon has that legal right. It can refuse to sell products at prices it doesn’t agree with. It also has no obligation to be nice simply because of its market dominance, which verges on monopoly. On the other hand, Amazon’s strident position is obviously predicated on the fact that Hachette can’t sell as many books via other pipelines, and Amazon knows this, so it’s playing hardball when it might otherwise have to take competition into account.

What continues to amaze me is that the main publishing houses (and record companies, and film companies) have not yet banded together to create an independent — and perhaps even not-for-profit — company that could handle online and offline distribution of everything from novels to movies to music. Even if the enterprise only broke even it would would necessarily create competition for Amazon that would improve the negotiating position of those content producers. (I don’t for a minute see this is artist-friendly given the history of predatory practices in those industries, but am simply agog that they are not doing this in their own best interests. There is nothing new to be learned about ordering and distributing products using the web, and I am confident there are plenty of ex-Amazon workers who happy to join such an organization. All the content producers have to do is drop money and they’re in business.)

My main reason for believing the time might now be right is that the once impenetrable branding of Amazon seems to finally be splintering. What used to universally be considered a customer-friendly site is now, more and more, being seen as a bully, opening the door for other players in that space — particularly if the cost of goods is no more than what you would pay from Amazon.com. Given that publishers and other content distributors can set prices on their own site at or lower than those on Amazon, yet pay none of the percentages, fees, kickbacks or other middle-man costs, I’m not sure how Amazon could compete over the long haul, and at the very least I think its negotiating position would be weakened.

If that also allowed independent authors to use the same pipeline for a reasonable percentage or fee — as is already the case on CreateSpace (an Amazon subsidiary) and Smashwords — that in turn would be of real benefit to writers who didn’t want to sign what are often exploitative contracts with publishers. Win-win.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and Journalism

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What is the overlap, if any, between storytelling and journalism? Well, that’s a tricky question. There should obviously be no overlap between fiction and journalism, because journalism is concerned with truth. If you profess to be a journalist but your reporting is a lie then at best you’re a propagandist and at worst you’re a fraud.

Storytelling is a murkier issue because the techniques that define storytelling are portable to almost any medium of communication. Not only do fiction writers tell stories but so do we all. Even children relate experiences not in a factual sense but as a narrative, picking and choosing among events, ordering events so they’re more compelling, and embellishing events so they’re more exciting.

It would seem, then, that journalists would be free to exploit storytelling techniques as well, but in fact they’re not — and they’re one of the few professions about which that can categorically be said. If you’re a journalist your first responsibility is to the truth of the facts you’re reporting, not to storytelling techniques that make those facts exciting at the expense of your professional obligations and ethics. (I know, I know, you’re blowing coffee out your nose because you know there are no journalistic ethics any more, but play along anyway.)

Yesterday, in announcing a new slate of programming, CNN’s new chief marketing weasel, Jeff Zucker, had this to say:

CNN President Jeff Zucker called [the new shows] “the foundation of our new prime-time lineup.”

In a statement, Zucker said, “The best journalism is, at its core, great storytelling. We are so pleased to welcome some of the finest storytellers in the business to CNN, the home to this kind of quality programming for more than 30 years.”

Coincidentally, as you may or may not know, for the past month CNN has been ruthlessly and brazenly exploiting the unsolved disappearance of a Malaysian airliner for the express purpose of making money. Using every storytelling trick in the book, including some of the most childish means of fostering speculation, morbid curiosity and lunatic thinking, CNN and its cast of purported journalists has turned an ongoing news event into an obsessive pursuit aimed not at the truth of the airplane’s disappearance, but at generating cash from the corpses of several hundred human beings.

Is that storytelling? Probably. Is that journalism? Not hardly.

Whatever CNN used to be, it’s noble heart died long ago. What’s left is not only an embarrassment to journalism as a profession, it’s an embarrassment to every storytelling profession as well. On the other hand, if you want to know how to make yourself rich off of other people’s tragedies, it’s easily the best example going.

— Mark Barrett

The Gatekeepers Are Dead

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It has long been sanctimoniously asserted by the mainstream publishing industry that it alone can be counted on to ensure the quality of writing and discourse in society. While I have previously reduced that assertion to rubble on multiple occasions, it’s worth nothing today that the industry itself has thrown in the towel at the highest levels, openly trading its tattered reputation for cash from sources whose stated intent is to deceive, then abetting those same funding sources in that fraud.

That this is happening in journalism in companies that purport to hold themselves to the highest ethical standards tells you that the game is over in every other corner of publishing. This realization came to me, ironically, from news stories about PBS and the New York Times. The PBS story, which I happened across a few weeks ago, concerned the funding of a new series by its news division:

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “The Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “The Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.

I can’t say I was surprised that PBS sold its soul for money, but I was disappointed. I was surprised, however, when I read today that the New York Times is planning to use what are euphemistically called native ads in its new paid app, NYT Now:

The new, paid mobile app for iPhone and iPod, debuting April 2, will cost $8 per month, and will focus on aggregation and curation, with editors selecting stories from the NYT and the wider Internet for a “fast and engaging news experience.” It also marks the NYT’s biggest move away yet from regular display advertising, with all ads on NYT Now in the form of “Paid Posts,” NYT’s term for native advertising — or advertorial, as it used to be called.

If you’re not familiar with native ads, advertorials, sponsored content or paid posts, they are essentially the same thing: attempts to deceive an audience that what’s being presented comes from the editorial or content side of a business when it’s really coming from marketing weasels inside and outside the organization. As always, there are plenty of good people working in publishing who don’t support such tactics and who really do believe in standards — at least until their own paychecks are threatened.

Which is to say that if you still think you need to wait for or even ask for someone’s permission to write whatever you want, you don’t. So get to it. Because even if you write the worst thing that’s ever been written, you won’t be a fraud.

— Mark Barrett

Apple Maintains Innocence Despite Guilt

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While I was away from Ditchwalk last year the legal system meted out punishment regarding Apple’s conspiratorial efforts to fix the price of e-books on an industry-wide basis:

As punishment for engaging in an e-book price-fixing conspiracy, Apple will be forced to abide by new restrictions on its agreements with publishers and be evaluated by an external “compliance officer” for two years, a federal judge has ruled.

Though the punishment is comically light, Apple remains determined to clear its tainted name:

Cupertino is not pleased, for example, to have an antitrust monitor who is responsible for making sure it does not violate antitrust rules going forward. Attorney Michael R. Bromwich was selected to serve as monitor, and Apple asked that his tenure be delayed pending appeal, but Judge Denise Cote denied that request last week.

Now, in filings with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Apple is arguing that it had no idea that publishers were colluding about e-book prices, according to Reuters. Any discussions it had with publishers were simply to boost competition “in a highly concentrated market.”

So on one hand Apple is a shining light of innovation, forward thinking and marketing brilliance, while on the other it’s a company run by dolts too stupid to realize that the relationships Apple entered into with multiple publishers at the exact same time and under the exact same terms constituted a federal crime. Good to know.

— Mark Barrett

Five (More) CSS Tips for Beginners

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Even if you’re an absolute beginner, making changes to an existing CSS style sheet is not complicated. Yes, there are things you need to learn, and computer code is often unforgiving, but as I hope I explained in the previous post the basics are easy to grasp. Fuel your own initiative with a reference site like W3Schools, where you can pick up tips and information as needed, or even try out techniques before implementing them, and the only thing standing between you and success will be the bitter realization that an innocent misstep may lead to hours of hysteria because you don’t know how to protect yourself from your own ignorance. So let’s solve that problem.

Whatever goals you have for learning or even just tinkering with CSS, the first thing you need to do is see those goals in context. Yes, finding the exact right shade of green for your hyperlinks is important, but so is ensuring the stability and functionality of your site. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about making changes or even making mistakes when you’re working with computer code as long as you know how to protect yourself from inevitable errors. That protection begins with making sure you can always get back to the most recent stable build, even after you’ve made (and forgotten about) multiple changes.

1. CTRL-Z IS YOUR FRIEND. CTRL-Y IS YOUR OTHER FRIEND.
If you’ve been using a computer for any length of time you probably know that pressing and holding the Control (Ctrl) key, then simultaneously pressing the Z key will undo the most recent action in many applications. Most word-processing and image-editing software uses this convention, and the same holds true for many of the applications used to edit CSS style sheets.

If you make a change to the CSS in your style sheet, then upload the change and get results you’re not expecting, you can usually press Ctrl-Z to undo your mistake. Since mistakes are quite often unintentional you may not even be sure what you did to cause the problem, so Ctrl-Z can be a real lifesaver. Even better, many applications allow for multiple undos, so you can go back through five, twenty or even fifty edits. (Check the documentation to determine the exact number.) Since some mistakes become apparent only after multiple changes, Ctrl-Z may be the only way to step back through the sequence that triggered the problem.

What many people don’t know is that holding the Control key down and pressing the Y key will often redo an action, meaning between Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y it’s possible to go backwards and forwards through your most recent changes. For example, maybe you made a change but forgot what the original value was and suddenly realize it’s important. With Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y you can cycle back and read the value, write it down on a piece of paper or copy it to a separate document for reference, then cycle back to where you were. (What you must not do is cycle backwards with Ctrl-Z and make a change unless you’re sure you won’t need to press Ctrl-Y again. Any change you make when you go backwards with Ctrl-Z necessarily starts a new Ctrl-Y sequence in the application’s memory at that point.)  [ Read more ]

The Most Important CSS Tip for Beginners Ever

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This isn’t the first time I’ve tinkered with a website or tweaked a WordPress theme, but as usual it feels like it. While I do remember a few things from previous style-sheet adventures, as with all things tech the horizon is constantly receding, and what once seemed like bedrock knowledge has become obscured by an ever-evolving feature set.

In the face of such inevitable changes the only options are to stay constantly up-to-date or effectively start from scratch each time. Because nobody in their right mind would stay up-to-date on CSS if it wasn’t paying the bills, it’s probably safe to assume that any CSS hacking you intend to do is driven more by your desire to have things just so than it is by a love of code. You want things to look the way you want them to look, but because money is an object you either have to suffer the indignity of off-the-rack blogging or make those changes yourself.

I feel your pain. In order to prevent you from feeling some of the pangs and jolts I’ve experienced, however, I thought I would pass along one tip I’ve never forgotten, which has saved me more time and trouble than the sum of all the CSS knowledge I’ve gleaned from websites, books and kind strangers who took pity on me. For all I know this is a common practice even among CSS professionals, but if that’s the case it’s considered so obvious that nobody mentions it when offering tips to absolute beginners. I stumbled upon it myself by accident and only belatedly recognized it as a means of preventing the kind of frustration and disorientation that can, in more advanced cases, lead to a seventy-two hour psych hold. Sure, you laugh — or at least I hope you do — but don’t laugh too hard because CSS can perplex almost anyone.  [ Read more ]

Construction Notice

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Spring is right around the corner and that means it’s time to swap out legacy plugins and update the third-party theme I use to modern standards. This will necessarily involve a fair amount of breakage, so if you notice something’s missing or not working (or you hear plaintive wailing in the distance) that’s why.

Phase I will involve changing over to a generic WordPress theme to make sure all basic functions perform as expected.

Phase II will involve installing a new third-party theme and tweaking that theme to taste.

If past experience is any guide the entire process will take, approximately, foreeeeeeeeeever. Then, years from now, I’ll go through it all again.

Because technology.

— Mark Barrett