Grey Hats

It seems to me that people see software as simply a set of instructions to provide a result in a digital machine. This is true, but it’s not the entire picture. Software is also something that we interact with, every piece has it’s own soul. As developers of software we have to be cognizant of what kind of voice we are putting into our own code.

You almost have to consider the app as if you would consider a person for a job. Does it need to have a business tone, or maybe a fun tone. Does it need a pretty face, or does it need a face at all. But on top of all of this: you have to consider the creator of your application.

As a programmer, you’re given a set of instructions. How you carry out those instructions is dependent on many factors. Such as your skill-set, desire to work on the project, and your own personality.

This brings me to my point: I believe that choosing the right programmers for a project by their personality is almost as important as their skill-set. The voice, look and feel, it can all be prototyped by a designer and conceptualized by a lead/director/architect sure. But the guys actually writing the code are the ones bringing your app to life. There is only so much time that you can send back changes to “get it right”, and let’s face it: it’s never going to be just right if you don’t write it yourself.

Moral of the story? Don’t assume software is just someone you can pay to sit in a chair and type. These guys are responsible for the code AND the heart/soul of your app. Find dynamic and interesting folks that care about what you’re trying to accomplish, otherwise you’re going to end up with an app that leaves you feeling like you brought home the wrong baby from the hospital.

If you’re interest more in this stuff check out Aaron Walter, one of the guys working on MailChimp, http://aarronwalter.com/blog/ http://twitter.com/aarron, he’s got a lot to say about emotional software.

Over the last two years (longer?) I’ve seen a debate pop up that usually starts with a comment like this:

RSS is dead! Long live Twitter/Facebook!

Most recently on TechCrunch (via HN). What I don’t understand is why people are missing the point of how people use social networks. The argument that “RSS is dead” centers around the twitter streams being so well curated, so they don’t need RSS Readers to deliver them content or news. Did you miss that? These people are deciding to use social networks as their means of news syndication. Doesn’t anyone else think that’s backwards?

I see two streams of content. On one side I have my social graph, all the people or companies that I think are so dang interesting I must hang on their every word. Then on the other side I have my news syndication, all the websites that I think are reliable enough to deliver enough well edited news. The way I see these two streams is oil and water. You can put them in the same bucket, but they aren’t going to mix.

Social networks may be driving more traffic than traditional article syndication, but in my opinion putting all your eggs into the social graph is folly. Consider this: when people interact with the content stream you are in, you now compete with every one of their relatives and friends that are also in that stream. Personally, I would rather someone opt-in to my content in a Reader fashion, where I’m competing with only other news, and not Granma’s new puppy, Farmville updates, or my buddy’s drunken photos. If/when content providers realize that, they will continue to push rss/email subscription over twitter followers.

“RSS is here to stay you say?” yep. It’s here to stay. Maybe it won’t be “RSS”, maybe it won’t be in a “Reader”, but people are going to continue to gravitate to a content stream that is only content, and not social. Not all of us have a “curated” social steam, or the interest to build one. Anyway someone has to find all that content in the first place. We can’t all survive on just stuff that goes “viral”. It may be an ebb and flow. But as one stream provides less quality people will move back to the other. But go away? No, never. Wane in traffic percentage? Duh, don’t be stupid.

What am I talking about!?

Well, there is this thing called “Multi-Site” in WordPress 3.0. You can read official docs on it here: Create a Network. It used to be called WordPress Mu or WPMU. The Multi-Site platform is MEANT to allow you to host multiple blogs on one domain via either subdirectories or subdomains like:

http://www.somesite.com/joesblog

or

http://joesblog.somesite.com

But any savvy web dev knows that this is not far from being able to host say the following on the same WordPress Multi-Site platform/install:

http://joesblog.com

and

http://samsblog.com

That’s what this guide is for: to help you “hack” WordPress to get multi-domains to work. Now you can do this with some fancy redirection plugins. But I really don’t like these because they mask/redirect a subdomain which can complicate some plugins and who knows what else. That’s why I wrote this post so you can make this work without using a redirection plugin.

This is really only for smarty-pants web developers

It’s possible that one day WordPress will move/remove this code I’m modifying. They did it in 2.9 -> 3.0 and I had to go looking for that bit of code again. Sure I’ll probably update this post if they do, but for how long? As long as I’m managing a Multi-Site I suppose. You do the math. So that said, you’re probably going to want to be smart enough to debug this if I quit the internets, or you don’t bookmark my site, or monsters eat your homework, etc..

Additionally: I haven’t ran this by ANY wordpress experts. But I’ve been running this on “old” WPMU for years, and now “new” 3.0 Multi-Site, with no issues.

This is NOT for the faint of heart!

If you have a lot of sites you’re going to want to gauge heavily on how/when to do this. However in my opinion this is a LOT less janky than all the redirect plugins. Twice I reviewed my options and both times I came up using this method. Once it’s done: it’s great.

This is also the first draft.

I literally copy/pasted this from an email I just sent and made some modifications, so it may by a little rough. I’ll try to update it if people give me feedback or I do any modifications on my end.

My method is two-part

1. changing 1 line of php (into 2)
2. changing the “domain name” in the db for each blog to be the real domain instead of the subdomain

Part 1

note some further info/instruction can be found here on updating to new WP versions etc.: Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion

We check out via svn on the 3.0.1 tag (note: this is the latest version as of this posting):

$ svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0.1 .

note: don’t worry about not being able to updated to new versions like 3.1 etc all you have to do to do so is: svn switch http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.1 you can see how to do that in that wp codex article I linked

once we’re checked out, we are able to make changes to the core and be able to still update from wordpress because updating from the remote repository will trigger a merge with our locally modified code. So we don’t have to fear our slight modification ever getting overwritten.

As for the code we changed, it’s very simple. WPMU is (obviously) only setup to work on subdomains and subdirectories. So it _always_ loads the basic info from the root domain name. So we only need to make a slight modification for when it does this:

Here is the .diff patch if you don’t want to do it manually: ds_wpmu.zip

file: wp-includes/ms-load.php
line: ~141

remove this line:

$current_site->blog_id = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT blog_id FROM $wpdb->blogs WHERE domain = %s AND path = %s", $current_site->domain, $current_site->path ) );

replace with these lines:

$current_site->blog_id = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT blog_id FROM $wpdb->blogs WHERE domain = %s AND path = %s", $domain, $path ) );
$current_site->domain = $domain;


Part 2

Then you have to update each blog so that it’s domain name isn’t the subdomain and instead is the real domain. When I first set this up I had < 20 domain so I did it all manually, you may want to do it automagically if you already have a lot of sites via a big sql script or a mixed php/sql script or w/e your favorites are. Anyway these are the options that need to be updated in each blog:

1. in [wp_blogs] each [domain] field (and possibly [path] if you’re using subdirectories)
2. in each [wp_X_options] table, X being the blog’s ID the following fields:

• siteurl
• home
• fileupload_url

Note: Instead you can update the domain manually in wp-admin when editing the site. You can check-box the “Update siteurl and home as well.” but it doesn’t update fileupload_url, so make sure to change tht too.

And that’s it.

Naturally these instructions come with no warranty, so don’t break your stuff, and make sure to back everything up before you do anything. I’m sure some of you are looking at me in horror, but meh, get over it.

Ever wondered what the heck each miniature was in those Player’s Handbook Miniature packs? Well, I’ve done your homework for you:

If you want a specific character you can find them at Miniature Market as well.

I fired up the App Store on my iPhone and I saw Carcassonne at the top of the list.  Not only does this game look beautiful, but it plays great, AND has multiplayer! MUCH more than can be said about the Catan game (phooey!). Additionally, according to the App Store page, if you buy the app now for $4.99, you’ll get the iPad upgrade free when it comes out (instead of paying the full $9.99).

Get it now! Carcassonne for iPhone

If you’re into euro games, you may also be into these iPhone/iPad games as well:

• Small World (4.99 now, will be going to 6.99 this month 6/10)
• Settlers of Catan (though like I said, not that great)
• Zooloretto (haven’t played this yet, but looks good)
• Werewolf – Curse of Pandora (Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow clone)