Dan Q
This checkin to GC5KBK3 ISAP: Omonia reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found! Took a bit of a search, because I had looked at the hint image which shows several trees at the GZ that are no longer there, so I was left thinking I must be in the wrong place for a while! TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
The first “full” day of WordCamp Europe 2023 (which kicked-off at Contributor Day) was busy and intense, but I loved it.
This post is basically a live-blog of everything I got up to, and it’s mostly for my own benefit/notetaking. If you don’t read it, nobody will blame you.
Here’s what I got up to:
David Artiss took the courageous step of installing 36 popular plugins onto a fresh WordPress site and was, unsurprisingly, immediately bombarded by a billion banners on his dashboard. Some were merely unhelpful (“don’t forget to add your API key”), others were annoying (“thanks for installing our plugin”), and plenty more were commercial advertisements (“get the premium version”) despite the fact that WordPress.org guidelines recommend against this. It’s no surprise that this kind of “aggressive promotion” is the single biggest annoyance that people reported when David asked around on social media.
Similarly, plugins which attempt to break the standard WordPress look-and-feel by e.g. hoisting themselves to the top of the menu, showing admin popovers, putting settings sections in places other than the settings submenu, and so on are a huge annoyance to everybody. I get sufficiently frustrated by these common antifeatures of plugins I use that I actually maintain a plugin for my own use that “fixes” the ones that aggrivate me the most!
David’s promised to put his slides online, plus to write articles about everything that came up in his Q&A.
I’m unconvinced that we can rely on plugin developers to independently fix the kinds of problems that come high on David’s list. I wonder if there’s mileage in WordPress Core reimplementing the way that the main navigation menu works such that all items in it can be (easily) re-arranged by users to their own preference? This would undermine the perceived value to plugin developers of “hoisting” their own to the top by allowing users to counteract it, and would provide a valuable feature to allow site admins to streamline their workflow: use WooCommerce but only in a way that’s secondary to your blog? Move “Products” below “Posts”! Etc.
Aaron Reimann from ClockworkWP gave us a tour of how WordPress has changed over the course of its 20-year history, starting even slightly before I started using WordPress; my blog (previously powered by some hacky PHP, previouslier powered by some hackier Perl, previousliest written in static HTML) switched to WordPress in 2004, when it hit version 1.2, so it was fun to get the opportunity to see some even older versions illustrated.
It was great to be reminded how far the Core code has come over that time. Early versions of WordPress – as was common among PHP applications at the time! – had very few files and each could reliably be expected to be a stack of SQL, wrapped in a stack of code, wrapped in what’s otherwise a HTML file: no modularity!
There were very few surprises for me in this talk, as you might expect for such an “old hand”, but I really enjoyed the nostalgia of exploring WordPress history through his eyes.
I enjoyed putting him on the spot with a “spicy” question at the end of his talk, by asking him if, alongside everything we’ve gained over the years, whether there’s anything we lost along the way. He answered well, pointing out that the somewhat bloated stack of plugins that are commonplace on big sites nowadays and the ease with which admins can just “click and install” more of them. I agree with him, although personally I miss built-in XFN support…
There’s a lot of exhibitors with stands, but I tried to do a circuit or so and pay attention at least to those whose owners I’ve come into contact with in a professional capacity. Many developers who make extensions for WooCommerce, of course, sell those extensions through WooCommerce.com, which means they come into routine direct contact with my code (and it can mean that when their extension’s been initially rejected by our security scanners or linters, it’s me their developers first want to curse!).
It’s been great to connect with people using WordPress to power the Web in a whole variety of different contexts, but it somehow still feels strange to me that WordPress has such a commercial following! Even speaking as somebody who’s made their living at least partially out of WordPress for the last decade plus, it still feels to me like its greatest value comes from its use for personal publishing.
The feel of a WordCamp with its big shiny sponsors is enormously different from, say, the intimacy and individuality of a Homebrew Website Club meeting, and I think that’s something I still need to come to terms with. WordPress’s success story comes from many different causes, but perhaps chief among them is the fact that it’s versatile enough to power the website of a government, multinational, or household-name brand… but also to run the smallest personal indie blog. I struggle to comprehend that, even with my background.
(Side note, Sophie Koonin says that building a personal website is a radical act in 2023, and I absolutely agree.)
I was proud of my colleagues for the “gimmick” they were using to attract people to the Woo stand: you could pick up a “credit card” and use it to make a purchase (of Greek olive oil) using a website, see your order appear on the app at the backend in real-time, and then receive your purchase as a giveaway. The “credit card” doubles as a business card from the stand, the olive oil is a real product from a real, local producer (who really uses WooCommerce to sell online!), and when you provide an email address at the checkout you can opt-in to being contacted by the team afterwards. That’s some good joined-up thinking by my buddies in marketing!
Petya Petkova observed that it’s commonplace to take the easy approach and make a website look like… well, every other website. “Web deja-vu” is a real thing, and it’s fed not only by the ebbs and flows of trends in web design but by the proliferation of indistinct themes that people just install-and-use.
Choice of colours and typography can be used to tell a story, to instil a feeling, to encourage engagement. Scrolling can be used as a metaphor for storytelling (“scrolly-telling”, Petya calls it). Animation flow can be used to direct a user’s attention and drive focus and encourage interaction.
A lot of the technical concepts she demonstrated – parts of a page that scroll at different speeds, typography that shifts or changes, videos used in a subtle way to accentuate other content, etc. – can be implemented in the frontend with WebGL, Three.js and the like. Petya observes that moving this kind of content interactivity into the frontend can produce an illusion of a performance improvement, which is an argument I’ve heard before, but personally I think it’s only valuable if it’s built as a progressive enhancement: otherwise, you’re always at risk that your site won’t look like you’d hope.
I note, for example, that Petya’s agency’s site shows only an “endless spinner” when viewed in my browser (which blocks the code.jQuery CDN by default, unless allowlisted for specific sites). All of the content is there, on the page, if you View Source, but it’s completely invisible if an external JavaScript fails to load. That doesn’t just happen when weirdos like me disable JavaScript in their browsers: it can happen if the browser interacts badly with the script, or if the user’s Internet connection is ropey, or a malware scanner misfires, or if government censorship blocks the CDN, or in any number of other conditions.
So yeah: uniqueness and creativity are great, and I like what she’s proposing, but not the way she goes about it. The first person to ask a question wisely brought up accessibility, and
Petya answered well that accessibility technologies can bridge the gap, but I’d counter that it’s preferable to build accessible in the first instance: if you have to
use an aria- attribute it’s a good sign that you probably already did something wrong (not always, but it’s certainly a pointer that you ought to take a step back
and check!).
Several other good questions and great answers followed: about how to showcase a preliminary design when they design is dependent upon animation and interactivity (which I’ve witnessed before!), on the value of server-side rendering of components, and about how to optimise for smaller screens. Petya clearly knows her stuff in all of these areas and had confident responses.
Oliver Sild is the kind of self-taught hacker, security nerd, and community builder that I love, so I wasn’t going to miss his talk.
It’s good news in general in WordPress Security-land… but CSRF is on the up-and-up (overtaking XSS) in the plugin space. That, and all the broken access control we see in the admin area, are things I’ll be keeping in mind next time I’m arguing with a vendor about the importance of using nonces and security checks in their extension (I have this battle from time to time!).
But an interesting development is the growth of the supply chains in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. Nowadays a plugin might depend upon another plugin which might depend upon a library… and a patch applied to the latter of those might take time to be propagated through the chain, providing attackers with a growing window of opportunity.
A worrying thought is that while plugin directory administrators will pull and remove plugins that have longstanding unactioned security issues. But that doesn’t help the sites that already have that plugin installed and are still using it! There’s a proposal to allow WordPress to notify admins if a plugin used on a site has been dropped for security reasons, but it was opened 9 years ago and hasn’t seen any real movement, soo…
I like that Oliver plugged for security researchers being acknowledged as equal contributors to developers on your software. But then, I would say that, as somebody who breaks into things once in a while and then tells the affected parties how to fix the problem that allowed me to do so! He also provided a whole wealth of tips for site owners and agencies to try to keep their sites safe, but little that I wasn’t aware of already.
It was about this point in the day, glancing at my schedule and realising that at any given time there were up to four other sessions running simultaneously, that I really got
a feel for the scale of this conference. Awesome. Meanwhile, Oliver was fielding the question that I’m sure everybody was thinking: with Gutenberg blocks powered by JavaScript that are
often backed by a supply-chain of the usual billion-or-so files you find in your .node_modules directory, isn’t the risk of supply chain attacks increasing?
Spoiler: yes. Did you notice earlier in this post I mentioned that I don’t use Gutenberg on this site yet?
My first “workshop” was run by Giulia Laco, on the topic of readable content and design.
Giulia began by reminding us how short the attention span of Web readers is, and how important the right typographic choices are in ensuring that people actually read your content. I fully get this – I think that very few people will have the attention span to read this part of this very blog post, for example! – but I loved that she hammered the point home by presenting every slide of her presentation twice (or more), “improving” the typographic choices as she went along: an excellent and memorable quirk.
Our capacity to read and comprehend a text is affected by a combination of common (distance, lighting, environment, concentration, mood, etc.), personal (age, proficiency, motiviation,
accessibility requirements, etc.), and typographic (face, style, size, line length and spacing, contrast, width, rhythm etc.) factors. To explore the impact of the typographic factors,
the group dived into a pre-prepared Codepen and a shared Figma diagram. (I immediately had a TIL moment over the font-synthesis: CSS property!)
Things get interesting at the intersection of readability and accessibility. For example, WCAG accessibility requirements demand that you don’t use images of text (we used to do this a lot back before we could reliably use fonts on the web, and before we could easily have background images on e.g. buttons for navigation). But this accessibility requirement also aids screen readability when accounting for e.g. “retina” screens with virtual pixel ratios.
Giulia provided a great explanation of why we may well think in pixels (as developers or digital designers) but we’re unlikely to use them everywhere: I’d internalised this lesson long ago but I appreciated a well-explained justification. The short of it is: screen zoom (that fancy zoom feature you use in your browser all the time, especially on mobile) and text zoom (the one you probably don’t use, or don’t use so much) are different things, and setting a pixel-based font size in the root node wrecks the latter, forcing some people with accessibility needs to use the former, which is likely to result in vertical scrolling. Boo!
I also enjoyed seeing this demo of how the different hyphenation-points in different languages (because of syllable stress) can impact on your wrapping points/line lengths when content is translated. This can affect any website, of course, because any website can be the target of automatic translation.
Plus, Giulia’s thoughts on the value of serifed fonts (even on digital displays) for improving typographic readability of the letters d, b, p and q which are often mirror- or rotationally-symmetric to one another in sans-serif fonts. It’s amazing to have something – in this case, a psychological letter transposition – pointed out that I’ve experienced but never pinned down the reason for, before. Neat!
It was a shame that this workshop took place late in the day, because many of the participants (including me) seemed to have flagging energy levels!
Altogether a great (but intense) day. Boggles my mind that there’s another one like it tomorrow.
Among the many perks of working for a company with a history so tightly-intertwined with that of the open-source WordPress project is that license to attend WordCamps – the biggest WordPress conferences – is basically a given.
It’s frankly a wonder that this is, somehow, my first WordCamp. As well as using it1 and developing atop it2, of course, I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2004 (albeit only in a tiny way, and not at all for most of the last decade!).
Today is Contributor Day, a pre-conference day in which folks new and old get together in person to hack on WordPress and WordPress-adjacent projects. So I met up with Cem, my Level 4 Dragonslayer friend, and we took an ultra-brief induction into WP-CLI3 before diving in to try to help write some code.
So today, as well as meeting some awesome folks, I got to write an overly-verbose justification for a bug report being invalid and implement my first PR for WP-CLI: a bugfix for a strange quirk in output formatting.
--no-color.
I hope to be able to continue contributing to WP-CLI. I learned a lot about it today, and while I don’t use it as much as I used to in my multisite-management days, I still really respect its power as a tool.
1 Even with the monumental stack of custom code woven into DanQ.me, a keen eye will probably spot that it’s WordPress-powered.
2 Perhaps my proudest “built on WordPress” moment was my original implementation of OpenID for WordPress, back in 2005, which is completely obsolete now. But I’ve done plenty of other things, both useful (like the multisite installation used by the University of Oxford) and pointless (like making WordPress a CMS for Gemini, Gopher, and Finger) too over the last 20 years.
3 WP-CLI is… it’s like Drush but for WordPress, if that makes sense to you? If not: it’s a multifaceted command-line tool for installing, configuring, maintaining, and managing WordPress installations, and I’ve been in love with it for years.
This checkin to GC1B0P5 The Runner reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
What a great statue! Cache was very easy to find; despite its camo it was very visible as I walked along the adjacent path. Thanks for bringing me out of my way on my walk from my hotel to the conference I’m attending, and TFTC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
This checkin to GC2K167 Petraki Monastery - NIMTS reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF once I found the right hiding place! TFTC, and for the excuse to divert my morning walk this way. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
This checkin to GC97N64 Under the Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Walking from my hotel to the site of a conference I’m attending, this morning, I stopped to find this cache. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to spot this sneaky little container! Greetings from Oxford, UK, and TFTC!
This checkin to GC9WD6N Peter's reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Saw the notification when this cache appeared near my house, which would normally be the point at which a race was kicked off between me and Go Catch for the FTF, before he inevitably got there first!
But this time around I was overseas when the listing went live and only found time to cycle out here from Stanton Harcourt this evening, after work. I’d visited the church here once before in service of the nearby multi, but it was nice to see a different side of it as well as an excellent hiding place.
TFTC!
I just spent a lightweight week in Rome with fellow members of Automattic‘s Team Fire.
Among our goals for the week was an attempt to strengthen the definition of who are team are, what we work on, and how and why we do so. That’s basically a team-level identity, mission, vision, and values, right?
Fellow Automattician Ben Dwyer recently wrote about his experience of using a deck of Dixit cards to help his team refine their values in a fun and engaging way. I own a Dixit set, so we decided to give it a go too.
Normally when you play Dixit, you select a card from your hand – each shows a unique piece of artwork – and try to describe it in a way that’s precise enough that some of the other players will later be able to pick it out of a line-up, but ambiguous enough that not all the other players will. It’s a delicate balancing act. Even when our old Geek Night was in full swing we didn’t used to play it often because our well-established group’s cornucopia of in-jokes and references made it trivially easy to “target” your descriptions at specific players1, but it’s still a solid icebreaker activity.
Perhaps it was the fantasy artwork that inspired us or maybe it just says something about how my team sees themselves, but what we came up with had a certain… swords-and-sorcery… even Dungeons & Dragons… feel to it.
Ou team’s new identity isn’t finalised, but I love the fact that we’ve been able to inject a bit of fun and whimsy into it. At our last draft, my team looks to be defined as comprising:
I think that’s pretty awesome.
This checkin to GC7FB9H From Canterbury to the cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Well that was quite the adventure!
The first wayoint is right across the road from where some work colleagues and I are staying for an “away week”. I decided to dash out during a break in the weather to try and solve this multi between meetings. But I was quickly confused because… this isn’t the way I was taught to do Roman numerals. I’d always been told that you should never have four of the same letter in a row, e.g. you should say XIV, not XIIII. Once I’d worked out what I was doing wrong, though, I was okay!
The second and third waypoints had me braving some frankly scary roads. The drivers here just don’t seem to stop unless you’re super assertive when you step out!
Once I had the final numbers and ran it through geochecker I realised that the cache must be very close to where I’d had lunch earlier today! Once I got there it took me a while to get to the right floor, after which the hint made things pretty obvious.
Great trail, really loved it. And just barely made it back before the rain really started hammering down. TFTC, FP awarded, and greetings from Oxford, UK!
This checkin to GC9QCKH When in Rome live as the Romans do (bb Tribute 05) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Took until the fourth hiding place before I found the cache. Out for a walk with work colleagues on the way to dinner. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
Now that travel for work is back on the menu, I’ve been trying to upgrade my “pack light” game.
I’ve been inspired in part by Beau, who I first met during my trip to South Africa in 2019 during my Automattic onboarding. Beau travelled from the US for a two week jaunt with nothing but hand luggage, and it blew my mind.
For my trip to Vienna earlier this year for a divisional meetup, I got by with just a backpack and a laptop bag. Right now, I’m waiting to fly to Rome for a week, and I’ve ditched the laptop bag in favour of just a single carry-on backpack. About 7kg of luggage, and well within the overhead locker size limit.
I’m absolutely sold on this approach. I get to:
As somebody who’s travelled “heavy” for most of my life – and especially since the children came along – it’s liberating to migrate to a “pick up a bag and go” mindset. To begin with, the nagging thought that I must’ve forgotten something essential was challenging, but I think I’ve gotten past that stage now.
Travelling light feels like carefree: like being a kid again, when all you needed was the back on your back and you were ready for an adventure. Once again, I’ve got a bag on my back3 and I know that everything I need for an adventure is right here with me4.
1 If you’ve travelled with me before, you might have noticed that I sometimes have trouble at borders on account of my damn stupid name, as predicted by the Passport Office. I’ve since learned all the requisite tricks to sidestep these problems, but that’s probably worthy of a post in its own right.
2 A little smart packing goes a long way. In the photo above, you might see my pre-prepared liquids bag in a side pocket, my laptop slides right out for separate scanning, my wallet and phone just dump out of my pockets, and I’m done.
3 I don’t really have a bag on my back right now. I’m sat in a depature lounge at Gatwick Airport. But you get the idea.
4 Do I really have everything I need? I’ve not brought a waterproof coat and, looking at the weather forecast at my destination, this might have been a mistake. But worst case I can buy a cheap poncho at the other end. That’s the kind of freedom that being an adult gets you, replacing the childlike freedom to get soaked and not care.
Lacking a basis for comparison, children accept their particular upbringing as normal and representative.
Kit was telling me about how his daughter considers it absolutely normal to live in a house full of insectivorous plants1, and it got me thinking about our kids, and then about myself:
I remember once overhearing our eldest, then at nursery, talking to her friend. Our kid had mentioned doing something with her “mummy, daddy, and Uncle Dan” and was incredulous that her friend didn’t have an Uncle Dan that they lived with! Isn’t having three parents… just what a family looks like?
By the time she was at primary school, she’d learned that her family wasn’t the same shape as most other families, and she could code-switch with incredible ease. While picking her up from school, I overheard her talking to a friend about a fair that was coming to town. She told the friend that she’d “ask her dad if she could go”, then turned to me and said “Uncle Dan: can we go to the fair?”; when I replied in the affirmitive, she turned back and said “my dad says it’s okay”. By the age of 5 she was perfectly capable of translating on-the-fly2 in order to simultaneously carry out intelligble conversations with her family and with her friends. Magical.
When I started driving, and in particular my first few times on multi-lane carriageways, something felt “off” and it took me a little while to work out what it was. It turns out that I’d internalised a particular part of the motorway journey experience from years of riding in cars driven by my father, who was an unrepentant3 and perpetual breaker of speed limits.4 I’d come to associate motorway driving with overtaking others, but almost never being overtaken, but that wasn’t what I saw when I drove for myself.5 It took a little thinking before I realised the cause of this false picture of “what driving looks like”.
The thing is: you only ever notice the “this is normal” definitions that you’ve internalised… when they’re challenged!
It follows that there are things you learned from the quirks of your upbringing that you still think of as normal. There might even be things you’ll never un-learn. And you’ll never know how many false-normals you still carry around with you, or whether you’ve ever found them all, exept to say that you probably haven’t yet.
It’s amazing and weird to think that there might be objective truths you’re perpetually unable to see as a restult of how, or where, or by whom you were brought up, or by what your school or community was like, or by the things you’ve witnessed or experienced over your life. I guess that all we can all do is keep questioning everything, and work to help the next generation see what’s unusual and uncommon in their own lives.
1 It’s a whole thing. If you know Kit, you’re probably completely unsurprised, but spare a thought for the poor randoms who sometimes turn up and read my blog.
2 Fully billingual children who typically speak a different language at home than they do at school do this too, and it’s even-more amazing to watch.
3 I can’t recall whether his license was confiscated on two or three separate ocassions, in the end, but it was definitely more than one. Having a six month period where you and your siblings have to help collect the weekly shop from the supermarket by loading up your bikes with shopping bags is a totally normal part of everybody’s upbringing, isn’t it?
4 Virtually all of my experience as a car passenger other than with my dad was in Wales, where narrow windy roads mean that once you get stuck behind something, that’s how you’re going to be spending your day.
5 Unlike my father, I virtually never break the speed limit, to such an extent that when I got a speeding ticket the other year (I’d gone from a 70 into a 50 zone and re-set the speed limiter accordingly, but didn’t bother to apply the brakes and just coasted down to the new speed… when the police snapped their photo!), Ruth and JTA both independently reacted to the news with great skepticism.
This checkin to GC8B4CH Is 14 Your Lucky Number Yet? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Easy find while out for a ride, breaking in my new bike. Great ride, aside from the mayflies, which I must’ve ingested about a million of! As others have observed, the logbook has soaked to the point of disintegration and could do with replacement. Thanks though for a cache I’ve probably driven, walked out cycled past a hundred times before actually stopping to find it.
Today I learned that the quiet, high-pitched neighing sound horses sometimes make is called “nickering”.
I learned this from a subtitle which read “[horse nickers]”. Which, as a Brit, I can’t help but interpret as somebody making a misspelling while talking about equine underwear. 🤣
![Screengrab from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Paladmin Xenk Yendar, played by Regé-Jean Page, rides his horse through a forest. It's subtitled with him saying "I'm sorry." and also "[horse nickers]".](/_q23u/2023/05/d0a809c06b0d71981.png)
Last night I had a nightmare about Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, about the group I DM for on alternate Fridays.
In their last session the party – somewhat uncharacteristically – latched onto a new primary plot hook rightaway. Instead of rushing off onto some random side quest threw themselves directly into this new mission.
This effectively kicked off a new chapter of their story, so I’ve been doing some prep-work this last week or so. Y’know: making battlemaps, stocking treasure chests with mysterious and powerful magical artefacts, and inventing a plethora of characters for the party to either befriend or kill (or, knowing this party: both).
Anyway: in the dream, I sat down to complete the prep-work I want to get done before this week’s play session. I re-checked my notes about what the adventurers had gotten up to last time around, and… panicked! I was wrong, they hadn’t thrown themselves off the side of a city floating above the first layer of Hell at all! I’d mis-remembered completely and they’d actually just ventured into a haunted dungeon. I’d been preparing all the wrong things and now there wasn’t time to correct my mistakes!
This is, of course, an example of the “didn’t prepare for the test” trope of dreams. Clearly I’m still feeling underprepared for this week’s game! But probably a bigger reason for the dream, and remembering it, was that I’ve had a cold and kept waking up to cough.
Right, better do a little more prep work!
