This strong typing concept can be anthropomorphized like so. The strongly-typed language sees that you declared that variable as an integer. When you ask it to add it to what’s obviously a floating-point number, it stops everyone and declares your entire program broken. For example, Java might declare smugly, ”Type mismatch: cannot convert int to short”. In it’s way, it’s being helpful. The rules are the rules, not to be broken.

In contrast, PHP might look at your mixing of types and do its best to sort out what you mean. “Oh, you must mean to treat that text like it’s a number,” it thinks. It adapts to context and provides the answer you most likely wanted. To be sure, in the realm of language design, there may not be one right answer. They are both valid approaches, although I don’t miss keeping track of elemental types myself when coding in PHP.

But have you ever noticed programmers can be strongly-typed or weakly-typed, too? Some programmers seem to have a thousand and one commandments inscribed in their mind’s programming bible. “Functions should have one way in and one way out,” they recite. “A function should only do one thing,” as they explain why they wrote nine different functions, each with only one line of code.

You will recognize these programmers when you propose a solution that violates their dogma. They will describe a terrible catastrophe, but will be unable to explain exactly why. Keep pushing them, and you might feel like you’re talking to a village elder. “This is the way we write code because that’s how our fathers wrote code, and their fathers before them,” they explain in reverent tones.

For me, the joy of coding is considering the whole of the context. We have guidelines, design patterns and experience–all to help us solve problems. I also like to think about the programmers who might come later to read and update my code. I like to imagine those programmers of the future are smart, smarter than me. I don’t assume they are like children who need strict rules. I don’t even like treating children that way.

The trouble with dogma, in programming or elsewhere, is that it drops context. It begs you to follow rules for their own sake rather than the reason you’re coding in the first place. I’d rather stay weakly-typed and keep routing around the slow nodes.

Maister uses healthcare as an analogy. Consider four roles: pharmacist, nurse, brain surgeon, psychotherapist. Each dwells in his own quadrant of a 2D space where the dimensions are innovation and how willing they are to talk to you.

The pharmacist performs a well-defined task for you with very little input from you. You merely tell him which drug you need and he provides it. Even if you couldn’t perform the work yourself, you expect it to be performed in a well-defined way. He provides solutions to solved problems. Between handing over the prescription slip and handing back a bottle, he requires little information from you.

The nurse also performs services you understand well, but you expect the nurse to ask you how you’re feeling frequently. The nurse is more collaborative. He won’t be inventing any new treatments, but he will explain what he can and he will choose treatments to adjust to changes in how the process unfolds.

Compare these roles to the brain surgeon and the psychotherapist. These latter roles include solving problems unique to you, perhaps problems no one else has before. You know the ultimate goal of the treatment, but it’s not a simple as a course of antibiotics. When you hire a brain surgeon, you’ll be out cold, and he’ll be taking you to the edge to solve your life or death problem. When you work with a psychotherapist, the situation will likely feel just as dire, but you will expect to work together with the therapist to find solutions. The psychotherapist requires continual input from you.

The metaphor is powerful, but the idea of a more entertaining spin nags at me.

Of course, being a software consultant, I recognize the parallels. Consider building a Web site. Rather than a pharmacist, you will seek a sysadmin to set up the server and later, testers to find bugs before launch. Rather than a nurse, you will work with a visual designer who will present several rounds of work before finding a theme you accept. Your site will never be successful, so you will hire SEO and advertising experts who will deliver traffic as if by magic. Finally, you will hire programmers who will decipher what the scribbles on the napkin mean and iterate on various functional parts of your new Web site so it matches your vision. Plus, if you’re managing a team of programmers, you might feel like you really are a psychotherapist.

But still, I want something more fun than that!

Let’s talk baseball. You are the owner of a baseball team, and you want to win. The players on the field know what’s expected of them: hitting, pitching and fielding balls. It’s not too different from mixing drugs. The manager will provide a familiar service, but likely will need to collaborate with you. He must guide the players to be both winning and entertaining. If you’ve got money to burn, you might not need anyone equivalent to the brain surgeon or psychotherapist. But if you’re the Oakland A’s, you’ll rely on Billy Beane to invent a way to win on a small budget. And he’ll need to find a brain surgeon like Paul DePodesta.

Welcome to the July 2011 18INT newsletter!

You can trust us to do the job for you

Does the title of this section make you feel more positively about 18INT? The Neuromarketing blog recently reported that adding that phrase to the end of an ad for an automotive services company caused customer trust to jump significantly. Their positive take advises us simply to remind our customers that we can be trusted. And yet, I hear the dark side whispering to me about how these magic words will win more business, regardless of anything else that’s done.

The truth is authenticity wins. Tricks just eat up good will, and then they stop working. We have seen how a decade ago, SEO was all about tricking the search engines into showing your site first. Slowly, these techniques faded in effectiveness. What kept working was offering compelling content that other sites linked to.

Here’s a real world example. A client of mine is setting up a community site which allows consumers to pose questions to be answered by company representatives. At the suggestion of the vendor, the site will be pre-populated with frequently-asked questions. The first draft of this content was written as if the questions were asked by a consumer. On the site it read strange and inauthentic. Rather than speaking for an imaginary consumer, the site needed to be upfront: many people ask this question, and this is our standard answer.

Forget the tricks. Be trustworthy and people will trust you.

• Ten Words That Build Trust
• Google’s Design and Content Guidelines

PhoneGap 1.0

PhoneGap is a toolkit for transforming HTML5 Web applications into stand-alone apps that run on Android, iOS and other mobile platforms. Version 1.0 was released today. This release represents a milestone in stability and features. It seems like PhoneGap has great momentum with attention from IBM and Adobe.

When I first discovered and researched PhoneGap, I was able to convert a simple estimating application from PHP into HTML5 and then into an Android app in about an hour. Once the app functions in the phone’s browser, it’s simple to compile the HTML into an APK file. The principle behind the software is that the Web application is wrapped in a bit of code that leverages the HTML rendering engine built into the OS. The two most-important platforms are Android and Apple’s iOS. BlackBerry and Palm are also supported.

In addition to features available to an ordinary HTML application, PhoneGap also exposes an API for access to additional features of the phone or tablet such as GPS, a camera or the user’s list of contacts. PhoneGap is not likely to be a good solution for an action game, especially since support for HTML5 audio is poor in most browsers currently. For anything less rapid fire, I’d choose PhoneGap over coding in Java for Android.

• PhoneGap 1.0 Press Release
• PhoneGap
• jQuery Mobile Framework

Company News

In the past month, Nick and Kyle have been learning the programming craft, first by building a Web site on the Concrete5 platform. They took the text from my book, Core MySQL, and built mysql.18int.com. We learned that Concrete5 is an able platform for hosting content sites. The user experience is smoother than WordPress.

We also wrote some code to parse through e-commerce site uvskinz.com to produce a Google Product Feed document. Our partner, buZZgen used this file to help promote the products for sale on the site.

• mysql.18int.com
• Concrete5
• Google Product Feed
• uvskinz.com

Do you find this newsletter helpful? If you do, please invite others to subscribe. As always, I appreciate your attention, and if you don’t care to receive any further emails, please use the unsubscribe link below.

Do you have a specific topic you’d like me to address? I’m close to kicking off a deep look at e-commerce solutions for a potential client. Is there anything else you’re wondering about? I’d appreciate your suggestions.

Thanks!

Leon Atkinson

Eighteen Intelligence

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo present schema.org

A couple months ago, I wrote about how Facebook’s Open Graph tags improve links to your content in the news stream. Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to does much the same thing–elaborate on the meaning of your HTML to improve user experience.

Professional programmers know standards and best practices provide the best long-term strategy. Like design patterns and test-driven development, we know it makes life easier even if it’s more work up front. This month, the major search engines agreed to a standard for adding more detail to HTML to aid search indexing. The technique annotates the information on the page without disturbing the display. This new tool is more detailed than Open Graph and aimed at better indexing rather than summarizing content.

Of course, the risk in accepting a new standard is lack of adoption. The potential reward is favored status in organic search results. For database-driven results, the effort is minimal. Well-formatted and templated content will be easy to enhance, too. Google certainly launches standards that fail, but the collaboration of the three largest search engines makes this a good bet.

• Schema.org
• Open Graph protocol

We have apprentices

This month I’ve invited two young apprentices to work with me. People talk about computer science and software engineering–I prefer to treat it as a craft. I enjoy this work for its own sake. I take joy in an elegant solution. And I know it makes everyone’s lives better.

Craftsmen are apprentices, then journeymen, then masters. We aren’t interchangeable tools. We are individuals with unique personalities. We are human beings who learn from each other. I work to live my values, so I went looking for apprentices to work with me this summer. I found two bright kids that I hope to help become productive programmers over the next few months. If my idea works out, I’ll have a couple of ready resource to expand the capacity of 18INT. And Kyle and Nick will have earned experience and cash.

I have some success in this. Several years ago, I hired a young guy to split his time between desktop support and HTML coding. He worked to learn PHP and earn more responsibility. Today, he leads a large team of engineers at a successful agency–a cherished milestone in my career.

My life with programming began with a teacher who lugged his Apple II to school every day. That’s a gift I can only repay with similar kindness.

• A Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship
• The Art of Unix Programming

Tilex.com and CloroxProfessional.com launch

May and June have been busy months for 18INT thanks to a lot of work sent our way from Clorox and our friend Fil Jach. Collaborating with diverse teams, we helped launch two sites this month, Tilex and Clorox Professional Solutions.

You likely have heard of the Tilex brand of cleaners. A refresh to the Web site was put together by internal design talent and 18INT engineers on a tight schedule. One of the most interesting aspects of the work was the addition of Facebook Open Graph tags. Try sharing a link to one of the pages and your post will contain a relevant description and a nice Tilex logo. Compare this to the mishmash and random image you might get when linking to some other page.

The Clorox Professional site describes Clorox products suitable for commercial enterprises such as hospitals, restaurants and janitorial services companies. The beautiful design presented many technical challenges to the team. We created features for filtering products by topic, finding resellers for different product types, and presenting recipes suitable for restaurants. This site will be a great help to Clorox in communicating their focus on solutions.

I’m proud of the high quality work we did on these sites. We ran every page through HTML and CSS validators. We adapted the site to all the popular Web browsers, from MSIE 7 through Chrome 12. And we delivered both sites on fast schedules.

• www.tilex.com
• www.cloroxprofessional.com

Do you find this newsletter helpful? If you do, please invite others to subscribe. As always, I appreciate your attention, and if you don’t care to receive any further emails, please use the unsubscribe link below.

Do you have a specific topic you’d like me to address? I’ve been asked about e-commerce several times in the past month, which I’m taking as a clue to take a fresh review of what’s out there now. I’d appreciate your suggestions.

Thanks!

Leon Atkinson

Eighteen Intelligence

Facebook and SSL

Facebook has been battling some bad press in the past month. They were caught hiring a PR agency to smear Google over privacy issues, perhaps to distract everyone from their ongoing security issues. Facebook app developers are a wild herd of cats, and facebook is finding they don’t all follow along. The protocol used by Facebook and applications can make it easy to “leak” a session identifier, which is an opportunity for bad guy to take over your account. Part of Facebook’s solution is to push all the apps into SSL. Another is to push all the apps into using OAuth 2.0 for authentication. Translated, this means if you’re running an app on Facebook, you’ll be upgrading your code very soon.

Facebook did not make a big splash about SSL when it rolled out in January, but there were plenty of people posting to their walls about it. Facebook clearly wasn’t completely ready for the feature. If you enabled it, the pages on Facebook itself would be encrypted, but you would find that most applications, including popular games like Farmville, would ask you to turn off SSL. Few developers had time or resources to offer encrypted versions of their apps. And when users clicked to turn it off, it stayed off.

Since then, Facebook has extended the Developer Roadmap to include dates where all apps must be served via SSL and users must be authenticated via OAuth 2.0. Version 3.0 of the PHP SDK was released recently, and it now supports OAuth 2.0. Unfortunately, the API has changed (again), so you can’t simply upgrade from version 2.2 of the SDK. In addition, the Javascript SDK has not yet been upgraded to support OAuth 2.0. This will be a tight turnaround to support the new requirements by September 1st.

• Developer Roadmap Update: Moving to OAuth 2.0 + HTTPS
• Facebook Caught Running a Covert Smear Campaign Against Google

No ODP!

Do you have the need to control how search engines analyze your Web site? You probably already know about making a robots.txt file to ask Google, Bing or Yahoo not to index parts of your site. For instance, you might want to keep your images directory out of search results. In addition to the robots.txt file, you can also control search engine spiders with the robots meta tag.

Where the robots.txt file applies to a directory, the robots meta tag applies to a single page. You place the tag into the head section of the HTML document, like the following.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

As with a robots.txt file, you can use noindex to ask the search engine not to index this page. You also can ask it not to follow any links on the page with nofollow. In addition, you can ask any of the search engines not to describe your site using content from the Open Directory Project using the noodp value. The ODP is a public directory of Web sites, and the description of your site there can be completely separate from any content on your site.

Google alone also offers a few other values: noarchive to prevent offering a cached version, nosnippet to prevent showing any description of your site in search results, and unavailable_after to let Google know that a page will be going away after a certain date.

• Metadata Elements – Robots META Tag
• Get rid of those directory snippets using NOODP & NOYDIR

I Can Haz Attenshun?

I am a programmer who has worked with marketers for most of my career. I find most ads annoying. I enjoy the skip button on my DVR and the AdBlock browser extension. I’d rather check out the latest from Memebase. My ideas about advertising are radical, but I want to stay humble. Still, I couldn’t resist trying the following crazy idea: submit demotivationals to memebase.com with my domain name embedded.

Demotivationals are parodies of motivational posters. Despair.com created the brand, but no one ones the meme. I picked this meme, versus rage guy or hipster kitty, because it requires less Photoshop skills and more room to write text. I found a couple of ads in the Sunday Contra Costa Times that struck me as worthy of ridicule, and I came up with the following.

I don’t know, maybe it will get voted onto the home page of memebase.com, and maybe someone will wonder what 18int.com is. Probably not.

• “Clean Feet”
• The Parody Motivator Generator
• Know Your Meme

Do you find this newsletter helpful? If you do, please invite others to subscribe. As always, I appreciate your attention, and if you don’t care to receive any further emails, please use the unsubscribe link below.

Thanks!

Leon Atkinson

Eighteen Intelligence

Add Open Graph Tags

Have you added Open Graph tags to all of your content? I haven’t either, but it feels like it’s time because Facebook is beginning to leverage the tags to enhance how the links appear in users’ news streams. Despite a recent report from Forrester that content on Facebook is not not driving eCommerce sales, being present on Facebook remains imperative. We just haven’t figured out the formula yet. I know this because I’ve seen Google ads drive people to a microsite that accomplished increasing offline sales.

How a link to Rand-o-Matic appears in the Facebook news stream.

I’m sure we can agree that controlling how links to our content appear in the Facebook stream supports the greater branding effort. If you share links on Facebook, you know how Facebook makes a best effort to suggest images and text for the title and description areas of the post. If you decorate your pages with Open Graph tags, you can set the exact values. As you can see in the screenshot, I’ve linked to the Rand-o-Matic widget. Facebook has placed the description I want to appear rather than whatever text appears early in the document.

The Open Graph tags are nothing more than custom HTML tags that Facebook parses and otherwise render invisibly in browsers. Adding them is a logistical rather than technological challenge. Incidentally, I made that graphic with the appropriately-named Awesome Screenshot, a free browser extension available for Chrome.

• Open Graph Protocol, Facebook
• Google Scores in Two Reports from Analysts, MercuryNews.com
• Awesome Screenshot, Chrome Web Store

Social Today, HTML5 Tomorrow

So far this year, I’ve been to GDC, Web 2.0 Expo, and ad:tech. The idea of being social permeated all topics. And by social, I mean Facebook, which has more than 500 million active users! There’s no doubt every business must have a strategy for how they use Facebook. But while this is today’s topic of conversation, I’d like to offer some insight into what we’ll be talking about next year: HTML5.

To be clear, a strict definition of HTML5 may be the newest standard for HTML, but the moniker is coming to mean this plus CSS3 plus Javascript plus Web services. This combines to form an alternative to native apps coded in tools we’ve been using for years. You may hear work being called HTML5 merely because it uses the new video tag or even that it uses Ajax. The key aspect of the HTML5 approach is the integration of all available tools to create event-driven code. Javascript is at the core of this approach.

Out on the bleeding edge, the conversation is about how Javascript may be the right tool on the server side, too. It’s possible we’re tipping into a new age of Web development where coding is oriented on events. Node.js is looking like a good solution for this direction.

Another appealing aspect of developing in HTML5 is the ease with which a Web app can retarget to various devices. I have been experimenting with building Web apps that render well on phones. Thanks to Open Source project PhoneGap, Web apps can easily become self-contained native apps that run on Android and iOS devices.

• Statistics, Facebook
• Node.js and the Javascript Age, Metamarkets Blog
• How HTML5 Will Kill the Native App, VentureBeat
• PhoneGap

Recent Work

In the past month, the game I was helping AltEgo build has launched. The game is called Hollywood Magic. Players run a movie studio, buying script and casting actors. The movie plays out in cartoony 3/4 view as you try to match props to script genre to maximize your score. The primary game experience is through a Flash interface. I wrote many REST services used by Flash as well as several HTML pages and admin forms that helped designers create content for the game.

I also built a small widget for MindPosts.com that generates random quotes as if spoken by Ayn Rand characters. This was an amusing technical hack. Users can drop in a few lines of javascript. Functionally is pulled from my own site, similar to the approach used by Google Analytics.

In April, I started working for two new clients, Clorox Creative Services and INSZoom. I am helping the Clorox team with several projects, acting as a technical lead. INSZoom hired me to build browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome and Safari with the aim to extend support for their Web application to OSX. This project should have a high fun factor.

• Hollywood Magic
• Rand-o-Matic

Do you find this newsletter helpful? If you do, please invite others to subscribe. As always, I appreciate your attention, and if you don’t care to receive any further emails, please use the unsubscribe link below.

Thanks!

Leon Atkinson

Eighteen Intelligence

The Past

I have been building Web apps for about 17 years, most of that time leading small teams of engineers at consultancies. I met many great friends, including you. Sometimes friends would nudge me to start my own company. Recently, the time felt right, so I took their advice.

The Present

The formalities of starting the business are wrapped up. I founded 18INT on four values (truth, independence, computer automation, joy) and the core mission to free you from unnecessary constraints through programming. Now I’m ready to live and breath these principles. Clients recently commented on my speed and expertise, using words like “most excellent” and “awesome”. I hope to improve my service through more detailed feedback.

Our Future

I would love to work with you (again)! I have projects close to launch, I’ve got bandwidth to spare, and I’m ready to expand the business. How can I help you?One of my specialties is putting up with the ever-changing Facebook API. Ask me about HTML5 apps optimized for Android devices. I’m also expanding capabilities to include browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

The Name

Most of us know how few .com domains remain available. Did you know many domains with digits in them are still easy to register? As I brainstormed names, my youth spent playing Dungeons & Dragons came to mind. In this roleplaying game, you might find yourself as a magic user frying monsters with lightning bolts. Your key stat would be intelligence with a maximum value of 18.

I appreciate your attention. I hope to hear from you. If you don’t care to receive any further emails, please use the unsubscribe link below. Otherwise, I will occasionally share tips and trends via these emails — less about me, more about info that helps you.

Thanks!

Leon Atkinson

Eighteen Intelligence