pingVision

Now it somehow feels more official.

Some weeks ago, we sent Greg Knaddison (greggles) off to South America and Ezra Gildesgame (ezra-g) off to New York City. Here are some pictures, for the record.

I've spent my Sunday morning mostly online. It's a lovely day, sunny and cool outside, and I've been wanting to get outside and do stuff. But I wanted to catch up online with some blogging and reading and such.

Which means that I've spent a bit of time struggling with the pathetic, slow, DNS-forgetful DSL service from Qwest I have at home. Every page view was taking ages to load. (How does Qwest even stay in business? Oh yeah, I forgot.)

And what's worse, among the slowest sites to load this morning was your humble hostess' own blog. And it wasn't just Qwest making things slow to start with -- it was the widgets. The slooowwwwww widgets. I'd sit there, watching the sun rise higher and higher while I wait for "Read" and "Transferring data from" messages in my status bar cycle through all the different services trying to load their widgets.

The. Widgets. Must. Go.

Into my feed-reader steps a new post from friend and pingVision colleague Greg Knaddison on how he just killed all the widgets on his blog. And rather than just rant about the woes of having page loads slowed down by widgets having to load from different servers in the far reaches of the virtual world, Greg has some useful advice for the widget-makers out there:

As I've pointed out, the problem can't be solved by "get faster" solutions like just speeding up the internet connections of users or making the servers that run the widgets faster. That would certainly help, but the "more files" problem means you are still limited to a few widgets.

The real solution, in my opinion, lies in solutions that are integrated into my site's software. Don't give me a flickr javscript widget - give me a flickrrippr module that pulls my photos into a local cache. Don't give me a comment plugin that takes years to load - create the "intense debate" by reading my comment rss and aggregating that information with some form of universal login so that my comments can be tracked from blog to blog (if I want). Having integrated applications you can take advantage of javascript and css aggregation/compression to reduce those files from 10 to 2. That helps.

Of course the problems with my solution is that 1) it requires lots of things like microformats that are only slowly picking up 2) site users will need powerful website building software that can be more difficult to install 3) some of these widget companies have "collect lots of data and do stuff with it" as a business model and they can do more of that without you knowing about it when they do it in this format.

Greg is dead-on. Maybe we can collectively "scratch our own itch" in the open source world (and in particular, Drupal) to help bring about widget reformation.

Meanwhile I'm going to rip out the widgets and put them into an "about me" post, so they are still there but don't drag down the entire site with every page load. I'm going to do that. Soon. Right after I get out and enjoy some of this gorgeous fall day.

The design of the pingVision site was driving me crazy.

It really wasn't supposed to be the actual site design, but rather a temp theme to be cleaned up and spiffed up a bit. 18 or 20 months later (I actually don't know exactly how much later) I finally got around to replacing it.

It's certainly different. Cleaner. Simpler. Too simple?

I'd started on this new design several months ago, but left the theme half-done in order to focus on client work. Finally I just had to spend a weekend tinkering with it to get it live on the site.

This really was more of a starting over from scratch on the whole template, rather than just a CSS reboot. There might be some bugs in it -- I have yet to see it in IE7, and IE6 worked yesterday, but I made some changes since -- but there it is, in an unofficial live beta. Still to do (aside from debugging): update it and the site to Drupal 5, and update some of our main pages.

So what do you think?

It doesn't really seem right to add our own website design to our own portfolio so this is probably the only place I'll post this.

It's time for me to put my foot down. There's been a lot of griping about the BlogHer Conference, and griping about the griping. Within this metadiscussion, there's been much ado about BlogHer and its sponsors. First of all, I agree with the sentiment that BlogHer cannot be everything for everybody. However, there's been some very good criticism, and unlike some, I don't find fault with finding fault. As I am the president of a featured sponsor of BlogHer, though, maybe my opinion on all this is categorically deemed suspect by some. I'll just say what I have to say and let you be the judge.

How the sponsors handled their opportunities was really up to them, and when they blew it, well, that's on them, too, and is not the BlogHer organizers' fault.

At the top of the list of eye rollers was Microsoft, whose "Be a Jane" push struck me as a kind of Stepford Bloggers appeal. Suebob at Red Stapler puts it well:

Sometimes I am amazed at the stupidity I will sit through. The Evil Empire (the world's largest maker of software) put on a short presentation on the second morning of BlogHer that went down like the Titanic, and just about as quickly.

I have read bits about it all over the internet - that it was the marketing loser move the year, pretty much. I agree.

Of the other sponsors, GM might have been the big winner by simply offering up enticing opportunities to test drive their new cars. They were unobtrusive, never got in your face, even if you walked right by their reps, but they and their cars were there if you were interested (and looking at the BlogHer photos, many women were very much interested). GM got a lot of 'net publicity, and they didn't have to be obnoxious to do it.

The area that brings the most discomfort for me is where sponsors are panelists and keynote speakers. Here I have some disclosures to make: I was a panelist at the conference.

I now understand that all panelists and speakers were given travel stipends to appear (which I believe is a fabulous practice for what is still very much a start-up conference). I did not seek and was not offered any sort of stipend or reimbursement for my travel to BlogHer. That raises in my own mind the question of whether I was included on that panel simply because I was a sponsor. I don't believe that's the case, but if it is, then I should not have been there, because I feel that's totally inappropriate. (The same goes for my Contributing Editor status on the BlogHer site.)

In my own defense (to anticipate any criticism), I did not approach my participation on that panel wearing a sponsor hat, and I did not use that session as an opportunity to promote our business or huck our wares -- which is more than can be said for other sponsors who were official BlogHer speakers. Still, there is some fuzzy gray area of possible perceptions here, and I'm not comfortable finding myself in it.

But let's look at the bigger picture here. Did having strong sponsor presences constitute a sell-out? As Lisa and Elisa have said, the sponsorships made it possible for the conference to be affordable, with free food and drink and set in a pleasant venue (much friendlier than, say, the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the mother of all conferences, NAB, takes place).

I would add that if we or someone else had not stepped forward to design and develop the BlogHer community website, it probably would not exist either. We were delighted to have the opportunity to support what we consider a great cause, and despite our absence from the press hoopla, we've benefitted greatly from our association with BlogHer (not to mention the banner ad that has lived for six months on the site). We have no regrets.

I don't know if our involvement with BlogHer in aggregate constitutes crossing the line, but I'm glad we were able to help make the line possible.

[image: "Ping Vision Sandals", posted by cambodia4kidsorg]