Adobe woes and your profit had you followed my short advice

GREENSBORO, NC -- On March 6th, I wrote a post saying that I was wary of the business prospect for Adobe, the maker of the very excellent website design software Dreamweaver. The title of the post was I'd short the heck out of Adobe, a reference to the stock trading method of placing a bet that the stock price will decline in the future. The day I wrote that post, Adobe's stock closed at $68.92. Yesterday it closed at $60.20. If you had followed my short advice, you would be sitting on a gain of 12.7%.

My opinion then was that Adobe was making a mistake by no longer allowing customers to buy and install Dreamweaver (and other flagship products, like Photoshop) on their computers. Instead, they moved those products exclusively to a cloud based subscription service. I thought that was a dubious move—a roll of the dice that did not justify the then 121 price to earnings ratio (P/E).

[P/E: The price of a share of stock divided by the annual earnings per share. At 121, it would take 121 years of earnings to total the current share price. The S&P historical average is currently 16]

Even with the stock's decline, Adobe's current P/E ratio of 117 is still way too high, for the same reasons I posited previously: I doubt the ability of the cloud-only software model to sustain Adobe's revenues, much less grow them.

Indeed, Adobe's entire cloud service went down yesterday. Customers who no longer have Adobe's software installed on their computers, who had moved to the subscription service, were left in the lurch. I cannot imagine how businesses are supposed to put any confidence in mission critical infrastructure vulnerable to these kinds of sustained outages. From Reuters:

Adobe Systems Inc said on Friday that access to its Creative Cloud was restored following an outage that disrupted the Web-based, subscription service to top-selling software programs including Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash for about a day.

Customers can apply to get compensation for the outage, which company spokeswoman Vanessa Rios said lasted about 24 hours and was due to a database software failure.

Get out of that state you're in

GREENSBORO, NC -- It seems Rhino Times editor John Hammer has some complaints about the News & Record's website.

The Rhino Times, with a website design from 1997, designed and maintained by a junior high school student that doesn't adapt to mobile devices, with archaic photo galleries and commenting system and no RSS feed or social media integration goes unaddressed by its editor, but he has the wherewithal to complain about another media site? Is he just monumentally oblivious or what?

N&R's online commenting scheme shrinks youth access

GREENSBORO, NC -- When the News & Record implemented a mandatory Facebook login for story comments last year, I originally thought that bringing to their attention the fact that people could not even read comments on the N&R site without allowing Facebook tracking cookies might have inspired them to implement an alternative to the Facebook-or-nothing comments. Not so.

Maybe this will have them reconsider: Young people are leaving Facebook in droves.

Since 2011:

AGE
13-17: -25.3%
18-24: -7.9%

A mandatory Facebook login to comment or read comments should never have been implemented to begin with. Although it was defended as a way for people to have to use their "real" (haha) identities and, therefore, raise the quality of comments, it was short-sighted and deficient ( -- and a policy so conducive to the free exchange of ideas that the government of Communist China has just implemented a real-identity mandate too).

Now that the must-Facebook requirement has tied the N&R to a diminution of young readers will the N&R take note and make a change?

The Haversine formula

The haversine formula:

"The haversine formula is an equation important in navigation, giving great-circle distances between two points on a sphere from their longitudes and latitudes"

Why would I be interested in determining the distance between two points on a sphere? Because if you (or your device) tells me where you are, I can use the haversine formula to tell you how many of certain things are near you and even where they are within a specific distance.

You'll see.

Guilford County's information director leaves fine legacy

GREENSBORO, NC --The Rhino Times reports that Guilford County's Chief Information Officer Barbara Weaver is retiring at the end of this month. You may remember her as presiding over the county's website redesign fiasco a couple of years ago. But congratulations to Ms. Weaver for going out on a high note and leaving behind a wonderful new piece of technology for the residents of Guilford County.

I'm referring to the County's new Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Data Viewer. While it requires the download and installation of Microsoft's proprietary Silverlight, that's done easily enough with a click and the rewards are great.

The Data Viewer is smooth and speedy at its primary function, which is to access property records, but it also adds some interesting tools such as community information, which reports things like the elected representatives for a property as well as nearby parks.

The viewer also has some sophisticated drawing tools that allow for the measurement of distances and area or to get information about all properties within a shape you draw. I used this yesterday to get the length of a circuit on some trails around Lake Brandt

One can also overlay maps from other sources and perform thematic mapping, whereby one selects an area of the map then applies color coding to the properties within based on criteria such as year built, value or property type. One can even export data from the map results.

Thank you, Ms. Weaver (and the other, I'm sure, good staff people who helped) for bringing us this state-of-the-art tool for better understanding our community.

Google warns of News & Record website: "May harm your computer"

GREENSBORO, NC -- I've seen a lot of things in my (almost) fifty years, but I have never seen anything to rival the pigheaded refusal by the News & Record to achieve minimal competence on the web. They either have the most unimaginable incompetents in charge or some sort of passive aggressive death wish. Even without my personal puzzlement that they shut the door on offers of help from the highly qualified yours truly, their inability to otherwise find any path to minimal quality, much less excellence, is astonishing.

On the heels of their disastrous website launch—delayed, dysfunctional and wiping away years of archives—they have now allowed portions of their site to become infected with malware, leading Google to mark search results with warnings not to visit.

"This site may harm your computer," advises Google.

Dare to click on a link and Google gives you another warning, suggesting that you turn back:

If you insist on continuing, your installed anti-virus software will give you a message like this:

Google's details explain: "Of the 298 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 11 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent."

At this rate, and I'm not joking or exaggerating, the News & Record will be defunct in six months, for which the only upside would be that Greensboro will be rid of a source of great public embarrassment.

(Tip of the chapeau to Lex, who brought the malware to our attention.)

So you want to make things for the Internet? Try Lynda and Larry

I love learning. I think it is because I've had some great teachers, not the least of whom were my parents, but whom also included inspiring math teachers Mrs. Huckabee and Mrs.Williams, science teachers Mr. Huffaker and Mrs. Stone, the great team of Mrs. Banks and Mr. Cornelius (who took some of his sixth graders target shooting, of all things)  and the wonderful English teacher Mrs. Johnson (for whom I once dressed in a delivery uniform to deliver a rat in a box to someone -- long story).

The point is, I fondly remember and have a genuine appreciation of these people, not just because they were decent and kind, but because I was aware that they were making me smarter; made me smarter. What a gift, to be able to teach well.

Multiple times a day, I turn to search results for answers to specific web development questions, but when it comes to learning how to make things for the internet—actually increasing comprehension and building and a body of knowledge—there are two resources I would recommend for anybody with similar interests. They aren't magic—they take time and concentration—but they have the distinction of providing a great knowledge-gained to time-spent ratio. They teach well.

The first is Larry Ullman, whose book PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites (thanks, Paul!), opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about what it means to build for the Internet, inspiring me to think beyond just design and in terms of the total experience. He has some other worthwhile books too.

The second is not a person, more accurately, it's a collection or people: the instructors behind the video lessons at Lynda.com. These folks are good and, while I've never before seriously attempted to undertake a course of study by narrated video, I'm finding it to be a very efficient means of learning.  Some instructors are better than others, no doubt (especially Joe Marini and Simon Alardice), and you may run into an occasional instructor whose narrative style or vocal quality makes it hard to stay with the lesson, but most are very good teachers.

I initially expected that I might watch a few videos at Lynda.com during my free trial and that would be it. When the trial expired, I thought I would pay the $25/month fee just to maintain access to a couple more courses that had caught my eye. Six months later, I remain subscribed, have completed or have underway twelve courses and have eighteen more in my que.

If you want to learn how to make stuff for the Internet, or already know how to do some things but want to learn more, from beginner to advanced, you'll find both the books of Larry Ullman and the video lessons at Lynda.com great resources.

My next project

The essentials of the new Greensboro 101 are stable and working as intended. While I still have some significant work to do to upgrade the events calendar, I'm going to begin work a new project today: A web app for managing local campaigns, Greensboro city council campaigns to start.

At this point, I have a few specific ideas about what it should do, including contact, communications, scheduling, fundraising and reporting management integrated with geolocation (although, I hope I haven't just over-reached). Think about it for a minute, and you can probably imagine the possibilities for candidates as they are able to manage their campaigns while moving about the city with an app aware of where they are and who is nearby.

If you plan on running for office or otherwise think you might have a good idea for such an app, please let me know. You can leave a comment here or email me.

[edited @ 10:11 for clarity.]

Verio Review: A case study in how to kill a good company

In 2002 I became a customer of Verio, a web hosting company, for a Virtual Private Server (VPS). At the time, they were top-notch. The best. Their support people were experts who had the distinction of almost always resolving an issue, no matter how complicated or originally mystifying, with a single contact. That's why I stayed with them for just over ten years: I was in good hands.

Why I left is a sad study of how to kill a great company, a case that I would not be surprised presages the demise of this company.

At some time in the Fall of 2011, Verio got rid of their expert support personnel and outsourced their support to a third party. Support is now routed to people with poor English language abilities and with even worse technical knowledge.

I don't care where a support person is from or where they are located if we can collaborate to successfully resolve an issue—competence is the bottom line—but when we have difficulties understanding each other and when issues drag on for days requiring multiple contacts, often leaving issues unresolved or fixed only by my own research elsewhere, that's unacceptable.

I have some pretty good knowledge and experience maintaining a web server. I don't know it all. I'm not an expert, but I know a lot, so when I need tech support, it is likely either for an advanced issue or because something has gone awry at the host that they need to fix. In the year that I stayed with Verio after they outsourced their support, I found dealing with them to be maddening in its futility.

Experiences included:

• Getting replies that appeared to be robotic attempts to divine a keyword or phrase in my support request without comprehending the context in which I might have mentioned "domain name," "reboot" or "user."
• Getting instructions that were about the keyword or phrase they had identified in general instead of addressing the particulars of my specific situation. This lead to things like receiving instructions to repeat the very steps I had just taken that lead to an error.
• Advice that was ineffective or irrelevant. 
• Emails that advised, "Reply to this email if you have more questions," that, when replied to, were returned with a message that "This is not a valid support email address."
• Joyful emails announcing that my issue had been resolved and the ticket closed even though the issue had not been resolved.
• Refusal to provide contact with management.
• When I found a phone number for U.S. corporate headquarters (in corporate filings, not on any Verio websites), it was never answered by a live person and messages left where not returned. Not one. Not even the ones that said, "I'm a ten-year customer and you're about to lose me."

It's a remarkable shame that Verio could fall so far. Remarkable because they were so superior at one time, a shame because their degradation wasn't from circumstances beyond their control—they didn't suffer a natural disaster or hostile takeover—people in positions of authority and responsibility made decisions—conscious and intentional decisions—that may have netted a couple years of executive bonuses, but that likely have mortally wounded this company. (No wonder they don't want to answer the phone.)

If you've stumbled upon this post as someone considering Verio as a hosting company, my advice is unequivocal: Don't do it, you'll be sorry.

The beauty of precision

GREENSBORO, NC — As the launch of the new Greensboro 101 approaches (tomorrow, 1.01 at 1:01 P.M.), I am performing some final testing and fixing the bugs.

There is something beautiful about creating with computer code, but such beauty isn't easy. It is unrelenting in its demand for perfect precision. A single comma in place of a single period can, and does, render thousands of lines of code completely inoperable. Find it and fix it though, and it's like piloting a homemade spaceship -- exhilarating and satisfying.

As much as I appreciate and respect precision in writing, imprecise thinking rendered in the written word doesn't suffer the same immediate and certain punishment as does imprecise coding. Presume a condition that isn't true in computer code and things break in a very noticeable way. The language arts have no such throttle on precision. Nor should they, human language has its own beauty in nuance, but anyone who has scripted code for a while can't help but start to notice imprecise thinking in other forms of writing and be influenced because of it.

#Greensboro trending

Current trends on Twitter:

Interesting.

.

5 days and counting

Just over five days until the launch of the new Greensboro 101, on 1.01 at 1:01 P.M.

The process started with needing to make Greensboro 101 better suited for mobile devices, like phones and tablets. In examining how to do that, I recognized that many of the principles and means of interfacing with mobile devices could be used to enhance the desktop/laptop experience too. The results is something that looks and acts like an app no mater what the device. It's a web app. It looks and behaves a little differently at different screen sizes to create a native experience for the device being used, but it always has the same, hopefully intuitive, pathways to information.

I think you'll see Greensboro in a whole new light and in a way that is so easy it's fun.

It has been a real pleasure delving into this, even with it's maddening moments of frustration or schedule-busting detours while I learned how to do something previously unknown. Those moments are fewer and farther between than ever though, and my advancements in troubleshooting and efficient learning have made tackling the unexpected challenges more productive than ever.

As building was underway, new ideas kept popping up. Some were so intriguing that I stopped what was underway to design and code the new idea. Other ideas remain on the to-do list and will have to be gotten to after launch.

Well, the music's good and there are two solid hours until leftovers, so I better get back to it, I only have five more days.

1.01 at 1:01 P.M.

GREENSBORO, NC — The new Greensboro 101 will launch on 1.01 at 1:01 P.M.

New digs

I am moving Greensboro 101 and my email to a new server today — bigger, faster, better tasting. This may result in some intermittent connection or display problems. I apologize for any inconvenience you encounter.

Newspaper editor on website fiasco: "My soup's cold."

GREENSBORO, NC --

Reviews have not been good. The paper takes a beating all week about its functionality-challenged website and in his Sunday column editor Jeff Gauger writes about cold soup. During the Amendment One debate he wrote about blue yard signs. Right before the election he wrote about grits.
-- Sam Hieb

Sam is right, since arriving from Ohio this spring, News & Record editor Jeff Gauger's hokum has been an insult to the people of Greensboro. We are a city of five institutions of higher learning, two of them historically black, of inspiring participation in the civil rights movement and of national renown for our blogging and citizens media. Quaker influences still resonate as we stake a claim to a progressiveness that separates us from most of the rest of North Carolina. Our economic history is of a city built on a triumvirate of tobacco, textiles and furniture powerhouses and the subsequent challenges of having that base disintegrate in quick order by globalization. Our present is about us keeping our heads above water while we remain ever hopeful of revitalization. That's Greensboro.

Grits, Duke blue v. Carolina blue and our soup not hot enough for his liking? Gauger sounds like he's writing to his meemaw back in Akron while passing through, not to the people of his new hometown of whom he has apparently yet to gain any significant understanding, insight or respect.

skeuomorphs

In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.
-- Craig Mod, in his essay Subcompact Publishing

Skeuomorph [skyoo-uh-mawrf] — a design element of a product that imitates design elements that were functionally necessary in the original product design, but which have become ornamental in the new design.

It's hard to let go of skeuomorphs, they're cozy and familiar, and sometimes they are intentionally maintained, as Steve Jobs was apparently fond of for iPhone designs. But there are some really interesting things happening out there by people who are eschewing old things and thinking completely "in the context of now."

 The News & Record's new website design utilizes a lot of skeuomorphs. Do they enhance the user experience or are they the product of legacy thinking layered on an old thing to make it feel like a new thing? Do these leftovers from newspaper design help or a hinder the use of the site?

• A masthead 
• Columns (layout, not written pieces, although those too, perhaps).
• Sections
• A division between writers and readers
• Galleries
• Editions

I wonder what the News & Record would look like on the internet if they stopped thinking about putting the "paper" online and asked themselves what is the most interesting and valuable digital product their resources are capable of producing.

Wired in with some Argentinian new new age

One of my favorite scenes from The Social Network is when screwed over co-founder of Facebook Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) storms into the office looking for Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) who is working on his laptop with headphones on, oblivious to outside distraction, and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) tries to wave off the charging Saverin with "He's wired in. He's wired in."

I find that certain aspects of web development take enormous amounts of concentration for me. Coding doesn't come easy or naturally. It helps to get wired in -- headphones on with the right kind of music: no words, nothing too sleepy or frenetic. I like psy trance, down tempo, classical and new age.

I've found a great streaming new age station out of Argentina: Cienradios.com, which you can listen to here. It stretches the boundaries of traditional new age, yet retains that meditative and spiritual essence that is the hallmark of new age. It's not predominately South American, as far as I can tell, but it offers a broader mix than I'm familiar with from U.S. new age stations. Flavors of jazz, spacey and the occasional electric guitar join the familiar lush hypnotics. I find it great for getting wired in.

Here's the scene from The Social Network:

What's a web app?

Web apps are web sites that are made with open and common components of web design (HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript) to deliver an internet experience to users that is more like that of interacting with an application or program than what we have commonly experienced when visiting web pages through the years. In fact, the whole notion of "pages" generally takes a back seat in a web app to the experience of interacting with screens or portions of screens.

Web apps are not Android apps, iPhone apps or Window's apps that are created specifically for those operating systems and are capable of utilizing some features of mobile devices that web apps cannot (yet) such as the accelerometer (the thing that is aware of the orentation and movement of your phone). Web apps do have an advantage for developers/designers though in that they can run on multiple platforms and devices — a build once/run anywhere method of development that has obvious advantages of its own. While web apps rely on a device's web browser to function and actually reside at an address on the web, they can be added to a phone's desktop with an icon so that users can launch them directly, just like other apps.

Project Greene River, my redevelopment of Greensboro 101, entails making the site into a web app, essentially. I'll have more about my thinking on the ergonomics and user experience in another post, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about what it is Greensboro 101 can do and should do for users and how its current design has grown stale and deficient in meeting those goals.

I have no firm launch date yet, but it won't be long.

Why is the News & Record not on Greensboro 101?

You may have noticed that the News & Record's blogs and news feeds have disappeared from Greensboro 101. Their new site design broke the connections from which Greensboro 101 collected their excerpts and I don't see any updated links to replace them. I've emailed the editors and publisher to inquire about new links and hope to hear back soon.

In the mean time, I've added local TV stations WGHP and News14. These feeds are less than ideal because their "Greensboro" excerpts include stories from well outside this area, but they are still mostly local. WFMY does not provide a feed that does not also include world news and is not included for that reason.

Friendly advice for the Greensboro Partnership

Dear Greensboro Partnership,

When you announce to the media a report you've published that will likely have people visiting your website to read it, you might want to:

a. Put it on your website
b. Remove the trojan horse malware from your website.

Love,
Roch

P.S. I've given you this advice before.