To say that the internet isn’t going away would be an exercise in understatement. It’s 2009, and the number of people online has surpassed the one billion mark. As a writer, that’s a mind-numbingly large potential audience. And yet, there are still plenty of writers out there without websites. Judging from my readership, you already do, so this might be preaching to the proverbial choir. But, I’m going to do it anyway.
Why should a writer have a website?
Showcase your work
A website is a great place to establish an accessible, readable, and searchable portfolio of the works which make you, the writer, shine. If you’re established, your readers want to read you. If you’re currently establishing yourself, then you can give your reader a reason to want. A writing portfolio should establish desire. How you choose to do that is wholly up to you.
Connect with others
The ability to leave comments on websites has been the standard for better than five years now. Giving readers the ability to comment is a great way to interact with your audience. However, leaving comments on others websites is also an excellent way of meeting and communicating with others in the writing industry – writers, agents, editors, publishers – as well as letting their readers discover you. After all, when you have your own website, you have someplace to link to with your comments.
Practice
The term website and blog have slowly become interchangeable. And for the sake of this post, I’m treating them as synonyms. To that end, a website is a great means to practice the art in which you thrive. It’s also a fantastic method to learn more about yourself as a writer. Why? Articulation often leads to understanding. How many times have you sat down to write about a problem, only to find a solution before you’ve put your pen down?
Brand creation and maintenance
Whether your unpublished or currently on numerous writing short lists, as a writer, you are your own brand. A website is just one tool for establishing a central location for the definitive information on your brand. Or, to put it more bluntly, your writing website is the ultimate guide to you. For more on brand management, I’m recommending this video by Gary Vaynerchuk.
The internet was created for writing
Despite the heaps of love paid to music, photos, and video online, the backbone of the internet was and always will be writing. The internet is a text-based medium. As a writer, this gives you a leg-up on those who don’t embrace the written-word. For a writer to not have a website is to squander that very advantage.
So, here we are, the new year. And what have I done so far this year? A great deal of behind the scenes work. Just like being a writer today means you spend half the time being a businessman, running a website means a great deal of behind the scenes work. It’s a life of constant tweaking.
Here’s a list of changes and some helpful hints.
I updated my Portfolio, moving my writing content onto the portfolio’s primary page, deleting the writing only page, and moving my design portfolio to the bottom. Why? Well, my focus isn’t on designing websites, that’s basically a hobby I get paid for. Rather, I’m shifting the focus to my writing.
My Links and Reads Page has undergone a much needed infusion of links to things that I actually read. I read a lot of writing industry-related websites – agents, publishers, other writers – so that I can keep on top of everything that’s going on. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and it’s not even all that I read, but it’s a start in the right direction.
Server Cleanup. As my website has progressed, a lot of information has ended up being left in scraps on my server. I went through and cleaned up all of those scraps. I also added redirects to all of the pages that Google’s Webmaster Tools tell me are currently dead links. I’ve found that this is slightly more helpful than being greeted by a simple 404 error page.
SEO functions. I cruised the net for a few hours today and located about 75 directories which accepted free submissions. One can never have too many inbound links.
I’ve had a bit of an on-again / off-again relationship with what has recently been termed social media. As I might have mentioned previously, I started my online life when I was a teenager by dialing into a local bulletin board system called TopGun. As the board was local, so were the majority of its users. By local I mean the majority of us hung out at the same Denny’s, thus the line between online and off was in constant flux based on where someone was at the time. My understanding of the online world was that it was always an extension of one’s social circle, a meta-layer that sought to augment the real world, to complete instead of compete.
The switch to AOL nearly doomed TopGun. The difference was night and day. TopGun, for all the love bestowed upon it by us the users, was four colors, and could only support two dozen or so simultaneous users. AOL, on the other hand, had email which could reach anyone on the web, IMs to facilitate instant communication, chatrooms that could blow those of TopGun out of the water, and then there was access to the rest of the internet, outside of the walled gardens. I stuck with AOL until I went to West Point, where the firewall would not allow us to connect to AOL’s servers. While at West Point, and through my time in Iraq, the internet became a far less social experience.
After the war, and after getting the internet hooked up in my barracks room, the sense of social began to return. On April 10, 2004, I started my first blog. At first it was merely a place to post my writings online. After all, I had a writing partner and a lit agent in the real world, and plenty of brother’s in arms. What did I need extra relationships online for? Of course, I started plugging more into the Wild West that was the blogosphere of 2004. I started making friends with other bloggers, launched an online magazine, and pushed forward into other, more closed, social networks.
Its So True - Image from XKCD
I tried MySpace. It seemed silly, juvenile, and filled with spammers. My account languished from lack of attention. I tried Orkut back when it was in beta (rimshot, please), but where MySpace focused too much on the look at me individual and the collecting of friends, Orkut suffered from focusing too much on the look at me individuals and the collecting of groups. Both where inherently pretentious in their grasps of the ego. I tried Facebook, and failed to see the appeal aside from a couple of Facebook related hookups. All of these accounts were deleted at one time or another.
Then the social internet managed to get shorter while somehow still growing. While temping at Kellogg’s (yes, the cereal company) I signed up for a Twitter account. At the time I was manually saving all of my zany text messages from the day and posting them to a blogspot blog. Why? Because they were interesting and funny. When taken out of context, that usually increased. Why not skip the middleman and publish directly to the web? I languished on Twitter until the political season kicked into full swing, discovering that I could get news in appropriate lengths and with blazing speed via the service. I was then hooked.
That pretty much brings us up to the current state. If you look over at my networks box, you can see I participate in three – Twitter (a microblogging service), Rejaw (often incorrectly labeled as a Twitter clone, in reality it’s an asynchronous message board), and Facebook (because I was told that I had to, and I plan on using it to market products out).
Oh, and then there was last night’s King of the Hill. This is not a show which I normally watch. However, I had let the DVR queue up the Simpsons to avoid commercials and when that ended the girlfriend and I were unceremoniously dumped into an episode of King of the Hill, and an argument about blogging. The internet, in particular the social internet, is a point of contention in my relationship. I place an emphasis on what my social cohorts, particularly on Twitter and Rejaw, say. When something happens, I will frequently dash out a quick twitter about it on my BlackBerry, much to KnownGirlfriend’s chagrin.
The episode, embedded below, placed Hank Hill in camp with KnownGirlfriend, and my opinion seemingly to match that of the female accounted who creates a MySpace page for Strickland. As one would expect, there was a juxtaposition of resistance by those who didn’t understand the new technology and those who approached that lack of understanding with zeal usually reserved for religion. Yes, neither the girlfriend nor myself go to quite these extremes, but we have both known to view the other in that way.
This, of course, got me to thinking about what exactly social media is. How it’s not new at all. And each form of social media has its uses, its pitfalls, and its stereotypes. For instance, King of the Hill chose to lump together to disparate terms – blogging and MySpace – in an attempt to simplify the social web into a 22 minute cartoon. Those of us who’ve been around know that MySpace has the worst blogging platform in the history of the net. MySpace stopped being relevant years ago largely due to pages like this.
So, before I launch into my own taken on various social media platforms. What say you? Favorites? Strong dislikes? Notoriously or gloriously overlooked?
MVC, Model-View-Controller is a design practice theory that, according to Wikipedia, was pioneered by one Trygve Reenskaug in 1979 as method for developing object-oriented in a smart fashion. How smart? The development of any project is broken down into three separate areas, each of which can independently be changed without affecting any of the others.
Simple right?
Model – to put it bluntly, this is the raw data. For many websites, this is your database, the raw or stored data that is to be rendered into usable presentable content by the website. See updated section below
View – as the name suggests, this is the outward looking portion of a website or application, typically, this is the graphic user interface (GUI). Many developers are loathe to admit this, but the “pretty” is often how people judge an application.
Controller – the final, and arguably the most important part of the trifecta that is MVC, the controller aspect is what makes the application actually work. See updated section below.
MVC has recently come back into popularity in a major way due to two main things. First, would be OSX. When Jobs decided to scrap OS9 and all prior work, and instead borrow from the OpenSource community and his work at NeXT, it was determined that OSX would basically force programmers to use the MVC pattern when developing software. This was largely to allow OSX to dictate the View section, thus assuring a standard look and feel through all software running on Macs.
The other is the internet darling that is Ruby-on-Rails. RoR is, of course, everywhere based largely on the ease with which new programs can be made. Case in point is typically Twitter, which was purportedly built from spec in less than two weeks. While RoR doesn’t have any special abilities (that I’ve seen in my limited developers knowledge), because it forces developers to use MVC, mistakes which would ordinarily weigh down a development process are severely reduced.
Why take all this time to delve into the details of MVC? Because I’m firmly in the V category. Even though I’ve been building websites for several years now I’ve restricted my work to two main areas – designing static websites through a combination of CSS and X/HTML and templating various OpenSource packages (mainly WordPress and Joomla).
Just as I got into designing webpages because the built in blogspot templates didn’t satisfy how I wanted to present myself online, I am now in a position where the content management systems I use (WordPress for this site) isn’t adequate in it’s current form. Yes, WordPress is very extensible through third party plugins. The downside is that these plugins often don’t do exactly what is required or do more than needed. So, just as I did when I started learning basic design skills so many years ago, the V if you will, I’m now moving comfortably towards the C.
First up is the language of the software that I most frequently work in, PHP, and by extension, becoming more familiar with MySQL databases (that’s the M, for those keeping score). Why? In the end, it pays to be the entire product cycle when you’re working for yourself. Or to put it more bluntly, I’ll be more of an internet badass.
Update
Got a nice block of instructrion from aut0poietic which corrected some of the over generalizations I used in the definitions for Model and Controller. Here are more correct definitions:
Model: The model is not just the database, it’s the Data Access Layer. It’s typically an Object (capital O) that has been built expose a generalized API specific to the Application. A WordPress Model Object would have an API with methods like “getPost()”. getPost would return a Post Object that encapsulates the data.
Controller - It’s basically a traffic cop — directing messages back and forth. In a true MVC application, the Controller is painfully stupid: It does little more than send messages to the View when the Model updates, and the Model with the View updates. What it does contain is business logic, so that it sends the correct message, with the correct information based on business decisions.
And on why WordPress is not a true MVC pattern: Template files should be View, but instead it’s a mash of view and controller. The Loop *should not* exist in the View. The view should not reach out to the Model and get data, nor should it submit data.
In this day in age, Wal-mart get its fair share of lumps in the press. However, the behemoth that is Wal-mart does have what can only be described as a world-leading supply chain, the technology that moves products from warehouse to store shelf. The system hinges both on automation – when you buy a product, the register automatically orders a replacement – and predictive – meaning supplies deemed to be in high demand soon are shipped before perceived demand hits. Of course, that cold, fairly robotic system operates beneath the surface, transparent to the millions of daily shoppers around the world. What happens on the internet, however, is a bit more obvious.
Earlier this week a link was floated about the internet, coming to me on Monday via Jim Safley. The link was to the Walmart.ca page for Summer’s Eve Ultra Extra Strength Douche. The page was laced with mischief as the image of the product had been replaced with a heavy duty power washing system – the kind used to clean houses or decks, not feminine parts. The link was tossed around, and I myself started a shout thread on Rejaw.com about it.
As more eyes poured onto the problem a few things became apparent. This was not a script or redirect. This was, indeed, a page that existed on Wal-mart’s Canadian website. What’s more, by inspecting the link provided, the method of image insertion became apparent – Wal-mart Canada was calling each parts of the page independently – the item, the image, even the similarly suggested items and a call for the price.
Though this flaw was currently only being used for mischief and amusement, there did exist a potential for much greater damage to Wal-mart’s Canadian website. Please note that I am not a programmer, so my knowledge of such tactics are limited to having worked tech support at a major hosting company, but the potential that existed was that of an easy SQL injection.
What’s a SQL injection? It’s a method for an outside attacker to access a database (from personal experience those databases were almost always MsSQL 2005 or before) by inserting a command through a vulnerable area of a website. All too often, that area is the URL bar of a browser. The rise in 2008 of bot-driven semi-autonomous SQL injection attacks meant that many a hobbyist woke up to find their website overwritten with jibberish. Most large websites, such as Walmart’s Canadian site, took precautions or prevent this, or so we believed.
Thats a big douche
For most people, a SQL injection simply feels like a violation. However, the actual results are usually a database that is incorrectly stuffed with what amounts to junk. Some, the more devious, manage to inject a website with a degree of stealth, and thus a website ends up serving spyware or viruses to visitors who have placed inherent trust in the website. For these script kiddies, a major site like Wal-mart would have been a dream catch.
Wal-mart, to their credit, fixed their Canadian website with amazing speed, plugging the flaw in their database interaction with surprising speed. As of Thursday afternoon (and perhaps earlier) the flaw had been fixed. It appears that the Wal-mart supply chain might just extend to their websites as well.
Some of us, however, were quick enough to screenshot the flaw when it was still live.
I was taking advantage of the night at home before the move this weekend to do some much needed website maintenance. I actually managed to bang out a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that makes my website run faster, and that makes things easier to find not only here, but on the internet at large.
One of the other things I noticed today was that it was time to renew my domain name. Yup, that’s right, my domain has turned 3. Normally I’d take a look back at some of the many, many redesigns that this particular spot on the web has gone through since first being put online way back in 2005 when I made the jump from blogspot.
Yeah, that’s right, I started on blogger. Wanna do something about it?
