Greg Boone

Category: Blog

  • The Lasting Power of WYSIWYG

    Jekyll has become one of my favorite things lately. At 18F we’re using it to power our website but also our Hub project which includes serving up snippets, our weekly team updates submitted by Google Form, as well as a tremendous amount of information that is a mix of pages restricted to our team and some that is public. The Hub uses Prose to allow people less comfortable with GitHub and Markdown to edit Jekyll pages with something closer to a What you See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface than a typical markdown document has. Prose is a great tool, and I’m not just saying that because we use it. But for many static sites haven’t quite gone far enough, and that’s okay.

    Early adopters like static sites a lot. People who bought one of the first Blackberries or used WordPress in 2006, for example, might like static site generators a lot. People who like Markdown or other markup languages enjoy static site generators. And some appreciate the simplicity of configuration found in static sites, especially the lack of a database. For many people like me it is a refreshing focus on writing without the complications of The Admin UI that have plagued even the best CMS platforms.

    An example of these complications? I recently helped my wife with some settings on her blog and was reminded how confusing the WordPress Admin can be. Where do you think you should go to set your front page to display a page instead of latest posts? Settings > General? Settings > Writing? Settings > Media? The answer: None of the above. It’s Settings > Reading. I guess when I think about it that makes sense, you’re changing a setting that changes the experience for someone reading your site.

    At the same time, there are still some things that a CMS does really well that static site generators
    lack    . At least to me, Jekyll’s simplicity is a feature that forces me to think about the value of, for example, a tag archive or automatic image formatting before implementing it. With a CMS these features are there waiting for you to use or extend. WordPress for example provides a really simple API to extend the WYSIWYG interface with ‘shortcodes.’ All of this comes in handy when you need to create a blog post with images floated left and right and center, or when building that tag archive (easy as it may
    be    ) means taking away time from publishing real content.

    If I’m not a developer, needing to become one or hire one just to start writing a blog post is a pretty high barrier to entry. Feeling like I need to become one just to write a blog post is even higher. The reason I became a developer in the first place was that in 2006 when I needed to reboot my college radio station’s website WordPress was insanely easy to install and configure and gave us almost everything we needed (with the right theme and plugins), and in 2009 when I built the first version of HarmsBoone.org and International Underground I didn’t need to learn much beyond CSS and a few WordPress methods. When I eventually needed to know more it was still a fairly low barrier to entry and we always had a website that everybody could edit. In particular, Child themeing is particularly useful for learning WordPress on the fly.

    Static sites, for all their simplicies and technical advantages, still have a pretty high barrier to entry, especially if you need to overcome the limitations GitHub pages puts on Jekyll sites. And to be fair, WordPress has significant (read: 8-10 year) head start over Jekyll plus the entire WordPress Core and Automattic teams nurturing the developer base.

    Nevertheless, without lowering that bar and adding some of those features it will be really hard to get broader adoption among people who want a Just Start Writing Already. For many, logging in to the WordPress Admin and using the WYSIWYG either to write or to paste in copied text will always be preferable to editing monospaced text with strange formatting signals around it, even if there are buttons to help them out. (Let’s not belittle the bar-lowering power or Prose, Dillinger, and other Markdown helpers, though, for some they may be exactly the right tool.)

    It will remain preferable even if they rely on a bookmark in their browser, or an icon on their desktop to get them to the admin screen. Clicking “Preview” will be preferable to navigating to running a shell command and then heading to localhost:4000 because what’s a localhost? What’s that colon all about? And what’s so special about 4000? And clicking “Publish” will definitely be preferable over committing a git workflow to memory.

    These are problems Static Site Generators can solve, and part of what makes them beautiful is how they are malleable to each user’s needs. And if you put
    a developer on the comms team     you’ll be able to build the site you need on the platform that works because you’ll ask your users what they need and how they work. If your users need to
    copy and paste blog posts from Google Docs, give them that. If they want a WYSIWYG editor for writing and collaborating on posts, give them that. If the need the full WordPress UI, give them that. I’m not trying to sound flippant. Building a WYSIWYG on top of Jekyll would be a difficult problem, but it’s not
    impossible    . Using Google Drive as a CMS will also take work, it’s not impossible. Building GUI applications to abstract away the command line is difficult, but not impossible.

    There are hundreds of content management
    systems     and static site generators operating on nearly every language in existence (including FORTRAN). And there are WordPress plugins for nearly everything imaginable at this point, and usually there are three of four of them to choose from. Your mileage will almost certainly vary from one solution to another but go with the solution that will make your content creators most comfortable.

  • rePress: Jekyll with a WordPress Frontend

    Note: I’m not maintaining this open source project anymore. There was a pretty cool reception to it and I didn’t have time to maintain it for just myself. I still think it’s a good idea, though. 🙂

    About five months ago I left the riveting world of WordPress development for the greener pastures of helping a government startup manage its website, and while I’ve become pretty taken with Jekyll lately, there will always be a part of me that loves WordPress. And so, like a good hacker, I started a side project I’m calling rePress (a name that, admittedly, needs work—see below).

    There have been a few different ways people have approached the task of marrying WordPress with static site generators. Ben Balter’s WordPress to Jekyll exporter is one that takes on Jekyll specifically, then there’s StaticPress, a plugin for WordPress that transforms your installation into a static site, and finally CFPB is taking on the task of building a static site generator that will pull from WordPress and other APIs. rePress takes a different tack but is inspired by these other initatives.

    The first two of these solutions are WordPress plugins, and the second generates content from an API. This combines the two ideas by creating generator plugin for Jekyll sites that relies on the REST API currently being integrated into WordPress Core. Right now that API is only available as a plugin, but it will one day (soon, I think) require only a clean WordPress installation.

    Once you have the API exposed, you need only point Jekyll to the root endpoint and run jekyll build on your server or your local environment. Right now it will grab the 9 most recent posts and parse out the published title, date, tags, authors, and excerpts, and, of course, the post content and generate HTML files with proper Jekyll frontmatter. This has a couple benefits: it allows you to import your WordPress posts without exporting any files and it allows you to choose whether to write Jekyll Markdown or use the WordPress editing interface.

    It definitely has a long way to go, but it’s something I’ve been excited about creating pretty much since the REST API project was first announced. I’ll be pushing updates to GitHub, and would love any suggestions you have. In particular, I kind of hate the name I came up with, but all the original ideas like JekyllPress, StaticPress, and Hyde all mean other things related to Jekyll and WordPress. So here I am, with a name that means subdue by force which is not at all what this does or is intended to do. I’m open to name suggestions but know that it’ll probably change at some point.

    Discuss on HackerNews.

  • Coding on the 1s and 2s

    Brother Ali: Mourning in America and Living in Color (at 33 1/3 RPMs)

    I ended up working from home today. Even though I probably could have made it up the less-icy-than-expected hill our apartment is on by bike, I like working from home and the weather was a convenient excuse. I like it because my internet connecting is always surprisingly faster than dealing with the arms race-like environment of enterprise WiFi and I get to choose how much to interact with my co-workers and how much to focus.

    One of my favorite parts of working form home is my turntable. At the office it’s really easy to sit for more than two hours with on my figeting in the desk chair for movement. I have Rdio on blast when I’m trying to ignore the din of my surroundings and to facilitate that developer hyperfocus we all know and maybe love. At home, I have Rdio too, and I have my full iTunes library which is cool. But I also have a turntable that forces me to get up and stretch my legs once every 22ish minutes. I also get to listen to the same artist for a stretch.

    The timesavings are probably negligible. On the one hand records don’t buffer and playback isn’t beholden to someone else’s UI decisions. But the time spent on those things is balanced (or possibly overtaken) by gawking at the record collection looking for the next sheet of vinyl to spin. But the real advantage is in taking my eyes off of my screen for a few minutes a couple times an hour. I pop on the record and by the time side A ends I’ve either been productive or gone down a rabbit hole. If the former, I get a break to digest what I did before transitioning to the next thing; if the latter, I get a chance to rescue myself. Either way, I get a brief mode switch. Flip the record and repeat.

    I can’t work from home everyday, nor do I really want to. In light of that,
    I’m hoping to find a way to recreate this cadence at the office.

  • Static sites revisited

    jekyll logo

    I’ve been thinking a lot about static site generators lately. We use Jekyll at 18f, a generator platform I had previously only used in the context of
    Octopress and very briefly and fleetingly at CFPB. My past life as a
    WordPress developer effectively ended in September when I began shifting careers a bit to go back to my pervious role of hybrid communications-web developer, and begin a new adventure building a full website without a CMS, without a database.

    The most challenging part of this has been thinking about data and content first. In my experience developing on WordPress a request to put something new into the website usually involved one of two things: adding more custom fields and relying on the intentionally lackluster UI to accomplish that, or creating a new menu on a wp-admin screen. If you’re going the latter route you have to think about form validation, design, and what the appropriate method for saving might be just when building the menu. Displaying the saved content to the user requires a whole other step of ensuring you have the right information coming
    out of the database.

    Jekyll (which I’m using as a stand-in for any static site generator) simplifies that whole system by abstracting away the UI altogether. Let’s use guest authors as an example. Here’s the problem: you have an author on a blog post who is not a regular contributor and maybe they’ll never write a post again. In WordPress I’ve seen this problem solved two ways:

    1. Create a new user in your system, give them a minimal role, and assign post authorship ex post facto
    2. Create a custom field called, e.g., guest-autho and use template logic to replace the name in the byline

    Both of these have problems. In the first, you’re adding users with no relationship to the rest of the site. In the second, you’re adding extra data
    to a post, and confusing data at that. Either way, the semantic representation of the post in the database is messy.

    How to approach this in Jekyll? The easiest way is to just use the author’s name in the author field of the post front matter. But this solution is not
    without it’s problems either. On the 18F site we keep all our team members in a long YAML file inside the _data directory and we reference post authorship out of that file and wrote a little Jekyll plugin to fill in their full name and (maybe someday in the future) extra information about the author. If we have guest authors we have to break that pattern or write logic into either the template or the plugin to address it.

    In this example, both WordPress and Jekyll fail to give you a perfect
    solution. On the one hand, WordPress (and most CMSs) give you that “about the author” information out of the box, especially if you go with option 1. But in exchange you get a new problem Jekyll’s minimalist, database-free paradigm seems to answer: authors needn’t relate to any part of the system except the posts they author.

    I’m not sure which is best. I loved hacking away at WordPress even when it drove me mad. It gives you 90% of what you need out of the box, and querying a database is convenient, especially if you’re site is really complex. By not having a database, Jekyll forces you think broadly about what data you really need for a post and for your site because everything is built before a user loads their first webpage. As we’ve scaled 18f.gsa.gov
    from basically a blog to a more functional site, these questions haven’t held us back as much as they have forced us to think differently about the problem.

  • 18F Three (and a half) Months In

    When I left my last job the company threw one last happy hour for me—a typical send-off for that firm. While we were mingling around the bar my co-workers were asking me how I was feeling about the move. Earlier that week someone on my account asked me if I felt any “trepidation” about going to the GSA and for the most part people were supportive and congratulatory.

    At the happy hour, though, one of the company’s newer employees told my wife something interesting: “Unlike most people,” he said, “I actually became more conservative during college.” He went on to say he was an economics major and became enchanted with incentives and determined that, lacking them federal employees have no reason to do good work. And then he came right out and told me he thought that the ideals behind 18F were good and geniune but eventually I was going to be working on something great and a GS15 would show up and arbitrarily end it.

    He basically told me I was absolutely, undoubtedly, and quickly headed for
    Kafkaesque disappointment.

    That line stuck with me on my first day at the GSA, though, because it wasn’t just him who said things like this. The colleague who asked if I had any trepidations told me he spent a summer working for the GSA essentially inventorying the government issued furnituring for embassy residences. The details were a bit murky but I got the sense he didn’t take the job very seriously when the punchline turned out that a woman at one of the residences answered the door in her underwear. People would talk about our colleagues at the CFPB like they were riding out their careers, set for a life of doing nothing and getting paid to do it. I can’t count how many times I heard someone say our colleagues intentionally did shoddy work or had lower standards because they were government employees.

    “That kind of work would never be tolerated if there was money at stake.”

    That attitude was so pervasive that I was a bit nervous going into day one
    that, despite all signs to the contrary, they were right. I was determined to
    prove them wrong, and the incredibly talented, passionate team I work with has only fueled my conviction that public servants—be they teachers, software developers, or bank inspectors—are some of the most passionate, dedicated people in the workforce. If anything, I’ve had more GS15s tell us to keep up the great work than otherwise.

    All this is to say, if you think bureaucracy is hard, you’re right. If you think bureaucracy can be used to unproductive ends, you’re right. But if you think it has to be that way and will never change: you’re flat wrong. The government is a big ship and it’s going to take more than one 18F to change it, but the progress we’ve made inside the GSA is real. We managed to hire a team of more than 70, take on a smattering of projects that are either live or in beta stage with more on their way. And it’s all being done by public servants.

    To that colleague, incentives pretty much exclusively meant money: raises, bonuses, stock options, what have you. And that’s great but we do things every day that are not driven by earning more money. We are not all walking around with carrots in front of our faces and sticks at our back. At least in government, we’re driven by different motives: improving the lives of everyday Americans by making their interactions with government easier, more efficient, and with a greater chance of success motivates us. Saving taxpayer money motivates us. Disproving all the prejudices people have of government work motivates us. Who needs incentives to do that?

  • Something From Nothing: Sonic Highways in Pursuit of the American Sound

    Sonic Highways Cover

    Sonic Highways is the title of the latest release from the Foo Fighters. A short (their shortest ever?) album clocking in a just 8 tracks, one for each of the episodes in the HBO series of the same name. It is also the follow on album to Wasting Light, the band’s 2011 release and Reel to Reel Dave Grohl’s solo album recorded with various other musicians produced during the recording of Sound City, a documentary he wrote about the eponymous Los Angeles recording studio where nearly every musician worth knowing recorded an album. That documentary was a phenomenal tribute to American music and a particular kind of recording technique that is seldom, if the documentary is to be believed, used by musicians in the age of Pro Tools and home studios. Even if fans were unaware of the documentary, Sonic Highways is a Foo Fighters album that holds up every expectation we should have but taken with the HBO series it stands as a loving tribute to more than sixty years of Americans making music spanning Go-Go, Country, Rock and Roll, Hip Hop, Jazz or Punk (which features most prominently across the series).

    At eight tracks the album is a quick listen. Double records used to be somewhat rare (and much more expensive than a single LP) but they seem commonplace these days. Like it’s the default; as if you’re band is doing it wrong if they make an album that fits into a 44 mintue run. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Some would argue the concept of an album is making a quiet exit in a world where electronic media put fewer physical constraints on a person’s library. Sonic Highways is not here to make wistful arguments about the qualitative difference between digital and analog music. There is something, though, about the focus and concision required to produce an album that fits on two sides of pressed vinyl. The songs on Sonic Highways flow one right into the next, gracefully progressing from a gritty, heavy opening through an almost anthemic midesection before falling into a somber finale that leaves the listener feeling as if something bigger, grander is on the horizon.

    Those transition points are easily identifiable on a second listen (“What Did I Do?/God As My Witness,” Austin and “Subterranean,” Seattle), but seemed to pass right by me the first time round. Perhaps that is why, taken track by track, the album is hard to pin down. Though I don’t listen to radio stations other than The Current to know which songs are getting mainstream airplay, I imagine the first song released was “Something from Nothing,” the first track and the one recorded at the end of the HBO show’s first episode about Chicago. And as a lead single, it’s a good song and one that will probably get people to give the album a shot. But as an expression of the album, it’s maybe misleading—if a listener heard that song on DC 101 and thought the rest of the album would be a dark, punchy album they might be disappointed. Especially when contrasted with later tracks like “In the Clear,” (New Orleans) or “Outside” (Los Angeles) the first two tracks make the album and the band stand out more for their incredible range of talent.

    Watching the show and listening to the album one week at a time made the method behind this album seem like an exhaustingly stressful way to write music. Grohl came into each city with music but no lyrics. The band unloaded, unpacked, and spun up a single-song session every time they came into town and tore it all down immediately after they left. There are a few exceptions like in Austin, TX where they recorded at least one other song for Austin City Limits’ 40th Anniversary special (go watch that now, I’ll wait). The show makes it look like they did all of that plus film a documentary simultaneously and in about a week’s time. There was also a surprise performance of some kind most episodes: 9:30 Club (DC), The Bluebird (Nashville), Preservation Hall (NOLA). The show is a rare glimpse into not only how an album is made (we’ve seen that before), but also how music is made, and where an ensemble like the Foos turn inspiration into creativity.

    Compared with other rock albums this year, espeically Jack White’s Lazaretto, it feels like a work of rock and roll refreshingly gimmick-free.[1] It is internally consistent and demonstrates Dave Grohl and the Foos are masters of a particular and distinctly American form of music. Sure, the HBO series is kind of a gimmick, and maybe recording in eight different studios each in different cities is too. But the amazing thing about owning and listening to this album, is that you are completely unaware of that unless you’re prepared to geek out on the liner notes. HBO’s logo is nowhere on the album. It isn’t stuffed with pleas for you to join HBOGo. The Foos don’t do that kind of shameless promotion even though they definitely could.[2] Instead, the liner notes remind me of some of my favorite records out of my Dad’s old collection: photos of the band clowning around in the studio, looking serious at the board, crouching over a drum kit, clad in headphones. Other than “Greetings from X” postcard graphics on the reverse of the lyric sheet, there’s no indication of the pan-American recording other than the “Recorded in” line in the credits.

    Notes:

    1. I loved Lazaretto but seriously, the split-track, reverse-grooved, hologram-enabled LP was a bit much. We get it! Vinyl can do more than play music, MP3s can’t! Read you loud and clear, bro. It’s also increasingly clear Jack White is amazingly talented but when it comes down to it his ego gets in the way of the art.
    2. The show and the album have entirely different logos and branding.

  • Fear and Justice in America

    It’s easy to forget the first time I realized I had to go five blocks out of my way to continue going east on F St. NW when I hit 17th St because of the 4 by 8 block area closed off around the White House. DC is a confusing enough of a place to drive for the unintiated, with the diagonal avenues intersecting the grid at small, medium, and gigantic circles around the city. Add on top of that the variable directionality on Rock Creek Parkway and the whole 4 by 8 block area surrounding the White House and the northwest quadrant of the city starts to seem pretty difficult to navigate.

    That was the situation I imagine when I think about Miriam Carey, the woman who was tragically gunned down inside her car while attempting to drive through our city with her 13-month-old daughter in a car seat last October. On the heels of a deadly shooting at Navy Yard, and not long after the Boston Marathon Bombings, it was a scary incident, but one that had a pretty short life in the Washington news cycle. The Washington
    Post     revisited the incident about a year later, looking into what the official investigation tells us, and what might have been missed, overstated, or simply ignored. The first thing we learn reading the story is that the whole incident started when a tourist from Connecticuit “drove up to the Secret Service kiosk at 15th and E streets NW,” a vantage from which you cannot even see the White House. Instead of stopping as ordered by the Secret Service police, she made “a U-turn and [attempted] to drive back into the public space.”

    The first question I had when I read that was “isn’t leave what we’re supposed to do when we get to a security checkpoint we’re not supposed to be at?” The Post confirmed that answer is yes: you only commit a crime if you stay. Would I have stopped and rolled down my window? Maybe. But maybe I would have done exactly what Miriam did, realized I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be and leave.

    To be sure, Carey did some odd things after the Secret Service and Capitol
    Police began chasing her. Why didn’t she pull over her car? Why did she back up when there were police with guns drawn standing over her car? Maybe it’s because she was a maniacal criminal, but maybe it’s because encounters between black Americans and the police genearlly favor the police.

    We’ll never know.

    If, instead of starting with the assumption that she was a maniac guilty of
    conspiracy to assassinate the President, we assume she was innocent, it becomes pretty easy to imagine Miriam Carey as a woman from out of town, lost in DC and unfortunately learned the hard way that you cannot continue going west on E St. after 15th St. NW. And while I’m no expert on law enforcement, the “hard way” here seems excessive. After the chase down Pennsylvania Avenue she was ultimately shot at 12 times (eight times while her car was moving, which the Post quotes is rare, dangerous, and “only seems to work well in the movies,”) eventually killing her in her car next to her baby.

    I’m not saying attempting to drive on the White House grounds isn’t cause for alarm—neither is the Post. Nor am I saying disregarding the instructions of a guard at a security checkpoint isn’t cause for alarm—again, neither is the Post. I’m certainly not saying protection of the president is not a special kind of law enforcement. All those things are true. What the Post does say is that accidentally driving into that restricted area is a misdemeanor, and a fairly common one that again is only committed if you refuse to leave. What I am saying is that it looks like Miriam Carey actually did leave, and quickly, and even if she wasn’t leaving, any crime she committed before being killed certainly wouldn’t be a capital crime during a fair trial before a jury of her peers (see US Constitution, Amendment 6). As the Post put it “Carey did not refuse to leave. She refused to stop leaving.”

    Stealing cigarillos from a convenience store in Missouri is also a misdemeanor, as is brandishing a weapon in Ohio (especially if you’re a confused child). At least I’m pretty sure they are (IANAL). While I’m not equating these situations, it is impossible to ignore that these three individuals were killed by people we are supposed to trust to keep us safe before anyone asked them a question for allegedly committing a minor crime.

    Is this the society we want? It’s situations like these that make so-called
    Castle Laws so terrifying: ordinary people being gunned down out of fear. That we citizens might make a mistake and wind up dead is terrifying. What’s more terrifying is that it seems like when white people make these mistakes sometimes we get away with it (see the accounts of Mathew Goldstein and Kevin Carr in the Post article). We at least get charged with a crime. But when a black person makes a mistake, justice is swift and dealt by the barrel of a gun.

    None of this should be news to anyone. Debates about marijuana legalization here in DC and several other places around the country have highlighted the disparities in arrest rates among black and white people. Hopefully the best justice Miriam Carey, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, and any other black person killed imprisoned, or mistreated by police officers this year is to incite change. I don’t know what that change looks
    like but I know it starts with you and me standing up for injustice wherever we see it. It starts with people who don’t see a problem with unarmed black people being killed by police realizing that black lives matter.

  • YOMYOFFICECLOSED, A Yo App

    Note: Zero guarantees this app still works. I haven’t used Yo! in a while and don’t live in DC anymore anyway.

    This week marked not only Thanksgiving week but also the first winter storm of the year. The first time GSA emailed me about the possibility of the government closing or forcing telework due to inclement conditions. The Office of Personnel Managment (OPM) has great apps for Android, BlackBerry, Windows and iOS that you can download to get push notified about government closures, but should you have to download and enable notifications on another app just to get alerted about occasional snow days? No, I thought, why not use one of the apps I already have that can send me push notifications on demand?

    Thus was born YOMYOFFICECLOSED, a little Yo integration that will simply “Yo” at you every morning that OPM has a status of “Closed.” It’s not in the index yet, but hopefully it will be soon. In the mean time, just click the + button and add the user YOMYOFFICECLOSED.

    How does it work? Both Yo and the OPM have public APIs that this integration relies on. The script is a Python script scheduled with Heroku Scheduler. It uses requests to check the current operating status by querying OPMs API. There are several different statuses that OPM calls
    “Closed”     so I check if the current status has the “Closed” icon and send you a YO if it does. Check out the code below and write your own Yo integration. It’s super easy.

  • Your Comms Team Needs A Developer

    I recently started working at 18F as their first “comms person” which in a startup environment means you’re the person who does everything, just like everyone else, but you focus on writing blogs, publishing the website, and pitching new ideas for how we might communicate about what we do. Most of my work has been on the
    website     and a dashboard of all the work we do which has taught me a really important lesson: your website and how it is made, is just as much a communications artifact as anything else your comms team produces.

    Despite being on a communications team, I still write a lot of code. Writing code, or being able to jump in and learn some, is increasingly important in all kinds of jobs where people never used to have to write any code, and
    communications is no different if only for the simple fact that communications teams often end up owning most of the content and design of their organization’s website and if that website can’t meet their needs it causes rifts of trust between throughout the organization. Be they operational, managerial, or customer facing, a breakdown in trust is toxic and results in the web seeming useless to everyone.

    Often this happens because the website was designed and developed to spec by a freelancer or consultant on a one-time contract. An “expert” stands up a shiny looking website that does everything the organization wants it to do, trains a few people how to use it and leaves. Months (days?) later when somebody wants to put more than one photo on a page, they contact the IT
    department and are told “pages may only have one picture and it cannot be larger or smaller than x by y dimensions.” (True story.) Software is not static, as people use it, they discover how it can do more for them. Imagine if Microsoft stopped developing Word after it’s initial release. Nobody would use it because it would no longer be valuable.

    What an organization can do with its website is mission critical, not just for the communications team. Having a developer available who can make it possible to have more than one photo on your page is as important as having someone who can shoot and edit the photos.

    Communications teams should have developers baked in from the start, and not just for adding new features to the website. Having a developer on your communications team means you have someone who  an think about and build other artifacts to augment your message. A developer might think to host your website’s code on GitHub, allowing other developers to learn from it and offer feedback, or build an app to go along with a new initiative the team is rolling out, or identify and fix usability problems with some existing piece of the site.

    What your website is made of and how it works speaks volumes about your organization, both internally and externally. Internally, it makes your communications team a “yes first” team, or at least one where the reason for saying no to, say, putting more than one image on a page, is a communications one, not a technical limitation. And when there is a technical limitation, you can realistically evaluate whether it’s possible to overcome it.

    This doesn’t mean fire your entire comms team or only hire developers, nor does it mean hiring one developer will be your silver bullet. Instead, focus on fostering your team as one that is equal parts traditional communications and software development. Build a team ready to say yes to what your organization needs and not dependent on some piece of technology nobody understands.

  • Dark Pattern Alert: Forced continuity at Blue Apron

    This post is likely very out of date. I’ve been told Blue Apron has made improvements to their account closure process. This post is an historical representation of how they handled user requests in 2014.

    A friend of ours gave us an awesome wedding gift: a week of free meals from Blue Apron. We’d recently tried out Relay Foods a similar but only tangentially competitive service of home grocery delivery. The key difference between Relay and Blue Apron is in the former you shop like you’re at a grocery store, the latter you’re delivered exact fixings for specific meals. Our first week of meals arrives Friday and we’re pretty excited to have at least three dinners next week under delicious control. Thanks Laura!

    The service is great but from a usability perspective the process of redeeming this gift was interesting. One of the first things Blue Apron asked us for was a credit card number. Strange, we thought, because the gift covered the entirety of a week’s basic delivery (3 meals in one week). Tried as we might, we could not figure out how to redeem the gift without attaching a credit card to our account so, not wanting to turn down the gift, we did. We were then taken to a screen asking us how many nights per week we wanted meals still without any real indication of what the gift covered. The default was 3 meals per week so we figured we’d go with that and go up if the gift was for more. We clicked through and only then (3 screens later) were we aware of how many meals were covered by the gift. Even at that point, though, we still had no idea what we were actually getting only that it would be determined based on our “preferences.” So, seeking out the menus we had subscribed to, we clicked through to the “My Account Screen” to discover that we had been subscribed to automatic weekly delivery of three meals per week through to the middle of October.

    Scheduled deliveries every week? We never ordered that!

    Scheduled deliveries every week? We never ordered that!

    At that point we freaked out a bit. If we asked for a weekly delivery of three meals, we certainly didn’t remember doing it. Clicking through the application we tried to find a link to disable the account but the closest we could find was the ability to skip a week’s delivery. Not even on the My Account page was there an option to cancel the account or halt deliveries. We went ahead and skipped the remainder of the meals and will be investigating how to stop the service altogether following our Friday delivery.

    Forced continuity is a common dark pattern where users are automatically enrolled in a continual subscription after signing up for a free trial and was recently made illegal in the UK. It is particularly common with credit monitoring and media streaming services. The user signs up for a free month of credit reporting and suddenly, two or three months later notices charges on their credit card.. While most people signing up for Blue Apron are probably doing so because they want continual delivery of meals, the service should consider letting people sign up without a credit card or on a one-off transaction in order to redeem gift cards. At the very least, Blue Apron should allow its users to select 0 as an option along side 2 and 4 people on the “Edit My Plan” view with the understanding that ordering food for 0 people means $0 will be charged to a credit card.

    Blue apron should give users a means to cancel or indefinitely pause service.

    Blue apron should give users a means to cancel or indefinitely pause service.

    Canceling Blue Apron service can be accomplished by emailing cancellations@blueapron.com before your weekly cutoff. There does not appear to be any way of maintaining an account without being auto-enrolled in meal delivery. Finding this information requires three clicks, two page loads (in addition to loading blueapron.com), and some sleuthing. Scroll all the way to the bottom of any Blue Apron page and click “Contact & Help,” then choose “Skipping or Canceling” and click “Cancel my Account.” From there you’re taken to another page instructing you to send the email. Other help pages suggest there is no minimum subscription or commitment which, while true, is somewhat deceptive and a “roach motel” design anti-pattern.

    We’ll update here with more on the cancellation process.

  • 18F: Hacking Bureaucracy

    It’s a big life change for me to add on to so many others lately. (Did you hear I got married?) On Monday I leave almost two years of work at Excella Consulting and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to take on the unique opportunity of changing the way government works from the inside out. 18F is a fascinating agency that’s been getting a lot of attention for its connections to the Presidential Innovation Fellowship (which it runs) and the newly formed US Digital Service. At 18F we’re committed to working with other agencies to build high quality digital tools that disrupt the notion that government tech projects are long death marches that ultimately come up lackluster. Instead, 18F approaches government technical problems in a user-focused, agile way that will change the average citizen’s experience interacting with their government.

    Working with a team of talented individuals to create a more open, transparent, and accessible government is a cause close to my heart. I’m tremendously excited to get to work hacking our bureaucracy.

  • Sound City: American music, recording, and audiophiles

    Sound City is a documentary about the now defunct, eponymous Van Nuys studios. If you’ve never heard of the studios you’ve almost certainly heard music recorded there. The studios also hosted some of the most famous producers of the last 70 years, many of whom got their start as runners or assistants. The studios operated as a live performance studio: all analog equipment, with the full band recorded simultaneously. Directed and produced by Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana), Sound City is less a tribute to this studio so much as to the unique way in which music was recorded there.

    The studio began with two people who wanted to start a record company and made a $75,000 gamble on a state of the art mixing console. With the room’s acoustics and the quality of the board, it quickly became a premier studio and rode that fame all the way until the boom of CD and digital recording in the late 80s. Business slowed as artists gravitated toward digital until its renaissance in the early 90s with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. That resurgence was short-lived, though, and the studio closed in 2011 (selling the famous board to Grohl). While digital recording is not out-right blamed for the studio’s closure, the consequences of its refusal to go digital are front and center.

    Neil Young, one of the first artists to record at Sound City and possibly the biggest critic of digital audio around, is featured prominently and given room to go on his tirade against digital and the so-called “bill of goods” we’ve been sold with the CD and the false sense some musicans today have that they have a studio more powerful than Sound City built into their laptops. Instead of heading into a recording studio and producing an album, an individual can play the same intrument’s part hundreds of times and audition each part individually before stitching together a “prefect” mix.

    This is certainly a disturbing trend, and, more than anything else, that style of recording indeed sucks the soul out of music. But Grohl’s argument is interesting in its technological-agnosticism. Where some would get hung up on technical differences between analog and digital, Grohl focuses on what the art was that studios like Sound City added to the musical process and makes an argument for its preservation. For great artists, Grohl argues, analog or digital doesn’t matter. Great producers can work a compressor whether it’s physically in the room or digitally represented on a screen. There is something intangible about recording music as a band, live, together in one room that adds a soulfulness, cohesion, and sense of mastry over the material that is impossible to reproduce with any other recording method. To the extent Sound City mourns analog recording it is in the way analog forced this style on the process.

    Pro Tools is the easy scapegoat for the anti-digital chorus despite that it did for music what Photoshop did for photography. Professionals might disagree that having amateurs experimenting in their homes is good but for those of us who saw garage bands that might have faded into obscurity record full demos on a two track DAW, it is awesome. You don’t need to be an audiophile to know the difference between a good recording and a bad one. (Bad sound sounds bad, most people are just more tolerant of it.) But when you think you’re in the coolest band since Nirvana, you’re not recording your demo because you know anything about sound engineering, you’re doing it because you want to know something about it. You’re doing it because you want to be in a studio like Sound City.

    The analog-digital debate has a place to illustrate the decline of and call for preservation of a particular recording art form Sound City Studios were particuarly good at and highlights an important lesson about new technology. There are three ways to approach technological changes: fully embrance the new and abandon the old, cling for dear life onto the old and reject the new, or some mix of both. Too many people do one of the first two and neither is productive. Sound City shows us how taking the thrid path is possible, and just as artistic, as either of the first two.

    Sound City Studios will never be forgotten in American music history because of the music that was recorded there. The style and asthetic they infused into the recording process will be carried on by studios and future artists who insist on recording that way. Artists who insist on quality will not be stopped from it by technology. They will, just as Sound City did, focus on the sound of each instrument in the mix with the rest of the band to find the perfect rhythm, timbre, and harmony to produce an album. Dave Grohl’s documentary will live on as a reminder of what recording was like in the early years of the recording industry long after the mp3 has been supplanted by new technology and new musicians using it. To that end, Sound City is an important documentary for the history of American music and the nature of music as a form of art.