We should all name and shame

In any society there has always been behaviour that is legal but undesirable. In the past this was discouraged by the close community bonds that existed that most valued and were fearful to jeopardise.

Unfortunately those bonds are breaking down. My startup is working to remedy that by introducing functionality to “name and shame” individuals who act poorly. Here it is in action:

Hall of Shame


There is no logic in lockdown

Crunching the figures and applying logic to determine the actual “benefit” of lockdown

The Victorian covid slogan is

Staying apart keeps us together

lying government propaganda

Lets do the maths and see if this is correct. Here is a simple calculation based on figures that are widely available and making assumptions that allow for the worst case possible.

Here are the facts, I´ll base my calculation on, they are all based on the worst possible outcomes anywhere in the world:

  1. In the worst effected cities in the world COVID-19 has killed so far 1 in every 600 people. Note this is at a city level. The worst country (Peru) is actually 1 in more than 1000.
  2. The median age of death of coronavirus in Australia 82.5 years. I can´t find a wordlwide figure but figures in other countries are similar. So lets assume a mean age of death from COVID of 80 years.
  3. A that age the average person (who has lived to 80) can expect to live anoter 10 years .

Lets crunch the numbers

365 days in the year * 10 years / 600 people = 6 days per person

So the maximum possible benefit per head for lockdown is an extra 6 days of life per person. I need to reiterate here this is the extreme upper bound of the benefit. If I rejigged these figures to account for the fact that the average covid death is an 82 year who is LESS healthy than average and that the worst country has a death rate better than 1 in 1000, then this figure is less than 1 day. If I rejigged it to allow for an average outcome worldwide the figure would less than 6 hours per person

So we have decimated the world economy and compromised personal liberty everywhere in the world for this. Obviously not everything in life is about crunching numbers but I don´t know about you but quality of life is a thing and I’d happily sacrifice 6 days of my life to live the last 6 months in a normal way.

We can all come to different conclusions on these decisions but these sort of figures reresent the real collective risk that covid poses to our society and to me it is sad that no one is talking about them.

Native apps are (mostly) a waste of time.

So you think you need an app for your phone and you were considering shelling out some cash to a developer to build you a native app. Before you waste your money (and time) paying a developer to deliver a native app the first thing you need to consider the advantages an app has over a traditional website.

The big three are:

  1. It is installable, ie it appears on the phone home screen, this gives it a massive advantage over a traditional website in ensuring ongoing user interraction.
  2. An app is fast, ie it is faster to load and interract with than a traditional website.
  3. It can send notifications, again this increases user interraction substantially.

Obviously these are not the only reasons but they are the major ones.

Now here is the kicker, you can get all the above features on a website on the majority of phones right now! Goodbye native apps and welcome to the world of progressive web apps.

What is a progressive web app (PWA), you may ask? Well at it is heart it is just a website with some additonal features. Those features enable all three of the adavntages I outlined above on the majority of smart phones worldwide, right now!! But being a website a PWA also has some massive advantages. They include:

  1. They are linkable, ie you can access them by opening a URL.
  2. They are much easier to build, after all they are just a website with some substntial enhancements.
  3. They are updatable, ie any changes can occurr as soon as the PWA is accessed (as opposed to waiting for a user to download a new version of a native app).
  4. Being on the web they are cross platform.

Lets look at the state of play on different phones:

On android phones which now constitute the majority of smart phones worldwide all of the above advantages are currently already available to progressive web apps. ie visitors will be prompted to install your website on the phone (provided it meets the PWA criteria) right now and that website if properly designed will be fast and be able to send notifications

For apple  the situation is not quite so good. Yes you can install a web app but the experience sucks and there is no ability to send notifications. The good news is that but in the upcoming IOS version (IOS 12.2) there will be significant improvement. Onced installed on your phone a well built progressive web app will behave like its native counterpart, with the only issue that it will not be able to send notifications. But that functionality is coming.

So in conclusion is that unless you need certain hardware apis that are not supoorted by PWA´s yet or you desperately need notifications on Apple phones then you should find a web developer who can enhance your existing website to become a PWA. The future is PWA´s and he future (to a large extent) is already here.

Don’t break the web or why html is important

just because you can doesn’t mean you should

I am a member of the advanced WordPress facebook group and its seems every few days someone posts and article on there waxing lyrical about the latest javacsript only theme they have built using the latest JavaScript framework and the rest api.

Dont get me wrong, I love javscript, and I think the rest api is one of the best things to happen to WordPress but every time I read about someone usea front end framework to build a theme I shake my head.

A wise man once said,

just because you can doesn’t mean you should

This applies to so many things, especially JavaScript when used to output content.  In order to explain we all need to be reminded of the way the web is traditionally designed namely:

  • HTML for con­tent
  • Css for pre­sen­ta­tion
  • Javascript for func­tion­al­ity

This combination might seem old hat but it was created by smart people with good reasons.

When done properly it has three major strengths

  1. It conveys meaning
  2. It is robust
  3. It has a clear separation of concerns

However it can be slow so today many advocate using JavaScript to interract with apis to replace this traditional paradigm. This has  major advantage in that can be substantially faster as the client side javascript can request only the information that it needs. However it also means that javascript is now the creating the content as well as the providing the functionality

However lets just compare how this compares to the traditional approach. Namely:

Conveying meaning.  Yes javascript can convey an experience that may be indistunguishable to the eye BUT the web is not just a visual medium for humans. Machine like search engines, and screen readers are important and in most cases a javascript front end is invisible to these agents

Being robust. Javascript is a not a fully standardized lanaguage and is notorious for conflicts and errors, and being browser depe3ndent. So an error on a javascript front end usually means the whole site falls over. In contrast a traditional semantic html front end degrades gracefully

Separating concerns. In a JavaScript front end you are tightly coupling functionality with content and potentially presentation as well. This actually if you change the api or you change your javascript the whole thing falls over. In contrast html is html and if the JavaScript stops working you still have the html.

Javascript is important but its not a replacement for html. Its future is in rproviing functionality, both in enhancing the reading experience and in making the eually important area of creating, updating and deleting content on the web.

Finally I’d like to urge you that is you need speed work on the basics like http caching, or look to modern technologies like http/2 and service workers.

Introducing LH Archived Post Status

LH Archived Post status is a WordPress extension that creates an additional posts status available for content that may no longer be relevant to most visitors but should be available publicly (perhaps for historical purposes).

I built this plugin as UI needed this flexibility whilst using WordPress as a CMS. The plugin adds a new post status that enables posts and pages (and custom post types) to be archived. Archiving in this context means that the content is still publicly available but is not published on the front page of the site or the feed. I was not satisfied with other archiving solutions which hid the content for all non logged in visitors and was not configurable.

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