#—Work out Google's developer fees /silly

[14dayswithyou]

There's recently been an overwhelming demand for it (on Itch especially), and I'm happy to look into creating an APK version for Android users!

However, please keep in mind that I will still prioritise PC/Mac/Linux builds above everything else — so any future Android builds may be a little behind in receiving major updates. This will also be extremely experimental!!

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We’re expecting a snow and sleet event this morning. As I was composing this post it started raining around 6:30AM and it’s below freezing. Here’s hoping we don’t lose power and have frozen roads later. 🥶

I hope you enjoy the links.

Colleen Long • The Associated Press

President Joe Biden will stress democracy is still a ‘sacred cause’ in a speech near Valley Forge

If TFG wins we may become an authoritarian nation. Kiss freedoms we’ve come to expect — like the horrible reversal of Roe v. Wade — to become the norm. I’d expect to see jailed political rivals and journalists. The Justice Department and Military will become law enforcement. With the law being his Orangeness.

No thank you.

Brynn Tannehill • The New Republic

The Polls Prove It: Many Republicans Love Fascism

So, yeah, fascism is the new GOP policy and Republicans across the nation love it.

That’s sickening.

Slashdot

Niklaus Wirth, Inventor of Pascal, Dies At 89

I never learned Pascal but know plenty of developers who made their career using it. 🪦

Casey Newton • Platformer

On Tuesday, I told subscribers that we are considering leaving the platform based on the company’s recent statement that it would not demonetize or remove openly Nazi accounts.

Bravo Casey! I wasn’t planning on linking to any Substack content but I had to break that rule for this piece. Casey is planning on doing something about Substack’s horrible position by, potentially, taking his publication and subscribers elsewhere. That’s very brave given it’s how he makes his living! ❤️

Now, if we can get other writers to follow that would be amazing.

BBC

Japan earthquake: Nearly 250 missing as hope for survivors fades

Our world has become such a mess the tragedy unfolding in Japan doesn’t even register as big news, at least that’s how it feels to me.

Kyle Orland • Ars Technica

34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen”

Great explainer video of how the true Tetris Kill Screen was finally reached.

Also, I had no idea Tetris was still such a big deal. Silly me, of course it is! 🧱

Ashur Cabrera

I thought I’d be sharing photos of pintxos and more Basque lettering from Donostia-San Sebastián, and diving into our early experiences of living abroad.

My friend Ashur had planned a big adventure that didn’t quite work out as planned. It’s a worthwhile read and proves things don’t always go as planned.

David McCabe and Tripp Mickle • The New York Times

The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.

Some of the things the Justice Department are interested in seen really strange to me. Like allowing access to the Messages Service. Why should Google, or whoever else, be given the keys to access Messages backend services? Apple created and runs that service. It’s not built on a free to use, government backed, open-to-the-public utility. It’s paid for and maintained by Apple.

Now, if by access the government means Apple has to open it up as a paid service, I could see that. Perhaps Google agrees to take on some of the cost burden, based on usage, or pay Apple some huge fee so Android users have full access to Messages with a native messaging app built by Google. That wouldn’t be so bad. Another alternative is for Apple to build a Messages app for Android and sell access to the service as a monthly subscription. Hey, Apple, that means more service revenue! 😁

The whole App Store payment kerfuffle is something a lot of developers would like to see changed. I think most developers don’t want to pay Apple 15-30% of their potential revenue. That can be a lot of cheese for many Indie developers. There are some things Apple could change to help the situation, like allowing developers to actually tell users to visit their website to sign up or subscribe to their service. E.G. Amazon and Netflix cannot tell new users, through their app UI, to visit their website to get started. For a company who prides themselves on simplicity and great user experience sure do make it difficult for third-party apps to be easy to use.

Anywho, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the Justice Department taking action against Apple and fallout from it.

Dave Winer • Scripting News

So at the beginning of a new year, I’m going to remind myself that I’m too old and not paid well enough (I’m not paid at all, heh) to do another year of this kind of work. I should be making writing and reading tools work better on the web. That’s my mission.

Dave has been an innovator all his adult life. Whether it was scripting on the Mac and Windows or creating widely used technology like RSS and podcasting. Since he sold weblogs.com and left UserLand he’s continued to build writing tools of various kinds. His latest venture is FeedLand. It’s a feed reader and more. I can personally see it as a mechanism to follow and find excellent podcasts for a podcast player. Yes, it has an API that could be used for such things and it has full search capability. Bet you didn’t see that use case coming!

Anywho, I hope you get some rest, Dave, and have a wonderful 2024 making the web a better place for writers.

Keep digging!

Tim Kellogg

Back in the ’00s you would download a feed reader and subscribe to feeds. This felt a lot like an early version of social media. Google Reader was killed in 2013, which was largely seen as the death of RSS. I think social media generally replaced RSS because it took far fewer technical skills to setup a Facebook account versus an RSS-enabled blog.

This is interesting because it uses Mastodon as a feed reader. That’s not a bad idea, really. It’s such a good idea to have a timeline based reader I made one! 😁

All the stuff Tim says about Facebook and other social media platforms is 100% accurate. Those platforms stood in for blogs because of their low barrier to entry. Quite honestly I’m surprised Facebook never embraced blogging as a true feature of its platform, complete with all the expected bells and whistles, and that includes RSS and posts that don’t require a Facebook login to read them.

Anil Dash

Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what’s getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we’re instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse.

There was a time, not that long ago, folks said things like “RSS is dead” or asked “Is RSS dead?” First off, it’s just a technology, so it can’t actually die. Second, its web fabric and has been since its inception. It’s boring stuff — this is not a dig or insult, it’s a compliment. It’s as boring as HTML or CSS. I’d imagine it’s been used for all sorts of stuff beyond blogs over its history and it’ll probably be around for as long as we have a web to browse.

Sure social media, or microblogging, took center stage for a while. My own blogging slowed for a long period of time because I started posting little blurbs of text to Twitter instead of my blog.

Now I do that with a combination of Mastodon and Micro.blog. Short posts go to Mastodon and Micro.blog and long posts, like this one, go to my blog with a link on many services including Mastodon, Micro.blog, Blue Sky, and Tumblr.

My blog is at the center. It’s my content, I own it.

Matt Birchler

Here’s an uncomfortable question: when do I stop blogging?

I always find this question odd. I figure I’ll stop when, or if, I just stop one day. I suppose folks who do it professionally have to think about stuff like this, especially if they have subscribers and/or advertisers.

Maybe when the day comes that you’d like to stop doing it for a living you just let folks know you’re going to blog about whatever you’d like and do it for fun?

I’ve been blogging since February 2001 and still love it.

Rain Noe • Core77

A Handsome Aluminum and Ultem Smartphone Case

I want one of these. Guess I need to buy an iPhone 14 or 15 Pro? Having an updated iPhone would also open the door to a whole lot of cases I love at Cotton Bureau. 😃

Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, Ben Lovejoy, and Ben Schoon • 9to5Mac

The iPhone is the device that pushed the mobile industry away from physical keyboards, but nothing can truly replace that tactile experience. Launching next month, “Clicks” aims to add a physical keyboard to your iPhone with support for keyboard shortcuts and backlighting too.

In 2013 Ryan Seacrest was part of an effort to bring a physical keyboard to the iPhone. It was called Typo and I never heard much about it beyond the initial announcement. I could’ve sworn it was earlier than 2013, but my memory sometimes fails me.

Anyway, I hope these folks are wildly successful. Good luck y’all!

Richard Devine • Windows Central

The best holiday gift was Mac losing out to Windows, at least according to these stats

It’s obvious some Windows users and pundits still have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Mac. It’s surprising.

I’m an old, long time, Windows developer and I owe a lot to the platform. I spent around 20 years writing code for Windows and I still believe it to be an amazing platform for users and developers. But I switched to the Mac full time in 2006 and have grown to enjoy it every bit as much as Windows.

It’s perfectly fine to love using a different operating system or prefer coding for one over the other. Let people have fun and enjoy what they love doing. ❤️

Here’s hoping 2024 isn’t a complete shit show. 🤣

[liamsmithphotography]

How to choose a wedding photographer

liam smith photography

Top tips on how to choose your wedding photographer

Know your fine art from your reportage

Look at lots of complete weddings, not just portfolios

Meet in person

Make sure you like them!

Understand what's included in each package

It's an age old question, how do you choose a wedding photographer...this is a long one, let's start with some LOL's...

Understanding the different terminology used when describing wedding photography style is integral to narrowing down your searches. I spent hours trying to define my own style. My work is fun, and it's also documentary. Wait... I've got it. 'Funcumentary' Don't you love a good portmanteau? Blend two styles of photography to invent a brand new one, how about, fine art and documentary? "fineocumentary" or "docart". Liam Smith – best docart photographer in the world (n.b, Liam is the only docart photographer in the world and wins by default)  To answer my own question, how do you choose a wedding photographer? The answer is choose me...I'm obviously hilarious.

What are these stupid words I keep reading, what styles are there? What do these words mean? I believe in creating great images. I've read endless blog posts and magazine articles trying to define what a photography style is and what it means. In my years of experience I have found that there are essentially two types; posed and unposed. Unposed can be referred to as candid, photojournalistic or documentary, essentially they are the same thing; capturing people unawares. Counter to this there are posed images; fine art or traditional. These images are orchestrated and the photographer is in complete control of the outcome. So who cares? It's easy for people within the wedding industry to forget that there is a world outside it. Phrases are coined and banded about and then thrown at the customer expecting them to know what they mean. If I question these terms objectively, fine art sounds like each image is going to take as long as a painting and photojournalism sounds like my wedding is going to be photographed like a war-zone. This is of course me being dramatic, but I hope you can see my point. Documentary/Photojournalism/Candid Documentary wedding photography (sometimes called photojournalism) refers to capturing natural moments, no staging or posing. The intention is to provide the couple with a narrative of the day, it doesn’t matter what happens on the day, your photographer will record it. Grandma falls over; click. Grooms scrunched up crying face; click. This is the real stuff. Pure emotions. No pretending. Great documentary photographers are masters of composition. Patiently waiting to create artwork out of serendipitous moments. Timing is everything. You have to be in the mix, switched on and up close and personal with people. Documentary photographers will also take couple portraits and group pictures. I've written in more detail about documentary wedding photography here Here's an example of being in the moment. Documenting events as they happen.

Fine art Fine art wedding photography focuses on recording your day in the most beautiful and elegant way possible. Lots of bright colours, clean whites, couple portraits and details. Stunning pictures that would look amazing on the mantelpiece or in an album. Fine art wedding photographers are masters of light and styling. Being able to find soft, even light is a must and a keen eye to arrange details to capture that editorial feel is a sure sign of a good fine art photographer. The main man of the fine art world is Jose Villa, his work is exceptional, “For me, it is all about making something beautiful, even if I have to insert myself into the situation. Ultimately, my goal is to craft vibrant, energetic, fine art images that are as unique as the people in the photographs.”

N.B Fine art wedding photographers often take photographs using old school film - expect their fees to be considerably higher if they do. Takeaway/What to Google Documentary/Photojournalism/Candid wedding photography – beautiful images, story telling, documenting not posing, people focused. Fine art wedding photography – beautiful images, posing where necessary, lots of details.

Should I meet my wedding photographer before booking? In short. Yes. For me, this is the second most important factor after the images themselves when deciding on who should photograph your wedding. I always say at client meetings that they have to like me. How much you can like someone in an hours meeting may sound silly, but your gut instinct is rarely wrong. If the vibe isn't right, go with someone else. In order for you to relax, you need to like the person who will be spending the day with you. Of course they won't be partying and socialising, but if you don't feel like you trust them, then ultimately you won't relax, they won't get the pictures you want and everybody loses. Knowing when it's not a right fit is an integral part of the process. A wedding is a collaboration, you have to be able to work together. Even if you choose a documentary wedding photographer who won't be posing you, you still need to trust them. There may be a moment happening right in front of you and the photographer nowhere to be seen. If you can't trust that they are off somewhere else capturing an equally important picture, then you won't relax and you won't enjoy your day to it's fullest. Meet them. It's one of the best investments you'll make in your wedding.

What defines a good photographer? This is also tricky as it is so subjective. Awards are difficult to judge a photographer by as some are more valuable than others. Certain awarding bodies use client feedback to judge the photographers quality of images and service. Others prioritise certain styles, so it's worth investigating whether or not the wedding photography award has come from a relevant and established source.  Who are these sources? WPJA, Fearless Photographers, Masters of Wedding Photography. Directories have their own awards, but only award to those who advertise with them. 'Top 50' round up posts are a technique used to get links to websites. Some photography bodies give you an award for submitting which means you can then call yourself 'award winning'. I have won an MoWP award, of which I am immensely proud. If I were to pin such a big decision on a question or statement, it would come down to this; when you look at their work, do you feel something?  Great images move people. They stir something in the soul. Whether laughter or tears, if you can feel a connection to the images, and the people within them without even knowing them, then it's a great picture and you've found yourself a great photographer.

Look at the blog in serious detail Portfolios are there to give you a wow. The blog is there to tell you the whole story. A portfolio could be made up from 100 or more weddings. A blog is one day. Even if a photographer only blogs the most insane weddings it will still show you what they delivered to the client. If you are happy with that then add them to your shortlist. Important frequently asked questions and top tips A few thoughts and important questions to consider when trying to choose a wedding photographer. How much should I budget? This is of course dependent on your personal circumstance, no one should ever consider stretching themselves financially for the sake of a wedding. I love weddings, I think they're truly magical. But life is long, your family grows and develops, magical moments happen on multiple occasions. Whether it's a wedding day, the birth of a child or buying your first house and rolling around on the carpets, life is full of joy, pay what you can afford. Between £1000 and £2000 is realistic for someone who is good. “Define good” some may cry. Well that's subjective, and I can't. You have to use your judgement on this one and trust your gut. An iMac with the same spec laptop that I'm currently typing on would be one thousand pounds more expensive. Some products are more expensive because of their quality, some are based upon branding. Look at the photographers portfolio and then examine their blog posts in detail. Only then will you be able to gauge what a full days wedding looks like and then make a judgement on call on whether that represents good value. Do I need two photographers? If you love documentary wedding photography, consider this; with a single photographer shooting in a photo-journalistic style, there is no guarantee that all of your guests will be captured in an image. Does this bother you? Maybe it doesn't. Keep in mind that the photographer won't know how your most treasured guests are. A second photographer can be a valuable asset as although it goes against my documentary ideology, the second photographer could arrange formal photographs to make sure that your most important persons are photographed in some capacity. If you're a purist like me then ignore that bit, I like to give both sides of the coin. If your budget will allow it aim for two, more pictures is never a bad thing. Note, this is likely to push your costs up to the £2-3k mark. How many hours coverage do I need? When whittling down the shortlist, working out how exactly how many hours you need might save you money. Magazines for some reason say from bridal prep to the first dance. WHICH I HATE. Many couples don't have a first dance. And what if you don't want photographs taken in the morning? Ten to twelve hours should be about right for the vast majority of people. I always say to clients the best way to judge this is based upon the general vibes of the day. If you know that your crew is going to rave until the early AM, then twelve hours might be a good idea to make sure you capture all the madness. In my experience, ten hours is usually plenty. It gives you approximately an hour and a half of getting ready and another hour or so of the evening dancing. What's included?/what do I need in a package? One photographer, ten hours, £1000-£2000 is the average cost in the UK. With that in mind, ignore books in the first instance - you can always buy one later.  I always recommend to clients that they book as many hours as they can if cost is an issue, they will always have the photographs and can save up for albums and prints at a later date. Do I need an engagement shoot? I think the question should be asking yourself is why do you want an engagement shoot? If the answer is 'to get used to the camera', then it may be worth considering the reality of that for a moment. If you prefer documentary style images, there's no need to pose, so no need to get used to the camera. Documentary photographers are skilled at being unobtrusive and capturing people off guard. Practising poses will not put you or the photographer at ease as you're both engaged in an activity that neither of you want. IF however, you love fine art style images, then engagement shoots are perfect. It gives you a chance to understand your best body position for posed photographs and gives you an idea of likely how long your posed pictures will take on the day. Gut instinct shouldn't be ignored. It exists for a reason. It's not a random part of your brain making decisions. It's a combination of all of your thoughts, feelings and experiences coming to the fore at an important moment. Trust it. The wedding is in the evening/winter etc. will lighting be a problem? You need to know the answer to this when choosing a wedding photographer if it applies. Any wedding photographer worth their salt will have equipment that can deal with low light levels. It is however, something to consider. Shooting in low light is difficult at the best of times. It's near impossible without high end equipment. -If your photographer is cheap, chances are, they won't have high end gear and will struggle to shoot in low light.  If you are having a candlelit wedding ceremony, then these are questions you will have to ask. I received this message from a bride and it is a fantastic question. “Our ceremony is in the afternoon and will be by candlelight. We both don’t like staged photos and are looking for a creative photographer that can shoot gorgeous photos in a candlelit/fairy light environment. We are very aware good photos depend on lighting etc. and are very keen to hear your take on this. Would that be something you would be able to help us with? Do you by any chance have some photos to show from other night weddings? The plan is to create a fairy light backdrop for the ceremony (which will take in a separate area) with candles in the aisle next to the chairs. In this scenario there would be no light coming from above. Do you anticipate that being a problem? There is a beam that runs the length of the aisle that we could always wrap in more fairy lights if you think that might help. In the barn where the dinner and party will take place there will be a festoon light ceiling and a festoon light backdrop behind the main table. On the tables there will be candles, additionally there are loads of lights all over the barn that can selectively be turned on and dimmed. I look forward to hearing from you!" Here is my reply: There are two main considerations when working in low light. One – the images will be grainy Two – candlelight only from below can cast unflattering shadows I’ve attached a few images for your consideration. The first image is an example of how low light levels (only lit by the fairy lights) will result in what’s called ‘grain’ on the photographs. It’s simply unavoidable, but something you should certainly be aware of. Personally I don’t think it matters and often adds character to an image, particularly black and white photographs.

It's worth noting that when light only comes from below the shadows can be unflattering. Image two I photographed in a particularly dark barn. This is a combination of fairy lights and ‘candle light’ bulbs worked very well to produce well lit photographs whilst maintaining the ambience. The bulbs fill in the shadows and provide more even lighting across the face.

My recommendation would be to have a combination of the two, candles for ambience and fairy lights to add to the ambient light. Another consideration is the heat from the candles if they will also be your primary light source. I’ve seen the Gentlemen get quite hot in a three piece woollen suit stood next to candles! To reflect Low light equals grain. Grain is not indicative of bad pictures, only low light. If you are having a candlelit wedding ceremony you should definitely ask if the photographers you have shortlisted have example images to share with you.

How do I approach the day? – Blending the styles I believe that weddings should be photographed with care and compassion as well as integrity. Capturing the narrative of the day, true to events. Weddings are an opportunity to dress up. Thought goes into every outfit, from the bride to the second aunt, everyone considers how they will look and wants to look their best. I believe that the bride and groom should also have a series of images that document the connection between them and have them looking amazing. This is possible if you shoot in a documentary style and I believe gives more genuine images than pure fine art. By mixing the two you have the benefit of controlling the location, the light and the basic body positioning, but then you let your confidence as a documentary photographer take over and let the moment unfold naturally. Believe me this takes serious practice and belief in yourself as it can feel super awkward at first, but you have to be bold, if you’re confident, then your client is confident in you. Continue as if this is absolutely normal. I've found if you stand maybe twenty feet away and say "I'm going to shoot this one quite wide so feel free to chat" something magical happens. All of a sudden they feel free to express themselves, everything becomes more relaxed and the real people emerge, not the 'people in that pose'. Then, because you told a fib and you actually have a 50mm lens on, you can shoot at f1.4 and capture those dreamy fine art style images which have all the blown highlights and shallow depth of field, AND capture a natural moment. Hazaahs all round. Here's the magic Here's an example to demonstrate my point. Here we have a beautiful couple and a beautiful location and an outrageously sunny day. The control part from me is placing them in this location under the willow tree. I have used my knowledge of light, environment etc. to place them in a setting I know will look good. The boughs of willow trees create a perfect canvas of elegant greens to create a couple portrait. Next, my instructions are thus "enjoy yourselves, the wedding flies by so take this opportunity to be together in the moment". They look great, the light looks good and everything is peachy. Then I say "I'm going to shoot this one quite wide so feel free to chat!". Then the most extraordinary thing happens. It's as if people feel like they’re no longer being watched and the most intimate moments happen. I've heard of some photographers who say to their clients "imagine a comet is about to hit earth and these are your last few moments, what would you do?". Whilst this may work for some, having to enact a scenario isn’t real to me, plus my clients would probably tell me to fuck off, after all, they did hire me because of my documentary *ahem* unposed style :). The recent image that went viral is a beautiful example of how inviting clients to interact can work. The instruction in that image was "whisper in her ear why you married her". The sentiment is beautiful as is the resulting image, but if we're going all purist, is that a real moment? If my one aim is to show clients images of themselves that they recognise, will they look back on that image and say 'that was the most amazing moment of my life' or 'that was when the photographer instructed us etc. and I cried'? Here is the magic moment. No instruction from me, everything apart from the location is spontaneous. Even the holding of the dress looks amazing, but had nothing to do with me. For me this is the perfect blend of fine art and documentary. The image is absolutely them, this is how they interact, how they stand, how they hold each other. Its magic.

The one thing clients always say The second best thing about this image? We were only gone from the crowd for fifteen minutes. Everyone tells me they hate it at weddings when the bride and groom disappear for the entire drinks reception for photographs. There's simply no need. Find a nice spot, be calm, relax, let the magic happen. It's a moment, it only lasts for a few seconds and then it's gone, so you have to be ready. So Liam what do you do for the other 99% of the day? I take pictures like this:

Liam Smith is a documentary wedding photographer from mars (probably) If you like the look of my work and my philosophy, hey, why not get in touch?

https://www.facebook.com/liamsmithphotography/ https://twitter.com/smithlphoto https://www.linkedin.com/in/liamsmithphotography/ http://youtube.com/channel/UCDRq0noH6kh0afzWK0zt_qw https://www.instagram.com/liam_smith_photography/

[tumblunni]

What do you guys think about the names Dustin and Darcy for my protagonists in Let's Go?

Cos i really wanted to play the co op mode thing by myself, just so i can pretend this role in the plot is filled by two siblings and have a bit of fun roleplaying that. But i dunno yet how the co-op works and whether you'd be able to customize the avatar of the second player or if its just the default trainer? Or can you only play co-op if you have two separate games? Im planning to buy the other version anyway once i get more money, so it could be fun to play my first version with sibling one and then the second playthru is sibling two's turn to shine!

Oh and the whole reason i wanted to do this is cos i wanna try out the customization features to make some ocs now that there's no competitive online stuff unless you pay a subscription fee (LOL NO THANKS). Like..i always felt like i HAD to make my character me in xy/sumo/usum, otherwise its like lying online? But of course i cant actually make me because theres no nonbinary option or even remotely ambiguous outfits for either gender. And you cant have wild hair colours while i dye my hair 24/7 irl lol. Its silly cos like 95% of the gym leaders and other characters ingame have anime hair colours yet the player has to be normal? So yeah i cpuldnt really enjoy making this innacurate defanged version of myself yet i didnt feel like i was allowed to just make up a new character either. Closest i could do was give myself white hair like my old trainersona when i was 12, lol. I mean i guess thats my 'real hair colour' underneath the dye right now, if you think about it that way?

OH GOD PIKACHU CAN HAVE A LITTLE TUXEDO AND BOWLER HAT HOLY FUCK IM SORRY TO INTERRUPT THIS BUT I WAS WATCHING THE IGN REVIEW AND THEY SHOWED PIKA BOWLER HAT PLEASE GO GOOGLE THAT VIDEO JUST FOR THAT 1 SECOND OF NEW FOOTAGE OF MY BEAUTIFUL CLASSY BOYE

okay where was i

Yeah! I think sibling trainers could be a good and unique way to handle a rival! Like having them be your sibling already establishes that rivalry. But it can be a soft and nice rivalry! I wanna go with that fun version rather than the full on angry exaggerated sibling rivalries you often see in kids media. Like i know that some people legit dont get on with their siblings and some people can even have a very gary esque full on rivalry thats sorta 'love to hate' or like..tsundere pretending you hate them. But personally i never had experience with that, i can never relate to those 'tfw u hate ur sibling and theyre always an asshole but lolll u love them anyway' posts. I only got to live with my little sister for a little while due to the catastrophe of abusive parenthood that was my childhood, and i lost contact with her forever when she was very young so i doubt she'd even remember me. *sigh* But like i don't think i only love her so much because i miss her! People say newborns and toddlers are the most bratty so like you'd think if i was gonna ever find her 'annoying' i would have done it back then. I was always just mega proud of her and whenever she'd be 'bratty' i'd be cheering her on and trying to protect her from mom. And when she'd try and pull pranks on me or practise play-fighting or whatever i was just like 'lol thats legit funny' and taking play-falls so she felt better about herself. Like we didnt have much power in that household so i felt like encouraging her pretending to be a wrestler would help her feel like she had some sort of control in some part of her life i guess? And just i wished i was allowed to roughhouse and run around and be all 'unladylike' and just enjoy BEING A KID when i was a kid, yknow? I always had legit fun being with her and legit enjoyed it and was legit proud and legit never annoyed. I just dont understand 'yeah she's annoying but i love her anyway'. I was only ever her rival as a play-rival to help encourage her to like.. Enjoy the things she enjoyed. Feel like someone else cared. I only ever acted like 'ha ha baby stuff yeah sure i hate hanging out with my sister" cos i thought i was SUPPOSED TO. I always felt so guilty doing it and so dissappointed cos id rather hang out with her than be a boring stereotypical teen tbh. I dunno, maybe this isnt typical for siblings and its just a sign of how badly we were raised? I was just real fuckin lonely and absolutely loved having a family member who loved me for the first time since my grandma died. Same reason i always used to act all 'i am too cool i totally am not soft for my lil sister' around my lil sister's dad. I really wanted him to love me too! I used to say swear words at him cos i thougjt he would thibk i was Cool And Adult?? I have soooo many cringe moments from that phase of my childhood. Man it hurts to think that i never actually did get to become that positive influence that protected my sister from my mum and let her know she was loved. Cos i was sent to live with my dad when she was like 5ish? And never saw her again and now im too scared to try and reach out to her again because 1: she probably doesnt even remember me, 2: theres a chance she believes my mum saying i was some horrible asshole who abandoned the family, 3: even bigger chance that contacting her could mean my mum finding me again and big fuckin risk of further abuse. Plus the awkwardness of introducing my trans self when she'd remember me as her sister and all. Sigh! All i can do is hope that her cool dad eventually got custody of her, and that he didnt turn out to be a secret bastard like when i met my own dad. He seemed good, but then again i was just a lil kid and my dad seemed good at first. Sighhhhhh...

SO UMM YEAH WOW I MADE MYSELF SAD

Anyway the point is that whenever i write siblings i'd rather write 100% unapologetic super loving love cos its wish fullfillment for me. This is also why in/cest shipping is a massive beserk button for me, good wholesome family relationships are REAL FUCKIN IMPORTANT and how DARE you corrupt that shit! Some people would fuckin KILL to have that wholesome family!!

Anyway lol thats why i'd like a Wholesome Rivalry for these sibling ocs! Like they challenge each other to contests along the way just for fun, and they react all 'wow my sis is the BEST' when you beat them, so hard feelings at all. And you dont JUST do rival stuff but also sometimes just hang out and have fun cos you missed each other. And if anyone threatens your sibling then THAT is the only time you see the Serious Sibling Power! Rival moments: ha ha lol bet ya cant beat me ooo im a scary villain LOL I CANT KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE HAHA! Giovanni punches your brother: *stony cold death glare from hell as tricksy prank sis turns into an unstoppable vengeance engine* Oh, but also the only other time they'd be serious is in their final battle together! Like most of the 'rivalry' is just competing to make the adventure fun and to help each other get stronger. But if sis/bro ever actually legit said they really want to fight to find out who's the best, and its like..important to help their self confidence, then i think bro/sis would respect that and go all out. Taking a fall and letting them win would be the most disrespectful thing of all! Oh, but i do think there would be one kind of battle like that during the story? Like in one of the more low stakes faux-rival fights the sibling actually does try and let you win, and the challenge is to try and lose against all odds. High stakes super failure battle!!! Imagine the evil team in the background like 'wtf' as these two run the most aggressively slow race of all time! XD

Oh and i kinda thought about different personalities for the two of them based on who you pick? Like i did like that aspect about brendan/may in RSE compared to other 'unpicked option becomes rival' characters in later games that didnt even have one personality let alone two. It just sucks that the personalities they decided to give them were 'female rival is super self concious and thinks youre better than her because youre a boy' and 'male rival is super ego and thinks he's better than you because he's a boy'. Boooo!

So instead of that the personalities i was thinking for these two would be less sexist lol. Male sibling Dustin is basically Wally so far? I need to develop him a bit more to make him a bit distinct, i mean its not like every single shy dude is identical. I'm thinking maybe mix him with all the wasted potential in Brendan? Like in the game they slightly hint at him having the ONE non stereotypical trait of liking cute teddy bears, and that made me think about how much better his whole plot would have been if it actually criticized his sexism and said that he only behaves that way cos he's overcompensating for being bullied for being 'feminine', yknow? And then in the manga they actually DO write him as super feminine, and even as a contest star who loves fashion and dressing up his pokemon! But then GAHHH they present it as some sort of fuckin 'character flaw', like he's shown to be selfish and superficial because of it. And the backstory is that him and the female protagonist used to be 'normal' until a traumatic event. Brendan was a Natural Fighting Prodigy until he saved his female friend from a wild pokemon and was so traumatized that he never wanted to fight again, while she wanted to learn to fight so she'd never need to be protected again. But this is not only presented as Wrong Ways To Be Gender but also like.. Fighting their natural instinct which still comes through?? Like male protag hasnt fought in YEARS yet whenever he's forced to fight he's just magically better at it than female protag who's been practising all these years to become his equal. Ha ha silly girl you can never achieve that! All you get is this patronizing 'well if you just tryyyyy girly things im sure you'll like it' plot and then you get rescued by him in the end because OF COURSE you do. Sigh! I cant believe they made me hate that pairing even more than the games did! So yeah i dont really wanna write Dustin as a jerkass who's secretly got synpathetic motives of internalized homophobia/sexism, cos i feel thats a plot very specific to my perceptuons of Brendan and id basically just have to make Dustin a clone of him and he wouldnt be able to shine on his own merits. Instead i'm just thinking of writing him as a 100% sensitive soul, and he still faces predjudice for not being that bigoted idea of an 'ideal man' but really the fact he doesnt bow down to their demands proves that he's the bravest person here.

And then I'm thinking maybe the female sibling Darcy is the older one and is a bit "gary ish"? Like eitjer way you still have a friendly and loving siblingness, but she's a bit more of a sass who is tsundere about admitting she loves her bro. But i dont think she's the cold or grumpy sort of tsundere, more like a trickstery tomboy? Bombastic loki jock sis! She can only be a bit abrasive with her bro cos she wants to teach him to be tough even when she's not there to protect him. But sometimes she can mess it up and make him feel like he has to change his personality in order to be tough, rather than letting him know she supports him in being "unmasculine" and just wants to help him find the confidence to stand up to people who bully him for it. Like she feels like she is 'weaker' than him in the sense that she worries too much about what people will think if she expresses her real emotions, yknow? Like theyre both suffering from toxic masculinity! He's suffering from the standard form where men who are too 'soft' are beaten down into that mould. Ans she's suffering from the problem where 'masculine' girls feel like they have to be '100% masculine' in order to be allowed to be themselves at all. Like back when i was a kid and before i came out as trans i always used to try and pretend to like sports ans like..cliche macho shit where you Cant Admit You Care About Your Friends and also i wasnt allowed to like ANY feminine things at all. I had to either follow the stereotype of femininity entirely or follow the opposite stereotype, i wasnt allowed to just reject stereotypes and like what i actually like. So yeah me realizing i wasnt really a girl has led to me embracing more 'girly' things than back when i thought i was one! So i think Darcy would have a similar arc but like..the cis equivelant? Just finds people who arent such judgmental pricks and stops having to conform to either of those stereotypes in order to keep fake friends who dont really give a shit about her. She can have a plot about both forced feminine and masculine stereotypes being equally limiting, rather than that shitty 'being masculine is a prison uwu every woman will be happier embracing her love of makeup' shit. That dominant narrative just made me feel like i was somehow wrong about myself whenever i didnt like 100% Of Sports All The Time, i must be somehow girly if i liked even ONE girly thing yet i needed hundreds of proofs if i wanted to be masculine. And like i wasnt just allowed to be neither! I wasnt allowed to like parts of both! I wasnt allowed to BE GODDAMN TRANS!!! So yeah i dunno if i'd go whole hog and make this character a trans man or a nonbinary person tho? I think she's just actually a cis girl who happens to be sporty and brash and likes a lot of 'masculine' fashion and hobbies. And she's just been made to feel self concious about it, as if she cant possibly REALLY be that unless she likes Every Single Boy Thing and wins at Every Single Challenge. Does anyone else remember that shit too? The girls have to win Every sports game against the boys in order to be 'one of the boys' but if you lose even one of them it somehow proves that you're inferior. Even though the boys lost 50 billion games to you and that doesnt prove theyre inferior! Like man she has sooooo many 'gary rivals' in her school life, thats why she loves going on this adventure with a kind brother rival who actually respects her! So her resolution would just be her staying the same but being more confident about it and saying fuk u to those fake friends. Same as her brother's plot, just they both face different specifics to the way this sexism affects them, yknow?

Oh but yeah when i did finally learn about LGBT stuff and realize i was trans it was Big Amazing cos even in the rare stories about Its Okay To Be Yourself it still left me feeling weirdly empty when the girl decides that yes she does wanna be a girl in the end. So i get that these plots might come off as queerbaiting if i write them badly? I need to make sure to make it clear that these characters 100% want to be seen as this gender and its just other people being fuckfaces and trying to define what their gender has to mean. I think maybe i'll try and mitigate this potential misunderstanding by adding different sorts of lgbt content. And, well, also cos i just want lgbt content in all of my stories because i am lgbt, of course! I'm 100% sure that Darcy is gay, and i think also maybe possibly Dustin is trans? Like, his plot is about being mocked for being a 'feminine' boy, but its also even more personal for him because he's a trans boy and he feels like he needs to change his personality in order to pass/he isnt really real because his personality doesnt fit the stereotypical image of a man. Like if you'd looked at the two of them back when they were identical twins, you probably would have expected Darcy to end up being trans if you were the sort of person who believes those basic ass stereotypes about 'boys who play with barbies and girls who play with trucks'. Or i mean maybe its the other way around and Darcy is a trans girl who still has a 'masculine' personality according to stereotypes? Or even both of them are trans and both face being told that they arent real because they dont fit the perfect stereotype of a trans person according to cis perceptions? Or maybe i'm overcomplicating things with all of this and it'd just muddy the message i guess. I might just keep it to them both being cis but also both of them like girls. And i can always apply my trans and other LGBT headcanons to other characters along their adventure.

Anyway LOL im rambling too much!

[steenbergavery4-blog]

R410A TXV Failings Across Lots of Brands.

The Apple TELEVISION is the facility of your amusement body or even the facility from your hooked up house now the HomeKit is actually a huge part of the Apple ecological community. VAPOR Check whether the Workshop update is stuck on installing webpage of Vapor, if so, re-installing vapor repairs the issue. My preferred story was Straw into Gold," where the miller's daughter as well as Rumpelstiltskin are actually friends, carefully adhered to through Ms. Rumpelstiltskin," where Rumpelstiltskin is actually an unhappy woman which wishes a little one. If you have actually experienced a macOS Sierra trouble that we haven't dealt with listed here, allow our team know in the comments as well as our team'll attempt our hardest to find a remedy for you. While the the apple iphone 6 iOS 10 upgrade is actually presently dependable for our team, others are bumping into iPhone 6 troubles on Apple's brand-new software. Don't misery, though - while these issues may be definitely discouraging, solutions are starting to appear. The planners of the Female's March teamed up with the disability community to guarantee the march was accessible for people from all capacities. I am having an issue along with the 9.1 download that my iPad Air whenever I turn it on this keeps inquiring me for my Apple ID Security password. UN Women Global Goodwill Emissary Anne Hathaway beams a light on the problem from parental leave on International Female's Time. A research study of Harvard grads in the United States discovered that median incomes in 2005 were $90,000 for women but $162,500 for men.

Usually, however, men act quite badly around eye-catching females (or function far better around all of them, thus taking into viewpoint just how they don't function towards mistress), so the appealing woman receives connected with the bad male behaviour. Many documents all over the official Google product online forums have confirmed there is an issue along with MMS (picture messages) in Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Today, even with the intricacy of life in this particular century, God proceeds as well as are going to remain to use girls off all histories as well as training class for His Glory. Each one of her pre-conceived suggestions concerning the functions from males and females will definitely be actually re-examined and what takes place consequently is going to modify your home from Wu permanently. The company has actually confirmed a brand new Android 7.1.2 update for Nexus devices as well as it is actually readily available in beta type, at the moment, for pick designs. When ladies were actually married off I adored every term of this manual, all specified in a time and culture! The partnerships in this particular story highlight that the method gender is actually conducted in our lifestyle puts women at a conveniences in this regard, developing relationships that have a strength nearly unprecedented in friendly relationships one of males. While there have actually been dispersed reports of red displays, the trouble doesn't seem to be nearly as extensive as Customer News' HALF had an effect on fee. Bluetooth concerns are actually one of the best popular iphone complications and also we've heard countless grievances coming from iPhone 4s customers in the months given that the iOS 9 launch date. Our experts're launched to a variety of girls: jaded females, girls which do not think they deserve love, wome Twenty-one narratives regarding problematic, intricate individuals who could typically be actually reduced to prideful types. There are a couple of traits you may attempt to repair the concern if your Mac computer system crashes or even ends up being less competent while putting up macOS Sierra. These are actually all exceptionally common iOS complications as well as they affect all apple iphone designs, certainly not only the apple iphone 6s as well as iPhone Sixes Plus. Grievances concerning unsatisfactory Wi-Fi connection are actually also remarkably common so this hasn't already been actually astonishing to find Samsung Universe S6 consumers complaining regarding complications with their Wi-Fi links. The Spinoza Problem has plenty of from the aspects that I commonly like: historical fiction drawn around significant and true historical bodies, setups and also themes of individual implication to me, and also a core political/philosophical dimension. Similarly the controversy regarding exactly how - as opposed to whether - ladies should join the repair of Iceland's broken economic body is actually a mainstream dialogue, whereas this is viewed as a fringe problem right here. When you leave your phone placing on the table, Retrevo found that your substantial other is actually quite potentially inspecting your telephone call history and e-mail notifications. This is actually an online forum for women to get tips regarding temptation (typically seduction from men, however ladies interested in corespondents are actually additionally invited). An additional point I discovered is that Hillary (and also Expense along with his soul concerns) remains in delicate health. If http://viatapetocuri.info/ adored equal rights he might create earnings at Microsoft transparent, guarantee income equality for men and also women, and also deliver Microsoft's family members leave around the industry criterion prepared through firms like Facebook, Instagram, and also Reddit. The religion has actually always replied to objection of the restriction on girls through mentioning that Jesus just picked guys as his apostles. This offers you a crosshair arrow you could utilize to select a particular place from the monitor and also a text carton where you may discuss what the complication is. http://viatapetocuri.info/ returned it to the store i got it from as well as they have actually ended that is flawlessly great, no problems what therefore ever. Bluetooth problems are a common problem from iOS 10.3.2 beta consumers as well as our team intend to summarize a handful of solutions that need to function. Microsoft has actually been actually servicing the concern given that October, when CEO Satya Nadella stated girls in the specialist business must trust in fate as opposed to bring in a scenario for a raising. Once again, I don't have a complication along with dumb publications, however when it is actually a silly publication camouflaged as a Significant Work from Social Past history, all I wish to carry out the whole time is actually tear its own cover-up off.

[ufifaplayers]

Best Apple Arcade Games

Apple Inc. is an American international modern technology firm that focuses on consumer electronics, computer software program, as well as on-line services. Apple is the world's biggest modern technology business by revenue (amounting to $274.5 billion in 2020) and, considering that January 2021, the world's most valuable company. As of 2021, Apple is the world's fourth-largest PC vendor by system sales, as well as fourth-largest smart device maker. It is one of the Huge Five American details technology firms, in addition to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and also Facebook.Apple was started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, as well as Ronald Wayne in 1976 to develop and offer Wozniak's Apple I computer. It was incorporated by Jobs as well as Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1977, and sales of its computers, including the Apple II, grew promptly. They went public in 1980 to instant economic success. Over the next few years, Apple delivered new computer systems including ingenious graphical user interfaces, such as the initial Macintosh, revealed with the seriously well-known advert 1984. Nonetheless, the high rate of its products as well as restricted application library created problems, as did power battles between execs. In 1985, Wozniak departed Apple amicably, while Jobs resigned to discovered NeXT, taking some Apple colleagues with him.As the market for individual computers increased and developed through the 1990s, Apple lost considerable market share to the lower-priced duopoly of Microsoft Windows on Intel PC duplicates. The board recruited CEO Gil Amelio, that prepared the battling company for ultimate success with considerable reforms, product focus and also discharges in his 500 day period. In 1997, Gil purchased NeXT, to resolve Apple's not successful OS strategy as well as revive Steve Jobs, who changed Amelio as CEO later that year. Apple returned to profitability under the rejuvenating Assume various campaign, introducing the iMac and also iPod, opening a retail chain of Apple Shops in 2001, and also getting countless companies to widen their software portfolio. In 2007, the business released the apple iphone to crucial honor and financial success. In 2011, Jobs surrendered as CEO because of health and wellness problems, and also died two months later on. He was been successful by Tim Cook. In August 2018, Apple became the initial openly traded U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion and also the first valued over $2 trillion 2 years later on. It has a high level of brand name commitment and also is placed as the world's most important brand; as of January 2021, there are 1.65 billion Apple products in use worldwide. However, the company gets substantial objection regarding the labor practices of its service providers, its ecological techniques, as well as business values, including anti-competitive actions, and also products sourcing.

Apple Arcade has finally started growing to meet the expectations of users. The service offers more than 100 premium games at the choice of players for a monthly fee. All arcade games are worth playing, but if you do not have the time or ambition to overcome them, the ten should be sufficient. Here are the top ten Apple Arcade games according to their popularity and notes. All these games have a high replayability value and will entertain you, you and your friends and family for a long time. Most of these games are also available on other platforms such as Steam and Epic Games Store.

Exit Gungeon

The rest of the independent favorite Enter The Gungeon may not be quite what the players were waiting. But it's still an exciting adventure. In this one, players embark on a lateral scroll adventure, rather than up and down, eliminating enemies using a variety of creative weapons. Despite the change of perspective, Gungeon is always a game that raises the challenge. And it looks just as charming as the original title. Just make sure you have a controller for this - these contraction skills will be needed to survive the subsequent steps. Consider this as a warning.

grinding wheel

It is difficult to describe the last effort of the studio that has released the episode below and Swords and Sworcery. It contains role play elements and the kind of classic game puzzle game, similar to Puzzle Quest. However, he has several monsters and a hero who is not afraid to decide and cut them into dice. It also has a hand drawn style that stands out from other Apple Arcade offers. It's really a unique effort and it's worth trying.

Sayonara Wild Hearts

In Sayonara Wild Hearts, players will guide a virtual heroine through several scenarios, fighting dangerous enemies while capturing all the hearts she can find. It's a superb game with a memorable soundtrack and kind of engaging gameplay that attracts people to more. Wild Hearts is definitely worth falling in love when you take it.

What is golf?

Call this game Golf with a torsion would be huge euphemism. What is golf? Is a parody based on the physics of all other golf games available. The game is a silly and absurd puzzle game that requires players to take up a series of ridiculous challenges. Players can play golf on a horse, a bird and even a house while browsing obstacles. The game gradually passes from golf as we know it to something indescribable.

Cat Quest II

Cat Quest II is an open-world action RPG that takes place in a world entirely filled with cats and dogs. The game takes place at the height of a war between the cats of Felingard and the dogs of the Empire Lupus. Players endorses the role of the kings of each country as they work together to recover their thrones. Players can explore each kingdom alone or in cooperation with another player. The game offers a variety of monsters and areas to explore in a unique art style.

Mutazione

Mutazione is a mutant sheet rather similar to Night in the Woods. The players play the role of Kai as she sails in a post-apocalyptic world and the gossip of his small town. Kai begins to take care of his sick grandfather in a city of mutants called Mutazione. Once players reach the city, they have to navigate in an immersive history and take care of the gardens scattered in the region to maintain balance and peace in Mutazione.

pilgrims

Pilgrims is an adventure game of cards point clicking. The goal of the game is to navigate the world and find as many solutions as possible to the stories of the different characters you meet. This is not a game that is intended to be beaten but rather replayed again and again. Players use cards to solve problems and progress as their characters argue in the world of the game. There is no correct way to follow for players to explore as they please.

Collector Garden

The World of Manifold Garden is vaguely based on Mr. C. Escher's work. The game plays with the concepts of physics, space and geometry to create a world that repeats itself to infinity. Players can manipulate gravity to solve puzzles and change the appearance of the world around them. At each level of the game, players will have to cultivate a garden to advance in the world and earn new perspectives.

Lego Builder's trip

Lego Builder's Journey combines the creative aspects of other Lego games with a poetic narrative and the meditative possibilities of building a new LEGO creation. The game uses a gameplay based on puzzles to move the players through a series of construction challenges. Throughout this time, the game plays soothing music while accentuating the importance of creativity and game. Players can create a variety of LEGO creations to move in adventure and gain some inspiration for constructions Actual LEGO.

Map of Darkness

If you enjoyed the Cartoon Network Emps of Adventure, Card of Darkness will seem familiar to you. The game was developed by Zach Gage with the help of Odventure Time's Creator Pendleton Ward. The game is an animated adventure-puzzle game. Players need to navigate the world and solve numbers-based cards puzzles to retrieve the dark card. The game offers five bosses, eight environments and tons of unique monsters and equipment that players can use and with whom interact.

_ Robert Workman's originalMessage, updated by DAVY DAVISON_

[adventuresinlibraries]

Raz Kids- Reading Apps

The world of ed-tech is an ever-expanding universe. 

There are apps to teach toddlers and apps for older kids. And then there are apps to teach reading. 

I personally feel strongly that there is absolutely no substitute for reading one-on-one with a child. In scholarly terms, this hand-over-hand reading practice is referred to as direct/explicit instruction. Rupley, Blair, and Nichols (2009).  Children learning to read need guided practice so that they can receive help immediately when they struggle with a word or phoneme. According to  Rupley, Blair, and Nichols “ The key to direct/explicit instruction is the active communication and interaction between teacher and student. This style of teaching can be well structured or less structured in nature.” My gut feeling is that the positive feedback provided by the interaction and the attention the child receives creates a positive feedback loop and is a big part of creating motivated lifelong readers. 

Some of my happiest memories have been working with struggling readers and providing this type of instruction and watching the aha moments and cheering on successes. So, when I started reading about reading apps I was sad.  

However, they have their place in facilitating independent practice, one of the keystones to reading, stressed by experts like  Rupley, Blair, and Nichols. 

Raz Kids Learning A-Z won a 2018 Eddie Award for Educational Software and it is, according to the Raz Kids website it offers a  “teaching product that provides comprehensive leveled reading resources for students. With hundreds of eBooks offered at 29 different levels of reading difficulty, it's easy to put the right content in every student's hands.”

Let’s start with the price. A license for Raz Kids costs 99.00 per year for every 36 students. It is not available for parents to purchase on their own.

Raz Kids or Kids A-Z as it is called once loaded onto a device provides kids with access to a collection of leveled readers. Each book is read aloud, then can be read independently. The books are followed by short comprehension quizzes.

The benefits of this app are access to an immediate paper-free library of books written at an appropriate level for the child; the educator can track students progress working through these leveled readers, making data gathering easier; and the program provides comprehension questions so teachers can assess understanding as well as fluency. And, this app offers materials in Spanish, making it an ideal app to use in some bilingual households where children need reading help but caregivers may not yet be fluent in English. The narration for each story fits the text exactly, helping the reader associate letters with sounds.

The cons are: This app does not provide quality children’s literature! The chunks of text are just right. But when the app is reading aloud the readers are quick and the pacing of the reading is often too fast for beginning readers to follow. And, though there is a lot of importance placed on the comprehension questions, the app offers only multiple choice answers. Open-ended or fill-in-the-blank, cloze style, questions would develop writing and recall skills even more effectively. Also, the app makes it easy to game-the-system by offering the same reward if a reader redoes the module by quick clicking and remembering correct answers to earn stars.

To become truly motivated independent readers kids should be given stories that grab them, with breathtaking art and compelling characters. These stories are not quality children’s literature. 

One of the sets of fiction stories written for level G readers is the Carlos series. This series features a minority protagonist, yay! But Carlos is FLAT, FLAT, FLAT!

In one story, “Welcome Carlos!” Carlos is making a poster for his new school. He has recently moved from Mexico to the United States and has made a poster to introduce himself to the students at his new school.” Carlos has no feelings, quirks, or unique things about him except where he is from. He and his neighbor, Maria, whom he shows his poster to are completely devoid of anything to make them interesting to the reader. 

This app makes navigation easy. The Reading Room icon is a rocket at the left-hand side of the home screen. From there the reader can click on big subject icons to change topics or start a book. 

When reading or listening to the books the reader can move backward and forwards by tapping either side of the app but this is something the reader must intuit. There are no arrows to indicate this option.  

This Academic Choice Award winner is billed for ages 4-10. I was not able to get access to the material at the oldest level to see if the stories got more detailed and compelling as the app is locked by the educational institution that pays the licensing fee. This drives home the point that for most people this is strictly a teaching tool and not something a child would pick up for pleasure. 

Other apps I liked better were 

Reading Eggs an Ed Tech Cool Toy Award Winner for 2019

Mainly a phonics teaching tool, this app has is not free, At 9.95 per month for one child it promises to get kids reading in two weeks. It is available for parents, which means kids can start using it before they start a program of formalized education. The interface is playful and reminds one of Candy Land. Children progress along a phonics path, going through multiple modules to test fluency and learn letter recognition and later, phoneme patterns. Like most apps, it is easy to repeat modules for a higher score. Once a module is complete a child earns a new “pet” This creature appears as a repeating animation. Children can replay this animation for a chuckle whenever they want. 

Rivet 

This app was started by a group of engineers for Google who thought that machine learning could be used to teach reading even more effectively. It only works on Android and Fire devices right now. But, more is coming. 

This free app for android and offers access to 3,500 leveled readers. The stories vary but many use real books and some quality art pulled from the public domain. Most stories about people use photographs as illustrations so most of the art isn’t really fantastic to look at. However, the characters are approached with humor and the plots offer a few more contradictions and twists and turns. This, in turn, creates characters who are rounder and more relatable, such as in the story where Gabriel calls Papa Bee to ask about marriage. Gabriel asks what Papa Bee thinks about marriage. The pictures, mostly of Papa Bee’s world give the reader the idea that Papa Bee is the main character and the story is told from his point of view even though the language used refers equally to all characters and indicates a third-person narrator. Papa Bee says thinks about how good Mama Bee is to him and says “Marriage is great”  Then he thinks about when Mama Bee is sick and crabby. Mama Bee is shown sitting in a chair in her bathrobe with a hot water bottle, a thermometer, and an unpleased expression. He repeats his opinion that “Marriage is great!” The questions go on like this, for every positive statement, Papa Bee internally recalls a negative counterpoint but sticks to his story. In the end, when Papa Bee hangs up the phone the reader realizes that his family has been watching the whole conversation and they are pleased with his monitored responses. The situation is silly, the pictures introduce sight gags to reinforce the humor inherent in the contradictions, and the characters are real people. Readers will relate to watching family interact at less than perfect moments. And, Gabriel’s questions show a mentoring relationship that is nice to watch. The family comes across as being not quite round, but their sense of humor makes them less than flat.

The app is easy to navigate and provides stories about many different topics. Navigation within a story is done with large blue arrows to flip pages and the reader controls the pacing. There is an atomic cloud that hovers over the page and readers can drag it to a word they need clarification on. Tapping the top of the screen brings down the home and settings icons. The algorithm picks up on the reader’s choices to target selections to their taste. A child who chose a book about mermaids receives books about unicorns and rainbows in the next go but a child who chooses a non-fiction text about animals gets similar content suggestions afterward. 

The downsides to this app are that it collects data, the function to have the computer read is clunky and requires readers to click every word for a word-for-word narration of the story. Kids have a read-aloud option that records audio, which on one side is desirable because kids are encouraged to read out loud and reinforce fluency feedback as they listen to themselves, but digital privacy and footprint may be a concern. It does not quiz readers so this may not be as useful as an educational tool. But as far as providing independent reading practice for 4-10-year-olds it’s higher quality than Raz kids, in my opinion. 

William H. Rupley, Timothy R. Blair & William D. Nichols (2009) Effective Reading Instruction for Struggling Readers: The Role of Direct/Explicit Teaching, Reading & Writing Quarterly, 25:2-3, 125-138, DOI: 10.1080/10573560802683523

[fitdiettrends]

Fusion Rise Keto - Makes You Lose Weight

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More info at https://www.fitdiettrends.com/fusion-rise-keto/

[jacobhinkley]

Litecoin [LTC] is more centralized as the creator decides the course of the currency – Says Charlie Lee

Charlie Lee, the Founder of Litecoin in his recent chat with Dr. Julian Hosp, the Co-Founder of TenX started off by introducing the Litecoin’s motive. According to its creator, Litecoin was created to compliment the Bitcoin and move hand in hand. He developed Litecoin while working for Google as his side project that wasn’t disclosed to the company and in his words, they didn’t really care about it either.

He further talks about the motive of Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. According to him, Bitcoin Cash aims to replace the Bitcoin and be a better version of Bitcoin. In the current scenario, the Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are very similar as both altcoins charge low fees and are faster as not a lot of blocks are being used. He finds that there is a trade-off between what Bitcoin Cash wants and what Litecoin aims at doing.

He added:

“Bitcoin Cash supporters want it to replace the brand of Bitcoin but it’s quite silly because the structure of the currency is similar to Litecoin and does not support such a thing”

Litecoin is more centralized as the creator has the power to decide the course of the currency, says Charlie Lee. He believes this makes the Litecoin more efficient. In a hypothetical situation, if the government coerces Charlie Lee to destroy Litecoin, it could happen given its more centralized nature. His decisions can hurt a few for a cause aiming at Litecoin’s future.

He further draws a parallel between the concept of Litecoin and Bitcoin with Democracy and Dictatorship. In his opinion, democracy is better but less efficient so there is always a trade-off and Litecoin chooses the side of a centralized more efficient structure.

Charlie Lee did step away for a while as he aimed to focus on Google and making Bitcoin more accessible. He says in the future he will have to move away from the leadership as a currency’s true nature is to be decentralized and it is possible only if he leaves his current place. His first step was to sell his stash of Litecoin last year. His sale did not affect the market and it was the right move from the point of long-run according to him.

His main aim right now is merchant adoption so that people can actually use Litecoin for transactions which require a connection with the fiat world as the volatility of cryptocurrencies make it hard for merchants to hold on to cryptocurrency.

The Debit crypto cards help people access to debit cards backed by cryptocurrencies which is a true stepping stone and in future Charlie hopes that merchants will accept cryptocurrency and then cryptocurrencies could be used directly. The end goal is that merchants will accept Litecoin and users will use Litecoin.

Stability in the cryptocurrency is the key to Charlie’s vision. He feels in future the fiat currencies will be more volatile and will see higher rates of inflation than in cryptocurrencies.

He also shares his views about the Litecoin and Bitcoin being better than Government issued cryptocurrency as they will be more decentralized.

Dr. Julian Hosp then questions Charlie Lee on why is Litecoin Debit card is better and why should people use it instead of other crypto backed debit cards to which Charlie replies with humor:

” The Litecoin is much cooler and provides the user the freedom to use any of the cryptocurrency on it”

After this point, the conversation shifts to TenX where Hosp shares his vision of ‘quality over quantity’. He looks forward to adding valuable currencies on the TenX platform and not currencies that are just highly priced on the CoinMarketCap.

He further discussed the issues with the third parties and how the banking license would help clear things out for them and will help them give out a date which they can meet this time, unlike the last three times.

As they were done discussing their products, the conversation then flowed towards a more personal note where Hosp was seen asking Charlie how he deals with haters to which his reply was very witty:

“I block very aggressively!”

Charlie responds based on his feelings and he confesses in the chat that he feels he responds too much sometimes. He usually faces issues when people ask him about other coins on Twitter. His opinion about a few coins sometimes is negative which brings on a lot of attack on him from users over various online forums. He has never thought about changing the consensus algorithm and thinks the Litecoin mining is one of the strongest out there.

The post Litecoin [LTC] is more centralized as the creator decides the course of the currency – Says Charlie Lee appeared first on AMBCrypto.

Litecoin [LTC] is more centralized as the creator decides the course of the currency – Says Charlie Lee published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions

[reputationiseverything]

How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game

email marketing for small business

Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.

And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.

A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.

Can you guess what happened to my traffic?

Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going to guess that it went up.

Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.

My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.

I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?

What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?

But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.

A new trend

I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.

When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.

Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.

But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?

Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.

Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search traffic.

Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?

And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.

On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.

In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.

But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.

Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.

And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.

But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I would lose a ton of money.

I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.

So what did I do?

I took matters into my own hands

Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still generate leads for my business.

In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.

Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.

In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.

And it’s not just Google either. Facebook Ads keep getting more expensive as well.

I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.

So, what did I do?

I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)

I went on my mission

With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.

Here were the criteria that we were looking for:

Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic

Sites that didn’t need to continually produce more content to get more traffic

Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic (we both saw social traffic dying)

Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past or present

Sites that didn’t leverage marketing

In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.

Do you know what we figured out?

I’ll give you a hint.

Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.

Do you know how they are naturally popular?

It comes down to building a good product.

That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?

That’s when Andrew and I stumbled upon Ubersuggest.

Now the Ubersuggest you see today isn’t what it looked like in February 2017 when I bought it.

It used to be a simple tool that just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.

Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.

All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.

The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?

The term was “Ubersuggest”.

In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.

Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.

In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.

It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.

Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.

As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.

And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.

Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?

It continually goes up and to the right.

Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the results I am generating.

As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.

Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.

Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the tool:

Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs

Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs

Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs

Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs

Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.

It was at that point in my career, I realized that people love tools.

I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?

How to build tools without hiring developers or spending lots of money

What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.

You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.

And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.

So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?

You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.

Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.

And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.

Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/

Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.

In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.

Conclusion

I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google and they have built a great product.

But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.

That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.

Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO, paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing product or service.

So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.

Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.

What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your site?

PS: If you aren’t sure what type of tool you should add to your site, leave a comment and I will see if I can give you any ideas. 🙂

Google

[reviewandbonuss]

How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game

Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.

And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.

A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.

Can you guess what happened to my traffic?

Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going to guess that it went up.

Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.

My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.

I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?

What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?

But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.

A new trend

I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.

When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.

Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.

But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?

Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.

Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search traffic.

Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?

And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.

On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.

In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.

But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.

Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.

And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.

But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I would lose a ton of money.

I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.

So what did I do?

I took matters into my own hands

Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still generate leads for my business.

In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.

Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.

In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.

And it’s not just Google either. Facebook Ads keep getting more expensive as well.

I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.

So, what did I do?

I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)

I went on my mission

With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.

Here were the criteria that we were looking for:

Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic

Sites that didn’t need to continually produce more content to get more traffic

Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic (we both saw social traffic dying)

Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past or present

Sites that didn’t leverage marketing

In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.

Do you know what we figured out?

I’ll give you a hint.

Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.

Do you know how they are naturally popular?

It comes down to building a good product.

That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?

That’s when Andrew and I stumbled upon Ubersuggest.

Now the Ubersuggest you see today isn’t what it looked like in February 2017 when I bought it.

It used to be a simple tool that just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.

Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.

All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.

The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?

The term was “Ubersuggest”.

In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.

Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.

In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.

It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.

Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.

As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.

And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.

Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?

It continually goes up and to the right.

Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the results I am generating.

As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.

Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.

Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the tool:

Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs

Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs

Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs

Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs

Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.

It was at that point in my career, I realized that people love tools.

I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?

How to build tools without hiring developers or spending lots of money

What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.

You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.

And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.

So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?

You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.

Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.

And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.

Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/

Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.

In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.

Conclusion

I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google and they have built a great product.

But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.

That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.

Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO, paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing product or service.

So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.

Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.

What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your site?

The post How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game appeared first on Neil Patel.

[sdfsystems-blog]

THINGS TO DISCUSS WITH YOUR WEB DEVELOPER BEFORE YOU START

If you’re designing a new website or online store, and you need a web developer. You might need them to develop a site from start. Or maybe you just need them to work through some tweaks, changes, issues, or extra functionality.

I’ve found that an open conversation about these items can start a project off on the right foot.

1. How Will We Communicate?

How will you communicate while working on the project? Slack? Phone calls? Texts? Emails? PM software? Just as importantly: How often will you communicate? Every day? Once a week? At kickoff, and then not again until QA? If you’re doing a daily check-in, will it be a two-sentence email or a 15-minute phone call? What’s the plan in case of emergencies?

You want to have a good rapport with your developer, and to accomplish that, you need an established mode of communication. Usually, a phone call is helpful to develop an initial personal connection and to make sure it’s a good personality fit.

During development, work to strike a balance between checking in too much and too little. Too much and you’re micro-managing. Too little and the developer might not stay on track. It’s best to set the expectations at the top and stick to them.

2. How Will You Manage the Project?

Where are the files and login credentials the developer will need? Where will you track tasks, milestones, and deadlines? What software will you use? Basecamp? Trello? Asana? A spreadsheet or Google Doc? Basically, define the central hub for everything related to the project.

3. Who’s Calling the Shots?

Are you the final decision maker on the project? Is there a UI/UX team involved? Is there anyone else who has input on decisions? Is there a marketing team or a manager who wants to weigh in on decisions? Is anyone else other than you going to be giving direction directly to the developer? When does the client come in, and how many decisions does the client get to make? Will the client have direct communication with the developer?

4. How Should the Developer Handle Assumptions and Small Decisions?

How much freedom does the developer have while interpreting designs? Should they build the website pixel-perfect according to the designs, or should they make small assumptions around consistency and reusability of sections? If you’ve designed a responsive site, have you designed for all breakpoints? Have you provided notes regarding animations, transitions, and hover effects? Have you designed validation states for fields? (i.e. the popups: “Password invalid.” or “Username doesn’t exist”.) If you haven’t, is the developer free to make decisions or suggestions?

5. What is the timeline?

What’s the hard deadline for the project, and what’s the soft deadline? Is there a major press hit happening that the site needs to be launched for? If the deadline is ambitious, is there a way to launch it in phases? What’s the expectation for responding to quick changes? One week turnaround? Less than an hour?

6. What’s the Structure of the Scope, Contract, and Payment Structure?

What’s the project fee? What’s the benchmark for the end of the project? What is included in the scope of the project? When does payment go out? Are you hiring the developer to do the project at an hourly or fixed rate?

Overall, setting expectations and communication are critical things here. It can feel a bit silly to discuss how you’re going to talk to each other during a project, especially if you already have a good rapport. But it’s always good to just set expectations ahead of time, so you don’t end up inside your own horror story.

Are you looking to hire a professional web developer who can handle all your tasks carefully? Contact Us now to find out how we can work together.

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The Foilies 2019

Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency

The cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese American family set in Orlando, Florida, in the late 1990s.

In a January episode of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, the Huang family’s two youngest children—overachievers Evan and Emery—decide if they sprint on all their homework, they’ll have time to plan their father’s birthday party.

“Like the time we knocked out two English papers, a science experiment, and built the White House out of sugar cubes,” Evan said. “It opened up our Sunday for filing Freedom of Information requests.”

“They may not have figured out who shot JFK,” Emery added. “But we will.”

The eldest child, teenage slacker Eddie, concluded with a sage nod, “You know, once in a while, it’s good to know nerds.”

Amen to that. Around the world, nerds of all ages are using laws like the United States’ Freedom of Information Act (and state-level equivalent laws) to pry free secrets and expose the inner workings of our democracy. Each year, open government advocates celebrate these heroes during Sunshine Week, an annual advocacy campaign on transparency.

But the journalists and researchers who rely on these important measures every day can’t help but smirk at the boys’ scripted innocence. Too often, government officials will devise novel and outrageous ways to reject requests for information or otherwise stymie the public’s right to know. Even today—20 years after the events set in the episode—the White House continues to withhold key documents from the Kennedy assassination files.

Since 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, privacy and government transparency in the digital age) has published The Foilies to recognize the bad actors who attempted to thwart the quests for truth of today’s Evans and Emerys. With these tongue-in-cheek awards, we call out attempts to block transparency, retaliation against those who exercise their rights to information, and the most ridiculous examples of incompetence by government officials who handle these public records.

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award -  City of Greenfield, California

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

Sunshine laws? Tech giants think they can just blot those out with secretive contracts. But two nonprofit groups—Working Partnerships and the First Amendment Coalition—are fighting this practice in California by suing the city of San Jose over an agreement with Google that prevents city officials from sharing the public impacts of development deals, circumventing the California Public Records Act.

Google’s proposed San Jose campus is poised to have a major effect on the city’s infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. Yet, according to the organization’s lawsuit, records analyzing issues of public importance such as traffic impacts and environmental compliance were among the sorts of discussions Google demanded be made private under their non-disclosure agreements.

And it’s not just Google using these tactics. An agreement between Amazon and Virginia includes a provision that the state will give the corporate giant—which is placing a major campus in the state—a heads-up when anyone files a public records request asking for information about them. The Columbia Journalism Review reported Facebook has also used this increasingly common strategy for companies to keep cities quiet and the public in the dark about major construction projects.

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

Courtesy of National Security Counselors

After suing the CIA to get access to information about Trump’s classified briefings, Kel McClahanan of the National Security Law Center was expecting the agency to send over eight agreed-upon documents.

What he was not expecting was for the files—each between three and nine pages each—-to be spread out across six separate CD-ROMs, each burned within minutes of each other, making for perhaps the most unnecessary box set in the history of the compact disc.

What makes this “extra silly,” McClanahan said, is that the CIA has previously complained about how burdensome and costly fulfilling requests can be. Yet the CIA could have easily combined several requests onto the same disc and saved themselves some time and resources. After all, a a standard CD-ROM can hold 700 MB, and all of the files took only 304 MB of space.

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

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Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com

After repealing the Open Internet Order and ending net neutrality, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai doubled down on his efforts to ruin online culture. He released a cringe-inducing YouTube video titled “7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality" that featured his own rendition of the infamous “Harlem Shake” meme. (For the uninitiated, the meme is characterized by one person subtly dancing in a room of people to Baauer’s track “Harlem Shake.” Then the bass drops and the crowd goes nuts, often with many people in costumes.)

Muckrock editor JPat Brown filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails related to the video, but the FCC rejected the request, claiming the communications were protected “deliberative” records.

Brown appealed the decision, and the FCC responded by releasing all the email headers, while redacting the contents, claiming that anything more would cause  “foreseeable harm.” Brown did not relent, and a year later the FCC capitulated and released the unredacted emails.

“So, what did these emails contain that was so potentially damaging that it was worth risking a potential FOIA lawsuit over?” Brown writes. “Pai was curious when it was going live, and the FCC wanted to maintain a veto power over the video if they didn’t like it.” The most ridiculous redaction of all was a tiny black box in an email from the FCC media director. Once removed, all that was revealed was a single word: “OK.”

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

When President Trump tweets attacks about the intelligence community, transparency groups and journalists often file FOIA requests (and subsequently lawsuits) seeking the documents that underpin his claims. The question that often comes up: Do Trump’s smartphone rants break the seal of secrecy on confidential programs?

The answer seems to be no. Multiple judges have sided with Justice Department lawyers, concluding that his Twitter disclosures do not mean that the government has to confirm or deny whether records about those activities exist.

In a FOIA case seeking documents that would show whether Trump is under investigation, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that the President’s tweets to that effect are “speculation.” Similarly, in a FOIA suit to get more information about the widely publicized dossier of potential ties between Trump and Russia, U.S. District Judge Amir Mehta said that the President’s statements are political rather than “assertions of pure fact.”

And so, whether Trump actually knows what he’s talking about remains an open question.

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

One of the benefits of public records laws is they allow almost anyone—regardless of legal acumen—to force government agencies to be more transparent, usually without having to file a lawsuit.

But in Washington State, filing a public records request can put the requester at legal risk of being named in a lawsuit should someone else not want the records to be made public.

This is what happened to Sarah Schacht, a Seattle-based open government advocate and consultant. For years Schacht has used public records to advocate for better food safety rules in King County, an effort that led to the adoption of food safety placards found in restaurants in the region.

After Schacht filed another round of requests with the county health department, she received a legal threat in November 2018 from Stanford Law School professor Daniel Ho’s attorney threatening to sue her unless she abandoned her request. Apparently, Ho has been working with the health department to study the new food safety and placard regulations. He had written draft studies that he shared with the health department, making them public records.

Ho’s threat amounted to an effort to intimidate Schacht from receiving public records, probably because he had not formally published his studies first. Regardless of motive, the threat was an awful look. But even when faced with the threat, Schacht refused to abandon her request.

Fortunately, the lawsuit never materialized, and Schacht was able to receive the records. Although Ho’s threats made him look like a bully, the real bad actor in this scenario is Washington State’s public records law. The state’s top court has interpreted the law to require parties seeking to stop agencies from releasing records (sometimes called reverse-FOIA suits) to also sue the original requester along with the government agency.

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

Courtesy of Jessica Huseman

ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman has been digging deep into the child welfare system and what happens when child abuse results in death. While following up on a series of strangulations, she requested a copy of a case file from the St. Joseph County Superior Court in Indiana. Apparently, the clerk on the other end simply took the entire file and ran everything through a scanner. The problem was that the file contained a CD-ROM, and that’s not how CD-ROMs work. “Well this is the first time this had happened,” Huseman posted to Twitter, along with the blotchy black-and-white image of the top of the disc. “They scanned a CD as part of my FOI and didn’t give me its contents. Cool cool.”

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

As tech companies experiment with autonomous vehicles on public roadways, reporters are keeping tabs on how often these cars are involved in collisions. That’s why The Information’s Matt Drange has been filing records requests for the crash data held by state agencies. Some government departments have started claiming that every line of the dataset is its own, individual record and subject to a copy fee. Our winner, the Michigan State Police, proposed to charge Drange a 25-cent fee for each of a 1.9 million-line dataset, plus $20 for a thumbdrive, for a grand total of $485,645.24, with half of it due up front.  Runners-up that quoted similar line-by-line charges include the Indiana State Police ($346,000) and the North Carolina Department of Transportation ($82,000). Meanwhile, Florida’s government released its detailed dataset at no charge at all.

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

In 2016, the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), an infamous neo-Nazi group, staged a demonstration at the California State Capitol. Counter-protesters fiercely opposed the demonstration, and the scene soon descended into chaos, leaving multiple people injured. When the dust settled, a member of the public (disclosure: also a co-author of this piece) filed a California Public Records Act request to obtain a copy of the permit the white nationalist group filed for its rally. The California Highway Patrol rejected the request for this normally available document, claiming it was related to a criminal investigation.

Two years later, evidence emerged during criminal proceedings that a CHP detective used the public records request as a bargaining chip in a phone call with the TWP protest leader, who was initially reluctant to provide information. The officer told him how the request might reveal his name. “We don’t have a reason to...uh...deny [the request],” the officer said according a transcript of the call. But once the organizer decided to cooperate, the officer responded, “I’m gonna suggest that we hold that or redact your name or something...uh...until this thing gets resolved.” In light of these new facts, the First Amendment Coalition filed a new request for the same document. It too was denied.

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

In defiance of the law enforcement lobby, California legislators passed a law (SB 1421) requiring police and sheriffs to disclose officer misconduct records in response to California Public Records Act requests. These documents, often contained in personnel files, had historically been untouchable by members of the public and the press.

Almost immediately, police unions across the Golden State began to launch lawsuits to undermine these new transparency measures. But the Inglewood Police Department takes the prize for its efforts to evade scrutiny. Mere weeks before the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2019, the agency began destroying records that were set to become publicly available.

“This premise that there was an intent to beat the clock is ridiculous,” Inglewood Mayor James T Butts Jr. told the LA Times in defending the purge. We imagine Butts would find it equally ridiculous to suggest that the fact he had also been a cop for more than 30 years, including serving in Inglewood and later as police chief of Santa Monica, may have factored into his support for the destruction of records.

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

One Wednesday morning in April, 15 Halifax police officers raided the home of a teenage boy and his family. “They read us our rights and told us not to talk," his mother would later tell CBC. “They rifled through everything. They turned over mattresses, they took drawers and emptied out drawers, they went through personal papers, pictures. It was totally devastating and traumatic."

You might well wonder, what was the Jack Bauer-class threat to geo-political stability? Nothing at all: The Canadian teen had just downloaded a host of public records from openly available URLs on a government website.

At the heart of the ordeal was some seriously terrible security practices by Nova Scotia officials. The website created to host the province’s public records was designed in such a way that every request and response had a nearly identical URL and placed no technical restrictions on the public’s ability to access any of the requests. This meant that regular public records requests and individuals’ requests to access government files about them, which included private information, were all stored together and available on the internet for anyone, including Google’s webcrawler, to access. All that was necessary was changing a number identifying the request at the end of the URL.

What Nova Scotian officials should have done upon learning about leaks in their own public records website’s problems was apologize to the public, thank the teen who found these gaping holes in their digital security practices, and implement proper restrictions to protect people’s private information. They didn’t do any of that, and instead sought to improperly bring the force of Canada’s criminal hacking law down on the very person who brought the problem to light.

The whole episode—which thankfully ended with the government dropping the charges—was a chilling example of how officials will often overreact and blame innocent third parties when trying to cover up for their own failings. This horror show just happened to involve public records. Do better, Canada.

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

When self-described transparency advocate and civic hacker Matt Chapman sent his request to Seattle seeking the email metadata from all city email addresses (from/to/BCC addresses, time, date, etc), he expected some pushback, because it does sound like an incredible amount of data to wrangle.

Seattle’s response: All the data can be yours for a measly $33 million. Officials estimated that it would take 320 years worth of staff time to review the roughly 32 million emails responsive to Chapman’s request. Oh, and they estimated charging an additional $21,600 for storage costs associated with the records. The fee request is the second highest in the history of The Foilies (the Department of Defense won in 2016 for estimating it would take $660 million to produce records on a particular computer forensic tool).

Then the city did something entirely unexpected: It revisited the fee estimate and determined that the first batch of records would cost only $1.25 to process. We get it, math is hard.

But wait—that’s not all. After paying for the batches of records with a series of $1.25 checks, Chapman received more than he ever bargained for. Rather than disclosing just the metadata for all 32 million emails, Seattle had given him the first 256 characters of every email. Those snippets included passwords, credit card numbers, and other personally identifying information.

What followed was a series of conversations between Chapman, Seattle’s lawyers, and the city’s IT folks to ensure he’d deleted the records and that the city hadn’t just breached its own data via a public records request.

Ultimately, Seattle officials in January 2018 began sending the data to Chapman once more, this time without the actual content of email messages. The whole episode doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Seattle officials’ ability to do basic math, comply with the public records law or protect sensitive information.

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

Seattle isn’t the only city to stumble in response to Matt Chapman’s public records requests for email metadata. The Vermont governor’s office also wins for its scissor-and-glue approach to releasing electronic information.

Rather than export the email information as a spreadsheet, the Vermont governor’s office told Chapman it had five interns (three of whom were unpaid) working six hours each, literally “cutting and pasting the emails from paper copies.” Next thing Chapman knew, he had a 43-page hodgepodge collage of email headers correlating with one day’s worth of messages. The governor’s attorney told Chapman it would cost $1,200 to process three more days’ worth of emails.

Chapman pushed back and provided his own instructions on exporting the data using a computer and not, you know, scissors and glue. Sure enough, he received a 5,500-line spreadsheet a couple weeks later at no charge.

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

In the last few years, we’ve seen some great resignation letters from public servants, ranging from Defense Secretary James Mattis telling President Trump “It’s not me, it’s you” to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ forced resignation.

But the Trump DOJ seems to have had enough of the tradition and has now determined that U.S. Attorney resignation letters are private in their entirety and cannot be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, civil servants should have their private information protected by their employer, but that’s precisely what redactions should be used to protect.

Past administrations have released resignation letters that are critical of executive branch leaders. The change in policy raises the question: What are departing U.S. Attorneys now saying that the government wants to hide?

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

After the tragic Parkland shooting, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel went to court to force the Broward County School Board to hand over documents detailing the shooter’s education and disciplinary record. A judge agreed and ordered the release, as long as sensitive information was redacted.

But when reporters copied and pasted the file into another document, they found that the content under the redactions was still there and readable. They broke the story of how the school denied the shooter therapeutic services and alternative education accommodations, but then uploaded the school board’s report with working redactions.  

Rather than simply do better with double-checking their redactions next time, the school board struck back at the newspaper. They petitioned the court to hold the newspaper in contempt and to prevent anyone from reporting on the legally obtained information. Although the local judge didn’t issue a fine, she lambasted the paper and threatened to dictate exactly what the paper could report about the case in the future (which is itself an unconstitutional prior restraint).

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award -  City of Greenfield, California

The Monterey County Weekly unexpectedly found itself in court after the city of Greenfield, California sued to keep the newspaper from publishing documents about the surprising termination of its city manager.

When Editor Sara Rubin asked the interim city manager for the complaint the outgoing city manager filed after his termination, she got nothing but crickets. But then, an envelope containing details of a potential city political scandal appeared on the doorstep of one of the paper’s columnists.

The weekly reached out to the city for comment and began preparing for its normal Wednesday print deadline. Then, the morning of publication, the paper got a call saying that they were due in court. The city sued to block publication of the documents, to have the documents returned and to have the paper reveal the identity of the leaker.

Attorney Kelly Aviles of the First Amendment Coalition gave everyone a fast lesson in the First Amendment, pointing out that the paper had every right to publish. The judge ruled in the paper’s favor, and the city ended up paying all of the Monterey County Weekly’s attorney fees.

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

Brigham Young University’s Police Department is certified by the state,* has the powers of the state, but says that they’re not actually a part of government for purposes of the Utah transparency law.

After the Salt Lake Tribune exposed that the University punished survivors of sexual assault for coming forward and reporting, the paper tried to get records of communications between the police department and the school’s federally required sexual assault coordinator. BYU pushed back, saying that the police department is not subject to Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act because the police department is privately funded.

This actually turns out to be a trickier legal question than you’d expect. Brigham Young University itself isn’t covered by the state law because it is a private school. But the university police force was created by an act of the Utah legislature, and the law covers entities “established by the government to carry out the public’s business.” Investigating crime and arresting people seems like the public’s business.

Last summer, a judge ruled that the police department is clearly a state agency, but the issue is now on appeal at the Utah Supreme Court. Sometime this year we should learn if the police are a part of the government or not.

*Because BYU police failed to comply with state law, and was not responsive to an internal investigation, the Utah Office of Public Safety notified the department on February 20th that the BYU police department will be stripped of its certification on September 1, 2019. The University police also plan to appeal this decision.

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

Congressional elections can turn ugly, but the opponent of newly elected U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger got a boost when the U.S. Postal Service released Spanberger’s entire personnel file, including her security clearance application, without redaction of highly sensitive personal information.

When a third party requests a person’s federal employment file without the employee’s permission, the government agency normally releases only a bare-bones record of employment dates, according to a Postal Service spokesperson. But somehow Rep. Spanberger wasn’t afforded these protections, and the Postal Service has potentially made this mistake in a “small number” of other cases this year. Security clearance applications (Form SF-86) are supposed to be analyzed and investigated by the FBI, raising questions about how the FOIA officer got the information in the first place. The Postal Service has apologized for the mistake, which they say is human error, but maybe security clearance applications should be kept just as secure as the state secrets the clearance is meant to protect.

The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass, Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, Frank Stanton Fellow Camille Fischer, and Activist Hayley Tsukayama. Illustrations by EFF Art Director Hugh D'Andrade. For more on our work visit eff.org.

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6 Things To Discuss With Your Web Developer Before Kickoff

So you’re designing a new website or online store, and you need a web developer. You might need them to develop a site from scratch. Or maybe you just need them to work through some tweaks, changes, issues, or extra functionality.

Either way, your relationship with your web developer can be difficult to manage. I’m a developer, so I know that there are so, so many ways the relationship can fall apart:

Missed deadlines

Lack of communication

Slow communication

No communication

Developer over-promises

Developer under-delivers

Developer disappears

Loosely defined scope

Lack of protocol for small assumptions/decisions

Bugs or issues don’t get fixed

Practically every designer I work with has shared a horror story involving one of those things. In order to avoid becoming a horror story myself, I’ve developed a handy list of pre-kickoff discussion items to help us avoid these kinds of issues.

Before we get into it, let’s be clear: This is not a cure-all for all designer/developer relationships. At the end of the day, it’s still a human relationship—it’s complicated. But I’ve found that an open conversation about these items can start a project off on the right foot.

1. How Will We Communicate?

How will you communicate while working on the project? Slack? Phone calls? Texts? Emails? PM software? Just as importantly: How often will you communicate? Every day? Once a week? At kickoff, and then not again until QA? If you’re doing a daily check-in, will it be a two-sentence email, or a 15-minute phone call? What’s the plan in case of emergencies?

More communication does not always equal better communication

There are no wrong answers here, as long as you set expectations at beginning. But remember: More communication does not always equal better communication.

Why This Matters

You want to have a good rapport with your developer, and to accomplish that, you need an established mode of communication. Usually a phone call is helpful to develop an initial personal connection, and to make sure it’s a good personality fit.

During development, work to strike a balance between checking in too much and too little. Too much and you’re micro-managing. Too little and the developer might not stay on track. It’s best to set the expectations at the top and stick to them.

2. How Will You Manage the Project?

Where are the files and login credentials the developer will need? Where will you track tasks, milestones, and deadlines? What software will you use? Basecamp? Trello? Asana? A spreadsheet or Google Doc? Basically, define the central hub for everything related to the project.

Why This Matters

During the project, your project management and communication should be centralized and trackable. A lot of time can be lost in the back-and-forth of looking for files, check-ins, updates, progress, questions, decisions, etc.  That’s why it’s important to establish where the developer can find everything they need.

3. Who’s Calling the Shots?

Are you the final decision maker on the project? Is there a UI/UX team involved? Is there anyone else who has input on decisions? Is there a marketing team or a manager who wants to weigh in on decisions? Is anyone else other than you going to be giving direction directly to the developer? When does the client come in, and how many decisions does the client get to make? Will the client have direct communication with the developer?

Why This Matters

You don’t want to backpedal on development, or have your developer redo work. To avoid that, it’s important that every stakeholder is aware of all relevant decisions—and that each decision is recorded in a single, central location.

4. How Should the Developer Handle Assumptions and Small Decisions?

How much freedom does the developer have while interpreting designs? Should they build the website pixel-perfect according to the designs, or should they make small assumptions around consistency and reusability of sections? If you’ve designed a responsive site, have you designed for all breakpoints? Have you provided notes regarding animations, transitions, and hover effects? Have you designed validation states for fields? (i.e. the popups: “Password invalid.” or “Username doesn’t exist”.) If you haven’t, is the developer free to make decisions or suggestions?

Why This Matters

Very often, designers are dissatisfied when a website doesn’t closely match the designs—or conversely, when the site too closely follows the designs, to the detriment of its performance or the project’s timeline. At the beginning, define your intended level of detail. It makes for a much smoother QA process.

5. What is the timeline?

What’s the hard deadline for the project, and what’s the soft deadline? Is there a major press hit happening that the site needs to be launched for? If the deadline is ambitious, is there a way to launch it in phases? What’s the expectation for responding to quick changes? One week turnaround? Less than an hour?

Why This Matters

it really doesn’t help to create artificial hard deadlines…honesty is the best policy

If there’s a hard deadline, make the developer aware of it, and make sure to leave time for proper testing. After the site launches, know that most developers can’t be on call at all hours to make changes. Waiting for a developer to make a fix can be frustrating, but even small requests require maintaining version control, launching the development environment, connecting to the server, deploying to the production site, etc. Determine ahead of time how long you expect fixes and changes to take, and take stock of the priority level of each task.

Also, it really doesn’t help to create artificial hard deadlines. Just be transparent with your developer and trust them to deliver accordingly. Again, you’re building a relationship, here. Honesty is the best policy.  

6. What’s the Structure of the Scope, Contract, and Payment Structure?

What’s the project fee? What’s the benchmark for the end of the project? What is included in the scope of the project? When does payment go out? Are you hiring the developer to do the project at an hourly or fixed rate?

Why This Matters

The last thing you want is a developer getting a site 95% of the way there, and then not launching the project due to a discrepancy in the scope/contract/payment.

Conclusion

Overall, setting expectations and communication are the critical things here. It can feel a bit silly to discuss how you’re going to talk to each other during a project, especially if you already have a good rapport. But it’s always good to just set expectations ahead of time, so you don’t end up inside your own a horror story.

  Featured image via Unsplash

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[iyarpage]

6 Things To Discuss With Your Web Developer Before Kickoff

So you’re designing a new website or online store, and you need a web developer. You might need them to develop a site from scratch. Or maybe you just need them to work through some tweaks, changes, issues, or extra functionality.

Either way, your relationship with your web developer can be difficult to manage. I’m a developer, so I know that there are so, so many ways the relationship can fall apart:

Missed deadlines

Lack of communication

Slow communication

No communication

Developer over-promises

Developer under-delivers

Developer disappears

Loosely defined scope

Lack of protocol for small assumptions/decisions

Bugs or issues don’t get fixed

Practically every designer I work with has shared a horror story involving one of those things. In order to avoid becoming a horror story myself, I’ve developed a handy list of pre-kickoff discussion items to help us avoid these kinds of issues.

Before we get into it, let’s be clear: This is not a cure-all for all designer/developer relationships. At the end of the day, it’s still a human relationship—it’s complicated. But I’ve found that an open conversation about these items can start a project off on the right foot.

1. How Will We Communicate?

How will you communicate while working on the project? Slack? Phone calls? Texts? Emails? PM software? Just as importantly: How often will you communicate? Every day? Once a week? At kickoff, and then not again until QA? If you’re doing a daily check-in, will it be a two-sentence email, or a 15-minute phone call? What’s the plan in case of emergencies?

More communication does not always equal better communication

There are no wrong answers here, as long as you set expectations at beginning. But remember: More communication does not always equal better communication.

Why This Matters

You want to have a good rapport with your developer, and to accomplish that, you need an established mode of communication. Usually a phone call is helpful to develop an initial personal connection, and to make sure it’s a good personality fit.

During development, work to strike a balance between checking in too much and too little. Too much and you’re micro-managing. Too little and the developer might not stay on track. It’s best to set the expectations at the top and stick to them.

2. How Will You Manage the Project?

Where are the files and login credentials the developer will need? Where will you track tasks, milestones, and deadlines? What software will you use? Basecamp? Trello? Asana? A spreadsheet or Google Doc? Basically, define the central hub for everything related to the project.

Why This Matters

During the project, your project management and communication should be centralized and trackable. A lot of time can be lost in the back-and-forth of looking for files, check-ins, updates, progress, questions, decisions, etc.  That’s why it’s important to establish where the developer can find everything they need.

3. Who’s Calling the Shots?

Are you the final decision maker on the project? Is there a UI/UX team involved? Is there anyone else who has input on decisions? Is there a marketing team or a manager who wants to weigh in on decisions? Is anyone else other than you going to be giving direction directly to the developer? When does the client come in, and how many decisions does the client get to make? Will the client have direct communication with the developer?

Why This Matters

You don’t want to backpedal on development, or have your developer redo work. To avoid that, it’s important that every stakeholder is aware of all relevant decisions—and that each decision is recorded in a single, central location.

4. How Should the Developer Handle Assumptions and Small Decisions?

How much freedom does the developer have while interpreting designs? Should they build the website pixel-perfect according to the designs, or should they make small assumptions around consistency and reusability of sections? If you’ve designed a responsive site, have you designed for all breakpoints? Have you provided notes regarding animations, transitions, and hover effects? Have you designed validation states for fields? (i.e. the popups: “Password invalid.” or “Username doesn’t exist”.) If you haven’t, is the developer free to make decisions or suggestions?

Why This Matters

Very often, designers are dissatisfied when a website doesn’t closely match the designs—or conversely, when the site too closely follows the designs, to the detriment of its performance or the project’s timeline. At the beginning, define your intended level of detail. It makes for a much smoother QA process.

5. What is the timeline?

What’s the hard deadline for the project, and what’s the soft deadline? Is there a major press hit happening that the site needs to be launched for? If the deadline is ambitious, is there a way to launch it in phases? What’s the expectation for responding to quick changes? One week turnaround? Less than an hour?

Why This Matters

it really doesn’t help to create artificial hard deadlines…honesty is the best policy

If there’s a hard deadline, make the developer aware of it, and make sure to leave time for proper testing. After the site launches, know that most developers can’t be on call at all hours to make changes. Waiting for a developer to make a fix can be frustrating, but even small requests require maintaining version control, launching the development environment, connecting to the server, deploying to the production site, etc. Determine ahead of time how long you expect fixes and changes to take, and take stock of the priority level of each task.

Also, it really doesn’t help to create artificial hard deadlines. Just be transparent with your developer and trust them to deliver accordingly. Again, you’re building a relationship, here. Honesty is the best policy.  

6. What’s the Structure of the Scope, Contract, and Payment Structure?

What’s the project fee? What’s the benchmark for the end of the project? What is included in the scope of the project? When does payment go out? Are you hiring the developer to do the project at an hourly or fixed rate?

Why This Matters

The last thing you want is a developer getting a site 95% of the way there, and then not launching the project due to a discrepancy in the scope/contract/payment.

Conclusion

Overall, setting expectations and communication are the critical things here. It can feel a bit silly to discuss how you’re going to talk to each other during a project, especially if you already have a good rapport. But it’s always good to just set expectations ahead of time, so you don’t end up inside your own a horror story.

  Featured image via Unsplash

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‘Most people don’t like change’: CEO of Sidewalk Labs says criticism of project was inevitable

One day after the Canadian Civil Liberties Association published an incendiary open letter calling for a stop to the Sidewalk Labs development in downtown Toronto, the chief executive of the company behind the project said opposition was inevitable.

“Most people don’t like change, or at least they’re afraid of it in some way, and their natural tendency when they hear something new is to step back and say ‘no,’” Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff told the Financial Post in an interview Wednesday.

“You are naive if you don’t think that there’s going to be controversy when you’re trying to do something that’s hard, or never been done before.”

Sidewalk Labs, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, was selected to develop a smart city plan for a new neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront, but as public consultation has dragged on throughout 2018 and early 2019, critics have raised fears about data collection and corporate overreach by the tech giant.

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On Tuesday, the CCLA threatened to go to court to block the project, arguing that until proper regulation is in place for smart cities, the project is premature and risks creating a “non-consensual, state-authorized mass capture of Canadians’ personal information.”

Doctoroff said he believes that claim is “without merit” and the idea that the project should be halted until governments can legislate clear rules for data collection is “a very silly response.”

“We all know that this issue with data — particularly data in public and semi-public spaces — is a big issue in society for which there are basically no rules. It’s the Wild West out there,” he said.

Doctoroff said that the Sidewalk Labs proposal of an independent civic data trust to regulate and hold all urban data inevitably means that government regulation will happen before the project gets off the ground.

“This place won’t get set up unless, whether it’s an independent data trust or something else is in place to actually do it, and ultimately it’s going to be government that has to do it. We’re not going to do it on our own,” he said.

Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff

Thus far, Sidewalk Labs has tried to put the emphasis on proposed urban innovations that might be included in the development, such as “raincoats” for buildings that would create usable outdoor public space regardless of the weather.

But now the project is moving toward a critical phase, with Sidewalk Labs expected to deliver a draft version of a Master and Innovation Development Plan (MIDP) that will lay out its detailed vision for the project.

Doctoroff says the draft MIDP will be published sometime this “spring” before soliciting public feedback, but criticism of the project is already mounting.

In addition to the CCLA letter, a group of activists have recently come together to launch the Block Sidewalk campaign. A report in the Toronto Star detailing secret Alphabet documents about the MIDP sparked a flurry of critical media coverage.

According to the report, Sidewalk Labs is looking for a share of property tax and development fees that the city collects in the development area, and the company also wants to be paid for “a share in the uptick in land value on the entire geography.”

Doctoroff confirmed that they’re asking for a share of the development fees and property taxes in the port lands, arguing that the company is only asking for a share of incremental revenue that the city would not otherwise receive without an “essential catalyst” spurring development.

He also confirmed that Sidewalk Labs is proposing to finance a light-rail transit extension into the development, though the company has no aspirations to actually operate the transit line — it would still be run by the TTC.

Doctoroff was vague on the broader topic of the Sidewalk Labs business plan, saying that it is still a work in progress. For example, on the Sidewalk Labs support for tall wood buildings, he said that once they prove that it can work, the company can make money “in some isolated cases from the technology we create” being used in other cases.

But when asked if that means patenting and licencing their technology, Doctoroff responded, “I don’t know about patenting or licencing, what the method will be, but if people look to this place and see that we’ve actually been successful in what we’re trying to do, presumably there might be business opportunities elsewhere.”

One area of the business model he was very clear about was to say that Sidewalk Labs does not intend to monetize data.

Despite the fact that Google is a sister company to Sidewalk Labs, he said there’s no linkage between the two companies’ revenue plans.

“From a business model perspective, it is completely 100 per cent separate,” Doctoroff said.

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