This is kinda cute.

I have to wonder how much damage the adoption of Firefox and some of its addons is doing to the Internet. I’m thinking specifically of one of my favorites, Ad Block Plus. Simply put, it prevents just about every ad from appearing on any page I visit.

As Firefox’s market penetration increases (it’s at about 23% now), or if add-ons like Ad Block Plus become available for Internet Explorer, that has to worry advertisers and those who depend on their money.

The same problem exists, of course, with TiVo and other digital video recorders, where you can easily fast-forward through commercials. (My Verizon Fios DVR, like some others, even has a skip-30-seconds button.) But with that you have to take action to skip the ads, you can’t skip if you’re watching in real time, and sometimes you forget or just don’t bother.

With the Internet, Firefox, and Ad Block Plus, you don’t have to take any action beyond installing the add-on. You simply never see an ad again. It doesn’t substitute a blank box; it removes the ad and its space altogether and the remaining page content just fills the gaps. It’s invisible.

Imagine a free DVR that could automatically detect and remove commercials with 100% accuracy. Imagine 23% of people had it. What would that do to television advertising?

With television, one (partial) answer has been the shift to paid content — basic cable, premium subscriptions, pay-per-view, etc. And radio of course has Sirius/XM. Pay-for-content works there because you don’t have millions of options. You have 20 or 50 or 500 channels, not uncountable Web sites. Anyone can publish on the Internet, but not anyone can broadcast to your living room. (Yet. But the Internet-TV convergence is another story.)

Also, because TV and radio are one-way media, the revenue model is solely dependent on involuntary exposure to the ads. But the Web is two-way, and the model there depends on A) that involuntarily exposure, followed by B) voluntary clicks. And the weight is more and more on B — the click-through counts, not the view.

Toyota doesn’t know whether or not I fast-forward past its television ads; I still count as a “viewer” if I watch the show it sponsors. But online, Firefox and ABP prevent me from seeing the ads and thus prevent me from clicking. If a site gets paid by the click (not the view), I become a freeloader — I don’t even give myself the option to click.

Right now 23% of Web users are freeloaders like me (or are a click or two away from becoming such).

There was talk at one point that digital video recorders would prevent viewers from skipping the commercials. Maybe it will happen someday. But it can’t happen on the Internet. I think I can safely predict that there will always be a simple and free way to keep it ad free.

So how can ad-supported Web sites survive? Answer: They can’t. Something else has to take its place.

What else? Paid subscriptions. Maybe ad-watching requirements (i.e., forcing users to view ads before delivering the content). Or something else.

But the bottom line is this: We’ve always had professionally created free content (or in the case of print media, very inexpensive content) because of the unspoken and un-ignorable agreement: We would have to deal with the ads in newspapers and magazines, and on radio and television. Those ads paid for the content. Without revenue, you don’t get content.

You can argue, as many have, that professional content-creators will simply disappear — newspapers and other news organizations won’t be able to sustain themselves. So what’s going to take their place? Bloggers?

Who’s going to create and produce television shows? The Lonelygirl15 guys?

It takes money to consistently create great content. Anyone can occasionally do a great thing; browse through YouTube and you’ll see some wonderful shows that rival anything on network TV. But those people can’t make a living at it; they do it for love or for fun.

I don’t want to have to rely on getting my news and my entertainment from people who do it for fun. You can’t count on them, and they certainly can’t produce the kind of quality that a well-funded organization can. You’ll have Lonelygirl15, but you won’t have CSI. Or Battlestar Galactica. Or Scrubs.

So what’s going to happen? Easy, I think. An Internet without advertising can only have two kinds of content: free and paid. The free stuff will be what we have today, and a lot of it is great. But the professional stuff is more and more going to end up behind the green curtain — subscription only.

Heck, that’s not new. That’s the way movies work. If you want to see a first-run flick in the best possible venue, you have to pay for it. So why not “If you want to get the news when it happens instead of waiting, you’ll have to pay for it”?

What will survive? Big newspapers? CNN? Small-town papers? Dunno. Depends what people are willing to pay for. That’s what the market is for. But I can foresee a day when the free ride is over and you’ll have to pay if you want the latest news.

Which means you end up with the haves and have-nots — people who pay for the latest and people who have to wait for it to trickle down… but that’s another story.

“Cell phone makers have agreed to introduce a one-size-fits-all charger in the European Union within the next six months.”

Still slowly but surely linking my various social networks. Blog to Twitter? Check. Twitter to blog? Check.

Facebook to blog? Um… no. Blog to Facebook? Only to a section of FB that no one sees. Work still needs to be done there.

New blogging tool? Check — trying out Deepest Sender for quick updates.

All while editing, uploading, and trying to keep up with too many people.

I am shocked that someone, somewhere, has not created a Word or Excel macro that searches and replaces based on a list of common nicknames — changing all “Mikes” to “Michael” and so on. It would seem to be a darned useful tool.

Having just spent about 45 minutes crafting a neat little Excel formula, I found that it could be made immeasurably better if it had the ability to clean up nicknames. Oh, well. (I did find some lists of nicknames, so maybe I can figure out how to do it myself….)

Update: I found a good and comprehensive list of nicknames — too comprehensive, perhaps (Hetty = Mehitabel?). But with a bit of cleanup to remove the old-fashioned ones (this was from a genealogy site), it might be a good starting point for a macro. “If [nickname] is on nickname list, replace it with the [fullname] from that list and shade the cell so I can verify it.”

Hmm.

(At my office I get 512Kbps to maybe 1Mbps.)

At least not yet. Gosh, we need an easy way to share all this stuff. RSS is great, but Facebook’s support is crappy.

Update: Now it is! One small step…

I realize that the best way to work with social networks is not to treat each as a separate thing — that is, posting something to a blog, then something else to Facebook, with a few Twitters in between. You’ll go crazy; every time a new site gets hot, you’ll feel the need to create and maintain a presence there.

No, the right way to deal with social networks is integration. You publish your stuff once, and it goes to all your networks. That way you use the tool(s) you prefer, and your friends can see what you’re up to using their preferred sites. So my Twitter followers will see the same thing my Facebook friends do, without my having to update each one separately.

Of course, there are tools on these sites that I’ll want to use, so it’s not like I won’t log in to Facebook or whatever. But the goal I’m working towards is a single place where A) I can post what I’m up to, and B) I can keep track of friends.

There are some WordPress plugins involved, and a few esoteric Facebook or Twitter features, but it’s coming together. (But I’m wondering what this post will look like on Twitter, seeing that it’s well more than 140 characters.)

Slowly but surely it’ll come together. Then I can be really social.

I appreciate the fact that you learned to type on a typewriter. So did I. But that was then. Today we use word processors, so the age-old tradition of putting two spaces after a period is over. Over. One space.

Thank you.

It used to be a general rule with Microsoft that the third version of its products was the good one. With Windows 7, the company got it in two.

I’ll explain. First off, that rule of thirds: Windows 1 and 2 were jokes; Windows 3.0 was where it hit the mainstream. Ditto for third versions of Word for DOS, Office, and probably a lot of other products. (Or maybe it’s my imagination.)

Anyway, Windows 7 is, really, the second version of Windows Vista. It’s being released, almost quietly, in the next few weeks. The final release candidate is going out Tuesday. I’ve been using an evaluation version.

I am no fan of Vista; I’ve written about that before in a few places. I’ve been using it for the past few months because it takes advantage of RAM in a better way than Windows XP, and I wanted the processing speed. So I’ve been putting up with Vista’s annoyances. (My fave: In order to get it to permanently recognize that I wanted my data on a second hard drive, I had to create a special installation disk with my settings built in. We’re talking about finding bits of obscure software and creating strange configuration files.)

Vista does do some things better than XP. It’s smoother and often “snappier” — things happen faster. It’s more polished. The built-in tools are better. But behind the scenes, for tweakers like me, it was just annoying in a host of small ways.

So here comes Windows 7. Unlike Vista (and unlike products from another technology company), there isn’t a huge bru-ha-ha about it. Certainly it’s reasonably big news in the tech community, but it’s kept out of the mainstream. (Maybe that’s because, unlike Vista, years and deadlines haven’t passed us by.)

So I loaded it. And it is good.

Essentially, Microsoft took Vista and fixed many of its annoyances, added some nice features, and made the new OS that Vista was supposed to be. It’s little things like getting rid of Vista’s sidebar (which took up way too much real estate on the desktop) and letting users move gadgets anywhere on the desktop.

It’s the taskbar (or “Start bar”) being streamlined, with the Quick Launch bar now integrated with the rest of the taskbar, so you have links to your favorite programs sharing space with open documents. It works nicely.

It’s the use of “Libraries” — virtual folders that allow you to group folders and documents no matter where on your hard drive they resides. For example, let’s say you have Quicken and Tax Act installed, along with some separate documents relating to your personal finances. You can create a library called “Money” and put all those files into it. The files are still stored in their original folders, but now you’ve grouped them in a more useful manner. (I’m not going to go into the details of things like Libraries — others have done a better job.)

It’s not perfect, of course. Only Apple products are perfect (and every one is). But for the small but growing number of Windows users — about 95 percent of the market these days — it’s a worthwhile upgrade. Unlike Vista.

So my goal of creating a simple, clean Web site with news, message boards, and a user-filled photo album is getting close.

It turned out to be more complicated than I expected to do something simple: Create a single sign-on for the site that would allow users to post comments to the news, add photos to the gallery(ies), and post messages to the boards.

There’s plenty of software to do all these things — and do them well — but getting the Holy Grail of clean, powerful, and integrated wasn’t straightforward.

I knew the pieces I wanted: WordPress for the overall site, because it’s so easy and powerful (and because I know it well); bbPress for message boards because it can, with some work, integrate with WordPress and because working with its templates is relatively straightforward; and Zenphoto to handle the photo album.

It took a while to get bbPress and WordPress to talk, in large part because of the lack of documentation for bbPress. But I did it. Yay. One sign on gets you permissions for both, and as you bounce between the forums and the main site it remembers you.

Now, on to photos.

Zen and the art of photo galleries

I can’t say enough good things about Zenphoto. It’s, to me, the definitive photo-album-on-a-Web-site package. It’s free, of course, which is staggering in itself.

Zenphoto lets you create as many albums as you want, and put as many photos into each of them as you like. It’s got powerful templates, so you can display a tone of info about each shot (or just the name). It supports the IPTC standard for including info within photos — title, caption, etc.

Once set up, it’s stupidly easy to use. If you have, say, 50 shots from a beach trip, you can create a directory within Zenphoto’s “albums” directory called “2009 Beach Trip.” Then you just upload all your photos there. And you’re done. Zenphoto sees the new directory and automatically creates a new album, then handles creating thumbnails to your specs. All you have to do is dump the files there.

Visitors can browse the albums, leave comments (if you let them), and — if you’ve tagged your photos with keywords — those visitors can creating instant albums of, say, every photo in every album tagged “horse.”

Talk about powerful. That’s why I wanted to use it.

Zenphoto’s downside (if you can call it that) is that it’s single user. It’s not meant to have lots of people with different permissions accessing it. You’re either an administrator (who can add photos) or a user (who can view them).

This could be a challenge, as I wanted to allow users on the site to upload, but I didn’t want them to be administrators and be able to change things.

That’s where Zenphoto’s simplicity comes in.

Easy does it

Here’s how it’s gonna work:

I’m going to create a WordPress page that’s only accessible to registered users. That page will contain a simple FTP upload form that lets users send their files to the site’s server. Specifically, they’ll upload those files to the directory that Zenphoto processes to make albums.

There’s the beauty. Because Zenphoto doesn’t need to be told about new photos — because it simply says, “Look! New pictures within the /album directory! I’d better process them!” — the only permission I need to worry about is registered users’ access to that upload page. If you’re not registered, you can’t see the page, and thus can’t upload images.

This means finding some nice PHP code that will handle the uploads. It will limit file size and only allow JPEG, GIF, and PNG images, which is pretty standard stuff. And presto!, Zenphoto is integrated into the site without worrying about databases and sign-ons.

I’m now doing the final look-and-feel integration, to make the different sections of the site (main, forum, photo gallery) look like they’re part of a seamless whole. No one needs to know what’s powered by bbPress, by WordPress, or by Zenphoto; it’s one big, happy site.

And every piece of software used to make it is absolutely free. Wow.

Creating fully functional Web sites isn’t quite as simple as it should be.

I’m learning this as I’m working on a site for a group. The requirements are fairly simple. It should have:

• Latest news and announcements on the home page
• A message board
• A photo/video gallery
• Single sign-on (so you log into the site once and can then access those message boards and upload photos to the gallery

Like I said, pretty straightforward. So I thought.

I am building the site with WordPress. I love it. As a content management system it’s downright incredible. (And no, it’s not just a blogging platform.) Unless you have a tremendous site with a lot of users, you can do anything with it — either with the base package or via the hundreds of terrific plugins that add functionality. (And I think you could even create that “tremendous” site with it.)

Creating the basic site was easy — that’s what WordPress is great at. I picked a theme similar to what I liked, then tweaked the heck out of it. News goes here, archives are formatted like this, and so on. Soon I had a basic home page and layouts for the interior pages.

Then came the message boards, what I think of as a core component to a site — there needs to be some way of having users communicate.

Board education

Responding to blog posts is one way, but then you end up with dozens or hundreds of separate conversations. A message board gives you a centralized location for discussion, as well as the ability to do things like browse by topic, find unread messages, and so on. Blog comments don’t work that way; a message board was it.

Trouble: Most message boards are ugly, overly complex, and confusing. I wanted something clean.

For example, the site was going to have about a half-dozen forums, and I didn’t want to clutter the page with a section of forum “categories” — there weren’t any. (Rather, all five or six forums would belong to the single category, so listing that one category seemed silly, and it took up space.)

Simplicity was key. I didn’t need a box of smilies to choose from, or choices of font, color, and so on. This was a basic message board, not an art project. (Italic, sure. Links to Web page, absolutely. But being able to choose font, color, and size? Forget it.)

I also wanted to integrate the boards with the look and feel of the rest of the site. Bottom line: I needed software that would let me customize it easily — to clean out stuff I didn’t need from a page, and to fit it into the site’s design.

Oh, and it needed to share login info with the site in general.There shouldn’t be a separate login for the message boards. Once you’re in, you’re in.

That turned out to be trickier than I thought. There isn’t a lot of message-board software that integrates with WordPress. An old plugin called “WP-Forum” was the first thing I saw, but it isn’t supported any more and there are security issues.

I ended up with two possibilities, both of which can use the general (WordPress) site login: Simple:Press Forum and bbPress.

Nothing’s simple

Simple:Press is a WordPress plugin,so it uses the site login seamlessly. And it has all the functions you could want. Great! Simple and easy, and my biggest issue was taken care of. Now I just need to customize… oh.

Simple:Press is customizable, in theory. There are some nice templates available. But nowhere is there documentation for creating or tweaking them.

WordPress, like many things, uses a straightforward scheme for designing a site: It has specific codes that automatically insert a particular piece of content. So you design a page, and where you want the headline to go, you put in the <$headline> tag. WordPress knows to insert the article’s headline there.

So you create a template for every kind of page on your site — the home page, an individual article, an About page, etc., and WordPress reuses that template, popping in whatever content the user asks for in place of the headline tag, the author tag, the date tag, etc.

But Simple:Press doesn’t use that kind of templating. And because there’s no documentation of how to create a template (including the all-important ‘list of tags you can use’), I couldn’t customize the forum. I could figure out (I think) how to remove things I didn’t want, such as that unnecessary list of forum groups, but I couldn’t redesign the Simple:Press forum the way I wanted it to.

So off to bbPress, which is created by Automattic, the same people who make WordPress. (It’s also free, like WordPress.)

But get this: Even though bbPress is by the same folks, and even though a message board is a popular request for a Web site, the folks at Automattic don’t integrate bbPress with WordPress. You can’t have a single login; users have to create an account on the site in general, and a separate account the message boards. Argh!

But wait — lots of people are asking for integration, and plugin authors have come to the rescue. You can integrate them! You can have a single signon. W00t!

Um… yeah. But it’s not a matter of taking 30 seconds to install a plugin. To get the two products to work together, you have to, let’s see…

• Install bbPress, and edit its configuration file to use the WordPress database — so you have to know the name of that database, which you get via your Web site’s control panel.
• Install the bbPress plugin that enables WordPress integration; it’s called Freshly Baked Cookies.
• Pull out two variables from your WordPress options page (which isn’t all that easy to find) — AUTH_SALT and LOGGED_IN_SALT — and put them in the right place in the plugin’s file.
• Copy four lines from your WordPress config file — SECURE_AUTH_KEY, NONCE_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY, and AUTH_KEY — and put them in your bbPress config file. (You may not need all four, but I wasn’t taking chances.)
• Mess with bbPress’s WordPress integration settings to make sure everything’s in place.

This may not seem to be that complex if you’re used to working with this stuff, but here’s the rub: There’s no single place with all this info. I had to go through bbPress message boards, WordPress message boards, and the plugin author’s message boards to piece it all together. (And nowhere did it mention that you need to tell bbPress to use the WordPress database instead of its own!)

But the end result: Single login works. And bbPress uses a template system much like WordPress’s, so…

Wait. There’s no documentation for bbPress templates? None. You can look at an existing template and glean a lot about the various tags it uses, but there’s no list. So I could see that such and such must insert the list of available forums, and such and such must insert the number of posts, but it’s all guesswork.

ARGH!

How can companies that make a product as slick and powerful as WordPress not bother to write even the most basic documentation for bbPress? Yes, it’s mostly volunteers, but we’re talking about a list of tags (like this one for WordPress) — tags that you need to know in order to work with the forums. Talk about frustrating.

But it works, even if I haven’t yet fixed the forums to fit into the site (that’s tonight). And then there’s the photo gallery — I need to let registered users, and only registered users, upload pics.

The best gallery software out there (and yes, it’s free) is Zenphoto. But can I get it to integrate?

To be continued.

According to Career Cast, “philosopher” is the 12th best job in America today.

Suck it, meteorologists!

There’s an argument made by a lot of Web design types that a proper site is created using cascading style sheets (CSS) to position the various elements, rather than using HTML tables. They’re wrong.

(I’m not going to go into too much detail about these things here. If you don’t know about ’em, just skip this post.)

The argument for CSS over tables seems good on the surface. With CSS, one file (the stylesheet) defines the structure of the page — header here, navigation here, body here, and so on. A separate file contains the content that’s ‘poured’ into that structure. It only has basic markup (this is the headline, this is the body, etc.) It’s the stylesheet that does the heavy lifting and contains, potentially, a ton of code placing things on the page just so.

This kind of separation of content is great. If you visit CSS Zen Garden you can see it in action. One click changes the stylesheet but leaves the content alone; the result, though, is an entirely different look.

In contrast, if you use HTML tables to define the page, the same file contains the structure (the table’s cells) and the content. If you want to change the look, you have to mess around with that content as well. It’s not as neat.

Or so the logic goes.

Two problems with this.

One: CSS doesn’t completely separate content and structure. If it did, the ’stuff’ in your content file could be in any order. In fact, the order of items in your content file is important — crucial, in fact.

Putting, say, your “navigation” section before your “sidebar” section can very well give you a very different result than if you switch them. (Unless, that is, every element on the page is positioned absolutely. That can be done, but not many designers do that for the entire page — it reduces browser and screen flexibility too much.)

So using CSS means content is only separated in theory. In reality, you still have to worry about that content file.

More importantly, perhaps, is that for many of us content and design are already separate. We use content-management systems (CMSs). In my case, it’s WordPress, one of the most popular. Others use Drupal, or Movable Type, or Joomla, or… the list goes on.

With a CMS, content and design are separated by definition, no matter what you use to create that design. Tables or CSS, your design (WordPress calls it a template) and your content are in two different places. The template has codes that say, essentially, “put the headline here” and “format the columns like this.”

The template could use CSS or not. I find using CSS to be convenient for many things, but not everything. I think tables do a simpler, better job of defining the overall page structure — I never have a right sidebar disappear under the content because it’s one pixel too large, for example. That happens in CSS all the time.

Tables are incredibly flexible, down to the pixel level just like CSS. In fact, you can use CSS to format tables and cells (table {text-align:center} and so forth). There are fewer browser incompatibilities as well. (There is an argument that tables are harder for the browsers used by the blind to read. But so much of the Web uses tables, I would have to think that those browsers are getting smarter.)

So enough about tables being evil and backwards. I’ve coded a ton in CSS and a ton using tables. They’re both tools in the toolbox, and for anyone using a CMS there’s no advantage to one over the other.

When I write an entry to my blog, or create a page, the text is stored in a database. WordPress then pours that data into my template and you see it.

Today’s chores reminded me of the other good (great!) reasons to own an electric car — once they’re available for everyday drivers, that is.

I needed to top off my power steering fluid, and I noticed that my coolant was also a little low; might as well kill two birds with one stone beat two drums with one stick (sorry — The Wife’s a bird lover). Oh, and even though it was only about 2,500 miles since my last oil change, the oil was looking very dirty — might as well change that, too. It’s 65 degrees and clear, so why not?

Thus car maintenance was today’s Thing, along with an engine degreasing (“a clean engine is a happy engine”) and the associated cleanup, especially the used oil.

And that’s why I started thinking about electric cars. If I had one, I’d have most of my day back.

Electric motors mean no oil changes. No coolant. No transmissions and no transmission fluid.

And the other things I’ve dealt with lately: EGR valves that needed to be cleaned. PCV valves that needed to be replaced. Mass air flow sensors giving strange readings. And so on. None of these things was a big deal (we’re talking less than $20 in parts and cleaners), but with electric motors they simply wouldn’t exist. There’s no airflow to worry about, no crankcase to ventilate, no exhaust gas to recirculate.

My car’s approaching 80,000 miles. If it was electric, I wouldn’t have to think about timing belts and new water pumps.

Sure, there would be other issues, but batteries and capacitors are a lot simpler (and cleaner) than what goes into a gasoline-powered vehicle. And other things would remain — tie rods and CV joints and air conditioners and so on. But overall, an electric car is orders of magnitude simpler than a hydrocarbon-powered one. So I could have spent my morning doing something else.

For those who are interested, I have just finished and posted a new and updated version of my Legal Rights of Photographers. This is done from scratch, so all the legal jargon has been cleaned out. It’s easier to read, adds more information, and answers the most-frequent questions I get.

Legal Rights of Photographers, version 2.0 (500K PDF)

Got a nice new pair of Creative EP-610 earbuds. Nothing fancy, but nice. Nice, that is, until I moved.

I rolled my chair on the (carpeted) floor and ZAP! — static shocks from the earbuds into my ears. Sizzle sizzle ZAP!

File under double-plus-ungood. (Although the sound is very nice, especially for $25 ’buds.)

The other day, I wrote about a bad experience I had with Newegg.com. Essentially, I was annoyed that I had to pay a restocking fee on a defective item.

I got a note from one Alex at Newegg. He apologized and told me that no, there’s no restocking fee on defective items. However, because the ordering system will add the fee automatically, you need to contact the company to have it waived. (I did point out that this bit of info isn’t on the site, and that there was a 17-minute wait to chat with a customer-service rep.)

Alex waived the fee, and he said he’d speak to the Web folks about making this info clear. (And yeah, I’m gonna keep an eye on that.)

What really impressed me, though, is that Newegg has people watching the Web and Q-list bloggers like me (my PageRank is only 5), and took the time to reply to me. So I’ll give the company another shot. I’ll see if the Web site changes, and I’ll see if I get all my money back or if 15 percent is taken out. For the moment, though, Newegg gets the benefit of the doubt.