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625: CarTalk, Ownership of A Book Apart, and URL Shorteners

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Dave's putting together a platform for his presidential bid and workshops his policies, discussing vehicle options for a family in 2024, Chris and other authors get ownership of their A Book Apart books back, and the ramifications and reasoning behind Google killing a URL shortener.

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Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert in silly sunglasses and a sign that says Shawp Tawlkk Shough DOT COM

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert

This episode is with just Chris & Dave, ShopTalk Show's hosts. Chris is the co-founder of CodePen and creator of CSS-Tricks, and Dave is lead developer at Paravel.

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Transcript

[Banjo music]

MANTRA: Just Build Websites!

Dave Rupert: Hey there, Shop-o-maniacs. You're listening to -- [vocal percussion of "The President's Own"] -- a presidential edition of the ShopTalk Show. I'm Dave--in the running--Rupert, and with me is Chris--the president to my vice-president--Coyier. Hey, Chris. How are you doing?

Chris Coyier: Oh... I'll be president. Yeah, I was thinking about starting my campaign.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Now that it's a little up in the air who is running.

Dave: I mean why start at the local level?

Chris: Right.

Dave: Like city council of Bend.

Chris: That's clearly not necessary.

Dave: Don't.

Chris: No.

Dave: No. Jump to the big leagues. You know?

Chris: If you can be a Twitter... If you can be a TV star and go for pres, why not a Twitter star, an X, an X mid-ling, niche Twitter star?

Dave: I don't think people appreciate how many websites I've built, and how different is that from running a country?

Chris: Right. Think of how many people you had to pull together to make those projects work. I think start saying it and say it a lot is the ticket.

Dave: Yeah. I think you just say it, and you say America is no different than a bad website. I can fix it. You know?

Chris: Oh! Pretty good.

Dave: Yeah?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: What would you--? Then once you're in there, though, what's the first 100 days? Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. Little murky on those details, but I've got a few points on the platform.

Chris: Oh... Yeah?

Dave: You know?

Chris: Uh-huh.

Dave: I'd love to hear yours. One is you should be able to buy antibiotics over the counter. [Laughter] Like one or two days' worth. That's it. Then maybe every 30 days. Scan your driver's license or whatever. I know if everyone is on antibiotics all the time, we get super viruses and stuff. Don't want that.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: But when my kid is 800-degree fever, I need... I know it's a sinus infection or an ear infection. Just give me the fricken' thing. Let me administer this.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: I'll take the risk. [Laughter] I'll assume the risk of giving my kid penicillin. You know? I don't know.

Chris: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Over-the-counter antibiotics, I like it.

00:02:26

Chris: There's the time zone one is a classic for nerds.

Dave: Oh!

Chris: You'll get the nerd vote if you abolish them.

Dave: UTC.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: UTC only.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: We record this podcast every week. We do, "Oh, it's 11:00 or 9:00? Oh, shoot!" You know?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Guests, inviting guests. You know?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: We were like, "Oh, we record at 1800. Whatever that time is for you, you wake up at 1600, great. Then it's at 1800."

Chris: Yep. Yep.

Dave: I think UTC across the board.

Chris: Fine with it. It's just a little different. However you want to arrange it. Make it weird for me. I'll take it. Metric system, too, while we're at it.

Dave: Metric system!

Chris: It's not even up in my brain very good. Just as an American, we just don't use it that much, so I'm more comfortable with just whatever units are around me that everybody else uses. But I'll bite the bullet. I'd be happy to do it.

Dave: Yeah. I know a kilometer is half a mile. But then a kilogram is like two pounds - or something like that. [Laughter]

[Laughter]

Dave: That's confusing for us, okay, over here because we're used to the king's breath.

Chris: Yep.

Dave: This is 800 kings feet long.

Chris: Yep.

Dave: We measured his foot and that's how we tell how long things are.

Chris: Yep. It's weird for us, but we'll do it.

00:03:45

Chris: We've got to get rid of change, too. That's another one, Dave, that's got to go. At least the penny has got to go.

Dave: The penny is out. We could just - whatever - auto-donate it.

Chris: I could see it all go.

Dave: Auto-donate it to charity.

Chris: Oh, my god! That's the new taxes is the remainder is automated?

Dave: Yeah, just auto-donate.

Chris: You only ever round up.

Dave: I'm basically proposing the office space scam - or whatever. What was the movie? Was it Office Space?

Chris: Took the pennies? Oh, now I can't remember.

Dave: The took the pennies. Office... I should know this. It was filmed in Austin.

Chris: It was an office space. That was not it. Or maybe it was if it was just an idea. In the plot of it, did they actually implement it?

Dave: Uh... Yeah, yeah. They implemented it. Yeah, it was Office Space. Yeah, there it is. Yeah.

Chris: What?!

Dave: Office Space, yeah. That sounded wrong to me. But anyway, they implemented that hack. So, we're doing that but at a federal level. Easy. [Laughter] We're just stealing pennies. Getting rid of them.

No tipping. I'm done with tipping. Okay?

Chris: Tips out? Oh, my god. You could get a lot done. You're just a four-year candidate, too.

Dave: I'm a four-year candidate.

Chris: You just roll in, and just make these little--

Dave: Pew-pew-pew-pew-pew.

Chris: Yeah, what do you call it? The winter of code or winter of bugs.

Dave: Yeah.

Dave: You know like when a software agency will just... Instead of tackling the big stuff, they just spend one sprint just tackling a bunch of little stuff.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris: Quality of life improvements. You'd just be a QOL president. Roll in. Get rid of change. Get that penicillin rolling - or whatever you're going to do. [Laughter] And then you're out. Then you're out. Let's get back--

Dave: Back to the penicillin thing. That can kill kids with allergies, so [laughter] you should probably... We probably need a card that says, "My kid can take this kind of penicillin."

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Whatever. Anyway. That's what I'm proposing. I think here's another one. I'm just off the dome. Ready?

Chris: Yep.

00:05:36

Dave: You go to a gulag for 20 years if you don't use your blinker. Just hear me out.

Chris: Oh...

Dave: How much would traffic flow better if--? You know we spend billions on these roads and then we just create traffic by not using blinkers. Get them out of here. You can't drive on the road, the big roads, if you don't use a blinker.

Chris: Absolute mandatory blinker usage?

Dave: Yep.

Chris: It reminds me of accessibility in websites a little bit because it's like, at the moment, we're trusting the makers and users of websites to deal with their own accessibility stuff. Right? Then some people are like, "Well, it's not working." Right? So, let's solve it at another level.

We could... In this version of it, you're making the laws stricter.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, I mean you know. I'm trying to think of, like, you build a community center and somebody is like, "I'm going to play ice hockey in here. I'm going to flood the community center and freeze it and then skate on it." You wouldn't let them do that. You would be like... [Laughter] You need to - whatever - prove this out and make sure that this is something that isn't going to damage this place and whatever. You need to be a good steward of the community center.

The same with roads. We've got to just... Like traffic. We're sharing the road. We've got to do it. You don't get to use it if you don't abide by the rules. That's my rule.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: I also think it's kind of dumb that we're like, "Every American should have a three-ton death rocket." That's a really good solution to our problems in life is everyone needs a three-ton.

Chris: Car ownership? Yeah.

Dave: Piece of metal that can go 100 miles an hour. That's a smart solution. I don't think that's a smart solution.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Even in Texas. I can't believe they let you live there. You can't be saying that stuff in public in Texas.

Dave: Well, hey. I'm all for... I mean I do drive a big dumb truck.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: But it was a hand-me-down farm truck. Okay?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It was a free truck, and I only drive it like 40 miles a week, a month, or something like that.

Chris: Yeah. I help justify it that way, too. I'm like, man, I've had a truck for three years with 10,000 miles on it. You know?

Dave: Yeah. It's very important I have it, though. We're kind of thinking about redoing cars. We can switch to the car talk show. Don't sue us, NPR.

We've been thinking about new cars because our Volvo, which has been a good car and it leaks. The sunroof leaks every time it rains. And we've tried to get it fixed, and it doesn't work. So, it just fills up with water every time it rains. That's less than ideal.

Chris: Well, if it leaks bad, it just comes right through. Yeah.

Dave: Just...

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Well, it pools up and then you don't find out it leaks until you park at an incline or stop suddenly at a stop sign. Then it just comes rushing forward. It's pretty cool.

So, anyway, got to get rid of that. So, we were like, "Okay, we need a new car." Trying to figure out what kind of car. But then my wife wants kind of like a big kid carrier, you know.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: And that's fair for the stage of life our kids are in. But then we'd have a big truck and a big kid carrier. And so, it's like, well, maybe we don't need the truck. So, maybe I get a little tiny electric deal to scoot around in.

Chris: Yeah, a little town scoot around thing. Yeah.

Dave: What stinks is we need two cars. Because our kids are in different sports - or whatever - and we're zipping across town three different directions--

Chris: Got to have two.

Dave: You have to have two, and so it's just... I hate that but it's just this situation we're in for this - whatever - five to ten years of our life. We're just zipping around.

Chris: Oh, yeah. It's not going to get better, though. Then the kids start turning 16, and then they get one, too.

Dave: They want one. Yeah. I don't know. We live a block from the high school, so I might be like, "You get an electric bike. Sorry." [Laughter]

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: "That's your car." So, that might be the solution there. But anyway, I'm just like, "Man, what do we get? What should I figure out." I don't know. Just trying to--

00:09:53

Chris: You haven't even started? You have a plan? You have a secret plan in your head that you're trying to... or not?

Dave: I think it's a kid carrier, kind of like a third row.

Chris: The Wagoneer?

Dave: SUV kind of deal, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: The Wagoneer is hot. The Wagoneer is hot.

Chris: We rented one on this trip, and I was like, "I love it!"

Dave: Oh, you did?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Okay.

Chris: Just on accident, you know, like, "Here's your car." And we're like, "Oh... Hmm..."

Dave: I've been thinking about taking a bunch of Uber XL just to get a vibe for all of these cars. [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah! There you go.

Dave: Because I took... The Toyota Grand Highlander is pretty sweet. Rode in a Ford Expedition on the trip I was just on, and that was kind of okay. But anyway, I think we'll get one of those.

But then it's like, "What is the other car?" And I'm kind of like, "Ooh... It'd be kind of cool to have a little Rambler, like a Jeep or a Bronco or something."

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: But even... But I think it should be electric just because it's the other car. You know? It doesn't need... you know? I don't know. There's not a lot of--

Chris: I see you're mostly concerned with practicality here, but it just slipped a little bit that you're interested in a little flare, perhaps.

Dave: A little flare, so then there's the ultra-practical Hyundai Ionic 5. Right? Have you seen that one?

Chris: No.

Dave: It's basically their hatchback. It's the classic electric car. Really affordable. It does the go fast accelerate thing that electric cars do.

Chris: I'm looking at it now. They call that an SUV these days? That doesn't--

Dave: Hmm...

Chris: I don't know.

Dave: Crossover at most, right?

Chris: Yeah. Does it have a third row, though? Or can you get it with one?

Dave: No. No, that's just--

Chris: No.

Dave: There is... I think it's a KIA or something. But there's a big third-row electric SUV, but there are not a lot of electric SUVs. So, anyway, the Hyundai Ionic 5, but then there's this 5N, Chris, that has a sport mode, and it has a turbo boost button. Thinking about that.

Chris: Also a Hyundai?

Dave: Yeah. Wouldn't that be cool? Hyundai Ionic 5N has a turbo boost, so I'm a 40-year-old man.

Chris: You need turbo.

Dave: I've never had a car with a turbo, a NOS button before. You know? So, maybe I should have that. You know what I mean?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. Maybe that's what I need.

Chris: Maybe you need a turbo button. I don't disagree.

Dave: Maybe I need a turbo button in my car. I don't know. I've never had that. But then that new Rivian, the 2, RX2 - or whatever - looks kind of interesting just from... I think I like that company more than other electric car companies. Wink. Not to get too political again.

Chris: Yeah. It must be the best thing that ever happened to Rivian is all of Musk's shenanigans.

Dave: Yeah. So, anyway.

00:12:50

Chris: Yeah, I see them. They are just everywhere in Bend. Rivian is just popping here, which is a little bit surprising to me because we have this general problem in Bend of being a little isolated.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Doesn't it just cross your mind a little bit where the hell you're going to get it fixed?

Dave: Right, right.

Chris: You're going to go to Portland? No. Your car is broken. But maybe it's really good, like maybe they dispatch people.

Dave: Oh, yeah.

Chris: That's how Tesla used to work.

Dave: How far are y'all in Bend from the next big-big city, like Portland or whatever?

Chris: Four hours.

Dave: Four hours?

Chris: That's pretty far, right?

Dave: You'd need a charging station in between. That's for sure.

Chris: Yeah. My wife's... We have a Tesla X, too. You know? Maybe we won't forever, but we bought it before he went crazy.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: Although, I'm sure he was crazy all the time. You can dang near do it because we bought the biggest possible battery you can possibly get.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It's just usually how we roll, and we can pretty much get to Portland without a charge. Although, we often do charge because there's just a nice stop, a nice super-charger stop halfway-ish.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: You're like, "Meh, might as well just do it." Anyway, no regrets really. I drive the big dumb truck. She's got the EV. Good enough for now.

I don't love thinking about it. There's hardly a single car in the universe that I pine over.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: Even sports cars. Nothing. It's very hard for me to muster up any enthusiasm over a car. Kind of a bummer. I wish I could. It seems like a lot of guys really have their dream car, and I don't even have one.

Although, I just sent you a picture in Discord. Sorry, everybody. That's the worst possible radio, but this might be as close to a dream car as I have. It's a little bit like the old Bronco thing.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: But it's a little lower with no roof on it. I took a picture of that last night, and I was like, "Ooh... I could see myself in a little convertible Bronco kind of thing - easy."

Dave: See, yeah. Maybe that's what... It fits into my Rambler category. Just a little car to tussle around in.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Just - whatever. It doesn't have to work very good. It doesn't have to necessarily go up hills. It just has to kind of motor around. Just good enough, right?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Anyway.

00:15:16

Chris: Well, in websites land a little bit, we used to joke around about A Book Apart a lot. Then, unfortunately, the ship has sailed, Dave. There'll never be an A Book Apart for you. They closed their doors.

At first, they announced that they were not going to publish any more books. Relevant to you here.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Then said, "We're just done-zo." That happened. But behind the scenes, it was like, "Well, what happens to all of us?" All of us being the authors who wrote.

What happened at the end there... At some point, the whole story needs to get written down more clearly because I don't have it all in my head at the moment. But the idea was, like, they still own the books. At one point, the way that they were being distributed was with this company called Ingram. Ingram's business model is a little bit like - I don't know. Do you remember CD Baby - or whatever - that your band could record an album and put it on CD Baby? But one of the reasons you might do that is because then you get to go on Spotify, too.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris: That's just how that worked.

Dave: Kind of like they were a distributor for you.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Sort of... Yeah. Or even like Tower Records might pick it up - or something.

Chris: Yeah. Except they might have some scrutiny whereas CD Baby, they didn't give a crap.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It could be anything and they would be, "Whatever. You're on Spotify now. Congratulations."

I think Ingram is a little bit like that. I don't think that they have a lot of scrutiny. Although, I'm sure they were happy to have the A Book Apart books. But the idea is if you put your stuff on there, then it's kind of print on demand. And they'd just take whoever. But then also, your book is available through Barnes & Noble and Amazon and whatever and things like that, which not everybody can just do. You need to get your stuff somewhere.

Anyway, that's where the books went in the end. They're like, "We're not going to print and sell books anymore. But we put your stuff on Ingram. Thus, anybody who wants the book can still get it." To your average buyer, it really wasn't that different. But it was kind of a step towards spinning down their operations, I think.

But then there just wasn't a lot of money happening. Obviously, there are business problems. You don't close the doors when you're kicking ass. You know? So, there were business problems and people weren't getting paid, really. And it was a little confusing.

Dave: Hmm... That's a tough one.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Then they'd say you were getting paid and not. I don't know. It got all kind of confusing there. Anyway, they just closed, right?

But then it was like, "But what happens to our books, though? Do they just sit on Ingram and people can buy them and somebody is getting money but it ain't us." You know? This is weird.

So, there was a little bit of a grouping up of the authors, a little worker movement as it were. We all got together and emailed them as a unit. We weren't an official union or anything, but we acted as one.

We were like, "Here are our demands," pretty much. It worked. It ended up being... It's not like it was a big fight or anything. They're just like, "Yeah, sounds good."

The demands essentially were like, "We want our books back," like ownership of the books.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: So that if we want to republish them with a new publisher, we can, or make them available for free under our own terms - or whatever. They basically just said, "Yeah, sounds good. Sign this. Sign this document."

I did that. All these authors are in various states of putting the books back out however they want to up to and including probably the most common choice of just leaving them on Ingram. Meaning that you can still just buy the book. But all the A Book Apart branding had to get pulled off of it - whatever. There's some work to do to get the books re-ready.

00:19:25

Dave: How does that work? They have to reprint the book or recover it? Then who bears that cost?

Chris: Well, they transferred it.

Dave: Oh... Okay.

Chris: There used to be just one A Book Apart account, I guess, on Ingram. Part of the deal is if you want to stay on Ingram that there was this elaborate process that was pretty janky.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It became kind of a meme joke in the Slack community of how bad it was. But whatever! You eventually get the book transferred to your own account. Then when you make sales, the money comes to your account. Now you're making money again as an author, which is good. But before you could do that, essentially re-upload your book, there were some stipulations like re-covering it, essentially, like you said.

Dave: Then who--? Are they print on demand? Is that kind of the vibe there then?

Chris: Yes. Right.

Dave: Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

Chris: But it was a little confusing because people... There still was inventory for some reason. Maybe some books they would print ahead of time or something or all sales weren't all Ingram all the time. I think they still had some and printed on demand for some. But if it's Ingram, it's print on demand.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: I chose not to do Ingram because I was just like, "I don't know. It seems like a bunch of work and my book is so old." My book is Practical SVG, if you don't remember. But there was a time in the Web where SVG wasn't particularly popular. Not that it is now. But the vibe at the time was really centered around icon systems and SVG started to get a little momentum as, like, "This is the proper technology for icons," which has pretty much settled in now as, yeah, obviously.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Although, not everywhere.

Dave: Not everywhere.

Chris: You'll still see plenty of icon fonts still. But I was big into, like, "Icon fonts suck. Why would you do this? There are so many obvious problems to it. SVG is the correct solution."

The problem is you can't just say, "Use SVG for an icon system," because "How?" comes up pretty quickly. The answer is actually there are lots of different ways, and there are some really simple ways like just put the SVG in the HTML, which these days I'm mostly in favor of (unless there are hundreds or thousands of icons on a page). Sometimes the HTML weight or the DOM weight is a little much for that, or if the icons are really complicated, that could be a problem.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: But for the most part it's like, "Just put them in there. It's fine."

Dave: Yeah. If it's a complex thing and you didn't minify it, then it should live outside - or whatever.

Chris: Right.

Dave: And if it's repeated a bunch in a non-templetized way, then you probably shouldn't.

Chris: Exactly. There's nuance right and left to this. That's a perfect one that you just pointed out.

Dave: But then there are workarounds. You just chuck it into the body and you use SVG use. Ta-da! You solved the redundancy problem.

Chris: Sure. You could even use the IMG element. That's an efficient way to reuse one, too, if you don't need the styling.

Dave: Then you can't color it.

Chris: Yeah. But you can if you use filter.

Dave: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris: These debates were freaking endless with SVG. It depends on what you need. It was the ultimate "it depends" kind of thing. But still, there were answers to everything, like, "Use SVG for your icon system," was still the right answer and still is the right answer.

Anyway, that stuff is all in there. I wrote this book when all that was probably at its hottest (at least the debate of it, as far as I'm concerned). That's some of the stuff in there. But it's also not only icon systems. It was like what other ways are there to leverage SVG as a front-end developer.

It's not particularly the deepest dive in the world. These books are pretty short. It's just like, "You should be aware of this as a technology and here are some ways to use it."

Then it's aged, so it's like, "Here's how you set up Grunt for your icon system." You know?

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: That doesn't... Who is begging for that anymore? So, I just didn't feel like selling it was that interesting anymore.

00:23:53

Chris: Kind of the end of this story for me, just so we don't drag on forever, is that Jeff Eaton -- Do you know Jeff Eaton? Cool dude.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: I think he got kind of nerd sniped by this and was like, "Ooh... I think I could take... We could make an epub machine that would take an epub file and bust it apart into Markdown files and images and stuff."

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Then once you have that, you're free to use any static site generator kind of thing to do that. Then Mat Marquis, Mr. Wilto, made a nice, little 11ty template thing that took the busted apart epub file and made a really nice online book thing over it.

I didn't do anything but thank those two people. But now I--

Dave: Is it called Busted Apart, literally? [Laughter] That would be a really good....

Chris: No, it's even better. It's even better. It's called Dancing Queen.

Dave: Oh, perfect. Yes. Great.

Chris: That's the A Book Apart book parser. You can find the link to it. You can just go to practical-svg.chriscoyier.net. I'm a subdomains kind of guy.

Dave: Subdomain name.

Chris: Yeah, this was very little of the work of me. It was this Dancing Queen plus an 11ty template that Mat put together. And there's the book. It's for free. Enjoy, everyone.

Dave: Hey, that's a really awesome end of that story. I like that it's still online or it's still available for posterity's sake.

Chris: Yeah. I'd say as far as technology is concerned, it's probably 50% still accurate partially because I lucked out in that SVG just doesn't move that quickly as a technology.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris: The tools for optimizing SVG are probably just about the same as they ever were.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: There's nothing new in SVG as far as syntax is concerned. Pretty much nothing since I've written the book.

Dave: Yeah. Maybe that you can use href instead of xlink:href.

Chris: Yeah!

Dave: That's maybe the only bit that's changed, right?

Chris: In the use element, which is not even that popular anymore anyway.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: Funny.

Dave: Well, what's funny... Yeah, this is great, dude. I see some Ajax code. This is good. And some jQuery. I love it. I love it. I love it.

Chris: Did I just slide in some jQuery? Yeah, I did.

Dave: Yeah, we've got some jQuery in there. That's good. No.

00:26:20

Dave: Yeah, I saw Ethan had a post, and he kind of was like, "I'm taking my books, and I'm going to sell them and then I get the money," so I thought that was kind of cool. Then one thing he said, too, was, "I am going to lower the cost."

Chris: Yeah. He was pretty big on that.

Dave: I kind of liked that. Not to be a hater pants because obviously some business problems were happening and some costs were rising and stuff like that for paper, especially during the pandemic and stuff.

Chris: Right.

Dave: But man, I was just like, "It's getting really expensive to own these rainbow books." That was kind of hurting me. I'm spending $40 to get my friend's--

Chris: What were they? They were about $40? Oh, my god.

Dave: Yeah. I think $30.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: But then it was like, "How much was the--?"

Chris: Shipping.

Dave: Okay, I'll get the ebook, and the ebook was more expensive. I've seen places where the ebook is more expensive.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: I'm just like, "Maybe my understanding of reality, [laughter] like physical goods versus megabytes is different. But how could an ebook be more expensive, a PDF of the ebook be more expensive?" I guess it takes time to code up and stuff. I don't know. It's getting cost-prohibitive to own every book that comes out, even though I want every book that comes out. I own a fair chunk, but I don't have the complete series.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It looks like he's got it at $25 now, so it looks like it got notched down. Good job, Ethan.

Dave: Ethan's book is great.

Chris: I can't blame him at all because his books were sold way... They're just more important books, I'd say, all three of his.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: They were important moments in the Web design industry (all of them, really). And his union one -- remember, we had him on the show to talk about it -- just came out.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris: So, to have the implosion of the publisher happen most pointedly affected him.

Dave: Yeah. He was the last big title. I know Sam Kapp's book had come out fairly recently, just before that, too.

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Dave: But yeah, I think his was the last blockbuster title.

Chris: Getting not paid at the end, you don't want to... Not getting paid eight years later is one thing. Not getting paid right after you publish your book is another thing.

Dave: It is harder. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

00:28:54

Dave: Yeah. Well, that's... I mean I hope... It's hard because you're friends in business and stuff, too. Right? You like these people, generally.

Chris: Yeah, right. You've got to be careful. Bridge burning is dangerous. [Laughter]

Dave: But it is also this... That's just hard. But if you work enough, you understand how things fall apart. You've seen things go from everything is great to a sudden collapse.

Chris: Yeah. You've seen plenty of beginnings and endings.

Dave: Thinking about presidential candidacies.

[Laughter]

Dave: Bringing that full circle. It's like, "Everything is great," then it's like, "Nope."

Chris: Until it isn't.

Dave: Yeah. Well, that's an interesting end. I guess maybe not the end but just the end of A Book Apart story. I think that's cool that authors, y'all got together and got your books back.

Chris: Right, right.

Dave: Like an Oceans 11 style book heist.

Chris: Yeah, it was cool.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: I like that, but part of that even was complicated because you've kind of got to make sure that that's what everybody actually wants. If you're going to act all together as one, do you actually all think that? Do you want your rights back? Even that was a little complicated.

In the end, I think most people did. It's just that it became work then. And I sensed that as a big undercurrent of all this is like, "Yeah, this is cool and all. But man, all of a sudden, my plate is all full of crap to do."

Dave: Mm-hmm. Forms to sign. Taxes. Blah-blah-blah.

Chris: Yeah, even looking on Ethan's post here. It looks like when you click over to buy his book, it still has the A Book Apart cover on it. It's like, yeah, he did a bunch of work to get ready for this but he hasn't even gotten to that part yet.

Then you have to make technological decisions, too, because the way that it was mandated in there was to use their link shortener thing for all the references. Any URL in the book goes through their website. You have to decide. What have they said about keeping that online and then what do you believe?

00:31:10

Chris: Wasn't it in the news this week or last week that Google is shutting down theirs, the one that was like goog.le - or whatever?

Dave: Yeah, goo.gl. Yeah, goo.gl, they're killing it.

Chris: Yeah, and they've been saying they're going to kill it forever, and they have interstitials. The full story is that they're trying to kill it as well as they can. But then people looking up data for it is like, "Dude, there is no good way to shut this down." You can do a search for short links like that in academic publications, which of course will never be updated. In fact, I don't even know if they can be, right? They're published and stuck in time - kind of thing - on purpose because that's the correct way to do that type of publishing. Those links can never be changed, this academic publication that used it. It's not like there are 13 links like that. There are millions.

Dave: Yeah. I read this. I think that shortener, I think it was maybe something they just made but I think it was tied to Google+, that whole era.

Chris: They automatically shortened?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I don't remember them asking. It's not like there was some URL you'd go to and you'd paste in the URL and then it would give you one below (kind of like how bit.ly works). Bit.ly is trying to get you to shorten your URLs with them. You know what I mean? I don't remember Google doing that for you. I don't remember the origin of this shortener. Maybe it was more like, yeah, you just share a link on Google+ and then other people would copy the link out it and it would be shortened.

Dave: Yeah. It was launched - I'm seeing - December 2009, so is that around the time they killed Reader? Used for Google Toolbar - rip, and Feed Burner - also rip, and then, oh, Firebase dynamic links, Google Maps and Workspaces.

Chris: Oh, it's just all kinds of stuff then?

Dave: I guess it was tied to that. It wasn't necessarily tied to Google+. Yeah, that makes sense if it was more of a maps thing because I think I saw it there.

Chris: What was the full list of reasons why you would shorten a URL? I remember a big one was social media, like Twitter, had limits to the characters that you can enter. Having it be shorter was advantageous because it meant that you could write more. Then at one time they just stopped caring how long URLs were.

Dave: Yeah, they didn't count.

Chris: Was that the number one thing or were there other reasons? I know bit.ly these days, like if you have an account, one of the things it gets is, like, well then you can see how many times it was clicked and stuff like that. It was like a metadata situation.

Dave: Yeah. I think it was the Twitter thing. I think vanity plays a huge part. Like if I can send you to da.ve - or whatever. You know? That's cool.

Chris: Oh, it was just cool?

Dave: Yeah, I think it was cool. It was just kind of a fad to have these really short URLs that, then, /abcd that took you to a real URL.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: Then the metric tracking.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: If it's going through my server now, my little database of links, I can now track who clicked.

Chris: It's just so silly because there were performance implications for that. It makes the Web a little slower. It's so dumb. I'm glad they are out of vogue.

Dave: Well, like Twitter's thing still doesn't work for me from time to time.

Chris: Their little t.co thing?

Dave: T.co, yeah. It still doesn't work sometimes.

Chris: Yeah. That's a security thing for them, though, right?

Dave: Probably. But then it's also probably... Yeah, it's injecting your little campaign thing. That's how you could guarantee your campaign tracker got stuck on it.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: I think, in the A Book Apart thing, it's like typing out a big old dumb URL isn't necessarily great.

Chris: No.

Dave: And so it made sense that--

Chris: But was it?

Dave: But then that could also be a reference to an appendix, like, "Go see link number 53 in the appendix."

Chris: Yes.

Dave: It could have been that.

Chris: How many people manually type out a URL from a book that they're reading? That's my concern. Then it's like what you probably do is look in the appendix, see the long URL, and then Google... use a Web search tool that's obviously going to take you to that link.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I think people have that skill already to be like, "Oh, this is a Douglas Crawford post about the invention of JSON," or whatever. Just then Google that. That's where you're trying to get. I just feel like the type in angle is a particularly weak one.

You don't need the short URLs for the digital version of the book because you just click. Then you go.

Dave: I think there's maybe some uniformity there, too. It all looks the same. It's not in context.

Chris: There's some aesthetics.

Dave: Yeah. It's a 20 or 10-character thing instead of... It could be short. It could be 256 characters long, so I think there are some aesthetics there. But I think the pro move would be, "Go see this link in the appendix. Link number 53." You know? In hindsight, that's probably the most scalable situation forward.

There's also maybe cool URLs don't change, but sometimes URLs do change, so you could also reroute a URL if you needed to. I'm not advocating for that necessarily.

Chris: Oh, the old rewrite. Ah...

Dave: Kind of UR proxy for things.

Chris: That's kind of interesting. Yeah. The problem is that just didn't pan out. Right? The chances of your shortener dying is a lot higher than the original URL needing to be updated.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: I could see somebody talking about that as a potential benefit.

00:37:17

Dave: You know actually who uses URL shorteners to a great effect is this little company called Microsoft that I have some experience with.

Chris: Yeah? Are they good at it?

Dave: They have a URL shortener for all your internal links. You have to think of the context here. It's like 200,000 people trying to be like, "Where is my healthcare? Where is my 1040ez?" These are little URL shorteners, and you can apply to a central database for them and get your own URL shortener. Yeah, so they have a URL shortener for internal Microsoft links.

I think that's cool. I think that's helpful. They have posters all over the campus for stuff. That's easier than a big ol' URL to some SharePoint website. So, in some ways that's better. That's a better user experience.

Maybe a QR code is also the same. It's kind of like a QR code. Why do they exist? Well, it's because URLs are dumb or URLs are verbose.

Chris: Right. One thing that occurs to me, though, is when you hear news like that. What do people actually think? What goes through your mind when you hear, "Oh, Google is going to shut down their thing"? Then the way that you should write an announcement of that is to preemptively think about that in your brain and then answer those questions right away in the post.

It always bugs me when that's not what they do. I get sometimes it's more complicated than that. You have to... There are business implications or whatever. But one of the things that when you say, "Oh, we're going to shut down our link shortener," and you're talking to people that have made a bunch of links, the first thing you think is, "Hey, aren't you a super billion-dollar company? Isn't it 18 lines of code to write a function that says 'Get the slug off a URL. Look up the other URL in a database that's now locked in time and highly optimized, and just redirect to that thing'?" That's the simplest Web server in the world. How much money could it possibly cost?

Can you tell us in this announcement why this thing has to be shut down? From my perspective, it looks like being mean or vindicative or something because it's certainly not a technological problem that you're having being able to just keep this going in perpetuity. You know?

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: Tell me why you can't do it.

Dave: Yeah. Why was it not a server... a Lambda function that hit a CSV file or a Google Sheet that just has a billion URLs in it? It can be slow. It does not have to be fast. It just has to be a thing. It could have been, yeah, a text file hard-coded into this function.

I don't know. I think you're right. Why is it--? Why do the big brains, the big Stanford brains at Google have such a hard time maintaining a URL shortener?

Chris: Yeah. Then you get negative press out of it, too. I don't know. You must have really wanted to shut that thing down and have some real strong reasons that are apparently a secret.

Dave: "It's costing us $8 a year to manage this." [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah, and it would atrophy over time if you just stopped using it. But all those URLs would still work. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, and especially this company that tries to invest lots of money in making the Web better. We know. We have friends that are hired and paid by the company with seemingly no other reason to exist other than just make Web better.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Make the Web better than it was before. That's what you're paid to do at Google. Then they're like, "We're going to make little decisions to also hurt the Web." I don't get it!

Dave: Yeah. I'm looking at a Tech Crunch article called "goo.gl is a go. The stablest, most secure and fastest URL shortener." Hey, oh! Anyway, that's funny.

Chris: It's stuff like this, too. I know we've got a hard stop.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

00:41:34

Chris: But I think this is a preview of a potentially upcoming episode. I heard that Astro or Netlify is going to be the new hosting partner for Astro, right?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: You're like, "Oh, that's really cool," and you see some news come out for it. What goes on through a developer's head -- this is just mine, but I feel like an announcement like that should be just coded in understanding what is going on.

Vercel was their partner before, so what happened there? Was it a juicy falling out? Did Netlify just outbid them? Did the contract fail?

I don't know. You can't really say that in the announcement, but of course, I want to know. What the hell happened there? That's pretty crazy.

Then weren't they... They were a partner with Netlify before? What is it about this that makes Netlify think it'll be worth it, worth the money they're putting into it? How does that go? Is it a changing hands of money, or is there now some technological stuff that's happening at Netlify that makes this work better and then it makes Astro a showcase for that technology? Is that really what's happening?

But they also sponsored 11ty and then didn't anymore, which makes you think, "Oh, that's a little--" it's a little like these things kind of come and go. That feels dangerous. Where are all the answers to all that stuff?

Dave: Yeah, kind of the economics of dating projects. [Laughter] Like courting other projects or whatever.

Chris: It makes me want to write press releases. I'll be like, "You should hire me to do it because I will answer the questions that people have."

Dave: Right.

Chris: All right. I know you've got to go, so let's wrap it up and we'll see everybody next week. We're back at the offices.

Dave: Yeah, a hard stop. I'll wrap it up. We're back. We're back, so we should have a stable release of episodes heading into Frostapalooza. We hope to see you there.

Follow us on Mastodon. That's the cool one. Join us in the D-d-d-d-discord, that's where the party is at, patreon.com/shoptalkshow.

I've got to go to a standup. Chris, do you got anything else you'd like to say?

Chris: Oh, ShopTalkShow.com. Bye-bye.

Dave: Bye.