Transcript

[Banjo music]

MANTRA: Just Build Websites!

Dave Rupert: Hey there, Shop-o-maniacs. You're listening to another episode of the ShopTalk Show, a podcast where we do rigid journalism every day, every week, every month, day in and day out for 630-something straight episodes. We are professional journalists, Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier. Hey, Chris. How are you doin' today?

Chris Coyier: Good, good, good, good. Yeah. Very good. Um... you know, speaking of—

Dave: Probably need to change our theme song to like a dancing piano if we're going to be doing all this journalism, you know?

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Have, like... you know. We'll figure it out. Yeah.

Chris: We'll figure it out, for sure.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: For sure. Dedicated to the truth around here. "Democracy dies in darkness," that's what I always say.

Dave: And so does open-source.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Open-source dies in Discord. [Laughter] I'll take that. I'll put that on a T-shirt, "Open-source dies in Discord."

Chris: [Laughter] That's pretty good, actually.

Dave: It's good, right? Yeah.

Chris: Want unsearchable conversations?

Dave: Yes!

Chris: Try Slack. Try the free Slack.

There's another thing that we're not, which is lawyers.

Dave: Not a lawyer. Did we get in trouble again? [Laughter]

00:01:30

Chris: We had somebody write in.

Dave: Yes. [Laughter]

Chris: Wrote in as first name Anon, last name ForObviousReasons, for who wanted to know a couple of questions, which we can of course opine on but then be wrong because we're not lawyers. They were almost like, "Please don't do that. If you could ask a lawyer because you know one, that would be helpful. Otherwise, just read these questions on the air and maybe a real lawyer can write in, and then we can follow up on those answers."

They are pretty simple ones. I bet everyone will have an opinion about these. But we'll see if we can home in on an actual lawyerly answer through time and publishing.

Number one is, Anon's employer wants to put a copyright notice at the top of every single source file in their entire repo. That's just what they think is the right thing to do. Anon says this feels wildly excessive to me. Is there any world in which this is necessary or does the license in the repo cover this?

I imagine 99% of people listening, including myself, would say this is clearly excessive, and the only thing that I can cite as an example is every single repo.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: I've never seen one that's ever done that.

Dave: Every repo doesn't do this.

Chris: I have seen a built copy of a library have a copyright notice at the top of it. jQuery has a copyright thing at the top of it - or whatever - or the license. I don't know if there's a difference between using the word license and copyright, but they're related, certainly.

00:03:08

Dave: Yeah. I was going to say, you know who I think does this is Chrome? Chromium Dev, Google. I was trying to find the repo.

Chris: Every file? Every CSS file? Yeah?

Dave: Yeah. Go into their... Not every file but in lib, maybe. No. No. Okay, I'm lying.

I feel like I see it from time to time in Google repos, only Googly ones.

Chris: I just did the same thing. I Googled Chromium. You can just go to the Chromium GitHub project, and I just clicked on some folders, and I'm opening up some files, and they really do have copyright at the top of all of them.

Dave: Yeah, so I'm at GitHub.com/googlechromelabs/squoosh/lib/clientbundlepluginjs -- everyone's favorite file -- and it has a copyright 2020 Google Inc., and then the license and some other stuff.

Chris: Hmm... I was wrong about every repo. Clearly, this repo has a copyright.

Dave: Well, every repo... We've overstated. So, Google does this. I think, why does Google do this? Probably for a reason. But what is that reason? Not clear.

I assume Serma is not like, "God. You know what? I've got to really just put this on every file or I'm not going to be happy." So, I think it's not on, like, config files and stuff like that. It's just on lib files, it looks like.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: I'm just going through.

Chris: Maybe somebody saw this at one time and be like, "You know who knows what they're doing? Google. So, maybe we should do what they do." I would not blame you for that. You know that's pretty common thinking.

Dave: Right. I think you are sort of in a... Yeah, well... See, it's just in their lib files, so maybe these are library files they pulled from somewhere, and so they want to say, "We have used this. We're reusing this with this." You know they're tracing this library to something else.

Anyway, I don't know. All this to say is I've seen it before. I don't know. It's not clear why they're doing it or why your boss wants that. But maybe it's... My thinking is it's sort of like, "Well, if you don't do it, you have no argument."

Chris: That's exactly what I think, too, is that there probably hasn't been a court case that has established a really strong precedent here. And so, you're certainly safer if that thing is at the top of every single file just in case it gets that far in a court case. Be like, "Hey, you copied something from a file that had it at the top of the file."

Dave: At the file, yeah.

Chris: So, I don't know. it does seem excessive, but maybe it's just untested in courts.

Dave: jQuery in Modernizer used to have something like that in the bundle file.

Chris: Yeah. The single file thing makes a little bit more sense to me if it's the entirety of the entire thing you're delivering.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: If that has a copyright/license at the top, it makes a little more sense to me.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Again, we're just opining. If you know the answer to this or think we're wildly off or are a lawyer of sorts and want to answer this, please go to shoptalkshow.com and write in and we'll follow up and try to get to the answer.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: If we don't hear anything, we won't. Sorry.

00:06:52

Chris: Here's another one that's the follow-up question is that copyright in the footer of a website. I guess it doesn't have to be in the footer, but I guess probably there's some design precedence that puts it there, and/or it just has to be at the end of content, which I wouldn't be surprised.

You see it pretty commonly, I'd say. But it's just a C with a circle around it and the year, sometimes a range of years. Sometimes the years are wrong, and saw the jokes in early January about, "Make sure to upgrade the copyright on your thing."

It seems like... Go to The Verge. Go to Dave's favorite website, theverge.com.

Dave: theverge.com.

Chris: There is absolutely a copyright in the bottom of it. It says copyright 2024, the current year, VOX MEDIA, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Dave: Dude, wouldn't that be awesome if it was 2023 still, and I could steal The Verge and The Verge was suddenly mine? I'd get The Verge.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Because they didn't change it.

Chris: Well, I think that's why Anon is asking this question. Does it matter?

Dave: Uh...

Chris: No. Here's this other thing that you hear about it.

Dave: I mean, if you're an LLM, it doesn't matter. [Laughter]

Chris: Well, god-dang right it doesn't.

Dave: Hey!

Chris: Do you hear that the technology just doesn't even really exist to untrain a model? If you opt-out, a company can be like, "Okay, cool. Future trainings won't include that, but we cannot (because the technology doesn't really exist) pull your stuff out of the model that's already been trained."

Dave: Whoops.

Chris: Wow. That blows my mind.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Anyway, what if it did say 2023 down there? Would that open them up to problems? You could steal all their 2024 content because it said 2023? It seems highly unlikely to me.

Usually, what you hear about this is that those don't matter at all. That there's an implied copyright on it. Sometimes, if you're trying to be more permissive, you need to put a copyright on there or a license of sorts that opens up the permissions of it because, by default, your stuff is copyrighted just by virtue of you publishing it. Then does that change country by country? Don't know.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Again, we need real lawyer answers here. I have never once worried about it, but I run pretty small companies and just tend to not care about stuff like that. Sorry.

Dave: I think it's just talk to lawyers and get the final say from your business's lawyers. Yeah, that copyright thing is so weird because I've not undergone any kind of legal process [laughter] luckily, to copyright of the words on my blog. I just post them out and then I put that little... auto-generate that thing on the bottom. There's no... I didn't file any papers to anyone to achieve a copyright on this text, so I don't even know. I don't know.

I think it's weird. Yeah. I think all of this is changing in the face of AI, whether we want it to or not. I think it's all becoming sort of this idea of commons, kind of like creative commons, but just like buckets of text, unfortunately. I think New York Times falls under the same bucket of text problem. It's just they have more money to--

Chris: I wonder if their lawsuit against all that LLM stuff has settled. That would be interesting to know.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Speaking of rigid journalism that we don't do.

Dave: Follow-up is a lot of effort, to our credit.

[Laughter]

Chris: I only follow up on things I put on my calendar for ... reasons.

All right, well, those are the two questions that Anon wants to know real lawyerly answers for. It certainly would be interesting there.

I suspect a company like The Verge and/or the default WordPress theme and crap like that has some reason.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Perhaps historical, for putting that there.

Dave: Yeah, well, I wonder, too. If your company is open-sourcing it, that's one thing, right? You have a license in the repo, right? But when you're putting it out, you're stripping all that stuff out. You know what I mean? If it goes to your website, you theoretically stripped out all the comments. Did you just strip out the copyright? Who knows? Anyway... Sorry. My brain. Sorry. It just keeps going; keep pulling this sweater thread. Here we go.

00:11:33

Dave: Next, Lucas Paetow writes in, "I recently had some time and started to rebuild my personal site. It should be interactive, uniquely me, showcases some of my front-end skills, and be a little challenging. Meaning, I want it to be as vanilla as possible. No framework, no artificial CSS scoping. I'm a big fan of the cascade. And no JS, as little JS as possible for the core experience without sacrificing responsiveness or accessibility. That made it quite complex and took some time. I eventually used Astro as a sort of middle ground and mainly as a discount HTML imports." Heck yeah.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave:"But I would have been a lot faster with less strict requirements, especially for the no JS part. So, what are your requirements for your own personal Web things, projects?"

Chris: Yeah, okay. Cool. I don't know that I have any requirements, but I like that you intentionally made your website on hard mode, or at least according to you. That's kind of cool.

Dave: Yeah. No, I mean I start in vanilla, man. I try to avoid a build process whenever possible, and I actively find things that have build processes. I don't go back to that often. [Laughter]

But there are reasons, like if you think the scope is going to be more than one page. Having something to manage your pages, that's helpful. I think Astro is really good at generating HTML pages, so use it for that. If that's what you need, if that's what... You're going to build a site with more than five pages, that's probably what you need. You need a machine that spits out HTML, so I don't think you're cheating. I don't think you're getting... You're not... You know. You're not shortcutting - or whatever.

00:13:29

Chris: I just wanted to draw a connection to another blog post I read recently: "Coming Home," by Mandy Brown on aworkinglibrary.com. [She] was writing about personal websites and stuff. It looks like she's been doing some work on her own website and was talking about an early decision that she made on the site, which is that it will be loosely organized around things that she's ready.

Can you imagine making a decision like that and then just spending - whatever - a decade or two dealing with that as what she calls the shape of the website? It becomes a part of the website's grain, in a way, in that you can make different choices and websites can have different shapes - and that kind of thing. All very interesting writing.

There's a part of it that has to do with the difficulty level. It reminded me of this question because part of the question is about intentionally doing it on hard mode, like I said. You know? It sounds like Mandy likes that idea in some way.

Maybe I could read a part of it. It talks about... hmm..."There's a great deal of friction between an idea or phrase coming to mind and the words making it out into the world. And I don't mean the writing itself, which every writer will tell you is dreadful, but the actual mechanics of sharing that writing.

"I mean I'm the fool who opens their damn terminal every time they want to publish. In recent weeks, I've spent a not insignificant number of hours writing some absolutely criminal CSS. I cannot in good conscience advise this path for anyone with sense. But the choice to do so suits my own proclivities; the desire to tinker not only with the words but with the strata underneath them and the long-running interest in the material reality of publishing.

"Often more than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal. Is it at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being."

Kind of cool.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: That there's just so much thinking about, "Make it easy. Make it easy. Make it easy," which I usually am on team easy. But I take the point here that sometimes the effort is what helps the shape and helps the site overall.

00:15:53

Dave: Yeah. I think you learn by doing and encountering problems and debugging and searching. Then your first search doesn't work because you don't understand what they call - whatever - an object. And so, you're like, "Okay. What does this even call this thing?" And so, I call it this. "Okay, now I'm going into--"

You start... you sort of start pulling apart the machine that you're dealing with while you're debugging or trying to get something done, so you're becoming smarter and better at this piece of software.

Yeah, sometimes it sounds like it was a challenge to not use a JS framework or something like that or a CSS framework or a CSS, like a module system or CSS and JS. I think that's admirable to just be like, "How can I do this but in a stripped down, different kind of way, different than what I'm used to?"

A blog is a great way to explore different paths. Yeah. I've started doing a lot of projects in Web components. I know that's kind of my thing. But a lot of it is defensive because I don't want to come back to this and be like, "How was I fricken' building this? Oh, okay. What NPM command makes this happen?" You know?

I just want it to be like NPX HTTP server, and then go. You know?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave: That's what I want, and so try to keep it as dumb as possible. Been working on that, but my "go back to project" rate right now is very low. [Laughter] So, I'm not the person to ask right now.

But you know I use Jekyll on my blog. I've tried to switch to 11ty. I built the whole dang thing, but then I just... You know Jekyll is fine. It's got Ruby. That's weird. Maybe next time I set up a computer, I'll regret that decision. But it's fine. Jekyll works. It spits out pages in three seconds, so I'm good.

[Laughter]

Dave: It'll be fine.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how long it lasts. It's lasted a long time, so it's probably just fine.

Do you read the Jekyll release notes? Do they even release new Jekyll?

Dave: I don't know, man. That would be a surprise to me if there was a new Jekyll.

[Laughter]

Dave: There are some occasional things like some functionality. I use the Jekyll SEO plugin, which is weird, but it's basically just--

Chris: What, metatags?

Dave: It does all your metatags and stuff. Where I was doing that manually, now I just hand it off to a plugin. That's great because I used to have this partial that would import and blah-blah-blah. Now it's just a gem that I install. Yeah, now I'm going to... Now I'm curious about Jekyll release notes, releases.

00:19:03

Chris: Yeah, is there anything juicy? Do they help with stuff?

Dave: Hey, dude, 4.3.4 came out just a little bit ago. Oh, man. They're relaxing version constraint on gem, WDM, and gem file created by Jekyll New. That's awesome!

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Patch Jekyll drops, theme drop root to render absolute path to theme gem only if Jekyll end in set to string development. That's great, man!

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Then the other one before--

[Laughter]

Chris: That is somehow just exactly what I expected.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah? Just the most esoteric, tiny, tiny thing. Actual users are like, super shrug.

Dave: Yeah. Jekyll 4.3 had a bunch of releases, and then it's been just a bunch of Jekyll 3 releases. [Laughter] Jekyll 3.10 got released. That's great. [Laughter] It's on 4.3.

Chris: I don't even know what you do. I'd have to do a comparison. It's mostly my ignorance, but can they provide features at this point? What would they do that's like, "Wow! Now that's a release"? You know? Would it be switching languages? Would it be giving you a CMS? Would it be building in an automatic some kind of thing that helps with site search or comments or something? Probably not because a lot of those things seem outside of the scope of a thing that just builds some static pages. But you never know. Who knows what products choose to do.

Dave: Yeah. Well, and maybe they win by keeping it really dumb, like really small in features.

Chris: Right. They win so far by it's the thing that... The only one that GitHub Pages will build.

Dave: Right now. I've heard that's going to maybe change. I don't know where I heard that, but I think... I've heard from GitHub people, I feel like--

Chris: Murmurs.

Dave: --there are ideas that that they'd offer options. But I don't even know if that's true.

Chris: Yeah, maybe.

00:21:08

Dave: Jekyll is the default. Defaults are pretty powerful. I do think they are constrained by, if they put a feature in, it goes into GitHub and that's a big deal. That's potential security.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: So, I do think there is that kind of pressure there.

Chris: And don't they kind of own--? Doesn't GitHub kind of own Jekyll, too? It's kind of incestuous in a good way, kind of.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like--

Chris: Right.

Dave: --dogfooded.

Chris: Somehow, I don't think Pressable is going to be hosting Drupal sites. Probably, they'd prefer to keep it in-house.

Dave: But they've got integrations with, like, CloudCannon, Contentful, Tina, Decap. So, they're trying to tail to new stuff.

Chris: Stay hip. Yeah.

Dave: Yeah, follow that. Algolia Search, ElasticSearch, Bonzi Search.

Chris: Cool. Good job, Jekyll.

00:22:07

[Banjo music starts]

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[Banjo music stops]

00:23:33

Chris: I'm going to read a rant. Are you ready?

Dave: Love it.

Chris: From Michael C. who wrote in.

Dave: Let's hit it.

Chris: Michael is pissed about this one. I like it.

"There's a combination of UI and UX patterns that's becoming increasingly popular in the last few years, and I firmly believe it's from the eighth or nineth level of hell. I don't know if there's a name for this combo pattern, so I'll just call it Bob from Hell.

"Bob from Hell is typically an eighth level of hell abomination that is comprised of two relatively innocent UI/UX patterns. Sometimes, however, a couple more patterns are included that kick it straight into the accursed nineth level of hell.

"The first pattern is that of auto-playing videos, which are completely unrelated to the article in which they infest. Okay. Fine. It's basically an advertisement. We'll all ignore it. Scroll past. Keep on reading. Whatever.

"The second pattern is that oh so helpful UI pattern of a floating picture in picture state for actively playing videos. Typically, these videos are sticky positioned into the corner of the browser window.

"By itself, this might even seem somewhat useful to those of us who lie to ourselves that we can multitask. But when this is combined with the previous pattern, you get floating auto-playing unrelated videos, which on small screen devices often obscure the content that you're actually trying to read. Not okay.

"But wait. There's more. Pattern the third is that hiding the X close button for the floating videos for a few seconds. It's very similar to the skip ads button on YouTube, except somehow far more infuriating. Also, the UI of these buttons is often terrible. There are these tiny, gray circles that can't really be seen whose hit boxes are far smaller than the fingertip on mobile, so you're just as likely to tap the video as the close button itself.

"Lastly, the fourth pattern is that it really elevates the maliciousness into an artform is that of the auto-cycling, auto-playing videos every 15 to 30 seconds or so, and each time restoring their floating PIP status (even if you just closed the previous incarnation a few seconds ago).

"All together, you get a never-ending cycle of unrelated auto-playing floating videos obscuring the content you're trying to read, forcing a five-day delay before they can be closed and then self-resurrecting ten seconds later to repeat the torture all over again. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Bob from Hell. I don't know if there's a better, more descriptive name for this hell spawn, but it needs to be called out, vilified, and banished from the Web with extreme prejudice."

[Laughter] I'll take it.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Thanks for the rant, Michael. Yes, that's a bad one.

00:26:06

Dave: Common UI pattern. Did you read that post, "How to Monetize a Blog"?

Chris: Yeah. [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Oh, my God. Oh! That was hilarious.

Dave: We'll put a link in the show notes from modem.io, but it was basically just this--

Chris: Talk about an artform.

Dave: This one just... It has a little revenue counter that goes up as you scroll.

[laughter]

Dave: Then every link you click, a little coin flies up. Did you know that? [Laughter] So, you can actually earn more money if people click on links. Anyway... I don't think you earn more money.

Chris: Yeah. That's tremendous. Then it descends into basically Garfield on the Internet weirdness at the bottom. Hilarious.

Dave: Yeah.

00:26:48

Chris: Really well done. I agree with you, of course, Michael, in all ways. Nobody disagrees with that. It's awful.

I do find it interesting to think about how it came to be and why it persists. Why do websites even do this at all? Well, it's obviously money. No website is like, "You know what I'm going to do? Make myself worse just for no benefit." They don't... People don't... That's not an incentive. People don't make that choice.

They make this choice because somehow, some way, this is a thing that gets actual clicks, which turned into actual money. Then the website benefits. Then they look past it. They say, "This is okay. We are making enough money from this pattern that we're going to leave it. We're going to allow this to happen." That's what actually happens.

The money is just good enough, probably, that they choose it. They don't pull it down.

We are complacent. As much as this rant is a beautiful thing, we're not voting with our fingers well enough to make this not work.

Dave: Yeah. No, I mean it's weird, right? We just let it happen.

It's not us. It's the whole world. We vote. We run ad blockers and stuff like that and try to steal the content as best we can. But it's just a gross... I feel like.. Of course, the term enshittification has to come up, right?

I feel like people without taste get put into positions where they're told to make money and that's how something becomes bad. They lack taste. They lack nuance. They don't know how to communicate with actual humans. They just know how to put things on a page and sell that real estate - indiscriminately. They don't sell it to high bidders. They don't sell it to quality products. They just sell it to whoever will give them 35 cents per page view or per million page views - or whatever.

I don't know, man. It's a race to the bottom, I feel like. I feel like we've not... Like you were saying, voted with our dollars. We've not requested quality content in advertisement.

Chris: Right. This website that Michael was on, he saw this pattern on it. Are they right? Does their analytics say, "Hey, we're doing fine. It's not going down. It's staying up. We're gaining new customers. We're gaining new readers. Our revenue is up. Everything is going in the right direction." Or are they wrong and they might see a temporary gain but then a long-term decline in readership and customers and whatever else they're trying to do because they're being so obnoxious?

That's what's interesting to me. I don't have a good sense on whether they're "right" in that they're fricken' making money. You can say you're annoyed by Bob from Hell. It's absolutely annoying. Nobody is going to disagree with you. But if it works, then what?

If there's no decline in customers, all they're doing is making more money from their website, they're kind of right then. And it's unclear to me.

You can paint this picture and say, "Well, they're eroding the trust of their customers. Eventually, this will bite them in the butt." It's satisfying to think that. But are you right? Is there proof of that or not? I think that would be hard to know the answer to that, and I would love to know the answer to that.

00:30:36

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, well, why doesn't Google (who search indexes people and has big power) say, "Hey, Bob from Hell gets you nuked from the search rankings"? That would solve the problem overnight. But that doesn't happen.

Chris: It doesn't seem to. They've said they were going to do that. There have been public statements from Google saying, like, "If you have, for example, a modal that comes up and obscures content, that you'll be penalized for that," from an SEO perspective.

Now, is that just talk? Are they just saying that? Are they actually doing it? How badly does it affect your SEO, et cetera? We don't--

Because some of these things are just so secretive, sometimes you'll just never know the answer to that. I don't know. It's tricky. I like watching websites like The Verge because they do a good job. They have a good staff. They do good writing. They have good design. It seems like a successful website and they play this game of filling it with ads.

Visit it without an ad blocker on. There must be 50 ads on the homepage of the site. And those are just the ones that you can see. Of course, if you open your console, you'll see Web requests just absolutely flying to all kinds of different Web servers. That I'm sure has to do with the concept called header bidding where, on the fly, as soon as an ad is shown, they hit an ad server that hits another ad server. People bid on that impression. Then they show the thing. There are just lots of Web--

Dave: Edge blocked 127 trackers on The Verge. [Laughter]

Chris: Yeah. Wow!

Dave: It's so many, dude.

Chris: [Laughter] I know. It's wild, and that's the world in which they live in. They--it's tempting for me to say--are doing this game correctly. As much as that sucks and is painful to say and I don't want them to be doing it, I want them to be successful in some other way. I don't all the way hate advertising.

I mean I do hate this tracker stuff, but they've probably got the dial just about where it needs to be where they can get away with this. They can get away with 127 trackers and 50 ads on the page, and they're not really losing customers or readers.

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: However you want to think about that, that's where we're at.

00:33:06

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like this needs to be addressed higher up. You have the IAB setting ad standards, but they're all like, "Retargeting is the best." We've talked about that on the show.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It's like these cookies don't do anything.

Chris: This is like the new Dave. You're always like, "This needs to be... It's almost like a governmental problem," or something. It can't be solved at the tiny level.

Dave: I absolutely think it's a government problem. Yeah. Dude, stop. This is bad. [Laughter] You know. There is no incentive to not just play video ads.

Have you tried to read CNN.com? You can't. One-third of the top of the page is an advertisement. Then the minute you scroll, that herk-jerks and turns into an auto-playing video at the bottom of your screen. It's just this... You can't read the first paragraph on CNN because it's impossible. It's so bad.

Chris: This other sad thing is there are a lot of people that use ad blockers, and they tend to do a pretty good job such that it went from 100% ads (just absolute coverage like you're describing) to 0% and a perfectly good reading experience. So that the way that CNN needs to turn up the dial to make more money when they need to is by punishing the people who don't use the ad blockers. That experience needs to get worse and worse and worse whereas the ad blocker experience just stays the same. It's just totally clean.

You wish you could turn the dial such that it's not so horrible for the non-ad blocker people and somehow spreads the wealth into the ad blocker people land.

Dave: Yeah. It's just a race to the bottom. Then ads are... Basically, you're monetizing people who aren't smart enough to install an ad blockers or a browser with an ad blocker. Now it's like these are ads for... What do I get on YouTube? It's like, "Meat in a can." I get prepper ads for meat in a can, Chris. It's so bad.

Chris: Do you?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah?

Dave: It's because I watch, "I built an off-grid cabin in Idaho," so it's like, "Oh, okay. Cool." But then it's like, "This guy loves to prep."

00:35:31

Chris: This is a fun game. What are all of them if you go to some random CNN article? What do you got?

Dave: Oh, on CNN? Let me see. I'll see what they--

Chris: Yeah. Why not? Because it'll probably... If you do it in... If you do it in an incognito window or private window, theoretically, it doesn't know who you are. It'll have your IP address but that's about it.

Dave: I get some ads for some boots that look like they're from the 1800s. Okay? I feel targeted there.

Chris: Boots? Yeah, boots.

Dave: Boots, man boots.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah. Some cruise ship encounters with pirates. That feels like--

Chris: Cruise ship encounters? Okay. That's really weird.

Dave: These are the link... What are they called? The outbrain sort of stuff, you know?

Chris: It looks like a link but it's not?

Dave: It's a link to some sort of thing, you know, "Six things not to do when selecting a financial advisor." Things like that.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: Let's see if I get any other ads besides boots.

Chris: Oh, I see. I see.

Dave: Seniors can now fly business class.

Chris: Hmm...

Dave: Got me.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Here's some more. "Amazon's worst nightmares." Ooh..."How much money should you have before hiring a financial advisory?" It must sense I really want a financial advisor. Not really in the market, but sure.

Yeah, let's see. I'm now not getting ads. I'm getting just like recycled outbrain content.

Chris: I got hats, handmade hats, Conner Hats. Yeah? Scroll down just a little bit, and the auto-playing video starts. It's some kind of foundation called Come Back Alive, which is pretty dark. I think it has to do with military stuff.

Allbirds ad here. Not bad. I'll take it. Part of me thinks that if advertisement then scam. I have that part of my brain, too. But Allbirds, I'll had some All Birds before. I assume... Let me do it. I'm going to click on this ad.

Yeah, we just go to the Allbirds store to buy some shoes. I'm hoping that works. That's the ad I want to see.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: We haven't ran it, I don't think, yet, but we have an opportunity to run a Nike ad in the CodePen Spark newsletter. It's just a picture of a shoe and the link goes directly to buying that shoe on nike.com. And I'm like, "Hell, yeah! We're going to run that." It's just so straightforward.

There are no trackers involved. It's just a link, a picture of a shoe that links to a shoe store. It's just in a different category.

Oh, I see the outbrain stuff. "Here are the 29 coolest gifts of 2024." Wow.

Dave: In theory, those upsell you to something else. Yeah.

I went to the homepage, and I got some more financial advisor stuff. I got an air purifier. I got the Penguin on Max.

Chris: Oh, yeah. I heard that's a good show. You know what's funny is that this logged out version, this one where they know nothing about you, it tends to be just as good or better, I find, than some website that theoretically knows all kinds of crap about me.

Dave: Yeah.

00:38:38

Chris: The targeting thing, just anecdotally, seems like a joke.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Unless it's Instagram, and then they've got to me dead to rights.

Dave: [Laughter]

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: See, my Instagram is awful.

Chris: Is it?

Dave: It's like, "Cool Beenie Babies." I don't know. It's stupid. Or like... Uh... I don't want to turn on notifications. Sorry.

Chris: Don't do it. Yeah. [Laughter]

Dave: Glasses. Okay. Got me. This is fun, isn't it? Oh, I get Ugmonk, which I do actually like, but you can use my referral.

Chris: That's interesting. They're a little bit of a small guy company, a little bit. It's kind of interesting to know when a company like that, that's as established as they are, is still finding success in running--

Dave: Yeah. I get--

Chris: --such generic ads.

Dave: --keyboards, blah-blah.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Games that don't look good, like low quality games. A razor. Yeah, dude. [Laughter] Hey, advertising is stupid. There's nothing important.

Chris: Yeah. I heard those are coming back. Those are those really thin phones that were hot in the--what would you call it--late '90s, early '00s.

Dave: Oh, yeah. No, mine was a physical, like, shave your face razor.

Chris: Oh, shave your face razor. What kind of nerd am I that I'm like, "Oh, Razor? I remember that phone."

Dave: I love Razors.

Chris: Not think of an actual razor.

Dave: The scooter. [Laughter]

[Laughter]

Dave: I love the Razor scooters. Can you do tricks?

Hey, we've got one more question. Where are we at on time?

Chris: We've got a couple, yeah.

Dave: We've got....

00:40:09

Chris: Etienne Lareau writes in. I’m sorry if I murdered that. It was just a one-liner question that says, "But what about Joomla?"

Dave: Ah...

Chris: Just for fun, we even talked about other CMSs. Joomla.org is doing just fine. I would put their homepage design as slightly nicer than Drupal's.

But Joomla used to be part of kind of the trifecta. During my formative years early on it was like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla was kind of a three-for. Joomla always kind of being at the bottom. Sorry, Joomla. At least in my mind it was (only in terms of usage).

In my mind, it kind of stayed there because I never once had the opportunity to spin one up. To this day, I've never made a Joomla site. Although, I knew Joomla people and I always knew them to be pretty happy and pleased with their system.

I admit it would be a rare day for me to reach for it now just this many years later knowing that it just doesn't seem like one that I could think of a single reason why I'd want to spin up. Sorry, Joomla.

Dave: Yeah. It's weird. You don't know the competitive advantage. I understand the competitive advantage of Craft over WordPress.

Chris: Certainly because it's absolute. To me, when I think of Craft, I think of an absolute dedication to setting up the CMS in a way that reflects the content that it's about to serve. That that's a part of setting up a Craft site is being like, "Okay, what kind of content is it going to be? Okay, I will model it to that content and make it that kind of perfect. It's always appealed to me."

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I get that.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: Maybe you do that on Joomla. I sort of doubt it.

Dave: Yeah, I just don't see what the competitive advantage is, but you know. I'm sure people have Joomla and there are over two million active Joomla websites, so there you go.

Chris: Yeah. Hey, no shade--

Dave: Hey.

Chris: --shade on all ya Joomla people. Can't speak about it. What do you got, man?

00:42:05

Dave: Ben Edmonds writes in, a long time listener. Thank you for listening to the show. I appreciate it.

"I make a handful of websites each year, all bespoke, small, some small and static, some bigger with a CMS. So, my ears perk up when CMS chat arrives. I've rarely heard you discuss Statamic," -- that's hard for me to say, Statamic --"in any depth, though, and I wonder why. Its offering suits me well, and I suspect many others in the Indie Web. Low barrier to entry, scalable, get everything detailed in human readable docs, DX, bring your own Markup, extend as you like, AX (author experience).

"My clients always pick it up easily: customized fields (you can customize the fields, deployment options, direct from server, static caching, SSG, and it has a business model. And it's steadily grown and stabilized over the years. Would love to hear thoughts."

You know Statamic, I actually just don't have experience with it.

Chris: Yeah but look at how nice it looks. Go to statamic.com, and you can see this really classy-looking admin screen of what it is. I'm like, "Hmm... I admit that just the design alone to it looks awfully nice to me."

Then the fact that it has this... You use this admin. But when you hit the save button, what happens is that static files are produced that then can be pushed via Git. That I also admit is highly, highly appealing to me.

Dave: Yeah? All right. I like that. I mean you know. I think it's just like experience. I never really did anything with it. For me, it feels like in the Kirby family of CMSs.

Chris: Right. We have talked to Bastian about Kirby. But yeah, it does feel similar, doesn't it?

Dave: Yeah, I don't know. I guess I should look at it more. It's got a lot of the features I would want, especially in a post WordPress world [laughter] we're finding ourselves into.

Chris: [Laughter] We're one episode in. We're like, "We're movin' on."

Dave: Post-WordPress.

Chris: Looking for something else.

Dave: Post-WordPress. But I think--

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: What? You want some ergonomics. You want it to look good. You want some custom fields. You want some Markdown editor. Yeah, it has the feature set. I think this would be on my list of things to try. I just don't--

Chris: It would for me, too. When I read this, I was like, "I would try it. I would give it a spinsky.

Dave: I think I've just been in my client world, like, I have to show up with name-brand CMSs. Not that Statamic isn't, but it's on the next tier.

Chris: It is. It is.

Dave: Of, like, it's not your WordPress or your Craft or whatever. But it's on the next tier, sort of. I think it's been off my radar, I should say.

00:45:03

Chris: It depends on who you're delivering it to. You are at a kind of echelon where that makes sense to me. But I could see, on an echelon down where you're working for clients that maybe don't care, you're doing work for them and they want whatever opinion you're going to deliver to them, and this is Ben saying, "My clients always pick it up easily. Customize the fields almost entirely," or whatever. He's making an endorsement that his clients at least embrace it when it's given to them. That's glowing praise if you ask me because that seems like a big requirement.

I have had... My most recent experience with helping somebody out with their WordPress site -- this was a couple of years ago, but it has strung along all those couple of years up until recently again -- where I was, like, I've been on the record clearly for liking the block Gutenberg experience with WordPress. I was like, "You're going to love this."

I kind of forced that opinion on them and they did not. [Laughter] I converted their site from not that to that. I was like, "Look! Look how you can make headers and columns and stuff. You use that kind of thing. You're going to love it." To this day, no.

They are as far outside of tech as you can possibly be. They run a music lessons thing and old-time music. They intentionally push away technology a little bit but need to have it because their students sign up and use it and stuff.

I don't know what to say other than I wasn't about to build it with some other technology because it's not a waste of my time because I consider helping people out with their websites as part of my hobby of music as being good for the world. I'm happy to do it. But it's ultra-pro-bono, ultra-pro-bono, so I ain't going to rebuild it using Statamic or whatever because it brings the scope of the project too high.

But I will say that I kind of made a mistake, I think, in jamming modern WordPress down their throat also, just in this case.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: [Laughter]

Dave: Yeah. Well, it's like, yeah, the line. How much update-ability do you need, and what could we get by with?

I am thinking, too... I don't know. I probably need to go through and reevaluate, if that makes sense. Give it a Hello, World. You know?

Chris: Yeah. You just need a project, right? It's not like we're sitting around doing three projects a week.

Dave: Right.

Chris: I do a couple of projects a year, maybe.

00:47:47

Dave: Yeah. Well, I think what you need in life (right), you need your toolbelt. You need, like, how am I going to make a very big website? What tools do I know or can I use to make a very big website? What tools can I use to make a small website? What tools can I use to make a bloggy-ass blog? You know? [Laughter] What tools could I have to just - whatever - spin up a one-pager as quickly as possible - or something like that?

I think when you're young - or whatever - you're like, "Everything is in Jekyll." You're just like, "I'm going to use one tool for everything. That's the way to go. It's all Next.js."

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Dave: But I think, after you've traveled through technologies a few times here and there, or you've built 100 WordPress sites, it's probably worth picking up Statamic and saying, "Hey, how do I do this?"

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: And is there a way to do this? Could I be functional in this faster - or something like that? You know you're not going to be faster the first time around, but could you see yourself being functional faster?

I just think there's this... Yeah, but then you never really know a software until you've been through a major upgrade cycle. I'll say that, too. What is the jump from Statamic 3 to 4, whenever that comes out? I don't know.

Anyway, I think you need these tools in your toolbelt to fill these kind of project sort of archetype. How do you spin these up as quickly as possible, or what is within your wheelhouse?

Chris: Yeah. Interesting stuff. Good luck. Happy to shout it out. That was cool.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: I'll just do this one in two minutes.

Dave: Yeah. Hit it.

00:49:38

Chris: Matt M9Y wrote in. "What's the go with paid fonts? I'd assumed when they get loaded in the browser, people would just download them for free from that website. I'm not saying people should do that. Of course, people should get paid for creating fonts. I'm just wondering if there's some kind of protection or what with loading fonts."

I'd say you're basically right. If it gets to the browser and it's loading a font, you can get your hands on those bits and bytes that make that font work. There are protections. I've used many sites in the past that attempt permissions, like Adobe Fonts has some JavaScript, or Typekit before that had some JavaScript file that you load from them that authenticates the website you're using and then loads the font. So, you wouldn't even get the access. But again, the font is ultimately delivered.

I remember using Typography.com when it's ultimately delivered through them, it's broken into pieces, so you get .waf files that are not the complete font, but theoretically could be pieced together on another website to use.

If you want to break the law or license or whatever with a paid font, I'm sure you can find a way to do so. I usually find smaller font shops just sell the font and hope that people buy it.

You can probably find paid fonts in GitHub. Just search for the font name in GitHub and you'll find somebody that's (on purpose or accidentally) published that WAF file to a GitHub repo, and you could take it from there.

It sucks for them. But you know what sucks even worse is copyright crap turned into Web standards. [Laughter] You know?

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: That really sucks, if you ask me.

Dave: Yeah. I've seen font foundries. Was it cloud? Maybe you said that. They split the font. They do, like--

Chris: Yeah, they split it. But it still hits your browser as a WAF.

Dave: Two WAFs, though, so you'd have to piece it back together.

Chris: Right, but then if you want to steal it, then you load the two WAFs.

Dave: Sure. Sure. Yeah, yeah. That's true, yeah.

Chris: It's annoying and maybe it's enough annoying that people don't do it. But of course, it can be done.

I much prefer, "Can you just trust me?" kind of thing. But I don't sell fonts, so still, it's like stock photography. I buy the image. I use it on the Web. When it's delivered on the Web, anybody can just grab it and use it.

Dave: Yeah.

Chris: It's just the way the Web works. It's like, bummer.

00:52:13

Dave: I did have a client who had a font in their font stack, but they weren't serving it. It was Helvetica Neue in the font stack, which ships on a Mac, right? But a font foundry, one of the big ones, approached the client.

Chris: Sent a cease and desist? Oh, my gosh.

Dave: With a lawsuit to, "You owe us money for using this font," and it was, like, a--

Chris: We're not even using it.

Dave: We're not even using it.

Chris: It's just a string in the CSS.

Dave: It's just on... Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It's like if you have a Mac, it shows up. But otherwise, you get Ariel.

Chris: Oh, my God!

Dave: [Laughter] So, anyway--

Chris: The website was big enough that the lawyers came knocking just to shake them down a little bit? Classy.

Dave: All this to say, I mean some foundries are petty or have lawyers that will go around and hunt for this stuff.

Chris: Right.

Dave: I think you have to always be above board as much as you can.

Chris: That's a good point, yeah, that if you steal it. Is it possible to steal? Yes. Are you still in breach by using it? Yes.

Dave: Yeah, so I don't know. There's also--

Chris: Interesting.

Dave: If you're... Yeah. Hopefully, you're paying for fonts. I don't know. The best you can.

I think when you get down to these... I've met a lot of typographers just through, like, Paravel and things (being a design agency). They're actually pretty cool people, and they really make cool stuff.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: It's really niche work. And so, we should support it.

Chris: Yeah.

Dave: Just like you'd support open-source or something.

00:53:53

Chris: We talked about building a website earlier, like what's the criteria for you. To me, it's almost always typography-driven. I see some font that I really, really, really want to use, and I have a limited amount of projects that I work on that I could publicly use said font. Dang, that always gets me.

Also, a presentation. I'll almost always grab a new font for a new talk.

Dave: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: Because I like fonts and it's the only way I get to use them.

Dave: You know sometimes it's $30. Sometimes it's $200.

Chris: Right.

Dave: Sometimes you'll pay, but I think there's a world where you can support people who do good work, so I would recommend doing that.

Chris: I would too. Great message. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: All right. Well, thank you, dear listener, for downloading this in your podcatcher of choice. Hopefully, you're doing good work. Yeah, so you can follow us on Mastodon. That's the good one. Then head over to the D-d-d-d-discord, patreon.com/shoptalkshow. Would love to have you. Chris, do you got anything else you'd like to say?

Chris: [Trilled b-r] ♪ Shoptalkshow.com ♪