A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.

While what they’re doing may not be illegal, EdenFantasys has proven itself to me to be an unethical and unworthy partner, in business or otherwise. Its actions are blatantly hypocritical, as I intend to show in detail in this post. Taking willful and self-serving advantage of those not technically savvy is a form of inexcusable oppression, and none of us should tolerate it from companies who purport to be well-intentioned resources for a community of sex-positive individuals.

For busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you whether you’re a customer, a contributor, or a syndication partner. For the technical reader, the Technical Details section should provide ample evidence in the form of a walkthrough and sample code describing the unethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques EdenFantasys, aka. Web Merchants, Inc., is engaged in. For anyone who wants to read further, I provide an Editorial section in which I share some thoughts about what you can do to help combat these practices and bring transparency and trust—not the sabotage of trust EdenFantasys enacts—to the market.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Internet sex toy retailer Web Merchants, Inc., which bills itself as the “sex shop you can trust” and does business under the name EdenFantasys, has implemented technology on their websites that actively interferes with contributors’ content, intercepts outgoing links, and alters republished content so that links in the original work are redirected to themselves. Using techniques widely acknowledged as unethical by Internet professionals and that are arguably in violation of major search engines’ policies, EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.

Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript and included as part of the web pages is automatically downloaded and intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate, and that a destination is provided as expected.

For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys, as well as syndicating SexIs Magazine content such that the content is programmatically altered in order to create multiple (real) inbound links to EdenFantasys’s websites after republication on their partner’s media channels.

How EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have an impact on you

Regardless of who you are, EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have a negative impact on you and, indeed, on the Internet as a whole.

• If you’re an EdenFantasys employee, people will demand answers from you regarding the unethical practices of your (hopefully former) employer. While you are working for EdenFantasys, you’re seriously soiling your reputation in the eyes of ethical Internet professionals. Ignorance is no excuse for the lack of ethics on the programmers’ part, and it’s a shoddy one for everyone else; you should be aware of your company’s business practices because you represent them and they, in turn, represent you.
• If you’re a partner or contributor (reviewer, affiliate, blogger), while you’re providing EdenFantasys with inbound links or writing articles for them and thereby propping them up higher in search results, EdenFantasys is not returning the favor to you (when they are supposed to be doing so). Moreover, they’re attaching your handle, pseudonym, or real name directly to all of their link farming (i.e., spamming) efforts. They look like they’re linking to you and they look like their content is syndicated fairly, but they’re actually playing dirty. They’re going the extra mile to ensure search engines like Google do not recognize the links in articles you write. They’re trying remarkably hard to make certain that all roads lead to EdenFantasys, but none lead outside of it; no matter what the “link,” search engines see it as stemming from and leading to EdenFantasys. The technically savvy executives of Web Merchants, Inc. are using you without giving you a fair return on your efforts. Moreover, EdenFantasys is doing this in a way that preys upon people’s lack of technical knowledge—potentially your own as well as your readership’s. Do you want to keep doing business with people like that?
• If you’re a customer, you’re monetarily supporting a company that essentially amounts to a glorified yet subtle spammer. If you hate spam, you should hate the unethical practices that lead to spam’s perpetual reappearance, including the practices of companies like Web Merchants, Inc. EdenFantasys’s unethical practices may not be illegal, but they are unabashedly a hair’s width away from it, just like many spammers’. If you want to keep companies honest and transparent, if you really want a “sex shop you can trust,” this is relevant to you because EdenFantasys is not it. If you want to purchase from a retailer that truly strives to offer a welcoming, trustworthy community for those interested in sex positivity and sexuality, pay close attention and take action. For ideas about what you can do, please see the “What you can do” section, below.
• If you’ve never heard about EdenFantasys before, but you care about a fair and equal-opportunity Internet, this is relevant to you because what EdenFantasys is doing takes advantage of non-tech-savvy people in order to slant the odds of winning the search engine game in their favor. They could have done this fairly, and I personally believe that they would have succeeded. Their sites are user-friendly, well-designed, and solidly implemented. However, they chose to behave maliciously by not providing credit where credit is due, failing to follow through on agreements with their own community members and contributors, and sneakily utilizing other publishers’ web presences to play a very sad zero-sum game that they need not have entered in the first place. In the Internet I want, nobody takes malicious advantage of those less skilled than they are because their own skill should speak for itself. Isn’t that the Internet and, indeed, the future you want, too?

TECHNICAL DETAILS

What follows is a technical exploration of the way the EdenFantasys technology works. It is my best-effort evaluation of the process in as much detail as I can manage within strict self-imposed time constraints. If any of this information is incorrect, I’d welcome any and all clarifications provided by the EdenFantasys CTO and technical team in an appropriately transparent, public, and ethical manner. (You’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to leave a comment.)

Although I’m unconvinced that EdenFantasys understands this, it is the case that honesty is the best policy—especially on the Internet, where everyone has the power of “View source.”

The “EF Framework” for obfuscating links

Article content written by contributors on SexIs Magazine pages is published after all links are replaced with a <span> element bearing the class of linklike and a unique id attribute value. This apparently happens across any and all content published by Web Merchants, Inc.’s content management system, but I’ll be focusing on Lorna D. Keach’s post entitled SexFeed:Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts for the sake of example.

These fake links look like this in HTML:

And according to Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, <span class="linklike" ID="EFLink_68034_fe64d2">female consumers make up 56% of video sales.</span>

This originally published HTML is what visitors without JavaScript enabled (and what search engine indexers) see when they access the page. Note that the <span> is not a real link, even though it is made to look like one. (See Figure 1; click it to enlarge.)

Figure 1:

In a typical user’s browser, when this page is loaded, a JavaScript program is executed that mutates these “linklike” elements into <a> elements, retaining the “linklike” class and the unique id attribute values. However, no value is provided in the href (link destination) attribute of the <a> element. See Figure 2.

Figure 2:

The JavaScript program is downloaded in two parts from the endpoint at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx. The first part, retrieved in this example by accessing the URI at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx?i=jq132_cnf_jdm12_cks_cm_ujsn_udm_stt_err_jsdm_stul_ael_lls_ganl_jqac_jtv_smg_assf_agrsh&v_14927484.12.0, loads the popular jQuery JavaScript framework as well as custom code called the “EF Framework”.

The EF Framework contains code called the DBLinkHandler, an object that parses the <span> “linklike” elements (called “pseudolinks” in the EF Framework code) and retrieves the real destination. The entirety of the DBLinkHandler object is shown in code listing 1, below. Note the code contains a function called handle that performs the mutation of the <span> “linklike” elements (seen primarily on lines 8 through 16) and, based on the prefix of each elements’ id attribute value, two key functions (BuildUrlForElement and GetUrlByUrlID, whose signatures are on lines 48 and 68, respectively) interact to set up the browser navigation after responding to clicks on the fake links.

var DBLinkHandler = {
    pseudoLinkPrefix: "EFLink_",
    generatedAHrefPrefix: "ArtLink_",
    targetBlankClass: "target_blank",
    jsLinksCssLinkLikeClass: "linklike",
    handle: function () {
        var pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksSpans.each(function () {
            var psLink = $(this);
            var cssClass = $.trim(psLink.attr("class"));
            var target = "";
            var id = psLink.attr("id").replace(DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
            var href = $("<a></a>").attr({
                id: id,
                href: ""
            }).html(psLink.html());
            if (psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
                href.attr({
                    target: "_blank"
                });
                cssClass = $.trim(cssClass.replace(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass, ""))
            }
            if (cssClass != "") {
                href.attr({
                    "class": cssClass
                })
            }
            psLink.before(href).remove()
        });
        var pseudolinksAHrefs = $("a[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksAHrefs.live("mouseup", function (event) {
            DBLinkHandler.ArtLinkClick(this)
        });
        pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksSpans.live("click", function (event) {
            if (event.button != 0) {
                return
            }
            var psLink = $(this);
            var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix);
            if (!psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
                RedirectTo(url)
            } else {
                OpenNewWindow(url)
            }
        })
    },
    BuildUrlForElement: function (psLink, prefix) {
        var psLink = $(psLink);
        var sufix = psLink.attr("id").toString().substring(prefix.length);
        var id = (sufix.indexOf("_") != -1) ? sufix.substring(0, sufix.indexOf("_")) : sufix;
        var url = DBLinkHandler.GetUrlByUrlID(id);
        if (url == "") {
            url = EF.Constants.Links.Url
        }
        var end = sufix.substring(sufix.indexOf("_") + 1);
        var anchor = "";
        if (end.indexOf("_") != -1) {
            anchor = "#" + end.substring(0, end.lastIndexOf("_"))
        }
        url += anchor;
        return url
    },
    ArtLinkClick: function (psLink) {
        var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
        $(psLink).attr("href", url)
    },
    GetUrlByUrlID: function (UrlID) {
        var url = "";
        UrlRequest = $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: "/LinkLanguage/AjaxLinkHandling.aspx",
            dataType: "json",
            async: false,
            data: {
                urlid: UrlID
            },
            cache: false,
            success: function (data) {
                if (data.status == "Success") {
                    url = data.url;
                    return url
                }
            },
            error: function (xhtmlObj, status, error) {}
        });
        return url
    }
};

Once the mutation is performed and all the content “links” are in the state shown in Figure 2, above, an event listener has been bound to the anchors that captures a click event. This is done using prototypal extension, aka. classic prototypal inheritance, in another part of the code, the live function on line 2,280 of the (de-minimized) jsget.ashx program, as shown in code listing 2, here:

        live: function (G, F) {
            var E = o.event.proxy(F);
            E.guid += this.selector + G;
            o(document).bind(i(G, this.selector), this.selector, E);
            return this
        },

At this point, clicking on one of the “pseudolinks” triggers the EF Framework to call code set up by the GetUrlByUrlID function from within the DBLinkHandler object, initiating an XMLHttpRequest (XHR) connection to the AjaxLinkHandling.aspx server-side application. The request is an HTTP POST containing only one parameter, called urlid, and its value matches a substring from within the id value of the “pseudolinks.” In this example, the id attribute contains a value of EFLink_68034_fe64d2, which means that the unique ID POST’ed to the server is 68034. This is shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3:

The response from the server, shown in Figure 4, is also simple. If successful, the intended destination is retrieved by the GetUrlByUrlID object’s success function (on line 79 of Code Listing 1, above) and the user is redirected to that web address, as if the link was a real one all along. The real destination, in this case to CNN.com, is thereby only revealed after the XHR request returns a successful reply.

Figure 4:

All of this obfuscation effectively blinds machines such as the Googlebot who are not JavaScript-capable from seeing and following these links. It deliberately provides no increased Pagerank for the link destination (as a real link would normally do) despite being “linked to” from EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine article. While the intended destination in this example link was at CNN.com, it could just as easily have been—and is, in other examples—links to the blogs of EdenFantasys community members and, indeed, everyone else linked to from a SexIs Magazine article or potentially any website operated by Web Merchants, Inc. that makes use of this technology.

The EdenFantasys Outsourced Link-Farm

In addition to creating a self-referential black hole with no gracefully degrading outgoing links, EdenFantasys also actively performs link-stuffing through its syndicated content “relationships,” underhandedly creating an outsourced and distributed link-farm, just like a spammer. The difference is that this spammer (Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys) is cleverly crowd-sourcing high-value, high-quality content from its own “community.”

Articles published at SexIs Magazine are syndicated in full to other large hub sites, such as AlterNet.org. Continuing with the above example post by Lorna D. Keach, Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts, we can see that this content was republished on AlterNet.org shortly after original publication through EdenFantasys’ website on May 3^rd at http://www.alternet.org/story/146774/christian_anti-porn_activists_now_targeting_female_. However, a closer look at the HTML code of the republication shows that each and every link contained within the article points to the same destination: the same article published on SexIs Magazine, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5:

Naturally, these syndicated links provided to third-party sites by EdenFantasys are real and function as expected to both human visitors and to search engines indexing the content. The result is “natural,” high-value links to the EdenFantasys website from these third-party sites; EdenFantasys doesn’t merely scrounge pagerank from harvesting the sheer number of incoming links, but as each link’s anchor text is different, they are setting themselves up to match more keywords in search engine results, keywords that the original author likely did not intend to direct to them. Offering search engines the implication that EdenFantasys.com contains the content described in the anchor text, when in fact EdenFantasys merely acts as an intermediary to the information, is very shady, to say the least.

In addition to syndication, EdenFantasys employs human editors to do community outreach. These editors follow up with publishers, including individual bloggers (such as myself), and request that any references to published material provide attribution and a link back to us, to use the words of Judy Cole, Editor of SexIs Magazine in an email she sent to me (see below), and presumably many others. EdenFantasys has also been known to request “link exchanges,” and offer incentive programs that encouraged bloggers to add the EdenFantasys website to their blogroll or sidebar in order to help raise both parties search engine ranking, when in fact EdenFantasys is not actually providing reciprocity.

More information about EdenFantasys’s unethical practices, which are not limited to technical subterfuge, can be obtained via AAGBlog.com.

EDITORIAL

It is unsurprising that the distributed, subtle, and carefully crafted way EdenFantasys has managed to crowd-source links has (presumably) remained unpenalized by search engines like Google. It is similarly unsurprising that nontechnical users such as the contributors to SexIs Magazine would be unaware of these deceptive practices, or that they are complicit in promoting them.

This is no mistake on the part of EdenFantasys, nor is it a one-off occurrence. The amount of work necessary to implement the elaborate system I’ve described is also not even remotely feasible for a rogue programmer to accomplish, far less accomplish covertly. No, this is the result of a calculated and decidedly underhanded strategy that originated from the direction of top executives at Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys.

It is unfortunate that technically privileged people would be so willing to take advantage of the technically uneducated, particularly under the guise of providing a trusted place for the community which they claim to serve. These practices are exactly the ones that “the sex shop you can trust” should in no way support, far less be actively engaged in. And yet, here is unmistakable evidence that EdenFantasys is doing literally everything it can not only to bolster its own web presence at the cost of others’, but to hide this fact from its understandably non-tech-savvy contributors.

On a personal note, I am angered that I would be contacted by the Editor of SexIs Magazine, and asked to properly “attribute” and provide a link to them when it is precisely that reciprocity which SexIs Magazine would clearly deny me (and everyone else) in return. It was this request originally received over email from Judy Cole, that sparked my investigation outlined above and enabled me to uncover this hypocrisy. The email I received from Judy Cole is republished, in full, here:

From: Judy Cole <luxuryholmes@gmail.com>
Subject: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 17, 2010 2:42:00 PM PDT
To: kinkontap+viewermail@gmail.com
Cc: Laurel <laurelb@edenfantasys.com>

Hello Emma and maymay,

I am the Editor of the online adult magazine SexIs (http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/). You recently picked up and re-posted a story of ours by Lorna Keach that Alternet had already picked up:

http://kinkontap.com/?s=alternet

We were hoping that you might provide attribution and a link back to us, citing us as the original source (as is done on Alternet, with whom we have an ongoing relationship), should you pick up something of ours to re-post in the future.

If you would be interested in having us send you updates on stories that might be of interest, I would be happy to arrange for a member of our editorial staff to do so. (Like your site, by the way. TBK is one of our regular contributors.)

Thanks and Best Regards,

Judy Cole
Editor, SexIs

Judy’s email probably intended to reference the new Kink On Tap briefs that my co-host Emma and I publish, not a search result page on the Kink On Tap website. Specifically, she was talking about this brief: http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676. I said as much in my reply to Judy:

Hi Judy,

The URL in your email doesn’t actually link to a post. We pick up many stories from AlterNet, as well as a number from SexIs, because we follow both those sources, among others. So, did you mean this following entry?

http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676

If so, you should know that we write briefs as we find them and provide links to where we found them. We purposefully do not republish or re-post significant portions of stories and we limit our briefs to short summaries in deference to the source. In regards to the brief in question, we do provide attribution to Lorna Keach, and our publication process provides links automatically to, again, the source where we found the article. :) As I’m sure you understand, this is the nature of the Internet. Its distribution capability is remarkable, isn’t it?

Also, while we’d absolutely be thrilled to have you send us updates on stories that might be of interest, we would prefer that you do so in the same way the rest of our community does: by contributing to the community links feed. You can find detailed instructions for the many ways you can do that on our wiki:

http://wiki.kinkontap.com/wiki/Community_links_feed

Congratulations on the continued success of SexIs.

Cheers,
-maymay

At the time when I wrote the email replying to Judy, I was perturbed but could not put my finger on why. Her email upset me because she seemed to be suggesting that our briefs are wholesale “re-posts,” when in fact Emma and I have thoroughly discussed attribution policies and, as mentioned in my reply, settled on a number of practices including a length limit, automated back linking (yes, with real links, go see some Kink On Tap briefs for yourself), and clearly demarcating quotes from the source article in our editorializing to ensure we play fair. Clearly, my somewhat snarky reply betrays my annoyance.

In any event, this exchange prompted me to take a closer look at the Kink On Tap brief I wrote, at the original article, and at the cross-post on AlterNet.org. I never would have imagined that EdenFantasys’s technical subterfuge would be as pervasive as it has proven to be. It’s so deeply embedded in the EdenFantasys publishing platform that I’m willing to give Judy the benefit of the doubt regarding this hypocrisy because she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a search query and a permalink (something any laymen blogger would grok). This is apparent from her reply to my response:

From: Judy Cole <luxuryholmes@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 18, 2010 4:57:59 AM PDT
[…redundant email headers clipped…]

Funny, the URL in my email opens the same link as the one you sent me when I click on it.

Maybe if you pick up one of our stories in future, you could just say something like “so and so wrote for SexIs.” ?

As it stands, it looks as if Lorna wrote the piece for Alternet. Thanks.

Judy

That is the end of our email exchange, and will be for good, unless and until EdenFantasys changes its ways. I will from this point forward endeavor never to publish links to any web property that I know to be owned by Web Merchants, Inc., including EdenFantasys.com. I will also do my best to avoid citing any and all SexIs Magazine articles from here on out, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in seeing honesty on the Internet to follow my lead here.

As some of my friends are currently contributors to SexIs Magazine, I would like all of you to know that I sincerely hope you immediately sever all ties with any and all Web Merchants, Inc. properties, suppliers, and business partners, especially because you are friends and I think your work is too important to be sullied by such a disreputable company. Similarly, I hope you encourage your friends to do the same. I understand that the economy is rough and that some of you may have business contracts bearing legal penalties for breaking them, but I urge you to nevertheless consider looking at this as a cost-benefit analysis: the sooner you break up with EdenFantasys, the happier everyone on the Internet, including you, will be (and besides, you can loose just as much of your reputation, money, and pagerank while being happy as you can being sad).

What you can do

• If you are an EdenFantasys reviewer, a SexIs Magazine contributor, or have any other arrangement with Web Merchants, Inc., write to Judy Cole and demand that content you produce for SexIs Magazine adheres to ethical Internet publication standards. Sever business ties with this company immediately upon receipt of any non-response, or any response that does not adequately address every concern raised in this blog post. (Feel free to leave comments on this post with technical questions, and I’ll do my best to help you sort out any l33t answers.)
• EdenFantasys wants to stack the deck in Google. They do this by misusing your content and harvesting your links. To combat this effort, immediately remove any and all links to EdenFantasys websites and web presences from your websites. Furthermore, do not—I repeat—do not publish new links to EdenFantasys websites, not even in direct reference to this post. Instead, provide enough information, as I have done, so visitors to your blog posts can find their website themselves. In lieu of links to EdenFantasys, link to other bloggers’ posts about this issue. (Such posts will probably be mentioned in the comments section of this post.)
• Boycott EdenFantasys: the technical prowess their website displays does provide a useful shopping experience for some people. However, that in no way obligates you to purchase from their website. If you enjoy using their interface, use it to get information about products you’re interested in, but then go buy those products elsewhere, perhaps from the manufacturers directly.
  • On the recommendation of my friend Dr. Charlie Glickman, I suggest Good Vibrations.

  • On the recommendation of my friend Shanna Katz, I also recommend Fascinations.
• Watch for “improved” technical subterfuge from Web Merchants, Inc. As a professional web developer, I can identify several things EdenFantasys could do to make their unethical practices even harder to spot, and harder to stop. If you have any technical knowledge at all, even if you’re “just” a savvy blogger, you can keep a close watch on EdenFantasys and, if you notice anything that doesn’t sit well with you, speak up about it like I did. Get a professional programmer to look into things for you if you need help; yes, you can make a difference just by remaining vigilant as long as you share what you know and act honestly, and transparently.

If you have additional ideas or recommendations regarding how more people can help keep sex toy retailers honest, please suggest them in the comments.

Update: To report website spamming or any kind of fraud to Google, use the authenticated Spam Report tool.

Update: Google provides much more information about why the kinds of practices EdenFantasys is engaged in degrade the overall web experience for you and me. Read Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages at the Google Webmaster Tools help site for additional SEO information. Using Google’s terminology, EdenFantasys’s unethical technology is a very skilled mix of social engineering and “sneaky JavaScript redirects.”

Social media. Internet publishing. Privacy. Three phrases that have seemed to be at tenacious odds with each other in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For people like me, who have progressive views about sexuality, these three things are constantly on our minds. How do we participate in the online revolution without being forced to “come out” about every sex act we enjoy, some of which are still illegal thanks to draconian restrictions on sexual freedom, even (and especially?) in America.

This month, a new social network called Blackbox Republic (BBR) is attempting to tackle this head-on and aims to create a place for, as Marshall Kirkpatrick put it, this particular large and unserved group of people. Although BBR is clearly a business, it’s a business whose creators have laudable intentions for positive social and cultural change. In that respect, and in many others, Blackbox Republic is worth a close look.

I was informed about the venture via Clarisse Thorn many months ago. I got in touch with BBR and signed up for a limited-offer “founder” account—basically a private beta. The founder account gave me free access to the features of the BlackboxRepublic.com website for what would normally be a $25 monthly subscription fee.

So, without further ado, here are my impressions about Blackbox Republic, and how its launch may be just what the Internet needs to get us moving in the right direction with regards to personal privacy, and mainstream awareness of the different needs of different people on the Internet.

Mainstream sex-positivity or a VIP room in cyberspace? Or both?

Over the past few months, Blackbox Republic has been building a marketing arsenal of anticipation and intrigue. Its creators are successful in non-sexuality-focused spheres of influence: Sam Lawrence is the respected former Chief Marketing Officer of Jive Software, Inc., and April Donato, has experience in community management. They also both jive (pun!) well with the sex-positive movement, discussing it at length in the early stages of their marketing efforts after de-cloaking the new company.

In an interview for Social Networking Watch, Sam Lawrence said,

[Sam Lawrence:] The co-founder [April Donato] and myself are part of [the sex-positive] community. Sex positive means that your sexuality is not an issue. You don’t have an issue with other people’s sexuality. You’re open to what other people are interested in and what their boundaries are, and you’re open with your own.

[…]

[Interviewer:] To what extent do you practice a sex-positive lifestyle?

[Sam Lawrence:] From the perspective of sex not being an issue, I think that love is generated by people being open enough about who they are as people to put all of themselves out on the table. As far as putting all of myself on the table, it’s something that I do every single day.

I have an enormous amount of respect for anyone able to so capably present themselves as authentically as Sam does. On the eve of KinkForAll New York City 2, I met Sam and April at one of their “founder meetups” and had the chance to talk to them face-to-face. Our conversation revolved around the importance of steadfastly holding true to one’s own desires and having appropriate places to express those things with appropriate communication tools. I really liked their emphasis on self-identification over labeling throughout our discussion.

I also really appreciated the way that Sam and April spoke about their target audience. Blackbox Republic will welcome everyone, but it’s not designed for everyone, and I think that’s a good thing. David Evans writing at Online Dating Post says,

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

So is Blackbox Republic a dating site, or a social network? Well, both, kind of. Part of BBR’s slogan includes, “Dates will happen. Sex will happen. It matters how you get there.” The implication, of course, being that the current suite of tools for finding love or play online—sites like Alt.com, OkCupid, and countless personals boards—focus too strongly on the end result, turning matchmaking into a meat market instead of the natural process of getting to know one another. The focus BBR is placing on each person’s “journey” is an extremely welcome paradigm shift in the online dating world.

Along with the welcome and (IMHO, painfully obviously better) new approach to online dating, however, Blackbox Republic faces some real challenges. For new users, the service costs a minimum of $5 a month to use (and $9 per month for new sign-ups starting in 2010), which gives access to basic features like a personal profile. For $25 a month, members get added features like the ability to list real-world meet-ups, send private messages, and partake in a virtual “gifting” economy (think LiveJournal’s “virtual gifts“).

For that reason, BBR has been called a “members-only club.” There are some legitimate differences of opinion as to whether this is a positive or a negative thing. In a press release over the summer, Blackbox Republic is reported as stating:

Blackbox Republic will be a members-only experience that will unite the sex-positive community and give them a personal, private and secure way to connect online and in person.

Writing for ZDNet, Oliver Marks likens Blackbox Republic’s approach to online dating to the fashionability of owning an Apple computer:

Think of Blackbox Republic as a fashionable online ‘members-only’ club where you might expect to meet people with similar interests to your own, and ideally the person of your dreams. […] Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

Many pages on Blackbox Republic's website showcase fashionably dressed women.

Indeed, almost everything about Blackbox Republic’s marketing and design seems to me as though it’s positioning itself as the equivalent of the hip, new, and exclusive nightclub down the street. There are images of super-chic women in short skirts and tight pants all over the Blackbox Republic promotional pages—way more than there are pictures of men. I was (yet again) put-off by this over-prevalence of women in all advertising material.

This isn’t really a criticism of the site, but rather a statement of disappointment that the marketing gurus behind the effort seemed to me to have succumbed to overwhelming cultural pressure to sell their site with old-school sex appeal: women’s sex appeal, of course. How…traditional.

Not only is the Blackbox Republic intro video markedly gender-skewed, but somewhere along the line Sam and April decided to drop the “sex-positive” phraseology from their marketing:

[L]ike most startups, Blackbox decided it needed to change up. Observers were confused by the sex-positive label.

Oh well. I think this just goes to further showcase how much more social change we really need in our culture.

However, while the clubby, cliquey feel is totally my own subjective perception, there are other issues at play here, too. Most notably, as Clarisse Thorn and many others rightfully remind us very often, the sex-positive movement is overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, college-educated, and privileged in a huge number of ways that many people often take for granted. Even without a for-pay social network, not everyone who wants to can participate in the great-sex-for-everyone party atmosphere of many sex-positive niches.

Will creating a “members-only club” of sex-positivity on the Internet really be a positive thing for “the movement”? Well, maybe. Although it has the potential to exclude lower-income people from the experience, who are sadly also often the people with the most pressing need for the kinds of privacy-related tools BBR offers (school teachers spring to mind!), one upside is that Blacbox Republic promises to pledge a portion of membership dues to a charity of the user’s choice.

It’s $25 a month and $5 of those community dues go to charity. One way to think about it is if you’re sex-positive, you can either spend money on expensive coffee every month or upgrade your social life and meet other sex-positive people like you.

Inescapably, the major selling point of any social network is, of course, the network! If your friends aren’t on Twitter, then you’re probably not going to find it useful. The same truth holds for Blackbox Republic: if the users you want to interact with aren’t there, I doubt you’re going to find the experience fruitful. Due to the membership fees and the socioeconomic realities of the sex-positive community, I’m concerned that BBR’s current business model is too exclusive, and as a result it will have a lot of trouble attracting the kind of diverse community its creators seem to be hoping for.

Yet, some others think differently (pun!). For instance, Dennis Howlett welcomes the for-pay model for a social network:

anyone can join provided they’re willing to pay the $25 a month (I like that he has a pay model from the get go. That sorts out the weirdos and hangers on from day one)

I wonder if adopting a free-mium approach might work better. Still, there are real-world limits to business. Everyone needs to make money, and I don’t think Blackbox Republic’s business model is inherently more exclusive than, say, purchasing access to porn. If anything, BBR’s got some real promise to inject much-needed financial awareness to the sexually insensitive corporate infrastructure of our society. Nevertheless, convincing people to join “the Republic” is going to be a hard sell.

Show me the features!

Let’s say you do decide to join. What do you get? Other than the sex-positive mindset, what’s the benefit?

Well, the bulk of the experience is what you’d expect. Profiles (called “personas”), messaging, user search capabilities (called “explore”), and so forth. A Twitter-like “activity stream” dominates the main page where you can post text, picture, or video status updates. Event listings fill the sidebar. (I’m not going to provide internal screenshots in deference to BBR’s strict confidentiality rules.)

While that’s fun, it’s nothing special. What makes Blackbox Republic different is flexibility, and privacy.

Goodbye drop-downs, hello sliders!

An innovative new interface acknowledges (most of) the diversity in human sexual experience and desire.

Blackbox Republic’s most visible feature is the way its interface allows you to flexibly self-identify various facets of yourself. Rather than give you static drop-down menus or radio buttons for things like your sexual orientation and relationship status, you’re presented with sliders you can change at will. Perhaps you’re feeling particularly same-sex attracted one day. Just move the “Orientation” slider towards the “Gay” end and away from the “Hetero” end. If that changes tomorrow, just move the slider back. Sho-weet!

BBR offers you 5 different sliders for your profile. In addition to the one for sexual orientation, you also get one for relationship “status” (ranging from attached to unattached, with Facebook’s famous “it’s complicated” neatly in the middle), whether you’re available for more partners or not, how comfortable you are with casual sexual activity, and how eagerly you’re looking to par-tay. I’m instantly reminded of FetLife‘s innovative, if dull-looking, mechanism for specifying multiple relationships. Blackbox Republic gives you similar flexibility as FetLife does but presented in a superb and far more intuitive interface.

All that said, one slider is conspicuously missing: the one for gender. The sliders are a very interesting idea and might just be the most innovative feature of the entire site. It speaks volumes about the sensitive and thoughtful mindset of the developers, and that’s why I’m so disappointed that the interface for self-identifying gender is relegated to the Sex 1.0 days of a single, binary option of “male” or “female.”

What gives? Are polyamorous people more welcome here than those who don’t fit the gender binary? I hope this is simply an omission that will be fixed as the service matures, since I couldn’t find any other reason why gender was absent from the sliders. For extra credit, I hope to see different profile options for “Sex” and “Gender,” two distinct concepts that frequently and incorrectly get used interchangeably. This would make it possible to represent complex gender presentations like additive gender on a social networking interface for the first time ever, and that’d totally be something to write home about!

Privacy and security

The other major selling point of Blackbox Republic is its careful attention to privacy. The entire offering, including its name, is predicated on letting users very carefully segment their information based on their privacy boundaries. I love some of the things BBR has done to enable this, and I can only imagine it’s going to get better from here.

Blackbox Republic’s Web of Trust

There are three levels of privacy, which (as far as I can figure out) map directly to the level of trust other members have gained within the Republic’s community. It works like a web of trust. New users are “un-vouched.” As they begin to interact with others on the site and, hopefully, make some friends, they should receive “vouches”—or votes of trust—from previously-vouched members. As a member, you get to control whether something you do, such as posting a status update, gets sent to the “public,” (i.e., the entire public-facing Internet), to all Blackbox Republic members (i.e, to both vouched and un-vouched members) or only to vouched members.

Additionally, privacy settings allow you to specify whether you want to allow un-vouched members to send you private messages, to follow your updates, to comment on your posts, or to see you in search results.

Unlike Facebook, which has very good privacy controls that almost nobody on Earth is aware of (thus negating the control’s usefulness), Blackbox Republic makes it a point to highlight their privacy controls at just about every sensical turn. Each of the settings I found defaults to the most private setting, not the most public, which is exactly the right move. I gotta say, I found turning off privacy settings instead of having to turn (or leave) them on to be a really empowering feeling.

You’re not a “friend,” you’re an acquaintance!

Moreover, the Blackbox Republic platform makes a native distinction between “friends” (again, like Facebook, or FetLife) and “followers” (like Twitter). When I friend someone, I’m connected to them in a way that I’m not if I just follow someone. I’m not yet certain what the practical distinction between “friending” and “following” are, other than the fact that your view of the people you’re connected with is segmented based on which button you clicked, but I think the distinction is a very appropriate and natural one to embed in the software.

This separation is probably the single most important innovation in the space of social networks as a medium of communication and collaboration that I can point at. I love that I can indicate without ambiguity which people I want to remain in constant communication with and which I simply want to watch from a distance. After all, aren’t at least some of your “friends” on Facebook really just “acquaintances” in reality? I think that for the first time ever in a social network, Blackbox Republic gets this feature right. Now, if only I could figure out what it actually does. :)

What? No on-the-wire encryption?!

With all that being said, there’s still at least one really frightening problem with Blacbox Republic’s careful attention to privacy: as far as I could tell, no part of my session is SSL/TLS encrypted!

Stunningly, for a site that sells privacy, not even Blackbox Republic's login form is on a secure page.

The entire BlackboxRepublic.com website is served over HTTP, including the login form and—again, as far as I could tell—every page on the inside of the site. This means that it’s trivial for malicious people who don’t even have a Blackbox Republic subscription to intercept, eavesdrop, and modify my interaction with the site. They could watch—and save—private messages between me and one of my friends (or lovers!), for instance.

In Blackbox’s defense, I don’t know of any social network that protects you from this. FetLife is another example of a website that should seriously consider HTTPS-only pages, but as of this writing hasn’t implemented it. Therein lies one of the most frightening oversights in the entire social networking space: regardless of so-called privacy settings, everything you do on the vast majority of social networks, blogs, and other sites on the Internet are the equivalent of passing notes between friends in a classroom. Better hope that big bully who likes to steal your lunch money doesn’t open the note and read it himself while he’s passing along your login details!

The thing is, few other social networking sites place so strong a spotlight on user privacy and security. Since Blackbox Republic seems to be nobly and rightfully holding itself up to a new standard of privacy, I feel justified in pointing out this glaring omission in their service offering. Given everything else they’ve done so well, and how well-aligned the majority of their technical implementation seems to be with their philosophy, this omission came as a big surprise to me.

Until Blackbox Republic only serves HTTPS traffic for all private areas of their site, I can’t make a recommendation in good conscious that it’s the place to be for privacy-conscious people. But again, despite public opinion to the contrary, I’ve never been able to make that claim for FetLife either.

Conclusion

Blackbox Republic is one of the most interesting websites on the Internet today. Its privacy-conscious and sexually open approach to social networking and online dating deserves huge praise. Its technical implementation—although plagued with some glaring oversights for now—is to be seriously respected.

From a social change perspective, I think the site is a mixed bag. Its exclusivity arguably makes the insularity of the sexuality communities an even bigger problem than it already is. On the other hand, the market-value of that very same exclusivity, if steered toward a benevolent purpose, can end up benefiting philanthropic, non-profit, and other sex-positive endeavors that often struggle to find necessary financial support.

Moreover, Blackbox Republic’s internal gifting economy does seem to encourage a sort of altruistic nature among members. How that may or may not translate into increased support for non-commercial activists has yet to be seen. Nay-sayers should remember that this kind of thing simply hasn’t been done before and the net effect could be quite positive.

Having just launched, however, I don’t think Blackbox Republic should be touted as the go-to site for sex-positive people quite yet. Like other social networks, it needs to grow to become truly useful, and its subscription fee business model poses a serious obstacle to many people. I was fortunate to get in with a free “founder” account, but I have mixed feelings about encouraging my friends to join me knowing they—or someone nice enough to “gift” a limited-time subscription to them—will have to pay for the service.

Additionally, its focus on being, well, a black box and its commitment to not allow Google or other search engines to index its internal content simply doesn’t resonate that strongly with me.

Lawrence emphasizes that what members say in Blackbox Republic will stay private. There’s no danger of what they post inside becoming part of their “Google resume,” as he puts it. He says he would resist efforts from search engines to index content the way Facebook and Twitter allow. “The value proposition is this is the first private, large social network out there,” Lawrence says.

Put simply, and noting that I’m probably not the majority case here, I rely on my “Google résumé,” to use Sam’s words, to live the life I want. My lukewarm reaction to this isn’t a criticism of the goal, simply an observation that it turns out I’m not in the ideal target market for Blackbox Republic’s value proposition.

In other words, I think I’m “too out” for this site to be immediately useful to me. The fact that FetLife is not readily available to the public Internet is the single biggest reason why I don’t sign on to that site very often, and so I have the same reason not to spend all that much time behind the curtains of Blackbox Republic.

Nevertheless, many other people do. If you’re among the cross-section of the populace who’d like a sociosexual experience online and would also like to effectively outsource your social reputation management, if you will, but you feel that sites like Facebook just aren’t cutting it, then Blackbox Republic is definitely worth checking out.

If you do check it out, or even if you don’t, I’d love to know what you think in the comments. And if you’re definitely sold, consider signing up via my partner link. Full disclosure: signing up that way earns me a small commission. If you’d rather sign up but not give me a commission for the referral, just register from the front page.

The books are full-color PDF downloads, and include some really awesome titles. These are precisely the kinds of books you want as PDFs, too, since you can search through them and always keep them with you while you’re coding and looking for inspiration or a reference (even when you’re without Internet access). I couldn’t help but pounce on this deal, and I’m now the proud owner of the following books, which have all received some pretty great reviews:

• No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP
• Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design (on Raena‘s recommendation)
• The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques
• The Art & Science Of JavaScript

In just 3.5 hours, SitePoint has managed to raise over $15,000 AUD, according to employee Kevin Yank on Twitter. And that’s just on this side of the world. All my North hemisphere friends were asleep when this was announced, but not to worry. SitePoint’s sale will last until this Friday, so there’s plenty of time to take advantage of it.

Obviously, I think you should do so. Not only are you getting some really quality content and helping disaster victims at the same time, you’re also sending a loud and clear message that companies whose humanity outshines their accounting are the ones you’re going to support. I’m thrilled to see that SitePoint is one of these human companies, and ever more thrilled to be a part of it.

The error, which is triggered on login regardless of whether or not the username and password you enter are correct (presumably because the issue occurs while trying to authenticate), displays the username and the password the user has entered in cleartext and then (as if that wasn’t bad enough) encourages the user to email this information to their support department!

Yes, we have made the company aware of the problem. No, they have not fixed it yet. Proof in the form of a screen capture from literally 10 minutes ago:

Workamajig.com login error echoes the entered password in cleartext and encourages the user to send this to their support via email.

No, these are not real credentials, but an uninformed user may very well enter access credentials that are valid. Since this issue is not triggered by invalid credentials, that means valid login information for god knows how many Workamajig user accounts is very likely sitting in the SMTP logs of countless mail servers. Since in many countries these logs are federally mandated to be saved for at least two years, if I were a user of Workamajig I would seriously consider changing my account password ASAP, as well as changing any other account that I used the same password for!

I can’t be sure from this screen shot, but I sincerely hope that user’s passwords are passed around in the application as well as stored on disk as salted cryptographic hashes. Of course, after seeing this, I wouldn’t be shocked if that wasn’t the case. The good news is that the login screen to their application is only accessible with an SSL/TLS connection, which does prevent someone from snooping on the wire. Nevertheless, there are still many attack vectors that SSL/TLS doesn’t protect against if the rest of the application is not secure or, say, if you’re encouraged to bypass those protections by sending emails with sensitive data in order to request technical support.

Anyway, hopefully this gets fixed sooner rather than later. At the very least, don’t encourage users to email cleartext passwords. That is pretty much always a Very Bad Thing.

Update: It took only a couple of days for Workamajig to notice this blog post, which is great because it means I woke up to a forwarded email in my inbox in which a Workamajig representative said:

On the issue of showing the user id and password in an error message, [we] will be changing the way that error message is displayed. […] Just to clarify the user id and password is just on the screen of the user that is logged in, and that message to copy and paste is a standard messages and it is just intended for you to copy and paste the error message; you are not required to send the user id and password.

I haven’t encountered the same issue again (but then again I only tried to login to my account twice in between then and now), so I can’t verify that the error message really has changed but I’d give Workamajig the benefit of the doubt. If you’re using Workamajig and notice a change in the way this login error is handled before I do, leave a comment to let me know it’s really been changed.

When you log in to just about any Web site or Internet-enabled service, say Basecamp for example, you traditionally simply type in a user name and matching password. This is known as one-factor authentication because all you need to do to log in successfully is use a matching pair of user names and their passwords. Since the user name is not hidden, the only piece of the puzzle that’s providing any security is your password.

Now, a password is something you have to remember, so this factor is called "something you know." Of course, if someone else also knows your password, this means that person can log in pretending to be you. Thus enters the need for a second factor for authentication.

The YubiKey is a physical USB fob device with a unique ID. That is, each YubiKey in the world has its own ID, meaning that no two are identical. This implies that if you have a YubiKey with you, no one else can have that same YubiKey anywhere else in the universe. Thus, this gives you a second factor with which to authenticate yourself, specifically it’s "something you have."

When you combine something you know (for instance, a password) with something you have (such as a YubiKey), you have two-factor authentication. Authenticating yourself with both of these factors is obviously more secure than relying solely on one factor because in order to compromise it an attacker needs to compromise both factors; the attacker would need to know what you know (figure out your password) and steal something you have (physically obtain your YubiKey).

If you’re familiar with one-time credit cards such as those that PayPal offers, you can think of the YubiKey like one of these cards, but instead of being used to make online purchases, it’s used for logging into stuff (and, of course, you don’t need more than one physical YubiKey). Of course, for authentication to work with the YubiKey the application or service you are logging into has to be able to understand that you’re using one of these authentication devices.

The good news here is that the entire process of using a YubiKey is a well-documented, open-source, and open-spec scheme so it’s easy for service providers to implement. And, because Yubico is also an OpenID identity provider, you can use your YubiKey to log into any site that supports the OpenID protocol right now, such as (you guessed it) Basecamp! There’s even a WordPress YubiKey plugin so you could theoretically use your YubiKey to secure your authentication to any of your WordPress blogs.

The YubiKey spec is, itself, completely independant of the OpenID spec and vice versa, which is what makes the combination so formidable. What’s so cool about this process is that the site you’re authenticating to, such as Basecamp or your WordPress blog, doesn’t have to know anything about how you’re authenticating because the OpenID provider (Yubico in this example) simply returns the answer—a perfect example of a well-constructed API at work. Either you have successfully authenticated to your OpenID provider or you haven’t, and the site can respond accordingly.

And if that’s not cool enough, want to know the coolest thing about the YubiKey? It’s environmentally friendly! The YubiKey web site states that the robust, ultra-thin and battery-free design increases lifetime and reduces environmental impact.

I’m more than seriously considering getting one of these myself, and even beyond that, getting one for all of my fellow site editors on some of the community web sites I help maintain. This is especially important for sites dealing in confidential or otherwise sensitive information, such as those which hold financial records or have other privacy concerns. Securing the authentication of privileged users such as the site administrators seems a natural step.

Even better yet, because the only cost to implementing this system is developer resources and the cost of the physical YubiKey device, I’m also seriously considering baking this right into any new sites I develop. At $35, a YubiKey is actually cheaper than an SSL certificate, and even though they don’t protect against all the same attack vectors, I think a device like the YubiKey is clearly a vastly superior solution in the majority of use cases.

I never really had a compelling reason to begin to propagate an OpenID identity before but now, at last, I do.

By those definitions, I’ve been a productive twentysomething-year-old since I was a pre-teen, which just goes to show you that age has nothing to do with it. Damn straight.

Apple WikiServer: Mac OS X Server’s built-in Intranet builder

At work, I’m finally getting the opportunity to try the Apple WikiServer out. Its strongest asset, by far, is the integration it has with Apple’s Mac OS X permission scheme. Apple WikiServer makes heavy use of the OS‘s built-in user accounts to define users and groups, and the permissions those users and groups have to edit, view, and comment on pages in the wiki you create with it. And, because Leopard Server has full support for Access Control Lists, those permissions schemes can be as complex as you like.

This is very important because many large (and small) organizations have sensitive material that they’d like to keep private, or restricted to certain groups. Historically, wikis are a free-for-all. Anyone and everyone who has access to any part of the wiki can change any other part of the wiki. Recent wiki implementations such as later version of MediaWiki and some other wiki software have implemented permissions systems to allow administrative users to control access rights, but these are often complicated or require code-level configurations.

With Apple’s WikiServer, all of these permissions can be managed via the Workgroup Manager application, and because you can take advantage of the built-in ACL support, you can model your organizations permissions scheme directly in the Server OS permissions structure, giving you a much easier way to control information access. Take note, however, that like almost all other things that have to do with your Apache configurations, your Server’s Web Service will likely need to be stopped and started again for any changes you make to a wiki’s permissions take effect.

The Workgroup Manager application is also where you go to create new wikis for groups. To enable a wiki, you need to already have created a group and assigned users to that group. For instance, I created a Developer Wiki where all of the in-house developers can share tech tips, so I created a group called “Developers” and assigned individual developers, as well as the company executives (by way of the “Executives” group) to that group. The group-within-a-group technique is key, because if the company executives change, the members of the Developers group does not need to change, too. In all of Apple’s publications, Apple refers to the wikis hosted by WikiServer as an “intranet website.”

It’s clear that Apple intended this product for use within small companies, and not necessarily out on the open Internet. What follows are just a few notes I’ve compiled about how the Apple WikiServer works.

Front-end Code Generation from the Apple WikiServer WYSIWYG Editor

The Apple wikis are very nice to use. Their functionality is relatively straightforward to find and activate. However, the HTML code that the Apple wikis generate can be a little confusing. By default, new page text is entered into a semantically meaningless <div> element. This can be changed by highlighting text and then selecting “Paragraph” from the formatting toolbar. Subsequent paragraphs that are typed seem to then use <p> elements. However, some paragraphs revert back to <div>s when I used it, and I’m still not sure why or when this occurred.

On the plus side, so far, all the browsers I’ve used with the Apple WikiServer function the same way. This include Firefox 2, Safari 3.1, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Typing actual code and having it marked up as such can’t be done in the GUI formatting toolbar to select a <code> element. The “Monospace” item in the text formatting toolbar creates <pre> elements and <pre> elements only. However, Apple does provide a “Switch to HTML view” button (the arrow brackets button) and one can enter standard HTML, including <code>…</code> elements in that view, and then switch back. This behaves perfectly on all browsers except Internet Explorer, in which your text area field shows no line breaks whatsoever.

Apple’s WYSIWYG editor handles escaping special characters when those special characters have HTML entity reference equivalents, such as double quotes (“), arrow brackets (< and >), and ampersands (&). It does not seem to handle Unicode characters, such as the ellipses in the prior paragraph. However, such Unicode characters need not be escaped as long as the document’s character set is UTF-8 (or UTF-16), which the Apple WikiServer specifies and supports out of the box.

Pressing the Return key twice causes the Apple wiki to generate an empty <div> or <p> element with an explicit break (<br />) inside of it. One can deduce that this is a design choice in order to help transition users who are used to plain <textarea /> inputs to Apple’s WYSIWYG editor. It’s also the only way to space paragraphs properly if the user hasn’t selected the “Paragraph” option in the text formatting toolbar. Otherwise, simply hitting the Return key once is enough to space paragraphs apart properly (i.e., the functionality is equivalent to the way Microsoft Word or Pages handles paragraph breaks).

Interestingly, the “Enter URL…” functionality form the toolbar is smarter than one might first assume. For instance, it recognizes email address and prepends a mailto: scheme to the link if it finds one. This is contrary to what the Apple-provided manual states, which tells you to enter the “mailto:” portion as part of the URL. In fact, you should omit this, else your final mailto link will actually read “mailto:mailto:your.email@address.com”.

This means linking to “mailto: links” is as simple as typing an email address. Similarly, the WYSIWYG doesn’t complain if your fully-qualified URL doesn’t include a scheme, so you can enter //apple.com/ and the subsequent link is generated as <a href="//apple.com/">Link text</a>. This is one step above and beyond even WordPress’s new WYSIWYG editor, which forcefully prepends an http: scheme to URLs without one.

For the most part, copy-and-paste works as expected, except in cases where the WYSIWYG editor does not understand the current formatting, such as a specific font and (and this is a biggie) for links. At first, the editor will appear to show that the formatting (including links) is saved, but when you actually save the page, only the formatting that the WYSIWYG editor understands is actually saved. Worse, all your links are turned into underlined—but unlinked—text. In short, this means that if you are copying and pasting page content that contains links, you need to do so in the HTML view of the page editor.

Inexplicably, the editor generates <i> and <b> tags for italics and bold, instead of the preferred <em> and <strong> elements. I’m not sure I understand why this is the case. There does exist a an “emphasis” option in the toolbar, as does an “important” option, but these generate strange spans instead. The “Important” item wraps the selected text inside a <span class=”Apple-style-span custom_forecolor_important”>…</span> and the “Emphasis” item wraps the selected text inside a <span class=”Apple-style-span custom_forecolor_emphasis”>…</span> element.

There’s also one other item, “Highlight,” which wraps the selected text inside of a <span class=”Apple-style-span custom_backcolor_highlight”>…</span> element.

The only explanation that makes sense to me, after much speculation, is that perhaps Apple does not want to encode semantic information such as what <em> and <strong> would imply from users who use a WYSIWYG editor. This shows either a blatant distrust of users or incredible foresight. I’m not sure which.

Page names and URLs

Currently, the search functionality built into Apple’s WikiServer only searches on the text of a page’s title.

Apple’s WikiServer generates unique page names for each new wiki page. These names consist of two parts, but only one seems to make any difference. For example, if you create a new Wiki page called “Hello”, you might get an address in your web browser’s location bar that looks like this:

http://your-server.local/groups/your-group-name/wiki/1d06a/Hello.html

Most of this is standard URL stuff (the protocol, the server address), and most of the rest is self-explanatory (the group name, the wiki section). The important bits in this URL are the last two:

• 1d06a
• Hello.html

Obviously, “Hello.html” came from the fact that you named your new page “Hello”. WikiServer appended “.html” on its own. The other bit, the short string of random characters, is a unique identifier used across all of this group’s web services (the wiki, blog, calendar, and mail list, if these other services are enabled) to uniquely identify this page. What’s interesting about this is that only the unique string of characters seems to matter in regards to accessing the page. That is, if you next ask for:

http://your-server.local/groups/your-group-name/wiki/1d06a/Some-Random-Page.html

you’ll still get the same “Hello.html” page from before, even though you’re seemingly asking for “Some-Random-Page.html”. In fact, it doesn’t seem to matter what you replace “Some-Random-Page” with. So long as there is some text in that part of the URL, that the URL ends with “.html” and that the unique identifier remains untouched, you’ll always end up retrieving the “Hello.html” page.

This means that if you change this page’s name later to, for instance, “Hello world”, old links that point to “…/1d06a/Hello.html” will continue to work, even while new links will start to point at “…/1d06a/Hello_world.html”. From a usability perspective, this is simple and effective; it ensures that users have a reminder of what the page is about by looking at the last part of the URL. However, once page names change, it becomes a bit non-optimal, because the same page can be referred to by multiple names—a “no-no” in the SEO world and a practice discouraged by most semantic-web types.

I would imagine that Apple made this design decision because the company envisioned their WikiServer to be used, again, primarily in intranet and SOHO environments, and as a result are not too concerned with search engine optimization. As an aside, this unique string is also how Apple’s WikiServer identifies the stored content on the filesystem. Read on for more details.

Hacking the Apple WikiServer

There isn’t a lot of information out on the Web right now about how to work with the WikiServer, especially for developers. Therefore, some digging is needed. After a bit of research, I discovered the following key directories that the WikiServer uses. They are as follows:

• /usr/share/collaboration - This has a few developer tool support files as well as the majority of the client-side code for the Wiki (javascripts, etc).
• /usr/share/wikid - This directory holds the Python sources and compiled bytecode for all the “Teams” components (including wiki, blog, calendar, etc.). It seems to run on Twisted and a number of other familiar-sounding components.
• /Library/Application Support/Apple/WikiServer - This is where most the data is stored, inside of plist files and a few others. The Themes subdirectory here is where Apple recommends that look-and-feel changes be made.
• /Library/Collaboration – This is the default data storage location for all the “Teams” components. The actual content of the wikis and blogs will be kept somewhere in this directory, which means that this is the directory you want to backup to backup the content of your wikis. This location is the only user-configurable one of the bunch. To change it, change the “Data Store” value in Server Admin. (A more detailed listing of this directory hierarchy is available on page 62 of the Mac OS X Server Web Technologies Administration For Version 10.5 Leopard manual.)

If you take a peek at the /Library/Collaboration directory, and follow that into the Groups/your-group-name/wiki directory, you’ll find a list of all the pages in your wiki stored as .page bundles, identified with the unique character string WikiServer generated when it first created the page.

It should be noted that anything in the /usr/share directory will likely be overridden whenever Apple releases an update that modifies the WikiServer. As a result, any and all changes you make to WikiServer’s templates or themes should be done by creating new files in the /Library/Application Support/Apple/WikiServer/Themes directory.

It’s interesting to note that the WikiServer seems to use Python for its back-end processing. This may open up some interesting integration possibilities for Python programmers in the future.

More help eslewhere

Even though Apple WikiServer is relatively new, there’s a load of helpful information about it on the web. Most of the good stuff is on Apple’s own Discussions boards, but more and more info is beginning to show up on blog posts. A Google search should give you what you need. For the really lazy, however, here are a few helpful items:

• Server Admin 10.5 Help: Customizing Wiki Themes and Layouts
• Apple Discussions: How to customize Apple WikiServer templates and themes
• Mac OS X Server Web Technologies Administration For Version 10.5 Leopard

This was just a brief introduction to WikiServer from some notes I’ve been collecting in my experimentations, but I hope it’s helpful to someone somewhere. Cheers. Or, continue to Part 2.

In a nutshell, we aren’t pro-porn, but we are pro-freedom.

To prevent porn, you have to take an activist stand against freedom of expression — you have to get in there and judge content, judge people, judge intent, and take action based on your judgments. I would never criticize a company for doing so, but I don’t want to do that, and we as a company don’t want to do that.

We think a better approach is to let people fundamentally do what they want, as long as it isn’t illegal and doesn’t otherwise violate our terms of service.

A heartfelt applause to Marc and everyone at Ning for putting their user’s personal choices ahead of their own. It’s not only good social justice, it’s excellent business.

Marc even provides some history:

From the very beginning of the Internet as a mass medium, porn has been present, and all of the Internet companies that have come before us have had to figure out where they stand.

[…]

[D]uring my time at AOL, I was fascinated to see how AOL dealt with porn. AOL had to balance two facts. One, their entire marketing thrust to be a mass market service meant that they had to come across as — and be — highly family-friendly. And in fact, they did a lot of work with parental controls and other features to make sure that families would use AOL safely. But the other fact was that a huge part of AOL‘s actual usage all through the 90′s was for adult content — chat rooms, bulletin boards, and all the rest.

In practice, I think they balanced those two facts quite well — AOL could be used as a family-friendly service or as an open environment for people to do whatever they want, and it worked quite well for everyone.

This is a model that Yahoo then followed, and Google more recently.

Yahoo has always had an enormous amount of adult activity and material — some estimates are that as much as half of Yahoo Groups’ activity is adult in nature, for example.

And Google of course famously crawls and serves up search results and images for all kinds of adult topics, among every other topic in the world.

In light of many high-profile anti-porn practices by social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and to a lesser degree, LiveJournal, it’s great to see that at least one company has put its own business ahead of other people’s politics. It’s precisely that sort of thing that’s made Marc an entrepreneurial blockbuster time and time again.

And frankly, I think the social agenda called freedom is just as important.

Via Susan Mernit

There is an expectation of overtime in [the technology] industry. I don’t think anyone’s surprised by that.

Um, I’m surprised by that. That’s why they call it overtime. It’s over(what is expected)time. Otherwise it would just be called moretime or something that doesn’t imply the fact that a particular measurement has been exceeded.

Of course, I’m not really surprised by that. I have been facing this expectation ever since I began working at 16, and since then I have been working some “overtime” hours, most of them unpaid. Surprised? No. Incredulous? Yes.

It strikes me as particularly insane to let my lack of surprise for such a thing turn into complacency, as the vast majority of people I have always shared office space with have seemed to do. Some go so far as to volunteer overtime hours, which always leaves me with a puzzled look on my face.

One of the primary issues for me is to have some choice in the matter. Flexibility is freeing (even if it has to be legislated), and enhances productiveness by increasing a worker’s efficiency. An expectation of overtime (or anything) is accompanied with an implicit ultimatim: do X or else Y. This is even more evident when other people volunteer X and I don’t, and it creates an environment that culturally strengthens the expectation of X. There’s a phrase for this: it’s called peer pressure.

American workers are indoctrinated with a system of reward: “work hard—play hard.” This is not really so bad, it models the reality of many situations quite realistically (i.e., not everything is perfect or enjoyable all the time), and it’s generally a good if simplistic approach to a holistic life.

Until you realize that this work culture places more importance on work than on play. This is a Bad Thing. The reason this is so bad is because it informs every decision employers (and to my astonishment, many employees) make: that they should always sacrifice “play” in favor of “work” because the latter is percieved as more important.

Now, I realize to most of my colleagues and fellow white-collar Americans I am probably being written off as a lazy slob right about now, and I suppose there’s little avoiding that. However, if that is what you are doing I will challenge you to consider the following question: If work is so much more important than play, why the incredibly passionate concerns over quality of life, or fulfillment, or happiness, or personal satisfaction? Are you happy with your job? Does it provide for you these things you say you seek?

If so, I envy you, as do the massively overwhelming majority of other employed people. The sad truth is that for most people, many of whom don’t even know what it is they want (myself included to some degree), expectations of work being more important to me than, well, the rest of me, are absurd.

I am not saying that working jobs you don’t really want frees you of the comittments you made to tasks you have, if you have made such comittments. What I am saying is that the (ridiculous) expecation of work being more important doesn’t change those comittments. In other words, if I have a full-time job, I should be working whatever the definition of “full-time,” which in New York City is 40 hours per week. Working one minute over those 40 hours is, and should always be expected to be, optional.

Right now, that isn’t really the case, and it’s unfortunate because the rather arbitrary dogma of the 9-5 for every conceivable working environment set forth by Henry Ford in the early 1900′s is rapidly becoming ever more inappropriate to today’s working conditions. As the New Zealand Herald article I linked to above says:

“If employers were able to vary their working hours, and work more often from home, there would be real social, environmental as well as economic benefits,” Ms Kedgley said.

I sincerely believe this is true, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s such a foreign concept to most people. Even the people who talk about “work-life balance” often talk about it in a way that shows they clearly separate the idea of work from the idea of life. Instead, I think work should be viewed not as a “necessary evil” that just happens to be a part of life, but rather that people need to be enabled to find the ways that makes working, y’know, work for them.

Succeeding in that can only cause Good Things to happen for everyone.

Possibly the best example of this phenomenon in action is Wikipedia, which hosts several different versions of its pages. The version everyone knows about is the supremely academic one, the one Wikipedia presents by default. Here’s an excerpt of one such page’s introduction, the Wikipedia entry for the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles that make up all matter. It is a quantum field theory developed between 1970 and 1973 which is consistent with both quantum mechanics and special relativity. To date, almost all experimental tests of the three forces described by the Standard Model have agreed with its predictions. However, the Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions, primarily because of its lack of inclusion of gravity, the fourth known fundamental interaction, but also because of the large number of numerical parameters (such as masses and coupling constants) that must be put “by hand” into the theory (rather than being derived from first principles).

Contrast the above with this excerpt for the same page, the Standard Model of particle physics, taken from the simple English version of Wikipedia:

The Standard Model of physics is the best idea to say how fundamental forces and elementary particles work. It uses quantum mechanics and special relativity. In physics there are many different particles and forces, the Standard Model says that all particles and forces are only two different types: fermions and bosons.

Okay, now that’s a lot easier to understand. In this example, the simple English version is a lot shorter, and at first glance that might strike you as its major distinguishing factor. However, if you read closer, you’ll notice many things specific to the language that was used that serve to give the simple English version much more accessibility than the academic one. Some of these things include:

• Simpler, more familiar vocabulary. Instead of using surgically-precise words that may not be familiar to an uninformed reader, plainer words (and no less accuracy) are used to describe concepts.
• Dense sentences are broken up into smaller chunks. When accessibility or successful communication is the primary concern, longer sentences that deliver more information in one punch may be counter-productive. Instead, it’s often better to chop up larger concepts and deliver them in smaller-sized chunks that are easier to digest.
• Specifics are introduced one at a time, and defined at each instance. Possibly the most common error writers (especially technical writers) make is introducing lots of interdependent ideas at once or without proper prior context. Rather than work your way from a complicated idea to a simple conclusion, work instead from a simple foundation to a complicated idea, building vocabulary as you go (see point the first about vocabulary).

Of course, this is always easier said than done, and it is also why simplicity is intuitively understood by lots of people to be a hard thing to create. Presenting things simply is a challenge because it requires more knowledge than simply understanding the thing; it requires understanding the thing and understanding what pieces of the thing your audience does not (yet) understand. The value of simple lies in being able to fill those gaps.

It’s frustrating that people’s lack of understanding about the various computer industries leads to situations that affect so many innocent bystanders. The fact that computer programmers and sysadmins (in the US) are currently considered ineligible for overtime pay because “all they do is implement someone else’s desires”, even though every computer professional knows how much independent thought and judgement is required in their everyday jobs to produce a quality result, is a classic example of this. (How sad is it that we actually have a “classic” example, by the way?)

In a recent post by Greg Jorgensen over at the Typical Programmer blog, Greg cites Joel Spolsky (programmer extraordinaire), as saying that working ’til midnight is a sure-fire way to get software projects to fail. However, while this is certainly sound reasoning as far as I can tell, what’s even more frustrating to me than being made to work long hours is having my desires for learning and skill development brushed off and made less important than the project deadlines.

Joel says that the first thing you can do to destroy the hope of a successful software project is to hire mediocre programmers, instead of the best ones. Greg makes the good point that we were all mediocre programmers once. How did we get better? Greg says,

The best way to use the people on the team and to help them gain experience is to have them work together as much as possible. Even without keyboard sharing it’s better to have programmers mentor and learn from each other than to let each carve out a domain no one else understands.

And indeed, search the job listings on any career search board and you’ll see companies trying to sell themselves to you in exactly that fashion. But once you’re hired, it’s often a very, very different tune. Suddenly your interests in skill development take a back seat to project deadlines, tight schedules, and more work. This is all, of course, understandable to some degree, but as an all-encompassing truism that provides no wiggle room, I can’t tolerate it.

What irritates me even further is that companies and recruiters only seem to seek the already-skilled. I may be fortunate to be on this list for some skills and so am thankfully not living on the street, but I know better than most that I am not a world-class programmer or an exceptional system administrator. Frankly, I think I am a mile wide and an inch deep in most of the things that I know. Thus, it is irritating that this isn’t seen as a skill when, in fact, it is the one thing that has given me the most success: my speciality is being a generalist, and my ability to learn new technologies’s baseline quickly is what’s enabled me to hold so many different kinds of tech jobs.

And why have I held so many different kinds of tech jobs? Because not a single job I’ve ever held has actually encouraged me (except on my own time, as opposed to on the company’s dime) to broaden my skill set. Frankly, broadening my skill set is why I like to work. And having employees who like to work seems like it would be good for business.

So why is skills development only paid lip service by every company I’ve ever worked for?

That’s the problem with this place. I just don’t care. I don’t care about your motorcycle, just as I don’t care about your software. I don’t care about your network, or your IT projects, or your deadlines. I just don’t care.

And why should I? No, really, why should I? Don’t tell me that I should because it’s my job because the question I’m asking you is why should I care about this job. You already know I care about doing a good job. Don’t tell me I should care because you care, because I don’t care about you (same question: why should I?). And don’t tell me I should care because caring about it is more than caring about a job, as I know you truly feel (you’re missing the point again, I am thinking about more than just my job).

Why do you even care the way you do? Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question because I already know the answer. It’s the same reason why I cared about my job at Apple; because I felt good about what I was doing. I didn’t care about Apple, the company, I cared about the people I was working with (or some of them, anyway), and I cared about making the lives of my customers better. Apple as a company could live or die and I would really not care one way or another, but if that sweet mother didn’t get her iPod nano fixed and it made her son sad, I would care. I still care more about that boy’s happiness than I do about whether or not we close that several million dollar deal you want to fly me out to that suburb of Seattle to work on.

Do you know why that is? Because I’m not going to see any bit of that million-dollar deal, nor am I going to improve people’s lives because of it, regardless of how hard I work. What’s going to happen is that, if we get that deal closed, some sales person who sold that prospect our software gets a relatively minor commission (his incentive, not mine), the customer increases the efficiency of their IT processes (their incentive, not mine) which is just business-speak for making management feel better about laying people off (the customer’s CEO incentive, the greedy bastard) and never will my action actually have a benefit for this prospect’s customers, who in some altruistic sense I care about in much the same way as that boy and his mother who wanted their iPod fixed.

So why should I work here? Should I keep prostituting my values and my sense of fulfillment just to satisfy my curiosity with high-technology? Obviously not, though that’s what I’ve been doing since I realized I was unhappy here. You don’t want me to do that because it makes me a bad employee, unable to be optimally effective. I don’t want it because it’s making me miserable and makes me feel like I’m wasting a huge part of my life. It would have been easier if I got more of the perks I was expecting (more training and learning opportunities, more personal time, follow-through on promises like having a day off to make up for the holiday I worked, working with people I like, and so on), but seeing as how these don’t seem to be happening I see no reason not to accelerate my alternative plans (of which I have plenty).

So unless you see a possibility for this to change, it’s not a matter of if I’m going to quit but when, and the countdown to a decision ends this Friday at noon.

Oh my god! This can not be happening to me. I simply can not deal with this.

There has been an ongoing issue at my work about training. After the absolute disaster at the last engagement I was on, I was promised three weeks of training–something I’d been asking for since after I finished my “official” training that I felt didn’t really help me at all because of the unorganized, utterly abysmal experience that was. Then it was two weeks. Then it a little more than one. Then it was just cancelled, and I was next put on an assignment that allowed me to work from home.

This working from home thing was awesome, because it meant two things. First, that I would get the chance to actually use the product I’m supposed to be an expert in supporting as opposed to looking over someone’s shoulder while they use it because they don’t want me touching their computer network due to the company’s security restrictions, which is what was happening at the disaster client. Second, it gave me the chance to work from home (duh), which is honestly not something I really care that much about for any reason other than the fact that it meant I don’t have to dress in ways I don’t feel comfortable and maintain this mask of someone who I’m not for the sake of the business. Admittedly, that is a big deal, but it’s not a dealbreaker, y’know? (I don’t actually have any problems being professional, but there’s a huge difference between being myself professionally and being a certain kind of professional that has to fit into the molds of the B2B corporate American mold. I can be professional, but I will never fit into that mold, not by a long shot.)

The really annoying thing about getting the chance to work from home, however, is that all this opportunity to spend at home is happening while Sara is in freakin’ Australia on the other side of the fucking world! Sara has been gone since january 24^th (and I missed her a ton immediately), the same day I fell awfully ill with the flu for half a week. It’s been an unbelievably long amount of time and the whole experience, for many reasons that I won’t go into here, has been harrowing in ways I wouldn’t have imagined to the point that I’m insanely anxious about simply getting to see her again because the thought fills me with a crazy sort of unimaginable fear. (I feel so stupid for being this scared about it.)

Now she is finally returning, though because of flight delays I don’t know exactly when, and I expected a call from her some time this morning but haven’t yet gotten one and it’s already 2:30 PM, so this whole airline delay thing may very well cut into our weekend plans. I have already booked flights for myself to Maine and for us to come back on Sunday night. I had to juggle my plans around because this next week at work was planned to be a formal Oracle database training intensive, which I have been looking forward to ever since my first day on the job when I learned about these training intensives because one of my bosses told me I had just missed (by a couple of weeks) the week of intensive Python training taught by Mark Lutz, the author of Learning Python, Second Edition. In brief, I cancelled my Monday day off that I would have spent as an additional “welcome back” period with Sara in Maine that I had asked for (and earned because of the fact that I worked the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday) in order to attend this Oracle training–because I wanted to.

Now, I just got an email from another engagement manager (a boss, basically), that they want me to fly out to Washington State so that I can be there on Monday through (probably) Friday. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?! If I am made to go all the way across this fucking country on the first week of Sara’s return (this upcoming week) for a client who has offered me no real idea of what the fuck I’m supposed to do instead of the training everyone else is getting and that I was expecting from everything I was told at my interviews (I literally asked people “Why did you join this company,” and everyone told me because the learning opportunities were immense–which is true, the opportunties are immense and wonderful, but I want some of them too, damnit!), then I am seriously considering simply saying no and quitting my job on the spot. I simply don’t think I’ll be able to handle that, and with all of this turmoil and absolute torture this job is putting me through, I don’t think I’d feel as if it were such a loss (except financially).

I feel like every single fucking thing is going wrong right now. I don’t feel as though I have a damn shred of support (I know I do really, but it’s so far away), an ounce of understanding (again not really true, I have friends who can understand, but I don’t think Sara really can on anything but a cognitive level–not to say she doesn’t have struggles or that her battles are less important or easier than mine, but she does not have these struggles that I have and by that very fact simply may not be able to relate experiencially to what I’m going through), and the worst luck (and please don’t tell me to count my fucking blessings, that is not what I need right now; I know damn well what my blessings are, thank you). What makes it so unbelievably painful is that the whole of my experiences is so much less priviledged than Sara’s, who’s just been on a wonderful vacation for six weeks and is returning to the wonderful feeling of coming home for a weekend ski trip and to her boyfriend who is supposed to be ecstatic to see her. And I am ecstatic to see her again, but I am so stressed out and emotionally high strung right now that I feel as though I wish she isn’t going to have to put up with this from me.

I spoke for hours with my friend who’s staying with me (after her own horrendously painful breakup the week Sara left for Australia) and she told me that I have to start thinking about myself, not worrying about what kind of a burden I’m going to be on Sara. This is smart, and is probably what I should do, but it’s so hard for me to do that when I have this incredibly powerful urge to just focus all my energy on making everything good for Sara. (Why is that such a powerful urge? Oh my god, for many reasons, all of which are valid and many of which are perfectly healthy, but none of which I’m going to go into right now.)

My friend said that I should want to get pampered from Sara for a little while, have her take care of me, be treated to thoughtfulness and compassion and empathy, and that I should let go of all these stresses I keep taking upon myself like worrying about whether or not I’m going to be happy enough for her so she has a good time. Again, this is smart and makes sense; I can’t possibly have a good time or expect Sara to have a good time with me (which is what I want more than anything in the world right now) if I’m going to be obsessing about the question all the time. But I’m really scared.

I’m scared not only about this weekend but the future as well. What’s going to happen if Sara gets accepted to a school far away? Besides the point of fact that means she’ll be leaving New York, it makes me feel like another knife of how differently priveledged Sara and I are is once again thrust into my heart–not by Sara, just by the situation. I would feel much, much, much better about the whole situation where she feels like she wants to go to graduate school for creative writing if I could understand what the real driving force behind that motivation is. I have to know that if she leaves me for school (I evidently have major, major abandonment issues–not surprising considering my childhood with divorced parents and whatnot), she’s doing it for a reason that’s near and dear to her heart.

Not that I think she’d ever do something so big as moving to Australia for graduate school for any other reason than one that’s near and dear to her heart, but it will be easier to take if I can at least understand–not necessarily agree with–her choice of action and why that specific action of going to a graduate school is the right one for her to make, versus something like getting a full-time job and actually getting into the mindset of writing professionally–not just learning about writing–as I know she can do brilliantly. It comes back to the feeling of resentment (and I feel more guilt for having this feeling of resentment in the first place than I ever thought I would ever feel guilty about anything ever (especially since I constantly tell Sara that guilt is not a useful thing to dwell on–we both have our guilt complexes, me from this, and her from being more priviledged in life than I have ever been)) over my being forced by the Fates to fight a hellish battle for every scrap of happiness and capability to follow my dreams that I can get, whereas Sara has the good fortune to prolong her schooling–something she enjoys–and put off the dreadful experience of having a so-called “real” job (it is viscerally disgusting to me that a “real” job is always seen as something you don’t want) and putting up with the rest of the crap of living in the so-called “real” world (again, I want to vomit thinking that the “real” world is so full of strife all the time) for yet another four years (or more, if she goes for a Ph.D. in Writing in Australia).

(As a sidenote, holy shit, that was an insanely convoluted parenthetical paragraph. Also, I don’t actually wish for her to get a job she hates, of course. I would hardly wish this hell on my worst enemy.)

Again, it’s not that I think Sara doesn’t have her own stuff to deal with. But there is simply no arguing the fact that on many scales of measurable priveledge, she got dealt the better hand. She is brilliant, a constant inspiration to me. And she is so amazingly healthy. No other person I have ever met or ever heard of in my entire life, without exaggeration, is so glowing with the unmistakable aura of a uniquely qualified intelligent mind such as hers is and has not gone through a great deal of very measurable pain and suffering as the source for their genius, the likes of which is obvious to everyone who hears about their suffering. That is the case with me. I am very, very smart. I match Sara’s awesome strengths in many ways, such as self-awareness and intelligence, kindness, and skills in our respective interests. But I have so many still-open scars that have gotten me to this point. Her body is enviously relatively unscathed by the harsh realities of life.

I don’t want this whole thing to sound like a self-pity party–because that’s not what this is supposed to be, but I can’t not feel this way right now. I’m working on it, god, I’m really working on it as hard as I can because I don’t want Sara to have to deal with this huge amount of utter shit that’s in me. I miss smiling. I miss being happy enough to just listen to music and hum to myself. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

And of course, I miss Sara. My god, I miss Sara most of all.

Sara just called! Right as I was publishing this entry, Sara called. She had heard my rambling, crying message I left for her and called me back saying that she was sorry for saying that she’d call me this morning because she was thinking in California time, and I’m on New York time, so when she meant morning she meant California’s morning. (D’oh!)

However, also bad news is that because of the airline delays it is looking like she may not be able to get to Maine until 10 AM Saturday morning, which absolutely changes our weekend plans…. I don’t know what else to do about this weekend, my job, or anything right now, except to go through the motions as normal and so I’m just going to wait things out until I can see her and talk to her face to face and actually hold her in my arms again.

These past two weeks at work were prime examples of just such an occurance. The fact that these two weeks were supposed to be the weeks that I was getting additional training just makes this fact even more frustrating. Instead of additional training, which I still feel like I desperately need to be effective at my job (because the particulars of this product are so damn, well, particular), I was tasked with a vague and unexplained assignment.

(The kicker, by the way, is that in addition to the vague assignment, I was also given the task of training a new hire. So let me get this straight. You’re going to cancel my training, and then ask me to train someone. While I apprecaite the vote of absolute confidence, that’s more than a little backwards.)

The problem with vague assignments is that they don’t give me a direction to work in. There is certainly a balance to be struck between micromanaging an employee and giving them no direction. Neither side of the scale is appropriate or helpful. It’s interesting to me, however, because never before in my life have I experienced the “no direction” side of things so often. This assigment takes the cake, even in this job.

I understand now what it means when employers and managers say that they want someone who can “work independently.” What they mean is “we just want to give you some vague idea about what we’re looking for, because honestly we have no idea what it needs to look like and only sort of know what it needs to do, and you should fill in all the details yourself. Oh, and you’d better get it right.” (How the hell should I know what right is if you don’t even know, and I’m doin this for you?) Naturally, this makes a lot of sense and sounds perfect (especially to managers). After all, why shouldn’t employees do this?

Well of course they should. The problem isn’t in the paradigm, it’s in the execution. This paradigm assumes that the employee already knows what the desired result is and how to accomplish it. If this were the case, then the request wouldn’t have seemed vague to begin with. It’s the fact that I don’t know enough about the situation (see infuriating lack of context), the product (see infuriating lack of training), and the requirements (see infuriating lack of clear communication) that make it vague.

Thanks to so many reasons such as the Peter Principle and the nature of managerial work to forego employee’s interests in favor of shareholder’s interests, companies consistently sabotage their own best efforts to be successful. While I am sure that the size of a company is one contributing factor to this sabotage, I think that it misses the point. More to the point is the fact that managers are to blame.

A company that does not strive to “be large and successful” is not going anywhere. But it’s the manager’s fault that such horrendous acts of self-mutilation happen over and over again. Workers need proper training, managers need proper communication skills, and both parties need the wherewithall to understand the basics of teamwork. Frankly, these things are all sorely lacking pretty much everywhere.

Just another of the countless reasons why I know I’ll never be happy in corporate America. The more of this shit that happens, the more convinced I am that I’m here for the experience only. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right? It’s just a question of when the next better opportunity comes along. There’s no point in suffering to gain experience when experience can be gained without suffering.

• Google search ranking for a search on my last name: 9^th
• Google search ranking for a search on my first name: 7^th
• Google search ranking for a search on my nickname: 1^st

Hmm….

First of all, how is it that I actually can work from home? Well, networking technology, of course. It’s certainly not a surprise to anyone anymore that the business world looks nothing like what it did twenty, ten, or even five years ago. With telephony on its way to becoming free (ala Skype), video conferencing becoming increasingly prolific, and mobile PDA devices that give people access to email, instant messaging, and web access on the go, we’ve never been more connected.

As a result, there’s no reason, technically, why I can’t work from home, from the office, from a friend’s house, from a coffee shop, or from a boat in the ocean as long as my connection is fast enough. That very fact alone, decoupling the physical location of the workplace from the activity of work itself, was one of the very first motivators that pushed me into technology as a career path.

Being physically where I want to be and feel comfortable is a hugely important part of how productive I feel. The key bit in that phrase is where I want to be; just being mobile isn’t really decoupling the workplace from the work, it’s just working in more than one place. That can be fun (for those, like me, who enjoy travelling), but it’s missing the point.

In the future, as technology continually finds new and more effective and comfortable ways to keep our connections to more of our work available longer and cheaper, more people will begin to realize the benefit of working where they want to. I would even dare to optimistically suggest that this fact alone will increase everyone’s overall productivity by several orders of magnitude because giving people the choice of what environment suits their needs and mood will make people happier, and happier people do better work. This future has always been my goal, and learning about networking and remote management tools early on was a manifestation of this desire. My obsession with mastering complex VNC and SSH tunneling configurations was an early example.

So other than the fact that technology has decoupled the workplace from working (or, gives the possibility of decoupling, anyway, since most of the time I do actually have to go to some physical location in my current job), what other benefits can it bring? In a word, I say specializtion.

In a practical sense, however, what is specialization? We all know the word, and it’s clear that with advancements in technology in all industries more and more specialized sources of this, that, or the other thing have cropped up. Companies who were once manufacturing giants like BMW are now honing in on their differentiators and hammering the marketplace with what they’re best at—marketing cars (not manufacturing them), in BMW’s case. (See Wikinomics for the reference.) At the same time, other firms that are better skilled at the things others are weaker on have come to fill the void, and this is the crux of issues such as outsourcing and globalization.

This move towards honing strengths and farming out weaknesses drives specialization even further. Having each company or individual working in a more collaborative environment better enables the end result to have the best of all possible worlds while at the same time not penalizing (indeed, actually encouraging) specialists to contribute their efforts. But the question still stands: why is this a perk?

Isn’t it bad that specialization is becoming not merely a nice-to-have, but a requirement to keep yourself employed or your business in the black? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

I see this ever-increasing specialization as a positive step for the worker because it means he or she will have to spend less time dealing with uninteresting problems, whatever they are for her. In the past, an entrepeneur had to not only be skilled in his business, but also had to focus strongly on being a vigilant accountant, salesman, and strategist. These things aren’t going away, but the amount of effort and time required to do them right is going way, way down.

Specialized companies that offer extremeley targetted services like Vebio, a web site that let’s freelancers and consultants keep accurate timesheets and invoices, are filling in the gaps. With more of these services cropping up all the time, motivated business people can spend a greater chunk of their energy actually tackling the problems they want to, instead of the ones they have to.

Not only that, but the reverse is true as well. With increasing options to take advantage of specialized services and products, people who will be more versatile and able to adapt quickly and effectively to more specializations will see more work and opportunities coming their way. In effect, being a specialist at specilizing in something will increase your implied odds of success in whatever task you undertake more than ever before. The more able you are to apply specialized skills to a broad range of problems, the more valuable your skill set.

So technology is driving many great things for the every day worker. Even though these perks haven’t touched a large population of the workforce yet, I believe everyone will at least begin to feel them in a few more years. Businesses that don’t adapt will lose employees to opportunities that offer a better work-life balance. Our society will have to adjust to the idea that the 9-5 isn’t as efficient as it once was (and is still often thought to be).

Especially when more folks from my generation join the workplace (I realized recently that I was in some ways unfortunately too damn early to the party), the generation that has been socialized in cyberspace just as much as they have been in meatspace, the very structure of our hierarchical corporate foundations will shift beneath our feet. And you know what, God bless that change.

Oh my god. What am I doing? This situation just keeps getting worse. I’m amazed, utterly and completely amazed at the childishness of all of this. I have no idea what I’m here for, what I’m doing, what to do. I get forwarded emails with questions to which the answers are behind a single link in the email itself. (Why are you asking questions? You obviously didn’t actually read the email.) I write up huge amounts of detailed information on the situation only to be told I sound like a technical madman guru, and to please compose a Power Point presentation instead. (Technical madman guru? I didn’t even use a single acronym in the whole document, nor did I even talk about computers. I talked solely about the ridiculous interpersonal antics of the people I’m working with. Or not working with, as the case may be, because of said stupid interpersonal antics. And Power Point? Oh, I get it, no full sentences and really big text. Yeah, that does seem to be the norm for some reason.)

No one smiles, everyone talks quietly. Walking over to each other’s cubes has been replaced by email because of the tension. (What sense does it make to send an email to each other when I can hear you breathing not ten feet from me?) I can’t believe this is what the modern workplace is like. I’m so disappointed in our society right now, so angry that people as a collective don’t see this as a major problem, an incredibly unhealthy and dirty thing.

I feel so fed up with all of it, so much like just screaming at the top of my lungs at all these zombies around me. They are so dead, so…plugged into their insignificant activities. I loathe the thought that I even look like any of these people with their bland clothes and black leather shoes, identical haircuts and PDAs and black Dell laptop bags. It feels disgusting, like heavy vomit.

I hate it. And most of all, I hate that I spent the entire day doing “work” and I didn’t learn a damn thing about anything interesting.

Update: In fairness, today was a much better day, though in large part only because I found out I’ll (probably) be scheduled for additional training in the coming weeks. It was supposed to be three additional weeks, then two, but then there’s a holiday, so it’s really one and a half weeks, but that’s better than nothing. I just hope this won’t be like the first time I went to so-called “training.” I want to actually feel like I’m learning something that’ll help me.

Second update: So it turns out training was totally canceled on me, which is not a big surprise, but I did get the opportunity (probably by being pulled off the project I was on) to work from home for a few days, which was absolutely awesome (and educational!) anyway. And today, my first day in three days back in an office, I got to meet the new “boss” guy, who seems nice but, better yet, made an impassioned 10 minute speech about the importance of team building, ongoing training, and knowledge sharing to a successful team. Maybe things’ll get better around here after all. I can hope, can’t I?

It is more than foreign. It is alien. It feels a little bit like I’m a bird under water, or a fish out of water, or some such analogy intended to imply an absurdly misplaced object. I don’t feel like an office denizen, and, more disturbing, is the fact that I honestly don’t think I ever want to feel like one either.

I keep trying to make the situation better in small ways like keeping a sense of humor about myself and the work and the situations we find ourselves in — like my Family Feud research notes which fell totally flat — but the most I get out of it is perhaps a guarded smile from the guy at the next cubicle. The office is so amazingly bland. All the furniture is beige and the entire floor is filled with a grid of cubes. The only thing worth looking at all is the New York City skyline out the window. At least my cube is right next to the window. Of course, the desk and computer is situated such that I have to sit with my back to the skyline, an interior design decision I can only imagine was made by some “productivity” company that figured people would be more productive if they didn’t look out the window at the river too often.

So basically I have found the other side of my golden coin. Now I have the salary I want and deserve (though why stop here?), the job is technically demanding and offers tons of opportunity for growth and learning, but the environment is all wrong, in almost every single way. Past jobs were shitty money (especially for my level of expertise), way too easy or too dead-ended, but the environment was better. Why is it so hard to find a balance for these things? I refuse to believe that I am just that hard to please.

And I am having a hugely difficult time pursuing my own projects, too. In the past it was still a challenge, but it was one I enjoyed because I was practicing at it and was ultimately successful, but now I only eek out little things here and there instead of the (relatively) awesome personal accomplishments of the past. It’s because back then I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Now I can only do whatever I want between certain hours of the day, and only if I’m not too tired or actually feeling up for it at the right time.

I used to stay up all night and do personal projects. I can’t do that anymore. I would get all into these projects and they would distract me and keep my occupied. I’d like that, and I’d also like working on the project. But now I can’t schedule things that way anymore because of work. God, I hate having a 9-5 job. I hate it so much sometimes it’s just unreal. It’s so fucking not true what people tell you when you’re little: “You can do whatever you want when you’re grown up.” What a load of crap that is. It should be, “You can do whatever you want on your own time when you’re grown up, but you’ll also sell a large chunk of your time to other people for money.”

I keep telling myself things will get better, but how likely is that really if what I’m really having a problem with is the environment of the place to begin with? If the environment were really awesome at this job then I’d probably feel differently about it. I think. I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t and I’d just find something else to complain about. Damnit, then, why can’t I find something to do or make that I enjoy doing and makes me the money I want to live off of the way I want to?

I said no. I’m a little worried about that. Fact of the matter is, I’m just not that devoted. I see no real benefit from working more. I don’t earn more money and I’m not exactly having a ball. Frankly, I can’t understand why the people who said yes actually said yes. I did feel the pressure to say yes, and though I still don’t know if I would have done so, the fact that saying yes would have meant that the last time I saw Sara until she returned from Australia would have been tomorrow closed the argument. There was just no way I was going to give up the last weekend I could spend time with her in over a month for…that.

Consolingly, Sara told me I could explain that this situation isn’t typical and so my refusal is a special case. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to say that because if I am asked to do many more of those such things, I intend to say no just as often. My job should only be my life if I am doing only what I want to do and nothing else. There’s so little reason in this day and age why people should ever, ever do anything (significant) they don’t genuinely want to that I’m growing increasingly frustrated seeing such pointless things around me and as a part of my life so often.

I love technology and I love learning more about it, solving problems, working on implementing solutions, and documenting them thoroughly. There’s no question I’m better off today than I ever have been before. But it’s not good enough. I’m still doing and putting up with so much of other people’s bullshit that I shouldn’t have to–that nobody should ever have to–that I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

The way I see it, there are only two ways I can ever make doing what I want and only what I want a reality. The first is to work for myself, freelance or start-up company or something. For the several years that I did that, I was actually much happier for a much longer time than I’ve ever been when I worked as an employee of any company, big or small. I think that is because I focused on solely what I wanted to do and deemed worth doing. The only issue was that my income was not steady and ultimately not profitable enough to sustain a living doing the kind of web development I was doing. I’m not going to be an exceptional web developer; there are too many other people out there who are far better at that than I am. I lack the graphic design skills to be a designer and I lack the programming skill to be a one-man developer of anything beyond small projects.

The only other way to ever do only what I want, then, is to join an open source or open source-like organization where I get paid for it. Unfortunately, I am too unskilled and thus unknown for anyone to be that interested in me right now. Hopefully, this will eventually change, and I’ll get better and better and become a uniquely qualified individual for some uniquely specialized task that I enjoy doing. However, there is no doubt in my mind that this will never happen if I work for a company that still functions in the old-model of thinking, closed source and closed minds. It is a requirement that I task myself to ensure that I only receive tasks that I enjoy, and that is only possible in groups when collaboration is voluntary.

I am also not yet over being incredibly bitter and resentful at the world at large and at certain past situations in particular for making this sort of thing a constant battle for me. The majority of my life has been a constant struggle to make others see the most basic, fundamental, obvious things. I resent that most of my memories of growing up are about fighting with parents and teachers about my own well being. I am angry that I have had to parent myself to such a degree that I feel so much older than everyone my own age. I felt like I was 20 at 12, like 30 at 16 and now like 45 at 22. I am tired of fighting.