This theme, inspired by vintage Indian batiks and tapestries, exudes grace and sophistication.  6 color palettes are available so you can choose the one to fit your mood, office or season.  Built into the theme are our normal treasure trove of customized social networking icons, automagic Twitter hovercards for @usernames and configurable tweet displays, and social bookmarking options on posts.  The theme is optimized for readability and includes built-in WordPress post thumbnails, custom nav menu and widgetized sidebar and footer.

View Demo | Buy Indian Flowers — $60

Get the 1.0 out as quickly as possible

Despite the wave of betas and user-previews that we’ve grown accustomed to, from our email software to our Twitter clients to our online timesucks, a beta version is what it is: incomplete.  It’s beta because it hasn’t yet fulfilled the requirements of an official release.  And while we’ve settled with Good Enough for years, particularly with Gmail, in other cases, a pre-release version of the software can be damaging to the inevitable release of the final version.

Let’s take Wine as an example.  Wine is a Windows emulator for Linux, able to run Windows binaries as Linux-native applications.  The goal for 1.0 was to make Wine a workable environment for most major Windows desktop applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and other apps that people use most frequently.  The theory was that when those apps could install without any problems, they’ve reached their 1.0 landmark.

This would have been great when we were looking for a viable Windows alternative operating system.  It would have thrown Linux right out there for its inherent cost-effectiveness, frequent, integrated updates, and ability to get things done right.  However, the world that needed Wine 1.0 was not the world that finally greeted Wine 1.0 when it was completed.  We needed Wine 1.0 when we were trudging through Windows ME or hanging onto the buggy Windows 98.  When Windows XP came around, it was a minor improvement, but still we had no other revolutionary options — Mac OSX wouldn’t be released for another year.  By the time Wine 1.0 was complete, we had two actually really good operating systems to choose from with an OSX well into its development cycle and Windows Vista and then 7 a year later.  The time when Wine could have turned Linux into a powerful alternative for the masses in the operating system market was passed — we already had pretty good options.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and one of the major forces behind WordPress said in a presentation a few years ago

Get out of version 1.0 of your product as soon as possible.  Even if it sucks.

The idea is that you want people using the software, breaking it, trying it in new ways that you didn’t think of when you were writing it.  Get the 1.0 out so real people, not just coders, developers, and nerds are the ones actually using it.

One of the core ideas of development for The Long Con is to build a simple, solid, usable system as quickly as possible.  Much like the structure of WordPress itself, the core Long Con system will contain only as much as is absolutely necessary or beneficial for the enjoyment of the game.  New features, rules, add-ons can be added and expanded later.  What I have now — I think — is a solid beta.  It’s rough around the edges.  It’s untested.  But I believe it’s a usable system and even has some flourishes for advanced and (what I deem to be) unique rules and features.  After we run our seminal test game and clean up some of the documentation, it should be ready for a 1.0 release.

Does this mean it’s done?  Absolutely not.  There are several major components that are missing, including GM-less play, that I have planned and still want to include.  However, I’ve decided that those can and should be added at a later upgrade.  Plugins weren’t added to WordPress until 1.2, and themes weren’t added until 1.5.  Now entire businesses are built on custom plugins and themes, and the official WordPress plugin repository stores over 10,000 unique plugins.  Which leads into the next point:

Never stop developing

What the hell happened between Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons?  There was, like, an epic gap, and AD&D only marginally resembled the original D&D.  Times, trends and ideas change.  I co-wrote a system called Goth: the Corruption — a sort of goth-centric take on Vampire: the Masquerade — somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years ago.   It hasn’t been touched since.  Is that system topical and relevant?  Probably not.  Could it be?  Absolutely.  Even Vampire, which it was inspired by, has gone through some pretty revolutionary changes since the time GtheC was written, including two major revisions and a rebranding.  The difficulty of tabletop game systems is that once the game is printed, that’s it, it’s set in stone.  The current edition of Dungeons and Dragons sort of gets around this by releasing updated rules for .5 releases, but there’s still a lot of time in between a 3.0 and a 3.5 and when the 3.5 or the 4.0 is released, that means your players and storytellers need to go out and buy a whole new stack of books.

Software doesn’t have to work that way.  Sure, when the new version is released you need to — in some form or another — download the updated copy.  By making your software free-as-in-beer, you make it easier for your user by taking out the cost concern of getting the upgrade.  Keeping frequent updates and keeping your users informed of them — and why they should care about the updates — encourages users to grab the most recent version even if there’s a minor inconvenience.  If we applied this to gaming, it’s the equivalent of Wizards of the Coast coming up with an awesome new system for the next version of D&D but it would otherwise need to wait for the next official release.  You could wait, or you could download a “patch” that you could keep as an e-book (or in some other form) and print out or email around to your players and start using this Saturday.  Who wouldn’t want to be using the most updated version of the rules if they added cool new things you could do and you could get it delivered to your inbox automatically for free?

One of the key elements of getting the 1.0 out as quickly as possible and delaying important features or milestones to later releases when you can focus more attention to them is that it keeps you focussed.  Complete this task right here and don’t worry about feature x over there, that’s scheduled for 1.3.  It doesn’t matter when 1.1 and 1.2 come out, and it doesn’t matter if they come out in short succession if that’s the way it works out.  What matters, as a game (and software) developer is that you remain focussed on only what’s in front of you and that what’s in front of you is the most important thing you need to be working on for the project right now.

Along with that is to set a goal to have tangible results in a set period of time.  WordPress’ goal is to release 3 major version updates each year.  This holds you accountable to continuing development and making sure your project doesn’t stagnate.

Allow for modding

One of the most transformative features added into the Dungeons & Dragons system after Wizards of the Coast took over from TSR was making the D20 system open source.  AD&D was great, and the plethora of expansion sets and storytelling resources were far-reaching.  Sets like Ravenloft, Planescape, Forgotten Realms and Dark Sun changed the whole landscape of the type of story you could tell.  But even so, you were still confined to those systems, those worlds.  And some of us like to tinker.  Others of us wonder what it would be like to play a game set in an obscure TV show for which a standalone game hasn’t been built.  Enter D20.

My first exposure to the D20 system was through the Babylon 5 game.  I knew of the major changes in D&D 3rd ed. after Wizards of the Coast took it, but I didn’t realize the D20 system had become open property.  The idea that you could take the core gaming system and overlay any scenario or world you could think of on top of it was brilliant, and allowed independent publishing houses and armchair game developers the opportunity to build a game without having to worry about the system.  It enabled players to enter into a brand new game without having to re-learn core rules and systems (since it’s fairly likely that you would have played at least one D20 game in your lifetime).  In short, it made tabletop RPGs more like what PC games had been doing for years, since the very first Doom mods put you in Homer Simpson’s shoes as you ate donuts and beer through Doom’s maze-like levels.

In The Long Con, there are three major ways the game can be modded and further developed without touching the core rules; Plugins, Modules and Extensions.  Each takes a page from open source software developing.  Plugins are add-ons that add new features or rules to the core system.  Developing a LARP system around The Long Con might be a plugin (albeit a really big plugin), as would adding or replacing Skills to make the game more action-packed.  Modules are sourcebooks that contain NPCs and bad guys.  Modules are crucial to GM-less play, since to play without a GM you would be relying solely on material from modules.  Extensions are full scenarios or worlds.  Extensions can contain plugins and modules (in fact, they probably should), and might also have unique world information and data.  One of the things that appealed to me about The Long Con as a game concept was that it’s not time period-centric.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that since the dawn of man, there have been con artists.  So you can run the game in any time period or world scenario you can think of, from steampunk to space opera to gritty war dramady.  I envision extensions expanding the game system almost indefinitely.

Engage the community

The reason I wanted The Long Con to be open source was to encourage community involvement.  (And once the 1.0 is done, I’ll start fencing it around the greater gaming community to see if there’s any interest.)  The last thing I want is to be the only one playing or writing for The Long Con, but I see it as being appealing to an audience far greater than just me.  Not just in the playing aspect, but in the building and developing aspect.  I had no idea, going into this, that open source gaming even existed, I was just going off of being really passionate about the GPL and what we were doing over on Museum Themes under the GPL.  The idea struck me — hey, this doesn’t have to apply to software.  Building a community of fellow passionate users reinforces all the other points and keeps you going when you otherwise might throw the project along the wayside.

Again, I have no idea if applying an open source software philosophy and approach to building a role playing game is an original idea.  But it feels right.  More than that, it feels like it might benefit the development of the game in a way that a traditional, linear approach wouldn’t.  It’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of work or to just put a project like this on hold and then forget about it.  I believe that applying this kind of approach can seriously combat that, put your idea into a framework, and potentially transform it from an idea to an actual completed and viable work.

Related posts:

1. Applying open source to gaming
2. "We are losing colleagues who played an important role getting us to where we are — #1 in games and…"
3. Hack to In-Place “Downgrade” from Windows 7 Ultimate or Professional to Less Premium Editions

But what happens when there’s a new version and you want to upgrade?

The first things you’ll want to do to keep your customizations and also keep the core code up-to-date is to create your own “fork” of the theme.  This is a lot less complicated than it sounds, and all it means at this point is to rename the folder that holds the theme files (so if you’re using Museum zine, you could change the folder name from AP-Museum_zine to YourDomain-Museum_zine or YourDomain_zine or just YourDomain — whatever you want as long as it makes sense to you) and to make some minor edits to the main stylesheet (style.css).

Why do you need to edit the stylesheet if you’re not making any CSS changes?  Well, WordPress checks the style.css to grab some basic information that’s used on the Appearance → Themes page.  All of that stuff is located above all the code, so if we’re looking at zine again, you’d see this:

/*
Theme Name: AP-Museum zine
Theme URI: http://www.arcanepalette.com
Description: AP Museum zine is a set of grungy, magazine-style themes inspired by the underground fanzine movement
Version: 1.1
Author: Arcane Palette Creative Design
Author URI: http://www.arcanepalette.com
*/

If you have two themes with the same name in the Themes page, both will display, but it gets confusing (for the record, WordPress tells you the location of the files underneath the description, where it says All of this theme’s files are located in /themes/AP-Museum_zine so even if you skip this step, you can still sort of tell which is which).  So what you may want to do is change the Theme Name so it appears as something different on the Themes page.  All you need to do is change AP-Museum zine next to Theme Name: to something else of your choosing.

Congratulations, you’re now officially a theme developer and have made your own version of a WordPress theme! (If you wanted to distribute it to others at this point, there’s a few more things you’re required to do by the GPL before you’re good to go on that point, and “forks”, in particular, have some special rules.  It’s a good idea to be familiar with the terms of the GPLv3 — which is what our themes are released under — before actually releasing your own theme.  For the most part, however, you probably don’t have any intention of redistributing your theme, so you don’t need to worry about GPL guidelines or restrictions — the GPL only affects you in that sense when you choose to distribute your theme — customizing your theme for your own personal use is fair game.)

Nothing we’ve done so far has actually changed anything. In reality, you’ve already changed the theme, so all we’re doing is changing the name and the directory to reflect that.  (As such, any of the other things in the style.css you want to change, like the version or the author, you’re free to do also.)  Now we’ll concentrate on incorporating the new code into your theme (or vice-versa: your customized code into the new version).  To do that, you first need to know what files you’ve changed.  Every time a piece of GPL software is modified, the new version is required to include some form of documentation saying what you changed and when.  This is primarily to keep developers accountable for their code, so that if you fork a piece of software, someone else can come along and figure out where the software was forked from the original source and what things were added or changed.  But even more than that, keeping this kind of documentation — which can be in the form of a Changelog — keeps you honest, and provides important reference notes for when you need to make future updates.  All our themes include a changelog.txt file in the theme folder which includes all the changes up to that date.  You may want to check this before you start so you know what we updated in the new version.  It might save you some work if you’ve modified a file that we didn’t make any changes to this time around — in that case, you could just keep your version rather than copying your code into the version of the file included in the theme zip package.

Let’s say you’ve edited the header (header.php), the sidebar (sidebar.php) and the single post template (single.php).  The first thing you’ll want to do is put those files aside — create a temp directory within your theme and copy those files in, or just copy them to the desktop.  For that matter, it’s probably a good idea to back up your whole theme, just in case there’s anything you might have forgotten about.  Once you’ve gotten your customized files out of the way — including the style.css that you just modified — copy the contents of the updated theme into your theme folder.  This will most likely involve extracting the zip somewhere on your computer, then navigating to that folder, selecting all the files inside and copying/pasting them into your theme.

Occasionally, we reference specifically in the changelog what files we’ve created or modified, and moving forward we’ll be doing a better job of being more specific in this regard.  If it doesn’t look like we’ve made any changes to any of the files you’ve modified, you can just copy your customized versions into the theme folder and be done.  However, if we (explicitly or implicitly) reference in the changelog that we updated any of the files you’ve customized (including changes to style.css, which should be fairly rare in most cases), you’ll need to go into your version and copy your customizations into the code of the updated version.  Presumably you remember (or at least have a general idea) of what you did last time, and if all the code surrounding yours remained the same (which it should), it will be fairly easy to do a stare-and-compare with the two files and figure out what you need to do.

If you’ve been making the changes live on your site, everything should be ready to check and make sure it worked at this point.  If you’ve been editing the files offline (recommended), you should be good to upload them and see if anything else needs to be tweaked.  Now’s when you’ll find out if your customizations were actually limited to the files you updated in the new version, or if there were other modifications that slipped your mind.  However, if you have a backup of the original theme, you can always go back, find what you added, and copy that into the new version of that file, too.

That’s it.  Now you’ve got all the benefits of the new version of the software with your own customizations.  If you have any questions along the way, feel free to let us know in the Support Forums.  If you’re using a modified version of our Museum Themes, we’d love to see links posted in the comments!

Not all themes are made for big, changeable headers, but for those that are or would adapt well, this gives users a powerful resource far beyond the custom header features that Kubrick, the previous default WordPress theme, offered with its’ ability to change the header color and gradient. Likewise, I’m tentative about giving users the ability to pick a color at random from the 16 million colors at their disposal – it’s too easy to create clashes worthy of the most gaudy GeoCities or MySpace creations. However, used with discretion and a keen eye, these features add a powerful tool to those WordPress users’ arsenal who are just itching to add a little bit of personality to their site without breaking everything.

Our newest free theme, Color Garden includes both custom headers and custom backgrounds, making it our first theme – free or otherwise – to offer both. I also played with custom headers on my recent redesign of jazzsequence.com. For the headers, it’s not the most intuitive thing to add by hand at all, and few of the resources I have found go far beyond quoting the code from TwentyTen’s functions.php file, so we wanted to give our readers just a little bit more to go on if you want to add these features to your blog theme.

Custom backgrounds are dead simple. A single line of code and you’re done:

// This theme allows users to set a custom background
add_custom_background();

Once this is included somewhere in your functions.php file, you will have a Background link under Appearance that gives you options to set a solid color for the background (by hex code or picking from a color map) or upload an file to use as a repeating background image.

Headers are a bit more complex.

To really understand how custom headers work, you need to know how post thumbnails work. Post thumbnails were added to WordPress core in 2.9 and use the built-in resizing process that happens when you upload images to create the thumbnails that will appear next to your post or post excerpt. This is presumably to replace other third-party scripts like the ubiquitous TimThumb which creates its own thumbnails and stores it in a cache folder usually located in the theme folder (although it could really be anywhere). Since WordPress 3.0, what was previously referred to as Post Thumbnail on the Add New Post page is now called Featured Image. This change is reflects the fact that the Featured Image option now controls the post thumbnail or the custom header, and the way it knows the difference is by the size of the image you are using.

Let’s take a look at how to add it to your theme and then we can revisit how to use it once it’s there. The code I will be showing comes from Color Garden although all of it has been adapted from TwentyTen (including much of the comments). Since most other posts I’ve found don’t discuss each piece of the header image function, I will go over each so you understand just what it is that you’re adding and what needs to be changed or left alone.

The first part is here:

// Your changeable header business starts here
// No CSS, just IMG call. The %s is a placeholder for the theme template directory URI.
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE', '%s/images/headers/leaves.jpg' );

The key thing to pay attention to in this snippet is the HEADER_IMAGE definition. This is the default header image. If this is left blank or set to an invalid path, no image will show up, and depending on your CSS, the layout might break. In TwentyTen this is set to %s/images/headers/path.jpg. You’ll probably want to put something here even if you plan on changing it later, and you’ll want to make sure the image actually exists where you say it exists.

The next part sets the height and width of your header image:

// The height and width of your custom header. You can hook into the theme's own filters to change these values.
// Add a filter to twentyten_header_image_width and twentyten_header_image_height to change these values.
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', apply_filters( 'cg_header_image_width', 1000 ) );
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', apply_filters( 'cg_header_image_height', 343 ) );
 
// We'll be using post thumbnails for custom header images on posts and pages.
// We want them to be 1000 pixels wide by 343 pixels tall.
// Larger images will be auto-cropped to fit, smaller ones will be ignored. See header.php.
set_post_thumbnail_size( HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH, HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT, true );

Notice that we’re using set_post_thumbnail_size with the header image’s dimensions. This is because the custom header function uses the existing post thumbnails function from 2.9 and builds onto it. As the comments indicate, images that are equal to or larger than the height and width definitions will be resized to fit and set as the header image when you add it to your post or page. Anything smaller will be ignored and set as the post thumbnail (if post thumbnails are enabled).

The last part of the custom header function is this:

// Don't support text inside the header image.
define( 'HEADER_TEXTCOLOR', '' );
define( 'NO_HEADER_TEXT', true );
// ... and thus ends the changeable header business.

The NO_HEADER_TEXT and HEADER_TEXTCOLOR add the ability to change the color of the text that appears in the header. The alternative (pulled from the WordPress Codex) would be to use:

define('HEADER_TEXTCOLOR', 'ffffff');

and omitting the NO_HEADER_TEXT line.

Now this part is done, you’ve enabled custom headers and defined a default. But what if you want to have multiple defaults like TwentyTen? In that case, we go back to TwentyTen’s functions and keep digging:

// Default custom headers packaged with the theme. %s is a placeholder for the theme template directory URI.
register_default_headers( array(
 
'leaves' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/leaves.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/leaves-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Leaves', 'cg' )
),
 
'sunset' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/sunset.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/sunset-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Sunset', 'cg' )
),
 
'beach' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/beach.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/beach-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Beach', 'cg' )
),
 
'blueberries' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/blueberries.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/blueberries-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Blueberries', 'cg' )
)
) );

Again, we’re looking at the code from Color Garden but it’s adapted from TwentyTen’s functions.php. Each item in the array above defines one of the default header image options. Color Garden has four default headers to choose from to go with the four color schemes built into the theme. All we’re really doing here is adding the path to the image, the path to the thumbnail of the image that appears on the Headers page in the WordPress backend, and the description which – as far as I have been able to tell – really only affects the alt text of the image in the backend.

All said, what you should be looking at in your functions.php file when you’re done is this (if you’re including multiple default header images):

// Your changeable header business starts here
// No CSS, just IMG call. The %s is a placeholder for the theme template directory URI.
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE', '%s/images/headers/leaves.jpg' );
 
// The height and width of your custom header. You can hook into the theme's own filters to change these values.
// Add a filter to twentyten_header_image_width and twentyten_header_image_height to change these values.
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', apply_filters( 'cg_header_image_width', 1000 ) );
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', apply_filters( 'cg_header_image_height', 343 ) );
 
// We'll be using post thumbnails for custom header images on posts and pages.
// We want them to be 1000 pixels wide by 343 pixels tall.
// Larger images will be auto-cropped to fit, smaller ones will be ignored. See header.php.
set_post_thumbnail_size( HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH, HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT, true );
 
// Don't support text inside the header image.
define( 'HEADER_TEXTCOLOR', '' );
define( 'NO_HEADER_TEXT', true );
 
// ... and thus ends the changeable header business.
 
// Default custom headers packaged with the theme. %s is a placeholder for the theme template directory URI.
register_default_headers( array(
 
'leaves' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/leaves.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/leaves-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Leaves', 'cg' )
),
 
'sunset' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/sunset.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/sunset-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Sunset', 'cg' )
),
 
'beach' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/beach.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/beach-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Beach', 'cg' )
),
 
'blueberries' => array(
'url' => '%s/images/headers/blueberries.jpg',
'thumbnail_url' => '%s/images/headers/blueberries-thumbnail.jpg',
/* translators: header image description */
'description' => __( 'Blueberries', 'cg' )
)
) );

What I haven’t said yet is that in every instance that cg appears in the code, this specifically references Color Garden. In TwentyTen it’s twentyten. You can put whatever you want here so long as it remains internally consistent.

After you’ve got your functions.php set up, you still need to add in some code in your header.php to actually display the custom header image. What we have in Color Garden is taken almost verbatim out of TwentyTen.

	  <?php
          // Check if this is a post or page, if it has a thumbnail, and if it's a big one
          if ( is_singular() &&
                  has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) &&
                  ( /* $src, $width, $height */ $image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'post-thumbnail' ) ) &&
                  $image[1] >= HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH ) :
              // Houston, we have a new header image!
              echo get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'post-thumbnail' );
          else : ?>
              <img src="<?php header_image(); ?>" width="<?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH; ?>" height="<?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT; ?>" alt="" class="masthead" />
          <?php endif; ?>

This is where the theme asks “what is the size of the featured image?” and, based on the size, determines whether it is a header image or a post thumbnail.

Now, obviously there needs to be some CSS styling involved and you may or may not want your header image to be 1000 pixels wide by 343 high like ours is in Color Garden. We added a “masthead” class to the image so we could isolate styles to our header image. But, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve got everything you need to tweak the code to suit your theme. The custom headers function is exciting because it doesn’t need to be limited to just header images. You can use it wherever you might want a customizable image in your theme, and there’s more than a few creative uses I can think of beyond headers for something like that.

A week ago on my blog, I posted my pledge to go one week without Google.  It was inspired, in part, by the Google/Verizon proposal for the future of high speed and wireless internet that was devised in closed-door meetings, in secret, while the same discussions were being had with the FCC and other major players that Google and Verizon were also a part of.  This sort of self-serving duplicity, as well as serious concerns about the end result for consumers this proposal would have if enacted, put a serious damper on my ongoing Google-love.  How dependent on Google, specifically, was I really, and could I actually live without using a single Google service?  As more and more concern about Google and their agreement with Verizon poured in, I wanted to find out.

I actually started early in my week without Google.  Friday night, after deciding to do this experiment, I set out right away to converting the stuff I use on a day-to-day basis to be without Google.  The first step was Gmail/Google Apps.

I use Google Apps for my primary email address.  While I have a Gmail account, I haven’t used it since getting my own domain name for my blog at jazzsequence.com, and I just forward everything sent to my Gmail address to my jazzsequence address.  (While, technically this could be considered still using Google, I’m not considering forwarded email from an unused email address to be really “using” Google services).  The process of switching my email away from Google Apps was pretty easy, so I had to go one step further to make it more complicated.

I’ve also played with the idea of migrating away from Microsoft Office products in favor of open source projects that support collaboration and open standards.  Switching to OpenOffice is easy (although I am skeptical now that Sun (and, in turn, OpenOffice) was acquired by Oracle).  In fact, last time I had to reformat my computer, I tried to install Thunderbird and use that for email but for some reason I couldn’t get it to play nice with my Google Apps email.  I didn’t have the patience for it and Outlook picked up the right settings right away, so I just gave up reluctantly and have been using Office ever since.  This time I stuck it out, since the Gmail/Google Apps problem wouldn’t be an issue and managed to get Thunderbird to play nice.

The other reason I’ve avoided moving away from Outlook is because I’m hopelessly dependent on the Calendar and Tasks features.  We use these internally at Arcane Palette to send each other projects or tasks for projects to work on and manage our workflow that way.  We’ve tried other project management applications, but using the one built right into Outlook it so much easier than having to log into a third-party application, especially when said application doesn’t necessarily send said emails.  Thankfully, Thunderbird has Lightning, the new Calendar and Task extension by Mozilla.  That’s two down, and that takes care of my email.

Next was switching from Chrome to Firefox.  I’ve been using Chrome since the late beta period, and have grown so accustomed to it that it’s second nature.  The web developer tools have become an invaluable resource when I’m working on a website, and I’ve foregone heaps of integrated functionality in favor of bookmarklets, plastering them all over my bookmark bar.  However, migrating to Firefox was relatively painless as well.  I just needed to export my bookmarks as an .html file and was able to import said .html file directly into Firefox and then move all my bookmarklets to Firefox’s bookmark bar.  I then focused on making Firefox more lightweight by uninstalling some plugins I wasn’t using and installing a couple plugins that would add some of the Chrome functionality I had grown used to, in particular, Taberwocky, which I use primarily to be able to duplicate tabs.  Since I’ve been using Glue, I finally got to install the Glue plugin and experience the web the way Glue wants you to, and I installed Firefox’s personas just for fun (which is Firefox’s version of Chrome’s visual styles).  I use Hootsuite for Twitter, and with Chrome, I was doing this by creating an application window for it, so it runs as its own standalone app.  Mozilla has this, too, in a project called Prism, and I actually like Prism more because it allows you to customize the icon, which Chrome’s application shortcuts don’t do.

I also switched search engines.  This was harder than it sounded.  You don’t realize how used to typing google.com into an address bar you are until you try to do something else.  I also realized I’ve become dependent on Chrome’s auto-fill technique of allowing you to search a site by typing the domain and hitting TAB.  I’ve yet to find something like that in Firefox.  On the other hand, Firefox has Search Engine add-ons for a variety of sites (including Wikipedia, which, along with YouTube and Amazon – both of which have Search Engine Add-Ons – was what I was using most frequently), which made it easy (easier, anyway) to switch over to Bing as my primary search engine.

The setup took me through the weekend, so by Monday I was ready to start my work week without Google.

YouTube was difficult to avoid.  It’s so ubiquitous for video sharing that you can choose to not watch viral videos, or you can suck it up and watch things on YouTube.  YouTube was acquired in 2006 by Google for $1.65billion from a couple of ecstatic developers who built it, and since then, Google has both added advertising to videos and started doing video ads with their AdSense service.  This was one thing I cheated on my Google-less week for, although that’s more a result of the decision of content creators to use YouTube rather than another service like Vimeo.

On Tuesday, I needed to send an invoice to a client.  I paused and thought hard.  PayPal has a higher processing fee, plus I have a bias against them since they screwed me once.  That said, in a lesser-of-two-evils decision, PayPal, at least, isn’t trying to take over the world (or, if not the world, gain more control over the future of the Internet than the government organizations assigned to regulate it and keep it free from corporate interests).  So I put my boycott on PayPal aside and sent out an invoice with a PayPal-linked button rather than a Google Checkout-linked button.  This was probably the hardest switch to make not because PayPal is inherently more difficult but because both companies, in my opinion, are crooked.

I suppose it should be said that I’m addicted to the web developer tools built into WebKit (and therefore Google Chrome), in particular the Inspect Element context menu.  I use it every day and I knew going into this experiment that this would be something I was missing.  I’ve become so accustomed to using Inspect Element that I’d completely forgotten how to use the much more elaborate Web Developer Tools plugin for Firefox (though I still had that installed).  In the end, for web development, I used Safari so I could get the benefit of the Inspect Element option.  To be honest, there was no specific reason for choosing Firefox over Safari as the browser of choice and by Wednesday I started considering just switching.  Most likely it was simply ubiquity and the fact that Firefox was what I was using before switching to Chrome, though, in retrospect, Safari is just as solid.

On Thursday, I realized that the database backups I schedule to automatically send every week to a specific email address weren’t coming.  After a second, I realized why; I never set up the email address when I was moving my mail over to my webhost.  While it’s just as easy to set up mail through your host as it is to set up Google Apps to handle your mail, it’s worth remembering that if you do decide to switch back (or switch any host or email provider), any email addresses you have set up will need to be recreated on the new host.  It’s a simple enough task, but just as easy to forget, especially if you have forward-only addresses like I do.

Another thing you forget about Gmail is how good the junk mail filter really is.  It’s been years since I really thought very much about junk mail.  I get so little of it, that I don’t even notice the problem.  Only after moving my email away from Gmail did I start to notice the junk come in, many times it was the same piece of junk mail.  Outlook has some built-in controls for that (which, of course, I’d forgone in favor of Thunderbird), and Thunderbird does as well, although, for the most part, it relies on you to mark things as spam to learn what to filter and what not to.  Thankfully, many webhosts have server-side spam filtering (using SpamAssassin or something similar), which I was happy to find on my host when I realized that was what was going on and looked for the possibility of a server-side spam filter (note: it wasn’t turned on by default, as they often are not, so if you find yourself inundated by spam, it’s a good idea to see if your webhost has the option and turn it on, if necessary).

The point of this experiment was not to take my one-man boycott and stick it to The Man.  I knew I relied heavily on Google services, and wanted to see how deep the ties were and how difficult it would be to avoid them.  Most people use Google by default, without thinking.  Are we wrong to do this?  Google has not made a secret of taking our information and using it to supercharge their other apps, like AdSense and search.  Facebook does this too.  But the difference between Facebook and Google is that Google is also asking you to host all your documents with them, to use their phones (bundled with their services) with your mobile service, to take control of your calls with their VOIP service, to own your conversations with their messaging service.  Does this mean that behind every corner, with everything you do online, you have a Google bot reading your messages, your emails, your documents, and assimilating that information into their vast grid for future use?  Are we okay with that?

Even putting Google and Verizon’s recent bid to determine the future of broadband and wireless internet aside for a minute, it can’t go without noting that Google is a huge corporation.  They may have started out as two guys in a garage, but those days are long gone.  Have we forgotten that Apple and Microsoft had similar beginnings?  Google isn’t the underdog anymore, they are the behemoth, and they want your data.  Internet pioneer, Richard Stallman, has some choice words on the sorts of cloud computing technology Google has led us toward with Gmail and Apps.

The real meaning of ‘cloud computing’ is to suggest a devil-may-care approach towards your computing. It says, ‘Don’t ask questions, just trust every business without hesitation. Don’t worry about who controls your computing or who holds your data. Don’t check for a hook hidden inside our service before you swallow it.’ In other words, ‘Think like a sucker.’

We can choose to not be a sucker.  We can look for a hook.  There was a time when people distrusted large businesses simply because they were large.  In this economy, where many of the little and smaller companies have crumbled, we should be even more wary of those left standing, not less.  When a company starts making rules for the government, that’s when I start tuning out.

The answer to the main question of the experiment, can you survive without Google, is: yes, of course you can.  Gmail is great, but by no means is it the be-all end-all email solution, and by no means is Gmail’s junk filtering the only answer, either.  Other cloud computing apps should make you wary at the very least – if the world ended tomorrow and those servers went down, would you be okay with loosing that data?  Neil Gaiman mentioned that some documents from 2007 stored in Google Docs were missing and that he may have lost a story.  I find this, for a writer – a bestselling one, at that – to be absolutely unacceptable, and proof that your data is not guaranteed.  And the only way to truly secure your data is to don your tinfoil hat and start keeping hard copies.

We’re so reliant on the web we don’t even think about it.  I don’t retain a printed copy of my tax return unless I absolutely need it.  Why should I?  Printer companies gouge consumers on ink refills for cheap printers enough that I no longer own a printer.  I have a pdf copy and I file electronically.  Personally, I retain all important data on a home server that maintains weekly backups on an external NAS server, but most people don’t.  The point is, we’ve become so used to going paperless that the idea of going back makes us sound like some relic from the 1950s (no offense to relics from the 50s).  Likewise, distrusting cloud computing, Google, Facebook, any company that hordes our data, makes us sound paranoid.

The answer to the followup question to the experiment, will I continue to live without Google services is: probably.  I was dissatisfied with using Firefox for all my browsing, and enjoyed using the Glue extension for Firefox that I was never able to use in Chrome, but as an experiment, I went to Glue in Safari and found an extension there as well.  Which implies there may be other extensions available for Safari that I didn’t know about (although, really, there weren’t many I use daily in Chrome, and one of them is a Google Voice extension).  Moving forward, I plan on switching over to Safari for my browsing as a replacement for Chrome rather than Firefox.

My email is already switched and I have no intention of switching back.  I’m now using free software (free as in freedom as well as free as in beer) to manage my email via Thunderbird, and I’m quite happy with it.  I was already growing apart from Google after my new mobile carrier (Sprint/Nextel, via CREDOMobile) doesn’t support Google Voice entirely, and text messages sent to my Google Voice number forward to my phone even when the setting is disabled to forward texts (as a way to save on individual text messaging charges).  Bing is not as good for search as Google, but it’s passable, and in many cases where I was looking for something specific, a site search gave me the result I wanted.

When I started this experiment, Nico, from Ten Times One, commented on my blog, saying, “Google is good for business.”  As a small business owner, sure, Google helps, but the only Google service I was using as a business was Checkout.  We experimented with AdWords only to find that it was a lot of money for no real result.  I haven’t used up the rest of my $100 credit, and we currently advertise via BuySellAds.  Google will always color how we think about search engine optimization, but Google is trying to enter an enterprise market with Apps where Microsoft has dominated for more than a decade and those types of markets aren’t often subject to radical change.  It will be a steep hill for them to climb to try to sell their wares to corporate businesses.  Even for business, Google is not the only answer, nor, in many cases, the best answer.  And increasingly, their dominance over the advertising market will decrease as Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook become more relevant players.

The first step in changing the world is to change yourself.  I’m not trying to change the world, but it’s also terrifying to me that we let ourselves be subjugated by corporate interests without being aware of it.  So, I encourage you to think about the online services you use, whether they’re Google, Facebook or other, and think about the data you’re giving them.  Could you live without that data?  Could you live without that service?  Could that data be used against you?  Do you trust a multi-billion dollar multi-national corporation with that data, whether it’s a search query or sensitive medical documents?  Does it make any sense at all for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation to truly have your interests at heart?

___________________

Chris Reynolds is one half of the design team at Arcane Palette Creative Design. He writes in his personal blog, jazzsequence, on subjects like music, technology and social media and shares links, videos, and posts various personal music and writing projects. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Color Garden is a free theme released on Museum Themes under the GPLv3.  This theme is jam-packed with features, from WordPress 3.0 functionality to Twitter integration.  Color Garden uses WP3.0′s custom header option, and comes with 4 unique headers that accent the 4 color palette options available on the theme options page.  We’ve also built in custom menus, custom backgrounds, and post thumbnails, hitting all the bases for cutting-edge WordPress functionality.  If you use Twitter, we’ve got you covered there, too, integrating Twitter’s new Tweet button into our existing social sharing block on single post pages and providing options to display your latest tweets in the sidebar or the footer.  The footer and sidebar are completely widgetized, and the footer has three distinct columns to add widgets.  If that wasn’t enough, we’ve embedded a custom typeface in the header using CSS font-face.  Each color palette has its own unique stylesheet, so you can easily use this theme as a framework or build child themes (or skins) for it.

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How did this happen?  How did we become so complacent?  How is it that more people trust a huge corporate conglomerate more than their President?

Google and Verizon’s legislative proposal, if adopted, would give them more regulatory control over access and the future of the Internet than the FCC, the government organization tasked to protect corporations from having too much control over communications technology (i.e. precisely what Google/Verizon propose to do).  Besides dictating to the FCC what the FCC can and cannot do with regards to internet access, the proposal allows access providers to prioritize traffic however they see fit, without that pesky FCC being able to get in the way and defend users’ rights.  But it’s not just about users.  It’s about Google maintaining its dominance of the market.  By creating a tiered structure with some prioritized traffic and other, slow-lane traffic, Google/Verizon are making it so new, upstart, garage companies and providers will never be able to compete with the big guys without significant financial investment.  Which is just how they’d like it.  And if there were any little guys who had something of interest?  You can bet Google will swallow them up like they’ve done in the past, all under the guise of providing users with a more complete and useful experience on the web.

The thing is, Google didn’t hide their growth.  We all watched and applauded as the little search engine that could rumbled up the mountain, “I think I can”‘ing their way past Apple and Microsoft not just in search but in technology in general.  The whole time, they released these little test projects that we gobbled up — they were so useful!  It seems foreboding now, more than liberating, that there was once a bid for their CEO to be Obama’s Chief Technology Officer.  Rather than being a reflection of new ideas, it’s easy to see it, instead, as being just one more way the corporation has tried to bind themselves with the American government.

Possibly what irks me the most is that I feel like I, personally, should have seen this coming.  Google played out a particular trick that I’ve seen once before in internet con artists.

Step 1: Establish your credibility

Google was able to earn points by building a technically superior search engine.  While it can be argued (and is currently being argued by “social search” engines like Glue and Hunch) that an algorithm isn’t as good at knowing what a human wants as much as a human (and therefore a more human approach to search results based on preferences rather than rankings), the more humanistic engines to date include Amazon, Netflix, and the aforementioned Glue and Hunch can often still be wrong.  And the other alternatives that try to out-algorithm the algorithm — I’m thinking of Wolfram|Alpha and search engines that use Wolfram|Alpha to enhance their results — leave much to be desired in terms of understanding what you’re asking.  The fact is that Google has become so ubiquitous over the last 10 years that the word is synonymous for “search” and no matter how catchy the next upstart search engine’s name is (Bing!), there’s very little hope of anything overtaking it.  Ever.  (At least in this country.)

Step 2: Build Trust

If I asked you to give me your name, picture, address, credit card number, date of birth, a list of all your friends with their email addresses and phone numbers, and another list of every topic you’ve ever been interested in, ever, you wouldn’t just think I was a crazy stalker; you would know it.  Yet, this is precisely the same information we give to Google by using their services.  Even if we haven’t directly given Google all of that information, Google (as well as other online services) is able to pull that information together based on your public profiles on social networking sites.  We hand over an astounding amount of information to Google and other corporations all in the name of “making our lives easier.”  Has your life gotten easier since using Google?

Google builds trust by speaking publicly about open standards (although they’re not always in favor of open software — it’s been rumored for a few years that internally they’re using a modified version of Linux that they are not privy to sharing with the rest of the world) and by giving stuff away for free (although not always under open source licenses).  But like a skilled magician (or a skilled con artist), while we’re all staring at the shiny free goodies, their other hand is reaching around for our wallet.

Google deals in information.  They deal in wants and desires.  Specifically, they deal with terabytes of information every day about what we want, what we think, what we’re looking for, what we need.  Their ad system is based on selling shares in concepts against a hypothesized value for said idea.  They take a keyword, say “licorice”, and determine a price based on how much they think people are going to be wanting licorice on any given day.  And these prices aren’t static — they’re constantly in flux.  In Wired interviews past, they’ve told journalists that things like seasons, weather, economic and social conditions color what we search for.  With that level of insight into the American psyche, it’s unsurprising that they could be able to anticipate just what we needed to hear to trust them with all our personal information.

Step Three: Go for the kill

Once a person or organization has gotten this far, gotten you to trust them, you will follow them to the end of the world and back without much thought.  After all, they’ve established themselves in the past, they’ve proven their worth, why doubt now?  You may trust them even while you notice, out of the corner of your eye, the hand reaching for your wallet — it couldn’t possibly be what you think it is, you must be imagining it.  This is the crucial point we are at as Americans, as citizens of the autonomous sovereignty of the Internet, in our relationship with Google.  We trust them.  We believe they have our best interests at heart and we are willing to give up our own individual voices and allow them to speak for us.

Isn’t this what governments were for?  Isn’t this what politicians were for?  And aren’t governments and politicians supposed to protect us from businesses that grow so large as to threaten their own regulating authority?

The con I’ve seen using the same tactics (and possibly these steps are common to all forms of advertising or marketing) was a cheap ploy to sell copies of an overpriced ebook that over-promised (make hundreds of dollars a day, gain thousands of followers a week, a huge network pushing floods of traffic to your site) and under-delivered.  I wasn’t alone when I found myself  not being able to match the phenomenal success I should have had and wondering what I was doing wrong.  I didn’t buy into the scam because I believed the hype (I didn’t), rather, because the author had made good on steps one and two; he established credibility by keeping a popular, high ranking blog about making money blogging that, while never revealing any actual useful advice on how to make money blogging, always carried with it the promise that the secret was just around the corner; and he built trust by exposing several scams related to his own ebook (in fact, it could be argued that his ebook was a rewrite of the scams he had exposed).  Surely his method was different than the ones he exposed as obvious scams.  What this particular con has in common with Google is good copy: both are very good at weaving their way around the truth, telling a believable lie — one laced with truth — and taking full advantage of the successes won from established credibility and trust.  Once you’ve scored on those two counts, you can do almost anything.

Related posts:

1. Don’t be Google: A battle-cry for Net Neutrality
2. Going Google-less – A Week Without Google
3. Going Google-less

So, I’m still bothered by the Google thing.  I’m bothered by how reliant I am on Google’s products the same way I was bothered by how reliant I was on Microsoft’s products.  It happened so subtly that there was never a conscious decision to use Google products and services exclusively.  It wasn’t something where there was a “well, I can’t get this anywhere else” conversation or a “well it works better with this or that feature” conversation with myself.  Google just quietly (or not-so-quietly) put out their products, and we downloaded them and incorporated them into our lives.

The sheer amount of data that Google has of ours is staggering.  And that’s just the data we know about.  Seeing as how they “accidentally” picked up some private data from wifi networks on their Maps expeditions, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they’ve got more on us than we know about.  And then there’s the stuff they have that we do know about, but don’t think about.  In The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr points out just how easy it is to identify people — and glean information about them that they would otherwise keep private — just from the types of searches we do, the city we live in, and our date of birth.  Besides being able to positively identify anyone with that information, think for a second about how much information a stranger would have about you if they knew every search query you ever typed into Google, whether it was for personal, academic, or business reasons.

So I’m going Google-less for a week, starting next Monday.  I want to see how easy or hard it is to weed Google out of my life as much as possible.  We got pissed off when Facebook started passing around our personal information but Google has now threatened to take on the FCC, a government agency, telling them “you have no jurisdiction over how we do things here” at the cost of small businesses and individuals worldwide.

Now, some things will be more difficult than others, for example, we use Google Checkout in our business (which came from boycotting PayPal), so there’s that.  And internally, we use the Google Talk protocol to send messages across the room (although I don’t actually use the client because I use Digsby, and other than that it’s just another Jabber server).  YouTube is so ubiquitous it would be somewhat difficult to avoid it entirely (though I’ll try) and this blog uses FeedBurner to handle the RSS feeds.  But in every other way I can think of I will try to avoid using Google at all costs and we’ll see where it takes me in a week.

I encourage anyone who reads this blog to do the same and to pass this message on.  It’s good to put things into perspective once in a while and find out just how dependent you are on certain services.  If Google went bankrupt tomorrow, what would you do?  And, possibly more importantly, what would happen with all your data?  What would happen if you went Google-less for a week?

Related posts:

1. Going Google-less – A Week Without Google
2. Google America
3. embed google apps documents in a wave

By now you should have heard about the closed-door talks that Google isn’t having with Verizon that absolutely wouldn’t destroy Net Neutrality as we’ve known it (and Google has argued for it) for the last several years.

Here’s the rundown:

The New York Times published an article that Google and Verizon were nearing an agreement in talks that would create a tiered structure for content providers such that certain types of content providers would get faster speeds than others.  In the current model of the internet, everyone works with what we’ve got, and any speed issues are solely on how much you as a consumer are willing or able to pay.  As everyone hooks up to broadband and Google is fighting for nationwide fiber-optic, speed differences will be dependent upon the servers of the content providers for the first time, rather than how slow or fast your modem is (remember 28.8k?).

Basically, this would give some content providers (i.e. anyone who’s worked out a special deal with Google, or content providers that Google already owns, like YouTube) fast-lane speeds whereas everyone else (say, a video startup in someone’s garage to compete with YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, etc) would be stuck behind grandma.

Essentially, this means that if you are friends with Google (or Verizon), you get to be in the cool kids club.  If not, you can eat the cool kids’ dust.

Huffington Post published a great editorial yesterday that highlighted some of Google’s flip-flops in publicly-expressed attitudes toward Net Neutrality.  In particular this:

Traffic prioritization allows the broadband provider to become an unwanted gatekeeper in the middle of the Internet. Because of the market power they currently employ, broadband providers have the technical ability and economic incentives to determine which packets of Internet traffic get delivered to which consumers under what conditions. The end result is that the Internet becomes shaped in ways that serve the interests of the broadband providers, and not consumers or innovative Web entrepreneurs.

has turned into this:

People get confused about Net neutrality. I want to make sure that everybody understands what we mean about it. What we mean is that if you have one data type, like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. It’s OK to discriminate across different types…There is general agreement with Verizon and Google on this issue.

Seriously, Google?  That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what you’ve been saying and arguing for.

Net Neutrality, it seems, is only worth fighting for when it’s profitable.  As soon as the time comes when Net Neutrality (or, you know, anything at all) no longer becomes profitable, Google seems to think it’s perfectly okay to switch gears with a complete reversal.  Google is no longer the scrappy underdog we all rooted for in the dotcom boom, when Microsoft was evil (and made no claims otherwise).  Google has grown to a mammoth internet behemouth able to wield huge swaths of internet real estate and tear down empires with their mighty power.  While we weren’t looking, they’ve hidden behind their “don’t be evil” slogan and made us okay with taking all our information (it’s okay because it makes search results more accurate and personalized), giving up our privacy (we don’t mind as long as we can find where we’re going), and handing over all our data to someone else (it’s so much more convenient to store our data online and access it from anywhere).  Now, they’re crowning themselves Kings of the Internet, able to rule over all that they see (which is everything), and determine what content providers or what types of content deserve special treatment and what doesn’t.  Not only that, but they’ve got us in a vice grip; like junkies, we’re addicted to their services because they work so damn well.  And Google can’t be all bad when all their applications are free (despite the millions of dollars they make shoving ads in your face).  I’d say I’m switching to Bing but even Bing can’t deliver search results that are as accurate to what I’m looking for as Google.

There’s a new meme in town.  No longer shall we say “don’t be evil”; henceforth the battle cry will be “Don’t be Google.”

Related posts:

1. Google America
2. Going Google-less – A Week Without Google
3. Going Google-less

Now my guess is it’ll be integrated into something else. ChromeOS perhaps? A standalone messenger? Upgrade to Gtalk? But I can’t say I’m surprised. As Mashable points out, there was a tremendous buzz that dwindled almost immediately after the official release as everyone collectively scratched their heads and said “wtf?” Some people (notably the guys at Fantasy Brewmasters) made good use of it, but on the whole, Wave was underwhelming. I do hope to see the live writing thing make a comeback. Here’s hoping…

Related posts:

1. i still have wave invites
2. embed google apps documents in a wave
3. I’m giving away Google Wave invites!