December 2014 archive

Dec 17

TDYR 199 – WordPress Content Creation Statistics – The Plugin I Want

By Dan York

TDYR 199 - WordPress Content Creation Statistics - The Plugin I Want by Dan York

Dec 17

Skype Translator Looks Intriguing

By Dan York in Skype

While it is only a "preview" release and is only available to people using Skype on Windows 8.1, Microsoft's new Skype Translator announced on Monday looks very cool! As they state:

The preview program will kick-off with two spoken languages, Spanish and English, and 40+ instant messaging languages will be available to Skype customers who have signed-up via the Skype Translator sign-up page and are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device.

The very well-done video shows the real potential, though:

I think many of us have always wanted the Star Trek Universal Translator and while this "preview" from Microsoft is not yet near that sci-fi ideal, it's definitely a very intriguing step along that direction. I like the idea that it can do both speech and text translation. Given my travel to different parts of the world, the idea of being able to whip out my smartphone and be able to translate to and from another language is definitely welcome.

I'm told the Windows 8.1 restriction is because it is based on Microsoft's Cortana 'personal assistant' technology. Given that I have no Windows 8.1 devices nor expect to anytime soon, I won't personally get a chance to check out this Skype Translator preview. (Although obviously I would expect Microsoft is hoping that perhaps this may help drive some people to use Windows 8.1.)

On a macro level, I think it's great that Microsoft/Skype is undertaking this kind of research and development. Certainly anything that can help bridge communication challenges is welcome in this global age!

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Dec 17

BT Releases Results of 2014 DNSSEC Survey

By Dan York in BT, DNSSEC

BT Diamond IP just published the results of their 2014 DNSSEC survey and the report is available for all to download for free. Back in October, I’d encouraged people to take the survey to help gain an understanding of DNSSEC deployment and BT’s Tim Rooney noted in his post about the survey that this year there was a high amount of participation by people who had already deployed DNSSEC:

Clearly this year’s survey attracted active deployers of DNSSEC, which contrasts sharply with the 2012 survey where less than 25 percent of respondents had already deployed or were actively deploying DNSSEC validation and signing.

In fact, the way I read his tables on page 4 over 60% of respondents had deployed DNSSEC and another 10% were in the process of doing so. Not exactly representative of the overall industry! (Unfortunately) Still, though, I think the report provides useful insight into DNSSEC deployment from the point of view of people who have deployed the technology. (By the way, we did write about the 2012 report back when it came out.)

Tim also relays these highlights of the 2014 report:

Nearly all respondents agreed with the statement that DNSSEC can or does provide value to their organization and over 85 percent likewise agreed that DNSSEC technology is mature and can be reliably deployed.
Forty-seven percent of respondents agreed that deploying and maintaining DNSSEC is very complex, 12 of the 47 percent strongly. Only 22 percent disagreed. This is rather telling in that DNSSEC is not only considered complex to the uninitiated, but that experience shows this to be the case.
Nearly half of respondents disagreed with the statement that only external (Internet-facing) zones need be signed, while 28 percent agreed with the statement. This majority position debunks the theory that internal name spaces are of little concern when it comes to DNSSEC.
Only 20 percent of respondents agreed that dedicated hardware security module (HSM) appliances or cards are required to store private keys.
Over 75 percent of respondents assign their DNS groups as responsible for DNSSEC implementation and management, sometimes alone or often in conjunction with other groups. It’s interesting to note that about 25 percent of respondents do not involve the DNS group in the process!
As an industry, simplifying the deployment process to reduce complexity and therefore costs to some degree could help spur further DNSSEC deployments.

I’ll definitely agree with his last point about reducing complexity and that’s something that I know we and others within the industry continue to champion … any way that we can add more automation or make the user experience simpler will go far to help advance DNSSEC deployment.

I found a number of the other charts quite interesting such as the reasons for NOT deploying DNSSEC as well as those about what software was being used. All in all I think the report is a useful contribution to the ongoing discussions around DNSSEC. I’d like to see more of these type of surveys so that we can continue to build out a picture of DNSSEC deployment as well as the challenges that need to be addressed.

Thanks to Tim Rooney and the others at BT Diamond IP for compiling this survey!

Statistics

Dec 16

TDYR 198 – Living In The IPv6 Bubble

By Dan York

TDYR 198 - Living In The IPv6 Bubble by Dan York

Dec 16

The WordPress Plugin I Want: Statistics About Content Creation – Number of Posts, Pages, etc.

By Dan York in Blogging, WordPress

Here's the one WordPress plugin I really want to have - something that tells me the number of blog posts, pages or other content types that have been created in my site over a certain period of time.

As every year draws to a close, I'd like to be able to generate a report that says something like:

In 2014, we created:

210 blog posts
43 pages
25 events
72 articles (or pick some other 'custom post type' that you create)

Now, for some sites, like the Deploy360 site at work, I'd like to be able to do this on a quarterly basis so that we can provide updates internally about how much content we've created. For this reason I'd love to be able to choose a date range for a report. I also want the plugin to be able to work with custom post types, as on a couple of sites I've used that feature to create new post types with certain formats so that they are easy to enter by authors.

That's the minimum of what I'd like - the number of posts, pages and other content types created within a given interval.

Beyond that, a few other features would be great:

the word count for each type of content and in total;
these kind of statistics based on categories and tags so that I could know how much writing is happening on different topics (kind of like the Story Board in the EditFlow plugin only with counts);
these kind of statistics for each author of content, so I could understand the output of the writers on a site.

All of which would be great... but the key is the early part about the counts of content type over a time interval.

Anyone using a WordPress plugin that does something like this?

If so, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! Either as a comment to this post or on social media... or via email.

I've spent time searching the WordPress Plugin Directory but so far I haven't found anything that fits what I need. A great number of the "statistics" plugins are related to visitor statistics, i.e. how many people visited your site - but I don't need that. I already have Google Analytics and the Jetpack plugin helping me there.

What I want are content statistics.

I want to be able to easily see how much content I and the others who write on a site are producing over a given interval.

I'd note that for some sites (such as my work) I'd be willing to pay for a plugin like this if it were from a commercial plugin developer.

Seen anything like this?

UPDATE: I should have noted that the closest plugin I've found so far is Word Stats, but the plugin hasn't been updated in almost 2 years and while it works fine on one of my sites, it has a problem creating reports on another of my sites and another site went unresponsive after I activated the plugin (and so I quickly ssh'd in and removed the word-stats plugin directory).

An audio commentary is available as TDYR 199:

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Dec 16

Facebook’s iOS Apps Now Work On IPv6-Only Networks

By Dan York in Facebook, IPv6-only, Mobile

Facebook continues to demonstrate their commitment to making sure that people can access Facebook from whatever networks they may be on – and particularly new IPv6-based networks. Not only is Facebook moving to an IPv6-only internal network, but now comes word that their iOS mobile applications, both the regular Facebook app and also the Facebook Messenger app, can work perfectly fine on an IPv6-only network.

The information was relayed by Facebook’s Paul Saab in, of course, the IPv6 Group on Facebook. Back on December 2, Paul wrote:

The most recent release of the Facebook iOS app works on IPv6-only networks. The interesting thing in making this all work, is the example Reachability code that apple released really only showed how to implement it for IPv4 or hostnames, but using a hostname was broken if you were on an IPv4 only network and the hostname was dual stacked. Anyway, the main app is now fixed and our Messenger application will be updated soon to also have the fix.

And late last night he posted:

The FB Messenger was released and now supports IPv6-only networks

As the discussion thread indicates, the Android versions of the two apps should also work on IPv6-only networks but there are currently issues with Android devices in general working on IPv6-only networks.

The key point here is that as some network operators are now deploying IPv6-only networks because of a lack of IPv4 addresses. Consider the case of T-Mobile USA. Facebook’s applications will work fine and give the best possible user experience on those IPv6-only networks. Some of these new IPv6-only networks, such as those in the mobile space, use technologies such as 464XLAT to enable IPv4-only applications to still work. BUT… any such translation technologies do add complexity and introduce some degree of latency (which might be quite tiny, but still there).

Facebook is avoiding all of that by making sure that their mobile applications work well in IPv6-only networks.

Those apps will work over native IPv6 networks to connect back to Facebook’s IPv6 data centers. Without needing to pass through some IPv4 gateway or translation tool, the apps should provide the fastest and simplest connections – which means a better experience for users.

Now, the Facebook applications also work fine in a “dual-stack” mixed IPv6/IPv4 network. They have for quite a long time now. But Facebook has now tested these apps on networks without IPv4 – and that is a difference.

Congratulations to Paul Saab and the rest of the team there at Facebook for taking this step – and we hope that other mobile application developers will see this and consider testing their applications on IPv6-only networks as well.

As we run out of IPv4 addresses and have to look at IPv6-only networks with some kind of IPv4 translation on the edge… the best possible user experience is going to be with those applications and services that can avoid all of the IPv4 translation and work completely over IPv6.

P.S. If you would like to get started with moving your application or service to IPv6, please visit our Start Here page for pointers on how to begin!

IPv6

Dec 15

Moving My Various Web Sites To Responsive Design To Be Mobile-Friendly

By Dan York in Weblogs

Danyork com responsive design Today I made on change on this "DanYork.com" site to move it to a new theme that uses "responsive design" so that it will look good on a mobile device as well on a large screen. I've been wanting to do this for quite some time because any of a zillion reports out there will tell you that an increasing majority of users are viewing websites on their mobile devices. I can just see that in my own behavior where I use my iPhone or iPad for viewing so many sites.

The challenge I have is that this site, and my other major personal blog sites, are all still hosted on TypePad, one of the early blog hosting providers where I started writing back in 2005 or so. Some year I'd love to consolidate them onto one of the other hosted sites where I run WordPress... but the amount of work to do so is quite substantial given the hundreds upon hundreds of posts between my various sites. Some day...

Meanwhile, I figured out enough about TypePad's one responsive design theme to be able to move this site over. At some point over my holiday vacation I'd like to move these two over to a responsive theme:

They are where the bulk of my personal writing occurs. The challenge with any move to a new theme on TypePad is that you need to rebuild the menus, sidebars, etc., so it does take a bit of time.

I also want to move my writing aggregation site to a responsive theme:

DanYork.me

That site is hosted on WordPress and so there are many options... I just have to find one that I like and spend the time configuring it.

Most of my other WordPress-hosted sites already are responsive, including:

Out of my various websites where I write that will really just leave CircleID, where I have no control over the formatting, and my 7 Deadliest UC Attacks site that is also still hosted by TypePad. If I have the time, I'll probably just move that one during the migration of my DisTel and DisCon sites.

And then, of course, there is my Deploy360 site at work... which is a MUCH bigger challenge that will be dealt with sometime in 2015...

The end goal will be that people will be able to read my writing with ease on whatever platform they use - mobile phone, tablet, desktop... or anything else.

Stay tuned...

Administrivia

Dec 15

FIR #786 – 12/15/14 – For Immediate Release

By Dan York

Quick News: Two airlines go Apple, employees increase your reach, Apple recruits luxury experts for watch debut, Facebook search implications for brands; Ragan promo; News That Fits: Microcopy is a new frontier for communicators, Dan York's Tech Report, Twitter's impact on news, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, agencies need to pay more attention to Glassdoor.com, Igloo Software promo, the past week on the FIR Podcast Network, the Social Media Charter for financial services firms; music from Plastic Sky; and more.

Podcasts

Dec 15

Indonesia And Vanuatu Sign .ID and .VU With DNSSEC

By Dan York in DNSSEC, maps

We were very pleased to learn this morning that both Indonesia’s .ID and Vanuatu’s .VU country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) had DS records uploaded to the root zone of DNS over the weekend. What this means is that they have both entered the fourth of five deployment stages that we track as part of the DNSSEC Deployment Maps.

At some point soon, people who have registered domains under .ID and .VU should be able to upload their own DNSSEC records and be able to obtain the higher level of security and trust that comes with having their domain signed with DNSSEC. We don’t yet know when the registries for .ID and .VU will start accepting DS records from registrants, but hopefully at some point soon.

Given that the records were entered into the root zone of DNS after I had finished updating the database on Friday for the DNSSEC Deployment Maps that were distributed this morning, I took the unusual step of re-generating the maps today after a quick database update. Subscribers to the public dnssec-maps mailing list have all received a second set of maps for today. Normally I might have just waited for next week but given Indonesia’s size it adds a nice bit of green to the Asia Pacific map and I wanted that to be shown.

With these two ccTLDs having their DS record in the root zone, this brings us to 97 of the 247 ccTLDs that we track in our database being signed with DNSSEC. (There are also .EU and .SU which we consider more “regional” TLDs (and are both signed), but other lists count as ccTLDs, so you could say that we show 99 of 249 being signed.) Given that most of the generic TLDs are signed and all the new gTLDs MUST be signed when they launch, the remaining 150 unsigned ccTLDs are the major area where attention will be focused over the next while in terms of getting TLDs signed. ICANN’s DNS team is spending a good bit of time traveling to many of these countries to help them get their ccTLDs signed and operational.

Congratulations to the teams at .ID and .VU for getting their domains signed and linked in to the DNSSEC global “chain of trust”. We look forward to learning that those two ccTLDs become “Operational” and second-level domains can begin uploading DNSSEC records soon.

Note – if you would like to learn more about how you can get started with DNSSEC, please visit our Start Here page to find resources tailored to your role or type of organization.

Dec 15

Two Weeks In… How Is A Blog Post A Day Doing? #Finish2014Strong

By Dan York in Blogging, Writing

So, two weeks after saying I would write at least one blog post a day (and talking about that) for all of December 2014, how am I doing?

Well... so far so good.

I posted at least once on the Deploy360 site every work day.
I did put something up on my personal sites every day so far.
I recorded a new "The Dan York Report" podcast on 10 of the 14 days.

I've had a serious cold/cough that made for really poor audio... so on some of the worst days I skipped it. I didn't think it made sense to record a poor-quality audio podcast just for the sake of saying I did it.

In fact, I'm honestly surprised how much I did write, given how foggy my head has felt and how most days it has seemed like I'm moving through molasses.

Now... the question will be whether I can continue this through the remaining days that include holidays and vacation time!

Here's the list of the month so far: