Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Dec 18
TDYR 200 – WordPress 4.1 Brings Improved Distraction-Free Writing
WordPress 4.1 is out today and brings a MUCH improved "distraction-free writing" experience...
More info: http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2014/12/new-wordpress-41-provides-much-improved-distraction-free-writing-experience.html
Dec 18
New WordPress 4.1 Provides Much Improved Distraction-Free Writing Experience
WordPress version 4.1 is out today and the greatest feature I like is a new and MUCH improved "distraction-free writing" experience.
The beautiful part about this is that when you click in the window and start typing, all the sidebars and menus fade way so that you can just focus on writing...
BUT...
... the moment you move your mouse outside the writing window all the sidebars and menus come back!
This is a huge improvement over the previous experience with WordPress 4.0 where once you clicked the button you were in a white screen with no way out unless you scrolled up and clicked the link in the menu bar that appeared:
I found the WordPress 4.0 way so annoying that I never used it. Inevitably after I entered the mode I needed to change categories or tags or something like that - and so it was simply easier to NOT use the distraction-free mode.
The WordPress development team produced a video that shows how well this new writing mode works.
I like it because it lets me write but also makes it super easy for me to get back to the menus and sidebars.
All you need to do to enable the "distraction-free writing" mode is to click on the box on the right top of the editing window:
It acts as a toggle to turn the "DFW" mode on or off.
Very nicely done!
There were of course many other aspects of the WordPress 4.1 release. The release post and the field notes as well as the codex entry go into much more detail. The Twenty Fifteen theme is pretty cool... and some of the other features are also interesting. But for me... I just like this new writing environment!
What do you think? What do you like best about WordPress 4.1?
An audio commentary is available as TDYR 200:
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Dec 18
ICANN Seeking Volunteers For DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover Plan Design Team
Do you want to help ICANN plan the best was to roll the root key used for DNSSEC? Are you interested in being considered as a volunteer member of ICANN’s Root KSK Rollover Plan Design Team? Recently ICANN staff sent a message to the public dnssec-coord mailing list and other various mailing lists asking for volunteers. The “Solicitation of Statement of Internet for Membership in the Root Zone Key Signing Key Rollover Plan Design Team” (say that 10 times fast!) begins:
ICANN, as the IANA functions operator, in cooperation with Verisign as the Root Zone Maintainer and the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) as the Root Zone Administrator, together known as the Root Zone Management (RZM) partners, seek to develop a plan for rolling the root zone keysigning key (KSK). The KSK is used to sign the root zone zone-signing key (ZSK), which in turn is used to DNSSEC-sign the Internet’s root zone. The Root Zone Partners are soliciting five to seven volunteers from the community to participate in a Design Team to develop the Root Zone KSK Rollover Plan (“The Plan”). These volunteers along with the RZM partners will form the Design Team to develop The Plan.
The document goes on to list the requirements and the process. Essentially, if you meet the requirements you need to send a message with the requested information to ksk-rollover-soi@icann.org by the end of the day on Friday, January 16, 2015. The Root Zone Management partners will then choose from among the applicants to form the Design Team.
We’ve written here before about how incredibly important it is to get the Root KSK Rollover right, and so we commend ICANN for going through this process to create an appropriate Design Team. We would encourage people with operational knowledge of DNSSEC and DNS in general to definitely read over the document and consider applying!
P.S. And if you don’t know about DNSSEC, or want more information, please visit our Start Here page to find out how to begin!
Dec 17
TDYR 199 – WordPress Content Creation Statistics – The Plugin I Want
TDYR 199 - WordPress Content Creation Statistics - The Plugin I Want by Dan York
Dec 17
Skype Translator Looks Intriguing
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
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!
Dec 16
The WordPress Plugin I Want: Statistics About Content Creation – Number of Posts, Pages, etc.
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:
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
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Dec 16
Facebook’s iOS Apps Now Work On IPv6-Only Networks
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!
Dec 15
Moving My Various Web Sites To Responsive Design To Be Mobile-Friendly
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:
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...
