Podcast 6 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 6: Chatting with the father of the permalink (2007-04-13).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary Keywords

people, post, filter, thread, flickr, blogger, paul, thought, metal, tag, sergeant pepper, timeout, read, totally, question, play, meta, construction worker, week, wedding ring

Transcript

mathowie 0:01 They play the life out of some song notice not the times but che Globalsat it's seen this I heard sound

Jessamyn 0:33 music you're gonna Yes

mathowie 0:34 I think I'm gonna do three pieces of music. So I think I'm gonna open with Sergeant Pepper 2.0 some clip of it. Awesome. And then

Jessamyn 0:43 did you hear the thing that person asked you to like fade it out and then start talking over it much more classy. You mentioned it in the podcast, right?

mathowie 0:51 Yeah, I don't know. It's the way Garage Band does level if you play two tracks at once it like cuts down the loudness of both I not like an audio guy. So how to overcome that. But I'm sure there's I'm sure there's some like, way to get around that. But yeah, it like cut. As soon as the sound the music goes away, I'll send my voice comes up and like I'm like, Oh, geez. Our voices are always like, way too low. So I don't really want to talk over music very well. I don't know. I'll try it, though. Sergeant Pepper 2.0. You know, kind of amusing, funny. It's funny. It's always great when someone makes a song out of a comment. Right? And then later on, I'll just drop in the home on metal filter and like overthink, played a beans. And I'll probably be in the middle like before a PB introduce. And we'll probably just wrote PB in in about 20 minutes.

Jessamyn 1:43 That sounds great. And that was so funny that on that guy's got an adorable website with a whole bunch of little stupid songs like,

mathowie 1:50 oh, wow,

Jessamyn 1:51 I didn't even know how to look. Well. That's because you don't read the Mi fi user sites block.

mathowie 1:56 I have it in my RSS. So the last song I'll do is what's his name? Summers ending the dude with the album. lewd vague von? Oh, he's at CMU is probably graduating. I mean, he's hopeful he is. He sounds like a pretty good damn good musician. And I'm trying to do I have a beer with me. So hopefully, yes.

Jessamyn 2:23 This is gonna be beer podcast. Swimming after this. I

mathowie 2:27 don't at all. I was gonna like, go grab some water out of the fridge. And I was like, Hey, I forgot I'd never buy beer. Or we have beer. And we'll have for six months in the fridge rotting away.

Jessamyn 2:37 I know. I have mine leftover from like a party that I had in December. Yeah, we

mathowie 2:41 still have overflow beer in the garage from party we didn't a year or two ago. never gotten rid of. So I bought some shiner when I got back from South by Southwest. Federal for two weeks. So yeah, instead of playing one song and clips and stuff, I'll just play these three songs. And they're all good. I think I'll just end it with Ludwig bonds. He's posted one, two. Wow. It's posted five songs from his album, which I think is cool. It's kind of pushing the lines half his album is online.

Jessamyn 3:13 That's okay, though. I mean, that's why you've got the like how often you can post right? Let the software handle

mathowie 3:21 it. So the music's out of the way thing we want to say about Sergeant Pepper. Besides, it's cool when they use comments.

Jessamyn 3:29 I just talked to a Metafilter user in Vermont on the telephone last night, helping him figure out how to get broadband in rural no place where he lives. And we were talking about the Sergeant Pepper and the Alice's Restaurant covered type songs and how delightful they are. So he's a new member metal filter. Now he's been around for a while. He's just he doesn't post that frequently. But I know him and he lives he lives in the state. We were talking about having a Vermont, Vermont meet up. But in Vermont like when we do that we get on the telephone.

mathowie 4:01 Classy. I guess we should just cover metal filter stuff. Oh, so like one of the most popular things was the most popular thing was Kurt Vonnegut dying, which is weird to be a popular favorite thing. But like as a nightmare thread. The most popular thing was the of course, I knew it. When I read it on another blog and I was like I should post this meta filter I think had already been posted three times before it reached a maximum of six and that was the same way why least eight times. Wow. Yeah. There's something about it because I was like, I just read the first couple paragraphs. I was like, This is awesome is leading. This is great. It's like a mythbuster sort of thing. I always wish someone would do this is so sounds so great. And then and then I random edit filter was already posted that I read well I read through the end and I was like I was pissed. I was like this is shitty. This is I mean they say they're they're stacking the deck but they totally stacked the deck. So that

Jessamyn 4:59 was just stunt It was a total stunt. And as far as I'm concerned, it was just made for the pundits.

mathowie 5:06 Yeah, it was built to fail. Definitely. It was like, why did he play 45 minutes? Why is such a weird small? Why such a small number? Why such a weird number? Like, did they think people would SMS each other like one person would notice and tell everyone and like, why didn't you play a real like day in the subway, and then it wasn't the subway, it was just a fucking hallway on the way to the subway,

Jessamyn 5:26 because of the rules. Because of the rules. If I mean, Metta talk, it was interesting, right? There was the one post and then there was seven more posts that were deleted. But then there was the meta talk thread about the seven posts that were deleted. And there was actually a lot of interesting discussion that happened in the meta talk thread about that post, I think, because it pissed a lot of people off, not the post, but like the actual article, but they didn't want to like shit in the thread and say, like, brah this guy's an asshole. This is so idiotic. And so there's this kind of meta commentary in meta talk, but it included the the q&a that the author did the next day. And like, yes, he chose the title. And here's why there was the restrictions on, you know, date, time and location, which actually made made it make a little bit more sense. But yeah, people were really divided on it. A lot of people thought it was annoying. And then a lot of other people were like Philistines, no, and there was a lot of useful conversation about it. I thought I enjoyed that thread.

mathowie 6:25 All the stuff about the Stradivarius is really cool and bizarre at the same time.

Jessamyn 6:31 Well, and I thought, you know, it was a really interesting thing to talk about the nature of art and the nature of

you know, how people deal with it, right? Because the big question is, is there? Is there not some kind of platonic ideal of beauty and art that people don't notice? Or is it contextual? Which you kind of know that it is? And is it heavily, societally determined? Which I think we know it is? And then how much can you use it with as a bludgeon to, you know, hassle other people with, right? I mean, that's my feeling about the blogger code of conduct, not that I don't think people should act nicely. But that it's, it's, it's impossible to make one standard one size fits all standards, then the only thing it serves to do is say these people are on the inside, and those people are on the outside. And that was my feeling about this article, too.

mathowie 7:22 Yeah. Oh, I thought you had like bullet points. But no, you just said

Jessamyn 7:26 that. No, I just said it was dripping with casual snobbery. Yeah, that's Yeah. Which, you know, resonated with some people. And then other people didn't agree. But a nice conversation.

mathowie 7:36 It's like an article. I think the right of that article thought this would be cool. Is this something everyone probably always wishes they could do? And wouldn't it be great if nobody noticed? So we're going to do as much as we can to make sure nobody notices so that I can write this awesome article about how nobody notices and like, yeah, that's where the cowl snap.

Jessamyn 7:55 If you've read his follow up, you know, with the person who's like, dude, I'm listening to my iPad, because it's early in the morning and I have to go to work. I mean, it almost poked fun at people who had jobs that they had to go to. Really offensive from a class perspective. You know, what do you mean, you'd rather read the subway and not think about anything? I'd rather be in Paris, like a rich guy. You know, like, Paris is not the ideal for every living American. Nor should it be and I don't know, I just thought it was a weird, classist and naughty thing to say, but the stunt was interesting, interesting stunt. Sure, but you know, you could have written that up 100 different ways. And it was

mathowie 8:35 fair. I mean, I'd love to see more impartial, like, do it. New York City or busking is normal. Do someone playing something people are familiar with,

Jessamyn 8:46 or somebody that recognize have Bruce Springsteen doing it? Well, no, can't because Bruce Springsteen's like low culture, right?

mathowie 8:52 Yeah, well, no, do like Yo Yo Ma, like, you know, some people would recognize them most people wouldn't when people stop and listen to Yo Yo Ma,

Jessamyn 9:00 to be fair, you could probably do it with any Asian man playing a cello. And they would assume it was yo yo Han SMS their friends, what have you, but ya know, I know what you're saying. Like stuff that's a little bit more accessible. To start

mathowie 9:12 with. It was cool at the post spawned all the crazy or someone did a follow up post of you know the time springs. Yeah, someone sent me Neil Young in Glasgow years ago, just busking

Jessamyn 9:28 and the story was totally great. I love that post. Yeah, I

mathowie 9:30 love the story of the Arcade Fire at the top of a subway stop like a year or two ago for no reason. I like to in the morning. Like they just like came outside and play it. Yeah, like three of the members just playing. It's boggles my mind. That's cool. What else is super popular metal filter? Well, talking

Jessamyn 9:49 about women and harassment was very popular on Metafilter this week

mathowie 9:53 on Metis WWW dot Metafilter. Oh, yeah, well, I

Jessamyn 9:56 think of better filters the whole site. Better filter on men. Metafilter

mathowie 10:00 proper medical care proper, then we'll segue into filter.

Jessamyn 10:06 Oh, we'll see, I actually found a bunch of I don't know what it was I was like thinking about posts that I actually wanted to make. And so I was doing some searches. And I found a bunch of kind of older, older posts that I really liked. Like, there was this really old, great television science presenters post from like, 2004.

mathowie 10:28 I saw I was on your Favorites page, testing something out for some reason this week. And I was like, why is Jessamyn favoriting things from two years ago,

Jessamyn 10:37 because I just found them. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, maybe I wasn't paying attention in June 2004. But now I can. And I can go through all of these great like old television science shows now that I actually have time to look at it.

mathowie 10:50 I can't think of anything else I loved on medical to this week,

Jessamyn 10:54 I sort of enjoyed the highly sensitive person thread. Ah, it was it was just basically one of those like web tests for you know, whether you're a highly sensitive person HSP. But you get a whole bunch of people there being like, I'm sensitive. I'm not sensitive. And I don't know, it's always fun when people talk about their personalities, and you relate it to what you know about them on the site. And you're like, oh, like, who had a pet when they were little versus who was raised by wolves. And it was just another one of those fun threads.

mathowie 11:26 When I hear highly sensitive, I just think of the bizarro town in northern California that would like banned cell phones because of EMF and stuff like that. Our children's bones hurt because you have wireless, like weird stuff like that, that we know, may or may not be true, but who knows. We get

Jessamyn 11:43 people like that in the library community who like get jobs in libraries, and then, you know, are like, What do you mean, you have wireless here? I'm sensitive to whatever and they're, like, sensitive to the microwave. Because we have a microwave and it's hard, right? Because you're just like, I don't really know where the sciences. And if you're that sensitive, you may not be able to

mathowie 12:05 function in the world. I mean, I understand chronic fatigue syndrome. I know people have had that and but some of the other stuff that EMF stuff I don't know. Oh, I guess my favorite. The posts of the whole week was the making the whole website on a dry erase board. One. Did you show the drawing on the fridge? Yeah, I

Jessamyn 12:29 um, I actually saw that post somewhere else and then found it also on metal filter.

mathowie 12:34 I think metal for this first place. I saw it. Yeah, that blew minds. Cuz it's like annoying the first two clicks and you're like, come on. It's super slow. And I'm like,

Jessamyn 12:42 did I get annoyed about eight clicks in and then stopped? Does it have a happy ending?

mathowie 12:46 I'm sort of thinking of the 30 pages to get to the end. But yeah, after two I was like, people are gonna hate this. Geez. Oh, hey, wow. Book. This is pretty funny. And I just kept going all the way through it. Yeah.

Jessamyn 13:00 I stopped when they started writing on their stove. I was like you were writing on your stove for the first like six or eight slides. And it took you 20 minutes to erase and I'm supposed to feel bad for you get a whiteboard.

mathowie 13:10 It was it was very genius. So you think in 2007 just go nuts was just giant images, you know, with a little back and next. And that's it. Right? Like it still proves that narrative and invented display are worth a lot in this world.

Jessamyn 13:31 Right? No, I totally agree. Totally agree. But I didn't read the thread did anything interesting. Come up. And

mathowie 13:36 I think everyone was like me, they're like, I really wanted to hate this after the first couple. But you know, it was pretty good. That's like, absolutely, you know, totally inventive.

Jessamyn 13:45 I left too soon.

mathowie 13:46 That's about all I want to cover Metafilter what was switched over to AskMe edit filter stuff. What was your favorite stuff from AskMe unfiltered this week? Well,

Jessamyn 13:55 let's see.

mathowie 13:57 I also thought the calls from the construction workers was a great one. I had no idea there was any recourse.

Jessamyn 14:05 It was interesting how it grew kind of organically, like, you know, there was there was a thread about wedding rings, the anonymous thread about is it ethical to remove your wedding ring. Oh, saleswoman. Well, that's how it started, right? And then somebody was like it there was a couple of comments that attracted the ire of certain people that then made the internet a talk like this guy's calling you know, these women sluts, and it became a big discussion there very big discussion there. And then almost not relatedly there was another asked Metafilter post about I'm getting harassed by these specific guys on this specific construction site. Because the meta talk thread did talk about like women getting harassed just generally by like random dudes, and whether or not it's appropriate to wear a wedding ring. Yeah, to keep random do It's a way and then other dudes were like, I'm a random dude. And

mathowie 15:04 well, there was, there was a mention as a random dude reading that the first amount of talk or the very first post about the wedding ring thing. Someone said, like, you have no idea by the time I was 16, you know, I was, you know, I was viewed as meat, you know, from predators.

Jessamyn 15:21 Like he was a really curvy 16 year old.

mathowie 15:23 Yeah, and it's like, wow, I never even thought that, you know, like guys will look luridly look at someone they have no idea how old they are, they'll luridly look at teens all the time. And I just never noticed that not being a girl. And I was like,

Jessamyn 15:35 the thing that's really weird about being a girl or like a young woman is that like, one day you're like, built like a hockey stick? And like literally, like one day you're not. And so you actually have like a controlled experiment, where it's like yesterday, nobody paid any attention to me. And today, I get followed around by creeps. So it's just like, oh, random. It's like, oh, now that I have breasts, creeps follow me. Yeah.

mathowie 15:59 And you don't have the like, emotional. I mean, that does. I know, it doesn't pop in overnight, emotional maturity, or, you know, like, self

Jessamyn 16:06 capability to deal with it. If you don't have older siblings or a parent that's or friends who are good at that. Everybody's kind of dealing with like awkward dork attitude at the same time. So the construction guys are dealing with other dork attitude, things of their own that are make it complicated.

mathowie 16:20 Yeah. But I think the construction worker was a nice segue into oh my god, here's an application of the stuff we were telling you sucks to be a woman about. Here it is. And I think even if you're a guy you could relate to like, and I know this is like, be literally in the problem a little bit. But just you know, when you feel trapped at work, like there's some horrible person at your work a bully, or are just a person to talk your ear off or something, or you feel like, I'm just staying at my desk, I don't even want to go in anywhere near that person. And this is I mean, it's just a million times worse, like,

Jessamyn 16:55 well, and there were a couple of guys in the thread who were like, look, I grew up as like this total scrawny kid who people would beat on and so I sort of understand the cat calls or whatever can lead to actual actual violence, and it's something you need to sort of deal with, right? Yeah, I know what it's like to hide in my to hide in my cube.

mathowie 17:16 Yeah, the consensus seems to be like, figure out the company, threaten the company's HR department, essentially. But that was like in New York. I mean, if you call a construction company, they'd be like, Hey, fuck you. Like what the fuck this guy's do?

Jessamyn 17:32 Well, except that they don't want to get sued. And a lot of them the process, I'm sure for getting a contract to do anything in New York is, is horrible and complicated. And so you know, it's probably a tenuous relationship that you would like to keep decently but I don't really know. You know, I

mathowie 17:49 don't story stuck with me for days. I was like, I have no idea what would get this like, jerk ass construction worker off my ass. Like, I've no, like, anything short of pulling a gun would not stop him. I mean, she told him to his face, like fuck off. And he thought that, I mean, he turned that against her and was like, Ah, geez, that's totally powerlessness. It sucks.

Jessamyn 18:11 Right? Yeah, total total horribleness. But I was surprised actually, how many women in that thread were like, I just got right up to him in his face and yelled at and fuck off. You fucking piece of shit. And that's all the problems sometimes, you know?

mathowie 18:26 Yeah. Although you don't want to, like present a violent reaction to the wrong person.

Jessamyn 18:32 That's always hard to but I'm always surprised like when I used to live in Seattle, and I would like walk home by myself at night, like, you know, sometimes said like, bumped into a friend in the same neighborhood. And a lot of times like their idea of a joke would be to like holler across the street at me as if they were some deranged homeless person. Yeah. And then be surprised when I like started to cry. I'd be like, dude, I'm walking alone by myself at one o'clock in the morning. What did you think? But they thought it was funny. You know, like, Haha, it's my friend Jessamyn nothing, nothing fazes her. So then the only other thing and asked me to filter was our friend JJ G who answered the question about power chords.

mathowie 19:12 Yeah, yeah, I've been freaked out I have this MagSafe cord is awesome. I probably kicked my cord about four or five times since Oh, yeah, me too. Me too. Totally. Now well now I like I don't even care I'll just run cord across the US running cord across the hallways and stuff because I know that's not gonna be a problem anymore. But yeah, now I'm kicking them all the time but I've always wondered socially having a baby around like how dangerous is it

Jessamyn 19:37 and I've always just kept the cord hanging out on the wall that's live power

mathowie 19:41 hooked to a magnet with like a few like little copper leads on it like I've been careful not to like have my thumb dragging across it. So if I like complete the circuit and get a zap. So for Jessie to put that on his tongue that was psycho

Jessamyn 19:56 well, and of course he just he just had to be like, you know like licking a nine volt battery?

mathowie 20:04 Yeah, I did delete the obvious joke about a dozen times. Yeah, I do. nine volt battery. I think that's why he said it too.

Jessamyn 20:15 LOL LOL LOL LOL.

mathowie 20:17 Yeah, heard about that one. But yeah, that was that was amazing and we all get to talk to him a couple weeks about that.

Jessamyn 20:25 Oh dude, that's gonna be fun. Yeah.

mathowie 20:28 metal filter and I could overthink a plate of beans. Just want to know what it means. The joke's on my internet screens. Please explain your posts to me. I just don't get the joke. Is the egg on my face? Folks? Think I taste some yolk? Oh, there's Hey, how you doing?

Jessamyn 20:55 Good. You know, I haven't spoken to Paul since 2000. Wow. Really? Yeah, I spoke to Paul at South by Southwest and said I really wish blogger had a different date format.

Paul 21:09 Did I add your favorite date format?

Jessamyn 21:12 You said if I emailed you, you would? Oh, cool. Yeah, it was very nice of you. But then I decided not to use Blogger. Until last year,

mathowie 21:21 I came back from South by Southwest that year and said, back in the offices at pirate I was like, hey, you know, on the last day, I ran into Jason Kottke. And he was like, I would use Blogger if I had more date format. And mag like was like, really? He would get on that. And she added like seven date formats that day. And then he wouldn't use it. And then the whole crush thing happened. And now they're married. All because of shape format. Yes. Oh, yeah. We should have a ridiculous intro for Paul. Paul bash and Ben invented blogger permanently. Oh, what else ridiculous. You came up with

Jessamyn 22:05 permalinks? Yeah. As the father

mathowie 22:06 of the permalink.

Paul 22:08 That what? And they'll call me that. That's that's the only person who calls me that. Yeah,

mathowie 22:14 everyone does know everyone. Everyone goes Where's PB the father of the permalink. People say that?

Jessamyn 22:20 I mean, this column is the fifth. The fifth Beatle totally works on the filter. And nobody nobody knows. Exactly. This is like the lowest profile metal filter worker because he never

mathowie 22:31 uses metal filter.

Paul 22:33 I might not even actually work on metal filter.

Jessamyn 22:37 Matt says you do he says all that broken stuff is yours. He

mathowie 22:40 is a scapegoat.

Paul 22:43 Um, the metaphors? Are you a point here?

Jessamyn 22:46 You go over to Matt and play we at his house and then that he blames everything that doesn't happen on you.

Paul 22:52 That's true. Yeah, that's about it.

Jessamyn 22:54 Matt, Matt found a friend.

Paul 23:00 I don't know why you guys are interviewing me?

mathowie 23:02 Well, because you don't have a voice. You don't Why don't use metal filter?

Paul 23:06 Oh, that's good. That's a good one.

mathowie 23:10 Because we're so closely aligned with Flickr and you'd like to be off the grid?

Jessamyn 23:14 Did you forget your password? I can send that to you.

Paul 23:17 If it Flickr have more date formats, I'd use it? Oh, no. That's a good question. I think it's just because the metadata community is so intimidating.

mathowie 23:28 Wow, that's good. Metadata community would say that's great. So we have to deal with your stupid ass hat post your stupid fucked up snowflakes. Yeah,

Jessamyn 23:38 yeah, give people a lot of good advice and asked me to filter though, and they would they would review you like a god.

Paul 23:44 I asked a question and asked me to filter when it was first launched. Because I felt at that point, you know, maybe I could. Maybe the site would be useful to me and then

mathowie 23:56 work out for you super useful. No, it was good. It's still useful to this day. It's not intimidating. Is it? I mean, AskMe Metafilter? Isn't metal filter. That's true. No AskMe edit filters a lot better. And that was that was my problem with the Scots funny little jokey thing about metal filter, like ask metal filter, like, oh, yeah, ask a question. Then 1000 range monkeys in their mom's basement or yell at you. And it's like, that's metal filter. It's not really the way asked metal filter works, but he's just confounding sort of the metal filter world into a joke, but just fine. So Paul, what are you gonna do once you're a daily working set once a week because I only work once a week now. So what are we going to do if it's four days a week?

Paul 24:42 We're gonna build cool stuff. I don't know.

mathowie 24:44 Everything, everything. We everything. I can imagine all the things in my head.

Jessamyn 24:48 Yeah, everything. I want all of the Jessamyn features,

mathowie 24:52 right? Jessamyn what would you want all to do? Let's give them the list of things you need. Dude, I

Jessamyn 24:56 send it to you an email every week. I know. That that's not my Probably not losing

mathowie 25:00 is just sitting at my I have to do this. So pause here and he can tell you whether or not he can do this these things, I put it

Jessamyn 25:07 on the I put it on the wiki, I want like an automatic timeout or machine, you know. So like, if you tell somebody like you need to sleep it off, just be able to like click a button and then have them like be timeout it for 24 hours, instead of having to like remember to untime them out.

Paul 25:24 We'd have to field in the database. Yeah,

mathowie 25:26 but we didn't know we'd have to store like a band like two, two dates, a band start and a band end or something.

Paul 25:34 If the band was the same time, every time, you could just have one field.

mathowie 25:38 Well, what if what if we want to say this is a band forever?

Paul 25:41 You could do a timeout for like 12 hours and then you just distorts toward the end date? Yeah, so it was exactly. So if you want to date is less than the end date, then you can't post

mathowie 25:52 if you want to timeout forever, that would just be 2038 or something. Yeah, exactly.

Paul 25:57 But we just can't him at that point. Well, that.

mathowie 26:04 Yeah, we only use the same system for this.

Jessamyn 26:06 Actually, what I what I really want, which isn't like just like, make my band nation banhammer work better in a tag editing. Like, you know how,

mathowie 26:15 Oh, I was gonna ask Paul about this. Because I was just on my filter music. And I found some people are using covers and cover. So how are we going to do

Jessamyn 26:24 how? Not slash one, one and 911?

mathowie 26:27 Yeah, so I'm like, Well, we have to come up with their own clusters of like, these three tags are the same. I think there's no way to autumn I mean, we could do with an asset without an S somehow automatically. But the other stuff.

Jessamyn 26:38 And if you did bulk tag editing, you could and then had a tag recommender, I'm not saying I think this is the way to solve it. But you could do it. So that they can be like, Oh, this is covers the tag for covers is cover, or something like that a tag suggester or clusters cluster? Yeah.

mathowie 26:56 I was gonna ask Paul, what, what's the best approach to take? Should we force every cover to covers since that covers one out? Or no cover one out of recovers? And like should should we be doing admin only like search and replace on these things? Or should we do something with the URLs where we're doing two queries?

Paul 27:16 Well, my theory is always let let the users put in what they want. And then make order Don't touch it. Yeah. And then figure out how to order things. But I don't know if that's practical, but that you could do a mapping thing, like anytime you see this tag, it's actually this.

mathowie 27:36 Other things we do is nicer Admin Tools, I guess, double post is the thing, double post, just a form, like if we could just check off this is a double post. And here's the original and it would auto right, like previously posted previously, yeah, it would write out all the things for us. That's like better admin tools, we could go nuts on the admin tools. I think there's a lot of backend stuff like I was such a shitty coder that redoing a lot of stuff is probably the next step

Paul 28:03 eventually. And I'd love I'd love to do stuff where we combine code for all the sites into one body of code.

Jessamyn 28:09 And that would be awesome. Well, we

mathowie 28:10 almost have to make an API like this is a thing that posts a comment, and then every single exact section just like call that library or Oh, that would be so awesome. It would just be a giant switch. Like which table which site did you come from? Which table should it dump into? And all that stuff?

Paul 28:28 So you just need like a little mapping thing? And yeah,

mathowie 28:32 these are things we will have to do eventually. But that's like tedious work. It's

Paul 28:35 hard. And we it is and we and we can write it in PHP.

mathowie 28:41 Did you Did you see the Twitter code or interview that was great. Oh, that

Paul 28:45 was awesome. Real sucks.

Jessamyn 28:47 Oh, everybody saw that. I don't know anything about Rails. And I saw that showing up a bunch of places. Yeah,

mathowie 28:53 it was just Yeah, Buffington is always told me you gotta go to Rails man. It is a cool development approach. But I'm looking at the queries. It's like select star from every table, like loaded on every single page. Right? And I'm like, that sucks,

Jessamyn 29:07 right? It's just not efficient. It doesn't scale to really massive internet. Why frequently Are you trading

Paul 29:14 ease of development for performance down the road. So it's super easy and super fast to create a fairly complex web application, you're just not going to have a lot of people

mathowie 29:23 and we used to have a lot of people we used to have a name for that called Cold Fusion. Right was just you can make a big app in 10 minutes and it'll suck when you get more than 10 people. I guess we'll do travel filter. It's all sitting here on the whiteboard ready to go

Paul 29:40 and I love AskMe edit filter for travel advice. We're gonna

Jessamyn 29:45 go ahead Oh no, go on go on.

Paul 29:48 Just gonna say I often do site colon asked that meta filter.com And then my destination just to get see what people said about where I'm going.

mathowie 29:56 Sweet. I always do. I just look at the tags like I went to Maui and is Did the Maui tag and there's like a bazillion questions. I went through all of them there was even going to Maui as a new parent tells like exactly what I need. I think there are two questions like that. So it was like, it was, it was killer.

Jessamyn 30:13 I used it when I went to Hawaii to actually exactly the same thing like tags search location. Once again, going back to the it would really be great.

mathowie 30:25 Dessert better searches. Yes. Yeah. But better searching is we have to do more full text indexing.

Paul 30:32 Oh, man. It's so snappy. Yeah, we need to add that in a bunch of places.

mathowie 30:37 Anything else we need to ask Paul?

Jessamyn 30:39 I don't know. Paul, what would you like to do? What would be fun to flex your

mathowie 30:42 coding has asked Paul about the whole Flickr thing.

Jessamyn 30:46 Paul, what about the whole Flickr thing? You? You're like you hate

mathowie 30:49 Flickr? Right? That's your question. Right? It

Paul 30:51 doesn't have anything to do with metal filter.

mathowie 30:53 That's fine. This is Paul. We're interviewing Paul.

Jessamyn 30:56 We don't have to talk about hating Flickr. I just I'm just really interested in the in the the photo app that you're building. It looks neat.

Paul 31:04 Yeah, it's not it's not about hating Flickr at all. It's

mathowie 31:10 Is it the can do DIY attitude coming back? Like you're like, the year 2000. We built our own freakin apps, then we all got away from that.

Jessamyn 31:20 We all forgot how and our thumb was tranq away.

mathowie 31:23 Know, the guy who invented blogger instead of coding his own login? Oh, I guess he went back to that. So sorry. Go on.

Paul 31:31 No, I do have my own blogging system. So is it HP? No, it's not. It's, it's terrible. But I still you know, I sort of get nervous when one thing is the gold standard for something on the web. So it's like with Google, Google is sort of the gold standard for search. And everyone uses that. And Flickr is sort of the gold standard for sharing photos, and everyone uses it. And when that happens, I sort of think well, what, you know, what else could we be doing? And I really like decentralization, I like apps that are don't have a centralized server. That's my perfect web world, everything would be decentralized. And so I just wanted to play around with that. And

mathowie 32:14 but you still need an aggregator to serve along all the different servers?

Paul 32:21 Right? That's yeah. But since I have since I'm now separated from Flickr, I'm thinking about these issues a lot more on a daily basis. Yeah. How can I bring photos from Flickr and SmugMug? And these crazy decentralized applications? How

Jessamyn 32:38 can you make shots or whatever? Yeah,

mathowie 32:40 yeah. How do you bring imagine like, for your friends are also running their own photo gallery server? It's like, how would I get a tattoo? How would I get a tag feed across all four? Or how would I get my comments? I left on their photo over there. How would I get notified a follow ups on? Or how

Paul 32:57 could these four people posting in their own spaces collaborate on some project? Right now, on an ad hoc basis? How can we do like, a one off, you know, squared circle group

Jessamyn 33:08 without learning a whole bunch of new from the ground up tools?

mathowie 33:12 fall open? ID?

Paul 33:14 I don't know. I don't know. But it's fun stuff to think about. Yeah.

mathowie 33:18 feeds of all the comment threads from every photo.

Paul 33:22 Oh, I don't have comments yet. Oh, okay.

Jessamyn 33:25 Good. That's the best way to start really, with no comments.

mathowie 33:29 It's fine. I think I'm gonna use Paul's code for 10 years of my life that will be like a two day project that years of my life still exists. I know exactly why the software is such a pain in the ass that I don't upgrade. I don't update to it anymore.

Jessamyn 33:43 I love that site.

mathowie 33:45 It was too much work to update. It's like it'd be a 20 minute chunk of time to do a photo each day that I would dread not not like even taking out taking the photo just processing it and posting it was such a nightmare. And as you build it yourself, no, it's like a really hacked up thing on movable type of the billion custom script. So it's, it's really janky though it takes like there's Photoshop work. There's resizing I have to do on my client, then I have to upload it under a certain naming convention. I have to think I had to remember what it looked like so I can describe it's horrible. It's Paul wrote this really nice smooth, you upload it does everything on the server. You describe it just like Flickr and leave tags. And so I'm going to do something like that.

Jessamyn 34:29 Good. That's awesome. Yes, I think that'd be great. I like 10 years of my life, I want to

mathowie 34:33 see if software is holding me back and

Paul 34:36 I did an implementation of at or blogs and so that now that or blogs photos section is all based on that code I wrote,

mathowie 34:43 oh, you should tell us about or blogs. What is your blogs, Paul,

Jessamyn 34:46 tell us about or blogs,

Paul 34:48 or blogs is just a blog aggregator for bloggers in Oregon. And it just brings together a bunch of posts into one space,

mathowie 34:58 and people just volun Totally sign up or do you surf around looking for?

Paul 35:02 No, it's just a aggregator. It's, yeah, it's a voluntary aggregator. So people come and say, Hey, I have an Oregon blog and then I add them if they look like they're from Oregon and then it throws them into the mix and it does a bunch of sorting by city and by topics and

mathowie 35:19 so he was like going to be a car blogs and a while blogs and I

Paul 35:24 know I have enough it takes us to run our blogs, you

mathowie 35:28 should open source or blogs. And then there could be a nice blogs and blogs and visit blogs,

Paul 35:35 or blogs, that sort of suffering from the meta filter code problem, that it's all it's all written in ASP except it's also using Perl and PHP in various places. And wow, it's really tough to distribute with these when it's like that. So thanks, Paul

mathowie 35:50 Jessamyn and all listeners. That's it for this week and we'll be back in about two weeks and hopefully you have an interview with a JJ G.

Unknown Speaker 36:35 Night In August, the front lawn is tickling the back of mine as I listen for the bullfrogs you smoke your last cigarette on the day now that those summers and cold wind blowing so we got to build some shelter remains again hold a sleeve for us to say get up use the time that you've got because you're not afraid of vampires for earthquakes as much as the hands on the car traders last fall what to say now I want to stay convenience stores and the playground where I found my the day my lunch was the murderers ages My hands are dirty my my car sometimes right so now