Episode 94 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Brad Williams (@williamsba), and Kevin Yank (@sentience).

SitePoint Podcast的第94集现已发布！ 本周的主持人是Patrick O'Keefe( @iFroggy )，Stephan Segraves( @ssegraves )，Brad Williams( @williamsba )和Kevin Yank( @sentience )。

下载此剧集 (Download This Episode)

You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:

您也可以将本集下载为独立的MP3文件。 这是链接：

• SitePoint Podcast #94: Appy New Year! (MP3, 66.4MB, 1:12:31)

  SitePoint播客＃94：新年快乐！ (MP3，66.4MB，1:12:31)

剧集摘要 (Episode Summary)

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

以下是本集中介绍的主题：

1. Craig Buckler: My Three Web Wishes for 2011
   Craig Buckler：2011年我的三个网络愿望
2. Assaf Arkin: 2011 is the year of Server-side JavaScript
   Assaf Arkin：2011年是服务器端JavaScript的一年
3. Techcrunch: Apple will sell $2 billion in apps in 2011
   苹果公司将在2011年销售20亿美元的应用程序
4. Kroc Camen: RSS Is Being Ignored, And You Should Be Very Worried
   Kroc Camen：RSS被忽略了，您应该非常担心
5. Slashdot: Pay What You Want—a Sustainable Business Model?
   Slashdot：付您想要的钱—一种可持续的商业模式？

Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/94.

浏览http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/94中显示的参考链接的完整列表。

主持人聚光灯 (Host Spotlights)

• Stephan: Coding a Blog Layout PSD File into HTML & CSS

  Stephan： 将Blog布局PSD文件编码为HTML和CSS

• Brad: WordPress 3.1 RC2

  布拉德： WordPress 3.1 RC2

• Kevin: Nike Better World

  凯文： 耐克更好的世界

• Patrick: Quora

  帕特里克： Quora

显示成绩单 (Show Transcript)

Kevin: January 7th, 2011. Server-side JavaScript comes of age, the role of mobile apps on the Web, and RSS’s future in browsers. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #94: Appy New Year!

凯文： 2011年1月7日。服务器端JavaScript的时代已经到来，移动应用程序在网络上的作用以及RSS在浏览器中的未来。 我是Kevin Yank，这是SitePoint播客＃94：新年快乐！

Welcome in to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast, just another episode, only the first one of 2011. Can you believe how long we’ve been doing this, guys?

欢迎收看SitePoint Podcast的另一集，这只是2011年的第一集。你们能相信我们已经做了多长时间了吗？

Brad: We’re getting old.

布拉德：我们正在变老。

Patrick: Yes.

帕特里克：是的。

Kevin: (Laughs)

凯文：(笑)

Patrick: I actually looked it up, and don’t ask me why but I just had a feeling, and I think it’s in July it’ll be 10 years since I first took some sort of volunteer staff member-ish role at SitePoint, so 10 years is of this year.

帕特里克：实际上，我抬起头来，并没有问我为什么，但是我只是有一种感觉，我认为距今年7月，我第一次在SitePoint担任类似志愿人员的角色已经有10年了，所以今年是10年。

Kevin: Holy Crap!

凯文：胡扯！

Patrick: Yeah, no kidding.

帕特里克：是的，不要开玩笑。

Kevin: I can’t believe we’ve been around that long, that’s amazing.

凯文：我简直不敢相信我们已经走了这么久了，真是太神奇了。

Well, it’s 2011, wow, I actually just spotted in my notes my first mistyping of the year. My notes said January 7, 2010. Hopefully that will be the only time that happens! We’ve got a predictable range of stories here, we’ve got a bit looking back, a bit looking forward, and we’ve got our typical mix of news stories as well. But I wanted to start off with Craig Buckler’s blog post on SitePoint, Craig’s always got great stuff for us on the SitePoint blog, and he posted on New Year’s Eve his Three Web Wishes for 2011, and I saw this got picked up by a few sites, he’s done well with it, and I thought we could go through this and see if we agree or if our wishes would be a little different. His three wishes, the first one he wished Microsoft would release Internet Explorer 9 on Windows XP. I have to admit if I were making my list of wishes that probably wouldn’t be at the top of it. He starts off by saying it’s his “realistic list of wishes,” so he’s not wishing for more wishes here, he’s not wishing for a million dollars, he’s wishing for things that he thinks might actually happen, but still, top of the list IE9 on Windows XP, I don’t know, is that something to be excited about?

好吧，这是2011年，哇，我实际上是在笔记中发现了我今年的第一场迷雾。 我的笔记说2010年1月7日。希望那是唯一的一次！ 我们这里的新闻报道范围可预测，我们有一些回顾和展望，我们也有典型的新闻报道组合。 但是我想从Craig Buckler在SitePoint上的博客文章开始，Craig总是在SitePoint博客上为我们提供很多东西，他在除夕夜发布了他的2011年《三个网络愿望》 ，我发现这一点得到了一些关注。网站，他做得很好，我想我们可以仔细研究一下，看看我们是否同意，或者我们的愿望会有所不同。 他的三个愿望，是他希望微软在Windows XP上发布Internet Explorer 9的第一个愿望。 我必须承认，如果我列出的愿望清单可能不是最重要的。 他首先说这是他的“现实的愿望清单”，所以他不希望在这里有更多的愿望，他不希望有一百万美元，他希望自己认为可能会实际发生的事情，但仍然是IE9榜首在Windows XP上，我不知道，这令人兴奋吗？

Patrick: Are we still on Windows XP? Just kidding.

帕特里克：我们仍在使用Windows XP吗？ 开玩笑。

Kevin: Well, I think that’s his point, a lot of people are still on Windows XP.

凯文：恩，我认为这就是他的观点，很多人仍在使用Windows XP。

Brad: Well, if the goal of Microsoft is to phase out XP, which I’m sure it is by now, then that obviously is not a smart move for them.

布拉德：好吧，如果微软的目标是逐步淘汰XP(我相信现在已经淘汰)，那么对于他们来说显然不是明智之举。

Kevin: Yeah. Well, I suppose they’ve got to draw the line somewhere, and I guess as podcasters and bloggers in this space we generally tend to keep our computers pretty up to date. I know I would bet very strongly that Brad as the Windows user here in the Podcast you’re probably on Windows 7 on all of the computers that you use regularly, would that be fair to say?

凯文：是的。 好吧，我想他们必须在某处划清界限，而且我想作为播客和博客作者在这个领域中，我们通常倾向于使计算机保持最新状态。 我知道我会非常坚信Brad作为Podcast中的Windows用户，您可能会在经常使用的所有计算机上使用Windows 7，这可以说吗？

Brad: Yeah, absolutely.

布拉德：是的，绝对。

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. So it’s difficult for us as web developers probably to get excited about Internet Explorer 9 on Windows XP until maybe we look at our visitor stats. And those would probably tell us a very different story, that the regular users out there probably a lot of them are on Windows XP still, and so until we get them either off Windows XP or Microsoft does what Craig suggests and puts IE9 on Windows XP we’re not going to be able to rely on the technologies that are in IE9. This is I guess something we covered when we talked about how IE8 is going to be the next IE6 for this very reason, that it’s the last version of Internet Explorer to run on XP.

凯文：是的，确实如此。 因此，对于Web开发人员来说，我们可能很难对Windows XP上的Internet Explorer 9感到兴奋，直到我们查看访问者统计信息为止。 这些可能会告诉我们一个截然不同的故事，那里的普通用户可能仍在Windows XP上，因此，直到我们将他们从Windows XP删除或Microsoft按照Craig的建议并将IE9放到Windows XP上为止我们将无法依赖IE9中的技术。 我想这就是我们在谈到IE8即将成为下一个IE6的原因时所涉及的内容，因为这是在XP上运行的Internet Explorer的最新版本。

Patrick: According to Statcounter.com global stats, Windows XP usage in December of 2010, and this is of operating systems in general, so you’ve got XP, Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X, Linux and other of the six categories, Windows XP accounted for 50.59% of overall usage, global usage, in December. Just to compare that year over year, December of ’09 it was at 65.12%, so it’s fallen about 15% but still holds obviously a majority of 100 and also a vast lead over second place which is Windows 7 with 25.86%.

帕特里克(Patrick)：根据Statcounter.com全球统计数据，2010年12月Windows XP的使用情况，并且通常是操作系统，因此您拥有XP，Vista，Windows 7，Mac OS X，Linux和其他六类Windows XP在12月占全球总使用量的50.59％。 只是与去年同期相比，09年12月为65.12％，因此下降了约15％，但显然仍然占据了100％的多数，并且以25.86％的优势领先于第二名Windows 7。

Kevin: This is for what, worldwide web users?

凯文：这是给全球的网络用户使用的？

Patrick: Yep.

帕特里克：是的 。

Kevin: Wow, 50%, yeah so, gosh. Man, that number really depresses me; when I think about all of the exciting things that are coming in IE9, you know, the HTML5 video support, the CSS3 support, all of these things, and 50% of my users aren’t going to be able to use that browser. I’m hoping a significant number of those 50% have moved to Firefox.

凯文：哇，百分之五十，是的，天哪。 老兄，这个数字真的让我感到沮丧。 当我考虑到IE9中所有令人兴奋的事情时，就会知道HTML5视频支持，CSS3支持，所有这些事情以及我50％的用户将无法使用该浏览器。 我希望这50％中的很大一部分已经迁移到Firefox。

Stephan: So we’re kind of back at the IE6 problem, right, just in a different way.

史蒂芬：所以我们以不同的方式回到了IE6问题上。

Patrick: New year, same way to get traffic baby.

帕特里克：新的一年，用同样的方法吸引流量。

Kevin: (laughter) But it’s true, every time Microsoft takes a break or makes something really successful that they stop building new versions of for a while, and we saw it with IE6 and now we’re seeing it with Windows XP, it gets them into trouble, or it gets the Web into trouble I suppose.

凯文：(笑声)但是，的确如此，每次Mi​​crosoft休息片刻或取得真正成功时，他们都会停止构建新版本一段时间，我们在IE6中看到了，现在在Windows XP中看到了，他们陷入困境，否则我想网络就会陷入困境。

Patrick: Yep, IE6 and ColdFusion still kicking, still hanging around.

帕特里克(Patrick)：是的 ，IE6和ColdFusion仍然踢球，仍然徘徊。

Brad: I think a lot of it has to do with Netbooks, that’s one of the reasons it didn’t die off when it was supposed to was because of Netbooks.

布拉德：我认为其中很大一部分与上网本有关，这就是它之所以没有死的原因之一，是因为上网本。

Kevin: Right, yeah, definitely. Well, they’re doing the right thing with Windows 7 there, Windows 7 reportedly runs as well on a Netbook as Windows XP and that’s kind of one of the main design focuses they had there, right?

凯文：对，是的，当然。 好吧，他们在Windows 7上做正确的事情，据报道Windows 7在Netbook上也能在Windows XP上运行，这是他们在那里设计的主要重点之一，对吗？

Brad: Yeah, I actually formatted my Netbook and put Windows 7 on it and it runs great.

布拉德：是的，我实际上格式化了上网本，并在其上安装了Windows 7，它运行良好。

Kevin: Looking at the visitor stats for SitePoint, which is probably a more tech savvy, well, more web developer focused audience, obviously. We’ve got 75% of our users are Windows users, and 43% of that 75% is on Windows XP. So, you know, a little less than half of our Windows users, and a very similar percentage, 42%, are on Windows 7, so the poor sods stuck on Windows Vista account for 13% of our Windows traffic, which again is three quarters of our overall traffic. Yeah, definitely, okay, I was skeptical to begin with but I’m on board with Craig, it would be really nice for Microsoft to make IE 9 for Windows XP. I’m not sure they can do it though. This is something he brings up, he says that IE 9 uses Windows Vista/7 rendering technology, so this is I suppose why Microsoft would say they can’t do this because at some point they have to start building on a more modern foundation, and so taking advantage of the core features of Windows Vista and Windows 7, even if they decided they wanted to could they make a version of IE9 for Windows XP? It’s a 10 year old OS. Hmm, yeah. I suppose maybe asking them to move to Firefox wouldn’t be out of the question. Brad, would you consider detecting Windows XP users on Internet Explorer and asking them specifically, you know, displaying some sort of message specifically to them saying, yeah, we’re not saying you need to upgrade your operating system, but on that operating system Internet Explorer just is not a good browser to be using.

凯文：查看SitePoint的访问者统计数据，很显然，这可能是一个更精通技术的人，以及更多以Web开发人员为重点的受众。 我们有75％的用户是Windows用户，而其中75％的用户是Windows XP。 因此，您知道，只有不到一半的Windows用户和42％的用户使用Windows 7，这一比例非常相似，因此滞留在Windows Vista上的糟糕用户占了我们Windows流量的13％，这又是三个总流量的四分之一。 是的，当然，好的，我一开始就对此表示怀疑，但是我与Craig一起工作，对于Microsoft来说，为Windows XP制作IE 9真是太好了。 我不确定他们是否可以做到。 他提出了这一点，他说IE 9使用Windows Vista / 7渲染技术，所以这就是为什么微软会说他们无法做到这一点，因为在某个时候他们必须开始建立在更现代的基础上，这样就可以利用Windows Vista和Windows 7的核心功能，即使他们决定想要制作适用于Windows XP的IE9版本？ 这是一个已有10年历史的操作系统。 嗯是的 我想也许让他们迁移到Firefox并不是不可能的。 布拉德，您是否考虑在Internet Explorer上检测Windows XP用户并专门询问他们，您知道，向他们显示了一些特定的消息，说，是的，我们并不是说您需要升级操作系统，而是在该操作系统上Internet Explorer并不是一个很好的浏览器。

Brad: Possibly, I guess it depends obviously what the site is doing and if there are features that aren’t available or wouldn’t work, yeah, I mean it’s a tough one because it’s not like you’re saying switch your browser, although they could, it’s kind of like switch your operating system, that’s a pretty personal choice and a more advanced choice too.

布拉德：可能，我想这很可能取决于网站的运行状况，如果某些功能不可用或不起作用，是的，我的意思是说这是一项艰巨的任务，因为这并不意味着您要说的是切换浏览器，尽管可以，但这有点像切换您的操作系统，这是一个非常个人的选择，也是一个更高级的选择。

Patrick: That would be bold.

帕特里克：这将大胆。

Kevin: “Switch my what?”

凯文： “换我的？”

Brad: “This site runs best on Windows 7.”

布拉德： “此站点在Windows 7上运行最佳。”

Kevin: (Laughs) “This site runs best on anything except what you’re using, change something, change anything!”

凯文：(笑)“该网站在除您正在使用的内容之外的任何内容上运行效果最佳，可以进行更改，更改任何内容！”

Stephan: But we all know that Brad wouldn’t suggest Firefox though, he would suggest Chrome, I mean come on, of course.

史蒂芬：但是我们都知道布拉德虽然不建议使用Firefox，但他建议使用Chrome，我的意思是，当然。

Kevin: Yeah. Does Chrome run on Windows XP? I suppose it must.

凯文：是的。 Chrome是否可以在Windows XP上运行？ 我想必须。

Brad: As far as I know it does. I don’t have XP anymore, so.

布拉德：据我所知。 我没有XP了，所以。

Stephan: I think so.

史蒂芬：我是这样认为的。

Patrick: It does. It does. Just to confirm.

帕特里克：是的。 是的 只是为了确认。

Kevin: Well, I want to skip over Craig’s number two and come back to it, but his number three is web developers would backtrack on bandwidth hogging websites. “There’s an annoying web development trend which considers bandwidth to be unimportant. Why do some sites insist on multi-megabyte pages, why is the total file size larger than the browser used to render it?” Well, geez, I’m okay with that actually (laughs). “But I have some sympathy with those developing complex web applications,” still quoting Craig here, “although there are a few excuses. Google and other vendors can provide full online office suites in a few hundred kilobytes, so there’s rarely a need for larger applications, but it’s an entirely different matter for content only websites. Bandwidth is not necessarily cheap or unlimited, especially for those using mobile devices. Trim that bulk or have your web development license revoked,” says Craig. Well, I’m kind of on board, I think mobile is definitely making file sizes and bandwidth limits a lot more important for ordinary users out there then they may have been for the past year. Certainly I remember vividly the day the main online news site in Australia, news.com.au; someone showed me it loading up on their first generation iPhone. The homepage of news.com.au at the time at least was over a megabyte in size, and the phone from memory dropped five percent of its battery just by loading that page from scratch.

凯文：好吧，我想跳过Craig的第二名，然后再讲，但是他的第三名是Web开发人员会回避占用带宽的网站。 “有一个令人烦恼的Web开发趋势，认为带宽并不重要。 为什么有些网站坚持使用数兆字节的页面，为什么文件总大小大于用于渲染它的浏览器？” 好吧，天哪，我真的同意(笑)。 “但是我对那些开发复杂的Web应用程序的人表示同情，”尽管这里有一些借口，但仍然引用Craig的话。 Google和其他供应商可以提供数百KB的完整的在线办公套件，因此几乎不需要大型应用程序，但是对于仅内容网站而言，则完全不同。 带宽不一定便宜或没有限制，特别是对于使用移动设备的带宽。 大量修改或撤消您的Web开发许可证，” Craig说。 好吧，我有点喜欢，我认为移动无疑使文件的大小和带宽限制对于普通用户来说比过去一年变得更加重要。 当然，我清楚地记得当天澳大利亚主要的在线新闻网站news.com.au ; 有人向我展示了它正在第一代iPhone上加载。 当时的news.com.au主页至少有一个兆字节大小，仅通过从头开始加载该页面，内存中的电话就减少了5％的电池电量。

Brad: I feel like this is one of those issues that kind of comes and goes, and it has as long as I’ve been building websites, because back a few years ago when Web 2.0 was all the craze, Web 2.0 this and that, the minimalist design was really in at the time, everything was very minimal, clean, simple, very simple websites, not a lot of info on them. And now it’s kind of going back to where it’s jam as much stuff in there as you can, make sure you have 50 ads per page, and it just seems like a rollercoaster almost.

布拉德：我觉得这是一个反复出现的问题之一，而且我一直在建立网站，因为几年前Web 2.0兴起的时候，Web 2.0就是这样，当时确实采用了极简设计，所有内容都非常少，干净，简单，非常简单，但网站上没有很多信息。 现在，它可以返回到尽可能多的地方，请确保每页有50个广告，并且看起来几乎就像是过山车。

Kevin: Yeah. I think ads are a big issue, probably if you have the luxury of working on a site that is self-sustaining and you don’t need to run ads probably you have a lot more control over your bandwidth profile then if you’re running third-party ads. I know that’s something that affects us at SitePoint from time to time, an advertiser will come along and say here’s a video ad we’d like you to run, and we have to go, “Ahem, allow me to refer you to the clause in our advertiser guidelines that say you can’t have file sizes more than 500 kilobytes because that four megabyte video is not going to do on our homepage.” Yeah, I think you’re right, Brad, I think it comes and goes, I think it comes in cycles that people suddenly, mobile devices like iPhones become popular and people start spending, developers start spending a little more brain power on making sure sites perform well and load quickly on those devices, and then we get a bit more complacent for a few years as these devices mature and offer speedier access, and then something new comes along that again pushes the limits of what’s possible and demands a smaller footprint I suppose. I guess that’s the nice thing about the Web that no matter what we’ve added to it over the years it still comes down to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, these are text file formats, they’re relatively slim, and this idea of being able to trim out pieces of the code of your site and still have a working entity, you know, you can rip out the JavaScript and still have an accessible site in best practice. This ensures that the Web will continue to function even as I suppose the limitations of current browsers fluctuate back and forth.

凯文：是的。 我认为广告是一个大问题，可能是如果您有能力在一个可以自我维持的网站上工作，而又不需要投放广告，那么您可能会对带宽配置文件有更多的控制权，而如果您正在运行第三方广告。 我知道这有时会在SitePoint上影响我们，广告商会跟着说这是我们希望您投放的视频广告，我们必须走，“哎呀，请允许我向您推荐该条款在我们的广告客户指南中，您说文件大小不能超过500 KB，因为我们主页上不会播放4 MB的视频。” 是的，我认为您是对的，布拉德，我认为它来来往往，我认为它是周期性出现的，人们突然间，iPhone之类的移动设备开始流行，人们开始消费，开发人员开始花更多的脑力来确保网站在这些设备上运行良好并能够快速加载，然后随着这些设备的成熟并提供更快的访问权限，我们在几年内变得更加自满，然后出现了新的事物，这又一次又一次突破了可能的极限，并要求占用的空间更小我想。 我想这对Web来说是一件好事，无论这些年来我们在Web上添加了什么，仍然归结为HTML，CSS，JavaScript，这些都是文本文件格式，它们相对较小，并且这种想法能够整理您网站的代码片段，并且仍然有一个有效的实体，您知道，您可以删除JavaScript并在最佳实践中仍然拥有一个可访问的网站。 即使我认为当前浏览器的限制来回波动，这也可以确保Web继续运行。

Stephan: My personal favorites are the sites that have 30 videos on one page, those are awesome.

斯蒂芬：我个人最喜欢的是在一页上有30个视频的站点，这些站点很棒。

Kevin: And they all play automatically.

凯文：他们都自动玩。

Stephan: Exactly (laughter).

史蒂芬：是的 (笑声)。

Kevin: I said we’d come back to number two and that’s because there’s a related story I wanted to talk about. And his number two wish is widespread availability of server-side JavaScript. This is a bit of I guess a, I don’t know, there’s a bit of hype in the developer community around server-side JavaScript at the moment, and to me it seems like it’s largely driven by Node.js, this new server-side framework that lets you write your server-side code, the logic of your site that runs on your server, you can write it in JavaScript. And I saw, well, late in December, so around the same time that Craig wrote his blog post, an excellent blog post by Assaf Arkin over at his labnotes.org site. And he says 2011 is the year of server side JavaScript, and he’s talking about how he expects in 2011 a lot of the stuff that he started using Ruby for in 2010 he’s going to be using more and more JavaScript for in 2011, and that means server side code. His blog post, it starts off by pointing out a lot of the amazing places that JavaScript is running now, a lot of the amazing libraries, you know, there’s a web server framework in Express JS, there’s a Dropbox API, there’s monitoring, web scraping libraries, there’s good database drivers for MySQL, MongoDB, all these sort of things, everything you would need in a server-side language seems to be coming to JavaScript now, and Node.js of course being the container that lets you run JavaScript at blazingly fast speeds on your web server, so it seems like for possibly the first time right now is becoming practical for you to build all of the sort of programming code whether it’s running in the browser on the client side or on the server, you can write it all in JavaScript.

凯文：我说过我们会回到第二位，那是因为有一个我想谈的相关故事。 他的第二个愿望是服务器端JavaScript的广泛可用性。 我想这有点，我不知道，目前在开发人员社区中围绕服务器端JavaScript进行了一些炒作，在我看来，这很大程度上是由新服务器Node.js驱动的端框架，可让您编写服务器端代码，在服务器上运行的网站逻辑，也可以使用JavaScript编写。 我看到，好在12月下旬，大约在同一时间，克雷格(Craig)在他的labnotes.org网站上写了一篇由阿萨夫·阿金(Assaf Arkin)撰写的优秀博客文章。 他说2011年是服务器端JavaScript的一年 ，他谈论的是他对2011年的期望，他在2010年开始使用Ruby的很多东西，他将在2011年使用越来越多JavaScript，这意味着服务器端代码。 他的博客文章首先指出了JavaScript现在正在运行的许多奇妙之处，还有许多奇妙的库，您知道，Express JS中有一个Web服务器框架，有一个Dropbox API，有监控，网络抓取库，适用于MySQL，MongoDB的良好数据库驱动程序，所有这些内容，服务器端语言所需的一切现在似乎都已包含在JavaScript中，而Node.js当然是让您运行JavaScript的容器以惊人的速度在您的Web服务器上运行，因此对于您来说，构建所有种类的编程代码(无论是在客户端的浏览器中还是在服务器上运行)似乎现在都是第一次成为现实。可以用JavaScript编写。

Stephan: My question is why is this important though?

史蒂芬：我的问题是，为什么这很重要？

Kevin: Same question I have. Exactly. I’ve seen a few people say wouldn’t it be great if you had to learn one less language to become a web developer, but I’m not sure I buy that because I suppose the same used to be true of Java that you could write server-side Java code and write applets on the client side in Java. And to me learning the Java language was half a day’s work, but actually learning how to use it to do one thing was completely different to learning to use it to do another thing, and you basically had to start from scratch, and I think the same is true probably of JavaScript that learning to write JavaScript to make wizzy things happen in the browser and make slick, usable interfaces in the browser using usually a library like jQuery or something like that, it’s going to be a completely different proposition to using JavaScript on the server to write the database interaction code, the login forms, all this sort of stuff that makes the server-side components of your site go. I’m not sure that there’s much benefit to this being the same language.

凯文：我有同样的问题。 究竟。 我见过一些人说，如果您不必学习一种语言就可以成为Web开发人员，那不是很好，但是我不确定我是否会购买，因为我想您以前对Java也是如此可以编写服务器端Java代码并在Java客户端中编写applet。 对我而言，学习Java语言是半天的工作，但是实际上学习如何使用它来完成一件事情与学习使用它来完成另一件事完全不同，因此您基本上必须从头开始。 JavaScript可能也是如此，那就是学习编写JavaScript来使浏览器中发生麻烦的事情，并使用jQuery之类的库或类似的东西在浏览器中创建精巧，可用的界面，这将与使用JavaScript完全不同。在服务器上编写数据库交互代码，登录表单以及使站点的服务器端组件消失的所有此类东西。 我不确定使用相同的语言会带来很多好处。

Stephan: Well, and you’ve already learned, let’s say you’ve already learned PHP, why are you gonna go pick up JavaScript on the server-side, because there’s gonna be differences so it’s not really learning one less language; it’s learning another language or an addition to another language, so I don’t really buy the argument.

史蒂芬：嗯，您已经学过了，比如说您已经学过PHP，为什么要在服务器端使用JavaScript，因为会有差异，所以它并不是在真正地学习一种语言。 它正在学习另一种语言或另一种语言的补充，所以我真的不赞成这种说法。

Kevin: Quoting from the labnotes.org blog post, he says, “JavaScript is still the same ill-designed language best known for its high density of ‘surely this was designed to confuse’ language elements. Then again nothing interesting happens around pure and perfect languages, at best they evolve into text editors,” and he’s talking about Emacs here. “Fortunately we’ve got CoffeeScript, a dialect that mixes the better part of Python with the better part of Ruby and compiles into straightforward JavaScript, it’s incredibly fun to use.” It seems like he’s suggesting that JavaScript is destined to become sort of that intermediary language that no one actually writes but rather that things compile to. And I guess we’ve seen, you know, Google did this with Google Web Toolkit two years ago now to some success depending on who you ask, where you could write your web applications, your front-end code, in Java and it could compile to browser-independent JavaScript code. Similarly JavaScript gurus these days tend to use a library like jQuery, and if you’ve seen the difference between jQuery code and pure JavaScript code it almost looks like a completely different language to the uninitiated. Similarly it looks like he’s suggesting using CoffeeScript on the server side rather than JavaScript.

凯文：他引用了labnotes.org博客文章中的话说：“ JavaScript仍然是设计错误的语言，以其“一定是设计成混淆”语言元素的高密度而闻名。 然后，在纯净和完美的语言周围再也没有有趣的事情发生，充其量只能演变为文本编辑器。”他在这里谈论Emacs。 “幸运的是，我们有了方言CoffeeScript，它把Python的更好的部分和Ruby的更好的部分混合在一起，并编译成简单JavaScript，使用起来非常有趣。” 似乎他在暗示JavaScript注定要成为一种中间语言，这种语言没人真正写，而是可以编译。 而且我想我们已经知道，两年前，谷歌使用Google Web Toolkit做到了这一点，这取决于您问谁，可以在哪里编写Web应用程序，您的前端代码，用Java编写，以及编译为独立于浏览器JavaScript代码。 类似地，如今JavaScript专家倾向于使用jQuery之类的库，如果您已经看到jQuery代码和纯JavaScript代码之间的差异，那么它看起来与未使用的语言完全不同。 同样，他似乎建议在服务器端使用CoffeeScript而不是JavaScript。

Stephan: CoffeeScript, the new bytecode.

斯蒂芬： CoffeeScript，新的字节码。

Kevin: Yeah, yeah. Well, JavaScript would be the new bytecode in this picture I think, and CoffeeScript would be the thing you actually write. And similarly we’re seeing similar things with CSS, with higher level languages being built on top of CSS that compile down to CSS. It seems like we’re making web development more complicated here rather than less complicated, am I wrong?

凯文：是的，是的。 好吧，我认为JavaScript将是这张图片中的新字节码，而CoffeeScript将是您实际编写的东西。 同样，我们在CSS上也看到了类似的情况，在CSS之上构建了高级语言，这些语言可以编译为CSS。 好像我们在使Web开发变得更加复杂而不是那么复杂，对吗？

Stephan: That’s what we’ve always done, right?

史蒂芬：那就是我们一直在做的，对吧？

Kevin: Yeah, hmm-mm. Well, look, I’m still thinking Node.js, it’s exciting, it’s something new, but I’m not sure it’s better yet; I’m still happy to look at it but it feels like the people that are excited about Node.js are the same people who were excited about Ruby and Rails, and fair enough, Ruby is a great language and Rails is a great framework and certainly if you were starting web development from scratch today I could see much worse ways of going then starting with Ruby and Rails, it’s a great place to start. But do we need to throw everything away every year and look for something new? I don’t know; I’d love to hear from any listeners who are using Node.js, excited about it, tell us why you’re excited about it. Is it just because there are a lot of developers who are putting a lot of passion and time into it? I can certainly get on board with that but I’m not going to recommend it for beginners just yet, or recommend it as the best thing to be developing on. And I’m not sure this blog post is doing that either, Assaf seems more like he’s saying this is the year, not the year of server-side JavaScript so much as the year where server-side JavaScript is getting attention, and we’ll see by the end of this year whether that turns it into something that should be used as a first choice.

凯文：是的，嗯。 好吧，看，我仍在思考Node.js，它令人兴奋，它是新事物，但我不确定它会更好。 我仍然很高兴看到它，但是感觉像对Node.js感到兴奋的人和对Ruby和Rails感到兴奋的人一样，公平的说，Ruby是一种很棒的语言，而Rails是一个很棒的框架，当然，如果您今天从头开始进行Web开发，那么从Ruby和Rails入手，我会看到更糟糕的方法，这是一个很好的起点。 但是，我们是否需要每年扔掉所有东西并寻找新的东西？ 我不知道; 我很高兴收到使用Node.js的所有听众的消息，对此感到兴奋，并告诉我们您为什么对它感到兴奋。 仅仅是因为有很多开发人员投入了大量的激情和时间吗？ 我当然可以接受它，但是我现在还不打算将其推荐给初学者，或者将其推荐为最好的东西。 而且我不确定此博客文章是否也在这样做，Assaf似乎更像是他说这是今年，而不是服务器端JavaScript的年份，而不是服务器端JavaScript引起关注的年份，而我们到今年年底，我们将看到是否将其转变为应作为首选的东西。

Let’s take a quick break from the news here and look at the SitePoint Poll because I said we’d be looking forward but we should also be looking a bit backward to 2010, and the SitePoint Poll at the moment is “What was the most important web technology of 2010?” Alright, guys, here are your choices: HTML5; CSS3 and web fonts; mobile apps; and REST. Let’s go around the table.

让我们从这里新闻中快速休息一下，看一下SitePoint投票，因为我说我们很期待，但我们也应该回顾2010年，现在的SitePoint投票是“最重要的是2010年的网络技术？” 好的，伙计们，这是您的选择：HTML5； CSS3和网络字体； 移动应用； 和休息。 让我们围着桌子走。

Stephan: Who’s going first?

斯蒂芬：谁先走 ？

Kevin: Let’s go around the table. Patrick, what’s your pick of that bunch?

凯文：我们围着桌子走。 帕特里克，你从那堆里挑选什么？

Patrick: Okay, I’ll be the sucker. My limited understanding, I’m not even sure what REST is so don’t make too much fun of me, but I would say from this list that I would have to say mobile apps, I mean if we think about HTML5 as being everything, right, not just HTML5 but this all-encompassing term, then I guess it would probably be impossible for HTML5 to lose. But, given just the growth of mobile as a whole, we’re going to talk about mobile apps a little later and how Apple’s doing with app sales, I think that I guess most important web technology is mobile apps I guess for me. I think all these things are interesting except for the one I don’t know what it means; CSS3 and web fonts were definitely big stories this year in this space and very cool in their own right, but again, mobile apps it just seems to be the most impactful, the most — the one that’s done the most damage so to speak.

帕特里克：好吧，我会当傻子。 我的了解有限，我什至不确定REST是什么，所以不要对我感到太多乐趣，但是我会从这个列表中说我不得不说移动应用程序，我的意思是如果我们认为HTML5就是一切，对，不仅是HTML5，还包括这个无所不包的术语，那么我想HTML5可能不会丢失。 但是，考虑到整个移动设备的增长，我们稍后再讨论移动应用程序，以及苹果如何处理应用程序销售，我想我认为最重要的网络技术就是我为我准备的移动应用程序。 我认为所有这些事情都很有趣，除了我不知道这意味着什么。 CSS3和Web字体今年肯定是这个领域的热门话题，而且就其本身而言非常酷，但是，再次，移动应用程序似乎是最具影响力，影响最大的-可以说是造成最大损害的应用程序。

Kevin: Is anyone else voting for mobile apps?

凯文：还有其他人为移动应用投票吗？

Brad: I am; I think I would definitely say mobile apps too. And I think that the obvious answer like Patrick says is probably HTML5, but honestly it hasn’t peaked yet, and I think 2012 or 2013 that’s going to be the year of HTML5. We saw a lot of cool stuff come out of it but I really think mobile apps, and I know it’s one of the topics coming up as well, definitely made huge grounds this year in terms of sales and overall market value and just as developers as a whole, everyone’s really starting to kind of take hold of what a new market it is and how open it is so you can really dive in and make endless amounts of money if you know what you’re doing. I mean just look at some of these apps that are out there, a dollar a pop and these guys are becoming millionaires from it.

布拉德：我是。 我想我也肯定会说移动应用程序。 而且我认为像Patrick所说的显而易见的答案可能是HTML5，但老实说它尚未达到顶峰，我认为2012或2013年将是HTML5的一年。 我们看到了很多很棒的东西，但我确实认为移动应用程序也是我要讨论的主题之一，今年肯定在销售和整体市场价值方面以及开发者方面都取得了巨大的发展。总体而言，每个人都开始真正地把握着一个新市场以及它的开放程度，因此，如果您知道自己在做什么，就可以真正涉足并赚取不计其数的金钱。 我的意思是，只看一下其中的一些应用程序，一美元就可以赚钱，这些家伙正因此而成为百万富翁。

Kevin: What is your response to people who would say that mobile apps are not part of the Web; they’re a competitor to the Web.

凯文：您对那些会说移动应用程序不属于网络的人们有何回应？ 他们是网络的竞争对手。

Brad: There’s definitely an argument for that, see, I think they can work together; I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more mobile apps that interact with the websites that we use on a daily basis. We already see it for like Twitter and Facebook and things like that, but I think we’re going to start seeing it for the smaller sites that we use, maybe the local news channel or things like that, ones that are more than just reading news headlines but actually interacting with the websites via your mobile phone. So I like to think that they will eventually work together across the board, of course they are a little bit of a competitor right now, but I think eventually it will be where everybody’s trying to work together.

布拉德：肯定有一个论点，我认为他们可以一起工作。 我认为我们将开始看到更多与我们每天使用的网站进行交互的移动应用程序。 我们已经在Twitter和Facebook之类的网站上看到了它，但我认为我们将开始在我们使用的较小网站上看到它，也许是本地新闻频道之类的东西，而不仅仅是阅读。新闻头条，但实际上是通过您的手机与网站进行互动。 因此，我想认为他们最终将在各个方面共同努力，当然，他们现在只是竞争者中的一小部分，但我认为最终将是每个人都在尝试一起工作的地方。

Kevin: Yeah, I think I would have to vote for mobile apps as well. Definitely 2010 I think was the year of mobile apps in technology. If you had to put a label on the year as a whole the biggest thing that happened in technology was the rise of apps. And certainly there are a lot of people out there that are railing against apps, they’re saying apps are these things that are tied to particular devices, particular vendors like Apple, particular app stores. And this is not a good thing in the long term because you’re going to invest a lot of time and put a lot of data into these things that just go away the next time you want to switch to another mobile phone brand. But as far as how it pertains to the Web I think that what we’ve seen is a lot of mobile apps that back on to web services and websites. So apps like Dropbox, apps like Evernote, all of these things are rather than just storing data on the devices, which I agree is kind of a walled garden you want to keep away from if you can, these apps, the ones that are really breaking ground are the ones that back onto web services, store data in The Cloud, or at least a copy of data in The Cloud that can be synched to your other devices, your computers, and available through the Web when you’re away from your own devices. And that to me is what made mobile apps really exciting in the Web space in 2010. The Web has reached its fingers out into these devices, but rather than doing it through browsers the Web is doing it through apps, and I think that’s really exciting. Stephan, you haven’t voted yet.

凯文：是的，我想我也必须为移动应用投票。 我想绝对是2010年，这是技术领域移动应用程序的一年。 如果您必须在整个年度都贴上标签，那么技术领域发生的最大事件就是应用程序的兴起。 当然，有很多人反对应用程序，他们说应用程序是与特定设备，特定供应商(如Apple)和特定应用程序商店相关的东西。 从长远来看，这不是一件好事，因为您将花费大量时间并将大量数据放入这些内容中，而下次您要切换到另一个手机品牌时，这些数据将消失。 但就其与Web的关系而言，我认为我们已经看到了很多支持Web服务和网站的移动应用程序。 因此，像Dropbox之类的应用程序，像Evernote之类的应用程序，所有这些东西都不仅仅是在设备上存储数据，我同意这是一种围墙花园，您想让这些应用程序远离这些应用程序，这些应用程序实际上是具有突破性意义的是那些可以返回到Web服务，将数据存储在The Cloud中或至少将这些数据复制到The Cloud中的副本，这些副本可以与您的其他设备，计算机同步，并且在您不在时可以通过Web获得您自己的设备。 对我来说，这就是使移动应用程序在2010年在Web领域中真正令人兴奋的原因。Web已将其涉足这些设备，但它不是通过浏览器来实现，而是通过应用程序来实现，我认为这确实令人兴奋。 史蒂芬(Stephan)，您尚未投票。

Stephan: Yeah, you know what, I was going to say mobile apps, but now that you guys have all voted for it (laughter) I’m going to go with CSS3 and web fonts, and particularly web fonts, not necessarily CSS3.

斯蒂芬：是的，你知道吗，我要说的是移动应用程序，但是既然你们都投票赞成(笑声)，我将使用CSS3和Web字体，尤其是Web字体，不一定是CSS3。

Kevin: Okay, I’m glad it was mentioned separately then.

凯文：好的，我很高兴当时分别提到它。

Stephan: And the reason the web fonts mostly for me is because I’m thinking long term, I think it’s going to have a huge impact on the future of how we do typography on the Internet, so I’m hopeful that we’ll see some cool stuff, and we already have, we’ve mentioned a few things on the show, so I think it’s a big deal this year, for 2010 it was a big deal.

史蒂芬：网络字体主要为我服务的原因是因为我考虑了很长的时间，我认为它将对未来我们在互联网上进行排版的方式产生巨大的影响，所以我希望我们能够看到一些很酷的东西，而且我们已经在节目中提到了一些东西，所以我认为今年意义重大，2010年意义重大。

Kevin: I think you’re probably right, Stephan, that in a decade’s time if we look at what the Web looks like then and go back and look at the year 2010 and go what was new that year that has the biggest impact on the way the Web looks now, it probably is web fonts. I think developers are a little shy of it at the moment because web fonts, at least the good ones, cost a bit of money. And when you’re designing a website from scratch going, okay, the HTML is free, the CSS is free, I can do the graphics myself but web fonts are still a bit mysterious and going out and paying a commercial service to get access to some fonts I don’t think designers have made that mental leap to paying that money upfront just yet, but I think when we start to see more sites designed using this it’s going to act as a landslide and I think it’s just going to become commonplace pretty quickly.

凯文：斯蒂芬，我想你可能是对的，斯蒂芬，如果十年后我们再看一下网络的外观，然后回顾一下2010年，然后再看那年对互联网有最大影响的新事物。网络现在的外观，可能是网络字体。 我认为开发人员目前对此有点害羞，因为网络字体(至少是好的字体)要花些钱。 当您从头开始设计网站时，好吧，HTML是免费的，CSS是免费的，我可以自己制作图形，但是网络字体仍然有点神秘，因此出去并付费购买商业服务才能访问有些字体我认为设计师还没有花心思向支付这笔钱，但是我认为当我们开始看到更多使用这种字体设计的网站时，它会起滑坡作用，并且我认为它将变得司空见惯。很快。

Stephan: Definitely, and I think the place that we’re going to see it is people developing sites for the tablets and trying to make really cool magazine-type feeling websites —

史蒂芬：当然，我想我们将看到的地方是人们开发平板电脑的网站，并试图打造真正酷炫的杂志类感觉网站-

Kevin: Hmm, yeah.

凯文：嗯，是的。

Stephan: — for iPads or the Android ones and things like that; I think people are going to want that experience without having to build necessarily an app for it.

史蒂芬(Stephan)： —适用于iPad或Android，以及类似的东西； 我认为人们会想要这种体验，而不必为此构建必要的应用程序。

Kevin: Right. Alright, so let’s take a look at the results of this poll here, and … oh, well would you look at that, HTML5 is the winner according to the SitePoint Community. Certainly HTML5 I think made the most headlines probably of these technologies in the Web space, but I think Patrick’s right, it might be just because it became that brand that meant nothing. It was the year of HTML5 but what did that mean really? Hmm, I’d love to hear from some of these people that thought 2010 was the year of HTML5, well, HTML5 was the most important web technology of 2010; what made it important?

凯文：对。 好了，让我们在这里看看这次民意调查的结果，……哦，您会看到的，根据SitePoint社区，HTML5是赢家。 当然，我认为HTML5是Web领域中这些技术最多的头条新闻，但是我认为Patrick是对的，这可能仅仅是因为它成为了毫无意义的品牌。 那是HTML5的一年，但这真的意味着什么？ 嗯，我很想听到其中一些人的想法，认为2010年是HTML5的一年，好吧，HTML5是2010年最重要的网络技术。 是什么使它变得重要？

Stephan: It’s the double rainbow, you know.

斯蒂芬：那是双彩虹。

Kevin: (Laughs) Don’t take our word for it, listeners, leave a comment on this episode and tell us why we’re wrong, tell us why HTML5 was the most important web technology of 2010, with 37% of the votes you’re definitely not alone in believing that if that’s what you think, right behind it, though, mobile apps with 34%, so guys well done. Stephan, you were in the 23% group with CSS3 and web fonts; a measly 6% of people thought that REST was the most important web technology of 2010. Yeah, I don’t know, when I was talking about mobile apps there, the way the Web reaches into our devices through mobile apps, the way they did that was with REST, this ability to use the full capabilities of the HTTP protocol to make different types of requests to do things on the Web other than just viewing web pages. I think REST is maybe kind of the silent achiever here, no one really hears about it unless they’re writing the code deep down in these things, but REST is what powers web APIs, people.

凯文：(笑)听着我们的话，听众，对这一集发表评论，告诉我们我们为什么错了，告诉我们为什么HTML5是2010年最重要的网络技术，得票率为37％您肯定不是只有一个人会相信，如果这就是您的想法，那么，拥有34％的移动应用程序就紧随其后，那么伙计们做得很好。 Stephan，您使用CSS3和网络字体的比例为23％。 仅有6％的人认为REST是2010年最重要的Web技术。是的，我不知道当我在谈论移动应用程序时，Web通过移动应用程序进入我们的设备的方式， REST就是这样做的，它具有使用HTTP协议的全部功能来发出不同类型的请求以在Web上执行操作的能力，而不仅仅是查看网页。 我认为REST可能是这里的默默成就者，除非有人在这些事情的底层编写代码，否则没人真正听说过REST，但是REST是推动Web API发挥作用的人们。

Patrick: A whopping 72% had no idea what it was when they voted in the poll.

帕特里克：高达72％的人不知道投票时的情况。

Kevin: Really? (Laughter) Where did you see that stat?

凯文：真的吗？ (众笑)您在哪里看到该统计信息？

Patrick: The source for that data… (laughs) I’m looking at it right now, no, I don’t know, sorry.

帕特里克：这些数据的来源……(笑)我正在看它，不，我不知道，对不起。

Kevin: Let’s skip ahead and talk about apps, guys, because Brad you had a story about apps.

凯文(Kevin)：让我们跳过这些话题，伙计们，因为布拉德(Brad)您有一个关于应用程序的故事。

Brad: Yeah, TechCrunch actually had an interesting article, and it’s detailing a report that was released by Citibank, the report is called the U.S. Internet Stock 2011 Playbook, I don’t think they could come up with a longer name, but anyway it basically details that Apple is projected to sell two billion dollars’ worth in app sales in 2011, and they came out and said in 2010, the year we just ended, app sales across the entire market not just Apple were about at four billion. But I thought the really interesting stat from this report is that they’re projecting by 2013, so in basically two years that app sale market across the entire market will be right around $27 billion which is an insane increase in just two years, I mean it really makes you think about how young and infant this market is for apps.

布拉德：是的，TechCrunch实际上有一篇有趣的文章 ，它详细介绍了花旗银行发布的一份报告，该报告称为《 2011年美国互联网股票手册》，我认为他们不能拿出更长的名字，但是无论如何基本上，它详细说明了Apple预计在2011年将销售价值20亿美元的应用程序，然后他们问世，并在2010年(也就是我们刚刚结束的那一年)表示，整个市场的应用程序销售量不只是Apple大约为40亿美元。 但我认为这份报告中真正有趣的数据是，他们预计到2013年，因此在基本上两年内，整个市场的应用销售市场将达到270亿美元左右，而这在短短两年内就出现了疯狂的增长，我的意思是它确实让您考虑了这个应用市场的雏形。

Kevin: Yeah, I would love to know because Apple takes 30% of that. When they sell an app for a dollar they take 30 cents of it and give the other 70 cents to the developer of the app. So I’m wondering how much of that 30 cents is profit for them, because they’ve said before that the iTunes Store in general doesn’t make a whole lot of money for them, that more it’s something they more or less break even on but that they leverage to sell their devices, their iPods and iPhones and iPads and all these things, which is kind of the unique thing that Apple has going for it in their business model compared to competitors like Google and Microsoft that they don’t make so much money off of the platform so much.

凯文：是的，我想知道，因为苹果占了30％。 当他们以1美元的价格出售某个应用程序时，会收取其中的30美分，并将其余的70美分赠予该应用程序的开发者。 所以我想知道这30美分对他们有多少利润，因为他们之前曾说过iTunes Store通常不会为他们赚很多钱，更多的是他们或多或少收支平衡但是他们利用自己的产品来销售自己的设备，iPod，iPhone和iPad以及所有这些东西，与谷歌和微软等竞争对手相比，这是苹果在其商业模式中一直追求的独特之处从平台上赚了这么多钱。

Stephan: The difference is though that the music is expensive for them to license to sell, right, and they need to sell it a price point where you want to buy it. I think with the apps they’re taking 30% off no matter what you sell the app for, so if it’s 99 cents or it’s 99 dollars they’re still taking 30% of that, and I don’t think there’s a lot of overhead for them to just put your app out there minus —

史蒂芬：区别在于音乐对他们来说是很昂贵的，可以直接出售，而且他们需要以您想购买的价格出售音乐。 我认为，无论您以何种价格出售应用程序，他们都可以享受30％的折扣，因此，如果是99美分或99美元，他们仍然可以享受其中30％的折扣，而且我认为这其中并没有很多他们只需将您的应用程序放在那儿的开销减去-

Kevin: There’s probably a fair bit of overhead in, well, not so much hosting costs, I expect that scales pretty well and the more apps they have the less they’re paying for hosting per app. That’s probably pretty good but they have a big staff that’s doing reviews and support and all this sort of stuff, and they probably have a lot of free apps as well that they’re not making any money out of that kind of drags them down a bit, and I expect they have to have a pretty big staff to deal with the number of apps they have to get that $20 billion, $2 billion, sorry, two billion is still a very big number though.

凯文：托管费用可能会相当多，那么，托管费用就不会那么多，我希望它可以很好地扩展，并且拥有的应用越多，为每个应用托管的费用就越少。 可能不错，但是他们有大量的员工在进行评论和支持以及所有类似的工作，并且他们可能还有很多免费的应用程序，而且他们没有从中赚钱，这拖累了他们。一点，我希望他们必须拥有相当大的人员来处理必须获得200亿美元，20亿美元，抱歉的20亿个应用程序的数量。

Stephan: I wonder where they’re doing their support and reviews, I wonder if it’s offshored or actually in Cupertino, that’d be good to know.

史蒂芬(Stephan)：我想知道他们在哪里进行支持和审查，想知道它是离岸的还是在库比蒂诺(Cupertino)，这真是个好消息。

Kevin: Hmm, I wonder too. So, I suppose the question here in this TechCrunch story is whether the Web could have benefited from taking a similar approach to the app market. Well, the Web in general has always been sort of architected around free, that websites are free by default, and web applications are free by default. And this culture of free has possibly been to the Web, and the mobile Web’s specifically, detriment, and that the reason apps have taken off the way they are is because they have been marketed as things that people pay for. From the very beginning the expectation has been set that if you’re going to get an app it’s something you’re probably going to pay for if it’s any good. And the same can’t be said for websites, and so is the fact that the mobile web has this culture of free what’s holding it back compared to the app ecosystem?

凯文：嗯，我也想知道。 因此，我想在TechCrunch故事中的问题是，是否可以通过对应用程序市场采取类似的方法来使Web受益。 好吧，通常来说，Web总是围绕免费构建的，默认情况下网站是免费的，默认情况下Web应用程序是免费的。 这种免费文化可能已经对Web产生了影响，特别是对移动Web造成了不利影响，而应用程序之所以脱颖而出的原因是，它们已作为人们购买的东西进行销售。 从一开始，人们就开始期望获得一个应用程序，如果它有什么好处，那么您可能会为此付出代价。 而且对于网站也不能这么说，因此，与应用生态系统相比，移动网络具有这种免费文化的事实会阻止它吗？

Brad: Yeah, that is strange, because I remember back in the early Internet days, late 90’s, when a lot of the news sites were, they weren’t free, they were pay, and that was kind of the standard, they were all doing that; you could read excerpts and some articles were free, but to get full access to all the news articles and all the content they were providing you had to pay. I don’t know any stats from how well that worked back then but then somebody switched it up and now all the content’s free and then ever since then it just kind of seemed to be what was accepted, you just expected it to be free and if it was pay you looked for an alternative that was free that was just as good.

布拉德：是的，这很奇怪，因为我记得在90年代初期的互联网早期，当时许多新闻网站不是免费的，是付费的，这是一种标准，所有这样做； 您可以阅读节选，一些文章是免费的，但是要完全访问所有新闻文章及其提供的所有内容，您必须付费。 我不知道当时的效果如何，但后来有人切换了它，现在所有内容都是免费的，从那以后似乎只是被人们接受了，您只是希望它是免费的， if it was pay you looked for an alternative that was free that was just as good.

Patrick: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question I think, and it actually reminds me of a couple of sites I was thinking of spotlighting but I opted not to and went with another site to spotlight on this episode, but the sites are letter.ly, and that’s the first one I found and the one I was thinking of spotlighting. And then there’s a site tinyletter.com, and what they allow you to do, especially letter.ly, letter.ly is just a simple service that allows you to publish email subscription newsletters and for some small amount of pay usually, so you have newsletters that are $1.99 a month, $2.99 a month; Wayne Sutton just started one for $2.99 a month that will focus on geolocation and location based services. So, it says 1,304 newsletters, I know Chris Brogan just started one as well, Dave Moran, and so on, and so it’s almost like not micro-payments but a small subscription fee and some would consider it private blog posts, some look at it as a newsletter, but it is kind of a small payment, monthly subscription and they get access, private access to this blog post, this newsletter, and you can send it at whatever interval you want, basically you have the freedom to create the newsletter you want but at its core it’s a form of monetizing content obviously.

Patrick: Yeah, it's a really interesting question I think, and it actually reminds me of a couple of sites I was thinking of spotlighting but I opted not to and went with another site to spotlight on this episode, but the sites are letter.ly , and that's the first one I found and the one I was thinking of spotlighting. And then there's a site tinyletter.com , and what they allow you to do, especially letter.ly, letter.ly is just a simple service that allows you to publish email subscription newsletters and for some small amount of pay usually, so you have newsletters that are $1.99 a month, $2.99 a month; Wayne Sutton just started one for $2.99 a month that will focus on geolocation and location based services. So, it says 1,304 newsletters, I know Chris Brogan just started one as well, Dave Moran, and so on, and so it's almost like not micro-payments but a small subscription fee and some would consider it private blog posts, some look at it as a newsletter, but it is kind of a small payment, monthly subscription and they get access, private access to this blog post, this newsletter, and you can send it at whatever interval you want, basically you have the freedom to create the newsletter you want but at its core it's a form of monetizing content obviously.

Stephan: Do you guys think that mobile apps are different than let’s say desktop apps, whereas people — I’m trying to think of how to word this, do you think it’s different for people to choose to buy one, rather than a desktop app? So someone looking to buy an app on an iPhone, do you think they’re more easily swayed to go find a free one than they would be to let’s say if they were going to buy a piece of software on their computer? Like how much searching do you do for a free app or a free application on your desktop versus a paid option?

Stephan: Do you guys think that mobile apps are different than let's say desktop apps, whereas people — I'm trying to think of how to word this, do you think it's different for people to choose to buy one, rather than a desktop app? So someone looking to buy an app on an iPhone, do you think they're more easily swayed to go find a free one than they would be to let's say if they were going to buy a piece of software on their computer? Like how much searching do you do for a free app or a free application on your desktop versus a paid option?

Patrick: I’ll do a fair amount of searching myself, I would say. But if I find the pay option is exactly what I want and that has good reviews then I mean I’m willing to pay for it. I just bought something that will let me get the contacts on my old pay as you go phone, so it was a service that someone recommended that says it will do exactly what I want and for the 30 bucks it costs I was much happier to do that then to come up with some other hacked up backhanded solution that I would have seen from my random Google searches.

Patrick: I'll do a fair amount of searching myself, I would say. But if I find the pay option is exactly what I want and that has good reviews then I mean I'm willing to pay for it. I just bought something that will let me get the contacts on my old pay as you go phone, so it was a service that someone recommended that says it will do exactly what I want and for the 30 bucks it costs I was much happier to do that then to come up with some other hacked up backhanded solution that I would have seen from my random Google searches.

Stephan: I think my point being is that I think the functionality on mobile apps is much easier to imitate and move around, so people are able to find free versions of the apps that they want a lot easier then they are to find desktop versions of the software that they’re looking at. Am I making any sense?

Stephan: I think my point being is that I think the functionality on mobile apps is much easier to imitate and move around, so people are able to find free versions of the apps that they want a lot easier then they are to find desktop versions of the software that they're looking at. Am I making any sense?

Kevin: I don’t know, I think for me it feels about the same, and it’s very task dependent; there are some things for which I’m willing to pay just because they’re bigger priorities for me, and in fact if I see an app that’s well reviewed and costs a fair price and I see an app that’s free, I may actually go towards the paid one because I know I’m going to probably get a better quality experience, and it’s something that’s worth paying for. I’ll give you an example, as a web developer my text editor is vitally important to me which is why right now I use TextMate which cost me a bit of money, but I felt that was money worth paying for that, you know, if I can pay $20.00 to get a better text editor that’s a little slicker, a little faster, a little smoother, a little more configurable, a little more stable than the free option, and there are dozens if not hundreds of free options out there, but you know, this is my life, this is my job, I write code and it’s worth paying for.

Kevin: I don't know, I think for me it feels about the same, and it's very task dependent; there are some things for which I'm willing to pay just because they're bigger priorities for me, and in fact if I see an app that's well reviewed and costs a fair price and I see an app that's free, I may actually go towards the paid one because I know I'm going to probably get a better quality experience, and it's something that's worth paying for. I'll give you an example, as a web developer my text editor is vitally important to me which is why right now I use TextMate which cost me a bit of money, but I felt that was money worth paying for that, you know, if I can pay $20.00 to get a better text editor that's a little slicker, a little faster, a little smoother, a little more configurable, a little more stable than the free option, and there are dozens if not hundreds of free options out there, but you know, this is my life, this is my job, I write code and it's worth paying for.

Stephan: That’s my point is that you’re willing to pay for the desktop software whereas if something let’s say on your iPhone was a simple functionality app that was $2.00 you probably are going to go try to find a free version that does the exact same thing because it’s not hard to imitate it, right.

Stephan: That's my point is that you're willing to pay for the desktop software whereas if something let's say on your iPhone was a simple functionality app that was $2.00 you probably are going to go try to find a free version that does the exact same thing because it's not hard to imitate it, right.

Kevin: If you take it as read that the things that you do on your phone are more casual, more hobby, less vital to your, I don’t know, to your working life, your career or whatever it may be, whatever is important to you; if you do more important things on your computer than on your phone then I can see that definitely being true. I think the ace in the hole there is games though; I pay a lot of money for games on my phone. (laughter)

Kevin: If you take it as read that the things that you do on your phone are more casual, more hobby, less vital to your, I don't know, to your working life, your career or whatever it may be, whatever is important to you; if you do more important things on your computer than on your phone then I can see that definitely being true. I think the ace in the hole there is games though; I pay a lot of money for games on my phone. (笑声)

Patrick: Another thing about the whole phone thing is, again, I’m not in the market for that, I don’t have an iPhone, but I would think that they’re all priced, most of them are priced at such a low level, right, 99 cents, $1.99, $2.99, that if you see an app and we assume that you’re not someone who’s pirating software, right, through an unlocked phone or whatever, you’re in the app store, you’re buying things or you’re downloading free things from the app store; if you add an item right now and it’s a buck 99, I mean a lot of the app store stuff is impulse buys, right, you see what you want, you buy it, maybe next week you don’t even like it anymore but you still bought it. So I mean I could see that just because of the low price and you’re on your phone you want it fast, it doesn’t have a great keyboard, you’re there with your thumbs or whatever, and you got this and you buy it and you download it. I don’t know, I think that would factor in there too where a lot of people would just buy it for the sake of convenience and not having to look around any further.

Patrick: Another thing about the whole phone thing is, again, I'm not in the market for that, I don't have an iPhone, but I would think that they're all priced, most of them are priced at such a low level, right, 99 cents, $1.99, $2.99, that if you see an app and we assume that you're not someone who's pirating software, right, through an unlocked phone or whatever, you're in the app store, you're buying things or you're downloading free things from the app store; if you add an item right now and it's a buck 99, I mean a lot of the app store stuff is impulse buys, right, you see what you want, you buy it, maybe next week you don't even like it anymore but you still bought it. So I mean I could see that just because of the low price and you're on your phone you want it fast, it doesn't have a great keyboard, you're there with your thumbs or whatever, and you got this and you buy it and you download it. I don't know, I think that would factor in there too where a lot of people would just buy it for the sake of convenience and not having to look around any further.

Kevin: Hmm-mm. Since we’re talking about pricing of things, this plays into another story that I put on the list for today. This is a topic that fascinates me, I don’t know if it fascinates you guys as much as it does me, so we’ll see how much gas we have in the engine for this particular topic, but this is a story that caught my eye on Slashdot, about the ‘pay what you want’ business model. This is something that I’ve seen a lot happen, particularly in the music world; Patrick, I imagine you’ve seen a fair bit of that as a music fan.

凯文：嗯。 Since we're talking about pricing of things, this plays into another story that I put on the list for today. This is a topic that fascinates me, I don't know if it fascinates you guys as much as it does me, so we'll see how much gas we have in the engine for this particular topic, but this is a story that caught my eye on Slashdot , about the 'pay what you want' business model. This is something that I've seen a lot happen, particularly in the music world; Patrick, I imagine you've seen a fair bit of that as a music fan.

Patrick: Sure.

帕特里克：当然。

Kevin: Yeah. So the idea here is that, and it’s something we’ve seen in the Indie software market as well a lot lately, that whereas previously you would pick a fair price for this thing you’ve built and try and guess at the supply and demand curve that will put you at the exact point where hopefully you make the most money out of this thing that you’ve built by picking the magic price that is low enough that people will buy it but high enough that you’ll make some money out of it, and there you go, you’re rich, right? But the pay what you want business model has no fixed price, rather you put this thing out there and in most cases you say take it for free if you don’t think it’s worth paying for, but if you think it’s worth some money pay me what you think it’s worth. And it’s almost an honor system at times, some examples here with software that are mentioned in the story are the Humble Indie Bundle, humblebundle.com, various other software bundles, and I’ve seen it a lot as I said in the music space that some of my favorite indie artists have released albums or EP’s and said, you know what, pay me what you want for this.

凯文：是的。 So the idea here is that, and it's something we've seen in the Indie software market as well a lot lately, that whereas previously you would pick a fair price for this thing you've built and try and guess at the supply and demand curve that will put you at the exact point where hopefully you make the most money out of this thing that you've built by picking the magic price that is low enough that people will buy it but high enough that you'll make some money out of it, and there you go, you're rich, right? But the pay what you want business model has no fixed price, rather you put this thing out there and in most cases you say take it for free if you don't think it's worth paying for, but if you think it's worth some money pay me what you think it's worth. And it's almost an honor system at times, some examples here with software that are mentioned in the story are the Humble Indie Bundle, humblebundle.com, various other software bundles, and I've seen it a lot as I said in the music space that some of my favorite indie artists have released albums or EP's and said, you know what, pay me what you want for this.

Stephan: So basically it’s donation-ware really.

Stephan: So basically it's donation-ware really.

Kevin: Ah, I don’t know, maybe it’s just a matter of spin but the idea here, the way that they pitch it usually is not take it and if you like what I do I’d appreciate a donation, rather they say, look, I’m putting this thing up here, you get to pick the price and pick one that you think is fair.

Kevin: Ah, I don't know, maybe it's just a matter of spin but the idea here, the way that they pitch it usually is not take it and if you like what I do I'd appreciate a donation, rather they say, look, I'm putting this thing up here, you get to pick the price and pick one that you think is fair.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s semantics.

Stephan: Yeah, it's semantics.

Kevin: It is, but I think marketing is semantics in general.

Kevin: It is, but I think marketing is semantics in general.

Stephan: Yes, exactly. Sorry, I don’t mean to interj— you know.

Stephan: Yes, exactly. Sorry, I don't mean to interj— you know.

Kevin: Patrick what’s your take on this?

Kevin: Patrick what's your take on this?

Patrick: As far as it being a sustainable business I think if we look at this Slashdot post a number of these things are tied to charity in some way, at least the ones that were cited there. And my answer would be yes maybe for some, I think the way these things work is it’s almost an event-based situation, so if a company is using this as their primary strategy just to stay afloat I think an example of a situation where it might work is a company that released a new product every month, for example, with that model. And maybe, perhaps, after a certain amount of time passes, then they set a flat price for an item, so you might have let’s say a game development company because that’s an easy example with the Humble Indie Bundle and whatever else, let’s say a company puts out a new game every month and they say pay what you want for 30 days and then after that it’s $19.99, and so they kind of build up this library of back catalog games and people will discover those games and want to buy them over time, over years, that won’t necessarily know about their pay as much as you want plan that they launched it with but still want to buy it so they will, and then you still have that initial rush of people who paid anywhere from I guess nothing to $10.00 to $15.00 and rush in there to get that good deal and to I guess support the company if they like that sort of strategy in general. I definitely think it’s a niche based model but in that situation I think it could definitely have some potential for the right business. Now, of course the question is will letting people pay what they want end up with more revenue than simply charging, for example, $29.95, I guess that’s the question.

Patrick: As far as it being a sustainable business I think if we look at this Slashdot post a number of these things are tied to charity in some way, at least the ones that were cited there. And my answer would be yes maybe for some, I think the way these things work is it's almost an event-based situation, so if a company is using this as their primary strategy just to stay afloat I think an example of a situation where it might work is a company that released a new product every month, for example, with that model. And maybe, perhaps, after a certain amount of time passes, then they set a flat price for an item, so you might have let's say a game development company because that's an easy example with the Humble Indie Bundle and whatever else, let's say a company puts out a new game every month and they say pay what you want for 30 days and then after that it's $19.99, and so they kind of build up this library of back catalog games and people will discover those games and want to buy them over time, over years, that won't necessarily know about their pay as much as you want plan that they launched it with but still want to buy it so they will, and then you still have that initial rush of people who paid anywhere from I guess nothing to $10.00 to $15.00 and rush in there to get that good deal and to I guess support the company if they like that sort of strategy in general. I definitely think it's a niche based model but in that situation I think it could definitely have some potential for the right business. Now, of course the question is will letting people pay what they want end up with more revenue than simply charging, for example, $29.95, I guess that's the question.

Kevin: That’s the key here I think because that’s the point that’s brought up in the Slashdot thread and I think it is the key point that is often overlooked that there has to be a reason for you to try this alternative business model, it’s a lot more complicated and if you’re going to make more money out of a fixed price there’s no point to doing it, if you’re going to make the same money as the fixed price there may be no point in doing it depending on what your objectives are.

Kevin: That's the key here I think because that's the point that's brought up in the Slashdot thread and I think it is the key point that is often overlooked that there has to be a reason for you to try this alternative business model, it's a lot more complicated and if you're going to make more money out of a fixed price there's no point to doing it, if you're going to make the same money as the fixed price there may be no point in doing it depending on what your objectives are.

Patrick: Right.

帕特里克：对。

Kevin: All things being equal your goal here is to make more money out of this business model than you would out of a fixed price, and so how are you going to do that? It seems to me that publicity comes into this a bit and the novelty of this model, and that to me has a limited shelf life; the idea here that by adopting this model you’re going to make a lot of news headlines, people will go, oh my gosh, you can get it for free, oh, you get to pick your own price! And it generates this whole other halo of publicity around the thing that you’re selling that has nothing to do with the thing that you’re selling but attracts more eyeballs, more attention than your competitor next door that’s just selling the thing for $19.95. I don’t know how long that’s gonna last, and the more people do this the less the shine is off this model and the more people go “Oh boy another package of stuff that they couldn’t sell at a fair price so they’re trying to give it away at whatever price they can get for it.”

Kevin: All things being equal your goal here is to make more money out of this business model than you would out of a fixed price, and so how are you going to do that? It seems to me that publicity comes into this a bit and the novelty of this model, and that to me has a limited shelf life; the idea here that by adopting this model you're going to make a lot of news headlines, people will go, oh my gosh, you can get it for free, oh, you get to pick your own price! And it generates this whole other halo of publicity around the thing that you're selling that has nothing to do with the thing that you're selling but attracts more eyeballs, more attention than your competitor next door that's just selling the thing for $19.95. I don't know how long that's gonna last, and the more people do this the less the shine is off this model and the more people go “Oh boy another package of stuff that they couldn't sell at a fair price so they're trying to give it away at whatever price they can get for it.”

Stephan: Well, couldn’t you do this pay what you want for a little while and then switch it up and say, okay, now here’s the set price, like maybe average out what people are paying and say it averages to 20 bucks.

Stephan: Well, couldn't you do this pay what you want for a little while and then switch it up and say, okay, now here's the set price, like maybe average out what people are paying and say it averages to 20 bucks.

Kevin: So use it as a research tool you’re saying.

Kevin: So use it as a research tool you're saying.

Stephan: Exactly, yeah.

Stephan: Exactly, yeah.

Kevin: It’s interesting, one of the posts in the Slashdot thread cites some stats form the Humble Indie Bundle’s results, they said their average purchase price for this bundle of games that they were selling, Indie Games, this bundle of games worked across Windows, Mac and Linux, and so they were able to show after a significant period of purchasing that the average purchase price for this bundle was $7.77. The average purchase price for a Windows user, however, was only $6.64 whereas Mac users paid more than the average at $9.06, and Linux users were the extreme case, they paid $13.78 on average.

Kevin: It's interesting, one of the posts in the Slashdot thread cites some stats form the Humble Indie Bundle's results, they said their average purchase price for this bundle of games that they were selling, Indie Games, this bundle of games worked across Windows, Mac and Linux, and so they were able to show after a significant period of purchasing that the average purchase price for this bundle was $7.77. The average purchase price for a Windows user, however, was only $6.64 whereas Mac users paid more than the average at $9.06, and Linux users were the extreme case, they paid $13.78 on average.

Stephan: That’s a conundrum.

Stephan: That's a conundrum.

Brad: Yeah, really.

Brad: Yeah, really.

Kevin: Well, yeah, to me this kind of reflects the supply side of the supply and demand curve; if you’ll go with me for a minute and we treat these games as commodities, it doesn’t matter what they are, but Windows has a ton of games out for it, and a lot of them you can download for free, whatever, Mac has less variety, less selection, so the fact that these games are being put out there for that platform the Mac users are going, “Oh, how nice of them to make their game Mac compatible, I’ll pay them in this case almost three dollars more on average.” Linux users, see this is what led me down this train of thought, the fact that the Linux users are willing to pay $13.78 a pop on average tells me that Linux users were so happy to have games for their platform they were willing to pay more than twice as much than the average Windows user for the pack. So it is kind of a research tool I suppose, you can see the values that these different sub markets placed on this, and then you can go oh, well, you know, I’m going to sell the Windows version of my game for this, the Mac version of the game for this and the Linux version of the game for this.

Kevin: Well, yeah, to me this kind of reflects the supply side of the supply and demand curve; if you'll go with me for a minute and we treat these games as commodities, it doesn't matter what they are, but Windows has a ton of games out for it, and a lot of them you can download for free, whatever, Mac has less variety, less selection, so the fact that these games are being put out there for that platform the Mac users are going, “Oh, how nice of them to make their game Mac compatible, I'll pay them in this case almost three dollars more on average.” Linux users, see this is what led me down this train of thought, the fact that the Linux users are willing to pay $13.78 a pop on average tells me that Linux users were so happy to have games for their platform they were willing to pay more than twice as much than the average Windows user for the pack. So it is kind of a research tool I suppose, you can see the values that these different sub markets placed on this, and then you can go oh, well, you know, I'm going to sell the Windows version of my game for this, the Mac version of the game for this and the Linux version of the game for this.

Stephan: I actually think your reasoning for why the Linux folks paid more is off maybe.

Stephan: I actually think your reasoning for why the Linux folks paid more is off maybe.

Kevin: Really?

Kevin: Really?

Stephan: Yeah, I think it has to do with who uses Linux and the geekdom that’s out there.

Stephan: Yeah, I think it has to do with who uses Linux and the geekdom that's out there.

Kevin: You think they have more money to spend.

Kevin: You think they have more money to spend.

Stephan: No, I think they appreciate what software developers do and game developers do and they’re willing to pay a little bit more.

Stephan: No, I think they appreciate what software developers do and game developers do and they're willing to pay a little bit more.

Kevin: That’s a really good point.

Kevin: That's a really good point.

Stephan: And I’d even say that maybe the Mac folks feel the same way a little bit.

Stephan: And I'd even say that maybe the Mac folks feel the same way a little bit.

Kevin: Mmm, yeah! I can see that, that’s where the developers are.

Kevin: Mmm, yeah! I can see that, that's where the developers are.

Patrick: Just to put it into context too is Windows users accounted for more than what Mac and Lenox users combined as far as total payments per platform, so obviously probably more people will drive down that average I would think, just a guess, but Mac and Linux had about the same number of payments, which I don’t know what that says for Mac actually now that I think about it that Mac users had the same amount of payments as Linux users would, that seems a little strange to me but maybe that’s just me.

Patrick: Just to put it into context too is Windows users accounted for more than what Mac and Lenox users combined as far as total payments per platform, so obviously probably more people will drive down that average I would think, just a guess, but Mac and Linux had about the same number of payments, which I don't know what that says for Mac actually now that I think about it that Mac users had the same amount of payments as Linux users would, that seems a little strange to me but maybe that's just me.

Kevin: So, bringing this back to the Web, there’s a web service that we have mentioned a few times in this podcast, I know Stephan you’re a big fan of Instapaper and the developer of Instapaper last year made the quite unexpected move of allowing people to pay for his service. This free service, this completely free service, he offered a pay option and, Stephan, did you see this story?

Kevin: So, bringing this back to the Web, there's a web service that we have mentioned a few times in this podcast, I know Stephan you're a big fan of Instapaper and the developer of Instapaper last year made the quite unexpected move of allowing people to pay for his service. This free service, this completely free service, he offered a pay option and, Stephan, did you see this story?

Stephan: I haven’t seen it, was it posted today?

Stephan: I haven't seen it, was it posted today?

Kevin: No, no, no, it was in the middle of last; well, in the past few months he made this change.

Kevin: No, no, no, it was in the middle of last; well, in the past few months he made this change.

Stephan: I remember him saying he was going to allow people to pay for it.

Stephan: I remember him saying he was going to allow people to pay for it.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, can you guess what extra features you got for paying?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, can you guess what extra features you got for paying?

Stephan: I’d say like an email or something a day or something.

Stephan: I'd say like an email or something a day or something.

Kevin: Yeah, you’d expect something like that, but in fact you get nothing extra for paying. You get a premium account that no one sees because it’s not a social sharing sort of service, but in fact aside from the happy glow it gives you to have supported this service that you use, you get nothing. He said he did it in response to some people who wanted to give him some money for the service, and he said sure, you want to give me some money I’ll write the web pages that lets you give me some money, but he did nothing else, and he made it — oh, I wish I had the figures right in front of me, but he made no small amount of money. He quit his day job with Tumblr to work on this thing full time if that gives you some idea. So, this to me is an extreme case of this pay what you want pricing model that he basically gives away the service, the default price is free, and this is more like the donation model that we discussed before.

Kevin: Yeah, you'd expect something like that, but in fact you get nothing extra for paying. You get a premium account that no one sees because it's not a social sharing sort of service, but in fact aside from the happy glow it gives you to have supported this service that you use, you get nothing. He said he did it in response to some people who wanted to give him some money for the service, and he said sure, you want to give me some money I'll write the web pages that lets you give me some money, but he did nothing else, and he made it — oh, I wish I had the figures right in front of me, but he made no small amount of money. He quit his day job with Tumblr to work on this thing full time if that gives you some idea. So, this to me is an extreme case of this pay what you want pricing model that he basically gives away the service, the default price is free, and this is more like the donation model that we discussed before.

Before I was saying that all things being equal your goal of trying a different business model like this should be to make more money, but maybe it isn’t always, maybe if you can make the same amount of money the fact that a lot of extra people will be able to use your service, buy your product, listen to your music, whatever it may be for free, maybe that is a benefit in itself that it generates free publicity for your product that all these people who go, ah, it’s nice enough that I’ll use it, that I’ll try it, that I’ll maybe even recommend it, but it’s not worth paying for to me. Those people are worth capturing and that’s maybe the secret weapon of this business model that it gives you that activist, that free publicity element to your market that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

Before I was saying that all things being equal your goal of trying a different business model like this should be to make more money, but maybe it isn't always, maybe if you can make the same amount of money the fact that a lot of extra people will be able to use your service, buy your product, listen to your music, whatever it may be for free, maybe that is a benefit in itself that it generates free publicity for your product that all these people who go, ah, it's nice enough that I'll use it, that I'll try it, that I'll maybe even recommend it, but it's not worth paying for to me. Those people are worth capturing and that's maybe the secret weapon of this business model that it gives you that activist, that free publicity element to your market that you wouldn't get otherwise.

Anyway, it’s fascinating to me, I wonder if SitePoint might have the guts to try a pay what you want eBook or something like that sometime in 2011. Hmm.

Anyway, it's fascinating to me, I wonder if SitePoint might have the guts to try a pay what you want eBook or something like that sometime in 2011. Hmm.

The last story on our list here is something that we’ve discussed before but it’s come back into the spotlight, and it is this idea that RSS is dying, and we have an essay by this fellow named Kroc Camen, I hope I’m pronouncing his name right, Kroc Camen, his blog post says, RSS is dying, actually strike that out, not dying, RSS is being ignored and you should be very worried. The interesting point he makes here if we can just skip over the whole is RSS dying or not for a second, we’ll come back to that, but the interesting point that made me read this was the point that he makes is that RSS is one of the few ways left for us to read stuff online without that fact being public. So if you want to subscribe to something on Facebook you’ve got to Like it, Facebook knows it, the site knows it, its advertisers get their cookies in your browser history, all this stuff happens. Similarly if you want to follow something on Twitter your following of that becomes a matter of public record more or less. What RSS lets you do, just like going and visiting a site from your bookmarks, it’s this technology that makes it convenient to follow things in an anonymous way or in a private way, that you can follow a site like SitePoint and not necessarily let anyone know that you are a SitePoint reader, a SitePoint fan, a SitePoint potential customer. He is afraid that if RSS goes, at least as a mainstream technology, a end-user technology, if it goes away that’s the important thing and it’s going to be lost—the ability to read stuff privately.

The last story on our list here is something that we've discussed before but it's come back into the spotlight, and it is this idea that RSS is dying, and we have an essay by this fellow named Kroc Camen, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, Kroc Camen, his blog post says, RSS is dying, actually strike that out, not dying, RSS is being ignored and you should be very worried. The interesting point he makes here if we can just skip over the whole is RSS dying or not for a second, we'll come back to that, but the interesting point that made me read this was the point that he makes is that RSS is one of the few ways left for us to read stuff online without that fact being public. So if you want to subscribe to something on Facebook you've got to Like it, Facebook knows it, the site knows it, its advertisers get their cookies in your browser history, all this stuff happens. Similarly if you want to follow something on Twitter your following of that becomes a matter of public record more or less. What RSS lets you do, just like going and visiting a site from your bookmarks, it's this technology that makes it convenient to follow things in an anonymous way or in a private way, that you can follow a site like SitePoint and not necessarily let anyone know that you are a SitePoint reader, a SitePoint fan, a SitePoint potential customer. He is afraid that if RSS goes, at least as a mainstream technology, a end-user technology, if it goes away that's the important thing and it's going to be lost—the ability to read stuff privately.

Patrick: I have a couple of problems with this post. Well written, interesting read, but, you know, firstly I think it’s not Mozilla’s job to promote RSS, I don’t think it’s any browser makers job to promote RSS. I think that RSS itself is not going away by any means, it’s a mechanism for delivering updates, and I think that in itself allows it to be used in any number of concepts, and it is used, it’s used on Twitter, it’s used on Facebook, it’s used in browsers, it’s used on websites, it’s used all around the Web, it’s used on every device. So it’s not going anywhere it’s just the simple behind the scenes sort of thing, and I think that is its strength and that’s where it should go. I think the idea of RSS itself is unimportant; RSS the term, the icon, the button, the whole RSS thing is unimportant and doesn’t need to be known by the most people. I think maybe browser makers, and someone from Mozilla posted a nice rebuttal that included in the message I thought, maybe they need to make it as just a subscription option and maybe that’s how websites need to look at it, subscribe, you know, and it needs to be an easier better way of doing that perhaps, but RSS itself, I don’t know, I’m not all that concerned with, again, I don’t think it’s going anywhere, and again I don’t really view it as, I don’t know, the browser makers and it’s their job to promote this. It’s a feature that you can promote on your website and embed and if people want that they’ll use a tool that allows them to get it. I don’t know if the mainstream culture needs to be bashed over the head with RSS.

Patrick: I have a couple of problems with this post. Well written, interesting read, but, you know, firstly I think it's not Mozilla's job to promote RSS, I don't think it's any browser makers job to promote RSS. I think that RSS itself is not going away by any means, it's a mechanism for delivering updates, and I think that in itself allows it to be used in any number of concepts, and it is used, it's used on Twitter, it's used on Facebook, it's used in browsers, it's used on websites, it's used all around the Web, it's used on every device. So it's not going anywhere it's just the simple behind the scenes sort of thing, and I think that is its strength and that's where it should go. I think the idea of RSS itself is unimportant; RSS the term, the icon, the button, the whole RSS thing is unimportant and doesn't need to be known by the most people. I think maybe browser makers, and someone from Mozilla posted a nice rebuttal that included in the message I thought, maybe they need to make it as just a subscription option and maybe that's how websites need to look at it, subscribe, you know, and it needs to be an easier better way of doing that perhaps, but RSS itself, I don't know, I'm not all that concerned with, again, I don't think it's going anywhere, and again I don't really view it as, I don't know, the browser makers and it's their job to promote this. It's a feature that you can promote on your website and embed and if people want that they'll use a tool that allows them to get it. I don't know if the mainstream culture needs to be bashed over the head with RSS.

Stephan: I think the argument of it dying, RSS dying, and us losing privacy is a non sequitur, I don’t buy it.

Stephan: I think the argument of it dying, RSS dying, and us losing privacy is a non sequitur, I don't buy it.

I can read stuff on Facebook without subscribing to it, right. So, if RSS goes away, and the other thing is, too, is RSS necessarily doesn’t give you privacy when you’re doing something on Facebook either, right, because you can’t — is there a way to do an RSS feed of a fan page, of a page you like? Things like that I don’t really think that’s a valid argument, I don’t think people are going out and using RSS because they want to stay quiet and be private, I think people use RSS because it’s an easy way to get updates, like Patrick said. That’s the reason I use it, that’s the reason that most of my readers on my blog are RSS readers, not necessarily visitors to the website, and I’m fine with that.

I can read stuff on Facebook without subscribing to it, right. So, if RSS goes away, and the other thing is, too, is RSS necessarily doesn't give you privacy when you're doing something on Facebook either, right, because you can't — is there a way to do an RSS feed of a fan page, of a page you like? Things like that I don't really think that's a valid argument, I don't think people are going out and using RSS because they want to stay quiet and be private, I think people use RSS because it's an easy way to get updates, like Patrick said. That's the reason I use it, that's the reason that most of my readers on my blog are RSS readers, not necessarily visitors to the website, and I'm fine with that.

Patrick: And also— You can have an RSS feed for a Facebook fan page, I just looked I up, just kind of a factoid.

Patrick: And also— You can have an RSS feed for a Facebook fan page, I just looked I up, just kind of a factoid.

Stephan: You can?

Stephan: You can?

Patrick: You can, yeah, I went to facebook.com/sitepoint for SitePoint’s Facebook page and there is an RSS feed available for the updates. But I think you make an interesting point about the privacy issue, and for me I read some of this and I find that it’s kind of at odds with itself at some point, this piece, because I think, and here’s like a quote here, “If RSS isn’t saved now,” and then there’s a portion in there that I removed and then “basically if it’s not saved I will have to have a Facebook account or a Twitter account or some such corporate control identity where I have to like or follow every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then I have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with the corporate owned entity owning a list of every website I’m interested in and wanting to monetize it, and every website I’m interested in knowing every other website I’m interested in following. And I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity everyday in order to find out what’s new on the websites, whilst I’m advertised to.” And then of course he continues with “We lose the ability from one website we read to not know what other websites we read.” But then he says that “If RSS dies we lose the ability for a website operator to be in control of what he or she advertises, rather than being at the behest of Facebook, Twitter and Google.” And I think that you maybe cannot have it every way, I don’t know if you can have it where, okay, no one knows what I visit and I can just read things within my RSS reader and also want to support people, website publishers with advertisements; it’s kind of a hand-in-hand thing at this point. Yes, RSS ads exist, but by their very nature, yes there is some tracking in there of those ads and what you’re viewing and what you’re doing, and it’s just a part of online advertising, and some may view it as evil, I don’t, but again, I think it’s kind of a conflicting message.

Patrick: You can, yeah, I went to facebook.com/sitepoint for SitePoint's Facebook page and there is an RSS feed available for the updates. But I think you make an interesting point about the privacy issue, and for me I read some of this and I find that it's kind of at odds with itself at some point, this piece, because I think, and here's like a quote here, “If RSS isn't saved now,” and then there's a portion in there that I removed and then “basically if it's not saved I will have to have a Facebook account or a Twitter account or some such corporate control identity where I have to like or follow every website's partner account that I'm interested in, and then I have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with the corporate owned entity owning a list of every website I'm interested in and wanting to monetize it, and every website I'm interested in knowing every other website I'm interested in following. And I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity everyday in order to find out what's new on the websites, whilst I'm advertised to.” And then of course he continues with “We lose the ability from one website we read to not know what other websites we read.” But then he says that “If RSS dies we lose the ability for a website operator to be in control of what he or she advertises, rather than being at the behest of Facebook, Twitter and Google.” And I think that you maybe cannot have it every way, I don't know if you can have it where, okay, no one knows what I visit and I can just read things within my RSS reader and also want to support people, website publishers with advertisements; it's kind of a hand-in-hand thing at this point. Yes, RSS ads exist, but by their very nature, yes there is some tracking in there of those ads and what you're viewing and what you're doing, and it's just a part of online advertising, and some may view it as evil, I don't, but again, I think it's kind of a conflicting message.

Stephan: Well, no, I don’t think RSS should— I agree with the general point that RSS shouldn’t die, like we need it, right. Do you read blogs online, Patrick, or do you visit a website every time that you read a blog? Or do you read a feed reader, right?

Stephan: Well, no, I don't think RSS should— I agree with the general point that RSS shouldn't die, like we need it, right. Do you read blogs online, Patrick, or do you visit a website every time that you read a blog? Or do you read a feed reader, right?

Patrick: For the most part I read a feed reader when I do use it, and I haven’t been in for a couple months which is pretty bad, but proceed.

Patrick: For the most part I read a feed reader when I do use it, and I haven't been in for a couple months which is pretty bad, but proceed.

Stephan: So, you know what I mean, like if it dies then it goes away which to me is a huge negative because that’s how I can consume a lot of content, and for me to consume content any other way actually would be very time consuming. So in that regard I hope it doesn’t die but I don’t think his arguments are valid.

Stephan: So, you know what I mean, like if it dies then it goes away which to me is a huge negative because that's how I can consume a lot of content, and for me to consume content any other way actually would be very time consuming. So in that regard I hope it doesn't die but I don't think his arguments are valid.

Brad: It’s not going anywhere, I don’t think it can go anywhere at least until there’s a suitable replacement, because you’re right, it’s too much of an integral part of how websites work today and how content’s read. Another aspect that isn’t really touched on in this article that I use quite a bit with RSS is to aggregate that content or that data into different systems, because right out of the box almost every major CMS out there has RSS support, so I can instantly grab that feed and pull that data and pull into any system I need to. So it’s a great way outside of setting up some kind of XML or some kind of custom feed like that to pull that data, so there are a lot of different uses for RSS other than just feed readers to keep track of the news.

Brad: It's not going anywhere, I don't think it can go anywhere at least until there's a suitable replacement, because you're right, it's too much of an integral part of how websites work today and how content's read. Another aspect that isn't really touched on in this article that I use quite a bit with RSS is to aggregate that content or that data into different systems, because right out of the box almost every major CMS out there has RSS support, so I can instantly grab that feed and pull that data and pull into any system I need to. So it's a great way outside of setting up some kind of XML or some kind of custom feed like that to pull that data, so there are a lot of different uses for RSS other than just feed readers to keep track of the news.

Patrick: One thing we should remember I think is that the growth of RSS wasn’t by browsers, I don’t think, I think RSS was this tool that people could use to stay up to date with websites, and then they used tools that could handle that RSS feed and then that’s how RSS grew, it wasn’t IE or Firefox that stimulated the growth and adoption of RSS, it was the tool being useful and helpful and then other tools integrating that and users who wanted that using them.

Patrick: One thing we should remember I think is that the growth of RSS wasn't by browsers, I don't think, I think RSS was this tool that people could use to stay up to date with websites, and then they used tools that could handle that RSS feed and then that's how RSS grew, it wasn't IE or Firefox that stimulated the growth and adoption of RSS, it was the tool being useful and helpful and then other tools integrating that and users who wanted that using them.

Kevin: I would agree definitely that it is not the role of any browser to, I don’t know, give people features that are good for them rather than the features that they want or to promote any particular technical or usability approach for the Web over another because it is better for people or for the Web in general necessarily. I think it’s useful here to focus the discussion that I don’t think RSS—or feed technology in general whether it’s RSS or Atom or any other standard—is going away anytime soon, it’s just a question of whether it is a user facing technology or as Yahoo! would call it, pipes, the technology behind the scenes that makes things go. I think feed technology will be making things go for a long time to come, but if Google Chrome is any indication feeds are not something that need to be exposed to users at this time because whereas what we’re arguing about or what the author of this post is arguing about here is whether or not the RSS or the feed icon that appears in the address bar of the browser when you visit a site with a feed on it should be hidden from the user or not or relegated to a Subscribe option in the Bookmarks menu, which is the case with Firefox 4. Chrome, however, has no support for feeds whatsoever, it has no icon that appears, it has no menu option; if you visit a URL for a feed the browser doesn’t even handle the feed, it simply has no support for feeds whatsoever. So it seems clear that even to Google, which is all about the pipes that make the Web work, doesn’t believe that feeds is something that should be a user facing technology at this time. I think if a browser figured out a way to make feeds work that users loved that they actually used then they would quickly do that and then the other browsers would quickly do their — make their own competing implementations of that; I don’t think we need to force the browsers to do it or I don’t think the browsers should be looking for a way to do it that aside from that motivation of market share that they already have.

Kevin: I would agree definitely that it is not the role of any browser to, I don't know, give people features that are good for them rather than the features that they want or to promote any particular technical or usability approach for the Web over another because it is better for people or for the Web in general necessarily. I think it's useful here to focus the discussion that I don't think RSS—or feed technology in general whether it's RSS or Atom or any other standard—is going away anytime soon, it's just a question of whether it is a user facing technology or as Yahoo! would call it, pipes, the technology behind the scenes that makes things go. I think feed technology will be making things go for a long time to come, but if Google Chrome is any indication feeds are not something that need to be exposed to users at this time because whereas what we're arguing about or what the author of this post is arguing about here is whether or not the RSS or the feed icon that appears in the address bar of the browser when you visit a site with a feed on it should be hidden from the user or not or relegated to a Subscribe option in the Bookmarks menu, which is the case with Firefox 4. Chrome, however, has no support for feeds whatsoever, it has no icon that appears, it has no menu option; if you visit a URL for a feed the browser doesn't even handle the feed, it simply has no support for feeds whatsoever. So it seems clear that even to Google, which is all about the pipes that make the Web work, doesn't believe that feeds is something that should be a user facing technology at this time. I think if a browser figured out a way to make feeds work that users loved that they actually used then they would quickly do that and then the other browsers would quickly do their — make their own competing implementations of that; I don't think we need to force the browsers to do it or I don't think the browsers should be looking for a way to do it that aside from that motivation of market share that they already have.

Stephan: I’m sure we’ll see an ‘Add to Google Reader’ setting in Chrome soon enough.

Stephan: I'm sure we'll see an 'Add to Google Reader' setting in Chrome soon enough.

Kevin: Oh, well you know there’s bookmarklets for all that sort of stuff, but I think the author of the FeedDemon feed reader for Windows, I was reading his blog today and he was weighing in on this, I wish I knew his name off the top of my head, but he was saying that RSS at this point in history has basically failed as a mass market user facing technology, but, all of the people who are writing for the major blogs, who are podcasters like us, they are the people who are using RSS as a user facing technology, and those people are well served, they’re generally tech savvy—thank you Patrick, Nick Bradbury, Patrick just looked up his name there, Nick Bradbury’s blog has this. He’s saying, look, as much as he would’ve liked his product, FeedDemon, to have become a huge hundreds of millions of copies selling piece of software, at this point he’s resigned that the market for feed readers is really a few million people, and those people they are the publishers, they’re the information addicts of the world who want to be able to subscribe to dozens or even hundreds of sites in a convenient way, in an anonymous way in some cases, and for those people RSS is a user facing technology whether there is an icon visible by default in your browser of choice or not.

Kevin: Oh, well you know there's bookmarklets for all that sort of stuff, but I think the author of the FeedDemon feed reader for Windows, I was reading his blog today and he was weighing in on this , I wish I knew his name off the top of my head, but he was saying that RSS at this point in history has basically failed as a mass market user facing technology, but, all of the people who are writing for the major blogs, who are podcasters like us, they are the people who are using RSS as a user facing technology, and those people are well served, they're generally tech savvy—thank you Patrick, Nick Bradbury, Patrick just looked up his name there, Nick Bradbury's blog has this . He's saying, look, as much as he would've liked his product, FeedDemon, to have become a huge hundreds of millions of copies selling piece of software, at this point he's resigned that the market for feed readers is really a few million people, and those people they are the publishers, they're the information addicts of the world who want to be able to subscribe to dozens or even hundreds of sites in a convenient way, in an anonymous way in some cases, and for those people RSS is a user facing technology whether there is an icon visible by default in your browser of choice or not.

Patrick: And just to kind of sum up my feelings, I don’t think a web browser either way has a say in whether or not RSS lives or dies. I think either way it’ll be okay, it’ll be something that people use, the technical people who use these applications and want to be updated in this way will use it whether or not all browsers support it or they all rip out support tomorrow, and I doubt that’s going to happen.

Patrick: And just to kind of sum up my feelings, I don't think a web browser either way has a say in whether or not RSS lives or dies. I think either way it'll be okay, it'll be something that people use, the technical people who use these applications and want to be updated in this way will use it whether or not all browsers support it or they all rip out support tomorrow, and I doubt that's going to happen.

Kevin: Alright, this is going long, guys; we need to rip through our host spotlights here. Let’s take a look at the things that pressed our buttons this week. Stephan, what have you got?

Kevin: Alright, this is going long, guys; we need to rip through our host spotlights here. Let's take a look at the things that pressed our buttons this week. Stephan, what have you got?

Stephan: So I have a tutorial that goes through I think you say to SpyreStudios and it’s the Brilliante Blog Layout, and it’s just a tutorial that this guy goes through how he took a PSD and turned it into HTML and CSS, and I just think it’s interesting; since I’m not a designer I think it’s interesting how his process works and stuff. It’s a good read, fairly detailed with screenshots and code and it’s well written so take a look.

Stephan: So I have a tutorial that goes through I think you say to SpyreStudios and it's the Brilliante Blog Layout, and it's just a tutorial that this guy goes through how he took a PSD and turned it into HTML and CSS, and I just think it's interesting; since I'm not a designer I think it's interesting how his process works and stuff. It's a good read, fairly detailed with screenshots and code and it's well written so take a look.

Kevin: Always great to get a glimpse into people’s workflows, especially in something like CSS layout that is still — it feels like every web designer has their own way of doing it, and yeah, it’s great to be exposed to other people’s ways of doing things. Brad?

Kevin: Always great to get a glimpse into people's workflows, especially in something like CSS layout that is still — it feels like every web designer has their own way of doing it, and yeah, it's great to be exposed to other people's ways of doing things. Brad?

Brad: Yeah, my host spotlight this week is WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 2 which just came out on January 1st, so it’s WordPress 3.1 is right around the corner and it might be this week, it might be next week, but it’s soon, but the Release Candidate 2 is obviously pretty stable, you can certainly start playing around and testing it and you can see all the new features that are included in it, a couple of the features real quick: post formats, so basically you can have a post format for like quotes, and then if you switch your theme and they support quotes then it’ll still look good in that theme, so kind of some cool stuff there. Internal linking so you can easily find old posts and pages that you’ve made and linked to when you’re writing new content, there’s a new admin bar that makes it much easier when you’re on the front-end of WordPress and kind of manage your website, and then a bunch of more kind of techie things, but we’ll have a link in the show notes so you can see all the new features, but play around with it, it’s pretty fun.

Brad: Yeah, my host spotlight this week is WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 2 which just came out on January 1st, so it's WordPress 3.1 is right around the corner and it might be this week, it might be next week, but it's soon, but the Release Candidate 2 is obviously pretty stable, you can certainly start playing around and testing it and you can see all the new features that are included in it, a couple of the features real quick: post formats, so basically you can have a post format for like quotes, and then if you switch your theme and they support quotes then it'll still look good in that theme, so kind of some cool stuff there. Internal linking so you can easily find old posts and pages that you've made and linked to when you're writing new content, there's a new admin bar that makes it much easier when you're on the front-end of WordPress and kind of manage your website, and then a bunch of more kind of techie things, but we'll have a link in the show notes so you can see all the new features, but play around with it, it's pretty fun.

Kevin: Really nice. And if you don’t have time to update to a major release like 3.1 at least you should be definitely making sure your WordPress 3.0 is up to date at the moment, right Brad?

Kevin: Really nice. And if you don't have time to update to a major release like 3.1 at least you should be definitely making sure your WordPress 3.0 is up to date at the moment, right Brad?

Brad: Yes. Actually 3.0.4 just came out, and just a quick note, the small incremental updates are usually just bugs and security patches, the last couple have been security patches, they don’t introduce new features so the likelihood of them breaking your site are very, very slim, so that’s usually a very smooth upgrade.

Brad: Yes. Actually 3.0.4 just came out, and just a quick note, the small incremental updates are usually just bugs and security patches, the last couple have been security patches, they don't introduce new features so the likelihood of them breaking your site are very, very slim, so that's usually a very smooth upgrade.

Kevin: Yeah, I read 3.0.4 especially was a fix to a rather nasty security bug, they said was highly critical.

Kevin: Yeah, I read 3.0.4 especially was a fix to a rather nasty security bug, they said was highly critical.

Brad: Yeah, so definitely get those sites updated.

Brad: Yeah, so definitely get those sites updated.

Kevin: My spotlight is a site called Nike Better World, and I did this because I know Patrick was so very impressed with the last site I picked that had special effects tied to scrolling that when I saw another one I just knew I had to have it as my spotlight. This is a site by Nike, the shoe maker, that is highlighting their various initiatives to make the world a better place through their green packaging and their Creative Commons licensing of their environmentally friendly rubber technology and all these sorts of things that they’re doing. Look, I’m as cynical as the next guy about a major corporation like Nike’s efforts to make the world a better place; at the end of the day, they are making stuff that ends up in landfills a lot of the time and they are just trying to get our money and bah humbug and so forth, but, they do put together a beautiful site about making the world a better place. And as you scroll down this, in a desktop browser at least, what we see is kind of a parallax effect that different elements in the background scroll at different rates and give this sort of pseudo-3D effect, it is really something nice to behold and when you get to the bottom it tells you how many pixels you have scrolled toward a better world.

Kevin: My spotlight is a site called Nike Better World , and I did this because I know Patrick was so very impressed with the last site I picked that had special effects tied to scrolling that when I saw another one I just knew I had to have it as my spotlight. This is a site by Nike, the shoe maker, that is highlighting their various initiatives to make the world a better place through their green packaging and their Creative Commons licensing of their environmentally friendly rubber technology and all these sorts of things that they're doing. Look, I'm as cynical as the next guy about a major corporation like Nike's efforts to make the world a better place; at the end of the day, they are making stuff that ends up in landfills a lot of the time and they are just trying to get our money and bah humbug and so forth, but, they do put together a beautiful site about making the world a better place. And as you scroll down this, in a desktop browser at least, what we see is kind of a parallax effect that different elements in the background scroll at different rates and give this sort of pseudo-3D effect, it is really something nice to behold and when you get to the bottom it tells you how many pixels you have scrolled toward a better world.

Look, (laughs) beautiful site, very inspiring whether you believe the message or not. Patrick what have you got?

Look, (laughs) beautiful site, very inspiring whether you believe the message or not. Patrick what have you got?

Patrick: My spotlight is a service that appears to be coming into its own over the past three weeks or month or so, it’s called Quora, and according to its About page it’s a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by everyone who uses it. And if you’ve been on the service already you probably have noticed some followers, like I said in the past few weeks, just because the service has really grown recently. It launched in private beta in January of 2010 and so it’s been around for a little while, but after lingering for a while it’s really picking up activity-wise, and it’s kind of a cool site, it’s very simple, very straightforward, it’s questions and answers, emphasis is on quality, on being detailed, in general those are the answers that rise to the top, there’s a lot of early adopters there, you know, one of the early people at Facebook is there to answer a question about how he felt being portrayed in the Facebook movie, for example, and you have Steve Case who co-founded AOL, and you have Evan Williams from Twitter, and just a lot of different people there answering questions and participating in the community which at this rate is not that large, so it’s not that easy to get lost in kind of like Twitter was when it first started one might say. Brad has an account, Kevin has an account, I have an account and Stephan is the only holdout among us but if it sounds like your thing you should check it out at quora.com.

Patrick: My spotlight is a service that appears to be coming into its own over the past three weeks or month or so, it's called Quora , and according to its About page it's a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by everyone who uses it. And if you've been on the service already you probably have noticed some followers, like I said in the past few weeks, just because the service has really grown recently. It launched in private beta in January of 2010 and so it's been around for a little while, but after lingering for a while it's really picking up activity-wise, and it's kind of a cool site, it's very simple, very straightforward, it's questions and answers, emphasis is on quality, on being detailed, in general those are the answers that rise to the top, there's a lot of early adopters there, you know, one of the early people at Facebook is there to answer a question about how he felt being portrayed in the Facebook movie, for example, and you have Steve Case who co-founded AOL, and you have Evan Williams from Twitter, and just a lot of different people there answering questions and participating in the community which at this rate is not that large, so it's not that easy to get lost in kind of like Twitter was when it first started one might say. Brad has an account, Kevin has an account, I have an account and Stephan is the only holdout among us but if it sounds like your thing you should check it out at quora.com.

Kevin: Yeah, it does feel like it’s got some momentum going for it at the moment and it stands a chance at being the breakout web 2.0—if we’re still calling them that—service of 2011.

Kevin: Yeah, it does feel like it's got some momentum going for it at the moment and it stands a chance at being the breakout web 2.0—if we're still calling them that—service of 2011.

Patrick: Right. It was co-founded by a couple of the Facebook guys so they know a little bit about being the breakout 2.0 you could say, the former CTO Adam DeAngelo is a co-founder as well as a former engineer and manager at Facebook, so they quit Facebook to start this service, quite a leap.

帕特里克：对。 It was co-founded by a couple of the Facebook guys so they know a little bit about being the breakout 2.0 you could say, the former CTO Adam DeAngelo is a co-founder as well as a former engineer and manager at Facebook, so they quit Facebook to start this service, quite a leap.

Kevin: So far I see a lot of questions, like I typed in a few questions that I had and a lot of the questions that I typed in were already in there, there weren’t many answers for them yet, so I’m not sure if this service actually works or if its just being driven by a lot of hype and is getting a critical mass of users at this point. I’m looking forward to seeing how it changes in 2011.

Kevin: So far I see a lot of questions, like I typed in a few questions that I had and a lot of the questions that I typed in were already in there, there weren't many answers for them yet, so I'm not sure if this service actually works or if its just being driven by a lot of hype and is getting a critical mass of users at this point. I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes in 2011.

And that is it for the show this week, first of 2011, good one guys, it feels like we gave them a show and a half which makes up for the week off we had last week. Our hosts as usual are Brad, Patrick, and Stephan, guys tell them who you are and where you are.

And that is it for the show this week, first of 2011, good one guys, it feels like we gave them a show and a half which makes up for the week off we had last week. Our hosts as usual are Brad, Patrick, and Stephan, guys tell them who you are and where you are.

Brad: I’m Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and check out our new design; we did a 70-hour marathon redesign on our site, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Brad: I'm Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and check out our new design; we did a 70-hour marathon redesign on our site, so I'm pretty excited about it.

Kevin: Oooh! I’m changing my spotlight!

Kevin: Oooh! I'm changing my spotlight!

Patrick: I thought about that myself, actually, but I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, I blog at managingcommunities.com, on Twitter @ifroggy.

Patrick: I thought about that myself, actually, but I am Patrick O'Keefe of the iFroggy Network, I blog at managingcommunities.com , on Twitter @ifroggy .

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and I blog at badice.com.

斯蒂芬(Stephan)：我是斯蒂芬·塞格雷夫斯(Stephan Segraves)，您可以在Twitter @ssegraves上找到我，我的博客位于badice.com 。

Kevin: You can follow me on Twitter at Sentience and follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom, visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank, thanks for listening, bye, bye.

Kevin: You can follow me on Twitter at Sentience and follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom , visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I'm Kevin Yank, thanks for listening, bye, bye.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Theme music by Mike Mella .

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we're doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-94-appy-new-year/