{"id":337,"date":"2007-01-31T21:36:19","date_gmt":"2007-02-01T02:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/2007\/01\/31\/sociable-20-plugin-release-interview-peter-harkins\/"},"modified":"2016-06-18T18:36:48","modified_gmt":"2016-06-18T23:36:48","slug":"sociable-20-plugin-release-interview-peter-harkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/2007\/01\/31\/sociable-20-plugin-release-interview-peter-harkins\/","title":{"rendered":"Sociable 2.0 Plugin Release Interview: Peter Harkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please bookmark as “Sociable 2.0 Interview” – Thanks!<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first met Peter Harkins<\/a> in person at Barcamp Chicago in the Summer of 2006<\/a>. As I\u2019ve gotten to know him, he knows far more than just coding, as he appreciates and participates constructively in conversations about business strategy<\/a> and monetization. It\u2019s a winning combination.
\n
\nThe response has been incredible to the Sociable plugin, so you\u2019ve been slammed with inquiries\u2026 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: I\u2019ve gotten dozens of mails about Sociable in the last week, from sites wanting to be included, users testing it out in unusual situations and last-minute feature requests. I\u2019ve promised to get 2.0 out by Midnight February 1, so it\u2019s been a race to the wire to get in new features.<\/p>\n

Peter: I\u2019ve added 26 sites at last count in this version. Just this morning a Hungarian programmer sent me at least a few more, so I may have as many as 60 sites in the next version.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve add new language translations with this version, that is exciting\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: Yes. It looks like this version will have support for Spanish, Czech, Italian, German and French with more to come. Before 2.0, interested users were just picking it up, translating it, and offering it for download on their blogs. It was a bit frustrating to track bug fixes between different branches of Sociable. Now we\u2019ll have a unified project to share resources and drive development faster, I want to have releases at least every other month in 2007.<\/p>\n

You keep the installation and interface pretty simple\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: Deliberately, so, yes. As a programmer, it\u2019s really easy to think of the UI as \u201cthat last bit I have to add so people can use my beautiful code\u201d instead of what it truly is: the most important part of the application. So I spent a lot of time making sure that you can install Sociable just by unzipping and uploading it, rather than try to provide complicated install instructions. I spent time on a feature most people never see: when you install Sociable, it checks a manifest of files to make sure it was uploaded right, and it tells you what files go where if it\u2019s not perfect. It provides help right when you need it most, and plainly enough that you understand it.<\/p>\n

Peter: The drag-and-drop in the admin interface is just a delight to use, and deliberately so. I want blog owners to feel safe playing around with the different options to see what works on their site. So I\u2019ve spent most of my time on making the UI really nice as well as fixing up the insides.<\/p>\n

So you also reprogrammed the internals of the Sociable application for future development and expansion beyond WordPress?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: I want to start porting Sociable over to work on other blog engines like TypePad, Movable Type, Mephisto, and more. So I\u2019ve cleaned up the internals of 2.0, laying the groundwork for 2.1 or 2.2 to support more engines. It\u2019s also going to start doing a little stat reporting when it checks for updates. I know there are roughly 10,000 blogs out there using it, but I\u2019d like to know more exactly and maybe cross-reference to traffic rating services to find out what kind of positive effect it has.<\/p>\n

You have an alert system for updating?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: Yes, Sociable checks for new versions when folks view the admin console and notifies the blog owner to go download it. Without it there\u2019d still be people using Sociable 1.2 in five years, hopefully with it everyone will be upgraded in a month or two.<\/p>\n

In the past you mentioned that there are three different types of users of Sociable\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: First up, there\u2019s beginning bloggers. They\u2019ve just started a blog, and they\u2019ve got stars in their eyes of being the next BoingBoing or something. Sociable is a tool they\u2019ll use to get the word out about their new blogs, and I\u2019m really glad to help out. As much trouble as some have had spelling \u201cSociable\u201d, it\u2019s been most rewarding to talk to them because they\u2019re new to blogging and are so happy to be able to easily drop in Sociable.<\/p>\n

Peter: Then there are the established bloggers. They\u2019ve got an audience and they want to start leveraging it. Sociable makes it easy for their audience to start getting the word out and growing the blog. I get most of my feature requests from this group, and they\u2019re the people who send me the code to add their favorite bookmarking site.<\/p>\n

Peter: I get a lot of links from the SEO crowd, who really put the word out about Sociable. They\u2019ve found Sociable to be a useful tool, so they turn around and install it for their clients. Oddly they\u2019re group I hear the least from, they almost never mail me. But they\u2019ll be the most unusual mails sometimes.<\/p>\n

So how are the SEO emails unusual?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: I\u2019ve gotten a really bizarre feature requests like – \u201cYou should make Sociable automatically submit each blog post to every bookmarking site! And then vote it up!\u201d – or other crazy schemes! It\u2019s frustrating, Sociable is a tool to help blog owners by reminding readers to bookmark good content. \u201cSociable should make other blogs using Sociable link to mine with the link text I fill in!\u201d Ugh! I should mention that this is a tiny minority of the SEO folks, I\u2019ve only gotten a half-dozen \u201cHelp me spam!\u201d mails.<\/p>\n

Sounds like we could monetize a Sociable SEO Pro version together?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: There are definitely a few customers waiting, but I\u2019ve got plenty of other projects ahead of it.<\/p>\n

Like what?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: I just recently launched NearbyGamers, a social site for tabletop gamers to find other folks to play card, board, and role-playing games with. It\u2019s been a real blast, but my to do list is as long as my arm so it\u2019s eating up my free time. And I\u2019ve been trying to keep updating my own blog with web coding tips but it\u2019s easy to slip out of the habit.<\/p>\n

Sociable has created great networking for you. What are some of the better stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: I ended up doing CrunchBoard for TechCrunch because I met a guy via a guy via a guy who used Sociable, and that was a real fun project.<\/p>\n

What are some of the underused or misunderstood features of the tool?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: One minor frustration has been writing CSS for Sociable that can deal with all the odd things different blog themes do. I\u2019ve had dozens of people mail me asking (sometimes quite forcefully) why Sociable doesn\u2019t look right on their blog, and so far none have thought it\u2019s their own site doing it.<\/p>\n

What else should the people know about Peter Harkins?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter: You should never ask him to sing anything\u2026<\/p>\n

Good luck with the release Peter!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please bookmark as “Sociable 2.0 Interview” – Thanks! I first met Peter Harkins in person at Barcamp Chicago in the Summer of 2006. As I\u2019ve gotten to know him, he knows far more than just coding, as he appreciates and participates constructively in conversations about business strategy and monetization. It\u2019s a winning combination. The response […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,12,13,16,24,20,7,26,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brandingbuzzviral","category-change-management","category-customer-experience","category-entrepreneurship","category-metrics","category-recruiting","category-reputation-management","category-social-media","category-wordpress"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daviddalka.com\/createvalue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}