What’s your overall strategy for transitioning from Think Vitamin Membership to Treehouse?

Writing Treehouse has been a bit trickier than a typical rebranding would be, just because so much of the underlying logic behind how the site works is changing as well. It’s a lot like writing a completely new app, but I’ve also got a ton of user data and other data, like video information, that has to transition with the app. Because of that, we decided against completely rewriting the app, but instead decided to rewrite chunks of it at a time and throw the old code away as we go. There are actually several things that are already rewritten and already in use, like video delivery.

Every app brings new challenges. What makes this app unique from others you’ve worked on in the past?

Probably the biggest unique factor is that we’ve got a lot of plans for the app that we’d love to be somewhat prepared for, so our strategy behind the app isn’t just focused on today, but it’s focused on how we plan to grow Treehouse. I’m usually against thinking too far ahead, but we saw with Think Vitamin Membership that getting too locked into strict rules about how our library is structured can be really limiting, so we’re changing that to build something that should be able to grow with us a bit more easily.

What’s the workflow like between you and Mike Kus?

I don’t know if there’s much of a set workflow between us. Mike and I work pretty well together, I would say, but the time zone difference makes it difficult for us to talk much. For the most part he’s been putting together HTML prototypes of the pages that we’re working on and then as I write the backed code for those pages I put the markup in place. As we get close to launch, though, I have a feeling we’ll have to deal with the time zone differences so that we can work more closely on cleanup and getting details perfect for launch.

Treehouse is being written using Ruby on Rails. What’s the reasoning behind this technology decision?

There wasn’t too much thinking behind it. Rails is just what we do when it comes to writing web apps. I’ve been a Rails developer for 5 years now (I did Java, .NET, and PHP development before that), and I can’t say that anything comes close to Ruby and Rails for me personally in terms of productivity and expressiveness.

That said, we’ve got some upcoming features that will benefit from the evented-ness of Node.js so we’ll be using it in the near future as well. We’re definitely not against using technologies other than Rails, but it has served our purposes really well thus far.

What other notable pieces of software are being used on the front-end and back-end, and why?

It’s mostly the normal stuff. On the front-end, Mike’s been creating his stylesheets with SASS. I’m using CoffeeScript for our front-end scripting and the wonderful MediaElement.js for our video playback. We’re using Modernizr. On the back-end there’s nothing too special going on. One of my major goals on almost any app that I work on is that the back-end is about as boring and reliable as it can possibly be. It’s hard to focus on overall experience if anything on the back-end is breaking, so I’m actually trying to strip away complexity and extra technologies on that side so that we can focus on having a nice, simple core to the app that will take us a long way into the future.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

As of this week I am CTO of PureCharity, a non-profit seeking to help people raise funds for projects and charitable causes they care about. Our technical team is a small group of Ruby on Rails developers building web and mobile platforms.

I’m a geek at my core and like to play wherever the user meets the machine. I love creating, so I straddle the line between developer and designer, but I’d consider myself a full-stack developer.

What open source projects do you work on? Which one are you spending the most time on these days?

I have an interest in (addiction to?) APIs and mashups so a lot of my time goes into creating and maintaining Ruby wrappers for popular APIs. I help maintain the Twitter Ruby Gem, and I created and now help maintain the Octokit wrapper for the GitHub API and the LinkedIn Gem for the LinkedIn API. Each of these projects uses Rick Olson’s excellent Faraday REST toolkit as well as Faraday Middleware, a project I created to bundle common patterns for API libraries to handle things like OAuth as well as JSON and XML parsing.

On the design side, I’m writing a book with Sass and Compass creators Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein so I’m creating more Compass plugins, such as Compass Formalize, which brings Nathan Smith’s excellent Formalize project easily into Compass.

Lately I’m hacking on Ti by Robert Evans (@revans), a Ruby gem that brings Rails-like generators, a command line tool chain, and a CoffeeScript framework to Titanium Mobile development.

What inspired you to work on Ti?

After building several mobile applications and refining approaches for building CoffeeScript, defining view factories, incorporating Sass, deploying beta builds, testing with Jasmine, and other techniques, we decided to bundle up our patterns for reuse and share with the community.

What plans do you have for Ti?

We’d love to see Xib support for Ti. I’m hopeful we can incorporate something like Xib2js to let developers lay out their Titanium views using Apple’s Interface Builder and have them compiled into CoffeeScript.

If you started a new open source project today, what would it be?

I’d love to build a robust data access and API library for Titanium mobile. Something along the lines of Backbone.js but with no cruft that comes from targeting the browser.

Also, I’m dying for GitHub to release a real-time API. I’d love to create an interface to let me see activity on just the projects I care about, in real time. Most of the ideas I have for new projects involve making better use of GitHub and what’s going on in the community.

What attributes make for a great open source project?

I think great open source projects meet a common need and are usually a by-product of some other success. Often, the greatest open source projects are a means, not an end. Without 37 Signals’ suite of tools we wouldn’t have Rails. Without Document Cloud we wouldn’t have Underscore, Backbone, or CoffeeScript.

Do you have any advice for aspiring open source programmers?

Like most endeavors, software is ultimately a people-centered economy. You’ll get farther with friends. Seek out people smarter than you and learn from their code. Browse the issues for a favorite project and submit a patch. Find a designer that can help create a brand or identity for your project. Trade off your skills and time with someone who complements yours. Encourage participation so that your project has shelf life longer than your own time, commitment, or attention span.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

I’m an independent web and iOS application designer living just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. I’m married to an amazing woman and father to a delightful two year-old boy who will soon have a new little brother or sister in July.

What open source projects do you work on?

I’m a core contributor to Compass, a truly wonderful project which gives front-end designers and developers the tools to easily build their own CSS frameworks powered by Sass. It’s chock full of the web’s best reusable patterns and provides mixins which make writing complex CSS3 styles a breeze. Compass makes it easy to share frameworks and extensions enabling designers to participate in open source like never before.

In 2009 I released fancy-buttons a very popular Compass extension which makes it absurdly simple to create beautiful CSS3 buttons which gracefully degrade for older browsers. I’m right in the middle of the 2.0 release which should be coming out in the next month or so. My goal for fancy-buttons 2.0 is to provide a curated CSS3 button library, equipping users with the finest selection of beautiful buttons from around the web. Basically, I’m snagging button styles that strike my fancy and recreating them with dynamic Sass color transformations, so you can generate BonBon style buttons with a single line of Sass, and easily change colors or other properties without having to muck about with gobs of complex CSS3. It’s really powerful.

I love how easily Sass lets me work with color, and as a result I do almost all of my web design these days in-browser. Sometimes I have a hard time envisioning what color adjustments I want, and to help, I built a web based HSL Color Picker and released the code on Github.

Currently the project I’m spending most of my time on is Octopress which is a blogging framework based on Jekyll (the static site generator powering Github Pages) and I’ll be releasing version 2.0 by the time this hits the press, or shortly afterwards. Basically, Octopress is a beautifully designed starting point for a Jekyll blog, though I have plans to expand Octopress to more static blogging frameworks in the future.

What inspired you to work on Octopress?

I was working on fancy-buttons and really starting to get into writing mixins for Compass and sharing code with the Compass community. I wanted to be able to easily share code on my blog and write tutorials, but with most blogging software I was at the mercy of TinyMCE or a host of other heinous browser based text editors. I had a WordPress blog and I was sick of the maintenance effort with updates, plugins, spammers, and database issues. I looked around, but none of the hosted solutions were much better.

Then, I stumbled onto Jekyll which allowed me work in my favorite text editor, freed me from the performance issues of the database, and gave me the freedom to publish my static site anywhere. Getting a Jekyll blog started is no easy task however. Jekyll is just an opinionated static file generator and it doesn’t ship with a template, or even an RSS feed. It’s a lot of work to get a high quality blog set up and I saw a real need for a well designed starting point for Jekyll.

I built Octopress to make it easy for developers to get started with Jekyll blogging. They simply fork the Octopress repository and they have a beautifully designed blog, complete with a flexible templating system, Compass and Sass, a set of rake tasks to simplify various tasks, a curated list of plugins and third party integrations like Disqus comments, and Delicious and Twitter feeds in the sidebar.

What plans do you have for Octopress?

Octopress 2.0 has been rewritten from the ground up with semantic HTML5 templates, a new theming system, and smashing support for mobile browsers with the “320 and up” approach to media queries. It’s also based on the latest and greatest Jekyll release, complete with some great new plugins and even easier configuration. I’ve ported the Solarized syntax highlighting system to Sass for gorgeously styled code sharing, and I’ve included a great little plugin for fetching and embedding gists from Github so they show up in RSS feeds.

Right now I’m just finishing up the documentation and going through a final polishing run.

If you started a new open source project today, what would it be?

I’ve recently designed a really amazing iOS web application (not for public use, sorry) which was nearly indistinguishable from a native experience. I’d love to find the time to package up all the work I did for that and release a web application kit for iOS. Maybe someday.

What attributes make for a great open source project?

A good open source project must fill a need, but it should also be something that other people can contribute to easily. This requires willingness to co-create with people at different levels of commitment and expertise. A good open source project is well documented and has core team members who are willing to support its users.

Do you have any advice for aspiring open source designers?

Become fluent with at least one system of version control (I like Git). Don’t be afraid to ship something that isn’t perfect yet. It’s a great learning experience to watch others improve your work and it’s an awesome feeling when someone solves a problem you couldn’t solve or didn’t know you had.

As a freelance designer I work for many different clients, all for different periods of time. But with open source, I have the opportunity to continually make progress on a project as I learn and grow in my career. Pick a project and stick with it.

This week we interviewed Chris Cagle, a PHP developer and creator of GetSimple CMS. You can follow what Chris is up to at http://www.cagintranetworks.com.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

Well, I reside in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and am happily married to my beautiful wife of 6 years, Krista. Together, we are bossed around everyday by our 3 toddlers and two mutts. I am a rabidly-obsessed Pittsburgh sports fan and work at 3PC Media as their Senior Web Developer.

For the first 6 years after college I worked for Mellon Financial in the IT field. I started out working at the IT helpdesk, then slowly moved up the middle management ranks. Even though I was happy with what I was doing, information technology was not my passion and I always had the desire to work in the web design/development field instead.

Rewinding the timeline a few years: I’ve been working on the web since I created a Pittsburgh Penguins fan site in the 6th grade. After graduating college I decided to try and earn some extra cash with web design so I started my own web design business. After 5 semi-successful years of freelancing bliss, I decided to make the jump from IT at Mellon Financial to a full-time web developer job at 3PC Media.

What open source projects do you work on?

The two I’ve worked with most are WordPress and of course GetSimple. With WP, I developed some plugins and themes, and got pretty comfortable with the project. However, the development community surrounding it was pretty large, so I kind of felt lost in the massive crowd. I also tried to lend a hand to a couple of open source invoicing systems, but their communities seemed have little or no activity, so my suggestions fell on deaf ears.

GetSimple is obviously my open source baby. My free time is pretty evenly split between developing the GS core and managing the growing (and demanding) community that has sprouted up around it. Luckily, I have a wonderful set of volunteers that have helped me a lot with both sides of the work load.

What inspired you to work on GetSimple CMS?

I started out working with WordPress almost exclusively in the beginning stages of owning my own web design company. The interface looked great, the system just made sense to me, and I loved how there was a huge development community surrounding it (for when I was looking for answers to my problems). Unfortunately, most of my clients were small businesses that didn’t use 90% of the feature set that came with it.

I started searching around and found that there really weren’t any content management systems out there that would allow for simple page editing AND also looked great. What self-respecting designer wants to hand off an ugly backend to a client? Not me.

I knew I could do better than any of the other solutions out there that catered to only small business websites. At that point, I knew I had found my calling and GetSimple CMS was born.

What plans do you have for GetSimple?

Over my 2 years of developing GetSimple, I’ve discovered that you get out of the community what you are willing to put into it. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true. So because of this, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to add features to the website in order to allow for more community involvement. This includes adding onto Extend (the plugin/theme repository), starting a wiki that everyone can edit and contributing a lot on the forums. Communities drive open source projects, so I am making conscious efforts engage the community every time I see a chance.

Product-wise, Version 3.1 of GetSimple will be our first major attempt at refining the backend administration UX. By taking manual features and changing them to be either automated or ajax-powered, we are making the software much easier to use. GetSimple needs to keep up its clean and simple interface in order to distance ourselves from most other competing CMS systems. (Yes, I know I am acting like it’s a business even though it is not)

If you started a new open source project today, what would it be?

Ha, I don’t think I have time for another open source project. I am always coming across an idea or script and find myself thinking “I could do this better.” However, in the end, I know I wouldn’t have the necessary time needed to devote to it. Taking the lead on an open source project is a labor of love and a time-consuming one at that.

What attributes make for a great open source project?

It services a need. This one is obvious, but when I was spending all my time trying to remove features from WordPress, I knew there had to be a better way.

An active community. Sometimes this part takes up just as much time as the code development itself, but it’s necessary to foster a healthy project. If you don’t yet have a community, add a forum, give it attention, and they will come.

Do you have any advice for aspiring open source programmers?

Create a Mission Statement. I can’t tell you how important this one is. You need to create a project that fills a niche, and does it at the best of it’s abilities. Attempting to compete with behemoths such as Joomla or WordPress would have been project suicide in my scenario. I clearly stated my niche-centric objectives in my mission statement, and regularly direct people to it when they ask for features simply because “WordPress has it”.

Pay attention to your community. An active community is just as important as your actual code. (Not to mention that it will inevitably lead to better code anyway: see the next bullet point)

Realize that there are better ideas out there than your own. This may be hard to believe at first, but there are people out there with ideas that are better than yours. The tricky part is filtering out the hundreds of ideas that are worse. If and when you find a better idea, act on it and give credit where credit is due. Your developers will inevitably disappear when all suggestions are ignored except your own.

Do it. Don’t let thoughts of failure or success get the best of you. You have nothing to loose and in the end you will be a better programmer for it. Even if GetSimple had failed, the amount of knowledge that I learned while developing it has been an invaluable tool.

In this installment of “5 questions for…” we ask Alex Hunter his thoughts on branding, the UK and European startup scene and ways of engaging with your customers in real life. He rounds off the interview with 3 online marketing techniques you can’t afford to ignore.

You have spoken before about the importance of branding for online companies. For many branding appears to be an afterthought. Where in the development process do you think it should be addressed?

Simple answer: ASAP. The sooner you lay down your core values and then feed that into your brand development, the better. Why? Because your values will define who you are and more importantly who you will be, now and in 10 years when I’m looking at you on the cover of BusinessWeek.

Set them early, set them well. And remember, that exercise cannot be successfully performed by one member of the team – it has to be tackled by as many members of the team as possible to effectively incorporate and reflect the DNA of the business.

Some of the hottest web startups in 2009 have clearly thought long and hard about their brand right out of the gate – it’s not just a tick/check in the box anymore, it’s a fundamental requirement for success.

Is the mantra “build it and they will come” still valid in 2010?

No. In fact, I don’t think it ever was. There’s been this (annoying) mentality of “If I build a good app or service, no matter how ugly it is, people will come.” They will not because they’ll never hear about it.

Furthermore, there are competitive apps to almost everything, and if there isn’t one today, there will be one tomorrow, and they will have looked at what you’ve done, they will have learned from your mistakes, they will have considered their brand and marketing, they will have started a Twitter account, they will have started a blog, they will have promoted it physically and they will have promoted it digitally, they will have thought about the presence, the UI, etc.

I think that hiding under a bushel (intentionally or not), and expecting it to develop on its own is a huge, huge mistake. Kevin Rose gave a great talk at FOWA London 2009 about taking your site from 1 to 1 million users and covered some great practical ways to build a userbase and get people talking about your app – I strongly recommend checking it out.

There’s been a lot of articles written about how important it is to be in Silicon Valley to succeed in the web app industry, and a lot of rebuttals. As someone who helps web businesses on both sides of the pond how important is the Valley to the web industry?

Ahh, interesting question. I’ll be honest, when I first moved back to England after an 8 year stint in the Bay Area, I was quite a snob about Silicon Valley being the only place where, by and large, web companies needed to be based to be successful. Now, having immersed myself in the UK web and startup culture, I don’t believe that at all.

The European, especially UK, web and startup scene is strong and I am VERY bullish about it. So much so that most of the companies I work with at an angel/advisory level are in the UK. I think the success of Seedcamp and other startup funding events based in the UK are a really good example of how this trend is playing out.

Now, all that said, I don’t think there’s any need to be isolationist about this. UK companies can absolutely learn from what Silicon Valley companies are doing but the same goes for US companies looking to the UK, Europe and beyond for inspiration and expertise. After all, Last.fm, Bebo, MOO, Qype, Spotify, etc are all UK/European companies who are arguably leaders in their space.

And south-east Asia is so far ahead of the rest of the world on things like mobile and micropayments, it’s not even funny. I’m super excited about the UK startup scene and I’m always keen to meet with young companies so please get in touch! ahunter(at)haebc.com.

In your last Think Vitamin article you talked about the importance of engaging with your community/customers offline. How would you recommend cash strapped startups do this?

I really think that bridging the gap between online and offline is one of the best ways to build loyalty. You’re connecting your users not only with their fellow users (and brand advocates) but also the people that created and curated the app/product/brand/community that they, as a user, have invested their time (and possibly money) in.

And the beautiful thing about this is it’s scalable – you don’t have to be as big as Digg or Yelp to do this. One of the easiest ways to do this, and kudos to Carsonified for having done this in the past, is to simply have a meetup at a local bar or pub. There’s no need to buy everyone a drink (although admittedly throwing a couple hundred quid/bucks behind the bar helps). A simple tweet and/or Facebook event notification saying “Hey some of the team are going to be at Pub x next Monday, it’d be awesome to hang out with you guys!” is all it takes.

Remember to use what you know about your userbase, through analytics and profile data, to identify geographic clusters of users so you’re hosting your events in the best possible locations.

You will be running a half day workshop about “kick ass online marketing techniques” at the Future of Web Apps Miami. Without giving too much away what do you think are the three most important online marketing techniques that web site/app owners can’t ignore?

1. Allow users to quickly and easily to promote what you do into their existing social graphs. Use Facebook Connect, use the Twitter APIs, and allow users to post their activity on your app into those platforms. This is hugely powerful because the message is so much more relevant coming from the user to their friends as opposed to coming (unsolicited) from you directly to the user’s friends.
2. Leverage what you know about your users, from profile data, analytics data, etc to provide them with a relevant and tailored experience. Listen to what they want and give it to them. This can be content or product driven (e.g. promoting products based on a user’s past purchase history) but either way, do it and watch your conversion levels go through the roof.
3. Lastly and probably most importantly, get involved in the conversation that’s going on around your brand. People are talking about you, whether you like it or not – find out what they’re saying, respond, and engage. And not just your PR or Customer Service teams, but the people that actually create the product, write the code, manage the DB, etc. Real names, real people.

First up is Kevin Rose. Following on from his FOWA keynote “9 Ways to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users” Paul and his co-host Paul Stanton asked Kevin a few questions on community, user testing and advisory roles.

This interview lasts for 19 minutes.

Read the full transcript by Simon Hamp.

Editor’s Note: Dan will be hosting a full day workshop with Ethan Marcotte on “Handcrafted Bulletproof CSS” in London, UK on November 23rd, buy your ticket online now. He will also be speaking about “Progressive Enrichment” at The Future of Web Design New York on November 17. Conference day passes are still available.

You have recently published a new book? Having purchased your first two (and learnt a lot) what can I expect from the third part of the trilogy?

Yes indeed, Handcrafted CSS was published this past August. In some ways, it’s a continuation of the previous book, Bulletproof Web Design and dives right into examples that revolve around a fictional case study for a coffee company website. Ethan Marcotte contributed an absolute gem of a chapter on fluid grids as well.

There are really 3 areas of focus in this short little book: continuing the “bulletproof design” mentality (that is, accounting for varying amounts and sizes of content, planning for worst-case scenarios). Also the concept of “progressive enrichment”, which is a fancy way of talking about what advanced CSS and CSS3 properties we can use _today_, while keeping in mind browsers that don’t yet support those properties. And also the book touches on “reevaluating past methods and best practices”.

With the browser landscape changing rapidly, and with new and evolving standards being implementing by those browsers, it’s a great time to reevaluate old habits, to see if there’s an easier way to handle things with the shiny new techniques.

The timing seemed fitting to write another book, with all of this fun new stuff to play with it’s important to sort it all out, see what’s actually usable today in some circumstances.

“Progressive enrichment”, “Graceful degradation”, “Progressive enhancement” – what’s the difference?

All three are similar ways of talking about the same concepts. “Graceful degradation” is the older term, with the idea being build and/or design for the future, while later providing fallbacks for legacy systems. “Progressive enhancement” was coined by Stephen Champeon in 2003, and builds on that idea while flipping it around: build a basic system anyone can use, then “enhance” that base with bells & whistles that only modern browsers can understand.

I’ve been using a variation on Stephen’s term, “progressive _enrichment_” to specifically talk about advanced CSS and CSS3 that we can use today to boost the user experience.

It’s kind of like enriched pasta, with extra nutrients added. It’s still pasta, and take away that enrichment and you probably wouldn’t know what you’re missing. And that’s the important part: utilizing this bleeding edge stuff while keeping in mind that designs may not look or be experienced the same in every browser. And that’s OK.

Your talk a lot about the concept of “Bulletproof Web Design”. What are the three quickest wins to ensuring a “bulletproof” site?

I have a knack for inventing unnecessary terms and phrases, don’t I? :)

Here are 3 ways to help bulletproof a design. All are simple things to keep in mind while building websites:

1. Use the text sizing controls in the browser to test a site’s integrity. Do design elements break apart? Can that block of text handle 3 paragraphs instead of 1? We’re not only testing the site for low-vision users, but we’re getting an instant barometer on just how flexible your design is. A design that can bend to the rigors of editing, content shuffling, internationalization, etc. is going to be a more robust system.
2. Turn images off. Check your design with images turned off to see if things are still readable. Slow loading images, or folks with slow modem or cellphone connections will still be able to read your site. Specify background color equivalents to any background images you’re using.
3. Check your design with stylesheets off. Is the raw markup style understandable? Can you get a sense of the hierarchy of the page? I call it the 10-second usability test. Not a true measure – but one that’s quick and easy to add to your workflow. Ensuring the page is organized and readable in the absence of CSS will help (in sometimes small ways) the accessibility of the site in other devices and assistive software. Pay attention to markup and you’ll get these benefits for free.

The word on the street is that you are working on a new site/app called “Dribbble”. Can you tell us more about it?

Yeah! I’m building Dribbble with my friend, Rich Thornett (http://thornett.com). Essentially, it’s a community for sharing small (400×300 max) screenshots of your work. By giving creative folks a forum to hang out and talk about design and process and getting a sneak peek at something before it’s live or bouncing ideas off your peers.

We’ve had about 50 people in a private beta over the last several months and the results have been fascinating. Getting to look over the shoulder of your friends and colleagues to see (and comment on) in-progress work has been extremely valuable – and we think it’ll be even more fun when things are opened up a bit more.

We’ll be giving more invites out soon, in small batches to keep tabs on scaling, listening to feedback and making changes. We’re not in a hurry, and are more concerned about maintaining the amazing quality of the “shots” that have been dribbbled in the beta thus far. Much more on this in the coming months!

What is the Future of Web Design?

The future of web design is content. It’s what’ll drive design and user experience going forward. We can’t predict, but can attempt to predict, what people will be consuming, what people will be creating, or talking about or interested in in the future – but I’ll bet whatever it is will be the catalyst for design.

So much of web design thus far has been about recreating familiar concepts for the screen. What’ll be really exciting is seeing ideas that embrace the web as its own unique medium. And that’s where you’ll see the most progressive web design.

More specifically, the future of web design is about being able to use tools that make our jobs easier. Freeing us up to worry about more important things. Progressive enrichment/enhancement is an important part of that for the modern web builder.

Editor’s Note: Steve will be hosting a workshop on “How to build a HTML5/CSS3 Website Today” at The Future of Web Design New York on November 16-17 2009. You can buy your ticket online now.

What’s all the fuss about HTML5 and CSS3?

For me, the big deal is that the specifications are at least moving in the direction of how we have been using the web for the past five years or more, e.g. video, audio and user generated content. Developers have started to fall into habits (some good, some bad), and so the specs are trying to make those habits easier and more standardized. The structural tags, web forms, and advanced CSS are all letting us do the same things we’ve been doing for years, just in an easier, more standardized way.

Should designers start using HTML5 and CSS3 today?

If it feels right, and it’s right for your audience, absolutely. In my mind, we’re well past the point of having to make everything look the same for everybody on every platform, so progressive enhancement is key. In fact, we’re to the point where if we try and play equally to the lowest common denominator, we’re actually limiting the experience for those who use more modern technology. And that’s just not cool.

In your Future of Web Design New York workshop you will be delving deep into HTML5 and CSS3. What can attendees expect to go away with at the end of the session?

Ideally, what parts of these specs they can start using right now, and what they can look forward to in the coming months/years. There will be practical examples of some of the more powerful parts of HTML5 and CSS3 both, as well as looking into things that are only beginning to be supported.

I understand from Dan Rubin that “Harmony”, your CMS project, is nearing completion. Can you tell us a bit more about it and how it is different from other solutions?

Ha, word gets around, doesn’t it? Harmony is meant to be a way for developers to work with web writers and maintainers in a simple, but powerfully flexible way. We’re trying to walk a fine line between the easy content-creation of systems like WordPress, but with flexibility like that of Expression Engine. We’re not going to try and be all things to all people, but we’re really happy with how it’s turning out, and can’t wait to let people know more about it. For those interested, they will be able to find out more at http://harmonyapp.com.

What’s the “Future of Web Design”?

Gradients. Lots and lots of gradients. Seriously, though, I think it’s taking the aspects of design, interface, and simplicity that we’re learning and spreading it to other industries. I see openings all over the market for small, niche web apps that meet real needs to people in specific markets other than our own. I see us web developers and designers digging into other careers and applying our knowledge of design to solve problems in new, creative ways through web technology. And that’s exciting.

I’m interviewing three amazing folks for our FOWA Bytes Series, in the run up to FOWA London on October 1st and 2nd.

First off, I’ll be interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk live tonight (Wednesday August 5th). Please comment below, with the questions you’d like me to ask Gary.

The interview is at the following times …

• 11am San Francisco
• 12 noon Denver
• 2pm NYC
• 7pm London
• 9pm Tel Aviv
• 11pm Bangalore
• 2am (Thurs Aug 6th) Shanghai
• 4am (Thurs Aug 6th) Sydney

To join the chat, just go to tinychat.com/carsonified.

In case you haven’t heard of Gary (who’s speaking at FOWA on October 2nd), here’s a bit more about him:

Gary has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

Garys book, Crush It!: Turn Your Passion into Profit in a Digital World is available to pre order. We know it’s going to be awesome :)

What are Your Questions for Gary?

Please let me know what you’d like to ask Gary. I’ll pick some of the best questions and ask him live tonight.

Watch the video!

Simon Willison talks to journalist Bobbie Johnson for Vitamin

Read the transcript!

VITAMIN: Can you just run through exactly what OpenID is?

Simon Willison: OpenID is a decentralised system for single sign-on. So it lets you have one user account that you can use to log into lots of different sites. The thing that makes OpenID special compared to, say, Passport or Typekey or other things that have gone before, is that with OpenID you get to decide where your identity is hosted. You can host it with SixApart, or you can host it with AOL or you can host it yourself. The standard, the technology keeps on working no matter where youve put it, so you can even switch providers and say actually I used to be hosted with Six Apart and now I want to host it on my own – you can do that and your login keeps working.

VITAMIN: So what is the fundamental problem that it solves?

SW: Everyone has too many user accounts. Ive got dozens and dozens of user accounts of sites that I use – some I use on a daily basis, some on a monthly basis. Managing all of those usernames and passwords is just incredibly difficult. Everyone knows that you should use a different password for every service, because otherwise one service gets cracked and you lose everything but of course nobody does that, because managing two or three passwords is enough work for most people.

VITAMIN: So I create an OpenID and associate it with other identities I have around the place, and the sign-on procedure becomes basically non-existent?

SW: Exactly. In fact, if you’ve got an AOL messenger account already then you have an OpenID it will be openid.aol.com/ and then your screenname. But the idea is that you find applications that support OpenID (this is currently quite a small list but its growing all the time), and you can then sign into those with your OpenID, potentially merge that with an existing user account or create a brand new user account and just continue using the application without any further hassle.

VITAMIN: Support is growing quickly. How is the take-up growing?

SW: The problem OpenID has is that there are two sides to OpenID there are OpenID servers, the places that will give you an OpenID, and there are consumers, the sites you can actually log in to. And of course everyone wants to be a provider, because it feels great to have lots of user accounts and loads of people have big user account databases that they can open up. But people are much more cautious about being a consumer because its a lot less well understood what that actually implies. So its all about the benefits of being a consumer and the sorts of things you can start to do once you let people log in to your site with an OpenID.

VITAMIN: Can you give us some examples?

SW: The obvious one is that you get linked to from digg or Techcrunch and people click through to your brand new Web 2.0 service; then it asks them to create an account and half of them just walk off because they dont want to create another throwaway account just to try out your service. If you support OpenID you can instantly get a much larger signup rate because youve got a whole bunch of early adopters especially if digg is supporting OpenID, anyone who comes from digg has got an OpenID there already so you get lots more people trying out your service.

So thats the really simple case, but looking further ahead whats really exciting is the stuff you can do to innovate around OpenID. So you might find that if you let people log into your service with OpenID and theyre logged into other services as well youve got a bridge between those two services. You can say well, youre logged into this bookmark service but because you used your OpenID for your photo service as well we can start combining your photographs and your links, we can start doing clever things like that.

VITAMIN: Would people be able to bring their different social networking identities together as well?

SW: OpenID actually does very little, it just solves the authentication problem. But its designed as a small component of a larger ecosystem, so you could build friend import and friend export on top of OpenID. You log into a site with your LiveJournal ID and the site then goes to LiveJournal and says hey, who does this person have down as their friends?. And if those people are present in that sites system then it can set up friend relationships there. So theres potential for people to start building social networks that exist outside of the silos of individual sites, sort of decentralised social networks. First people need to start using OpenID and then they can start building on top of it.

VITAMIN: So is this something which is finished and ready to go, or is it still in development?

SW: OpenID works today, and actually the current version of the spec thats being implemented is OpenID 1.1. Theres talk of developing OpenID 2, which covers a larger amount of ground and is under active development on the mailing list – but for all intents and purposes its ready for people to start using it, its ready to roll out.

VITAMIN: And youve now got some pretty big backers like AOL have you heard any feedback?

SW: Thats an interesting question. Obviously the big names that are getting involved are AOL who have actually launched, theyve made 68 million AOL user accounts available as OpenIDs which is huge and Microsoft, who had Bill Gates make a big announcement at the RSA conference saying that Microsoft planned to integrate their CardSpace client-based identity solution with OpenID. I think thats something thats looking ahead to OpenID 2, but AOLs commitment is right now theyve already started supporting it.

VITAMIN: But youve talked before about the problems and gaps that are still in OpenID. Can you explain some more about those?

SW: The biggest problem OpenID has is just in terms of explaining itself. Thats not inherent to the spec, its something thats difficult to explain to people – but people are already starting to make the effort to do that. So the problem that everyone talks about and the one thats a really legitimate concern is phishing. With OpenID because youre going to an untrusted site and trying to log in, it redirects you to your identity provider. But of course it could also redirect you to an impersonation of your identity provider, and if you werent paying attention you could have your account stolen. So the OpenID communitys been looking at a whole bunch of solutions to that, and this is where Microsoft and CardSpace come in to try and come up with a solution to phishing. In the end, my opinion is that phishing will become a competitive area between different providers, so when youre picking your provider you might look at what measures they have in place to help protect you from phishing attacks and use that to help influence your decision.

VITAMIN: So although OpenID has a weakness in it, you think its the job of other providers to come up with a real solution?

SW: I think its something that OpenID providers have to start tackling, but of course phishing is a problem that everyone on the web has, and its incredibly difficult to take on. They do academic studies against phishing protection and find that 90 per cent of people dont even notice that the phishing protection is there. So its really a problem for the whole industry and OpenID is actually benefiting from the amount of effort people are putting into solving this.

VITAMIN: So how easy is it for developers or service providers to implement it? Why would they?

SW: So the reason you want to do it is that you want more users, more people trying your stuff and you want to make life better for the people who are using your service you want to make it easier for them to manage their account with you. From the point of view of implementing stuff, there are libraries available to do all of the tough encryption side of things for PHP, for Python, for Ruby, for Java and for ASP.net as well – so any web environment that youre working with has probably got libraries, relatively mature libraries, for integrating OpenID functionality already. Its just a case finding the library, reading the documentation and glueing it into your existing accounts system.

Questions and topics we cover in the interview

1. What’s next according to the O’Reilly Radar?
2. Why people are getting the whole web 2.0 thing wrong
3. What’s critical for web developers to understand today?
4. Only a year and a half left for start-up excitement?
5. Design and commoditization

URLS Mentioned

1. sketchup.com
2. instructibles.com