testing

Weekend Read: Don’t Use Beta Software

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BETA stands for Doesn’t Work, Will Break, Might Delete Everything. It’s become a more familiar term since Google labelled Gmail as a beta for years and Apple did the same with Siri. It’s familiar enough a term that people don’t understand it and that’s more than just a shame when it means you can end up losing your work.

The current iOS 9 and OS X betas from Apple are causing problems. The beta for watchOS 2.0 which drives Apple Watches is apparently driving those watches back to Apple as they become useless.

You can and I do think Apple shouldn’t have put out software in this state but that is what beta software is. When you’re first making an application, you clobber together bits and pieces until it sort of, kinda, a bit looks like one day it may work. That’s an alpha release and it’s where you see if the thing has any point and it’s the place you think, do you know, it’d be much better in yellow. Or blue. Purple and orange with spots.

Eventually you reach a point where someone says enough. You can’t change the colour any more. It’s time to get this out into the hands of people to try it.

That’s a beta. It’s software of a set colour being put out to be tried. It will break. It cannot fail but to break. The issue is over how badly. If you’re a developer, the intended audience for a beta, these crashing failures are just your day to day life. They are why there is a beta. A bit breaks, you fix it, next day you move on.

If you’re a user, it’s different. You’re using your computer or your phone to ring people up or to compute, you can’t afford to have a problem. Hence the warnings every software company gives you about how you shouldn’t try this beta on your main or primary computing device and how you should have a backup. It’s a warning to us but it’s not. It’s really a note to future litigators that the company did warn people.

Few folk pay attention to that warning and today that means some people are having to return their watches to Apple.

It’s bad and worse than it should’ve been, worse than it would’ve been if Apple hadn’t made this beta public. But betas are there to be tested and for the problems to be found. There is no better way of testing software that will be relied on by millions of people than to try it with millions. Hence the public beta and for all the problems current ones are causing people, we’re seeing more of it and we’re going to see still more.

It’s important to beta test. You just haven’t signed on to be the one who gets problems so don’t be the one who installs and runs this pre-release stuff.

By the way, alpha releases are followed by beta releases but betas are not followed by gammas. The one after a beta is known as the GM or Gold Master, it’s the version of the software that is ready to ship. It used to be that software was sold on shiny discs so the Gold Master would be sent to the pressing plant. Funny how terms continue long after what they describe is gone.

Documenting The Blank Screen part 1

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This is just a website but it’s also the result of a lot of changes in my business and therefore in my online work: before this, I had a personal blog called Self Distract over on Blogger – I had such a good time there – plus a general personal williamgallagher.com website and what was supposed to be a business one for The Blank Screen book and workshops.

That last one never worked out. Roaring hosting problems, months of them, pointless errors. But as well as meaning I couldn’t rely on that site staying up, it also missed its launch date. Weirdly, the hosting errors were sometimes pulling down williamgallagher.com too so it was getting ever urgent that it be fixed and now I believe it all is. I’ve believed this before, roughly monthly since last May, so we’ll see. But as part of fixing that problem and part of how The Blank Screen keeps on growing, I spent about a month investigating whether I could have a single site for everything – and what that single site could be.

I want to tell you about this in case it’s of use: I spent a long time looking for the information I needed and went off a little ways down the road further than I needed. So if you do the same and I get the tagging right so that you can ever find this, hopefully it’ll help you.

I also want to tell me. Compared to my various iterating sites since a 1990s one solely about the BBC drama series Campion, this new spot for me is complicated. You don’t need to know that, but I do. Once I’d grasped that you don’t have to put your site on wordpress.com in order to run Wordpress on it, I changed my mind and embraced this platform. I still have the issue I’ve always had that you can tell me there are a million Wordpress themes – designs, really – but it’s as if everyone uses the same three. As I write this, I am no different. I’m using a theme called Reddle which is the first I tried.

It’s not the only one I tried, let’s be clear about this, but I think it may even have been the default. But I like it a lot and if I don’t add a background image, it has a plain stark simplicity that appeals to me and which also fits the idea of The Blank Screen.

But it took a month to get here and there are so many options that I need to keep straight in my head for any time I want to change anything.

So if you’re looking for help with your site, scroll down and keep an eye out for the headings that may be the most use to you. If you’re me, future William, and you’re trying to fathom out what the hell you did because you now need to fix it, take a biscuit or three and get reading.

The beginning: needing a Blank Screen news site

The first step was wanting to make more of The Blank Screen website since it had missed its launch and was just sitting there for me. Flashforward: I ditched the webspace and pointed the URL at williamgallagher.com in the end.

But I wanted a site I could post productivity and Blank Screen articles to. I wanted to know if I had the material to do this very often: Self Distract is once a week, I knew if The Blank Screen were to be worth reading, it had to be at least daily. Hopefully many times a day. But that meant there being enough to write about and it meant my being able to write it all that often. I secretly soft-launched a site on wordpress.com on 26 November 2013 and tried it out. As of today, 28 December 2013, I’ve posted over eighty times.

So I am now confident that there is material and confident that I can write it. I’m also enthused: with literally zero promotion – zero – I gained about a dozen followers to that site. I’ve now lost them all as I’ve moved away from the test, but.

I could have stayed on wordpress.com and I believed I had to. But I need to run ads on here: hopefully tasteful, hopefully few, and certainly nothing that will especially roll in the cash. (Update: I just checked and I made 74 pence from a test on my Self Distract blog. I will never see that 74p: you only get the cash when it exceeds some set amount. I’m not sure what it is, but probably around ten pounds. But I’m here for the long game and I needed ads in place from the start for it to ever generate cash and also, more importantly, so that you saw ads from the beginning. I don’t like the idea of building a site up over time and then switching on ads. Feels like me saying gotcha.)

But you can’t run Google Adsense ads on wordpress.com-based sites unless you pay for a premium theme/design. I was willing to do that: I was budgeting to do it when I believed it was my only option. I’d have to be paying at least £90 annually so that’s a lot of 74 pences but if it had to be done, it had to be done.

That’s been the key thing I’ve learnt from the whole process: you don’t have to be on wordpress.com to run Wordpress. Forgive me if this is obvious to you, it really wasn’t to me and that affected my plans for several weeks. Wordpress is a tool, a platform, for building websites and you can host them on the Wordpress company’s own space and use their extra benefits, but you don’t have to. With certain technical limitations that I don’t understand, you can use Wordpress on any hosted webspace you’ve got. Including the one I was already using. I’d tell you which one that was but I’m still smarting from the problems I’ve had.

Given that I could use this existing space and that I could run Wordpress on it, that meant I could use the benefits of Wordpress’s comparative simplicity and its abilities to handle web technologies I needed. It also meant I could run ads without buying a premium anything. As of this moment, it costs me $6.50/month to host williamgallagher.com which is one site that includes my personal site, The Blank Screen news plus my weekly Self Distract blog.

Or rather it appears to. It appears to and it actually does, but not in the way it looks. The Blank Screen is a news site but technically that’s a blog so for a long while I had to puzzle out how to have effectively two blogs on the same site. I originally learnt how to just make it look on screen as if they were separate but they really stayed the same and everything fell apart when I looked at how people could follow them. If you wanted to follow The Blank Screen, you’d get, what, twenty or more posts a week and I don’t think you’d mind very much that every Friday there’d be one Self Distract entry in there. But if you wanted to follow Self Distract – and 45 people did back on its old Blogger site – then I think you would mind very much when your one Self Distract per week was accompanied by twenty productivity articles.

The answer was to use a Wordpress feature called multisite and lie my head off at you: this is really two sites masquerading as one. You don’t need to know that but, man, I do. Once you tap on the Self Distract button you zoom off to another site and I have to make sure that all the menus connect back to where you think they do. That just means that when I make a change to the menu on williamgallagher.com I have to make the same change to the menu on williamgallagher.com/selfdistract/ which is a pain yet not really all that much of one.

Except I get lost. During the month’s secret soft-launch test, I ran a wordpress.com-only site and that worked well. During the last week or so, I moved back to my own space and I ran a test on the space I then had for The Blank Screen. Nobody ever went to that site because I couldn’t risk telling them it was there – as sometimes it wasn’t. Grrr. But I had this space, I had this need, I did the whole shebang there for a week or ten days. Found this multisite stuff, got it working, got used to how very easy it was to tap on a Wordpress menu and see my three sites listed: williamgallagher.com, The Blank Screen and Test. I no longer remember what Test was for. But the ease of going between them was great.

Until I moved it all to williamgallagher.com’s webspace and now have two sites but no easy way of swapping between them. I can do it, it gets done, but it’s a couple of steps now and I don’t understand the reason. It was actually this that made me decide I needed to document the work just so I can keep it straight in my head. Let me state, then, that to change sites as the owner/operator, I can choose William Gallagher and the Blank Screen from Wordpress’s My Sites menubar. And to change to Self Distract I have to choose that same My Sites, select Network Admin, choose Sites, then when all the sites are listed, then find Self Distract and tap on Dashboard.

Easy.

I need more biscuits.

Back later with the rest of the documentation and a plateful of dark chocolate digestives.