posted by max on May 26, 2008 at 09:57:41 AM

Ah May, when it finally becomes clear winter has ended, the month of my birth. May brings mixed emotions, mainly, shame and frustration.

I'm writing this news post with muscles in my hand I haven't been forced to use since grade school, actually physically writing this news post on a note pad. You see dear reader, I've been crippled by my sedentary lifestyle.


This is a two-part news post, first the depressing explanation of why I have been absent for a while, and second some big upcoming changes I want you guys to check out.

How the internet turned me into a sloth and cripple

By Max Goldberg, age 25 26

It all started with YTMND. The responsibility of maintaining this site started out as a fairly simple task and has grown to become a beast of burden and responsibility. I started YTMND because I like to make widgets, doodads and new features. I am in love with research and development. Over the years, my administrative tasks such as moderation, monetization and "community management" have made R&D more of a side benefit to an otherwise tedious job. It's because of this that I took a break and decided to work on weblog.

Weblog is a project I have held near and dear to my heart for many years. It originated when a pal created a script to log IRC chat and filter out the links back in 1998, before "weblog" was a synonym of an online journal, before the term "blog" was even invented. A few years later it died so I decided to make a new version which captures the images people link in chat rooms as well. I got really into it, wrote an entire bot from scratch and did all sorts of templating and other frivolous coding that has never really been used. This was in the beginning of 2004 and in the middle of creating this site, I made YTMND, which quickly became my main focus.

Over the last few months I have been thinking more and more about weblog, a site which at its heart is completely unmonetizable. I decided to make a new version, something spectacular. A project I could put my energy into without having to worry about user signup, moderation and monetization. A project I could work on for the sole purpose of creating something new and better.

So one day I sat down and wrote up some specs, and started coding some of the bits I thought may be fun. I became consumed. Six to seven day weeks at 18 to 24 hour days of coding, designing, testing and molding my dreams into reality. Ignoring phone calls from friends and family, never leaving the house unless I needed necessities, almost no human contact. I was loving every second of it.

Then one day I woke up and rolled out of bed, went to the bathroom to urinate, shower and admire the beard I had been unintentionally cultivating; I made a bowl of cereal and walked the 15 feet to my work station. Short of bathroom breaks and to get up and make tea, this was the most I moved for six week. This was my daily routine. On this day something was different; when I sat down my left thigh had a soreness to it, like I had run a marathon without stretching.

The pain became increasingly worse over the day to the point where I actually got up and tried stretching. It didn't seem to make a difference, but the pain seemed to slowly go away as long as I wasn't sitting, so I sat back down went to work. Mind you I'm no sadist, but I am apathetic enough that my drive to create is high enough to ignore minor aches and pains or any self inflicted discomfort.

After a few days of this, I decided it was time to Google up some information on muscle pain and see if I couldn't do anything about this pain in my lower east side (sorry Martin Amis). With a lot of finite descriptions of my pain I've self diagnosed myself with Sciatica, more specifically "Piriformis syndrome". Ironically nicknamed "fat wallet syndrome" as it is usually self inflicted by sitting on a thick wallet for a long period of time. I wish that had been true in my case, but alas, I think it was due to me sitting on my feet for long periods of time.

When you think about people who stay in the same position for such an extended period of time that they become injured my thoughts are immediately drawn towards Maury Povich clips of extremely obese individuals. According to my BMI I'm not even obese. I'm just one point into "overweight", just enough to be uncomfortable in weather above 80 degrees fahrenheit. In the famous words of Michael Richards, "That's what's so insane about all this!"

At this point I am unable to sit for a period of longer than 15 minutes without incredible pain. I'm not sure if this is a punishment from god for not working hard enough on YTMND or working too hard on Weblog. Either way, I've spent a good deal of time in bed thinking about the future of YTMND, as well as my own future. Let's face it; this site has been depressing for a while and it needs some serious loving. I have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday and physical therapy on Thursday. Physical fucking therapy. What a decrepit douche-bag I've become.

Anyway, enough of my pitiful problems. Let's discuss YTMND.

Down to Business

As my first major order of business for this summer, I have decided a new site template is in order. The site template has been pretty much static since 2004. While I've spent considerable time on the moderation side of things, I haven't really worked on compatibility or usability of the actual sites hosted on YTMND. One of the major reasons for doing so now is that with all of the work on the refactor, YTMND isn't getting much public love at the moment and I can work on the template without interfering with the rest of the refactor.

One of the problems that has been around since the beginning of YTMND is that playing sound through different browsers is a pain at best and impossible at worst. Requiring people to install (and understand how and why) Quicktime for Firefox to play YTMNDs is ridiculous. Then you look at looping sound. It doesn't work anymore at all and hoping that Quicktime/Apple will fix their shit after years is pathetic and pointless. So all sound will be played through Flash, this means gapless sound will actually be gapless. Lovely, seamless loops.

Instead of trying to break it down into bits and pieces you will all find boring, let me type up my in-bed-plan for the YTMND template (which you will find boring as well).

YTMND Flash Site Template

Draft version 0.02

• 1. Overview
• 2. New Features
• 3. Possible New Features
• 4. Dependencies
• 5. Concerns

1. Overview

-----------------

The goal is to recreate the current HTML site template into a 100% flash template. This will remedy a large number of problems that plague the current site template as well as removing the dependency for Quicktime or alternatives to play sound. Greater than 99% of the users who visit YTMND currently have Flash version 9 or greater, so harnessing the power and flexibility of Actionscript 3.0 seems ideal.

2. New Features

-----------------

1. Volume Control and Mute

The ability to raise/lower volume using a control directly on the site, using a flash cookie to save the volume level.



2. Pause

The ability to pause and resume a YTMND using a control directly on the site. For animated sites, this will pause both the animation and the sound, for non-animated sites this will merely pause the sound.



3. Restart

The ability to restart the YTMND using a control directly on the site without having to reload the page.



4. Automatic re-synchronization of animation

An automatic forced re-synchronization of sound and animation every X loops ensures that continual looping won't ruin the site due to lazy synching.



5. Loader advertisements

Finally being able to monetize the sites themselves with a 300x250 ad shown during loading. More on this below.



6. Asynchronous loading of site assets

Would allow both image and sound to be loaded at the same time, allowing for much quicker loading speed. Additionally, 100% flash would make the current onload issues (sites failing to start, browser compatibility, waiting for slow ad servers, etc) moot.



7. Better image placement

Currently you can only tile or center an image. New options would be to position at top left, top center, top right, middle left, middle center etc.



8. Truly seamless looping

No more gaps between sound loops. MP3s will still have gaps due to issues with the format that are almost insurmountable, but WAV files uploaded seem to be gapless once imported into Flash from all the testing I've done.

3. Possible New Features

-----------------

1. Zooming text options

Multiple options for shaping and positioning the zooming text. Such as text that blooms from the center or bottom of the page, or text that is rotated etc.



2. Finite image placement

The ability to set a pixel location of where the image should be positioned for ultimate control.



3. Background image

When not using a tiled image, allow users to have a background image with another image on top of it, with the option of tiling the background image or placing it like you would a normal image.



4. "Oh shit" button

An option that would allow the user to hit the spacebar which would instantly kill the sound and show a "work safe" image of a web page, such as a Google search.



5. Non-flash alternative

Depending on site options, fall back to a plain HTML/Javascript version of the site if possible. Show a warning message explaining the user is not getting the true YTMND experience as well. Alternatively, just prompt the user to install Flash.



6. Customizable Site Data

Allow site creators to choose what shows up on the info bar out of all the possible meta data on site profiles.



7. Downloadable YTMNDs

If everything is in Flash, it's possible we could package up all of the assets and site data into a single file and let people download YTMNDs.

4. Dependencies

-----------------

1. Asset conversion

All WAV files need to be converted to SWF or some other Flash-consumable format that doesn't add padding. All animated GIFs need to be turned into Flash MovieClips.



2. Ad system

As far as I know, Flash can not display embedded HTML/Javascript which is what most ads are. This means the ads have to consist of either an image file or a Flash MovieClip. A simple ad system would need to be built to handle tracking views/clicks etc for this. More Below

5. Concerns

-----------------

1. Moderation panel

This would invalidate a large amount of work I did creating the site moderation mini-panel. I'd need to figure out some way to reincorporate it into the new site template. Possible solutions are an iframe/normal frame, a popup or some sort of side bar or firefox extension type dealy.



2. Asset conversion

Asset to Flash conversion is a pretty big ordeal due to the millions of files that need to be altered.

Currently using PHPTurbine, I can convert WAVs and GIFs to SWFs fairly well, but it is unclear if the resulting SWF is in a format we really want. I need to learn more Flash before I can figure out if this is a major problem or not.

Another issue is that the conversion is picky about WAV files that aren't of a standard frequency (11kHz, 22kHz, 44kHz, etc) and this means some sites may need to be disabled or require an extra layer of conversion using sox or some other sound tool.



3. Animated GIF lag

Animated GIFs get turned into Flash MovieClips in order to be displayed. There is open source code to deal with this, but I need to test the limits of it. I am worried having 400 MovieClips tiled on a page (to emulate a current page with tiled animated gifs) might shit the bed. I am also somewhat concerned about the translation of frame-timing from GIF to Flash, but it may not be a big issue.



4. Ad Blocking

The data package that is sent to the YTMND loader will have ad data in it. It would not be hard to bypass/alter this client side to avoid having to look at ads. I think the best way to do this is include a hash of the data using a secret or changing salt to verify the data has not been altered in any way.



5. Zooming text

I'm not sure if I will encounter the same problems we see with lag due to large amounts of transparent background text on top of animations, but if not we can ditch the image text stuff.



6. Scaling/resizing

Again due to my lack of Flash experience, I don't know how to handle browser resizes on-the-fly, and I'm not sure how to set it up so stuff scales properly.

This is a sizable list of tasks that need to be completed, but in all honesty I don't think it any of it will be incredibly hard to do. At the same time, I am completely out of my element. I don't know Flash at all, but assuming I take a handful of pain meds every day I think I can learn enough to make something magical happen. I've already started laying the groundwork and despite my crippling pain, I've made some real progress.

Now before I go, let me mention the ads bit of the new template. Most of you know the sub-domains themselves are hosted at a huge loss and the ads on the other parts of the site make up for most of the hosting costs. I want to change this and make the sites actually profitable, but as most you also know (and as shown by the pitiful YTMND coffers) I really dislike ads. The new ads will only be shown during the loading of the assets, for about five to eight seconds, but there's a lot more to it than that.

One of the most ambitious ideas for this new loader is to use remnant advertising like you see around the site normally in the beginning and try to move to a user-funded ad system. I want the ads to be an extension of the creativity of the community and I think I've come up with a plan that is beautiful if executed correctly.

The key here is to allow users who just want to be creative to be able to express themselves at a fairly low cost. I've come up with a pricing plan that will allow users to buy ads for as little as $1 for a month for non-commercial purposes. The more options, targeting and priority you want, the price goes up. Ultimately non-commercial advertising will be cheap, most likely cheaper than the current average site sponsorship is. Ideally YTMND could at some point be run completely with non-commercial ads.

I will write about it a lot more in a later news post, but imagine this; Currently the main way users have to promote other sites is with site sponsorship which can be costly and not always have the desired effect. Imagine if for $5 you could run a month long ad that is shown to anyone who visits a site you like (or dislike), imagine being able to run ads across all sites made by a user you admire or despise, imagine being able to run ads that show up any time someone searches for a keyword. I think this is possible and could add an incredible layer of creativity to the site.


At any rate, I wish you all the best and I hope that soon I am able to participate with more vigor than I am currently capable.