In the beginning was the <blink> tag

In 1997 I co-founded a company whose business model was based on the value of building highly customized websites for our clients.  Those clients often didn't know (or want to know) much about the inner workings of HTML, Photoshop, hyperlinks and web hosting, but they knew that the World Wide Web and the Internet represented a new era of marketing and communications, and it was worth paying someone else to figure those details out so that they could be a part of that in some form.

And so in a time before content management software, Google, PayPal or GoDaddy, we - like other web development companies starting to pop up around the world - built websites, online stores and interactive community tools from scratch.  At first we hand-coded sites in HotDog Pro or BBEdit, and then later used Dreamweaver and Fireworks.  We created complex software applications using Perl, and others used PHP, Python, TCL and C.  We tested for compatibility with Netscape and Internet Explorer, and we submitted links to AltaVista for crawling when we were done.

That model evolved as we went and worked pretty well until around 2008, when we saw the maturity of many new "software as a service" offerings and a bunch of off-the-shelf tools and programs that often made custom website development unnecessary, or at least seen as too costly in the eyes of clients who once had few other choices.  We also saw the focus on developing an online presence shift away from "doing it right" to "doing it quickly" - edgy, authentic and in-progress began to trump polished and highly produced.

There's an app for that

So instead of hiring us or another firm to build an online store for you, you could just sign up for Yahoo! Small Business or plop a PayPal button on your site.  Instead of having us create an administrative interface for updating your web content, you could just install Joomla, WordPress or Drupal and do it yourself.  And instead of investing in professional graphic design, a $35 cookie-cutter design theme or a mashup version of your cousin's sketches and some photos you found online would do just fine.

We shifted our business model accordingly.  We were still website developers, but instead of even suggesting that clients pay us to invent something new for them, we built value on top of these powerful existing tools.  We could do more for our clients at a lower price point by installing and customizing a WordPress or Drupal site to their specifications.  When a client needed some functionality that was a little special, we could use our knowledge of and experience with third-party services to recommend just the right one.  And when they still needed something that didn't quite exist yet, we could use our expertise in building things from scratch to create just the right solution, be it a custom "theme," a new plugin or an entirely new piece of software altogether.

Almost the end*

Here in mid-2013, I think we're approaching the point where we can declare the end of website development as a profession.  There are now so many off-the-shelf tools and third-party services that it's rare we encounter a problem space that doesn't have some kind of existing solution we can point a client to.

And so on.

More and more, people don't even bother asking a professional - they know with a few quick Google searches or a pointer from a friend or colleague, they can find a tool that will do what they want.  In fact, even for more complex needs, they'd almost prefer crawling for hours through forum posts and how-to articles over paying real money for help.

As websites and related tools become commodities, I think the notion of website development as a profession is fading away.

Most of the companies that still promote themselves as "website development" firms are trading on the value-added services they can bring to those situations.  Don't have time to configure a WordPress site yourself? We'll do it for you!  Don't have the patience to read up on the latest search engine optimization best practices? We'll take care of it.

But these are often one-off projects focused on speed and the lowest price, not necessarily quality and long-term relationship building. The conversations I had in the past with prospective clients about how they're looking for a trusted partner have now morphed into intimations or outright requests that we need to compete with the folks down the street or around the world who will do what they see as the same work for a third of the price.  And with less repeat business, the "sales overhead" to being a website development generalist becomes higher, sometimes prohibitive.

The trend for small to mid-size agencies is toward a specialization of some form or another - WordPress experts, SEO experts, Social Media experts, and so on - so that they can distinguish themselves in a crowded playing field.  Larger agencies can still offer "the whole package" at a premium, but as the average Internet user becomes more tech savvy and less willing to pay for services they expect to be free, the projects that actually demand a dedicated, specialized team of website developers with a broad range of skills under one roof are becoming more rare.   And if that project is to build a new specialized "software as a service" tool that others can use, then that's one more problem space that's "solved" for now.

Being a "local" presence or contact on a project used to matter a lot more than it does today.  Internet users have warmed to the risks of dealing with a previously unknown vendors or services, and have largely accepted that the benefits of being able to find the fastest, lowest-priced option from a global marketplace outweigh the uneasiness of not being able to shake someone's hand or see their brick and mortar operation.  As screen sharing, file sharing, collaborative online brainstorming and video chatting tools become more prevalent, for the average website development project the concept of an in-person meeting almost becomes about quaint observance of tradition rather than about adding efficiency or value to the process.

What's left?

The asterisk in the post title is meant to qualify the idea of a true ending of this particular profession.  Many people who in the past may have called themselves "website developers" will go on doing similar-looking things under a different name, such as some of the areas of specialized expertise I listed above.  For better or worse, there are also still a lot of businesses and organizations that are willing to pay for low-end, fast and cheap websites without without regard to best practices in accessibility, mobile-friendliness, scalability, maintainability, etc, because they don't care or don't know any better.  I'll be the first to admit that if a $12, 5-page website from GoDaddy gets your information out there, it could be pretty hard to justify paying $500 or $2,000 for something that, to the layperson, might feel only moderately more polished or effective.

I think there are two primary areas where there are continuing business models related to website development that will carry on for some time now:

1) Marketing and branding consulting so that you know what the website should have on it.
So many of our clients over the years came to us looking for a website when what they actually needed was help figuring out their message, their brand, their story and how to share those things with their target audience.  That basic strategic need has been around for a long, long time and it hasn't gone away now.  Just because the media available for telling your business or organization's story have changed - websites, mobile apps and social media posts instead of print newspaper ads, TV commercials or radio spots - it doesn't mean you can't pay attention to marketing strategy.  Yes, there are now online tools for helping you figure out what your marketing strategy should be, but I still don't see any replacement for a competent, experienced and creative marketing professional who can help you discern your unique selling propositions and rise above the noise.  If they happen to offer website development services on top of that, great, otherwise they can farm that out to someone who does - it doesn't matter much any more.  But the firms and consultants that are going to be worth hiring in this category are going to be people with real training and backgrounds in effective marketing and communication, and all of the trade craft that goes with that.

2) Website content maintenance and software updates.
Just because someone can get their own WordPress or Drupal site up and running in a weekend doesn't mean they'll have the time or patience to maintain it.  It doesn't mean they'll pay attention to the security update notices in their admin interface or that when their mega web host borks their MySQL database that they'll know what to do about it.  These needs are still particular to each client and each site, and I don't see any automated solution meeting those needs any time soon.  The challenge is that the work is so unpredictable and often comes in such small chunks, the high volume and low overhead needed to make it profitable may be outside the reach of many service providers.  Not to mention that when a client perceives their website as having been initially created "for free," the maximum amount they're willing to pay to have someone update it is relatively low.  Perhaps this is where the lone techie sitting in his or her home office can still shine.

There may be other related models I'm missing.  And even these are vulnerable to fast-moving changes in the online world.  As Facebook works on blurring the line between paid corporate advertisements and amplified brand endorsements from trusted friends, some kinds of marketing is going to become irrelevant.  As the kids who are growing up now with smartphones and social media from a young age become interns and then employees and then managers and leaders, the idea of needing to hire outside help to update a blog will seem laughable.

So wait, what are you going to do now?

I've tried to make most of these reflections about the profession of website development as global as possible, even though they're heavily informed by the way my company, Summersault, has done things since we started almost 16 years ago.  But the reality is that my thinking about this comes at a time when as a firm we are intensely working to once again reinvent a  business model adapted to (and perhaps even helping to shape) the way things work today.

After a couple of attempts over the last few years to change course while maintaining our existing offerings, we recently decided  that we couldn't continue to take on new cargo in the form of general website development projects AND boldly sail in a new direction.  That's not to say that other website development companies aren't totally viable in some form - we know there are still plenty that are - as long as they mind the above trends.  But for Summersault, at our size and in our geographical location, we know that it's time for a transition.   We have a number of special projects and service offerings (like our web hosting) that will continue as they have, but we're also refocusing on how we can best live out our mission of building community using Internet technologies, while remaining a sustainable and thriving business.

I'm excited about what's ahead, and privileged to have the opportunity to once again be in that position that entrepreneurs love: asking what itch I can scratch in a way that will do something good and useful for the world, while allowing me and others to make a living and have fun along the way.

For other people out there who do website development in some form, I hope you can keep on keeping on, and I'd love to hear from you about the trends, shifts in business model and other changes you're seeing and experiencing as the Internet changes the world around us.

ADDED 5/20/13 at 5:23 PM: I've really appreciated the conversation about this post today on Hacker News and in the comments below. The feedback I've gotten prompts some clarifications:

I probably should have used a question mark in my post title instead of an asterisk. I don't claim to know the future and I get that I'm talking about an industry and an area of tech that's unpredictable. I've no need to be "right" about this and am just glad to have started some conversations.

I probably also should have referred to something like "generalist retail website development for the masses" instead of just "website development." One part of my current company that is still going strong is a business unit that's performing hundreds of hours per month of custom software development, database management and consulting for a client pioneering a unique problem space where no off-the-shelf tool is going to do the trick. We just had challenges replicating that scale of project within our company, but that's been more about roadblocks to growing the way we wanted to than it has to do with the nature of the industry overall.  I fully agree with the commenters who note that at the higher end of client and project requirements when it comes to creativity and complexity, there's still a great need for professional service providers with a broad range of experience and deep knowledge. As I tried to say in my post, I think the folks working with bigger budget clients and projects will have plenty of work for the foreseeable future, even if under a different name from "website developers."

I'm shutting the site down here in April of 2013 for a couple of reasons:

For one, it's been over a year since the last content update to the site.  Some of the old content has even become confusing to users looking for recent versions of past events.  Over the years I've tried various methods for keeping the site up to date and current: trying to post a lot of stuff myself, soliciting area organizations to post content, asking volunteer editors to write posts, paying people to write for the site, and others.  That's not to say that there weren't times when the site was chock full of useful info, but just not in a sustainable way.

Which brings me to another reason I think it's time for the site to go: the way people consume information about what's happening in their community has changed since 2006.  Between the increasing popularity of Facebook as town square and news source, the information overload that comes with lots of online news sites in general, and the appearance of a number of other related informational sites and projects in the Wayne County area, the PWC site and concept isn't as useful or relevant as it once might have been.

Lastly, and maybe this is more about a change in me than a change in the environment, but I think some of our local news sources are doing a much better job than they used to at telling the "success stories" of the community, including some really progressive goings-on.  While PWC was never intended to be a news alternative to the Palladium-Item or others, I'd had some sense in launching it that there was too much focus on sensational negative headlines and too many untold stories of good things happening here.  While I'm sure there are still many of those, there are more tools than ever for individuals and organizations to tell their own stories directly, and PWC just didn't have the critical mass of daily eyeballs to make continuing its operation worthwhile.

I enjoyed the time and energy I put into this community improvement project, and I think it met a need in its time.  I put it to rest thankful to everyone who contributed to it, linked to it and read it over the years.

While this is apparently the only officially supported method for restoring firmware (the alternative being to ship the router to ASUS for repair, a 10+ day process), I found with some exploring that the Windows program is likely just a glorified tftp client, and that you can restore firmware using some more standard, non-Windows tools.

I'm listing below the steps I had to use today after trying to upgrade my RT-AC66U device from firmware version 3.0.0.4.266 to 3.0.0.4.270.  (The release notes for the latter indicate a fix for a "live update related bug" which is what I suspect I encountered when I first tried to do the upgrade via the web GUI.)

I'm a Mac user, but these steps should work for other non-Windows operating systems such as Linux. It hopefully goes without saying that you should follow these steps at your own risk, and I make no claims or warranty about the outcome; you could end up worse off than you are now.  You could set your router on fire. You could end up killing another version of yourself living in an alternate universe.  Be careful.

1. Make sure your router is indeed in need of an emergency recovery firmware restore.  On the ASUS unit I have, this is indicated by a slowly flashing power light and a clear lack of Internet connectivity.  Make sure the other usual methods - power off, hold down the reset button, hold down the reset button as you power on, etc. - don't fix things.

2. Find a way to get a known good ASUS firmware image file onto your system.  This is probably a file that ends in ".trx" such as "RT-AC66U_3.0.0.4_270.trx".

3. Unplug all other network devices from the unit, and connect your Mac or other system to the ASUS unit with an Ethernet cable plugged in to port #1 on the router.

4. Setup your network configuration so that you have a static IP address on the 192.168.1.0/24 network block.  I used 192.168.1.10 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 and a gateway of 192.168.1.0.

5. Open a Terminal window and make sure you can ping 192.168.1.1., the probably IP address of the ASUS router.  If you can't ping the router, the rest of these steps probably won't work.

6. CD into the directory where the firmware image ending in .trx exists (see step #2 above).

7. Run these commands from the terminal prompt, using the correct firmware image filename in the "put" command:

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$ tftp
tftp> connect
(to) 192.168.1.1
tftp> binary
tftp> put RT-AC66U_3.0.0.4_266.trx
Sent 22765568 bytes in 76.5 seconds
tftp> quit

8. Give the router about 5 minutes to process the firmware image you've just sent it.  I had to then manually turn the unit off and back on to get it to reboot into a working state.  Once it came back up, I could again ping it and I could again access the admin GUI via the web.

If that doesn't work, it wouldn't hurt to repeat the steps again and give it another try.  If that still doesn't work, you'll probably want to call ASUS for an RMA case (that's 812-282-2787 in the US and Canada).

I would have hoped that a company manufacturing devices for the modern age would not hobble their customers` ability to self-troubleshoot by limiting the recovery process to only users running Windows.  Even if the above method is unsupported, they could at least publish it in some form so that they don't use up their time and their customers` time with unnecessary interactions with Windows users, or worse, mailing units in for repair that could instead be repaired where they sit.

I hope these steps are helpful to someone else.  Let me know if you find other techniques that might help in similar situations.

At Summersault, our entire company intranet is a wiki.  Anyone who works with us can edit the content on it, add new pages, delete stuff that they think is out of date or unhelpful, and so on - from small typo fixes to multi-page documents and images.  If someone makes a change that needs to be un-done, the wiki software lets us "roll it back" or otherwise incorporate only partial changes.  All of this gives us the opportunity to have an intranet "by and for" its users and our staff, instead of something built and maintained solely from a management point of view.

Wikis aren't appropriate for every kind of website, or even most kinds, but I've been thinking lately about what it would mean to have wikis power city, county and state government websites.

If these sites are primarily meant to be informational tools for use by the people who live in a given geographical region (and who are theoretically paying for the site's creation and maintenance), could governments give those people some control over the content on those resources?

Residents will tend to collectively be very knowledgable about the details of how their community/city/county/state works, at least at the practical level of the average citizen's interactions with government entities, and could collectively have more time and resources to keep an informational website current than a few government employees who probably have many other things to do.

Someone who knows the trick to expediting a certain paperwork process could share their wisdom.  Someone who just loves to keep track of certain kinds of weather trends or which floats were in which parade each year could curate an entire section of the site. Someone who did the research on who you have to talk to about getting a permit to build your deck could post the details.  The crowd-sourced content would be lopsided and messy at first, but over time it could grow into a comprehensive, living knowledge base about what it means to live in a certain area.

Of course you couldn't have all of the content be powered by users. Laws and municipal codes that need legislative action to change, election results, sensitive financial information, interactive forms and tools, etc. might still need to be managed by authorized users only - but wiki users could still annotate and expand on those pieces of information.

Wikipedia and The Wikimedia Foundation have found innovative ways to deal with people and robots who would abuse their editing privileges for posting spam, obscenities or self-serving content; these wiki-powered government sites would certainly need those tools.  And like Wikipedia, the content published at any given time would be a work in progress, always needing more editing, expansion, review and refinement.  The Wikipedia list of policies and guidelines is extensive, and similar guides and best practices would have to be developed for each site.

But could this still be a better way for taxpayers and residents to help shape government websites that are supposed to be most useful to them?  Could using a wiki to power these sites save taxpayer dollars, and maybe even help to build a sense of shared identity in a given area?

What if Facebook shut down once per day, every year?

Turn it all the way off. No one could get to it.  No walls, timelines, profiles, friends, games, apps or messages.

They could call it Facebook Appreciation Day.

Some people would appreciate that Facebook was off for the day and turn their attention to other things.

Some people would appreciate how much they enjoy / like / depend on Facebook the other 364 days of the year.

Facebook's servers and employees could appreciate the day off, or maybe they could do some deep cleaning.

I'm only partly joking here:

A ritual of sabbath from something that has become so engrained in modern culture, something that many people can't imagine NOT using in some form every day, could be useful.

Having everyone who uses Facebook experience it on the same day, together, would just be amazing.

What would you do on Facebook Appreciation Day?

I have over 190 accounts and logins for which a password or PIN is a part of my access: website tools, online banking, social media, email, internal company tools at Summersault, and so on.  I used to pretend that I was maintaining the security of these accounts by having a reasonably strong set of passwords that I re-used across multiple sites, sometimes with variations that I thought made them less likely to be broken into if someone did happen to compromise one of my accounts.

But as I prepared to give a talk in December about email privacy and security issues, and really stepped back to look at my own password management scheme, I realized just how much pretending I'd been doing, and just how vulnerable I was making myself to the increasingly well-equipped and highly-automated attempts at compromising accounts, stealing identities and stealing funds that are being launched every day.  I went and tested some of my passwords at the Password Strength Checker, and I was ashamed.   The potential impact of this really hit home as I read Mat Honan's personal tale of woe and his follow-up piece Kill the Password in Wired magazine.  Add in Passwords Under Assault from ArsTechnica and you'll be shaking in your boots.

So I decided that I was not going to be that guy who goes around telling people about how vulnerable they are with their simplistic password schemes while quietly living a lie in my own password management scheme.  I might still be hacked some day, but I would not be found giving some teary-eyed interview to Oprah where I whined about how the pressure of the 190 accounts to manage just got to be too much and how I knew using a simple dictionary word plus a series of sequential numbers was wrong but I still didn't do the right thing.

That's when I found 1Password from AgileBits, a password management tool that alleviates the horrors of password management.

I will admit that I didn't try other password management tools, but I did research the 1Password architecture and approach to security, and found that they had really thought the problem space through well.  I wouldn't have to store my unencrypted passwords on any third-party-managed service, the tool was resistant to most kinds of attacks or hacking attempts I might experience, and the AgileBits team behind it seemed to be constantly working on improvements and innovations.  And the reviews were great - I was sold, and it was clear I would be better off with this tool than with my existing scheme.

Now that I've used 1Password - and its companion apps on the iPhone and iPad - for over a month, I can say: what a relief!

I no longer have remember multiple passwords.  I no longer have to lose time in my day resetting the passwords I've forgotten.  I no longer have to resist changing passwords regularly as a part of good security best practices. I no longer have to worry (as much, anyway) about an insecure password being the beginning of a months-long identity theft nightmare.  With a single very strong master password and syncing between my laptop, phone and tablet, I have access to my passwords wherever I might be.

I'm especially impressed with the web browser extensions that let me easily and automatically paste in my super-secure passwords to the sites I visit every day without copying/pasting from some other window.  On my iOS devices, the 1Password app provides its own modified-Safari browser where you can achieve the same.  And even if I'm without my phone/tablet/computer, I can use their flexible web-based 1PasswordAnywhere feature.

So, you get it.  I recommend 1Password.  More importantly, I recommend some kind of password management tool if you're someone who has any kind of online identity that might include any kind of sensitive communications or information.  (See articles above if you need help imagining scenarios where you're vulnerable.)  If you're not on a Mac, there's a 1Password version for Windows and KeePass for Windows also seems to get good reviews.  There are a number of good options for Linux users.

Even once you're using a password management tool, there's more you should be doing to keep your accounts secure.  Make sure your master password is super-secure.  Consider using a dedicated email address for password reset link emails.  Change your password reset security questions/answers to something no one can guess or research.  Use two-factor authentication where possible.  Turn on alerts for logins that come from unfamiliar devices. And so on.

What tools and techniques are you using for password management?

At their core, the questions are asking an employee whether they feel their strengths are being used every day at their organization. The questions are simple and applicable across a lot of different kinds of organizations; I've listed them out below.

Using the free open source software LimeSurvey, I set up the questions in an open ended online survey on Summersault's Intranet.  Around twice per month, a randomly selected subset of the staff get an automated email invitation to answer the survey, anonymously by default but with the option to provide our names if we want.

Over time this has resulted in a growing set of data that help measure what about the experience of working at Summersault is going well, and what could be improved.  It's not completely scientific and this survey is hardly the only entry point for having this kind of conversation - in fact, it's even a very good one since it's not meant to be a direct line of communication between staff members and their managers/supervisors or other company leadership.  But it's a quick and easy way to get information about organizational health, and when we make changes to our structure or processes, we can look for any corresponding changes in how well our team sees their strengths being used at Summersault.

How does your organization measure whether your team's strengths are being used well every day?

Here's the  list of the questions developed by the Gallup team that we're using at Summersault:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Unboxing the Twine sensor

In late 2011, I noticed a Kickstarter project to support the creation of a portable wi-fi sensor device called Twine. I was already a fan of Kickstarter and its model of crowd-funding the development and implementation of great ideas, be they for gadgets, business models, artistic creations or otherwise. The idea behind Twine struck a particular chord: "connect your things to the Internet."

Yes, there have been Internet-connected things coming out all over the place for years now, and pretty soon the average consumer of household products will find themselves in a store aisle asking, "what do you mean this model doesn't connect to my home network?" But most of these network-connected devices are using their own proprietary standards and protocols for having those "conversations," and often the information being transmitted is only available through some specialized website or smartphone app. Just like all of the web services you now have individual accounts for, you'll have your toaster username and password, your refrigerator username and password, your lawn mower username and password, and so on.

In contrast to this trend, I was excited to see that Twine was an Internet-connected sensor device designed to be tinkered with, expanded upon, customized and fully integrated in whatever way you could imagine. Almost as soon as the project was announced, the creators were receiving fun and useful ideas for how Twine could be used; clearly there was an unmet need (you know, in that first world sense of the word "need") for a device like Twine.

So I became a Twine project backer, joining others who made the project one of Kickstarter's unexpected success stories with over half a million dollars in initial funding. I eagerly followed the project's updates on their blog; the project creators did a great job of describing the processes, challenges and decisions that went into making Twine a reality. And as you might expect for an idea that went from side-project to new business start-up, the complexities of actually delivering meant that the arrival date for my new Twine kept getting pushed back, from spring of 2012, to summer, to sometime before the end of the year.

When the Twine finally arrived, I was impressed with the packaging and presentation. Following the "Apple standard" of the unboxing experience, opening up the Twine box and encountering the gadget for the first time was a joyful exercise in minimalism and utility. The box held no manual or CD, just a website to visit, TwineSetup.com, to begin configuring the Twine.

Unfortunately, that'st where my enjoyment was put on hold for a while. First I had to learn by searching through Supermechanical forums that Twine's wi-fi electronics don't allow it to connect to hidden SSIDs of wireless networks, and that was a non-starter for our office network. After trying it out on several visible SSIDs, and some back and forth with Twine's support staff over the course of 3 weeks, it was determined that I'd been shipped a faulty unit, and it would need to be returned for replacement. The support staff was friendly and helpful, but it was an added disappointment (again, in that "boo-hoo your wifi sensor doesn't work what a hard life" kind of way) on top of the long initial wait.  It was a good reminder that Kickstarter is not an online store, and that the things supported there are often experimental in some form; I was still glad to be a part of the adventure.

Another couple of weeks later and my replacement Twine arrived. This time, network setup went quickly and perfectly, and in no time the Twine was online and sending back data about its temperature and orientation to the Supermechanical web tool where you can configure and interact with your Twine. I know I took a jab earlier at proprietary tools for managing these Internet-connected devices, and yes, your configuration of Twine is conducted through your special account on their web interface, but this seems especially necessary given the efficiency of not embedding all that software on the Twine itself. And, they give you lots of options for then triggering external events using your own custom tools, or through common services like email and Twitter.  (These are all tools that even just slightly nerdy people will probably be comfortable with, but they're maybe not quite ready for everyone yet.)

Twine's rule creation interface

My first setup of the new Twine was to attach it to the office refrigerator and have it email me every time the door was open. (Imagine the possibilities for fad dieting!) I'd ordered the magnetic switch add-on for the Twine during my initial backing of the project, and it's made for detecting whether doors are open or closed. The fridge door detection worked fine for the first few hours of the day (co-worker Derric made sure to open and close the door many times in fast succession and then check-in with me to make sure I'd gotten all the emails...I did), but eventually the masking tape rigging holding the sensor in place allowed it to slip a bit and the sensor was too far from the door to detect activity. But this was a fine first test.

I brought the sensor home and set it up to email me when the room it was in got down to a certain temperature. This test seemed relevant as I thought back to several years ago when I helped a family member who experienced the painful "furnace dies, pipes freeze, pipes burst, water covers floor" scenario in a sometimes-unoccupied house. To prevent a repeat, I set up some environmental monitoring using several different devices, and the "simple" behavior of getting an email alert to the right people for the right drop in temperature (and being able to make changes to the setup without being on site) involved a fair amount of technical configuration. Twine promised to make the same task - getting an alert if the temperature got too low - very simple, and indeed it was.

I let about a week go by with the Twine monitoring for temperature drop, and it seemed to work fine for the first few days, but then I stopped getting alerts; I'm not sure if this is because the house was just warm, or if something else happened, but when I checked in on the Twine web interface, it said it was working fine...until I got a notice a minute later saying the batteries were running low and needed replacing.

Overall, the Twine represents some really exciting possibilities for connecting real-world physical object behaviors to the Internet. When you add in services like IFTTT that let you take some kind of activity or event and turn it into a notification or some other event, you get some mind-boggling ways that you might automate parts of your life. I get that for many people, these kinds of devices and services represent complexity and a perhaps overwhelming dependence on technology. But just like the original mobile telephones or portable computers, what feels a bit clunky or inaccessible now will become even more miniaturized, commoditized and mainstream soon. Twine is on the cutting edge of that trend right now, and I'm impressed with what its creators have done.

As the Supermechanical team works to improve the device, it's up to the rest of us to find cool (and maybe even life-changing) ways to put it to work.

(If you like Twine and stuff like this, you should also check out Nanode, Arduino and GreenGoose.)

(You might think all that alerting would get obnoxious, but having these notifications sent to me according to my preferences has meant I'm less likely to obsessively check email or other digital inboxes for something important I might be missing.  The good/important stuff gets to me fast, the rest waits for me to view it at my convenience.)

In September 2011, the creator of Notifo announced that he would be shutting down the service.  It's continued to mostly work since then without his intervention (a testament to the self-sufficient nature of what he created), but in the last few weeks I've seen increasing errors or delays in getting messages through, so I went in search of alternatives to Notifo.

Today I found Pushover, a really simple but elegantly done service that offers all the features I want.

Signup on their site is simple, the configuration of custom services to talk to their API is straightforward, and they offer nice little examples of how to code your own scripts in a variety of languages.  The app for iOS is $3.99, well worth the price when you consider what the Pushover author went through to create the service.  There's an Android version too.

The service is otherwise free for up to 7,500 notifications per month.  You can set quiet hours just like in Notifo.  Unlike Notifo, you can customize notifications to go to some devices but not others if you want to (for example) get some alerts on your mobile phone but not your tablet device.

I further knew I'd found the right tool when I saw there is a growing list of other web services that integrate with Pushover, a Perl module to ease integration and an Irssi notification script that is a drop-in replacement for the Notifo one I'd been using.  In under 30 minutes I had all my notifications working as they were before. Yay!

If you're searching for alternatives to Notifo, Prowl or similar push notification services, Pushover deserves a look.

In school buildings and on college campuses, we learn about our history, how the world works and how to coexist with each others` diverse ideas, experiences and backgrounds so that we don't have to use threats, force and domination to maintain a life together.

Some are saying that the educational experience now needs to be conducted against the backdrop of a heavily armed security presence. Moving past just having metal detectors and "zero tolerance" policies, that our children should wear bullet-proof vests in classrooms and that educators should be trained to take down intruders with deadly force.

What would it say to our students about their futures and the relevance of their educations if every day they are reminded of a constant threat of imminent death through random acts of aggression? Why would anyone believe that education and seeking a shared understanding of the world might lead to peaceful coexistence if the very place where they're being educated is set up as a war zone?

More broadly, some are starting to wonder if every element of public life needs to be subjected to TSA-style screenings. If wandering through a shopping mall will need to start with a full body x-ray scan. If all strangers on a city street should be treated as potential assassins.

What does it say about our culture and our version of humanity if our daily interactions become focused on protecting ourselves from each other and from the violence that we're sure is around every corner?

In that model of living, there is only room for escalation, increased violence and additional isolation from each other. If someone's only reason for not shooting you in the face is that you have a bigger gun than they do or that your family might retaliate, then we have lost any kind of social contract that includes a shared understanding that it's not good or right to shoot each other in the face.

Albert Einstein said, "A country cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."

So much of the response to recent horrific events in Connecticut are focused on perpetuating a model of living in which we are constantly at war with ourselves and with each other. We are being asked to focus on surviving instead of thriving.

What does it look like to respond to these events in a way that moves us toward a model of living that prevents war instead of preparing us for it? What does it look like to provide an educational experience for our children that pursues peace?