I hear a lot of the Internet Marketing gurus brag about how they cannot even write their own landing pages. They argue that most (or all) of the technical stuff should be outsourced so you can spend time on marketing instead of hacking. There is no money in hacking, they proclaim. I see their point, and who am I to argue? After all, the number of "million dollar launches" that I have been involved in is exactly zero.

I do wonder sometimes how you know if outsourced technical jobs are being done correctly if you don't understand the underlying technology, but that is a subject for another blog post. This post is about code. And one thing you can say about internet marketing specifically, and the internet in general -- there is a lot of code out there. Code makes things work, and the quality of code can make or break a project (or an application).

WordPress is a great example of a situation where coding quality is absolutely critical. Apart from the core engine, there are hundreds upon hundreds of plugins that depend on the quality of the core code. Those plugins, if improperly written, can crash other plugins or even crash WordPress itself. In addition to that, there are themes which are really just code. If your theme is not written well, it can break too.

Last week, I was working with an excellent WordPress theme developer on a new theme. We were doing all of our testing on a site that was recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and were using some stock WordPress 2.5 template files. During our testing we found that some of the stock WordPress 2.5 theme files did not run on a WordPress 2.3 install. Now this is understandable -- after all, why would anybody expect something designed specifically for WordPress 2.3 to run in WordPress 2.5. (Note that he was doing all the work -- I was just along for the ride).

As it happens, the theme test we were working on crashed in WordPress 2.3 because it depended on the new gravatars function called in comments.php. Gravatars is the cool function now native to WordPress 2.5 that puts the author's picture next to their comment. The code in the them looks like this:

echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 );

See the problem? The theme called get_avatar without checking the return status (if available) or at least whether or not the function existed. Luckily, php provides for situations like this. The "function_exists" function lets you test to make sure that a function is there before you call it. So, a better way to call a function like this is:

if( function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 );

This tests to make sure that there is a function called get_avatar available to be called. It does not say anything about whether or not the call is successful. Now, you can reasonably make the argument that there is no need to test for get_avatar in a WordPress 2.5 theme since only a knuckle head would run WordPress 2.5 code under WordPress 2.3. I get that. But I also believe that it is always good practice to design code so that it is robust against unexpected circumstances.

Always use protection.

Regards,
Mark

P.S. The theme that I was working on is called SEOAdMax by Garry Conn. It is available for free.

On Monday, I said that today (Wednesday), I would report on my progress in my article marketing experiment. Actually, I am making some really good progress with Article Post Robot, and I have been working with Garry Conn on a new Adsense-optimized theme for WordPress. I'm waiting on some articles to be approved in the article directories, so I decided to move that post on article marketing to Friday.

While I was making that decision, I got back to thinking how weird it was to be off line over the weekend due to the storms and the kidnapping, and how cool it is that you can make money online from your home. What really makes this possible?

Answer: Semiconductors (and the electrons they manage).

Then I wondered, how many Internet Marketing geeks (or general web surfers) really understand the technology that allows them to read my blog? I mean, we all hear the marketing buzz about Intel and AMD microprocessors, and quad core technology and all that. But what does it mean? How can you put it into human terms?

How Small is Small?

Well, one way to get at this question is to consider how small the guts of a computer chip are. Here is a picture I pulled off of my hard drive out of a presentation that I made in 2000.

The image is from a friend of mine at Siemens in 1997. It shows a human hair magnified 1000 times with some "stuff" on it. The black box marks the "stuff." The "stuff" is the size of several transistors (transistors are the building blocks of computer chips). You can think about a transistor as a way to store a one or a zero. If the transistor is off, it is a zero; if it is on, it is a one. If you want to store that result for any lenght of time, you need to get several transistors together to make a "memory cell." The transistors work together to help each other remember if they are storing a one or a zero. Once you have ones and zeros, you can hook transistors together to count, add, subtract, multiply, etc.

If you zoom in on the picture above you see this:

The above image is the same hair magnified 10,000 times. On the hair, you can see that the "stuff" is seven things that are the same size as a transistor was in 1997. Since 1997, the semiconductor industry has been able to shrink the size of stuff like this about a factor of 5 or so (depends on how you measure it). So, things are much smaller today.

Putting it in Perspective

The above picture is from another presentation that I gave in 2000 (and I cannot remember the origonal source for the drawing). This drawing shows that same human hair on the right and a bacteria on the left. On the far left, you can see the size of a the same set of typical transistor lines from above. Of course, the message is that semiconductor circuits are much smaller than bacteria. In this picture the circuit patterns are depcited about the size they were in 2000. They are about half that size today (or smaller in many cases), and getting smaller as we speak.

So, what does it look like inside the chip.

The final picture I'll leave you with is a tear-down of an integrated circuit where you can see these small features hooked together to form circuits.

In this picture, I am only showing the wires that connect transistors together. A single wire is the size of one of the lines on the hairs above.  So, when you go to Best Buy to grab that next computer -- now you know what's inside the box.  Tiny structures that control the flow of electrons.  It is the meaning of life in modern times.

As a semiconductor engineer (my day job), I am in the business of making these things. Often, I am asked -- "Yo, Mark, How do you make stuff that small." Every time the answer is the same -- very carefully.