Tim Nitz: a kind of epic geekdom

For people like me, born before 1990, web sites are like cow pies: even though our initial inclination is to avoid them, as time goes on it becomes harder and harder to avoid stepping in them–to the point where we can either spend our lives cursing or go into the manure business.

I say this as someone who until two years ago followed the career ambition of John Cleese, who for years and years would tell interviewers that his goal in life was never to know what went on under the hood (well, he said “bonnet”) of a car. Last I heard, he owned a Rolls-Royce but still had no idea how it worked. Luckily, Rollses never break down, which is probably why he bought it.

In my case it was not luxury automobiles but web sites. Until August 2009, like most members of my graying generation I did not have a website, a Facebook page, or a Twitter account. I did not play foursquare, and still don’t. I used Google, but didn’t know it was called a search engine. I didn’t know RSS from CSS, and still don’t. I did not own a smartphone, and my only experience with apps was getting increasingly lost and angrier by the yard as a GPS-based mapping app sent me farther and farther into the kind of industrial wasteland near Logan airport where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre could take place and nobody would know. I actually owned a cell phone, but work had forced me to buy it in Cairo, so not only did it not work in Burlington, Vermont but its keyboard was in Arabic.

Since then, and especially since starting the Champlain College Publishing Initiative (CCPI), I’ve embraced the torrent of change with the slightly off-balance enthusiasm of the great folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who at the time I first met him was still limping from an accident that was the result of trying to take up skateboarding at the age of 70. I run more than half-a-dozen web sites of my own creation and have a hand in several others, and I’ve made WordPress an essential part of the list of techniques my students need to learn before graduation, in between Verbal Nouns and Zeugma.

But here’s the odd thing about learning about the Internet: it has changed the way we learn. It has changed the nature of learning itself.

From the very beginning of CCPI, I noticed an interesting difference between myself and our only other employee, the sainted Natalia Yaacob (now graduated and in the CCPI Hall of Fame), a junior at the time. As we were creating our first web site, or trying to upload files to Lulu.com, or trying to embed a downloadable pdf so readers could sample a new book, we constantly came across things she didn’t know how to do. (It goes without saying that I didn’t either.) She didn’t grind her teeth, or start boiling between the ears, as I did. She sat there in perfect calm and sooner or later sorted out pretty much any problem by employing an entirely new method of learning, which involved such strategies as Let’s Try This, and I Played Around With It For A While, or the old standby I Just Googled It.

Which was just as well, as in some cases there simply wasn’t a book to learn from, or anyone on campus we could call up. We stumbled from one cow pie to another, and sooner or later the thing got done and we stood there, our boots beshitten, grinning in triumph. Good times.

What brings all this back is the fact that yesterday we invited my friend Tim Nitz, owner and operator of Panther Internet, a Burlington-based web creation and web marketing company that is currently doing rather well, to visit and speak to the Publishing in the 21st Century class, and for the first time I realized what web sites actually are, and how they run. Rarely have I been forced to admit I knew so little about something I use not only every day, but pretty much every waking minute.

From the beginning of the class, is was clear that Tim has a kind of epic geekdom. He taught himself computing so long before C++ that people were still using A–. There was no WordPress. There was no DreamWeaver. People fired up their CPU’s by striking two flints together. There was email, but it consisted of typing out your message, then printing it out and handing it to a man with a cleft stick, who memorized the recipient’s address and ran off down the street.

Armed with this long historical view, he explained websites from the ground up–in other words, in terms of their evolving architecture. Websites were originally created at CERN in Switzerland, it turns out, as a means of exchanging the kind of scientific document that we’d call a research paper. Consequently, when search engines look for information they do so as if they were searching research papers: they look for a title, an introduction, a conclusion, subheads, and so on. They also look at the captions of photos or other artwork, and the title that accompanies such artwork. Apparently the magic numbers are 250 and 6: you want your business name (as an example, he used the charmingly fictional site for the Vermont Wombat Rescue Network) mentioned in the first 250 characters of your site’s text, and you want it to appear in about 6% of your copy. Any more than that and the search engine thinks you’re turning out spam.

He gave us tip after tip–in fact, it became clear that once you understand how a web site is put together (as opposed to blundered into, like my own cow pies) the tips are in every line of text, every square inch of screen.

Yet that was nothing compared to what was coming. He advised us to sit down, fasten our seat belts, restore our tray tables and seat backs to the upright and locked position, and clicked on Source.

The class gasped and shuddered. On the screen was everyone’s worst nightmare: line upon line of source code, that pungent mulch of comprehensible English words shredded up with dingbats, hieroglyphics and that mathematical minefield known as HTML.

It was awful. It was a kind of betrayal: we had happily been looking at plain English and comforting photos of women holding cuddly wombats, but behind it all was this. I felt like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, realizing that every single apparently-normal human around him was actually an alien, except that it was me who was about to start screaming.

In the end though, it all made sense. We went in there, behind the clock face and into the tiny, spiky wheels, and it all made sense. Unfortunately, it also made me realize that in my stumbling around the cow pasture of my web sites, I have missed countless opportunities in the name of simply getting something up there on the screen. Even now I probably use only half of even the basic functionalities of my sites, but at least I know that by mentioning Tim’s name in this post, I drive more traffic to his site–and mentioning his name in the post is actually more effective that posting a link.

All right, that’s enough for now. I think I’ll drive home and have a little lie down. If only I knew what that strange noise was coming from under the bonnet.

Tim Brookes

Oh, and a final question: will the combination of eBooks and search engines make indexing a profession of the past?

The System and its creators

I should be working right now, but I just saw a sight so unusual and so heartwarming I just couldn’t resist writing about it.

Okay, here’s the backstory. For the last two months, Champlain Publishing has been working at heroic speed on a book entitled My Own CEO, a collection of interviews with student and teenage entrepreneurs talking about how they started their first (and second, and third) businesses. The author is Bob Bloch, director of Champlain College’s Bring Your Own Business (BYOBiz) program, a radical initiative to support students who, even while in college, are starting and running their own entrepreneurial endeavors.

And of course very few things are as entrepreneurial or run so much by students as Champlain Publishing (CCPI), so we’ve been right in there from the get-go.

Leading the team is Alli Neal, who graduated in May from the Professional Writing Program and is now CCPI’s first actual hire, as Project Manager. (Roughly equivalent to Managing Editor.) Given that our aim was to produce an entire book, title-page colophon to end of back-cover copy, in two months, we needed a manager.

Alli is the most senior of the team. Everyone else is an undergrad. Jordan LaCount, a Graphic Design senior, is the Art Director on the project, and considering she’s working on her first book she is doing an astonishing job. She laid the entire text and photos out in InDesign over the weekend. Again: over the weekend. A whole book. And then realized she had better tweak the trim size so it laid better on the page, called the printer, got an updated quote, and so on.

As anyone who has worked on an interview-based book knows, the real bear is transcribing and editing the interviews. So right in there heading the transcription team is Jillian Towne, who as a Professional Writing senior has already edited or co-written three published books. She was also in charge of call-back and follow-up interviews, though in that (and in transcribing) she was teamed up with John Wolfe (Professional Writing junior, philosopher, former fencing champion) and Colleen Lloyd, (Professional Writing freshperson). John achieved feats of fact-checking–often last thing at night after a long hard slog with transcription) that were simultaneously intuitive and thorough. Who would have thought to check that someone mentioned in passing in one of the interviews would spell his name not Cameron but Kameron with a K?

So that’s all background. The team has been racing along, learning all kinds of things never taught in a classroom, working until they fell asleep over their laptops (a tricky feat, gymnastically and orthopedically), keeping up with this hellish and implausible schedule, and now we’re right up on deadline: the files need to go to the printer at the end of today. Knowing they were over in the college library, I thought I’d check in to make sure nobody had opened a vein or taken to laudanum.

Nothing could have been farther from the scene in the small conference room in the library. Sensibly, they had commandeered a lovely little space that overlooks the rooftops of Burlington, the silver expanse of lake Champlain, and the purpling Adirondacks on the far shore. And they had created, entirely off their own bats, a System. Not only that, but a System (O Joy Unconfined) that Works.

Jordan had her laptop open at the relevant page in InDesign. Alli, laptop open next to Jordan’s, was dictating changes coming in from Kathy Johnson, our professional copy-editor, from the author, and from Alli’s own proofreading. Jordan was entering the changes and adjusting the page payouts as necessary. As I arrived, we looked down across campus and saw Kaisa Jarrell, Graphic Design senior, heading into a building to take the last remaining author photo.

But that was just the beginning of the System. As soon as each chapter was laid out, Jordan sent out a Print command and Jillian or Colleen headed off to the library printer to begin proofing the updated layout. Once each of them had completed their individual read, they flagged edits to cycle them back to Alli to get them through to Jordan again.

I had given them the barest outline of the tasks ahead of them. They had worked the System out all by themselves. And barring accidents, the files will be heading down to the printer tonight.

I love this job for many reasons. I get to work one-on-one with bright, capable students. I get to dabble in publishing, especially at the fringes (of course, I claim these fringes are the cutting edge) of publishing as it is evolving hour by hour. I get to work without a tie, and I can swear if I feel like it. But the greatest pleasure of all is watching these extraordinary young people in the process of becoming extraordinary, learning things I never taught them and breaking out of their anxieties and limitation to try things that will change them forever.

I had gone to the library to see what help they needed, but after a short conversation break they told me, “Okay, now go away so we can get back to work.”

As I write this, the afternoon clouds are breaking up and the sun is sinking toward the mountains. The whole place seems to glow.

Photo by Kaisa Jarrell

P.S. Not sure if I mentioned dedication and stamina: after I left, the team continued to work until midnight. Alli carried on working all night; Jordan was back shortly after dawn, and took the files down to the printer.

O editors and publishers out there in the vast expanse of America: if you’re not already thinking of hiring these students, you’re insane.