Did you just switch to Thesis theme and now you’re having problems seeing thumbnail images on your teasers or other blog features? There could be a problem with your urls (if you also relocated your blog to a new domain or directory when you switched to the Thesis theme), or you might have had an old theme that stored your post image urls in a custom field, which Thesis knows nothing about (because Thesis uses its own, different snazzy custom fields). This tutorial will show you how to fix that latter problem, no matter what level of skill you have with mysql database administration.

Fixes like this are easier than they look, and this tutorial will work for beginners and non-programmers. But remember to backup your database first! Seriously, it takes a minute or two to dump your database into a backup .sql file, and it’s the ONLY way to undertake any database changes safely.

What’s a Custom Field and Why Did It Break My Post Images?

I recently had a client who needed me to migrate their WordPress blog to the well-known Thesis theme from another theme called Arthemia. Like many themes using the timthumb image resize script to generate cropped and resized images, Arthemia stored a post image url (the location of the image that should be the thumbnail picture for each post) in a wordpress custom field. When a user created a post, they uploaded an image and copied the url into a custom field (called “headerpix” in this particular theme) which was used by the theme’s internal php scripts to call timthumb and resize the image into a thumbnail for use in blog features like home page teasers. The problem with this approach is that loading a new theme that also uses a custom field for this purpose will require you to edit the wordpress database or else you will lose all of those urls that were hand-picked to be the main post image for all of your previous posts.

Thesis wants your post image url to be in a custom field called “thesis_post_image” so it can grab that image url and use it to create your post thumbnail images. You could manually go back and copy/paste your old custom field value into the new Post Image field in the Thesis post administration panel OR you could enter 2 commands via the shell or phpmyadmin on your web hosting server to automatically find/replace all of those old custom fields with the field name that Thesis wants. If you want to do it the smart way, read on.

Confirm the exact name of your old theme’s custom field

It was a simple fix once I figured out what I needed to change. The key was confirming where the old theme was storing the post image urls. WordPress custom fields for each post are stored in a table called “wp_postmeta” (if you chose a different prefix for your database tables than the default “wp” prefix, then substitute your custom prefix for “wp” in that table name). By looking at your previous posts, you should be able to find the name of the custom field with your image url in it.

Keep in mind that a “custom field” in wordpress is NOT a field name in the database table but rather it is a pair of values stored in the meta_key and meta_value fields of the wp_postmeta table. So when we find and replace our custom fields we are actually going to be setting values in the meta_key field rather than editing the structure of the table itself. For people new to mysql, this can all sound complicated but trust me, it’s very easy. Just follow along and leave a comment if you have questions.

Fix your Thesis thumbnail images via the command line

Step 1: Login to your web hosting shell (command line)

If you don’t have shell access, you probably have phpmyadmin (a graphical interface to manage mysql databases). Look for it in your web hosting control panel. You can’t do this stuff from within the default wordpress administration page itself. Feel free to skip ahead to the phpmyadmin instructions if you’re not using the shell at all.

At the prompt, type this command to login to mysql:

mysql -u username -p databasename

Press enter after that line. Don’t put a semicolon at the end of this command. Just type it like that, substituting your wordpress database user name and wordpress database name (both of which can be found in your wp-config.php file). You will immediately be prompted for a password, so enter your wordpress password and press the Enter key again. If you logged in successfully, you will get a welcome to mysql message and the prompt will change to this:

mysql>

If it gives you some kind of warning and says Access Denied, just try again and type carefully. The command line is very unforgiving of typos so always give your commands a quick look-over before you hit the Enter key to avoid screw-ups. It’s not rocket science but does require some attention to detail (if you’re comfortable with the command line, just skim past my detailed instructions meant for newbs).

Step 2: Replace your old custom field name with thesis_post_image using the shell

Now we just need to enter one command that will replace all instances of the old custom field name with our new field name for Thesis:

update wp_postmeta set meta_key = replace(meta_key, 'headerpix', 'thesis_post_image');

First up, use your own table name (the default will be wp_postmeta if you didn’t change the prefix in your wp-config when you installed wordpress). Second, replace headerpix in the above command with your old theme’s custom field name (which you already confirmed the exact spelling of). Don’t forget that semicolon at the end of your sql statement. Press Enter after you’ve checked your command over.

You should get a message that you changed a certain number of rows (each instance of the custom field, called ‘headerpix’ in our example code, will be in its own record also known as a row in mysql parlance).  Reload your blog and you should now see your image thumbnails. If you go into the post administration pages for your old posts, you will now see that there is a custom field called “thesis_post_image” which contains your image url. Congratulations! You fixed it in 2 commands.

Fix your Thesis thumbnail images using phpmyadmin

Step 1: open phpmyadmin and get yourself to the right table

Ok, if you’re doing it this way, there is a good chance you need screenshots and will want to make SURE you are messing with the right table before you run any commands in phpmaydmin. So first we are going to get you to the correct database, the right table, and the Search tab so we can verify that the custom field name you THINK you need to change is actually there (basically we are making sure you are in the right place before we run the fix).

Use this screenshot to help you navigate to the right place:

verify custom field name in phpmyadmin

The next step won’t work unless you are in the right database and table AND you have the exact spelling of your old theme’s custom image field.

Step 2: Replace your old custom field name with thesis_post_image using phpmyadmin

This part is easy if you don’t make any typos. One crappy thing that might happen in phpmyadmin is if the script times out because it’s taking too long and your server is configured to abort mission even before the script is done updating your database. That’s just one of the many reasons I use the mysql command line interface more than phpmyadmin.

Use this screenshot to help you navigate to the SQL tab and enter the right command. Substitute YOUR data as needed (see the command line instructions above for details about what you might need to change to make the command work for your wordpress blog):

Fix thesis post images custom field with phpmyadmin

Reload your blog and you should now see the image thumbnails from your old theme showing up in Thesis.

Please leave comments if you have questions, corrections, or find this tutorial helpful.

World of Warcraft Magazine is for Superfans

An old marketing adage that remains true in most cases is that it costs much more (sometimes many times more) to acquire a new customer than the costs to sell additional products or services to existing customers. At a time when World of Warcraft has an amazing 11.5 million players (market saturation yet?), it’s safe to say that the costs of acquiring new, virginal WoW players is likely to be significantly higher than simply creating new things to sell existing fans, particularly the superfans.

In geek and mainstream culture, the superfans are the ones who stand in lines to get new releases, tickets, and merch, and they are the people who create and consume fan art and fan fic, immersing themselves in the likable bits of their chosen fandom. Nearly everyone goes through some phase of fandom in our lives, whether it’s a particular kids’ show that we had all the toys for and made a point to be in front of the television at a certain time each day like it was our job, or whether it was a particular brand of shoes or computer that made us feel kinda cool just for owning them. Apple and fashion brands make a killing from superfans. Niche media like comic books practically live or die by catering to (or alienating) their superfans.

And the great thing about superfans is that they genuinely want to buy more of whatever it is you’re selling, so long as you are respectful of the things they truly love about your offering (in other words, you don’t fuck with their emotional attachments and badges of social status). Sure, if you mess up, a superfan can go incredibly sour on your company (think Kathy Bates’ character in Misery when she discovers her favorite fictional series is ending in the next book). But that’s a small risk when all you need to do is find out what your fans love, and build off of that.

This is why the Blizzard magazine makes sense. Maybe not for the long haul, but for right now while the superfans are hungry for more. This new magazine has nothing to do with the overall prospects for the mainstream sorts of magazines you see (but probably never buy) at the grocery store. The WoW magazine is actually an extension of some of the community features Blizzard has already identified, via their web site and popular 3rd party sites, as endless oceans of superfan joy. Fan art, especially beautiful painterly and comic style art, has been prominently showcased on the WoW community site for several years because the fans can’t get enough of the stuff. Ditto for WoW humor (how many dwarf beard jokes do we really need? “A plethora, El Guapo,” says the superfan). In addition to the t-shirts, action figures, and multitudes of other swag offered to superfans over the years, a magazine is just a natural extension of the art, fan fic, comics, strategy guides, developer interviews, and other popular fare that superfans already consume for free. Except now, Blizzard wagers the superfans are going to pay for it, at least for a while, because it will be in print.

And I believe it would not be a viable offering if the magazine were digital. Why? Because the lure here is to get all that free stuff superfans love in tangible, glossy dead tree format. The superfan collector will slide her issues into plastic covers to save them for some future auction or convention. The superfan art patron will have particularly beautiful color pieces from the magazine hung on the wall (matted and framed if she’s artsy herself). And all of the superfans who snap these precious (and probably short lived) rags up will have a touristy souvenir of Azeroth in their hot little hands. Like when that girl in the first Freddy movie pulls his hat out of a dream and into her world, except, uh, in a fun way. The magazine, like the action figures, is a means for superfans to get hold of a little bit of the dreamscape, the virtual place that they have lived so many hours of their life in. It really makes sense as fan service, and as a potentially high-margin new product aimed squarely at existing customers (a coffee table book is nice too, but a periodical feeds the superfans ongoing cravings for fresh, timely, I-just-saw-this-exclusive-shit-before-you-did content).

All that remains to be seen is 1) whether the editorial and graphic design staff do a good job of catering to the superfans above and beyond what is available on the many excellent 3rd party WoW sites, and 2) how long Blizzard can milk the epic cash cow that is WoW.

What I would love to see is a Second Life subscription-free digital publication (with optional pay-per-issue print-on-demand issues) highlighting all of the excellent Second Life user-created content. Partly because things don’t live long on the grid, and partly because SL graphics don’t look so hot in the viewer but can look stunning after light post work in a graphics program. It would be a small revenue stream (and additional advertising vehicle to augment the janky SL in-world classifieds) as well as a nice (and MUCH needed) way to show appreciation for all of the content creators who take a loss to build the experiences that make SL relevant. What SL superfan wouldn’t buy a print issue if their build, art, or avatar was featured in the magazine?

News via Mashable

EA is a monolithic corporation. They have more than enough HR people to screen out unqualified goons, like the geniuses who ran the spectacularly lame Dante’s Inferno “acts of lust” promotion at last week’s San Diego Comic-Con.

If there is one question you NEED to ask marketers before they take a job in your company, that question is “do you understand who buys our shit?” For marketing minions, that is the crucial dealbreaker, above all other criteria. These people are supposedly marketers, and yet they crafted a promotion that doesn’t work on any possible level. Allow me to break down this massive fail into smaller, more digestible (yet still totally incomprehensible) component fails:

1. The contest asked con folks to “commit acts of lust” with booth babes. This was presumably aimed at the kinds of people who would feel comfortable bothering the good people of boothcake for some kind of posed photo to win a contest. Right there, you have eliminated a ton of people who don’t have the heart to subject the boothcake to further annoyance; and you have mainly attracted the attention of the kinds of people who genuinely DO want to commit acts of lust with the boothcake. However, the contest also warns not to “get crazy” or do anything “depicting or mentioning sex, violence, drugs, alcohol and/or inappropriate language.” So… you get the attention of obnoxious perverts and then you tell us we can’t even mention sex? Just who is this contest targeting?
2. Ok, the contest is for people who want to win “dinner” (hey, that’s ME!)… and “a sinful night out with two hot girls” (wait… what the hell am I going to do with two hot girls?), and furthermore, “limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of booty” (paparazzi is something people WANT now? really?). Obviously, they think this game will only appeal to an elusive limo-and-hot-girl craving segment of the overall gamer population. Why not give out prizes that, oh, I dunno, a GAMER would want? Like cash, games, consoles, VIP tours of game studios and dinner with the lead design team? Don’t misunderstand: I love boothcake, but are these the kinds of people you really want to win a chaperoned, “just friends” dinner date with? What do you talk about? “Hey, I liked how you managed to smile through most of your shift and you didn’t freak out when that Sailor Moon guy hugged you for way too long.” Granted, I’m a hot girl, so maybe I’m undervaluing the joy of dinner with “two hot girls.”
3. So therein lies the biggest pile of fail: even though the entire contest concept and execution was completely misguidedly weak, they still had to add insult to injury by assuming the players are all straight, single men desperate for the slightest whiff of tits. Guess what? Not all gamer guys are hard up for opportunities to eat a free meal with a hot girl or two. Not all gamer guys even like-like hot girls. And, though it really truly hurts to have to say this again and again and again: not all gamers are guys. All these pitiful excuses for marketeers had to do was change the word “girls” in the contest promotional copy to “hotties” and then, depending who won, they could have had either the female or the male boothcake (er, “reps” as I guess some people call them) attend the prize dinner.*
4. The final ounce of fail was their halfass response to the uproar. When all the world is going to forget about this dumb promotion soon anyway, what harm is there in simply saying “Sorry, that was a lame contest!” and moving on with a better, more targeted promotion? Offer prizes that don’t insult your customers and create a contest built around a fun aspect of the brand/game. Don’t tweet ridiculous defensive clarifications, like you’ve just told an off-color joke at a party but think that explaining it in painful, obvious detail will somehow make it less offensive. Apologize, win people back, spin the flood of attention and free publicity back toward positive aspects of the product. These goons couldn’t handle the fallout from their PG-rated “edgy” contest idea, so ultimately I think the root of the fail was HR. Seriously, who hired these goons?

*Yeah, I live in a fantasy world where every game booth has both male and female boothcake on staff. It’s the same world where people get hired to do promotional work because they have some basic understanding of the desires and demographics of their target market. Go figure.

Why doesn’t Blizzard already have social media integrated? Why can’t you update your Facebook status while you’re waiting for a raid group to arrive? Why not play youtube videos in a little ornate metal-framed window above the skill buttons?

I’d volunteer it’s because we already have a client platform where you can play games and engage with social media (a web browser). But am I looking at this from the key perspective? No, because I’m not a social gamer. I’m an achiever/explorer type. I hardly need my in-game public chat channels much less a way to gab with people outside of the game.

When I’m playing a good game, I don’t want to multitask with real world bullshit. I’m in my magic circle. Let the calls go to voice mail, let the email go unread, and for the love of Will Wright, let the tweets STFU until I’ve logged out of the game world. A social media feed in my MMOs would be a very unwelcome intrusion, but that’s why it is so crucial for entertainment designers to design for the players rather than themselves.

TweetCraft highlights the fact that most online games still aren’t catering to the entertainment needs of social gamers. It’s not enough to be connected to friends in-world. For some, there needs to be omnipresent connectivity across online social services, across worlds.

Social media feeds in (and from) MMOGs are an interesting design consideration. I’m eager to see what the adoption rate is for TweetCraft and whether the underlying concept of external social media integration catches on in online games. It will be interesting to see whether Blizzard interprets this as a violation and bans the app or whether they start supporting social media integration in the core game client.

TweetCraft news via Mashable

I stopped blogging a couple years ago, but kept my old blogging domain name. I recently set up a tumblr scrapblog on that domain, kellyrued.net. So today, in Google Analytics, I was surprised to see some traffic still trickling from an old Broken Toys post mocking me for having a sense of compassion regarding a 2006 Ansche Chung griefing incident in Second Life. A quick recap of the incident: a real life female entrepreneur was ambushed with several minutes of disruptive prim spam shaped somewhat like pink dicks during an in-SL live event with CNET reporter Greeterdan Godel (Daniel Terdiman). Griefing and poorly designed prim penises are nothing remarkable in SL. However, what struck me then about the story was how this female business woman and her family felt about the incident.

She and her family were not just offended or hurt by the disrespectful joke, they also felt violated because of the sexual theme of the attack (no matter how silly, a dick is a dick; her attackers could have used any 3D shape to pummel her event but they chose to use cocks). Ansche expressed strong emotions using controversial language, basically claiming the in-SL attack felt something like a rape. Since virtual rape is an impossibility (anyone can exit a game or turn off their computer), I realized that sexual themed griefing is really the internet’s equivalent of sexual harassment and, yes, sexual violence. A lot of people took offense to the idea that Ansche felt raped. Please note that at no point did Ansche publicly say she was raped or that what happened to her in SL was the literal equivalent of an offline physical sexual assault. Her husband simply stated that she felt raped; in other words, that the incident made her feel violated in a sexual way. Sexual abuse is a spectrum that runs from the highly debatable, minor transgressions to the undeniable extremes of physical sexual assault; the only commonality between incidents of sexual abuse is that the victim felt violated in a sexualized context. People who think sexual harassment and violence are just physical acts might consider reading up on sexual abuse just to get a few more perspectives on the issue (or at least skimming their employer’s sexual harassment policy for some insight).

I empathized because I could not imagine a business woman NOT feeling sexually harassed if someone she didn’t know came into a live event where she was speaking and started throwing pink dildoes at her on stage (so many dildoes that the event had to be stopped and moved to a new location). Regardless of whether the joke was funny or not, it obviously had sexual themes. That some people are sensitive to sexual harassment shouldn’t surprise anyone. From bullying, bra-snapping boys in junior high through obnoxious ogling male coworkers who strain professional relationships by asking for (very unwanted) dates, almost every woman has had experiences that were in no way equivalent to the crime of rape, yet were more emotionally unnerving than they should be due to the unwanted sexual tone in the incident. Would sexual harassment policies even exist if people didn’t admit that when interactions include unwanted sexual themes, however subtle, they sometimes have a different and altogether more stressful effect on the victim? If a coworker compliments your neat handwriting at work, that alone is not likely to creep anyone out. If they compliment your perky tits, that can be really uncomfortable. It’s a fact of life that sexually themed language, media, interaction, and, yes, SL griefing will have different effects on people depending on the experiences and emotions of everyone involved. For Ansche, clearly the dick deluge left her feeling violated.

So, I wrote a blog post defending her FEELINGS. Three different ladies in the games industry wrote to me privately to tell me they appreciated my post. It was thoughtful in tone and did not trivialize the serious crime of rape, however several guys in the games industry (who are not known for their emotional IQs) criticized my post at the time and accused me of conflating rape with what happened to Ansche . None of the people who agreed with me that they felt bad for Ansche (because of how she felt) would say that publicly though because of the backlash from all the people who were rolling their eyes and feeling superior to Ansche because they could see the humor in her humiliation, the everyday griefing in what she experienced as sexual harassment while she was just trying to do her job (her SL business was actually supporting her in real life). People who knew me, understood why I thought the incident was worth remarking on publicly. Someone had to question the “griefers will be griefers” free pass that everyone was giving this incident. And I felt that someone who did understand Ansche’s emotional reaction should say so out loud rather than quietly thinking “hm, that would suck if it happened during my interview” like so many women did. I study sex in games, and my primary research focus for a little over a year in 2004 was researching emergent gameplay in online multiplayer games (including griefing, which is just another form of emergent play which for better or worse provides entertainment and retention for the griefers and their audience).

Sexual griefing is something I understand and have few problems within the context of a social, recreational game where the griefing target has plenty of choices (you can report people, you can block people, you can teleport away, you can log off, you can switch servers, you can switch games). But Ansche was at work. She couldn’t just leave her own speaking event. She didn’t have access to controls on the land where she was being interviewed and there wasn’t any feature she could use in-game to block the type of harassment during the event. The only power she had was to end her event, relocate it, or laugh it off and try to continue her event with the ridiculous griefing underway (this would have been my reaction, but that does NOT mean her reaction was any less valid).

Anyway, for anyone who comes across the Broken Toys post with the out-of-context quote pulled from my old 2006 blog: I was being compassionate and discussing an issue without mocking anyone else’s view point. I never said in-game griefing could be the equivalent of the crime of rape. I acknowledged that a victim of sexual themed griefing in a virtual world could feel violated the way Ansche did. Even today, I encourage people to think about the offline parallels (sexual harassment), especially when you consider that the woman was at work when this happened, not playing some frivolous recreational game that she could abandon for a round of Tetris once the dick storm started. Anyone who reads Broken Toys knows this guy knows a lot about games but you can’t view everything that happens in virtual worlds only through the “game designer” lens. Virtual worlds are conduits for real life, not just fun and games; there be ethical issues here too, not just dragons and gamer bullshit.

Hit a girl with dicks while she’s playing an online game, that’s griefing. Hit a business woman with dicks while she’s working an event in a virtual world… there are other words for that, perhaps depending on who you ask.

I just set up my first WordPress hosted blog, and I’m already fighting the urge to buy the custom CSS upgrade. I’ll probably just save some money and just learn to love one of the stock themes. I wonder how many WordPress hosted users spent almost $30 USD just to change their link color?