Longtime friend-of-the-site Nima Yousefi (he coded Scrippets) will be coming on board to handle a few special projects in the meantime.

With ridiculously good candidates to choose from, it’s not just protocol to say it was a tough decision. I learned quite a bit, both from video-chat interviews with applicants and calling references. I would have been happy with any of my final few choices; hiring just one was difficult. It forced me to focus on what I saw this person doing two, six and twenty-four months down the road.

I largely followed my original plan for the hiring process, starting with reviewing portfolios and emailing follow-up questions. I assigned a special project to my top few contenders, both to see what they could do and how they would discuss it afterwards.

You can read the assigment if you like. I’ve left it to the candidates whether they want to share what they did with the world.

If you feel like doing your own riff on the project, by all means go for it. If you’re using my text, I’d like attribution, but otherwise it’s free and clear.

In addition to my actual job of screenwriting and directing, I currently do all the tech stuff: the websites, the wiring, the coding, the iPhone app that’s thisclose to beta testing. And I enjoy it. The luxury of a writer’s life is the freedom to explore and obsess.

But the list of things I’d like to do is so much longer than what I could conceivably do that it makes sense to bring in somebody with similar ambitions and a specific mandate. Rather than, “Wouldn’t it be neat if…” I’d like to be saying, “Hey, figure out a way to do this.”

So I’m hiring somebody who can.

My assistant, Matt, will continue to handle my schedule, travel, research and proofreading. The new person will handle stuff related to this website and many new projects.

I see this as a full-time job. Salary would be commensurate with experience, and there’s health insurance.

I’d prefer the person live in Los Angeles for occasional face-to-face discussions, but she or he would be working outside the office most of the time. The new guy would be free to — encouraged to — pursue outside projects, as long as the real work came first.

After a string of terrific and very different assistants, I’ve learned that hiring someone is never a matter of checklists. Each employee brings experiences and abilities that change the nature of the job.

But I can safely predict this person will need to be very digital, with a good balance of design sense and general geekery. A good candidate for this position would be able to talk about most of the following with ease:

• Great opening title sequences of the last year.

• Pros and cons of breaking out CSS into multiple files.

• The feeds aren’t updating right. Is the problem on WordPress, Feedburner or somewhere else?

• Whatever happened to the Stone typefaces?

• Books you’ve bought just for the cover.

• Is that short URL scheme a good idea?

• Why isn’t Google hitting this page? What SEO should we bother with, and what should we ignore?

• Is it worth outsourcing comments to something like Disqus? Could we get Scrippets to work with it?

• If you were marketing a web series about giant killer plants, what outlets would you target and how?

• Since jQuery’s already loading, what else could/should we have it do?

• Getting an offsite backup server going.

• How quickly can we get The Variant onto the new Apple device?

• If we needed to swap hosts in 24 hours, what are the first six things to do?

• Five desert island typefaces, and whether TypeKit is worth it.

• Setting up A/B test pages to track two possible layouts.

A great candidate might also have expertise in several of the following:

• Coding everything from PHP to Flash to Ruby to Objective-C

• Motion graphics and VFX

• Shooting and editing

• Gadgetry and game development

You’ll notice that “writing” is nowhere in these criteria. To date, all of my assistants have been screenwriters, and all of them are now working in the industry. But I don’t see this new position as being a particularly good stepping stone for an aspiring screenwriter.

But it is likely a stepping stone for something else, and a paid opportunity to explore some areas of interest for a year or two. In addition to maintaining existing properties, there’s a range of new projects I’d like to tackle.

Here’s the hiring process:

1. Candidates email digital@johnaugust.com. Include a bio with work experience and background, interests, and (most importantly) links to work you’ve done. I’m particularly interested in seeing websites you’ve designed, along with an explanation of their goals and techniques. But I’m also curious about other projects, like iPhone apps or short films or something else you think I’d be interested in. I’ll be hiring a person, not a portfolio, so let me get a sense of what you’re like.

2. By the second week of February, I’ll narrow down my choices to a few great candidates. I’ll give each candidate a small budget and a reasonable deadline to come up with a site for a specific project, such as The Remnants. We’ll have coffee and talk about what you did and why.

3. I’ll pick the person who seems the best fit.

Do not apply in the comments. Let’s save the comments section for feedback about the nature of the job and general discussion.

So why doesn’t everyone make their own bread?

Because it’s a kind of pain in the ass. A lot of things can go wrong, leaving you with a blob of sticky dough. It takes time. It requires bowls and pans that have to be washed, plus an oven that heats up your kitchen. And truth be told, most people aren’t exactly Nancy Silverton.

All in all, it’s much easier to buy a loaf at the store.

Blogs are like bread.

To make a blog, you need something to write about, plus software and hardware to put it on the web. ¹

When I first launched johnaugust.com in 2003, I assembled everything on my own computer, then uploaded it to a shared host. In baker parlance, I mixed the dough in my own bowls, then carried it down the street to the community oven to bake it. I was outsourcing the expensive hardware.

By 2004, I outsourced most of the software as well, running Movable Type on the shared server. Later that year, I switched to WordPress, which has continued to run the site ever since.

I like WordPress a lot. It’s remarkably easy to install and theme. It’s powerful and flexible. It has an extremely active development community, so if there’s a feature you’d like, someone’s probably already built it.²

But make no mistake: you’re still baking your own bread. Things can go wrong. Really, really wrong. And when they do, it’s a lot of work to fix it. A bad loaf of bread is disappointing. A bad error in your database can be catastrophic.

Over the weekend, there was a lot of uproar about a worm attack on WordPress installations that wrecked some notable blogs. Amid the sometimes-smug observations by the unaffected, I found one point that needs to be elevated to basic principle:

Most people shouldn’t be running their own blogging software.

Services like Tumblr, Posterous and Blogger are excellent and free. WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPress, gives you 90% of the benefits with none of the hassle.

In 2003, I had to run my own software. There was no choice. But if I were starting a blog from scratch today, I would do it on one of these services.³

Some people like making bread.

For all the hassles, there are some benefits to doing things yourself. Just like the artisanal baker can tinker with a recipe, the self-hosted blogger can tweak things just to his liking. He also has more control over his content — some services make it difficult to migrate.

In a month or two, I’ll be launching a revamped version of this site, which will continue to use WordPress. That means I’ll have to keep up with security updates, backups and a lot of general troubleshooting. There will be more worm attacks and self-inflicted wounds. I’ve decided it’s worth it. For most folks, it’s probably not.

If you’re considering starting a blog, ask yourself whether you really want to bake your own bread. Odds are, you probably just want a sandwich. Buy a loaf and get to it.

1. Countless blogs are started without the “something to write about” part figured out, which is usually why they go dead after three weeks.
2. This weekend, I installed a plugin that automatically sends a backup of the site to my Gmail account. Total time: five minutes.
3. Also over the weekend, I nuked a few stray WordPress installations that had gone fallow. One of the pitfalls of WP’s easy installation process is that it’s tempting to throw up a site to test a concept. A year later, that mostly-empty blog is an attractive nuisance. I suspect that 80%+ of WP installations fall into this category. I’d propose the install scripts like Fantastico default to closed comments and randomized admin usernames.

If you missed it, Clay Shirky summarizes it thusly:

After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn’t actually occur.

Mary Hodder would probably agree with most of that history. But in her take on the event, she finds there is still reason for outrage, even if Amazon wasn’t deliberately trying to sweep gay titles under the rug:

The issue with #AmazonFail isn’t that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing “false” to “true” in filtering certain “adult” classified items, it’s that Amazon’s system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of “adult”. And “gay” is part of “adult.” In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas. When other employees use the system, whether they themselves agree with the underlying assumptions of the algorithms and classification system, or even realize the system has these point’s of view built in, they can put those assumptions into force, as the Amazon France Employee apparently did according to Amazon.

Shirky found himself part of the #amazonfail mob, and is now embarrassed by his assumptions:

Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true. As bad as that was, though, far worse is the retrofitting of alternate rationales to continue to view Amazon with suspicion, rationales that would not have provoked the outrage we felt had they been all we were asked to react to in the first place.

Shirky calls this “conservation of outrage.” Once you realize the original thing you were upset about doesn’t exist, there is a great temptation to find an alternate target. We’ve all done that.

Beyond the conspiracy theories, what I found most interesting about #amazonfail were tweets demanding to know why Amazon hadn’t corrected the problem just hours after the term had surged on Twitter. It speaks to the speed of popular culture — and the sugar-high of Twitter — that we expect every problem to be identified and remedied immediately. Five minutes feels like an eternity.

Unlike most blogs,² many of the 1,000+ posts on this site are still highly relevant today. They’re answers to reader-submitted questions, and most of the questions haven’t changed. It’s often difficult to find these older entries, however, and the chronological blog format doesn’t help. I’ve struggled to find ways to make it easier to dig around.

The category archives at the bottom of (almost) every page are a start. Clicking on Education, for example, will take you to a listing of all the articles in that category, along with brand-new summaries — most of them written by Matt.

Another option is what I’m calling Answer Finder, which takes all the screenwriting-related entries and groups them together in a much more browsable interface. It’s an experiment, and your feedback is certainly appreciated. Two caveats:

• There are known issues with Internet Explorer. In particular, the category box appears too far down the page. It’s a problem with IE’s box model, and if someone wants to grab the CSS and fix it, knock yourself out.

• Some of the older entries have weird formatting, particularly with scrippets, because the specs have changed over the years. One by one, we’ll be going through old posts and fixing them. But if you see something wonky, feel free to note the URL in the comments to this post.

For the truly curious, here’s how Answer Finder works. (You’re welcome to look at the source, of course.)

1. Getting both categories and posts out of WordPress is more difficult than you’d think, which is why I’m happy to have found the plugin WP Categories and Posts.

2. I hacked the plugin to make it generate DIVs for each category.³

3. With a custom page template (an under-appreciated WordPress feature), I used jQuery to hide the DIVs, bind the category menu and place a session cookie to help you come back to the same place when navigating away.⁴

Let me know how the new page is working, or not working, over the next week. You may see periodic downtime or wonkiness while things get sorted out.

1. Remarkably, they’re still running these, even though it’s been years since I’ve written a new one.
2. I’m using “blog” in the 2009 sense of a series of short posts arranged chronologically, newest first. That is: a blog is a blog because of the way it’s formatted, not because of the content per se. It’s easy to forget that the term blog originally referred to weblogs, or online personal journals.
3. When I say “hack,” I really mean it. It works because it works, not because I really understand it. PHP makes baby Jesus cry.
4. jQuery, by the way, is awesome. It lets a barely-programmer like me leverage a lot of CSS knowledge. And I have new respect for JavaScript, which is more Pythonic than I was anticipating. Given the speed boosts in the new Safari and Google Chrome, I’m looking forward to seeing what ambitious ideas will be coming down the pipe in 2009.

My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to reach for first — maybe I’m the culprit! — but it may explain why I’m a screenwriter.

The much more reasonable instinct would be to assume we had some sort of visitor. A mouse, a rat, a squirrel. Or possibly a raccoon — our housesitter had mentioned seeing one over the holiday. We set a peanut butter-baited mousetrap on the counter, and sure enough, at 4:50 a.m. Thursday I heard it snap. There was no critter under the bar, however.

I know through friends that a raccoon has to be handled differently than a mere mouse or rat, so I was determined to figure out which kind of varmint we had. I set my MacBook’s built-in camera to shoot one frame of video per second, and left the lights dimmed in the kitchen. I also re-baited the trap, this time with hummus.

This morning, I came downstairs and saw with disappointment that the trap hadn’t popped. But scrubbing through the video, I got my answer.

Fans of The Nines may recognize the kitchen, and the accuracy of Margaret’s “they live in the palm trees” line.

UPDATE: Conventional rat trap worked. It snapped four minutes after leaving the room. Cleanup was bloodless, but still more unsettling than I anticipated. Rat Guy comes Monday to figure out how it got in.

FURTHER UPDATE: Here.

It also reminds me of my junior-year class in postmodernism, in which we spent at least half the semester trying to arrive at a definition for the term — and never really got one. This video certainly has aspects of what we were seeking. It appropriates familiar cultural elements (The Charlie Brown Christmas Special) for use in unexpected contexts (advertising), much the way Michael Graves used the Disney dwarfs to hold up the roof of the Team Disney building. And in both cases, the project doesn’t really make sense unless you’re familiar with what it’s playing off. In this case, Lucy isn’t Lucy and Linus isn’t Linus, but the joke doesn’t work unless you understand who they usually are.

But I’d argue that the video also represents more than whatever postmodernism is or was. It’s the kind of thing you can’t imagine existing without YouTube. While the technology to make it could exist independently of internet distribution, the idea of doing it feels net-dependent. If Ernie doing M.O.P. is the quintessential video mash-up –

– then The Charlie Brown Ad Agency is its close kin. A mix-in, maybe. And it exists in the same metaverse as Beyoncé’s Single Ladies video, which remakes a mash-up (Walk It Out Fosse).

I offer these observations without any clear idea about what it means for screenwriting, but you can look at many current films through this lens. The Dark Knight is less a Batman movie than a Big Serious Movie with Batman mixed in. Twilight isn’t a vampire story. It’s a teen girl fantasy with a small thread of vampirism — not even real vampires, but something almost wholly different — woven in.

And I think that’s what our books and movies are going to be for a while: Aliens vs. Predator vs. Mr. Magoo. Our cultural world is vast and ephemeral, so we look for familiar icons that we can recall and repurpose. We want to know just what we’re getting, yet still be surprised. We’re toddlers that way.

Surprisingly, it all seems to be working okay. Even the wiki, which I was certain would break.

If you notice anything broken, leave a comment, or email ask (you know the symbol) johnaugust (dot) com.

The section is experimental, with the explicit goal of trying new things that are prone to failure. It’s not even hosted on the same server as the rest of the site. It’s a Tumblr blog with a lot of CSS hackery to make it resemble the rest of the site, and now a comment system powered by Disqus.

The new comment system is actually a lot slicker than the built-in comments used in the main site. But slick often equates with trouble-prone, so we’ll see if it’s useful and stable.

If you’d like one, you can register and upload an image.¹ It’s free and painless. Conveniently, the same picture will show up any blog that uses the Gravatar system, which will likely be a growing number, since the Wordpress.com folks just bought the company.

I debated for several weeks whether or not to use them. Avatars feel a little social-networky, which this site certainly isn’t. But we get a lot of comments — sometimes 80+ — and being able to put a “face” with a name helps a lot. Also, I tend not to remember the names of people who post, but with photos, frequent commenters stand out.

The gravatars are a trial-basis thing. A couple of weeks from now, I might switch them off if I find they’re more annoying than useful. But feel free to use this comment thread to test them out, and offer any opinion on the issue.

1. Note that it sometimes takes a few minutes for newly-uploaded images to show up, so don’t panic if it doesn’t register right away.