Recently we've done a couple of Typepad to Wordpress conversions for a very nice Austrian PR and marketing expert by the name of Karin Schmollgruber. Karin's very up-to-date on social media and Facebook.
While we are quite active on LinkedIn and Twitter and various other social sites, we avoid Facebook like leprosy. Mark Zuckerberg has shown time and time again that he is not someone to be trusted with your data. In fact, the origins of Facebook themselves are dubious, he hijacked someone else's code and project.
Our fundamental objections to Facebook go even deeper and affect our relationship with Google as well (I won't use Gmail, although we do use Gcal and some Google docs at work and of course I use the webmaster tools as well). Basically, in the Soviet Union, the government spent a huge part of GDP on its security apparatus of KGB gumshoes and their paid and unpaid informants, maintaining huge filing cabinet in the Lubyanka on people of interest. In the US, the FBI did similar surveillance of Black Panthers, human rights and Indian groups, although these activities represented a much smaller part of US GDP.
Google and even more so Facebook is us doing totalitarian surveillance work on ourselves for free. Basically every time you add data to Facebook or use Gmail you are turning unpaid informant on yourself and your family. In the US the boundaries between the state security organs and your private data are so emaciated that there is no difference between the data lying in US database at Facebook or Gmail or on a government server. In December 2009 on CNBC, Eric Schmidt Google CEO came right out and said it:
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Imagine our amusement when Karin made Foliovision an ideal example of how to find fans on Facebook. Karin's video is in German but basically she got a package in the mail from us and was very happy. She'd like to friend us in Facebook but we don't have a fan page.
If you are a Foliovision client or friend after you pay for our work, we will send you a really nice polo shirt along with a thank you note. We spent a lot time of time choosing really good shirts and getting first class printing and we mean the thank you that we send. The thank you gift should reflect the same high quality standards we set in our work.
Austrian PR and social media Expert Karin Schmollgruber show off her Foliovision polo shirt
It's probably a great marketing gesture but what is not accounted for in terms of its effectiveness, is that it is sincere. We really appreciate our T2WP clients from Microsoft to ZenDesk and the Hollywood Reporter to solo weblogs like Karin, Richard Nikoley and Scott McLeod at CASTLE trusting us to take good care of their websites and to do really great work for them.
So if there was some way to get a company fan page without having a personal Facebook account we'll probably do it. In the meantime, thanks Karin for the shout out and we'd recommend marketing via Twitter and LinkedIn. We've also heard that Xing is very big in the German speaking world and more similar to LinkedIn than Facebook.
At this point, Facebook is an attempt to privatise the web inside of a closed ecosphere so we really want to keep our distance.
We'll keep supporting the EFF, doing great work for our clients and sending out polo shirts. And staying clear of Facebook.
If you work on a busy Wordpress sites in a shared hosting environment, you know how important is to keep the number of MySQL queries down as much as possible. Even if you are using some caching plugin, it's a matter of principle.
Today I was shocked to see that one of my Wordpress templates (it's based on Cutline template) is taking more than 100 queries on the index page. I was removing various parts of the template until I found that it's the the_tags() Wordpress template tag.
And here's a number of queries going on on my test site right now with this code:
Total Time: 78 database queries run in 0.014724969863892 seconds.
Finally I discovered that if I replace the_excerpt() with the_content() (that means the full articles are displayed, not just first few sentences), the queries go down to around 50. Is the_tags() not working with database cache and global PHP object until the whole content is shown?
I found the exact line in the_content() function which makes this happen and put it into my code, right before the_excerpt:
If you have tried to set up network backup on OS X and you ran into the message "the backup disk image could not be created", probably this article will help you.
OS X's TimeMachine software had native support for network backup until the OS X Leopard 10.5.2 was released. Apple had its own reasons for the decision to remove network backup, but many advanced users including us at Foliovision would still like to be able to back up over the network.
We have a bunch of Mac Minis in a mixed network of Linux and Windows computers. We'd like to use all our Minis for work and not for backup and use one of our older Linux towers to store the backup.
Fortunately Apple left us an option to turn-on network support for TimeMachine by running the following command in terminal:
We can finally see network hardrives in selection for backup places. The problem might seems to be solved. No dice: it is only the beginning.
If you select a network drive for backup, you will see a very familiar message:
the backup disk image could not be created
Google automatically completes the phrase as soon as you type "the backup d".
The real problem is in the file system which must be used for TimeMachine backup. TimeMachine only supports Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system.
The solution is to create a place on the network, which will trick TimeMachine, into thinking that it holds data in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. This trick is accomplished via copying a sparsebundle image (with special name) to a network share. You have to do following steps for to make TimeMachine successfully run a backup.
OVERVIEW
Enable network hardrive support in TimeMachine
Mount network shared place for backup data
Create a sparsebundle virtual image
Copy the sparsebundle virtual image to the network shared place
Set up TimeMachine for network backup
Optimisation and other information
1. Enable network hardrive support for the TimeMachine software
Network hardrive support for TimeMachine is turn off by default. For changing this fact we have to type following command to the terminal: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
After that, you should see mounted network harddrive in TimeMachine's locations for backup. If it is not this case, probably a restart is needed.
2. Mount Network shared place for backup data
If you have a shared location for backup data on Linux server, you can map the directory as a drive to Mac in Finder application. You have to do following steps:
Click GO and then “connect to server” in finder menu.
Write following path if your sharing is based on protocol samba (SMB): SMB://<IP_ADDRESS_or_COMPUTER_NAME>/<NAME_of_SHARED_PLACE> (e.g. SMB://192.168.1.25/Backup)
3. Create a sparsebundle virtual image
This step is very important, because the TimeMachine doesn’t allow to backup data to a network drive, which has any file system except “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. So we have to create a disk image in "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” format.
We have two ways to do it:
Open disk utility (Disk Utility) and create new virtual disk with following atributes:
Save As: <computer hostname>_<hex mac address of en0 interface>.sparsebundle (e.g. MacAlec_00ef9a048c4f.sparsebundle, if you forget to add .sparsebundle, it will be added automatically)
Volume Name: Backup of <computer hostname> (e.g. Backup of MacAlec)
Volume Size: the max amount of space you're going to set aside for backups. (The volume size is depends on amounts of backup data. I have chosen 150 GB)
Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Encryption: None
Partitions: No partition map
Image Format: Sparse bundle disk image
Note: Disk utility automatically mounts the image to system volumes. We won’t need the image mounted, so we can safely unmount it.
The previous step can be done by one command in terminal: hdiutil create -size 150g -fs HFS+J -volname "Backup of MacAlec" MacAlec_00ef9a048c4f.sparsebundle
3. Copy the sparsebundle virtual image to the network shared place
You can copy the sparsebundle image to the network shared place using one of the following steps:
Copy the file to shared place by drag and drop operation in Finder application.
If you prefer to work with the terminal, you can type this instead: cp -r <sparsebundle_image_disc_location>/<computer hostname>_<hex mac address of en0 interface>.sparsebundle /Volumes/<NAME_of_SHARED_PLACE>/(e.g. cp -r /Users/Alec/Documents/MacAlec_00ef9a048c4f.sparsebundle /Volumes/Backup/)
Now we can safely delete the sparsebundle image copy on local computer once we are sure that it has been copied to the shared location.
Set up the TimeMachine for network backup
Open TimeMachine preferences (in SystemPreferences).
Click on Change Disk button for select the network drive for backup. (We have to select the "Backup"in our case.)
The first backup will start in two minutes. TimeMachine supports incremental backup, thus the first backup can take very long time (it is depends on network bandwidth and amount of backup data).
If you want to eject the mapped shared volume (/Volumes/Backup in our case), you have to do it within the two minutes countdown before backup starts or after backup is finished. TimeMachine has its own mechanism for mapping network hardrives, so a backup process isn't interrupted by your hard drive mounting or unmounting. TimeMachine will automatically mount the virtual sparsebundle image, when the backup starts. You will see Backup of <computer_name> as connected device on your desktop, so you won't need to manually mount the network hard drive later.
4. Optimisation and other information
in order to avoid long delays in backup process caused by Spotlight indexing, You should set the Spotlight application to not index the mapped network drive. Here's how to remove spotlight indexing for a hard drive:
Open up the Spotlight software preferences in system preferences window
Move to privacy options and add the network drive by plus symbol
If you'd like to back up a little less often, you can modify the file com.apple.backupd-auto.plist which is located in /System/Library/LaunhDaemons/ to change backup time interval. Open up the file in text editor and find the section:
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>
You should change the number 3600 to the number of seconds of your backup interval.
Result
I deliberately deleted some files to test backup reliability. This worked just fine. I was able to restore data from backup using TimeMachine's restore feature. TimeMachine restore is easy to use and lets you choose data from any date and hour. If you have followed the exact steps above, you should have a working network backup now on a non-Apple computer.
In January we helped Mark Levison's Agile Pain Relife consulting make a very successful Typepad to Wordpress transition. Behind the scenes there is a very interesting design case study, we'd like to share.
The main aim was to move the content from Typepad webblog to his new business domain. Mark's company focuses on the business of "relieving software development pain". He came to us with a great domain and a catchy name for this business: Agile Pain Relief Consulting comes from.
Mark chose the WooTuits theme, which we thought was a great fit. He didn't ask any significant modifications. The challenge was to adapt it to Mark's consulting firm's business goals. At Foliovision, when we talk about customising a template it goes far beyond simple changes like background colour or the size of the font. We start with a template but seek to end with a unique site which look like a custom design.
We firmly believe that getting one's logo and branding right is the starting point for a successful design. Mark didn't have a budget for the logo work so we agreed to do a new logo ourselves which Mark would purchase if he liked it.
The original logo
The original logo was saying the company name in simple black bold Times font without any other adjustments. Our concept was to focus on the "pain relief" element of company's business name.
We wanted to create strong, iconic branding capitalising on the billions of dollars already spent by pharmaceutical companies on pain relief imagery.
Here is our first good attempt.
Redesigning the original pill
This logo show the creative way of redesigning existing brand identity. Why to have the pills lying around your logo, when they can help tell the message straight by forming well known sign of the medical cross? Why to use serif font when simple, sans serif, modern looking typeface can communicate your brand values more clearly?
Creative redesign
But we still wanted to get to something stronger. After a trying many things we suddenly realised that AGILE is exactly five letters just like the word BAYER and their famous original pain relief pill: the simple aspirin.
Here's what we came up with:
Bayer aspirin pill idea
Since the logos were done rapidly, to as concepts, we used the existing Bayer aspirin pill. After acceptance we planned to do the 3D imaging necessary to get a convincing scalable version of the pill for both print and web with AGILE instead of BAYER.
Our client Mark liked the Bayer aspirin pill idea.
Unfortunately he was unable to find the resources for redoing the pill and the logo remains a concept only for now. Mark went with a homemade logo:
Self-made solution
Alas, homemade logos are often not as effective at presenting one's brand as a designer version. We are really sad that we were not able to complete this project for Mark.
Mark told us he doesn't think logos or design are a substantial reason that a client would choose a supplier or not. We disagree on that question. A logo is not a substitute for good service or product, but a complement. In our experience, A convincing logo will help with:
media relations
getting a better price
closing the deal
Hopefully a good project will come Mark's way this year and we can finish the job for Agile Pain Relief Consulting.
What are your thoughts on the important of a good logo?
WP Spam Free is a great antispam solution for Wordpress. But if you ever checked your site loading speed in any of the site speed loading tests (we like to use Web Inspector in Safari), you surely noticed that the WP Spam Free's wpsf-js.php JavaScript file is taking too long to load. And no caching plugin will stop that if you want to have working comments.
WP Spam Free Loading - check out the wpsf-js.php item
The reason is that this plugin uses a unique random cookie to protect your blog from spam. And to generate the cookie name and value in the JavaScript file it includes all the Wordpress code on every page load - thus slowing down the execution of your site's PHP code.
However there's a new experimental option in WP Spam Free which turns of this JavaScript while keeping the cookie anti-spam protection in. Here's how to turn it on
Open your WP Spam Free Settings page.
Add this to the location bar and press enter:
&showHiddenOptions=on
This is what the location bar address will look like:
Now you will notice that the JavaScript for WP Spam Free is no longer loading. Let's give this option a try and find out how effective is WP Spam Free without the classic JavaScript cookie protection. Hopefully in new version of this plugin it will be tested and fully operational.
Right now, we are adding some anti-spam features to our comment moderation plugin Thoughtful Comments which will use zero extra resources and your server load won't be affected by it.
