Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
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.
Keep reading How to Get Facebook Fans in German (and Why You Might Not Want Them)
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
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.
Keep reading Reducing SQL queries in WordPress Templates
By Martin
WordPress |
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
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.
How do you do it?
Keep reading How to create a network backup with Apple's TimeMachine
By Matej
IT |
Friday, May 7th, 2010
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.
Keep reading How much is a good logo worth? Case study: Agile Pain Relief
By Michala
Business |
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
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.
Keep reading WP Spam Free: Reducing Server Load
By Martin
WordPress |
