Once again, Distilled did a great job organizing yet another LinkLove conference taking place quite traditionally in the Congress Centre on Great Russels Street in the lovely Bloomsbury area in Central London. Foliovision was there on March 30 to pick up some fresh insight and tips from this year's LinkLove speakers.

01 handing out lanyards

Duncan Morris, CEO at Distilled kicked the sold-out conference off with traditional networking with your neighbours.

As a Distilled and SEOmoz subscriber, I guessed pretty much accurately what will be the most important takes from this conference looking at the main topics featured:

• Content building vs. link building
• Getting links from high-quality authoritative sites
• Making outreach of your e-mail marketing efforts effective
• Competitor research
• Building relationships in the blogosphere
• Smart and effective old-style link building
• New trends in SEO strategy

linklove sold out intro duncan morris

full house linklove sold out

Pretty much everything that we do for our clients in Foliovision was covered so I was extremely curious about the presentations and the speakers. This was my first SEO conference, so I was really looking forward to seeking these people live, as I have been following their blogs and twitter accounts for quite some time.

Quicklinks to Presentations:

1. Content Strategy vs. Link Building - Rand Fishkin
2. Making Outreach Effective - Michael King
3. Which Links are Really Helping Your Competitors to Rank - Branko Rihtman
4. Getting Golden Links - Jane Copland
5. Building Target, Relationships and Links - Wil Reynolds
6. Building Links With Products and Developers - Tom Anthony
7. Easy Ways to Win - Do it Differently - Martin MacDonald
8. The Critchlow Hierarchy of Needs - Will Critchlow

  Exciting lineup of linklove speakers

All of the speakers seem to have lots of relevant experience but not all of them held great presentations. Veterans like Rand, Martin and Will gave the impression that they know exactly what they're talking about whereas some of the other presentations were either vague or the speaker was working harder on entertaining the audience than delivering useful insight.

Content Strategy vs. Link Building – Rand Fishkin (CEO & Co-Founder at SEOmoz)

  SEO leader Rand Fishkin warns us about article networks

I expected Rand to be all white hat and moralist, but I certainly didn't expect him to start his presentation with a "F#$&! Link Building" Slide. Definitely caught attention of those who had less coffee that me in the morning and needed a wake up call. Basically, the message was that a pure link-building approach isn't the right way, in Rand's words:

"I'm going to do some dumb (link building) and I'm going to hope it sticks - That's a dumb approach."

Link Building is Painful

• The traditional way is painful, you have to be contacting webmasters directly in a personalized way
• That's why private link networks popped up and have been so popular ever since - a whole network of links for $49? Great!
• Not actually a good idea - if you go overboard you might get burned - it works in the short term or just partially

Why Links are in Danger

• The intent of an link was never to rank for it's anchor text - the algorithm was originally never designed  to do that
• Google didn't meant for SEOs to rank
• Since How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys  - Google's got angry and a lot of sites (700,000) mainly in the US received penalty emails from Google
• Don't use blog/article/link networks!
• Build My Rank and other networks shut down - a stupid idea to look for a substitute in terms of other link networks
• Linkerati (targets of linkbait) are a far bigger group - networked creators are everywhere

Go Social

• Social networking sites now dominate link sharing - 66% of internet users use them
• As a result, social signals in Google are on a rise - individual link metrics have lower correlation with SERPs over time
• Google says they don't get social signals directly - depends on what "directly" means here
• Google does collect a massive amount of social media data about every user - from Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Flick, digg, etc. - check it in your Google account
• They get a representative sample of "indirect" data to set up their social graph

Tactical Approach vs. Strategic Approach

• Tactical option A - ranking here will make things better - build content, build communities, promote great content
• Tactical option B - link building like crazy
• Strategic Approach - Acquiring customers at lower costs is winning
• Paid search is very expensive, average cost for a conversion - $95
• Organic SEO - a lot cheaper, same impact for $15
• Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio  - what you get for what you invest is a lot better for organic SEO
• Rand boasting with SEOmoz doing great in terms of conversion

5 Reasons to Invest into Content vs. Link Building

1. Simultaneous wins in multiple channels at once (social, link bait, etc.) – build up a follower base – brand visibility
   – hopefully google will notice and feature your G+ page in SERPs
2. The future is stronger social following - invest in things for the long term
3. Rand's "Give me 400 linking root domains button" => the publish button in SEOmoz's backend, of course
4. Duckduckgo.com could go big example – niche market search engine, but Google started exactly like this
5. Rand about building brand, brand, brand - makes everything easier

  Rand Fishkin topsy

What content should I make?

- use keyword research to see what audience likes
- Fiskars example: Scissor producer having a creative blog concept - visitors creating content
- or reverse and build content, tools for your current visitors
- or come up with a brilliant idea - Shitter (immediate success)

10 PRO Tips to do Content Marketing Right

1. DollarShaveClub.com – video (4 million views) that raised 1.5 million dollar funding
   – but no link building, bad title tag, the site was down in a critical moment
   – just a little bit of SEO and it would be beautiful
2. Visualize the time when a link is shared by time zone
3. FeeFighters Blog - immediate success
4. Economist – charts and infographics that get scraped or linked to
5. Zemanta's Blog Links Tools – images and content put in front of bloggers - a white hat link network, highly recommended
6. Twitter Stories – content curation + unique design
7. Slate's Partnership with Quora
8. Koozai's viral blog posts via Google News
9. See Jane Work: Demographically Targeted Office Supplies – use political and social messages to get people involved
   - target search suggestions - type "Romanians are" into Google
10. PrideBait – find interesting people, interview them, write about them, let their publicity rank for you

16 another question

Making Outreach Effective – Michael King (Director of Inbound Marketing - iACQUIRE)

  Mike King acquire black hat

Last time Mike spoke at LinkLove he even rapped, this time he tried to entertain us solely with his presentation. Mike rushed through the slides so quickly I had the impression he didn't want us to see at least a half of them.

The main point of Mike's presentation were outcomes of a marketing research they did in iAcquire to measure certain factors in outreach efficiency. They find out that:

• gender: female got a higher response rate, men got more conversions
• salutation: personalization is key. Other that the obvious, "Hey" had the best conversion rate, but the sample was too small (unsurprisingly). "Hi" did the best among the relevant. Use Rapportive to find names.
• day of the week: Tuesday seems to work best, but weekends tend to get high open rates as people receive less mail, so they're more likely to open it
• time of the day – 9AM had best response rate – but it makes sense to send at night, so people get them in the morning
• length of the emails - emails longer than 1000 characters tend to rank better
• logo vs no logo - emails with a logo are better

Other discoveries and suggestions included:

• throw away form letters and personalize – do more social linking
• phone number in email is worse than no number – better response rate from email without number can be due to a feeling that someone is trying to be trustworthy, but isn't - scams

Mike shared a bit about their outreach workflow.  To build a relevant target audience, they crawl 14 million page in a year -> put them through an algorithm -> filter blue (Wikipedia and other hard-to-get) and black (bad quality) -> filter them according to a few SEO metrics -> employ a quality control team (personalized for each client) -> then the real work starts with doing manual outreach

  Mike King iacquire wonders of SEO

Link Equity

Mike hates the term "link juice". What Mike likes to use when talking to a client is "link equity". He explained building quality links is more like building a piece of real estate than gaining juice.

• the price of a link is measured in how much would it cost to buy directly (or a very similar link)
• the cost is a function of incremental traffic in price of a CPC campaign

09 jo turnbull question

Which Links are Really Helping Your Competitors to Rank – Branko Rihtman

  Branko Rihtman

Is SEO a science?

• You would have to apply scientific principles - define questions and undertake experiments
• Practical science is what we need to apply, four principles:

1. Don't BS yourself
2. Truth above profit
3. Stay curious
4. Share knowledge

• Do social signals without links help rank directly or do they attract links?
• Use Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel
• Scientific approach – build plugins and use APIs to track content vs tweets/shares/likes vs links -> Result: a look at which social media audience is more likely to link
• MS Minesweeper effect: after the initial research step, we have 2urls -> which point to 214 twitter users -> who tweeted 12,000 URLs, which is about 3.700 domains
• Identifying valuable Twitter power users - users who tweet their links only or just links to your niche are not as valuable as users who tweet about various aspects of life - those aren't likely to send out spam signals
• Example: Pinterest content doesn't rank well with pure social signals, but ranks OK with some links
• Priorities: Links are first; then everything else - social shares are not yet the goal

breakout sessions: improving your blog strategy

Getting Golden Links - Jane Copland

  Jane Copland olympics of SEO

Link Building Like Everyone Else

• Most SEOs do link building in the same way, so they get the same links
• You need to think differently to be successful, following the crowd won't get exceptional results
• If you're using link networks, you get the same stuff everybody else does, to start outranking competition, you need golden links

10 belgian question

Do it like Michael Winner

• Use the bus lanes when driving around London if you've got enough cash to pay the fine and when you get caught - pay the toll - you just have to think out of the crowd
• Example: How to get an ad into the Olympic Games? Normally, you would have to spend 700 million dollars (viewership 4.7 billion in 2008) But there's only a 20k fine for streaking – that's a big saving
• Create a fake product, like the 10 Downing Street Experience
• You still need traditional links and volume, but golden links push you further
• Great links can be acquired on BBC, but you have to have a great product pitch - example: Zombie Boot Camp
• Outreach is not dirty - don't be shy, a little bit of showing off is good, but don't lie
• fix broken links found by webmaster's tools
• Opportunity is everywhere if you look at your obstacles differently

  Jane Copland with audience

Takes from Q&A:

• Reciprocal links are not bad when they're not between spammy sites
• Reaching people on social and in comments has actually brought employment opportunities in SEOmoz for the people
• Newspaper sites have different policies – some won't link ever
• Identifying targets first or building content first - the former is usually trickier than the latter

Building Target, Relationships and Links - Wil Reynolds

Wil Reynolds - Building Targets, Relationships and Links

Wil's presentation was basically a case study of him stalking a big fish in online marketing that he done a few weeks ago.

Stalking

• Want to get somebody's attention? Well, start stalking!
• You have to start tracking everything - tweets, mentions, everything you can get
• Pull RSS feeds of his/her tweets, etc. into iGoogle
• To be successful and noticed, you have to add value, help them out and act as your target, not as you
• Use Wil's Chrome plugins - look them up in his tweets
• The basic philosophy here is stalking = helping
• Use inboxq.com to find new followers - through answering questions
• Build a relationship online and meet in person, friends are more than links

Building Links With Products and Developers - Tom Anthony

 Tom Anthony - Building Links With Products and Developers

• 1997 - Google "discovers" links
• right after that - SEOs start to manipulate the linkscape and the cat & mouse game starts
• Does Google still trust links? There are trust issues.
• In the old days, every link was equal, now every link is screened for a multitude of factors
• SEOmoz Google algorithm survey 2011 – 40% of the algorithm is thought to consist of external link signals (down from 66% in 2009) – introduction of other signals
• either way, spamming anchor text still works to a degree - so what are Google waiting for?
• Link authority vs link volume graph shows us a great peak at DA 30 - that's the "normal" link distribution - link profile
• Anomalous link profiles can be white hat, but are usually not (spam advances faster than normal content), therefore Google is penalizing - deindexing whole clusters of domains even though collateral damage is done
• Panda sacrificed some white hats for the sake of getting rid of many black hats - a  great win for Google

What Should SEOs stop doing?

"We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years."

Google search blog, 2012

• Many of the big and small link networks (e.g. Build My Rank) have been deindexed lately - 20,000 to 30,000 domains got deindexed virtually overnight - that's 100,000,000 links gone.

Putting the Love Back to Links

• Google is scrutinizing every link
• The future are rich snippets and rel="author"
• Google+ isn't primarily a social network for Google, it's an identity service
• Google is defending their search territory and attacking social territory
• author stats are appearing in webmaster tools

What to do:

1. Make sure you have authorship markup set up properly
2. target trusted authors for links
3. shift your strategy from where you want your links to who will publish them

Author Crawler by Tom Anthony

• automated data discovery of author snippets data for link analysis
• loads of different uses for this data, e.g. identifying people you should be following (Wil's stalking)
• Follow @TomAnthonySEO to get the link soon

19 another question 4

Easy Ways to Win: Do it Differently - Martin MacDonald

Tips, Tricks from the Trenches

Martin MacDonald - Easy Ways to Win at SEO

Martin, with 10 years of SEO experience in industries like gambling, entertainment and travel spoke with the authority of a veteran. In his view, SEO's have two basic problems:

1. We're fighting all alone (and yes, according to the raised hands, most of the people in the room had small teams or did SEO alone)
2. What the others do? We tend to do the same.

• Martin would rather go the easy way and win still - the easiest way is going against the flow in link building
• Martin doesn't shy away from mentioning building an army - make somebody help you - mobilizing troops and getting links in a spammy way would cost him $10 a link
• Everyone likes to link to author profiles - use them to harness links

Ranking Without Links Example

• If you would get involved, you could even hijack a community
• Martin hijacked Rand's community by disproving a guy that lied about ranking without links
• Rand got involved into the debate, but Martin was the first one to bring evidence that the guy is a liar and has lots of links
• Rand retweeted Martin and not even did Martin's post rank #2 for Martin's name, but it even ranked for the liar's keywords on #2 for at least 12 hours

Great Links

• You can get links and traffic from a widget on BBC's site
• A human editor in BBC is picking mentions about BBC and linking to them in a widget on the BBC blog for a week - he should expect lots of new mentions this Monday
• The take: build widgets to make competitors build links for you

Shaping Link Equity

• harness affiliate links - with 302 redirects
• changing the way the affiliate network works – you can put # between your root domain and the affiliate code, then a 301 redirects your domain URL only, and a 302 redirect is put on the affiliate code, your competitors should then pass you their link juice

Ignore Convention, Reverse Hubs

• Example: Shit for Links - Exchange links for real useless stuff. The idea earned probably earned a comment even from Rand
• The five monkey theory applied to SEOs - following the crowd is not the right thing to do, in SEO and in life

Q&A

• Does exact match anchor text still work?
  - Yes it does!

• There is a breakthrough point for a overwhelming number of links. You have to build up nice and gradually.

The Critchlow Hierarchy of Needs - Will Critchlow

Will Critchlow - The Critchlow Hierarchy of Needs

Distilled leader Will has finished the conference with his own hierarchy of needs for the mediocre SEO.

Mediocre to Great

• Start by asking Why? - Not once, but 5 times, until you get to the root of the problem

Linking campaingns tend to be mediocre because:

1. You're not doing anything
2. You're not doing enough of the right things
3. You're not acknowledging your weaknesses
4. You're not cultivating spiky enough spikes

The Critchlow hierarchy:

1. Discover what you need to improve and win
2. Pitch big visions and small next steps
3. Experiment to find ways to improve and to persuade
4. Invest with evidence and experience in hand

Discover

• Analyze what it's going to take to reach goal
• do a SWOT analysis
• Pitch ideas afterwards

• Quality is what gets ahead of the competition - Apple had 75% gross margin of the market with 9% market share
• Only exceptional content gets noticed - Having mediocre content is useless - it's an exponential function

Self-assessment for Websites

• assess your website in 5 fields: design, content, commission assets, investment, USPs
• Your goal has to be to rank on an exponential scale
• This process should highlight the priorities
• don't fill the gaps - the weak spots, rather concentrate on your spikes - make your strengths rank
• Sometimes, you also need someone else to tell you how you're doing - reality check
• Another tool is to plot direct visitors against linking root domains – the conversion rate - you can identify content with low and high conversion rates and adapt accordingly

How To Do This Right?

• Content quality must be high enough
• Benchmark yourself against yourself in the past
• Forget about sub domains - redirect to root
• Don't worry about no follow links
• Example: The Boston big picture posts get links - great content, adaptable to any site - you can get amazing photos - it scales beautifully - endless themes
• Do small experiments to lower risk with a risky pitch
• Try an experiment: set up a sign up form, get people to sign up to get great content

Business Model Comparisons

• Content library = physical real estate
  - Red Bull owns its own media house - a little scary
• Good conversion rate = efficient supply chain

Big Ideas and Experiments

• Pitch a big idea and a small next step, set up a lunch with your colleagues
• Gawker's editorial strategy - one of his staff writers always had to look for funny videos, pictures, take pictures of Chinese goats, etc. - segmentation of team work - one part of the team focusing on high authority and other on link building
• Kerry Lauerman (Salon.com) says - 33 percent fewer posts, 40 percent more traffic
• Small experiments should be set to test your biggest risk - thus de-risking the plan
• Use kickofflabs.com  for these little experiments
• Read the Lean Startup
• Update reports to include the metrics your experiments are focused on

Invest

Key take-aways:

• Use shorter checklists
• Communication checklists are a good idea
• Ask what should we do if that goes wrong – critical situations will be easier to handle - (Hudson river plane landing example)
• If you can't find 10 targets to link to your idea in 10 minutes, it's probably not a good idea
• Take time to research whether they have linked to something like your content before

Making Plans

• Make an activity plan
• Make testable assumptions
• Measure progress towards your plans

"Who hates planning? I though I hated planning, but I what I really hated were plans."

thoughtful SEO: beautiful reflections on new link building strategies

Photo credits: Alec Kinnear, Foliovision. © Distilled.co.uk. Web republishing welcomed with credit to Foliovision and link this article. Thanks.

Review: LinkLove Conference London 2012

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  Julian Assange at Linklove in London.
Was Assange looking for SEO help for wikileaks

Will Critchlow, co-director and founder of Distilled.co.uk, organizers of the Linklove SEO conference said Assange's attendance was as much a surprise to him as to everyone else there.

I'm happy to see Julian here. Politics are not really something that are a priority with me, but I believe everyone has a right to their viewpoint. At this point, Wikileaks needs all the help it can get and what Julian and his team learn at Linklove will certainly be able to help them avoid any further penalties in Google.

Assange declined to comment insisting he was present as a private party and not as a public figure.

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange spotted at Linklove SEO confab in London

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How to increase social indicators seems to be the new strategy, just as link on acquisition used to be. Getting great social indicators can be encouraged but as Rand Fishkin says: "It all starts with great content."

These are just the morning pictures. We'll be back with afternoon pictures and in-depth coverage of every speaker.

Enjoy!

01 handing out lanyards

02 exciting lineup of linklove speakers

03 full house linklove sold out

04 linklove sold out intro duncan morris

05 seo leader rand fishkin warns us about article networks

06 rand fishkin topsy

07 Mike King acquire black hat

08 Mike King iacquire wonders of SEO

09 jo turnbull question

10 belgian question

11 linklove books

12 Branko Rhitman

13 Jane Copland takes questions

14 jane copland olympics of SEO

15 jane copland with audience

16 another question

17 thoughtful SEO

18 Julian Assange at linklove help for wikileaks

19 another question 4

20 improving your blog strategy

Linklove London 30 March 2012: Distilled.co.uk

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With all those currencies floating around, opening up Xe and filling in the field and changing a couple of dropdowns is a regular occurrence.

It turns out Google can handle your currency conversion needs. Here's a query:

5000 eur v CAD

Amount Currency Symbol v Alternate Currency. Fiendishly simple. Amazingly quick: just put it into your search bar.

This is the very tidy result Google furnishes:

google currency converter

Privacy Concerns

On the other hand, there are privacy concerns. Google keeps a record of all your queries. If you were engaged in illegal business of any kind or had substantial business secrets, you'd be much off using Xe. Sure Xe is tracking you but they probably don't know exactly who you are.

Google currency converter: Xe.com just lost another customer

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Our hopes are this post might help other small businesses protect themselves against Visiomente and their ilk in the future.

Visiomente appears not to do anything themselves except run around and subcontract experts to provide work to high end clients. It appears Visiomente’s sole business model is to contract at the lowest possible prices and then charges on the work at the highest possible prices under their own name.

The way Visiomente pull off their stunt is to get you to sign a five page “Independent Consultant Services Agreement” before Visomente even tell you what the work is. On the way, Visiomente’s Aaron Wentzel demanded detailed cost-free technical consultation: you aren’t engaged but have to pre-provide the services.

And once you’ve signed, you’re screwed.

Here’s how:

Visiomente as a company is registered in Delaware although they are domiciled in Bellevue, Washington. First sign of duplicity. Honestly run small companies for the most part are registered where domiciled, not in tax and legal havens. Utah would be another red signal.

There’s three paragraphs of non-compete agreement. The worst of it is that if Visiomente terminates you without cause (see later clauses), you are still considered out of the game. So just by getting you to sign the Visioment “Independent Consultant Services Agreement”, you’ve just sidelined yourself for years.

Surprise, surprise  you’ve just signed up to provide patent protection:

CONSULTANT will pay resulting costs, damages and attorney’s fees awarded by a court with respect to any such claims.

Visiomente’s contract means what it means except when it doesn’t:

Section Headings. The section headings used herein are intended for convenience only and shall not be deemed to supersede or modify any provisions.

So the section headings are not supposed to mean anything and are there for decoration?

Strange timing entirely in favour of Visiomente.

Notices and Requests. All notices, authorizations, and requests in connection with the Agreement shall be deemed given on the day they are (a) deposited in the U.S. mails, postage prepaid; or (b) sent by air express courier, charges prepaid to the address set forth below.

Great. So we might not know about the request but it will officially be considered filed. Great way to penalise or backswipe someone. Say one thing over the phone and send a registered letter with different content.

Survival. Any and all provisions set forth in this Agreement or herein which, by its or their nature, would reasonably be expected to apply after termination shall survive and be enforceable after such termination.

Another fantastic open ended clause. The agreement is over when it’s over except that it’s never over. And the crucial word is “reasonably”. I can only imagine the legal costs involved in proving provisions unreasonable. The burden of proof would be very high.

Even when writing about something as simple as starting dates, Visiomente provide themselves lots of wiggle room to screw you on the work:

This Agreement is effective as of the date it is signed by Visiomente (“Effective Date”) and shall remain in force for all Services unless this Agreement is otherwise terminated by either party with ten (10) days prior written notice for any reason.

So if you are stupid enough to sign this contract, Visiomente can cancel it without reason (any reason) within ten days. So you take on the obligation but don’t get the deal.

Additionally, this agreement or any work assignment hereunder may be terminated immediately by Visiomente if CONSULTANT shall fail to diligently or satisfactorily perform the usual and customary duties of CONSULTANT’s assignment, or such other duties as may be assigned from time to time.

So once you start the work if Visiomente feels like cancelling the contract on a whim they can. And if your work is good, they just have to add duties which you don’t want to do and then cancel the contract. Nice.

Upon receipt of notice, CONSULTANT shall promptly complete or discontinue work on the Services at Visiomente’s sole discretion. CONSULTANT shall render a final billing to Visiomente for any Services performed and accepted by the Client up to termination date…

So even if it’s going well, Visiomente can just tear up the agreement and get someone else to do the work. On a whim.

Successors and Assignment: This agreement shall inure to the benefit of Visiomente and its affiliated companies, subsidiaries, successors and assigns, current and future, including but not limited to any successor by merger, consolidation, purchase of assets, purchase of stock or otherwise. This agreement may be assigned by Visiomente. This Agreement may not be assigned by CONSULTANT.

So when Visiomente manages to sucker you into a dud deal, they can sell you into slavery to anyone they like. On the other hand, you can’t contract anyone else to do the work ever. Nothing like fair play in business negotiations.

Entire Agreement. This Agreement, including any attachments, (i) constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to its subject matter, (ii) supersedes all prior and contemporaneous communications including all prior and current agreements, and (iii) shall not be modified by any means (including any printed forms used by the parties in the performance of this Agreement) except by the express written consent of both parties.

Any cock and bull story or empty promises Aaron Wentzel has told you to get you to agree to work with Visomente dies with this one-sided agreement. If you sign Visiomente’s consultant agreement you are more or less screwed for life.

This is parasitism in a legal guise. If you are approached with this kind of agreement for a trivial project, you should just laugh it off.

The problem for certain consultants is that they actually add little value to the process. Such consultants try to hide their suppliers as there’s little reason to do any business with them: i.e. no added value.

Visiomente's who we are page: No sign of Aaron Wentzel

Looking at the Visiomente website you can see that they seem to have a lot to hide:

1. stock photos instead of real portraits
2. anonymous testimonials!
3. no portfolio, just a list of clients
4. not even their own names on a “who we are” page

Contrast this with the Foliovision website.

1. You can see us.
2. Our testimonials are signed and personal, most with photos.
3. A very detailed portfolio.
4. Even our weblog posts are signed.

If you are considering hiring Visiomente, I suggest you hire instead some true subject experts. We work with independent consultants and designers all the time to provide technical services to their clients. Of course we respect their client relationships. It’s a matter of principle. Most of them are proud to advertise their association with Foliovision, as their clients know their partner has hired the best team in the world at WordPress migration and/or one of the world’s top WordPress custom programming teams to handle the technical end.

I really wonder exactly what it is Visiomente has done for all the following companies whom they claim are past clients:

• Adobe
• Amazon
• AOL
• Archdiocese of Seattle
• AT&T Mobility
• BluWater Consulting
• Carlyle
• Conoco Canada
• Crestar
• DevSelect
• Dategrity
• EMC
• Getty Images
• Google
• Graphica
• HoneyBee
• HouseValues, Inc.
• InPhonic Inc.
• Insight Global
• Inteliant Corporation
• Intuit
• KForce, Inc.
• King County Library System
• Logicalis
• Microsoft Corporation
• Network Infrastructure Group
• Pacific Telecom Services
• Pizza Street Evans
• Pop Multimedia
• Post On The Wall
• SAFECO
• SeaMobile Enterprises
• SIFF Group
• Simply Honey
• Socair Solutions
• Solucient
• Structure Networks
• Terabeam Networks
• Vendavo

Visiomente is not going to tell potential clients or partners anything about the work. So one has to imagine that most of it is pretty trivial. I’ve rarely seen such a sham. I’m very glad I didn’t sign that “Independent Contract Services Agreement” and recommend you don’t either.

If you are thinking of engaging Visiomente, unless you are completely technically illiterate, you are almost certain to get better and faster service and save a great deal of money if you engage some real technical experts directly.

Visiomente: Modern Carpet Baggers or What’s Wrong with American Business

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3. Modern Ekklesia

Last year in April 2011, we made a written offer five times to test CloudFlare's performance when we were doing some benchmarking with LoadImpact. Our interest was honest: we were thinking about moving some of our very busy websites over to CloudFlare on a pay plan. Strangely, CloudFlare emphatically refused our offer. CloudFlare's refusal to allow live load testing aroused suspicion and we chose not to take the risk of putting our own client sites there.

Recently, we had another opportunity to take a close look behind the CloudFlare hype. And here's what we found.

How CloudFlare Works:

Once your register and setup CloudFlare with your website, all of the static files (images, style sheets and JavaScript) will be delivered from CloudFlare servers. That way your server or hosting account is less busy serving all the files and the site loads faster, since it gets served from CloudFlare servers.

CloudFlare Alternative for WordPress:

Minify is a name of PHP application which packs style sheet (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) files into fewer big files - usually one CSS and one JS file. That way your site has to load less items which are also smaller and therefore faster to download.

Our CloudFlare Test:

We tested how these two different technologies compare in speeding up a WordPress website. We used one of our client's websites - Chicago Divorce Lawyer and run the tests using WebPagetest.org (highly recommended). The site was hosted on LiquidWeb.

Test results

First screenshot shows how the site loads without Cloudflare and Minify. It's pretty slim and fast already - there are few Bytes to download and few Requests. The site was already using WP Super Cache at this point.

Site performance without CloudFlare or Minify - 4.355 seconds

Here is the performance with CloudFlare:

Site performance with Cloudflare - 3.376 seconds

The site loads 1 second faster - see Fully Loaded - Time. The site size was reduced by close to 100KB - see Fully Loaded - Bytes In.

Notice that Keep-alive and Compress text were enabled this time.

• Keep-alive reduces latency in subsequent requests and that saves some time when loading the site.
• Compress text (Gzip) reduces size of style sheet and JavaScript files which again speeds up the loading.

Since the results turned out to be better, we started to think - how can we add Keep-alive and Compress text features to the site without using Cloudflare?

LiquidWeb support technicians offered us to move the site to a different shared server which has Keep-alive enabled, but they could not setup mod_deflate Apache module for us - required for Gzip compression of the text files.

So we decided to add the compression with a WordPress plugin. WP Minify serves this purpose. It's a WordPress implementation of the Minify PHP script.

It was easy to setup, here are the results - same speed as with CloudFlare:

Site performance with WP Minify - 3.343 seconds

We still miss Keep-alive, but the site is now only 175KB - less than 198KB which we got by enabling Cloudflare.

WebPageTest.org gives us mark "B" for the compression, while it gives "A" to Cloudflare. That's because it only gives "A" if all of them are compressed.

Conclusion

No need to use Cloudflare, we can match its performance by adding WP Minify to already installed WP Super Cache. This might vary with each site.

LiquidWeb server	4.355 seconds
Cloudflare	3.376 seconds
LiquidWeb server with Minify	3.343 seconds

(we used median value out of 3 test runs)

Both systems add additional level of complexity to your website. Minify might require troubleshooting and CloudFlare takes over your DNS zone.

Minify

• Advantage: Better compression than Cloudflare
• Advantage: Less requests than Cloudflare
• Advantage: Editing of CSS files is easier, as the local minified version updates faster than Cloudflare
• Disadvantage: Might be harder to set up since not all JavaScript files like to be Minified. There might be conflicts, or some plugin might have weird JavaScript in it and breaking the minified file, so troubleshooting might be required.

Cloudflare

• Advantage: Might help your site sustain bigger traffic - which could be important on shared server hosting environments. You don't need to upgrade your hosting plan or move to a better host or troublesome so soon.
• Potential Advantage: CloudFlare provide a Free plan which already contains various claimed security enhancements
• Disadvantage: Takes over your DNS zone for the domain. This also needs to be checked during setup.
• Disadvantage: Changes to CSS files are not instant - it takes time for Cloudflare to update.

Conclusion

At this point it's not really worth using CloudFlare with WordPress unless you are a complete technical newbie and CloudFlare comes built into your hosting control panel. This is the case with LiquidWeb. Otherwise, you are better off just setting up WP Super Cache or WP Super Cache and Minify.

I would be very wary of moving my whole DNS set up to CloudFlare for a sophisticated domain. It's a lot of trouble to move DNS around and make sure all services are working. I'm not sure why CloudFlare has to have full control of DNS.

I'd certainly have more patience for CloudFlare if they could offer a way to use their service without handing over the complete DNS (even if it means assigning several subdomains to CloudFlare manually).

We'd love to hear some additional real world stories about CloudFlare: whether CloudFlare worked for you or didn't and why.

Cloudflare vs. Minify: CloudFlare WordPress Performance Test

Post from: Foliovision

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Read some of our tips how to optimize WordPress for large sites below:

Post revisions

This is a weakness of WordPress. On this site there are over 30,000 revisions for the 14,000 posts. That makes the table bigger and it's slower to search in it. WordPress users realized this three years ago.

Tip #1

We backed up the the wp_posts table and then used a simple MySQL command to remove old post revisions. This decreased the table size from 400MB to 120MB:

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_type = 'revision' AND post_date NOT LIKE '2012-%'

Long-term solution

There are WordPress plugins which can limit the number of revisions per post. We think that the WordPress code should be improved and the revisions should be stored in a different table to maximize speed. You can support this on WordPress bug tracking.

Large number of comments

We need to be extra careful specially with the wp_comments table which has close to 400,000 comments and 320MB. We often find speed issues with MySQL queries which take only a couple of milliseconds on smaller sites.

WordPress 3.2 added a count of comments into the WordPress Admin Bar which shows up for logged in Administrators and Editors when browsing the site.

Comment count in WordPress Admin Bar

Counting the comments actually takes a lot of time on our big database. Here's the query and it's duration in log:

SQL query for counting of the comments

SELECT comment_approved, COUNT(*) AS num_comments FROM wp_comments GROUP BY comment_approved;

In the above case, it takes 0.3 seconds, while all the other queries are done in 0.05 - 0.001 seconds.

Tip #2

To do this kind of audits use WPDB Profiling plugin for WordPress. It shows you all sorts of information in the site footer and you can turn it on and off as you like.

Beware: this plugin turns off post revisions and autosaves when activated, you need to turn it off once you are finished or change it's settings.

It's clearly the slowest query when the site is loading. And this site has up to 20 editors who like to come to the site and read the comments to their articles, so it affects the performance. Keep in mind that this information is shown on multiple places in WordPress Admin Interface.

We created our own queries to do this count. It's 5 queries instead of 1, but they are faster. Just try to test them:

SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'trash'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '0'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'post-trash'
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments

The last query counts all the commands, so we subsctract the previous counts. Here are our results - 0.042144 seconds:

SQL query for counting of the comments improved

That's a big improvement over 0.3 seconds duration with the standard query.

Tip #3

You can also download a code and test it on your site, just put it into functions.php file of template here.

If you want to test above queries, replace SELECT with SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE to make sure no MySQL caching will be used.

We also opened a bug tracking ticket for this on WordPress Trac - Speeding up Dashboard and Comment moderation SQL load.

Finding slow database queries with MySQL tools

Another way of finding the slow queries is using this MySQL command. It's best used when you have SSH access to the site.

1. Watch the server load using top.
2. When you see that mysql process is taking too much of the CPU, just try to list running queries with following command in MySQL console:

mysql> SHOW PROCESSLIST;

+-------+------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Id    | User | db      | Time | State        | Info                                                                                                 |
+-------+------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 59462 | site | site_db |    0 | NULL         | SHOW PROCESSLIST                                                                                     |
| 61208 | site | site_db |   62 | Sending data | SELECT ID FROM wp_posts AS a LEFT JOIN (SELECT post_id FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key='...') AS b   |
| 61228 | site | site_db |   25 | Locked       | UPDATE `wp_postmeta` SET `meta_value` = '1327484262:39' WHERE `post_id` = 66955 AND `meta_key` = '_e |
| 61238 | site | site_db |   16 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (17992)                       |
| 61241 | site | site_db |   16 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (12931)                       |
| 61249 | site | site_db |   11 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (34465)                       |
| 61251 | site | site_db |   11 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (5209)                        |
| 61257 | site | site_db |    6 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (34465)                       |
| 61258 | site | site_db |    5 | Locked       | SELECT meta_id FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = '....' AND post_id = 24661                          |
| 61262 | site | site_db |    1 | Locked       | SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (5367)                        |
+-------+------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

In the above list, there is some nasty query which is taking 62 (!) seconds to get executed and the other queries are just waiting until it's finished. Yes, the site was in real trouble when the above list was saved.

There is also an MySQL option called "log slow queries", but we newer had a success with it.

Here's the query in it's full beauty. Since it's using subqueries, it's slow and hard to optimize:

SELECT ID FROM wp_posts AS a LEFT JOIN (SELECT post_id FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key='fb') AS b ON a.ID=b.post_id WHERE b.post_id IS NULL;

We re-coded the plugin and this bad query is no longer used. This was some weird query in some old plugin which was running as WordPress Cron job, so it's not visible in WPDB Profiling which was described above.

Tip #4

If the query seems to complicated, try to move some of the processing into PHP.

Use indexes!

If you see a slow query, try to use MySQL EXPLAIN command on it. Here's the query:

SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments AS c JOIN wp_posts AS p ON c.comment_post_ID = p.ID WHERE c.user_id = '1079' AND c.comment_approved = '1' AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND comment_content REGEXP '[[::]]' = 1

Here's the output of the EXPLAIN command. Notice the big number in the "rows" column. It means that MySQL has to examine 377,606 rows in the wp_comments table - that's all the comments on the site.

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments AS c JOIN wp_posts AS p ON c.comment_post_ID = p.ID WHERE c.user_id = '1079' AND c.comment_approved = '1' AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND comment_content REGEXP '[:asdf:]' = 1;
+-------------+-------+--------+------------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------+--------+-------------+
| select_type | table | type   | possible_keys                                              | key              | key_len | ref                    | rows   | Extra       |
+-------------+-------+--------+------------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------+--------+-------------+
| SIMPLE      | c     | ref    | comment_approved,comment_post_ID,comment_approved_date_gmt | comment_approved | 62      | const                  | 377606 | Using where |
| SIMPLE      | p     | eq_ref | PRIMARY                                                    | PRIMARY          | 8       | site.c.comment_post_ID |    1   | Using where |
+-------------+-------+--------+------------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------+--------+-------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The SQL query is using user_id in the WHERE clause. And there is no index which would contain this (see possible_keys in above output, you can also execute "SHOW INDEXES IN wp_comments;").

So we create a new index which will combine two fields from the WHERE clause:

CREATE INDEX userid_approved_index ON `wp_comments` (`user_id`,`comment_approved`)

The table index size will increase a bit, but SQL will search only 1,423 rows when executing our query, because it's able to use our new index:

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT count(*) FROM wp_comments AS c JOIN wp_posts AS p ON c.comment_post_ID = p.ID WHERE c.user_id = '1079' AND c.comment_approved = '1' AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND comment_content REGEXP '[:asdf:]' = 1;
+-------------+-------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------+----------------------------------+------+-------------+
| select_type | table | type   | possible_keys                                                                    | key                   | key_len | ref                              | rows | Extra       |
+-------------+-------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------+----------------------------------+------+-------------+
| SIMPLE      | c     | ref    | comment_approved,comment_post_ID,comment_approved_date_gmt,userid_approved_index | userid_approved_index | 70      | const,const                      | 1896 | Using where |
| SIMPLE      | p     | eq_ref | PRIMARY                                                                          | PRIMARY               | 8       | mondoweiss_net.c.comment_post_ID |    1 | Using where |
+-------------+-------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+---------+----------------------------------+------+-------------+

Tip #5

When you create a plugin which uses custom SQL queries, have look at the tables and make sure the fields which you used in WHERE or ORDER BY statements are indexed.

Add more indexes to the table if necessary (but then be careful if you ever reinstall WordPress).

Another example would be sorting comments by comment_date. comment_date field is not indexed, but comment_date_gmt is. So use that one and your queries will be faster.

• Check out the indexes on wp_comments table in Database Description on WordPress.org Codex.
• Read more about indexes in MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual

Results

Check out the load of our server. It dropped significantly once we added these tweaks.

Reduced load

WordPress Performance Tips for Big Sites

Post from: Foliovision

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Here's all the reasons you might want a VPN.

The problem was Bill Bullock was obsessive about our security/anonymity. So the customer portal didn't really work or hardly existed. Support was over email and a bit hope for the best. Your email address had a single subscription.

Worse yet, when you would go to renew your subscription, you had to create a new account and login.

From the beginning there were two services: Personal, which always included PPTP and now includes ipsec and L2TP and Pro which was twice the price and included OpenVPN. Both are secure but Personal is more easily blocked by governments or corporations as they can usually detect the protocol.

Witopia SSL Service: Tunnelblick then Viscosity

Witopia's upgraded SSL service was always a bit of a crapshoot. For years you had to fight Tunnelblick (one of the nastiest pieces of open source software out there, which requires advanced networking knowledge modifying a text file to get anything done: it defaults to not working and makes you move text files all over your computer, authorizing them each time you do). Then came Viscosity which worked a whole lot better. With your Witopia VPN you got a free preconfigured Viscosity client.

Then something went wrong with Viscosity. When you update Viscosity to keep up with Mac OS X, it's another crapshoot if your settings will carry over to the next version.

So as someone who tried to buy three licenses last year (Personal x 2, Pro x 1) for my company and ran in circles for weeks with absolutely silly suggestions from Witopia on how to fix my configuration, I can tell you the dream was over, the shine off of the hood. With the obliging help of Witopia's owner Bill Bullock finally we managed to get a single one of the personal accounts up and limping. Our ideas of using VPN regularly in the various departments at Foliovision went down the tubes.

We cancelled the other two and got on with our lives. OpenVPN on a small VPS turned out to be an even bigger catastrophe. After a whole day of programmer time settting it up, we were able to eke out 2 KB/sec performance. When Witopia is working, you are looking at anything between 1 MB/sec and 8 MB/sec bandwidth up and down. It's not the 100 MB/sec down and the 10 MB/sec up we have on our connection but it's not 2 KB/sec.

So with clients to serve and lives to live, we more or less didn't use VPN except in emergency.

For reasons of my own, I was using VPN via Witopia a fair amount in the last week. All was well until my VPN account wouldn't connect today.

Witopia happily enough has live chat support now. I lost hours with them today so you don't have to.

Why did my Witopia VPN die?

Witopia created a customer portal and consolidated everyone's account history and orders.

When they consolidated the orders some accounts clearly died. Including one of mine as it was a courtesy account offered for last year's nightmare. Tip: don't kill your courtesy accounts early.

Witopia's ability to consolidate our orders years later begs the question how private were our accounts in the first place if Witopia could consolidate them after the fact.

Locked out of the Witopia customer portal

The new portal sounded great. One problem: it was impossible for me to log in with my old username and password. No problem.

I'll reset my password. No luck: No such username.

Joe suggested I reregister. No problem. Wait yes there is, Username already exists.

Joe suggested I create another account using another email and then consolidate them. That sounds like a lot of work and lots of chances for misunderstandings and broken accounts. No, I want access to my existing account.

Joe needs his supervisor.

Tara comes online (last year Tara was the queen of alternative protocols who led me around an enormous emerald coloured garden of irregularly working VPN). Tara remembers me. A bit awkward. Like an affair gone wrong. Happily she doesn't hold a grudge and we get to work.

Fortunately, Tara is able to get a link which allows you to login to your account and reset your password. Remember Witopia is not access to your data. Witopia is only access to your VPN accounts, so security is important but not paramount. If someone sneaks into your Witopia account, the most they can do is cancel your VPN without asking or change your passwords on you or use your VPN surreptitiously for their own purposes (actually that could get you in trouble if they did illegal things while using your account: but the same applies to your home broadband connection).

Inside the new Witopia Customer Portal

So now I'm in the portal. There are all of my orders for the last three years. Hurray.

On the two active orders, there's 412 days left on one and 46 days on the other. The other is also listed as cancelled, with no options for checking data usage, resetting password or assigning the VPN to someone else.

Looks like portal consolidation this week killed off the courtesy account. Sloppy programming. Thanks sloppy Witopia programmers, you've just stolen two hours plus of my life getting all this working again.

Tara asks me to install Witopia software and use that to access my VPN. No dice. With this track record on working software, there's no way I'm letting Witopia's direct installer get at my network settings. I have work to do this week.

Remember Tara loves the alternative protocols. So I set up all of the different OS X VPN protocols following her instructions.

Alas no protocol, PPTP, ipSEC, l2tp will work.

Testing the main Witopia account

I give Tara the password for my main account (not the courtesy one) to test herself. Tara disappears for about seven minutes. When she comes back she announces that the account works just fine and it surely must be a local problem on my end.

I try to reconnect with a couple of the protocols I'd previously set up and tested unsuccessfully. Bingo, I'm on.

"See," admonishes Tara, "it was a local problem after all."

Yes, Tara, but I haven't changed anything in my settings. All that happened was you went and worked on my account with a tech.

Whatever Tara and the tech did while she was away did manage to reset my Witopia account and get it working.

Witopia Speeds

The second test was on an account with send all connections over VPN so I lost my connection to Tara.

Taking the occasion to test while logging on an on, I ran a battery of tests using SpeedTest.net which is nice enough to give both ping and transfer speeds.

Here's what I found:

ipsec New York
ping 111 ms
download 1.2 Mbps
upload 1.1 Mbps

l2tp New York with built-in Mac client
ping 109 ms
download 2.66 Mbps
upload 7.23 Mbps

PPTP New York
ping 110ms
download 9.7 Mbps
upload 7.36 Mbps

Witopia VPN Software

I was feeling optimistic after seeing all of these protocols work so I decided to give Witopia's custom built software a chance. The download is quick and the installer opens up automatically.

Witopia's software gives a nice blue icon like airport in the menu bar. It takes up less space than Apple's built-in VPN. I tried the built-in L2TP and got some surprising results.

L2TP New York with Witopia client
ping 114 ms
download 8.43 Mbps
upload 6.86 Mbps

I'm still using this connection.

Here's what the interface of the Witopia VPN client looks like:

WiTopia application interface extras

Witopia application interface

Using either built-in or Witopia client software is fine. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just stick with OS X's built in protocols. I'd use PPTP as it tests out very fast. If you want to use a lot of locations, then Witopia's VPN software might be for you as you won't have to build all the locations by hand.

Round two: trying to get OpenVPN up and running with alternative Witopia account

When I got back to my chat, Tara had gone home. A gentleman named Shirin had taken her place. We spent a lot of time trying to resurrect the dead account.

More or less hopeless.

The main OpenVPN connection is very fussy. It wouldn't work with either the Witopia VPN client nor with Viscosity.

Once installed, to reinstall it you need to remove several .kext via terminal. Viscosity which did work at one point, won't anymore. The updater won't update Viscosity and you have to manually find and reinstall all the certificates.

What finally worked was uninstalling launch2netpremium and then doing a hand search for all of its files (a nasty respawn filled networking logs to the point that it was impossible to tell what was happening with Witopia). Next step was to install and reinstall the Witopia client with reboots.

The whole affair required three reboots to work and deleting kexts. You don't want to do this. Viscosity still won't work but for now with the Witopia client I can get on OpenVPN SSL internet.

I spent over three work hours painfully troubleshooting this by hand. Effectively Witopia stole $500 from my company while I did this unpaid work. All I got out of it was this article. Don't you be so foolish.

To be honest, I would not recommend a Witopia Pro account. The amount of time you will spend fighting with software and with cryptic errors just will not justify the small increase in speed and security which OpenVPN brings.

Not only that but a WiTopia Personal VPN account is just $40 (renewal) or $50 new account, while a Pro VPN account is $70/year and will cause you to lose hours with unnecessary tech support.

If you are in China or Iran or some place where you really need OpenVPN, go ahead and spring for it. But be prepared to spend a lot of time troubleshooting.

Resources

Here's a nice historic comparison of Witopia and HotSpotVPN with interviews with both company owners, Bill Bullock and Glynn Taylor.

Here's why you might want a VPN.

Answer number one: you are travelling and need to be sure your web access is not being logged (at least only by your VPN provider).

Answer number two: you need access to another server from a fixed and known IP. It's possible with a VPN.

Answer number three: you want to watch Hulu or listen to Mog or Spotify while outside the United States. If you don't use Facebook, your one choice is Mog.

Answer number four: you need to sign up for some papers or service from outside your home country. I wasn't able to complete a birth certificate request from Europe until I came in via VPN and made the order via VPN.

VPN for OS X: Witopia 2012 review (from a three year user)

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ISB haven't decided whether to put Microsoft or Apple onto their new laptops (actually with Apple you have to buy Apple laptops).

For a smaller program without dedicated IT help, I'd say Apple would be the better choice. But at 1700 students you have the scale to make other choices.

In terms of OS, I wouldn’t choose either Apple or Microsoft. I’d look to the future and give the children Linux laptops. Linux Mint Debian Edition is a very nice distribution which can be based on the very reliable and spritely Debian core (rather than the top heavy and sometimes slow to update Ubuntu).

Of course there are driver issues in Linux, but as you have control of the hardware, you can choose recommended hardware with 100% compatibility and effectively achieve the OS/hardware integration which Apple does at a tiny fraction of the price.

I’m a 15 year Apple user with four Apple computers now (have to get rid of a couple actually). We use all three OS at work but will be moving to Linux over the next years.

Why drop Apple?

Apple is going back to walled garden:

• software: only apps from their store
• data: iCloud for all your data
• hardware: all your devices and all your peripherals have to come from Apple (new proprietary data transfer and monitor connections)

This is an Orwellian world which I wouldn’t want to push children into.

The arguments against Microsoft (backdoors, security issues, shovelware on delivery, performance deterioration over time) have been covered many times.

Let the kids learn how to use real computers where there is a chance to look under the hoods and tinker. It will help them to develop clearer and deeper thinking about IT and technology.

And it will save a boat load of money over 1700 laptops. I'd also try to pick laptops for which I could replacement parts at reasonable prices. I'm not sure what vendor offers that. I know Apple parts are very expensive.

One could still make an argument for hardware quality in favor of Apple in buying the least expensive Apple laptops (say MacBook Air 11" with max memory) and putting Linux on them. Where that gets difficult is you do need a distribution which handles power management on those specific laptops well.

Those MacBook Airs are very light (I have one) and easy to carry around. The maximum memory at 4GB is a limitation but one that young students could probably live with, just as students are forced to live in shared dormitories and only get apartments later in life.

The equivalent of a MacBook Air 11" was only made by Sony a few years ago and cost upwards of $2300. Current US educational pricing on a Macbook Air 11.6" with 1.6 GHz processor, 4 GB memory and a 128 GB flash drive with Apple care is $1332 (bare bones 2 GB/64 GB is at $949 but it's seriously underpowered and nothing is replaceable). Not sure about Thai pricing on Apple computers. The advantage here is that the maintenance for three years would be all Apple's problem.

No, but even the Air doesn't scale out for educational use. The cost for 1700 machines would be $2,260,000.

Steve Jobs holding a MacBook Air: Laptops for Students should be small and light
durable and attractive. They also should not cost $1300+ with reasonable
memory and a multiyear warranty. Photo by MacMessiah.

Does anyone have any suggestions for similarly durable and attractive and lightweight mid-range hardware which would suit Debian Linux (with 1700 laptops, you could even afford to commission some power management rewrites from core Debian team)?

Laptops for Schools: Microsoft Windows, Apple or Linux

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And his name is Ivan Pope. He runs a site called Magazero that we moved from Typepad to WordPress. The move went very well, but Ivan Pope went AWOL after the move.

Ivan Pope is the reason we don't split payments anymore on technical moves.

ivan pope teapot head

His site Magazero.net is now offline completely. Probably another unpaid bill. It's very strange as at one point Pope controlled NetNames registrar and should have sufficient capital to pay his bills.

His other sites for which he may try to commission work include IvanPope.com where he runs a site called Learning to Write (he could better teach eat and run courses). For some reason, Pope's become obsessed with writing about Scrivener an OS X writing tool. I can't imagine Alexander Pope losing his mind about a writing tool.

Here's what he writes about himself:

After a short and varied career as an artist, entrepreneur and anarchist I am settling down to write books.

I am now writing Scrivener for Dummies about the best long form writing software in the world.

His other website AbsentWithoutLeave at awol.ivanpope.com is very appropriately named. Pop hasn't been here since July 1 this year.

Here Pope begs us:

You can buy prints of several of my pieces from the Saatchi online gallery. I’m adding new stuff every day for a while so have a look and make sure to buy something.

Thanks, Ivan

Why should anyone buy anything from Ivan Pope when Pope doesn't pay his own bills.

If you meet Ivan Pope, I recommend you avoid providing him any services as he is unlikely to pay. Anarchists are good that way.

Ivan Pope the Scrivener: Hit and Run Rip Off Artist

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