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Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Creative Director

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia. Alec maintains a photography and culture weblog at uncoy.com. His dance film Lapinthrope won prizes around the world.

Alec holds an Honours B.A. from Trinity College at the University of Toronto in Modern Languages and Literature.

The Definitive Guide to Deploying Apple OS X 10.13.5 High Sierra on Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 Silver Towers

The Mac Silver Tower 4,1 and 5,1 remain one of the most powerful Macs ever made, depending on your processor. Even the eight core 2.26 GHz version is incredibly powerful and fast, outrunning any MacBook Pro and most iMacs, as will a hexacore 3.33 GHz or 3.46 GHz. Certainly they are more expandable, repairable and upgradeable than any other Mac built since, with SATA SSD and PCI cards and graphic card upgrades readily available and easily installed. For video editors, the Mac Pro Silver Tower is one of the best computers ever built.

In terms of cost for performance, no current Mac whether iMac or iMac Pro can touch the 4,1 and 5,1 Silver Towers. What's especially wonderful is that both of them will still run the latest Apple OS and software perfectly, with just a bit of preparation. I'll take you through the steps of a successful deployment of a 4,1 Silver Tower with High Sierra.

Start by Testing Your Hardware: Apple Hardware Test

The first thing you should do is test your hardware. This is easier said than done on older hardware. Apple has some lovely software called Apple Hardware Test a.k.a. as AHT. There's no joy in suffering through crashes which are hardware related, trying to debug your OS (software).

Normally you find AHT at this path /System/Library/CoreServices/.diagnostics

Unfortunately, recent versions of the OS have not included AHT or at least not for older computers. Happily some enterprising Apple fans have collected all the versions of AHT out there for all kinds of Apple computers including Powermac, Powerbook, iBook, iMac, MacMini, MacPro, MacBook and MacBooks Pro.

Keep reading The Definitive Guide to Deploying Apple OS X 10.13.5 High Sierra on Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 Silver Towers

Shooting for Likes: Instagram’s Influence on Photography

I'm looking for a camera to shoot video at home and at work quickly, simply and well lately (comparative review coming). It's taken me out to spend more time looking at gear sites. Horatio Tan runs a very unique site which primarily compares top of the line Leica gear (M9, M10, SL) with top tier Canon (5DR), Nikon (D850) and Sony (A7S, A73, A7R2, A7R3). His subjects are mainly very pretty Russian models out and about in Hong Kong. Gear cat nip.

Tan is a bit existential about his photography. In his post A Crisis of Purpose in the Age of Instagram, he wonders about how likes influence photography.

Keep reading Shooting for Likes: Instagram's Influence on Photography

A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

The situation is more serious than I initially thought when I wrote this article. IBM has repeatedly savaged governments around the world for sums up and over $1 billion dollars for systems which don't work and have to simply be discarded.

Winning megaprojects with low initial bids and then turning a $20 million project into a billion dollar con of the client appears to be an artform at IBM. Governments all over the world have suffered, tax payers have paid for senior IBM bonuses. Ordinary citizens have gone six months or more without their paycheques.

This behaviour appears to be IBM policy and not an accident. This very grave situation cries out for a deep investigative long form feature. Together the governments of Canada and Australia and Pennsylvania (just the ones I've found so far) likely have a case of deliberately malicious business practices.

Apparently IBM has made USD $780 million building a payroll system for the Canadian Government which does not work.

Potential Savings on Payroll

The idea was to save money by eliminating jobs. Canada has about 260,000 public servants. Over 1200 people were working on payroll (accountants, bookkeepers and managers mainly with some IT guys thrown in to make it work). This is about half of one percent on payroll. Payroll is about one third the cost of accounting in our company. I'm unable to bring our accounting costs much below 3% of turnover on a sub-million dollar turnover despite strong efforts and automated software like Freshbooks.

Keep reading A billion reasons never to buy IBM services

Bad UX: How Medium’s comment system kills engagement

Medium's non-existent login

Let's start with Medium Login. What user hating, social media centric tool ever dreamed up temporary sign in via email? If you want to log in to Medium via your email, you can't do it with email and password. You have to send a new email to yourself (which takes somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes to arrive) and click on the link within 15 minutes.

Keep reading Bad UX: How Medium's comment system kills engagement

SoundCloud’s Path to profitability

SoundCloud's Shrinking Revenue, Real Estate and Headcount

SoundCloud had way too many staff members for what is a fairly simple website. Their headcount was 422 out of which 173 have been given their walking papers.

SoundCloud was also maintaining offices in Berlin, New York, San Francisco and London. For expensive real estate they only needed to add Paris and Tokyo for a perfect score. Fortunately, SoundCloud will cut back to Berlin and New York now. Someone needs to negotiate with the Americans (New York) while production and code and IT can all be done in Berlin.

There's a need for some kind of design and marketing input from New York as Germans can be really clueless about marketing to anyone except Germans. Germans in a way don't really believe in marketing, they believe in the product. I'm a German at heart that way myself. Heaven knows I could do a better job with the FV Player marketing1 while with Martin we've done a great job on the software architecture. While Mercedes no longer makes cars which run 400,000 km without major service (I owned one), many German products remain very high quality.

Keep reading SoundCloud's Path to profitability

How to write an ideal service notification

Editor's note: Service interruption notifications are the unloved sibling of newsletters and welcome emails. They just don't get enough love—and for the most part are fairly terrible, anonymous, vague and menacing messages, often from a no-reply address. There is a better way.

While software is our main business now, we have some hosting clients for special services. Every once in a while of course there is either expected or unexpected downtime. We strive to let our clients know about these issues in advance (planned) and in real time (unplanned). We don't try the tricky move that many hosts do of just trying to hide downtime.

Keep reading How to write an ideal service notification

Why WP Rocket fails on high traffic sites and how to fix it

We are big users of WP Rocket (licensed through 2020). WP Rocket works great on our clients' normal busy sites (up to 5 million visitors/month). We run one very high traffic network with up to 40 million visitors in one week or even a million visitors/hour.

On this site, WP Rocket fails miserably. When new articles are posted WP Rocket purges the cache of too many different pages:

  • all the category archives to which the page belongs
  • related date archives
  • even the previous post and previous post in the same category (this is to keep the prev/next links on the posts working, if the post is updated it clears the next post too)
  • feeds
  • and of course the homepage

And all of the above happens if a post is added, updated or a comment is posted. So when you have people writing new comments every second you end up with a lot of cache purges on the pages where the information about new comment is not so important - new comments should only purge that post cache and nothing else.

Keep reading Why WP Rocket fails on high traffic sites and how to fix it

WordPress Plugin Pricing

I recently received an email about our FV Player Pro plugin licensing and pricing. filmmaker Paul Moon's questions were good ones. Here are my answers. 

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your email and your questions. I'm delighted to answer your questions.

I am very bothered by what appears to be a surprise limitation on my purchase: https://prnt.sc/gerwa6. That is a screenshot of my license upon purchasing FV Player Pro. THERE IS NO PLACE ON YOUR WEBSITE CLARIFYING A LIMITATION ON MY LICENSE. For you to add this only after I paid, is unacceptable. I'd like to understand what happened. A product is completely worthless when it expires after 1 year.

Your license never expires. You can continue to use the last version indefinitely forever. The main sales page clearly states: "All updates and support free for 1 year."

Keep reading WordPress Plugin Pricing

Intranet.red of Patagonia paying with a fake credit card

During the last year, we added Stripe for payment of FV Player Pro. We've had many more fraud issues with Stripe than Paypal.

One case is the company Intranet.red of Patagonia. With an email address adriancativa@outlook.com and name Matt C., Intranet.red purchased an FV Player Pro license. On 12 July, the credit card owner disputed the charge. We sent a courteous email to adriancativa@outlook.com about the incorrect charge but never heard back.

Keep reading Intranet.red of Patagonia paying with a fake credit card

How to set up a Mac securely on OS X 10.11 Sierra (El Capitan)

We've recently upgraded our computer stock with a bunch of new (old) Mac Pros. These are the last computers which Apple built which can be upgraded (storage, memory, GPU, CPU in order of complexity). So I've updated our guide on deploying new Macs. I've often been asked about our special sauce for securing Macs and deploying them quickly so I've publishing this as a starting point for others.

Despite the title stating that this covers how to set up a Mac securely on OS X, it hasn't really been possible to secure a Mac since the App Store came into being (OS X 10.6.6 I believe). OS X 10.5.8 may be the last really secure full version of OS X ever created. Coincidentally Apple joined Prism in 2012.

Still one can make a good effort to make one's computer far less chatty. If you really want to be secure, don't use the app store at all and download your OS X updates. If you want to be a little bit secure, you have to avoid iCloud completely. Just ask the beautiful Jennifer Lawrence how iCloud turned out for her (I had no idea she was so sexy until those pics showed up). 

Keep reading How to set up a Mac securely on OS X 10.11 Sierra (El Capitan)

WordPress 2017 Security Roundup: Shield, Sucuri, iThemes, WordFence

Paul Goodchild over in Belfast is an interesting chap who's done some great work in security and in WordPress site management. We're ManageWP customers and huge ManageWP fans (great new interface), due to the great development and enthusiastic support team. But if we were to look for an alternative, iControlWP would be at the top of the list. iControlWP's existence probably pushed ManageWP to accelerate their improvements and simplify their pricing. We did consider switching both before the release of Orion (older ManageWP wasn't nearly as pretty or reliable as the current Orion version: if you haven't had a look for awhile, you should give ManageWP another chance)  and then briefly again at the time of the ManageWP GoDaddy acquisition as our clients had nothing but grief with GoDaddy hosting over the years. Fortunately ManageWP seems to run just as well as it did before the acquisition and the same people are in place. We in fact upgraded to the top package with built-in SEO and site performance reports for clients. 

Keep reading WordPress 2017 Security Roundup: Shield, Sucuri, iThemes, WordFence

How Observer Status in Teamwork.com project management allows Foliovision to handle more projects

Many of you may know that Foliovision began as a client service agency and not a software company. Our first big service was migration from Typepad to WordPress. We were literally doing dozens of migrations a month at one point. Project management in bulk was essential to the premium client experience we wishes to offer.

We started with Basecamp but eventually outgrew it (there's a long post about our Basecamp to Teamwork migration) and moved to Teamwork (back then TeamworkPM). Teamwork Projects at the time had a much worse design than Basecamp (latest version looks pretty good and even allows CSS customisation) but lots more tools (recurring tasks was a big one for us) at the time. As happy as the upgrade in features made us at the time, there was still one key feature missing. Later we called this feature Observer Status.

Keep reading How Observer Status in Teamwork.com project management allows Foliovision to handle more projects

Should you invest in Bitcoin

One of our more fun clients for our FV Player video player for WordPress recently wrote me:

btw.. i hope you invested in bitcoin like i told you...

Here's my answer.

I don't invest in systems where I have no control. Bitcoin could just disappear tomorrow and one fine day it will.

Here's how it will go down:

  • Bitcoin will be a threat to the USD
  • the US Treasury will declare Bitcoin a means to conduct illegal business

    • Keep reading Should you invest in Bitcoin

Yoast SEO vs FV Simpler SEO review or How Joost de Valk undermines WordPress.org

One of our clients is deciding on whether he should renew Yoast SEO or move to our free FV Simpler SEO. Tommie asked me some good questions about the differences.

Our SEO workflow in Yoast is mostly to help writers. It tells gives Harriet and other writers suggestions and warnings on optimising the permalink, meta description, heading, etc. based on the keyword target/s. Is that what yours does too?

Keep reading Yoast SEO vs FV Simpler SEO review or How Joost de Valk undermines WordPress.org

Akismet Alternatives: CleanTalk

We hate spam at Foliovision. Enough to have written a very effective anti-spam plugin ourselves. Our FV Antispam is on use on more than 4000 websites right now. If you like or use Akismet, FV Antispam works great. It can radically reduce your Akismet costs by cutting down on the amount of requests you send to Automattic, making an agency license go much farther (monthly limit, 100K checks).

FV Antispam also can speed up your site and lower server load as it processes machine spam locally. We also make sure that machine spam goes directly to trash so you don't have to waste time checking it manually (too many comments in a spam folder makes it impossible to evaluate any of them properly).

Keep reading Akismet Alternatives: CleanTalk

Moderating a busy WordPress Site with Thoughtful Comments

It's been a commenting kind of last seven days since Disqus started adding ads or charging what are extortionate rates for continued ad-free existence ($99/month for sites with from 50K to 250K visitors!). First some lively conversation over at WP Tavern about Disqus, wpDisquz (also very expensive at $29/extension), Postmatic, Replyable and our own Thoughtful Comments. Thoughtful Comments at free with Replyable at $3/month turned out to offer the best value in the advanced commenting sweepstakes to replace Disqus.

And now today I had one of our long time clients write in with a new issue which they hadn't faced before: how to deal with overly prolific commenters who were spoiling the intelligent conversations about law on their website. 

Hello! I've been digging into the documentation for "Thoughtful Comments". Do you know if it's possible in the plugin settings or in some other settings to limit the number of comments a single person (commenter) can leave either a) on a given post or b) in a given day?

We have a slight troll problem and we're wondering if something like that could address it. Or, maybe there's something else we could do short of manually flagging and banning individuals? Appreciate it!

Right now their website is open to any commenters, you don't need an account. This is the most difficult situation as in this case you have no real history with your commenters. Anyone can write in an email address, anyone can spoof another commenter's identity if s/he knows or can guess the email address of the other person. Guessing an email is not at all difficult if people are including a URL with their identity and a name.

Keep reading Moderating a busy WordPress Site with Thoughtful Comments

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