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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

FV Player’s New Features: Video Links and Other Improvements

List of contents:

FV Player has new version - 6.0.5.22, that brings a cool new feature called Video Links. Imagine that you want to show someone a certain part of a video. Until now, you had to share a link to a page and then add something like "Check out that killer solo at 2:34!".

From now on, FV Player will allow you or anyone who watches the video generate a link with a certain point on the timeline. Anyone who clicks that link will be directed right to the video and it will start playing from the given point. The best thing is that it works with all videos (with the exception of live streams of course), no matter where they are hosted.

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Video Links and Other Improvements

Vindur

Vadim Sherbakov is a multi-talent based in Moscow. After realizing that he wasn’t really happy, he left his corporate job and started focusing on creative ways to express himself. This decision led him to 15+ years of experience as an independent art director and digital producer both in film and web industries. Working with international clients from Ireland, UK, US, Germany, and Australia or Italy, he got to know these countries through his clients a little bit more. And being a freelance author, it didn’t take long before he started to be interested in making photographs and videos from places around the world. But it was really after he was introduced to the drone technology when his craftsmanship started to bloom:

Keep reading Vindur

Foliovision goes to the cinema: Anka and Naty’s birthday party

Foliovision has a very special bond with Canada. After all, Alec, our Creative Director was born in Vancouver and some of our favourite clients are Torontonians. July 1st, 2017 marks the 150th anniversary since the colonies of New Brunswick, Canada and Nova Scotia formed Canada and naturally, we want to celebrate the big birthday too. Fortunately, there are numbers of opportunities to do so even here across the pond in Bratislava.

We were invited by the Office of the Embassy of Canada to Slovakia to attend a screening of the film "It's Only the End of the World" by the Canadian director Xavier Dolan as a part of the Month of Francophonie in Bratislava and a part of the Canada 150 celebrations.

Xavier Dolan, the French-Canadian movie director, is only 28 years old and he already has six feature films in his portfolio. He won the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes last year for the movie we went to see, "It's Only the End of the World".

We're all big film buffs here at FV and we regularly organize movie nights combined with birthday celebrations, so this was a perfect opportunity to see a good movie and celebrate the birthdays of two of our favourite Foliovision ladies - the best coordinator/office manager Anicka and our project manager/programmer-to-be Naty.

Keep reading Foliovision goes to the cinema: Anka and Naty's birthday party

LearnDash + FV Player + Vimeo – A Great Video Learning System Combination

The legendary storyteller Richard Stone of StoryWork approached us recently to help him integrate LearnDash LMS (Learning Management System) with FV Player Pro and Vimeo for his LivingStoriesTraining.net project focused on the healing journey. Many modern themes particularly from Envato come with a bundled page builder which doesn't respect core WordPress editor features. Often those themes even try to force their own buggy or not particularly capable video player on the user.

Keep reading LearnDash + FV Player + Vimeo - A Great Video Learning System Combination

DRM Text – New Feature That Will Help You Protect Your Videos

Protecting your videos from downloading is basically impossible, but you can make it harder for those who want to steal your content.

Imagine that you have an encrypted stream that is really hard to download. But how can you stop someone from plainly screen capturing the video? There are a couple of solutions, but most of them are not really working. The user captures the video and uses it on his web. You are furious because you put your heart into creating your content and now someone else is using it without your permission. How can you prove that the video was yours?

This is where the DRM Text feature comes in. It creates a small overlay box in the top left corner of the video that shows the user's ID if he's logged in, IP address and the current date. The box will appear for just a fraction of a second and repeat regularly during the video playback.

Keep reading DRM Text - New Feature That Will Help You Protect Your Videos

Skygarden

Born in 1984, Fabian Weber is a director and photographer from Switzerland. In his work, he always presents objects in diverse angles and a new light, with sharp and graphical focus. But at the same time, he approaches these objects in an emotional and humane way, which leads the viewer to a different viewpoint.

I love to work in different genres, styles, and techniques. My mission is simple: I am a translator, an interpreter, I materialize your vision and ideas.

Keep reading Skygarden

Flying Condition

Piotr Matejkowski is a director from Warsaw. In his works, he primarily uses the medium of video and photography, but also the graphics and design. Participating in projects both artistic and commercial, such as music videos and advertising, his artistic practice is focused on the aspects of emotions.

We particularly like his most recent short film Flying Condition for being very personal and really taking us inside the world of the person creating amazing patterns.

Keep reading Flying Condition

Visio

Remi Besse is a talent from France, skilled in photography and painting, which led him to have exhibitions through the city of Paris. But he is also a finesse director, which is why we showcase his particular work this week!

Coming from the visual arts, it is quite natural for Remi not to imprison himself to what the camera can grasp. This is what makes his visual style so unique - creating a mix of classical cinematography and animation.

Keep reading Visio

Why You Should Care About How You Share Your Videos on Social Media

In my last article, I wrote about how video is becoming everything everyone talks about these days. At least on social media. And the ones who know how to use it properly and to their own advantage, are the ones running the conversation.

Gone are the days of sharing songs and funny videos from Youtube. Today, everyone is a content creator, or wants to be one, but I'll talk about that some other time. Since Facebook users are the ones creating their own content instead of sharing other people's content, Facebook recognized this and moved native videos to the top of the news feed pyramid.

When I say native videos, I'm talking about the videos you take on your phone or your camera and upload directly to Facebook without uploading them to Youtube or Vimeo or any other streaming service.

But why should a simple Facebook user care about this? Well, they shouldn't and probably won't. But just because this change hasn't disrupted an average Facebook user's life, there are many people out there who've been affected by it.

Keep reading Why You Should Care About How You Share Your Videos on Social Media

Comment Caching Models to improve WordPress Core Performance

Many of our clients don't like the paged comments feature of WordPress as they like to have all the keywords occurring in the comments present on our article page and not spread across multiple pages. Keeping thousands of fresh comments on the page with every possible combination of keywords helps them rank at the top of Google for very competitive product categories.

Our front-end comment moderation plugin Thoughtful Comments includes comment caching feature, this article describes why that is important even if you are caching your site HTML: Improve your WordPress speed by Caching Comments.

However the downside is that it doesn't work for administrators and that the cache has to be purged and rebuilt when comments are added or removed. It's also usually slows down logged in users as we move more and more of our clients over to a membership or at least logged in user model.

Keep reading Comment Caching Models to improve WordPress Core Performance

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

New Skin Settings, KeyCDN Support and Facebook Sharing in FV Player

As some of you probably already noticed, FV Player is again richer with some exciting new features. We have a new hosting option - KeyCDN, you can choose a new Skin for your player, and we added a way of sharing your videos directly to Facebook.

New options in Skin settings

You will like this change especially if you show subtitles in your videos. If you go to Settings > FV Player > Skin tab, you will find two new menus: Playlist and Subtitles. As you can see, you can now adjust the colours of your playlists, but a lot more can be done about the subtitles. You can set the change the font and it's size, lower the opacity and change the colour. The best thing is that you will see all your tweaks in a live preview.

The live preview is also available in the main demo video. Previously you had to update the settings by saving all the changes to see how your newly adjusted skin will look like. Now you can just play the video, change what you want and see how it will look like instantly in the video box. More info on how to customize your skin can be found in this guide - Customizing FV Player Skin.

Keep reading New Skin Settings, KeyCDN Support and Facebook Sharing in FV Player

Markdown Quick Reference for (Foliovision) Clients

Foliovision now uses Markdown for formatting text in fields in our MLS listings software. You can use Markdown in either short or long description. Markdown also works throughout our project management system if you disable the WYSWIYG. This is a really quick practical guide to using Markdown without all the complicated advanced syntax only geeks need.

Micro Markdown Syntax Reference

Headers - ###
Bold - **word**
Italic - *word*
[link text](https://domain.com/page.html)
Numbered lists - 1., 2., 3.
Bullet point lists - *, -, +
Blockquote - > Quotation text, could span multiple lines and sentences.
Image - ![alttext](http://domain.com/image.jpg)

Short Markdown Syntax Guide

The page below contains examples of Markdown syntax.

Keep reading Markdown Quick Reference for (Foliovision) Clients

Haut Vol

Louis de Caunes is a director and a photographer from Paris. Being a son of Antoine de Caunes, famous French television presenter, and actor, he grew up on film sets and always wanted to make movies.

Keep reading Haut Vol

Markdown Editors Shootout: Support for Tables, Footnotes, Strikethrough

We use Markdown everywhere at Foliovision as our main project management software Teamwork offers excellent Markdown support. For some of our internal documents we desperately need tables. This was preventing us from switching everything to Markdown. I'd heard there was decent support for tables in Markdown but trying to edit Markdown tables long hand was not fun at all. This is what Markdown tables look like as plain text:

| Application - Markdown Support | Active | Preview | Price     | Non-app store version | Writing Experience | Footnotes | Strikethrough | | ------------------------------ | :----: | :-----: | --------: | :-------------------: | :----------------: | --------- | ------------- | | Typora                         | Superb |   Yes   | Free Beta |          Yes          |        ++++        | Weak      | Two Tildes    | | TableIt                        |  Yes   |   Yes   |       $19 |          Yes          |        N/A         | N/A       | N/A           | | Marked 2                       |   No   |   Yes   |       $10 |          Yes          |        N/A         | Yes       | Yes, GFM      | | BBEdit/TextWrangler            |  Yes   |   No    |  $50/free |          Yes          |         ++         | No        | No            |

So I went looking for a Markdown editor which supported tables well for my team. In the process I discovered a lot about Markdown and even editing. I invite you to join me on my journey. As I use OS X and most of our team does as well (we have some Linux and a few Windows users: we have fewer people using Windows than Linux at this point), this article focuses on OS X Markdown editors. Our overall winner is a cross-platform application (OS X , Windows, Linux) built on HTML5 technology and we do cover other Windows Markdown editors at the end of the article.

Keep reading Markdown Editors Shootout: Support for Tables, Footnotes, Strikethrough

Youth

Spring.

That time of the year when you're walking through sunlit streets, the birds are singing and you don't need a scarf anymore. But there's so much more to spring than just the warmer weather. Spring feels like a new chapter, where everything starts waking up - the trees, the animals, but also your will to be more creative and more loving.

And in this recent week, we started to feel it. We think the spring is finally here.

Keep reading Youth

ExoClick Ads Now Supported by FV Player

ExoClick is one of the largest and fastest growing online advertising networks. Based in sunny Barcelona, ExoClick provides ads for 2.4% of the web, making it the 4th largest for websites in the world (according to W3Techs). Our clients have asked for an easy way of using ExoClick with WordPress, so we have delivered a smooth, Flowplayer based solution. From now on, all the owners of the Pro license can use ads from this network in their videos. 

ExoClick offers advertisers and publishers over 20 ad formats and detailed statistical data with several options to customize the tracking of their performance. Creating a Publisher profile (the one you need to serve ads with your videos) is free and you don't have to fill in any payment data until the point when you want to be paid.

Keep reading ExoClick Ads Now Supported by FV Player

Stop Hitting Yourself, Twitter

Twitter has 99 problems and UX is one of them. The roles of Advanced Search, Analytics and Moments in its ecosystem are uncertain. Therefore, using them is complicated and confusing. In this blog post I am looking at each feature, its malfunctions and how they can be improved. Feel free to join the discussion.

I am not sure whether it is worth anything to complain about Twitter. At this point, it seems like talking to a brick wall (not that wall). The company's financial results are as disappointing as is the average engagement. Yet, little has been done to overturn this.

Jan Rezab, the founder of Socialbakers, suggests pre-filtered feeds for sports, news, etc (this is something Facebook has been contemplating over the last year under the name 'Trending Topics'). He is also against the notion the company should sell - because there's so much room for improvement. And indeed, there is.

Keep reading Stop Hitting Yourself, Twitter

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