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Top Christmas commercials of 2018

Long before the snow even starts to cover the roofs of our houses and temperature drops to zero we are reminded to rejoice in upcoming Christmas time by commercials. Some find them too annoying, some think they create a certain holiday atmosphere. One way or another, there are commercials which are worth watching. Touching, funny, sweet, there are many of them, but no matter what genre, they all make us feel like celebrating Christmas whatever month it is right now. 

Keep reading Top Christmas commercials of 2018

Project Gutenberg – Subverting WordPress.org for .com marketing

People who use WordPress to publish their poetry, their photographs or communicate to their customers their small business (about 30% of the internet) may not even know about Project Gutenberg. Ostensibly Project Gutenberg began as a new editor. Given how mediocre the WordPress TinyMCE editor has been from inception (note: we created FV WYSIWYG on FCKedit ten years ago and it's still the only editor which allows a writer to switch to code view and back again and not have all his/her paragraphs and line spacing arbitrarily changed), a new editor is a laudable goal.

Unfortunately Project Gutenberg turned out not to be an upgraded post editor but a new vision of WordPress in permanent Page Builder mode. There have been serious writings about the tyranny of choice. By forcing writers to make decisions about blocks, multiple photo layouts, forms, sliders every time they create a new paragraph, there are two results likely:

Keep reading Project Gutenberg - Subverting WordPress.org for .com marketing

How to Setup LastPass On Subdomains

Update May 2021: We do not recommend LastPass under any circumstances. LastPass was bought first by an awful competitor LogMeIn in October 2015 and then even worse since December 2019 both are in the hands of private equity for $4.3 billion. After LogMeIn acquired LastPass, there have been never ending security breaches, the technology and interface have stagnated, while subscription prices have shot skyward year over year. In the hands of private equity, expect this kind of userbase exploitation to ever worse.

Fortunately there is a much better competitor, Bitwarden which we've used for almost five years now and which you should use too. The interface is better, the browser plugin is far more reliable. Bitwarden is the creation of a sole creator, Kyle Spearrin, who built Bitwarden from the ground up in a superhuman effort, including doing support for a couple of years while he built Bitwarden up. Now of course there is a larger team in place but Bitwarden is still very close to the technical founding team and is much better for it.

All of the good things we say about using a password manager like LastPass below apply to Bitwarden.
 
What is LastPass and why you should use it

As they say, the only secure password is the one you can't remember. This is the idea that keeps password managers like LastPass going. With LastPass, you only need a one super-strong master password (there goes the name—"the last pass you'll ever need"), which can be a line from your favourite song translated to a different language you speak, a quote from a movie, or any other phrase that is not too easy to hack.

Once you've entered the master password, LastPass will let you access your credentials for every other account saved in LastPass (Facebook and Twitter logins, e-mail, etc.) or do the autologin (If you activated it. Don't do it.). This way, you can use strong generated passwords for your accounts, without having to remember them or writing them down.

The great thing about LastPass is that it stores your data encrypted online and the data is only decrypted locally in your browser with your key, which even LastPass itself does not have. This way, LastPass users are protected from hacker attacks like the ones that happened to Adobe or Apple users.

Keep reading How to Setup LastPass On Subdomains

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

10 Best WordPress Podcasts You Should Start Listening to

The podcasts are slowly but steadily winning over the global audience. According to a research conducted in 2017, 67 million Americans listen to podcasts monthly (14% up in just one year) and spend on average about 5 hours per week listening to podcasts. Impressive, right? With our love for multitasking, no wonder podcasts are getting so popular: listening to a podcast can make the time spent cleaning your apartment or commuting much more worthwhile.

The statistics say that most of the podcast listeners are young, educated, affluent active social media users - basically a portrait of a WordPress developer or a digital business owner, which explains the fact that there is such a great variety of WordPress podcasts to choose from. 

Keep reading 10 Best WordPress Podcasts You Should Start Listening to

2017 Year in Review: a Look Back And New Year’s Resolutions.

2017 was a great deal for us in Foliovision! We've worked a lot on polishing our products and services as well as on getting more visibility on the market.

This year, we had our first Black Friday sale and got listed in about 20 different Black Friday sales roundups, yay! It was a great experience, but we still have so much to learn. Many thanks to all of you who decided to partner up with us, especially to MasterWP, WP Mayor, Winwar.uk,  WPulsar, WP Newsify, PressAvenue, you guys rock!

This year was also pretty awesome for us on social media. Alec's post on Markdown editors and Sanela's post on free stock video resources got shared more than 590 times each!

But the most important thing for us, of course, is that our beloved child, FV Player, grew so much in the past year! We welcome so many new pro users of FV Player Pro in addition to the 30,000 active sites using the free player. We've received 15 new reviews of our player on WordPress.org, and all of them were 5-stars!

The FV Player got lots of new tweaks and features and became the most feature-rich video plugin for WordPress on the market. Here is how it happened:

Keep reading 2017 Year in Review: a Look Back And New Year's Resolutions.

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

6 Great WordPress Newsletters You Should Subscribe to Today

As much as we love to stay updated on what's hot in the WordPress world, newsletters can be tricky. By signing up for a newsletter, you risk being spammed with commercial content or simply having your inbox cluttered with the information you don't need. Sometimes, there is a way to check what you sign up for by reading the previous issues online, but in most cases there is no way to know what you get until you press subscribe.

So how do you know which WordPress newsletters are worth subscribing to? To answer this question, we've subscribed to almost all WordPress newsletters that we could find and got our inboxes full of them for a few weeks so that you don't have to do the same. (Unless you want to!) We've carefully reviewed them and put together the ultimate list of top six best WordPress newsletters, all extremely helpful and free of charge.

Keep reading 6 Great WordPress Newsletters You Should Subscribe to Today

Case Study: Richard Silver’s Torontoism

When Foliovision first got acquainted with Richard Silver back in 2013, we knew we were at the start of a very fruitful relationship. Richard was already a big star on the Toronto real estate scene, being a real estate agent for the past 35 years and an ex-TREB president. He came to Foliovision with his Richardsilver.com site, which was badly hurt by Google Penalty at the time and found itself at the bottom of Google search results.

Together we built Torontoism.com and produced hundreds of articles during the past four years. Torontoism grew, and today it is a team of five real estate agents supported by two customer relationship gurus, catering to both Torontonians and international buyers and sellers. Here is Richard's and Torontoism's success story.

Keep reading Case Study: Richard Silver's Torontoism

Why Desiblitz dumped JW Player 7 for FV Player Pro

The award-winning lifestyle magazine Desiblitz.com were happy JW Player 5 and 6 customers. Desiblitz was using JW Player to embed their Youtube videos on their website. When JW Player 7 introduced a much more complicated interface and removed non-JW Player hosted options, Desiblitz.com started to look for a faster, simpler and more straightforward alternative. Desiblitz found FV Player, which allows publishers to combine free video hosting from YouTube with inexpensive hosting from Vimeo Pro or Amazon S3 and/or high security hosting with Cloudfront, KeyCDN, Stackpath CDN.

What Desi Means and What Desiblitz Does

Since there wasn't a real news platform focusing on British Asian and Desilifestyle, the team behind Desiblitz decided to create an online magazine with high-quality content specifically tending to British Asian society and the South Asian demographic globally.

"The term 'Desi' refers to a connection with the roots from your 'desh' or 'des' motherland,'' explains Indi Deol, managing director of the magazine. In this case the motherland is primarily India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka and 'Desi' is a collective term which classifies culture and people from these countries.

"The ethos was and is to develop the skills of young British Asians in digital media - especially online writing, video production, presenting and photography," says Indi. "Primarily helping those with very little skills or work experience, fresh graduates with little employment prospects and disadvantaged young people."

Keep reading Why Desiblitz dumped JW Player 7 for FV Player Pro

Case Study: How FV Player keeps CreativeScreenWriting.com’s videos safe from pirates

Foliovision had the opportunity to work with the best magazine for screenwriters, CreativeScreenWriting.com. They are using FV Player in their video store section to stream their video tutorials to members.

Screen writing is a form of art. It's not easy transforming stories into a video format. How many times have you watched a movie and you liked the idea behind it, but the writing was so bad you had to give it up? It proves the fact that good screenwriters are as important as good actors and directors.

CreativeScreenWriting.com went live in 1994. During the 90s, it was a printed magazine, publishing about 25,000 copies six times a year. Now it's only available online, catering for screenwriters and anyone interested in screenwriting. We talked to John Davis, the magazine's editor, about the site:

In both Hollywood and the industry that covers it, there has always been a focus on directors and actors. But screenwriters are every bit as important!

Keep reading Case Study: How FV Player keeps CreativeScreenWriting.com's videos safe from pirates

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 to use WordPress with CDN

Some of the FV Player users recently experienced issues with the last version - their videos were not playing. The reason was that there were bigger changes in our code and their websites used poorly configured CDN.

While CDN speeds up your site you must understand how it works to avoid issues and too much optimization which you don't understand. Just make sure that you don't remove query string versions - read on!

Keep reading How to use WordPress with CDN

Foliovision at WCEU Paris 2017

We had a great time at WCEU 2017 in Paris last week! We learned so much from the people we've met, especially at the Contribution Day which was a big success, and then attended great talks by WordPress experts and just enjoyed the amazing atmosphere at Les Docks Paris. If you were one of the volunteers, thank you for a job well done!

Keep reading Foliovision at WCEU Paris 2017

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