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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

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

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

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

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

Irocku.com & Chuck Leavell are changing the way music is taught

Give Twinkle, twinkle little star a rest. Learn Honky Tonk women instead.

If you want to learn how to do something, you want to learn from the best. And who better to learn how to play the piano from than the man himself - Chuck Leavell. Chuck doesn't need an introduction, but it would be a sin not to mention his rich music career.

There aren't that many musicians out there who can say that they've played with The Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Train, John Mayer. And now you can have that musician teach you how to play rock piano.

Chuck Leavell joined the legendary Allman Brothers Band in the early 70's. In 1973 they released the ultimate classic Brothers and Sisters album featuring what's one of the rock instrumental masterpieces - Jessica. The solo on Jessica was what launched Chuck Leavell into rock'n'roll stardom.

Keep reading Irocku.com & Chuck Leavell are changing the way music is taught

What GitHub brings to open source development

Recently we struggled with a difficult issue in WordPress Multisite. We take care of a network of sports weblogs. Each is for a different sport and not all the domain names sound the same.

We have a master install at say worldrecords.org (sample name, not our client's site). Logins only are SSL and all take place at worldrecords.org. An account at any site gets you access to all the sites. Hence login and password takes place at the master domain. Most visitors are not even aware of the domain switch during login.

When people would lose their password, the password reset email would not come from skatinggolds.org or lugegolds.org but from worldrecords.org. Many people would not recognise the domain and would delete the email without clicking and finishing the password reset. Worse yet the email might be considered spam by spam filters.

Keep reading What GitHub brings to open source development

Building a better WordPress Post Editor

There's been a lot of talk and writing about radically revamping WordPress edit experience since the New Year. It's great that the conversation has been started and many strong ideas have been shared. Matt Mullenweg kicked off the discussion on 4 January with a Coleridgian description of a new editor. Like Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome", the new editor should be a "miracle of rare device".

The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

Any "post building experience" which aspires to make "writing rich posts effortless" has my full attention. What should this experience look like in practical terms?

Keep reading Building a better WordPress Post Editor

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