Web of Success: 14 Years of KidPub.com

Ever think about how much you trust your software? For most of the things we do on a PC, there’s really very little trust involved. We expect Word to display text as we type it, or our calculator to return accurate numbers, but for the most part we accept the little idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of our applications and work around them, if we even notice them.

When it comes to backup software, though, the story is a little different. There’s no room for mistakes. In an earlier post I wrote about selecting a backup solution for our Linux servers, and part of that process included whether or not I got a good feeling when running the application. Any little glitch, unexpected response, or slow refresh meant that I’d cross that package off of the list.

I did the same thing when choosing a Windows backup solution for my daily work desktop.  Ghost was ok, but a bit slow, and I’d read that there were issues running it under then-beta Windows 7. I did some research and found that Acronis had a popular solution in their True Image Home product. It includes an innovative ‘continuous’ backup feature that does an incremental backup every five minutes which I found attractive. It retails for about $50, a bargain for some peace of mind.

Acronis worked reasonably well under Windows 7 RC. It was a bit of a resource hog and would slow the machine to a crawl on power-up as it rechecked every file on the system, but I got used to it. I ost and recovered a file or two over the month that I used it and was happy with the result.

Then came the installation of the production version of Windows 7. I’ll cut to the chase: Acronis completely failed. It wouldn’t run a backup, instead displaying a blank alert box: Ok? I don’t think so. Worse, I was not able to open ANY of the backed up files from the prior installation. Instead of simply refreshing directories on my base Windows 7 install, I had to dig up backup DVDs of those files and rebuild the machine manually.

Acronis’ answer to the high-severity bug ticket I filed? We know it’s a problem and we’ll get back to you. That was several weeks ago, and from the chatter on the Acronis user forum it’s clear that it wasn’t just me seeing this problem.

This kind of failure in a backup product is simply inexcusable. Fortunately I had backups of my Acronis backups, and I feel truly sorry for those who didn’t. Granted, rolling back to Windows 7 RC is a temporary fix, but Acronis has lost the single most important feature of their product: Trust. They have lost me as a customer for life, and probably anyone who asks me what I use for backup.

I replaced Acronis with Cobian, an open source solution that works extremely well. Unlike Acronis, which saves files in a proprietary format, Cobian stores files in standard format, so even if Cobian won’t start I can still get to my files. It does everything you’d expect it to, and does it efficiently. It offers features that Windows 7 backups doesn’t, and best of all it’s free.

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Just a few weeks after my post evaluating backup and recovery solutions for Linux, we had a hard failure on one of the machines that we use for daily editing work. It holds most of the master files for active books. It was one of those failures that ends up being cheaper to replace the machine rather than repair it.

On the plus side, it was an excuse to pick up one of the quad-core Intel machines that Gateway and others are deep-discounting right now. And it was a perfect lesson in the value of regular backups. Since we Ghost the machine daily (sometimes more often, using Ghost’s triggers), we were able to recover our data with just a few hours of lost work. It takes about ten minutes to set  up automated backup tasks in Ghost and other backup software, and then you just forget about it until you need it (and you WILL need it!).

On the minus side, I’m now starting to be obsessed with data protection…a rack of RAID is just what we need right now…

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About a month ago I started evaluating backup solutions for the web sites I host on my remote servers. I’ve had a little Netgear NSLU2 (Slug) doing the job…the Slug is a tiny Linux server…it’s about the size of a deck of cards…that come with two USB ports and an ethernet connection. Although the NSLU2 is preinstalled with a Linux distribution, I reflashed it with Debian. The little Slug has been doing nightly backups via rsync for three or four years now, storing them on an external drive. Once a week I burn a snapshot to DVD.

Why replace something that works? I’m beginning to worry that the NsLU2 might give up the ghost. I suppose it’s just paranoia, after all the thing has an uptime of 342 days today, and seems to be working fine. I think it was the launch of the new KidPub Press bookstore that made me rethink the backup strategy.

The difficulty I had finding a solution is that the servers are running a Red Hat variant of Linux (CentOS), and I wanted to to backups to a local Windows 7 box, mainly for ease of use. Even though the Slug does a great job, it’s incredibly slow…it takes a couple of hours to build a1G ISO image for burning to DVD, for example. My requirements were pretty simple. I need to do a one-way daily mirror of several directories and the MySQL databases.

I evaluated seven solutions:

• SiteShelter
• HandyBackup
• Backup4All
• Site Vault
• Unison
• DeltaCopy
• cwRsync

The first four are commercial products ranging in price from $200 to $40. The last three are open source.

Of the commercial solutions, only SiteShelter was able to properly mirror the remote server. The issue is that most of the backup programs rely on an Attribute flag on a file to determine if a file has been archived, however the flag doesn’t exist in the Linux filesystem. The symptom of this is that an incremental backup will download everything, even ify ou’ve just done one, because the software doesn’t have any way to tell if it has already downloaded a file.

SiteShelter is able to correctly manage incremental backups from the Linux box. Its interface leaves a lot to be desired, though. In its defense, the program is supposed to be run as a service, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for having an awkward human UI. Of the three commercial solutions it is the most expensive, at $200 for a single license. Although I thought SiteShelter was promising, I really didn’t see any advantage in using it versus using rsync, which is free.

The trouble, of course, is that there is no native rsync for Windows. I started looking for rsync ports. Most of them rely on Cygwin, and excellent Unix emulator for Windows that’s been around for as long as I can remember. Installing Cygwin just to get rsync seemed like overkill, ven for a Linux guy like me. Instead, I found three packages hat bundle just enough Cygwin with rsync to provide a backup solution for Windows.

Unison is the most complicated, and I rejected it for its complexity. It just does way more than I need, and just configuring it for a quick test took an hour.

DeltaCopy works but suffers from a very poor user interface. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it because of this.

I settled on cwRsync. Although it has a UI based on GTK, I didn’t use it. It is identical to rsync on the Linux side, so I simply copied over my rsync script from the NSLU2. I had to change the destination directory, but that was the only configuration required, and the exclusion file I’ve added to over the years didn’t need to be changed at all. Ten minutes setting up the batch file to run in Windows Scheduler and I was done with my backup solution. It’s fast, secure (uses SSH), and just works, which is my #1 criteria for any product.

One other bit of information…a few of the commercial products try to back up MySQL databases by logging on to them directly. I didn’t get a lot of good feelings about these, and they seemed terribly slow. Because I ended up using rsync, I stuck with my old database backup strategy, which is a cron job that runs on the server that uses mysqldump to create snapshots of all of the critical databases. These files are dropped into a directory that rsync monitors for its daily run.

I now have a solid backup system to a Windows machine that is fast, easy to use (the remote directory structure is duplicated locally), and provides a quick burn to DVD. That it is free and a familiar and trusted solution is icing.

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I recently spent about a week evaluating shopping-cart platforms for the new KidPub Press online bookstore. My requirements were actually fairly simple; I wanted something that:

• Is easy to administer
• Can be made to look like a bookstore
• Has PHP as the underlying code
• Integrates with Linkpoint as a payment gateway

The three prime contenders were Drupal (already in use at kidpub.com), Magento, and Zen-Cart.

I ruled out Drupal pretty quickly. even though I’ve used it for several years for the main KidPub site, I see it as a CMS platform, and what I really wanted was an e-commerce platform. Drupal can certainly be made to look and act like a bookstore, and it does have a Linkpoint module (though it is ‘beta’ code), but at the end of the day Drupal is about managing content, not transactions.

Next up was Magento. I’d read rabid reviews of the thing written by people who are just in love with the platform. I tried for about a day and a half to get Magento running correctly on my staging server without much luck. Wrong PHP version. Wrong SSL library. Database problems. I’m no slouch, having been knee-deep in Linux and Unix for about twenty years now, and I couldn’t get Magento to run in a way that gave me any sort of confidence. Letting it manage credit card transactions was out of the question, and it turns out that Magento and Linkpoint don’t play well together. Authorize.net? Out-of-the-box. Linkpoint? Good luck.

Zen-Cart was actually my second choice. Magento LOOKS fabulous, and I wanted that look for the store. Zen-Cart looks, well, a bit homemade, and there’s an expectation that you will roll up your sleeves and dig into the code if you want anything other than default behavior. To be fair, I’ve seen some outstanding sites powered by Zen-Cart, but I honestly don’t have the talent at hand to do such design work.

What sold me on Zen-Cart was that after literally two days of wrestling with Magento (and not getting ANYTHING to work), it took about ten minutes to get Zen-Cart up and running. Another few hours of tweaking and adding product, and I had a complete e-commerce site with full payment gateway integration AND that looks and acts like a bookstore. There’s a ‘book’ product module available, and I paid for a template look-and-feel that I thought was nice.

I’m pretty comfortable tweaking the PHP code in Zen-Cart, and I’ve done a moderate amount of customization. My impression of the Zen-Cart community is that there isn’t a lot of deep coding expertise, at least among the majority of users. There’s a lot of ‘find this line and change this value’ advice in the forums. That’s fine, Zen-Cart is a simple system and if I need to tweak a table or edit PHP to change some text, I don’t mind.

If what you need is just shopping-cart functionality without a lot of bells-and-whistles, consider Zen-Cart. Magento, in my opinion, just isn’t ready for commercial deployment. And Drupal? It’s still a pretty good CMS system.

You can see our Zen-Cart implementation at the KidPub Press bookstore.

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Those of you who know me even moderately well will be stunned to hear me say this: Windows 7 marks the end of the line for Linux on the desktop.

I’m a huge proponent of open source, and of Linux in particular, and I’ve actively used Linux since around 1994. Two of my current computers are running Ubuntu, and I use CentOS on the site’s web servers. In my former role as an analyst at a large market research firm in Boston, I wrote that Linux had boxed itself into a corner on the desktop by trying to be too much like Windows. Linux UI developers, particularly the Gnome and KDE teams, succeeded in their goal of making Windows users comfortable enough with Linux to switch by making their UIs so close to Windows’ as to be indistinguishable.

At that moment, any differentiation between Linux and Windows was lost. Desktop hardware has become robust enough that we don’t need an OS and GUI that runs ‘faster’ on limited specs. User applications like email and the browser are nearly identical. And, for corporation, why retool IT to deploy a desktop that looks and feels (and, for the most part, performs) just like Windows? Why not stick with Windows?

A few years back, though, Microsoft accidentally left the door unlocked and the car running when they shipped Vista. IT departments avoided it like the plague, but at the same time needed to update their installations. Distributions like Ubuntu came exceptionally close to making serious inroads on the corporate desktop, solely due to the enormous void left by Vista. That window of opportunity lasted a couple of years, and Linux could have pushed through the final barrier of resistance to deliver on its promise of an inexpensive, solid desktop solution.

It didn’t make it. Windows 7, now out as a release candidate, is so much better than Vista and XP that IT departments are going to breathe a collective sigh of relief and haul out their checkbooks. Win 7 is peppy, just like Ubuntu / Gnome, it’s pretty, and nearly all of the little things that drove frustrated Windows users to Linux have been fixed. There’s even less of a difference now between Linux and Windows on the desktop, except for the still large number of Windows applications that have no usable Linux counterpart.

Ah, but what about netbooks? Surely that’s the perfect place for Linux!

I disagree. I own a Linux netbook (the Acer One), and I love it, but only because I wiped the nearly useless, watered down software that it came with and installed Ubuntu (with a custom kernel that I compiled myself for speed and efficiency). The Linux experience on netbooks just isn’t that great. Once Win 7 is customized for the netbook market, there will be no compelling reason to install Linux on one.

Lest you think I’ve completely abandoned Linux, it isn’t true. I’m an open-source proponent, just not a zealot. Linux in the server room still makes a lot of sense, and there will always be those companies who embrace open-source technologies as a matter of principle. As an analyst it was quite clear that there weren’t significant financial incentives to choose Linux over anything else in the data center, and there will always be a split between the Unix camp and the Windows camp. Linux just makes sense on a server.

On the desktop, though…I’m a Win 7 convert!

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KidPub was on the road with a booth at the NJ State Homeschooling Convention a few weekends ago.  Some people hate trade shows, but I’ve always found them a great way to get feedback from your audience. Back in the day I did many shows as Editor of 73 Magazine, then later on with CUSeeMe Networks, and now with my own publishing company.

Here are a few notes for those who are thinking about doing their first show and might be wondering how to maximize their time.

1. Keep the message simple. Are you introducing a new product? Trying to sell an existing one? Both? Don’t confuse the audience…you have about 15 seconds to capture their attention, and if there’s too much information at your booth, they’ll just walk away. Pick the message that you want to drive home, and build your booth around it.

I violated this rule at the NJ show, and it haunted me for two days. We have two lines of business…books and a membership-driven web site. On the first day I tried to talk about both and ended up confusing people. On the second day I let the visitors drive which they wanted to talk about, which worked better, but I could have avoided the issue entirely by just doing one or the other.

2. People will take just about anything that you hand to them.  If you wait for visitors to come to your booth, you’ll miss about 75% of the attendees. It isn’t rude to walk up to a complete stranger and hand them a brochure at a show…they are there to collect information. Standing around behind your table is much too passive, you must get in front of your booth, hand out information, and literally lead people back to your table.

3. ASK FOR THE SALE. Even professional sales people forget this simple advice. You aren’t going to make a sale unless you ask for it. Create urgency by offering a ’show special’ price, and ask visitors point-blank if they want to purchase RIGHT NOW. Again, it isn’t rude…visitors don’t have a lot of time to spend while you go through a long-winded sales pitch. Show them what you’ve got, tell them the price, and ask for the sale. If they decline, hand them a coupon for the special price that they can redeem later.

4. Save money on booth decorations. Here in Boston, you can spend a couple of hundred dollars on a single 6′ x 2.5′ vinyl banner for the back of your booth. Or, you can go to Vista Print and get the same thing for $25. No one is going to remember what your booth looked like when they leave the show…make it look nice, but don’t spend a fortune on decoration just because you like it.

5. Use the 15-foot rule for signage. For some strange reason, even though people go to trade show vendor areas to look at the booths, they will do everything they can to avoid actually visiting your booth. They’ll avoid eye contact with you, walk out of their way to keep outside your zone…it’s really silly but I see it all the time. Because of this, any important message that you want to be seen should be readable from about 15 feet away. The message should be nonthreatening and make the viewer want to come over to see what you are doing.

6. Wear comfortable shoes. Take some time during your pre-show planning to consider what you’ll need to stay comfortable during the show. If you’re a small business it might just be you manning the booth, so take water, simple snacks, paper towels, and maybe a special treat or two, plus comfy shoes. You’re going to be standing for eight or more hours a day for a couple of days.

7. Take plenty of notes. You’ll have lots of great insights and ideas during the show. You’ll completely forget them if you don’t write them down. Just keep a little notebook under the table and jot them down as they come to you…you can process them once you’re home.

8. LISTEN. This is your chance to do invaluable market research. It’s tempting to want to explain everything about you, your company, your product, the weather, and so on, to every visitor that walks into earshot, but avoid the temptation and just listen. You’ll find out whether people understand what you do, or are confused by your messaging, by listening to their questions. You might even start a conversation with, “What do you think we do here?”

I think that this is one of the biggest reasons to do a show…it gets your company in front of thousands of potential customers in a short period of time, and it allows you to observe how they react to your product.

9. Talk to other vendors. You’ll get to know your immediate neighbors pretty well, but make a specific effort to talk to other vendors at the show, even your competitors. Find out what shows they go to, how they are doing at this show, look for opportunities for cooperative marketing, and get your name out there. Be sure to bring a long a stack of your business cards to hand out to these folks. Follow up with the vendors that interested you after the show, even if it’s just a ‘Nice meeting you’ note.

10. Have fun. Shows can be a lot of fun. Take the time to wander a bit and take it all in.

Good luck at the show, especially if it is your first. You’ll have a great time, meet a lot of nice people who are genuinely interested in what you do, and gain valuable insights into your business!

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Fresh, constantly changing content is the lifeblood of many web sites, but generating content can be challenging. The audience at KidPub are voracious readers of books written for teens and tweens, and we’ve turned to Twitter to help drive traffic to our site.

There are about 150 well-known (to teens at least) authors who regularly use Twitter. We use a simple script developed by Kent Brewster to search Twitter for updates from 100 of these authors and display them on a page called YA Tweets. KidPub readers love it…they can catch the latest news from their favorite authors in what feels like a very intimate way. What did Meg Cabot have for breakfast? What’s Maureen Johnson thinking about as she writes her next book? It’s all there in the tweets. You can see our page in action here.

You can easily apply this technique to your own demographic. What is vitally interesting to your audience? Create a search filter for Twitter that reflects what matters to your readers, and display it on your site. Surround the page with links out to your other content, and you have a self-generating, constantly updating traffic attractor.

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Just a quick post about Peter Shankman’s Help a Report Out (HARO) service. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a social network operating by Twitter and email of about 50,000 individuals. Reporters, journalists, authors, and other media tap into the collective knowledge by submitting requests for information, and receive responses from whoever feels that they can help out. A typical request might be, “I’m a reporter for the NY Times looking for individuals who have recently vacationed in Ohio, for an article on where to go when you can’t afford anything else.” HARO requests come out three times per day.

We’re launching a new feature at KidPub where we will feature an author of young-adult books, and the kids will have a chance to ask the author questions. Not terribly original, I know, but it’ll be a fun thing to do. I sent out a HARO request this morning asking for any authors who might be interested in helping out, expecting two or three, or if I was lucky, five.

In five hours I received just under 100 responses, including notes from executives at several well-known publishing houses. It’s going to take a week to sort through them all! This is social networking at its best, and it’s why the ‘Google Buys Twitter’ rumor is so persistent…real-time access to tens or hundreds of thousands of human brains is the ultimate search engine, at least for some classes of queries.

Hats off to Shankman and HARO!

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Here’s a chart of recent traffic at KidPub. Keeping in mind that our audience is under the age of 15, what day of the week would you expect those peaks to fall on?

You’d think that we would see a nice little peak on Saturday and Sunday, trailing off as the kids went back to school for the week.

You’d be wrong. The peak traffic day for KidPub is Wednesday, and it’s been that way for years. Our lowest traffic day of the week is Saturday. I’ve never quite figured out why this happens, but you can practically set your clock by it. Is it that homework is lighter in the middle of the week? Are the TV shows less enticing? I’ve asked my members in the past bu haven’t come up with anything conclusive.

Because it’s so regular, I plan around it. I tend to send press releases out on Wednesdays so that visitors from the press will see a very active site. I try to do maintenance tasks and upgrades on weekends when I know that traffic will be lighter. It’s the Rhythm of KidPub.

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Many small companies, like KidPub, have to watch every dollar spent. I’m always looking for ways to cut costs while not sacrificing either quality or progress toward my business goals. For a publishing company, PR is incredibly important, but it can also be incredibly expensive. We send out a press release for each books that is published, plus releases for contest announcements and general news.  It can add up to five to ten releases each month.

When I started shopping around for a PR agency to handle my account, I quickly realized that press releases were going to be a significant slice of my marketing budget. I wanted to know if there were alternatives to traditional agencies that might save money but still be effective.

I’ve used some of the online firms in the past with limited success. They typically charge a per-release fee with a suite of add-on services that can inflate the final bill. These companies, such as PRWeb, do an ok job of sending out your release and tracking it, but it seemed that my releases were getting lost in the flood of PR that goes across their wire.

Finally, by a stroke of luck, I found Mondo Times and its sister site, EasyMediaList. Mondo’s goal is to be a source of media information. Say you wanted to send a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Herald. it takes just a few clicks on Mondo to pull up contact information for the paper. Mondo is a membership site, and to get the phone, fax, and email of the editor it’s $80 a year.

That’s actually a pretty good deal, and I use this service to look up editorial information for hometown news media of each author that publishes with KidPub Press. I’ve found that the local newspaper nearly always will run a story about the young author.  Mondo lets you search by city, so it’s quick work to find the half a dozen news outlets in an author’s hometown and put together a list for the press release.

The better deal at Mondo, though, is their Professional level membership at $199 per year. You get all of the data and lookup features of the $80 membership, but you also get five free mailing lists for Mondos sister site, EasyMediaList.

EasyMediaList sells contact lists for media. You can purchase lists by state, major metro area, subject, and so on. The lists are priced according to size and range from $30 to a few hundred dollars each.  For KidPub, I used four of my five free lists from Mondo membership to grab the top 100 media outlets, the educational media list, and the parenting and kids media lists. The lists are high-quality (for example, Parenting Magazine, Scholastic, Nickelodeon, and Sports Illustrated Kids are included) and clean…I get very few bounces on the emails included.

I send out press releases to segments of these lists, depending on what the news is. Do they work? Yes. I’ve gotten responses from many major media outlets from releases sent to these lists. It’s well worth the $200 annual membership fee.

The other piece of the shoestring is Skype. We only have one phone in the office, and for $5 per month we’ve set it up with an inbound phone number and unlimited domestic calling, and it includes an answering machine. I can afford to spend afternoons on the phone calling media contacts…the phone numbers are on the EasyMediaList lsits…to follow up on press releases. I think that editors appreciate hearing an actual person on the other side of the press release, and I’ve gotten a great response.

Between Mondo and Skype the majority of KidPub’s PR needs are met, and I can concentrate on growing the business instead of worrying about the marketing budget.

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