Web of Success: 15 Years of KidPub.com

I was out in several of our nation’s major airports again this past week, and was once again struck by just how pathetic TSA’s so-called security procedures are. I really think that it’s time for Americans to acknowledge the massive failure that is the TSA and demand that we stop wasting taxpayer dollars on such an ineffective bureaucracy. Bruce Schneier is spot-on: The TSA and its procedures are strictly security theater, put in place to lull the traveling public into believing that their security is being somehow improved.

Consider that long line you stood in at the TSA checkpoint, waiting to show a TSA agent your photo ID and boarding pass. It seems very official, with badges and magnifying glasses and ultraviolet lights. We can take comfort that any of the million-plus individuals on the governments No Fly list would be stopped dead in their tracks by such scrutiny.

In reality, it is trivial to board a plane if you are on the No Fly list. Think about it. The agent at the checkpoint is relying on an ID and a document that you yourself hand to them. Also, what is being checked? Is your name being entered into a terminal to see if it matches a name on the list of know or suspected terrorists? Is there a paper copy? Has the agent memorized the million names on the list?

No, what’s being so diligently checked is whether the name on the ID matches the name on a piece of paper that you have produced. Same number of letters? Spelled the same, or at least close? You’re good to go. That TSA agent, front line defender of our flying safety, is little more than a uniformed elementary teacher checking spelling.

There’s nothing complicated about boarding a plane if you are on the No Fly list. Simply pick up a prepaid debit card at your local convenience store (while you are there you might as well pay cash for a prepaid cell phone in case you need to make an untraceable phone call). Go home, open up a browser, and purchase a ticket using your debit card. Use a name that you know isn’t on the list. When the day comes to fly, check in online and print the boarding pass with the false name on it. While you’re there, save the page…it’s a PDF file. Open the PDF file with Acrobat and edit the name on the boarding pass to match the one on your real ID. Print the second pass and head for the airport.

At the airport, hand your real ID and the matching boarding pass to the TSA agent. As long as you didn’t typo your own name, you’ll walk right through.

At the gate, hand the gate agent the boarding pass with the false name on it. They check the name against ticketed passengers. It matches, so you are free to get on the plane.

Incidentally, if you aren’t flying but just want to meet someone at the gate, or maybe shop at the duty free store, you can print your own boarding pass for any flight that you wish and just walk through the TSA security with it using the same technique.

This ridiculous system is costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year. Although it has its critics, the system in place in Israel seems to be much more effective and much less intrusive. It’s real security, not security theater. Tell your congressional representative that you are tired of wasting money and ask for a thorough review of the TSA and its ineffective policies and procedures. If you don’t know who your representatives are, visit congress.org to find out.

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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…

perryd Uncategorized, tools

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.

perryd Uncategorized, tools, web sites

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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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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I’ve written several times now about the SEO work I’m doing at KidPub. In addition to the optimization steps described in a previous post, I’ve also moved to a new Drupal template that is more SEO aware. The old template, Aurora, was pretty but a bit quirky in the way it handled placement of elements in the output stream, and about how it labeled text elements.

The new template, Sky, optimizes elements for search engines by using H1 and H2 tags more appropriately, and by trying to present content to the search crawlers first.

The result of all of this is that the SEO rankings for KidPub continue to improve. We’re now the #1 results for eight key phrases (and one oddball), and other phrases and search terms are moving up into prime territory. Here’s this week’s chart from SheerSEO:

The positive movement on our key phrases is really encouraging, and we’re already starting to see increased traffic from Google.

If you haven’t started working on SEO, do it now. If your site is like mine, 60% or so of your traffic is coming from search engines, but if you’re not on the first page of results, you’re not being seen by the majority of searchers.

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David Berkowitz just posted an interesting article on MediaPost about a study that suggests video content is 53 times more likely than text to make the first page of Google search results.

I’m not convinced. In the original Forrester study, the numbers just don’t seem to add up to the conclusion, which is that SEO optimized video content increases your ranking in search results. How many optimized videos didn’t make it onto the front page? How many of the videos that were on the front page were not optimized? Did the meta data for the video content even match the search query? We aren’t given any of this information.

It’s a bit like noticing that there are several blue arrows in the bullseye on the archery range and jumping to the conclusion that you should paint your arrow blue to increase your accuracy.

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It took ten days to burn through $350 of free advertising on Facebook. I ran five ad variations to test click-through rates and styles (for example, using a graphic versus not). I set a daily maximum of $35, and a CPC rate of 18 cents.

I have a couple of observations.

1. The targeting capability of FB is pretty good. My ads were aimed at kids 15 and younger, which required an approval from FB. I noticed that impressions were nearly zero each day until about 4pm, when kids started getting home from school. After 4pm they picked up dramatically and continued strong until the number of click-throughs hit my daily maximum.

2. Impression rates are good. In ten days my ads saw just over four million impressions. The effective CPM was about 9 cents, which is an excellent price in today’s market. It wasn’t possible to check ad placement, unfortunately.

3. Click-through rates are terrible. Average CTR for the best-performing ads was about .04%. On other networks, and on my own site, CTR ranges closer to .2%

4. However, Facebook provides a breakout of data based on unique impressions and clicks. For those 4M impressions, just over 1 million were unique, and the unique CTR was closer to .1%.

Here’s a look at visits to the target of my ads during the test:

You can see that there was a significant impact during the run of ads. The average deal for the target product is about $100, so a relatively low conversion rate will recoup my ad investment.

Will I continue with FB ads? Yes. I think that FB is delivering my target audience in a measurable way, and providing brand awareness among kids 15 and younger. It was nice to use FB’s money to do testing, and I’m using the highest CTR ad in the current campaign.

I found that an ad with a graphic did considerably better than one without, and that offering a free downloadable guide performed best of all. No surprises there. I capture email for downloaded guides, so in addition to building awareness and putting literature into the hands of a potential client, I’m building my marketing base.

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I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure out that Facebook is a seething pool of KidPub’s target audience. The site is aimed toward kid ages 8 to 15, and there certainly are a few of them on FaceBook. A blog post over at StartupNation prompted me to take a look at advertising opportunities on FaceBook.

Ads on FB are similar to Google Adwords. They are small, textual (though you can add an image) and appear in an ad bar at the right-hand side of the page. If you run Adwords campaings you can likely run the same ads on FB.

What is great about FB advertising is that they offer you the option of targeting a specific audience, and provide a rough estimate of how many users are in the particular set:

My target audience is kids 15 and under, and FB estimates about 2,000,000 users in that range.

Like Adwords, you can set daily spend limits, set the bid for either CPM or CTC ad types, and track progress. The first ad I placed has run for about 12 hours with 142,000 impressions and 64 clicks. Not a great ratio, but my cost-per-click is lower that on the Google ad network, and I hope that I’m reaching a higher concentration of my target audience. I’ll post about conversion rates when I have some data.

Ah, the free lunch part. The StartupNation blog pointed out the value of advertising on FaceBook. I started doing a bit of resarch, and kept running acroos bloggers saying, “For goodness sake, don’t spend YOUR money on ads…use coupons!”

Sure enough, a bit of Googling turned up lists of coupon codes to redeem at FaceBook for advertising. I spent about half an hour hunting and submitting, and ended up with $350 credit in my ad account. Coupns are used before your primary source of funding (a credit or debit account), so for a week or so I can play with ad styles, formats, and copy and see what works well, using FaceBook’s money.

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