We think not.

Sharing, photos, reality and new forms of innovation will be the key trend to hit the world of branding within the third sector. If you’re not utilising it, then it’s about time you did. It will effect the bottom line at the end of the year, improve the balance sheet in the annual accounts, and impart the truest form of advocacy from your benefactors. Just because you cared enough to think about them.

Applying a process

The immense scene of social media within the landscape of presentation has grown exponentially. Strategies are driven behind activity through Facebook and Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation techniques develop almost every month with new algorithms from the engines powering search, requiring a skill set only a few company’s care about, and the management of the social network that you’ve created, is a full time job in itself.

How do you cope with the new workload? How can you automate relevant tasks so you don’t have to micromanage your social presence? How can you measure all this activity so it doesn’t take a whole day or a whole week to gauge the activity?

Simple, share the workload with people who care enough about your benefactors and the balance sheet. Most people I know can do this in their sleep, but then again most people I know do nothing else but think about design, SEO and measure efficiency rates of the tools at their disposal. Just so their clients get a better understanding of who their customers are.

Streaming your way through 2012

As we tag our way through our lives, adding meta data to our visual experiences and simplifying all our uploads, we get a clearer picture as to what it all means for the organisation that utilises this form of sharing. New marketing language has been formed and digital startups like Pinterest, are changing the face of how we share our digital visual language with people around us.

Visual social networks are going to bring endless opportunities to charities that want to provide a new form of message delivery. Photography, once again, will become a wordless and powerful driver for brand delivery to global audiences, not just to the home market. It will allow you to build story streams of the work you do, harness social behaviours and make sure you have a narrative that expresses your brand perfectly.

Keeping it real

Bring yourself to life. It’s as simple as that. The world has gone from being connected to being so hard wired into the fabric of activity that everything is in the now. Organisations that wait for the ‘right time’, will ponder at their suffering, further increasing its lagging nature by not taking the risk of acting in the present.

Technology will aid in the process of effective and immediate delivery of everything you want to say. Even to the smallest charity or organisation, globalisation is a force that can be used deftly with creative thinking and entrepreneurial spirit.

Innovation in-house

Fostering creative work practices will also become more common in organisations. Innovation has long been seen at the core of disruptive technologies and new product launches or service deliveries. Becoming more people-centric will be the new in road into adding value to your brand. Risk taking will be the heart of innovation and boldness of thought with empathetic customer insights, at the forefront of any new campaign.

Staff will have more fun when organisations approach this new way of thinking internally. Happy employees mean they become owners of everything the organisation does, empowering and driving new processes to the development of it. Value is increased and ultimately recognition of a brand that stands out in the customers’ mind, is the end result.

The job of being creative is everybody’s so that everyone can share the benefits of good. Good is new, new is now and your brand has a story to tell.

We look forward to helping you read well in 2012.

Acumen’s technical director, Leo Brown, and lead designer, Hash Varsani, are raising funds for Peace Direct running the Brighton Marathon on April 10th.

A marathon is a tremendous task but the first Brighton Marathon (in which Leo raised over £1,000 for Peace Direct) was a fantastic turnout which made the task much more bearable.

Leo’s training for this year’s marathon started on January 1st 2011 and with 1 week to go, the payoff is almost palpable.

Any donations will be gratefully received by Peace Direct – just follow the link below!

http://www.justgiving.com/aculeo
http://www.peacedirect.org
http://www.brightonmarathon.co.uk

A lot of this contributes to very poorly performing code – and not in the way that many of the “well designed” CMSs perform poorly (because they’ve been over-thought), but because scalability and caching has not been built in at all levels.

This article will take you through the steps of optimising an existing WordPress install to purr again, either after many years of service which have bought it to it’s knees, or a massive jump in content that’s exposed parts of your template that really slow things down.

1. Keep WordPress Up to Date
On the whole, whist adding features, the WordPress team is also is working on optimisations which you can take advantage of by moving to the latest version available. Typically we use the Subversion repositories so that it’s only a single command to bring everything in line with the latest release. You’ll also benefit from having a greater number of plugins available that can help optimise your CMS – your plugins can also be kept up to date via Subversion or the back-end system. See more on this in my post on WordPress and Subersion.

2. Use Caching Plugins
This isn’t the place to go into detail on all the WordPress caching plugins available – but many of them will get the performance you need. At Acumen we typically use W3 Total Cache due to the advanced caching options and cache database engines (it supports Disk, Memcache, APC, etc)

3. Use PHP Optimisers
Again, there are many explorations of speeding up PHP on the web. At Acumen we use APC due to its simplicity to install on Linux.

4. Tune your template
First, turn off any and all caching plugins, and use Firebug or Google Page Speed to inspect page load time. This is important because it reflects the loading time of content that may at any point become uncached (after it’s been edited, after a cache expiry, etc). If you’re finding that some of your pages are loading slowly, you’ll need to look at the exact code you’re using and see if a simpler alternative can be written. In extreme cases you might need to write your own SQL to work around WordPress’s lack of recursivity options in the available system queries, or even add your own caching to your template’s queries.

Another template “gotcha” is out-of-date resources you might be linking to. If WordPress doesn’t find a page that’s been requested, rather than generating a simple 404, it spends time analysing what content it could serve instead – using expensive algorithms like Levenstein it will search for similar pages and still not find that Javascript file you deleted. This can visually really slow down the load of your template, so make sure there are no red (40X) lines in Firebug’s “Net” window.

Note that browser-based analysers aren’t the only approach to analysing the performance of your template. If your server is struggling to serve your user’s requests, it’s likely the nominal load will be greater than 0 (we’re talking UNIX here, obviously). In this case, you can set a target to bring your server back into a 15-minute average of no more that 0.3.

If you’re really struggling to identify where code issues are coming from, you can consider the MySQL –log option, which will write a list of all queries it’s supporting.

5. Clean Stale WordPress Files
One great new feature of WordPress 2.6+ was that it keeps a revision of every page. You may want to remove existing revisions by deleting all `posts` with `post_type`=’revision’, and setting a template variable like the below:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',3);

That’s it for now- if you’ve any other suggestions for speeding up WordPress, leave them below and we’ll work them into this article!

First, the context of using WordPress and Subversion jointly is typically in making sure that customer websites are fully versioned so that we can be accountable and transparent, and equally importantly so that we can roll back in a disaster scenario.

Second, some background on our approach. We believe that when using Open Source software for customers, it’s important to strike a balance between cutting edge features and stability. We typically accomplish this by starting the project at the head revision of the software we’re using – in this case, WordPress.

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk www

Now we have a freshly checked out copy of WordPress, and we’ll want to keep it this way. If you don’t feel comfortable with leaving a repository in a certain state there are a few options here – the most obvious would be for you to maintain your own copy of the WordPress source tree (which can be useful in other ways too, for instance if WP’s subversion servers were to go down.) This can be accomplished easily using `svnsync`.

Assuming that you’re happy with your checked-out WordPress, we now want to move all the User data to one place, so that we can version it separately to the WordPress trunk. Typically, this is just the `wp-content` folder, but you may also want to version wp-config.php, .htaccess, and any other special files you’re using in the project webroot.

Your final decision on the path structure really depends on the scenario- you may want to separate out the theme directory from other ‘user content’ directories if you’re planning to open source your theme or host it elsewhere. In this case, you’d have a subversion repository containing the folders within wp-content, with a `themes` folder which will load your versioned theme(s) as an svn:externals entry.

Now, a couple of tricks – first, your uploads folder may want to be versioned. If not, you’ll want to svn:ignore it. If you do version it, you’ll probably want to svn:ignore some of it. For instance, WP2.5 onwards supports image resizing, and it uses the uploads directory also as a cache store for these thumbnails. We can ignore these thumbnails by setting the svn:ignore property on the uploads directory as follows:

[root@www uploads]# svn -R  propset svn:ignore "*[0-9]x[1-9]*"; .
property 'svn:ignore' set (recursively) on '.'

Note that if your uploads folder is structured by date, these ignore settings will not persist in new directories, so I’d recommend you do not use a structured uploads folder if you are versioning it (the option titled ” Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”).

Here’s a quick runthrough of the solution I developed to the common ‘bad transaction’ issue, that causes your repository to stop checking out/modifying certain files (typically blobs).

1. Use svnadmin verify to find your bad revision (in this example, 195)

svn verify myrepo
* Verified revision 0.
...
* Verified revision 194.
svnadmin: Malformed representation header

2. Dump the first working section of the repository to a dumpfile, then dump the second section as an incremental dump onto the end of this dumpfile

svnadmin dump myrepo -r0:194 > my.dmp
svnadmin dump myrepo --incremental -r196:HEAD >> my.dmp

3. Try to rebuild this repository by creating a new repository, and using svnadmin load to read in the newly created dumpfile.

svnadmin create newrepo
cat my_filtered.dmp | svnadmin load newrepo

4. It’s likely that paths can not be rebuilt, and you will see errors describing this. Use svndumpfilter to exclude the problematic paths, creating a new dumpfile for each exclusion, and repeating from step 3.

cat my.dmp | svndumpfilter exclude "My/Bad/Path" > my_filtered.dmp
Excluding prefixes:
   '/My/Bad/Path'

Revision 0 committed as 0. (etc)

5. Replace the rebuilt repository’s UUID with that of the old repository, by using svnlook uuid and svnadmin setuuid.

svnadmin setuuid newrepo `svnlook uuid myrepo`

6. Use svn switch to attempt to move a checked out copy to your new repository.

svn --relocate switch http://host/myrepo http://host/newrepo .

7. If all goes to plan, replace your corrupt repository with your rebuild, and svn switch any working copies back to their original path. Then copy back in the data that you lost in the exclusion process, commit and get on with your work.

There you go, loads of messing around to get back to square one. Once that’s done, stop using FSFS as your SVN backend, as it’s much more buggy!

Additionally this shows how in two lines you can be notified of the scripts entire execution time using StopWatch.

<?php
include('StopWatch.class.php');
$stopWatch=StopWatch::getInstance();
$stopWatch-&amp;amp;gt;setFinishMessage('script executed in %01.2f seconds');
sleep(2);
?>

You can access the Seed to Plate site at http://www.seedtoplate.co.uk.

The Seed to Plate site was jointly developed by Acumen and Buffalo.

Peace Direct’s cause is grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, and is the sister site of Acumen’s earlier project Insight on Conflict.

The site was built on WordPress and utilises some of the latest features to create a great-looking, dynamic and easily maintainable site. You can access the site at the following link:

http://www.peacedirect.org

The site is built in WordPress, the open-source CMS, and is produced from designs provided by Typographics .

Visit the TCIJ site for more info: http://www.tcij.org.

Try out the new app at http://www.touchnote.com/facebook

Article Cuttings:

• Touchnote launches API, integrates with Facebook photos
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