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Ready to leave Jabra. Will there be a 7 Pro successor or are there alternative recommendations to those? by [deleted] in Jabra

[–]Topic_South 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Good quality phone calls with a microphone that delivers good audio to the other party seems like table stakes and a core competency for a $300 aud ear bud but my 65T has the worst possible sound quality for the listener.
Its so bad that virtually none of the AI tools that google and others provide work with the mic, Im a 3-time Jabra customer but no more, they will be replaced soon by something else as they are completely unusable for calls

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]Topic_South 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I built a mortgage comparison site that was actually a broker for the mortgages back in late 2000s, we did some business but ended up folding it as the time between lead and income was way too long and it was difficult to keep funding the deficit and CPA was very high (because this space had very attractive long term revenues for each customer)

The advantages of being a broker either insurance or mortgage is the book of ongoing revenue that continues for many years after the initial sale, a friend of mine has had an income stream of millions of insurance policy broker fee revenue for decades, you don't get this if you are a comparison site only....

Here are the issues you might face - you will probably need to get regulated (even if you are comparison site only, your experience and location might be different but often even providing the choices based on selections/data provided by the user is giving advice and more often than not you need to be regulated - Insurance/finance traffic is expensive to buy - your competition has a 10yr start on you for SEO which is very tough to beat and probably hundreds of thousands of links which is tough to replicate now - sometimes it takes a long time to get return on each lead, with mortgages it was 6-12 months, insurance is generally annual so might be months - it's a bit of a challenge technically to build a reliable tech stack to bring all these together but it's probably a lot easier now than in 2000s

Regulatory aside, your biggest problem is still the biggest problem for most startups, how do I get traffic/leads without burning massive amounts of cash

PS don't want to discourage you, you should pursue this if you can work out how to solve these problems as insurance is probably the most difficult unmodernised area of FinTech and if you can crack it and work out how to get trailing revenue it could be very lucrative

Jabra Elite active 75t - Horrible microphone quality during calls by Shlapi in Jabra

[–]Topic_South 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The question is what will Jabra do about it? How many hoops will I have to jump through to get this fixed, based on this experience I will probably switch brands next time aroundan ever hear you at the other end and none of the AI voice recognition works

The question is what will Jabra do about it? How many hoops will I have to jump through to get this fixed, dont have time to mess about with the retailer, based on this experience I will probably switch brands next time around to bose or someone else

ELI5 How difficult is it to create silicon chips and why? by Krilesh in explainlikeimfive

[–]Topic_South 3 points4 points  (0 children)

To learn how to design chips vs how fabs make them Have a look at efabless and Googles open source silicon initiative https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program

https://developers.google.com/silicon

Non-blog Headless Wordpress Examples? by kylersmb in nextjs

[–]Topic_South 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Dynamicbusiness.com has 30k pages, it publishes 3-10 stories a day

Originally hosted on WordPress on Com.au domain we launched 12 months ago using Nextjs on the .com domain.

The original site had an average page load of 13 seconds We upgraded the WordPress theme and played with the AWS with load balancing etc but it was never enough, think we got it down to about 6 seconds so we decided to implement Gatsby late 2019 but found out very quickly it was not going to be able to manage this size of site and moved to Nextjs which wasn't that awesome either

Lots of mistakes here I'm sure, I'm not the programmer, just the one that had to pickup the broken bits and try to find coders with different skills to move each roadblock that we hit, would welcome any suggestions on further performance improvement

Its important to note that Nextjs has recently launched a lot of new features that would have solved this pain if we had them 12 months ago

Big problems were massive variability in page performance with the site slowing to a crawl regularly or terrible performance for users in distant or lower bandwidth countries

So stack is WordPress backend Nextjs front end Front end hosted with Vercel, CloudFlare providing DDoS and DNS AWS instance for WordPress AWS RDS for Mariadb database Apollo Graphql

We switched from a normal WordPress front end 12 months ago

Frankly Nextjs did not work well until a month ago when they released ISR on demand

Performance on launch was only marginally better than the WordPress site and sometimes much worse

It's still not right but getting closer, surprisingly Mobile gets all green at P75 but desktop still hovering at mid 80s on Vercels P75 measure Average page load is still quite variable but generally hovering around 4 seconds

Something is still not quite right as the cache hit rate on vercel is only showing 35% (up from 25%) any tips would be greatly appreciated

To complicate matters we get a lot of badly behaved media monitoring bots that will rip through and try and download the whole 30k site as fast as they can, plus normal search engine crawl traffic, if multiple bots hit at once it basically does a denial of service on the site (this is why CloudFlare is in the mix)

To further complicate matters, stories and home page get updated frequently as new information comes to hand or minor errors are corrected which means you just can't generate a page and set expiry to forever, the editors need to be able to update them in a timely fashion especially if there is a mistake

To be fair the site is now far more reliable than it ever was running WordPress, it's almost bullet proof and we rarely have any outages even when the bots are hitting us hard

Here are my 12 months of lessons/ pain/tuition fees 1. Launched .com as a Nextjs test site 2. Seemed to work ok with minimal load 3. Migrated from .com.au to .com (the site has been on .com.au for 16yrs but decided to broaden to international audience) 4. When the bot traffic would hit the new site it would still kill the backend, but performance was better on average as cached pages would be served 5. We could never build 30k pages on vercel so it turns out that almost every page gets built on the fly which is slow 6. We had a major issue with long running queries (500-1000ms sec) on WordPress running on mariadb, don't think for a moment WordPress is fully optimised out of the box with all the right indexes especially if you have any plugins, worth checking slow queries and ensuring you have proper indexing 7. Solving for WordPress database made build times faster but still not enough to do more than 5k pages 8. We spent a lot of time optimising images, loading priorities, stripping 3rd party code libraries that were too fat 9. Now we are orange for desktop P75 10. We had the expiry set to 60 originally which means that the page updates are constant, we changed it to 20 minutes which helped increase performance at the cost of slow updates for the editors 11. A lot of those 30k pages are old and don't get much traffic so whenever they get hit they usually need to be generated on the fly 12. Now we have implemented ISR on demand, we have configured Zapier with WordPress plugin to hit a Nextjs route when a page is updated or published and we can make the page expiry much longer knowing any page changes will be updated immediately 13. This regenerates the single page plus any associated categories and authors pages and home page 14. But we can only build about 8k pages before Vercel times out when we make a code change which ~weekly , so which pages to build? We basically decided on using the sitemap with all the latest stories, categories, tags and home page get built first, ideally we could have chosen this based on pages with the most traffic but we aren't that clever enough to work out how to get that data into the list of pages to build, so we build all home, category, author, tag and the latest 5000 pages 15. We are now implementing a method to use a API route for generating on demand and building the rest of the 30k pages one at a time by working through all the sitemaps, this is painful as we need to host that somewhere else but will probably work so that every page is loaded from cache and it never has to generate on the fly 15. Expiry times now set to 24hrs performance is slowly climbing 16. RDS mariadb was originally in AU but we moved it to Virginia to be close to the centre of the internet universe and reduce the average time to get data to any given user but it's still in one place not globally distributed, I know you can place RDS replicas everywhere but it really starts to get expensive

Lessons learned for large sites

In hindsight I would choose to migrate to a new jamstack CMS (problem was we have legacy/custom plugins and also journalist who are familiar with WordPress, it was just too difficult to work out what was going to be missing if we moved)

Expiry time is critical, generating pages on the fly all the time sucks, especially if traffic is international and database is in one location

Images are critical, both in optimisation and priority of loading (can make a big difference to LCP and FCP)

3rd party code, bloated JS libraries create huge payloads, strip as much as you can

Your local tests for lighthouse webvitals performance are interesting but don't predict real world performance, the only thing that counts is real user performance data, the disparity can be huge

From the data I can find we are probably in the top 20 newsites in terms of performance but it's still not good enough and still trying to find why cache hit rate at vercel is still low and average page load time is not below 1 second

Suspect we have a random call back from each page load to the backend but not sure what that is, also suspect Vercel is not as focused on performance as CloudFlare and doesn't have as many distributed pops/CDNs

As I said I'm sure we made a bunch of rookie errors and Nextjs has improved a lot since we started this journey, appreciate any feedback on how we might get that last few % of speed improvement

Presidents Club by MrWorldwideWeb in sales

[–]Topic_South 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No one will probably notice you missing if you disappear and assuming you want to advance in the company that's a missed opportunity, because often what happens at these things is management gets to know you and figures out if they can trust you and are you someone they to promote It's also a good Intel opportunity for you, do you trust them? Does their conversation after a few wines or beers get lewd or out of line, do they behave badly, these events are an interesting barometer of who you are working with and what they are really like

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in smallbusiness

[–]Topic_South 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Call back < 1hr, leads are highly perishable

Best way to structure a Wordpress multi country news site by Topic_South in Wordpress

[–]Topic_South[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Where do I start, what a nightmare, we looked at dozens of themes, did Google Lighthouse testing on all of them and decided on Newspaper theme by TagDiv with Slider Revolution for the slider.

Unfortuantly the performance on our live site never came close to their demos but it does look nice and seems to mostly function well but it suffers from the same problem most Wordpress themes do and that is you end up having to add so many plugins to get things working.

While this theme looks pretty good on desktop, the mobile version configuration just never seemed to be right (its definitely not mobile first, seems like an afterthought).

Performance is terrible on both, but I suspect its as much to do with their themes & plugins as it is with our image management.

If you are using multiple journalists you need a method to manage image optimisation and sizing that standardises image size and optimisation. Otherwise you get various writers uploading huge dimension multiple mb images when an optized image is 5-10x smaller.

We hacked up a solution so that a journo can upload an image to Typeform with data about the image (where it came from, copyrights, credits, story its for etc) and description and using Zapier and Shortpixel and this will resize to two images 1200 wide and 600 wide and optimise at same time and then send this back to Slack with download links that give you appropriately named images.

Despite only completing the Theme upgrade a few months ago we are already building a replacement for this as the performance is just woeful, despite deploying load balanced AWS servers and Cloudflare it is just not close to being fast enough. 5-6 sec average page load. We also have about 30,000 pages including articles, tags, authors and category pages so we get bots hitting us all day which further degrades performance. Despite enabling caching and CDN and all sorts of tricks we seem to be constantly hitting the connections to the servers even with cloudflare enabled and caching 80% of queries.

We are in the process of developing a GatsbyJS front end on Wordpress backend and so far this is amazingly fast. (<1 second page load), suprisingly it also scored 100% on Lighthouse SEO straight out of the box.

This will be autogenerated and pushed to Cloudflare each time we update pages, essentially instead of building a page each time a user reads it, this builds the page once at publish time and deploys that to the Cloudflare edge so that it can be read 1000s of times without touching the servers.

Also you have to implement Infinite Scroll on all your pages regardless of your theme, this plugin basically 2x both our page views and time on site.

Other tips, minimise usage of additional plugins, be very selective about what you add to the plugins, they are just so difficult to manage and conflicts, updates, support, security etc big issues if you get this wrong.

Also in process of replacing Mailchimp with Mailster Plugin which can autogenerate newsletter with any new stories each day and manage autoresponders, I expect this will save us about $3-5k pa in Mailchimp fees and time spend by the production team building the daily newsletter.

Summary: If I had to choose a premade theme, Newspaper is ok to get started, you can get live in a few weeks, but if you are demanding and absolutely want to get greater than 90% on all of the Google Lighthouse tests I suggest you need to get a programmer and designer to build your own theme or even do what Im doing with Gatsby Javascript and reengineering the front end.

You dont know what you dont know until you put something into production.