cPanel can’t do a fraction of what Virtualmin can do and it is severely limiting to the end user and developers of a website by locking you behind a very restrictive user interface while Virtualmin allows you to go as far as to edit the actual Apache directives (if you know what you’re doing).

cPanel was built for server administrators and users that have absolutely no idea what they are doing and that’s my professional opinion.  If you do know what you’re doing, then you don’t want a UI that gives you access to only small bits of the interworkings of a website – you need full access.

But for most users, the UI does nicely too – and it’s the user’s choice – advanced directive editing or this:

And cPanel sure doesn’t allow you to mount your server’s file system through WebDAV either and refuses to fully support SVN or GIT.

But ultimately, we deal mostly in PHP and WordPress and you just don’t get this deep of control over PHP with cPanel.

Essentially, you can see how Virtualmin is built for both beginners and experts alike.  If you’re a beginner, Virtualmin is easy to learn but doesn’t keep you locked in a 1990’s, child-like interface that allows you control over only a few things.  Instead, Virtualmin gives you total access to your slice of the server, including file management.

Everything Virtualmin does is far superior to cPanel in every single way possible.  But let me just give a good comparison between the two here:

This is what cPanel looks like:

This is what Virtualmin looks like:

You be the judge.

The post Virtualmin vs cPanel: Why we champion Virtualmin appeared first on Tarheel Media Digital Marketing.

Almost 90% of a business’s new leads and sales online will come from a search engine directing a new buyer or client to their website. This is why it can be devastating for a small business when search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! suddenly stop visiting and indexing a website.

Look at it like a brick-and-mortar store. What is the language you always heard in marketing class as the fundamental 3’s to marketing? Does this sound familiar?

Location! Location! Location!

It’s true when a busy roadway or highway drives customers right to your front door, it’s really hard not to do business – there has to be a problem with your messaging or product if your store sits beside a busy highway and you get no sales. So, ruling out those 2 issues, what happens when your store is say in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas? How many sales would you expect from that store and why?

If you thought to yourself, “That poor business owner is going out of business”, you would be correct. Without access to a consumer pipeline, it’s just a fancy building with a lot of depreciating assets inside it. In other words, without moving products off the shelf that store bleeds money in operating costs and asset depreciation. Essentially the store goes nowhere very fast.

That last example is what a website that has been delisted or ghosted by search engines. If your site can’t be found, it’s essentially that brick-and-mortar store in the cornfields of Kansas (no offense to our brothers and sisters in Kansas – but your cornfields are legendary).

The first step, and not to sound like a famous institution here, is to realize you have a problem. You can identify this problem by simple website statistics. Being able to see your traffic to your website is invaluable in knowing if you’re in that cornfield or next to a busy highway (and somewhere in between).

The second step, and no I’ve never had a drinking problem, is getting help. Knowing your SEO experts can fix the issues that are delisting your website will likely make or break you. But one tip, never hires someone out of desperation. If you’re already delisted and ghosted, no one is going to fix that overnight so take your time and vet the firm you hire.

That last part is the most important part – in fact, there is no need in proceeding beyond this point if you get the wrong SEO firm because it is usually the wrong SEO firm that caused it. Blackhat SEO is a very real problem. Simply Google it. SEO firms employ these methods for one of two reasons: Inexperience, in that they don’t realize what they’re doing is wrong; and Profit, in that Blackhat SEO is far cheaper than Whitehat SEO, and achieves the same results, abet temporarily. Generally, you’ll know you have a problem with your SEO firm about 2-8 weeks past your bank’s “no charge-back” deadline (4 months or so).

There are some ways to spot Blackhat SEO as well. The most obvious is if it immediately starts getting you traffic. This is because they are using link spam and most of the traffic is garbage and likely bots looking for a web form or exploit on your site. The second would be unbalanced results between mobile and desktop iterations of your site. These are the top two, and both indicate a major problem that should have you reaching out to a real SEO firm that has the experience and know-how to undo the damage that has already been done.

The best option here is to avoid these SEO firms to begin with and never make your choice because of the price tag. Search engines are your lifelines online – much like a first aid kit in your house or vehicle; one would hope you invest well in things that are so life-saving.

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There has been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears with Goldsboro Web Development, and I mean that literally.  When we open the office it was in a mess. I called in my kids, wife, and workers to help tear out the inside of the building and entirely remodel it.  There were plenty of mechanical injuries, bandaids, and washing out debris from the eye.  If it could happen, it seemed like it did.

Goldsboro Web Development has been a brand of MLW & Associants, LLC, our parent company, for more than 12 years.  Before that, it was a DBA of Michael L Wells, the sole proprietor.  Today the company is far more than I could have hoped for.  We have customers from all around the world:  Ireland, Spain, the Grand Carny Islands, Germany, and Sweden.  We also have customers from all around the Americas:  Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and even Canada.   In the US, we have customers from all 50 states, and in North Carolina, we have customers from every county but one.  Franklyn County, what is wrong with you?

I never thought I would build anything that would be this widespread or affect his many people and considering that each of these customer’s websites is sometimes viewed by thousands of people per day or per hour in some cases, it is something that has gone beyond my wildest dreams.

And therefore, the name “Goldsboro Web Development” is no longer fitting.  That name implies a certain city or area where we started.  But it no longer represents our clients or what we do.  We do far more than just web development and truth be told, that’s been the case since the first year the company was incorporated.  Thusly, we shed this identity and adopt a new one – one that more accurately represents who we are and what we do.

We’ve certainly learned a lot and this time around, with this new website we’ve incorporated a lot of things that we’ve learned.  Some of the things are down to the technical and contractual lessons we’ve learned.  But one thing has not changed, you are still our top priority and our workmanship is still unmatched!

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SONGS ADDED TO MY PLAYLIST

One of the most frequent reports I’m getting right now is songs being added to users’ playlists.  Our AI makes decisions based on our tastes and choices.  For instance, if you skip through songs on your playlist that are fast-paced rap songs and stop on R&B, the AI begins to understand your mood is more centered toward R&B and will intentionally add some popular R&B songs based on your tastes and albums.  So if you have a lot of R. Kelly albums you will find new R&B music from R Kelly from various media sources and allow you to stream it from their services.

This is not a bug.

NAMES ADDED TO FACES

Another report was submitted; names are being assigned to faces in photo albums.  Once you add your email address, the AI will search social media with that face and will take a stroll through the friends and if it finds a face and name that matches the faces in your photos, it assigns a name.   The AI will not generally do this by default unless you indicate to the AI that you are struggling to find certain photos of people.

Again, this is not a bug.

THERE ARE FILES IN MY FOLDERS THAT I DID NOT ADD

For example, a friend of mine looking for a job just got an interview and dropped the schedule in his calandar and then almost instantly had a “Interview Points” dropped in his root folder.   He thought this was a bug until he read the points and saw an outline of topics to cover in the interview.  The AI decides what you’re attempting to do in your file structure.  Sometimes it may drop notes, and suggestions or even create a simple business card template in a “company” folder to aid you in a recent job search or resume or interview schedule.  The AI is very intuitive and looks at all aspects of the information you upload from emails to calendars, to contacts, to photos, and documents.  The AI makes decisions and if something is within it’s power to do in an effort to aid you, it will attempt to do it.

Once again, not a bug.

SUMMARY

AI is extremely new to all of us at our company and no one here is an expert in AI.  This started as a fun little project to see how or what the new advents of AI would do with a few of our files and then noticed how well it learns.   This quickly became applicable to our clouds and our own cloud was born.  Our AI runs from 3 neuro networks that make decisions based on consensus.  No engine can act alone and needs consensus from the other 2. That means every decision made is as error-free as possible and means that when the AI does make a decision it’s very meaningful because the AI is pretty sure it’s a decision worth making.

The post How to Train an AI appeared first on Tarheel Media Digital Marketing.

It wasn’t until about 2 years ago after I developed a brand new webmail client (that the customers enjoy today) that was capable of doing everything Gmail does and more, that I really ran afoul of Google when I tried to integrate Google Drive into the attachments system.  After three days of going back and forth with Google Admins to get the app approved for the webmail client, one of the admins actually replies and just comes right out and tells me what their grief is with my app.

Why do you need your own email solution when there is Gmail?

Well, Google!  I don’t like your privacy policy and your “indefinite rights” over my data.  It was odd that a few moments after an email akin to what I just said, they approved that app.

Now that we’ve launched a full-scale Cloud that seeks to literally replace Google, it’s now been over 7 days of going back and forth – it is pure obstruction.  It is so bad that the admins have stated several times that they want us to advertise for Google by stating on our home page that we have the button deep in the profile section of our users on the cloud website and how the button will enhance our customers’ lives.  I count about 18 different anti-trust laws they violated in request and I doubt they even realize it.

Google has been under scrutiny for years since the introduction of the DART cookie and the more layers investigators peel back from Google the scarier things are.  It’s well known that Google never really deletes your data and Google outright sells data to third parties.

Tarheel Media aims to fix this by offering real, competitive services on a network that is respectful of their privacy and safeguards their data from any other party.  We believe that if there is an alternative out there to Google, people will use it if they are keen on privacy.

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Cryptocurrency carries with ut a certain anonymity which in of itself is invaluable for most.  As far as protecting your identity goes, it’s far better than cash.  Cryptocurrency is also inflation-proof.  Don’t listen to those out there talking about how the value drops when new GPUs (graphics cards) come out and more coin is created because they have no idea what they’re talking about.  As more coin is created it becomes increasingly difficult to create more coin.  So, the inflation rate stays near exactly the same year after year.  What makes the value drop is people selling their coin in fear the price will drop because of the new GPUs.  It works much like stocks.  The more people that buy the cryptocurrency the more valuable it is and that value increases if there are people buying the currency faster than it can be created.  Inversely, the value of the coin will drop if people buying don’t keep up with the creation of the cryptocurrency.

So what happened and why is it important?  FTX started as a crypto exchange, which is a place or website people would go to in order to exchange cryptocurrencies for other cryptocurrencies or even cash.  In order for any company to facilitate this they must have a bank account that supports those currencies they are buying and selling.  In other words, if someone wants to convert their coins to cash, they better have the money sitting there for them to withdraw.

In order for FTX to promote their new exchange they created their own cryptocurrency called FTX.  Above ground things seemed just fine but crypto experts started reading warnings over a year ago that under that facade, things didn’t make sense and couldn’t be solvent.  These experts were folks like the founder of Bitcoin.  But, to understand what is going on here, you have to take a deep look into the guy that is running the show at FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Mr. Bankman-Fried started out as a no-body.  His parents, university professors – one of which is an accounting professor, and those near them profess that the family practices altruism.  Mr. Bankman-Fried started his company from nothing started selling his new cryptocurrency to market his exchange (FTX), and suddenly got really political.  It’s not any surprise his parents, university professors, influenced his far-left communistic ideologies.  Starting at the beginning of this previous election cycle of campaigning, Mr. Bankman-Fried showered the democratic party and its candidates with copious quantities of money while professing his support of abortion, global warming, and other far-left-wing agendas.  All the while, he professed these beliefs as the savior of humanity.

Mr. Bankman-Friend was the 2022 2nd most doner to the Democratic Party, second only to George Soros.

It’s not hard to see where this money went that suddenly was found missing from the FTX coffers and it’s even clearer who did it the only question is, will there be consequences?

No matter Mr. Bankman-Fried’s political alignment, the question of consequence remains a top concern for the future of all cryptocurrencies which is why this case should be looked at very closely by anyone who invests in cryptocurrency.  If Mr. Bankman-Fried goes without consequences, then cryptocurrencies will fail without the application of basic laws.  If he is held accountable, it will be the best time to start investing.

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