NetON Melbourne

Category: Client

  • WordPress 5.2 has just dropped with more security than you can shake a stick at

    WordPress 5.2 has just dropped with more security than you can shake a stick at

    WordPress 5.2 has just dropped :). This is a major security release for WordPress and needs to be rolled out to all sites immediately. The new release is named “Jaco” in honour of renowned and revolutionary Jazz bassist Jaco Pastorious.  If you want to listen to Jaco, please find a video at the end of this post to listen to while we work on updating your site 🙂

    Our team will be working on making sure your site is up to date with the new security release and making your WordPress website secure. You and your team will be notified when the upgrade is complete.

    This Security Release version focuses on Making WordPress more secure from malware and attacks while helping you run it error-free.

    We are really excited about all the new security features that web designers have been waiting years for on this Security Release.

    In this post, we will look at what’s new in WordPress 5.2, and which features you should notice or play around with after updating to this version.

    To view all the updates, bug fixes and new features included in this new version, please visit on over here.

    Lets find out what new features are available in WordPress 5.2.

    Whats new in WordPress 5.2?

    This latest update of the most popular website CMS in the world comes with the following features:

    Site Health Check

    Site Health Check feature has had an update from the previous version and now has two new pages to help debug most configuration issues in WordPress. These new pages give you site status and recommendations as well as overall info on your site which includes directories, drop-ins, active themes, themes, plugins, media handling, server, database, wordpress constants and filesystem permissions.

    WordPress Site health check

    WordPress site health info

    PHP Error Protection

    This update builds up on previous error protection and allows an administrator or developer to safely fix 500 errors or “white screen of deaths”. This update also bring the recovery mode which allows you to log in without plugins/themes.

    Minimum PHP version

    With WordPress 5.2, the minimum php requirement is now 5.6.20. Using a later version of php makes your site safer and faster. So please make sure that your PHP is upgraded before you run this update.

    Other updates

    There are a host of other updates mostly focused on developers and making it easy for them to develop your site easier such as a new theme page template, a conditional function, two css classes, a new body hook (wpbodyopen) and addition of webpack and babel configurations under scripts.

    About WordPress

    WordPress is the most popular website CMS in the world. The latest version of WordPress has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Did you know that 60% of all CMS run websites run on WordPress.

    NetON WordPress Security Release Update Policy

    WordPress security is one of the most important considerations for us. We want to make sure that your WordPress website is safe, malware free and attack-resistant. The NetON team will immediately update your WordPress website installation on our hosting as we do with any Security Release.

    The new Security Release 5.2 of WordPress makes your site safer and faster. If your WordPress site is not hosted with us, you should upgrade your PHP asap and update your WordPress to the latest version.

    NetON WordPress development services

    NetON is proud to provide a 360 degree solution of WordPress development in both Melbourne and Sydney Australia.

    We offer WordPress Website Development, WordPress Website Design, WordPress Website Hosting, WordPress security, Maintenance, WordPress SEO Optimisation and Upgrades.

    Whether you are starting a small blog or an enterprise fortune 500 company, we can help build and maintain your WordPress website for the best results online.

    Our WordPress websites are customised based on your busines and you requirments. We have built large scale eCommerce websites, traffic generating/ad revenue websites, community building websites, Business 2 Business Websites and Business 2 Customers website. All of them are completely different in their lead generation and revenue models.

    Please reach out to one of NetON’s Account Managers for more of our services.

    Our contact details are on the Contact Us Page.

    WordPress 5.2 Demo website

    Want to try out all the new features :).

    NetON maintains and upto date demo site of the latest version of WordPress that you can browse through.

    Click here to view WordPress Demo site“.

    Please ask us for a username/password to test the site. This will let you test run all the new features without putting your live website at risk.

    And here is a tune from Jaco Pastorius to listen to while we are updating your site:

  • WordPress 5.2 Beta Released, whats coming in WordPress 5.2?

    WordPress 5.2 Beta Released, whats coming in WordPress 5.2?

    The newest Beta Release for the most popular website CMS in the world is expected to be released this month. We have been following the release notes and development of 5.2 closely and have listed the new features and development here.

    WordPress 5.2 comes with a number of new features as listed below and focuses on fixing existing bugs and introducing some new features to the block editor.

    This article will feature all the features and screenshots of WordPress 5.2. We are really excited about all the bug fixes on the Gutenberg editor, allowing admins to login in case of site errors and all the speed improvements on this Beta Release.

    Please note that WordPress 5.2 is still in development. Not all features and enhancements listed below are guaranteed to make it in the final version.

    What new features are coming up in WordPress 5.2?

    This latest update of the most popular website CMS in the world comes with the following features:

    Updates to the Gutenberg/Block Editor

    WordPress Block Editor, Gutenberg has been adding a lot of improvements and fixing a lot of the niggling bugs over the past few months and we feel like its come to the point where its fully usable. Here are the new updates to the Block editor

    • 35% faster load time for larger posts and 100% faster keypress time
    • Addition of 5 new blocks, Rss for displaying rss feeds, Amazon Kindle embed block, Search Block, Calendar block for displaying calendars and a tag cloud block for displaying tag clouds
    • Allowing hiding blocks using the block manager. This allows you to hide the blocks you don’t usually use.
    • Block editor is also coming to the WordPress mobile app to allow you to make changes easily from your mobile devices

    Fatal Error Protection

    If there is a fatal error on the website now, WordPress will pause the error and send a link to the admin allowing them to log into the backend and fix the issue. This is a very welcome feature and will help out a lot of web devs because logging into FTP was a massive pain and would take a lot of effort.

    Please note that you will need minimum PHP version 5.6 to run WordPress 5.2 website. So this is the best time to upgrade your PHP before WordPress 5.2 becomes available later this month.

    About WordPress

    WordPress is arguably the most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. 60% of all CMS run websites run on WordPress.

    NetON WordPress Beta Release Update Policy

    Our team will not be updating your WordPress site with this version until it is released. Please read through this post to see what is coming to WordPress, however noting that the final version may be slightly different from the Beta Release.

    Please note that the NetON team won’t be updating your website with this version because this is not a final version. We will update your installation when the full production version is released.

    NetON WordPress development services

    NetON is proud to provide a 360 degree solution of WordPress development in both Melbourne and Sydney Australia. We offer WordPress Website Development, WordPress Website Design, WordPress Website Hosting, WordPress security, Maintenance, WordPress SEO Optimisation and Upgrades.

    Our team has worked with small to enterprise companies in creating, managing and running successful WordPress websites in Australia and around the world. Our WordPress websites are customised based on your busines and you requirments. We have built large scale eCommerce websites, traffic generating/ad revenue websites, community building websites, Business 2 Business Websites and Business 2 Customers website. All of them are completely different in their lead generation and revenue models.

    Please reach out to one of NetON’s Account Managers for more of our services.Please use the contact details on our Contact Us Page.

    WordPress5.2 Demo website

    We love checking out all the new features before a major release. We keep an upto date demo site with the latest (sometimes even nightly builds) of WordPress that you are welcome to have a look at.

    Click here to view WordPress Demo site.

    Please ask us for a username/password to test the site. This will let you test run all the new features without putting your live website at risk.

  • Setting up your signature in Outlook 2010

    Setting up your signature in Outlook 2010

    Step 1: Save the image on your computer to use as a signature.

    Save the image that you want to use as your signature on your computer. If the image is online, you can right click on it and select “save picture as” as save it on your computer.

    Step 2: Setup your details as the Signature

    • Open Outlook 2010
    • Click on File
    • Click on Options
    • On the popup that opens click on Mail on the left and click on signatures on the right hand side
    • If you already have set up a signature we recommend using the banner on top of the existing signature. If you haven’t click on New and give your signature a name (e.g Ansell Medical Signature)
    • Type your details in the box using the following syntax or copy and paste below

    Firstname Lastname
    Job Title, Department, Office
    Phone: +61 03 9999 9999
    Mobile: +61 0499 999 999
    Email: name@domain.com.au
    Company Name
    Company Address
    Website: www.domain.com.au

    Step 3: adding image

    Now put your cursor where you want the signature to appear and click on the insert image button which is immediately to the right of business card button. A popup will appear asking you to select the image. Please select the banner image that you saved in step 1.

    Now we have to link this image so that your prospects go to the website when clicked.

    Select the banner image and click on the link button which is immediately to the right of the insert image button. On the popup under address put the link url for the image.

    Click on okay. Now on the same window on the top righ look for select default signature and make sure this signature is selected for both New Messages and Replies/Forwards.

    Click on okay.

    You have successfully set up your signature.

  • DuckDuckGo Search Engine Website Submission

    DuckDuckGo Search Engine Website Submission

    Automatic website submission to DuckDuckGo

    At NetON, we want to make sure that our clients get the best online exposure from our development work. We are always looking for new ways to improve your business. We are now rolling out a new way of better online visibility for you. The addition of this process in our development cycle will allow our clients to generate more online visibility from their websites and get their websites in front of more prospects and visitors.

    What is a Search Engine

    A search engine indexes websites, images and other files available on the Internet (World Wide Web). When a visitor searches for keywords on a search engine it will then display results based on its index. A search engine’s index is usually updated by crawling those websites,images and files and adding new content to its index.

    What is DuckDuckGo

    DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers privacy. It also avoids the filter bubble of personalized search results. Google will give you results based on your demographic, activity and other history. DuckDuckGo will give everyone the same results for the same keywords. Because of a lot of data loss, hacking and data being sold to third parties, Privacy is a one of the biggest concerns for users online.

    Here are some features of DuckDuckGo

    • DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect any of your personal information.
    • It doesn’t keep track of what you searched, so your searches are anonymous the whole time. There is no search history or any profile. Since there is no personal information, there is no information sold/gained access by third parties.
    • DuckDuckGo doesn’t give you filtered bubbled search results. While Google and other search engines show different results to separate users based on their profile, search history and other factors, DuckDuckGo shows everyone the same results based on the same keywords.
    • DuckDuckGo has grown 50% in 2017 and now serves 20 million daily search results.

    So what do you get out of this change in process?

    • We do the website submission for you, when we build your website so you don’t have to worry about this in the future.
    • You will achieve better online visibility as a result of this
    • You will also be targeting a subset of users who only search on DuckDuckGo
    • You will be future-proofing your website as we expect DuckDuckGo’s search share to improve over time

    NetON’s website development value additions

    Submitting your website to DuckDuckGo is one of the many value additions you get from getting your website built with NetON. We have a checklist of 50+ items that we go through when building your website which means more time for you to focus on strategy and marketing of the website.

     

  • Top 10 Essentials for your B2B Website

    Top 10 Essentials for your B2B Website

    Looking for a resource to making sure your B2B website is setup for success.. It’s finally here!

    Do you have a B2B website but don’t have a business?

    Your B2B website is the central hub for all your business activities. Your B2B website should work for you. It should attract relevant prospects and convert prospects to leads. Those are the basics of what you would expect your B2B website to do. If you follow the guide below, it will not only do that; It will also track leads and send them to your sales team when they are sales ready by itself. Follow our guide below to make sure that your site is working for you.

    NetON’s Top 10 Essentials for a B2B Website

    This is a NetON Top Tips white paper written by Suman Dahal, Director at NetON. Suman has worked at some of the top Email Marketing, Marketing Automation and Optimisation companies around the world. He has over 10 years experience in all things B2B. He will be helping you make sure that you have put all the technology in place to make your B2B website a success.

    The whitepaper will cover all the groundwork of a B2B website including

    • Making sure you have ticked all the checkboxes with your B2B Marketing website
    • Making sure your B2B website generates leads and gives them an opportunity to reach out to you
    • Making sure that your B2B website converts its visitors to leads
    • Making sure that its easy for you to send leads generated through your B2B website to your sales team
    • Making sure that you can track your success and improve your procedures based on data

    Completed all the items on this whitepaper?

    Stay tuned for our advanced tips for B2B websites.
    This follow-up whitepaper will cover the advanced techniques for your B2B website.

    How do you implement these changes?

    We are platform agnostic. So this whitepaper mentions what things to do but it doesn’t mention what platforms to use. If you want to know what platforms to use for any of the tips we have provided, please reach out to us at info@neton.com.au

    NetON’s marketing and business whitepapers

    We create our whitepapers with you in mind. Our whitepapers are easy to read in all devices, both desktops and mobiles. We also make sure they are action orientated, rather than lots and lots of text, so there is an action plan against each item. Our aim is to create whitepapers that are on point, that you can follow and put it in action.

    If you think we can improve our whitepapers, please let us know how at info@neton.com.au. We love constructive criticism.

    [madownloadform id=5 title=”Download Whitepaper”]

  • NetON Styler – pick your colour combination for your online projects

    NetON Styler – pick your colour combination for your online projects

    Imagine this;  you have created a perfect brief for your next web project. You briefed an agency on a website/landing page/ email/ online store and few days later you received a round of designs. It’s great but just not there, the colour combination doesn’t feel right. So you provide your feedback and a few days later you get another round of update, the colours have changed but the whole balance is a little bit off, if only the buttons were a shade lighter or the navigation dark grey now instead of the corporate blue, that might work. You send it back for another round of change and now you are well past your appointed round of changes and it has taken a few weeks to get a few colour updates done on a single landing page.  The project is now over budget and over deadline for no fault of anyone. We have all come across these issues at one point or another and settled for what we were maybe not completely happy with.

    Not anymore!

    Introducing NetON Styler

    Our goal at NetON is to make sure that we are always more efficient and faster at delivering results to our clients. NetON is proud to announce a new way moving forward in Web Development. We think that the addition of this new technology to our stack provides a faster way for us to do development for our clients. We are now rolling out NetON Styler for all of our online projects. This means that for simple colour changes, instead of sending it one of our fabulous designers, you can actually ask for us to prototype the project and pick the colour combination yourself. You can play around with say the navigation area, buttons, highlights, accents, heading colours etc using a few clicks and let us know what combination you are happy with. We will then roll out that combination on your project 🙂

    When is NetON Styler rolling out

    We are really excited about the fact that this will cut down a lot of time between rolling out projects as well as provide the optimal theme and colours that you want. We are currently testing this new feature on a new site we are building for a telecom website and will share more screenshots when it’s out of Beta testing (ETA end 2017).

  • NetON Website Upgrade 2017

    NetON Website Upgrade 2017

    While we try and upgrade our site once every 6 months, we have been really busy this year with improving our client websites and rolling out a number of supplementary websites. The fact that Bootstrap 4 was out in Beta and we were still in Bootstrap 3 gave us the kick that we needed to start the transition. We were really happy with the look and feel of the site so we didn’t want any theme changes but we really wanted to make it easy to build templates, connect our Marketing Automation platform and make our pages look and work better. What we really want before the end of the year is a solid foundation for the next year where we can roll out a number of new products, market them effectively and integrate all the other systems that we have been building in the last 2 years.

    Bootstrap framework upgrade

    We have been building a very modular site since the beginning of the year where we have completely separated the data, the theme and the functionality of the site. So it was amazing to see all that come to fruition. The framework upgrade actually only took us a couple of minutes to complete,  collectively blowing our minds on the highs that website development has reached today.  In the past this would have been a few days at least for a website of our size and the components it has. Yes, some pages and templates didn’t work but 90% of the site and 95% of pages visited every day was functional and working straight out.

    Separation of Components

    One of the core changes we have been working on our site has been a separation of components. Similar to how a MVC system works, we have been trying to separate the skin and the functionality. While in the past this was all interconnected and an upgrade to the site meant separating them, rolling out the new site and then meshing them together again, we are now able to keep the functionality separate from the framework. This makes doing upgrades on our site a breeze.

    Better ways of displaying data

    We have also built a number of components to create better ways of displaying data. In the age where Google is king, our pages are expanding at the rate of our waists. So its time to trim them up by using gradients, boxes, icons and components that we can use from Bootstrap to make big amounts of content look more aesthetic and easily digestable.

    Breaking up with CSS and in bed with SASS

    As of this iteration, we are also fully running on SASS and ditching the age old CSS behind. We loved CSS but we were swayed by competition. SASS allows us to make styling changes to our website blazingly fast and with less code and less time. We want to reach a point where we can make fundamental theme changes and updates to the site in minutes and not hours.

    Integrated Marketing Automation

    This was probably the biggest thing we really wanted on this update. We have been setting up our Marketing Automation platform and we really wanted it to be fully integrated to our website. We are so excited that  full Marketing Automation integration is also complete on the site. This opens up a huge opportunity for us to now improve our website and our funnel.  Having the lead flow, lead follow up means that we can now focus on the top end of the funnel and let the mid and bottom end of the funnel work out by itself.

    Why talk about our site upgrade?

    As an agency, we feel like every time we upgrade our website, we learn and lot. What we learn from working on our website, we can start rolling them out to our customers. We thought that this post will be a good introduction to how we upgrade our sites and how we can help you with your site upgrade.  Please feel free to check out our WordPress Development page and our Marketing Automation pages for more information on our offerings.

     

  • Why close comments on some WordPress sites

    Why close comments on some WordPress sites

    For a large number of smaller websites, we recommend closing off comments because of the amount of comment spam on WordPress. Usually unless you are a big B2C website or daily news, we don’t see any comments on websites, so its best to close off comments. We find that the effort required to filter through the comments is not worth the time to find the 1 comment once a month. Instead of comments we recommend having your contact us forms on key pages.

    Please be advised that even though comments are closed site wide, you can enforce some pages/posts to have comments functionality. Please reach out to us on instructions on how to enable comments for specific pages/posts.

  • WordPress 4 Updates and RoadMap

    WordPress 4 Updates and RoadMap

    WordPress 4.8 Main Features

    Widget updates

    WordPress 4.8 came with the ability to use 3 new widget types in your widgets. On top of the existing Text Widget, you can now use an Image, Video or an Audio widget on your sidebars. All you have to do is to click on add media and then select the media (image,video or audio) to showcase your media on your sidebars.

    WordPress 4.7 Main Features

    New TwentySeventeen theme

    WordPress 4.7 was the last major update for 2016 and came with a sweet new theme TwentySeventeen to focus on more Business Websites rather than personal blogs.

    Custom Post Types

    Something that all developers and content marketers were waiting for a long time, WordPress 4.7 came with the ability to have templates for blog posts/articles.

    WordPress 4.7 also came with a large number of moderate features such as

    • PDF Thumbnails in media library
    • Dashboards in different languages
    • Other developer updates

    WordPress 4.6 Main Features

    Plugin and Theme library enhancements

    With WordPress 4.6, you could now install a plugin or theme from the screen without leaving the current page, so all your themes and plugins could be installed from the grid layout using a progress bar.

    Visual Editor Updates

    A number of things were updated in the Visual Editor including the ability to highlight broken links.

    WordPress 4.6 Other Improvements

    • Enhanced Auto-save and Recovery
    • Better Import functionality

    WordPress 4.5 Main Features

    Improved Customizer

    WordPress 4.5 was a major update to the customizer allowing users to set the website logo directly from the customizer and enabling responsive previews from the Customizer itself.

    Other Updates

    • Improved favicons
    • Enhanced responsive image optimisation
    • Visual editor enhancements
    • You can now log into wordpress using your email

    WordPress 4.4 Main Features

    New Default TwentySixteen theme

    WordPress 4.6 codenamed “Clifford” came with the new Twenty Sixteen theme which featured a standard blog layout but worked like a good mix between a personal/corporate website incorporating a horizontal menu, larger image sizes, custom color options and widget areas at the bottom of pages/posts.

    Responsive images

    WordPress 4.4 also introduced improved image handling which meant that large images would load faster and will fit nicely in smaller screens.

    Other Improvements

    • Expanded embed capacity
    • REST API improvements
    • Developer improvements

    WordPress 4.3 Major Improvements

    Stronger Passwords

    WordPress 4.3 Billie came with a number of security features. The key feature being stronger passwords, where you are discouraged from using weak passwords using a strength meter.

    Comments off by default

    The other major update in this version was that comments were disabled by default to combat comment spam.

    Other Features

    • Updated Visual Editor
    • Set Website Favicons from customizer
    • Customizer updates

    WordPress 4.2 Features

    Customizer Updates

    WordPress 4.2 Customizer allowed you to update and preview themes on the fly from the customizer itself without activating them. So you could test out how your site will look without enabling the new theme.

    Faster Plugin Updates

    You can now update your plugins using ajax without leaving the plugins screen using a progress bar. This meant that you don’t have to wait for each plugin but click on all of them to update them at once.

    Other Updates

    • New Auto Embeds such as Tumblr or Kickstarter. Just copy and paste the link and WordPress will do the rest
    • Emoji support in WordPress
    • Under the Hood changes

    WordPress 4.1 Features

    New Default Twenty Fifteen Theme

    WordPress 4.1 released wit the new mobile first Twenty Fifteen theme, an elegant and clean blogging theme with a left sidebar.

    Other Improvements

    • Distraction free mode to help you create more content without getting distracted
    • Inline Image editing
    • Language packs
    • Plugins recommendations

     

  • Keyword Ranking Report

    Keyword Ranking Report

    If you are one of our customers, most likely you have access to a Keyword SERP Ranking report from us.  Here is a bit more information on what each of the columns mean:

    Start:
    The ranking of the keyword when we started the Ranking.

    Keyword
    The keyword we are ranking for your domain in search engines such as Google/Bing/Yahoo

    Google
    The rank of your keyword in google.com.au, this ranking refreshes every 12 hours. Please note that a rank of 11 means first spot in page 2 of Google.

    Bing
    The rank of your keyword in bing.com.au, this ranking refreshes every 12 hours. Please note that a rank of 27 means seventh spot in page 3 of bing.

    Yahoo
    The rank of your keyword in google.com.au, this ranking refreshes every 12 hours

    Week Change
    How your keyword has changed rank over the last week (if its green, it has gone up, if its red it has gone down).

    Month Change
    How your keyword has changed rank over the last month(if its green, it has gone up, if its red it has gone down). 

    Monthly Search
    How many times that keyword has been searched for monthly on Google.

    Ranking Url
    What page of your website is being ranked for that keyword

     

     

  • Changing Providers

    Here is quick checklist of items when changing providers

    Domain Transfer

    Please make sure that you/your new agency are getting full access to your domain. This can be done by providers such as crazydomains.com.au or godaddy.com.au and is a straight forward process however please allow for a week or 2 weeks for this to happen.

    Emails

    If you are using emails with your previous agency (and not with Microsoft or Google), you will need to setup your emails with your new Agency/Hosting Provider, please ensure that you have setup your new emails before disconnecting your last emails.

    Email Backups

    You may want to backup your emails because otherwise there is a chance that you will lose all the emails. To backup your outlook emails please view this link
    https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Export-Outlook-items-to-an-Outlook-Data-File-pst-14252b52-3075-4e9b-be4e-ff9ef1068f91

    Files and Content

    Please note that depending on your agreement with your provider you may have access to source files. Usually all content and photography will be your property, please check with your provider and get all the exports that you need.

    Quick Suggested Action Timeline

    Step 1. Backup Emails
    Step 2. Initiate Domain Transfer
    Step 3. Get all Content /files
    Step 4. Setup your new email in your new server
    Step 5: Setup your new website
    Step 6: Point the domain to your new website and email server

     

     

  • Are you an Exising EXA Client? Need a New Digital Agency!

    Are you an existing EXA Web Solutions Client?

    Are you a client of Melbourne based, US and Australian digital agency EXA? I am sure you have heard the news about EXA Liquidation and are now looking for an agency that can handle your online marketing and web solutions. NetON is a competing agency and provide all the services that EXA used to provide.  NetON specialises in Digital Online Marking and all of its components such as SEO, Web Design, eCommerce, Web Development, Analytics and Marketing.  We have a track record of fast and cost effective online marketing projects delivered on time and within budget.  We offer a full range of digital services such as

    • Website Design
    • Website Development
    • Search Engine Optimisation
    • Pay Per Click (Google Adwords)
    • Content Creation and Copywriting
    • Email Marketing and Marketing Automation
    • CRM Development
    • eCommerce and Online Stores
    • Content Marketing
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Mobile Apps and Responsive Development

    Content Managed Systems for your website

    NetON has a team of expert developers who work on all sorts of CMS platforms such as

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    WordPress

    WordPress is the most used CMS in the world with 30% or more of all the websites running on WordPress.

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    Magento

    Magento similarly is the most used CMS for medium to large eCommerce websites and online stores.
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    Custom CMS

    We also build our own CMS if required, similar to EXA. While we don’t recommend creating your own CMS platforms, sometimes this is a better solution if your requirements are very specific.

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