back and speak from their perspective again. If we can't get our reps to do it, we may have to go to the- The actual one. The executive director or manager, whoever it is, EC-Fiber to get somebody. The big question being, why can't they do it? If this group can raise the money, why can't EC-Fiber get in there and put it in spell? Yeah. Especially since they could then carry it through to other people at the other ends of this district. And our reps to EC-Fiber, those are people who are acting in the best interest of the town, right? As our representatives. So they're not necessarily people who are representing EC-Fiber to us, thinking, trying to protect that as an organization. So that might be why we're not seeing them showing up. The latter would be why? Just that they might, maybe they all think, maybe our reps think, yeah, right, the district would be fine. Even though they're the reps to the EC-Fiber, I mean, they think, oh yeah, EC-Fiber is taking a long time. So maybe the town really should pursue other our avenues if at all possible. They have no objection to this process. EC-Fiber itself might. I do know that two or three reps are connected in a certain way. Some in ways that really would choose to not share in public. Just yet, not to me to release their news, but I think you're right in that there are issues there. They're not entirely opposed to it, but they're, we're in Randolph. Our representatives know the right to district interested party and so there's, there's a relationship. Beautiful. More people get competing for this and better as far as I think. So I'm trying to see it down side for the time. Don't report back with warrant next month. Contract with Orange County Sheriff's. We have received. Right one yet? Right one yet? I said we haven't hit the right one yet. Received notice from our Randolph Police Department officer, sole meaning officer that he will leave or has resigned his position effective as of September 16th. So that will leave the Randolph Police Department with no police officers. I would like to request that the board authorize me to amend the existing agreement with Orange County Sheriff's Department to include an additional 40 hour shift at the same existing rate of 46 dollars per hour so that we could cover all the shifts. The ones that will be, very least the ones that will be no longer coverable by our Department of Police Officer. Make a motion. We adopt the police district Orange County Sheriff's contract to add 40 hours at the rate of 46, 40 hours per week at the rate of 46 dollars per hour. Amend or adopt? Amend. What did I say? Adopt. Amend to amend. I think you heard me wrong. Let's rewind the tape. Motion and second all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. Motion carries. Thank you. Tax anticipation agreement. This is part of the continuation of tax anticipation note that the select board has previously approved. The bank has returned and asked that we have the appropriate agreement document signed, which are in the warrant folder that will be circulated before the end of the meeting. It's just confirming that the select board has authorized down to apply for a million dollar tax anticipation note. We will also share with them minutes of formal meeting saying that the board has authorized it and now we're going to have signatures to go along with the actual paperwork for the million dollar tax anticipation note. We don't need any further motions or anything. No further motions. Just signing. Just signing. Great. Other business, we have a dry hydrant grant. Yes. We received a dry hydrant grant from one of our community members, Troy, there. If the board continues to support the dry hydrant pass through grant, if the board could motion for the town to accept the grant. Is this the repairs? This is for the repairs. Yeah, where? I'm sorry. This is a dry hydrant that malfunctioned to be installed near... Oh, the silhouette road. The silhouette road. The silhouette road. Oh. Yep. So the town will not lose out on any money. It would be payable by the person that installed it. They just wanted us to help. Come on for it. Make a motion to accept the dry hydrant grant application, is it? It's a grant application. Oh, grant... Did you accept the grant agreement? Grant agreement. It was. Exactly. Those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Stained? Motion carries. Thank you. Any other business? We have the managers report and I have a feeling we have an audience for the managers report. At least one item on it. Yeah, we're all... As I was going to say, before we move on, was there a specific item that you folks came in for? We just cut down on some other meaning or just had sort of pride. It's bubbling over, I can tell. And you didn't bring coffee? They're muffins. They're muffins. So one of the items on my managers report actually works well with three of our attendees tonight is conversations that I've had with members of the conservation commission. The commission has requested that we could potentially reestablish a select board liaison to the conservation commission to have a more strong connection. I know we've had this... We've had this request relate to the board in the past. I've continued to work with Michael and attempted to attend the last meeting, but I think it was no form? I don't think that would happen. That's a good answer. About an hour and a half ago. Again, this is... Oh, okay. The second one. Do you want us to come? We won't. We don't count. So that is... That was a request from the conservation commission in addition to the request for the EAB report and the ML-ASHCOR report that had been spearheaded by the conservation commission. So I'm going to make more of a point to work with Michael, to work with the commission to review the report itself to become more familiar before bringing it back to the board for recommendations and actions. See, I did share. Information of the report. The part that was missing on that was like a recommended plan. Because it went from zero to a million dollars, right? We could do nothing or we could give you a million bucks. Well, I think that... My impression of it is that it's the kind of thing that needs some kind of subcommittee or organization to decide what to do with it. Like, it's a pest management plan specifically for this forest pest of the ML-ASHCOR that is not prescriptive, but it provides options and lays out some of the pros and cons of those options. And we use it up to a group of town decision makers to decide, you know, what we want, you know, people with burst strings, probably, to decide how we want to mitigate this risk and what we want to do with it. So it's a management plan. It's not a prescriptive step-by-step, you must do this kind of plan. I believe that we had a presentation in America. It was looking to accept the plan and move into action on it. I think the last one was when I came, that was last June, there were certain recommendations. There were options and then there were recommendations. One thing being establish a budget for some tree removal and that is, you know, and the plan offers amounts from zero to, like, like we said, a huge amount, but it's up to town planners or you all to kind of decide how much, how far you want to go and how much of a budget we want to create for it. But there's some other steps to take also, like just having, like, a place to put debris once it starts coming down, area, it's going to be in combination with another town, like they work with Rain Trees or another town to have a common area, but the idea being not only mitigating the effects of the past, but perhaps even more importantly, preventing, you know, future extreme costs due to, like, weather when these trees that are dying and you have a windstorm and all of a sudden you've got tons of limbs and roads that require a lot of talent and voice and if limbs have been taken down ahead of time or trees that were half-dead ahead of time or that, you know, step into the process rather than through years, a few years, or working with electric companies finding out how they'll take down just to kind of have some thought for what kind of things we can expect. I think the issue is basically you're going to have to deal with it now or you're going to have to deal with not having dealt with it now later and we just wanted to make sure that you guys, because we can't make decisions that can only recognize but at least you know what things to think about and maybe partnerships you can create now so that, you know, we know it's in Orange County and so now it's a little bit more urgent maybe than when we were talking last summer. Yeah, and if it doesn't feel like it's at a boiling point yet like, unfortunately, at some point it probably will feel like, okay, this is like an urgent thing that we need to deal with if there's questions, you know, in the town management about like how to handle this the management plan is meant to be a resource to look to to tell you, okay, these are the kinds of things that you might want to consider and make decisions about. It doesn't tell you do this, do that, do this. It tells you like, these are the kinds of things that you may consider doing. And it's available on the website on our page for landowners who may want to step in right now with whatever their situation is on the Woodlots. And we'll just cut them. There's a mass cutting of ash in Vermont right now which is what the state told them not to do. Not to do anything. So, yeah. And Woodlots is different then, right? But if the plan is supposed to help landowners too it's a lot of them just getting the woods. Right. A lot of furniture and that's going to be made in a few years now. Yeah, as I recall some of that information was sort of late in coming too or really recent that they realized that some of the native ash population is showing some resistance because like when the conservation commission was first approached by the state and had presentations from the supposed experts we were initially informed that you may as well cut everything because they're in Michigan and in these other places there have been no natural resistance shown and in recent months and years I guess real recently they've found that there actually is so some of that information changes over time as well which doesn't help. We have better wood pickers up here than they do. Maybe that's it, yeah. More aggressive. That's not the best thing I guess, huh? They'll eat them. I think they have a 90% success rate with wood pickers, huh? It's good. Thanks, guys. Another different conversation that I had also in conservation commissions been all over my radar. Another conversation I had with Michael, the chair for the committee related to interchanging of information from our different committees and commissions which spurred the thought of two new committees that I was hoping to share with the board at some point to potentially create. The first is more germane to the conservation commission conversation that I had and that's to create a committee's chair, a committee chair's committee and this would be once a quarter. All the committee chairs could come in and share about the work that they're doing so if one committee's doing one thing that helps with the other committee that could kind of work together or at the very least keep each other informed of what's going on so if there are ways so they can partner with each other they could. The thought is more information sharing, the better and it's only a quarter of the meeting as opposed to a monthly meeting. The other committee that I was hoping to get some input at some point would be an arts and culture commission or arts and culture committee. Try to tap into the arts community that we have here in Randolph. Potentially also use them as a little grant application source of their arts related grants that we could apply for and that staff just don't have capacity to apply for them. We could go to our committee and say this would be a good grant that we could apply for for whatever reason but mostly it's just tap into the arts community that we have in Randolph and it was a strong community we just wouldn't have much involved with them at the time. We've got a long laundry list going on. One of the major things that I would like to share with you is the very visible item and it's our town report. I brought some samples with us to take a look at and the samples are here because of an issue that we had with our order for last years for this current year's town report. We ordered 800 and approximately 63 versions of this town report. We had reports of the books falling apart. What was happening is books were just through normal use were opening them up, people were cracking the spine and the pages started coming out. We've since learned that the company said to us that they've apologized. They didn't use as much glue as they would have needed. So they've offered to us this spiral bound town report and if the select board in the town were to go back to them this year they would offer this more expensive version at no increase in cost. So they're essentially giving us a $500 and change of credit. If we do go back to this version it would be $500 cheaper than it was this year which already was 50% cheaper than the previous year because we had gone with a different company through an RFP process. I brought these examples to see if the board likes the spiral bound version. Staff have reviewed them. They like it. It's just easier to open up and no spine to break. So the non spiral one $500 cheaper this year than last year. They're going to give a discount for credit. Will they use more glue? I did say to them that the board because it became a problem with the community if the board said fine let's go with the one we had it would be $500 cheaper with a non ring binder but if we go part again then there would be a bigger issue with the community because it happened again. So if staff were to make a recommendation at cost neutral if we were to go with the spiral bound version I think it would be well accepted by the community we wouldn't have breaking spine issues or pages coming out and it would be at cost neutral again but even if we chose to go with it it would be $500 or $600 more than this version of it with the one underneath it but even still it was still roughly about $1,000 less than we had been paying before so we still had a savings. How many complaints did we get when the page was falling out? I had two or three but there were also issues I think complaints were being made to other people people were talking and they just didn't get to me. So I decided it was two or three mine did also fall apart and I thought okay if I only had three people in my book out of $863 maybe we were just the only three or four bucks that fell apart apparently it had been a much broader bigger issue. So mine fell apart too. But you're saying that these weren't basically weren't printed properly like they should have been they shouldn't have fallen apart. That's right. So in the future we can say $500 and get books that work what they're supposed to and then it will just be like it's always been and then they'll be fine. It's still $500. Okay. I just brought it just to share the options of the books and if the board likes the spiral it's still overall a savings from the previous contract that we had. What part of his example would it be like? You know what doesn't fall apart? PDS. That's true. Can I get everybody in now? One more reading. BGP was reading it out of thumb drive. They wouldn't be. That's right. Thumb drive that would hold this is essentially pretty true. The button in the bulk put our logo on it. Don't need them. We have just a general update on the Idaho Police District Evaluation Committee. We have our next meeting scheduled for October 12th with a also a I'm sorry no the date is October 12th. Public hearing. September 20th is the next meeting. I think that's right. That would be meeting number three. With a public hearing slash listening session for October 12th I plan to start advertising for tomorrow. The process is moving along well we've had members ask a lot of questions and have remained involved in the process. We have a proposal at some point the initial stages of a proposal to reconfigure the intersection of Beanville Road and route 12 just to make it more commercial truck traffic friendly. Currently there is just a severe angle that prevents trucks traveling southbound on 12 to make a left on the Beanville Road which could be leading to the increase in commercial traffic on Maple Street and Highland Street as it cut over to stop pleasant. So as we work on the Maple Street project which we'll talk about briefly or shortly we also are considering improvements to that intersection in addition to trying to reduce the dip on South Pleasant Street as it travels southbound right by the railroad tracks. That's also a place where trucks don't like to go because they have to slow down for the bump and then speed up again. So it makes it a problem for them to take those two routes. It's making it more like Main Street which is a pretty nice crossing. So there are potential issues there that we're going to have to deal with but for the most part we're initial conversations for that. We have established or re-established conversations with the New England Central Rail regarding Railroad Street. They've sent to me an agreement that would allow the town to not take possession but to lease Railroad Street so that we could then maintain and fix the road make it more to a class 3 standard. I've expressed concern to the railroad saying I don't believe we need to pay you $365 a year to allow us to improve your property and do all these things and then install a guard rail because they're insisting that we install a guard rail and do three other items. So they're open to having a conversation. They're open to continuing the conversation with the town but they are insisting that they be allowed to remove themselves from an agreement within 30 days regardless of whatever investment we've made into Railroad Street and they also will require us to install a guard rail so that any snowplow operation won't cost snow to go onto the track. I reminded them that there's no guard rail there now and cars are using it. I took photos and sent them to them of the condition of the road but they're holding firm. The guard rail piece has been in the conversation from the game bill. Even a few years ago when we were dealing with it it was here. It's been pretty. So who's plowing it now? There's probably the landowners. Last year it wasn't plowed at all. It wasn't plowed at all. Which added to the frustration. There was a huge pile of snow in the middle of the road so someone plowed it to that pile. They plowed the road to make the snowplows and the carill state. I meant to say that the pound didn't plow it. So is Railroad Street from Main and Back to Pleasant? Is that the whole thing? Is it the entirety? It's the entirety of it. And that's the side where Al's Pete said. I just didn't know if they owned from the back of Al's Park lot to the CERN or if it was the whole entire stretch. Yeah. So it's also pretty standard in Railroad bring up. I haven't seen them exercise it but it's there. Yeah. They're willing, from my conversation with their representative they're willing to potentially waive the dollar a day fee for the lease. So at least it's a gift. I'll continue talking to them. How much do we think it costs to just fill in the potholes of gravel to get it to a passable or is there like a whole gradient thing and sloping and drainage? Right now the water all slopes right towards the building that the real estate folks are in. And in the middle of Pizza Place there's always a puddle there. Some of those craters there are like 8, 10 inches deep. Yeah, lost my trophy once. Lost my trophy. It did cost it could bear could be an apples to apples situation but on Railroad on Furnace Road that project costs over 100,000 dollars for that large segment. Well it was paid for by the state. That large project was 160,000 but over 100,000 dollars. Taking the same type of work and putting that on Railroad Street could be more costly because it's a smaller road but if we took just an estimate of the same distance of Railroad Street to the same distance of Furnace Street and say well it costs us 20, 30,000 dollars just to do like a shim and overlay and not dealing with stormwater but we would have to deal with stormwater and gardener. We'll keep working on that. We talked about the One House Roads we had a change in personnel assignments the duties of HR director have been reabsorbed by the town manager's office so now the Human Resource Department is operating on the town manager's office so I'm performing those duties now. So if you have any questions related please feel free to come and see me. Where were they before? In that policy it specifically separates town manager from human resources director. I'd have to take a look but I know by state statute the town manager is technically the human resources director and then also something I don't want to do is to delay from tax cuts but I'll revisit that portion of it about human resources. That was a relatively new thing to happen so I could have followed this track. Were we outsourcing it before? No, they were being performed within our finance department so I just felt it was just better to have with the town manager's office. We have a conversation tomorrow with for my emergency management about a proposed table top exercise I have been sharing information with the fire advisory committee the committee is open to performing a table top exercise and later in next year in the spring to conducting the full utilization exercise so that's moving along we hope to have more information soon we will include Gifford and the Ornish Consulate in the exercise to make sure that we're all on the same page. So that's that. We have a meeting scheduled between the town and RECDC this would be a gold setting meeting I received confirmation from Julie and we have a meeting time and date so we will be meeting with them very soon to have more mutually agreeable goals as we move forward and the last thing would be a good thing before speaking about the maple tree project is the town staff is working on potentially creating a softball team and challenging one of our three fire departments so any of the select board members would like to play or one of the members of their family on the town well staff make it make it members of the family so the where are you taking on well we're hoping to do like a round robin well we play we play two games we're going to have to play a fire department for each one of the games and the other three fire departments would play each other so it would be a round robin four teams try to make it a family picnic at one of our local parks try to just do a camaraderie if we don't all pull something so if there's any interest in joining the team please let me know it's very competitive so we gotta hurry up try to be Saturday they're gonna practice for a month call the fire department we only have three members on the team right now so it's gonna be a long haul the last issue is the maple tree project we recently had a planning meeting yesterday with the Boise King we reviewed the proposed plan for the project and understand that there hasn't been a final decision being made yet on the one way direction for the road but during the meeting that we had yesterday we found that there are size constraints that limit our options we recently learned that Green Mountain Power would be able to move the light poles within a relatively short amount of time at their expense which is great but the actual project itself because it narrows to some places down to 17 feet we would prefer to have it one way as opposed to have it in a dual way direction there are some constraints with size and the width of the road and this would just make it easier for us to be able to have the project but before we asked the board to make a decision the the goal would be if the board approved to have a meeting either a specially warned meeting or even at the next select board meeting where the item is either put on the agenda or a special hearing is held before the board meeting to invite all the members of the Maple Street community Highland Street so that they could come in and share their concerns and their views and that the last time something like this was held it's been I think over a year it's well before I arrived at the town so this would give them a new opportunity to voice their concerns with traffic for the town select board if the select board would approve to also potentially include speed tables on Highland to limit speeding on that street or commercial traffic so that's something that we would like to bring to the board at some point before you're already considered either a special meeting or a hearing before the next select board meeting we could definitely would need a decision now it's under the manager's report so we wouldn't be able to have them but a conversation that we could have and then forward but the project itself we feel very comfortable with with the relationship that we're going to have with three man power and at least the players involved in the planning process and that one last thing I might as well go the extra mile I'm going to do this earlier and that we do have our current vacant position with the buildings and grounds director position we are working on a plan to be able to reorganize the position break out cemeteries and have our existing cemetery crews just do cemeteries reclassify our laborer positions to not just be cemetery laborers and parks and rec laborers but just be laborers for the town so this way we can move them around wherever we need them if we need all our laborers at the cemetery we could send them all over there or if parks and recs needs all the laborers to set up goals or something that they need right away we could send them all without having to fall under the well I'm classified as cemetery so I'm not leaving as cemetery or I'm only classified as parks I'm not going to help at the cemeteries that will be a much larger process because it's dealing with reclassification of duties but on a more immediate front is we're learning that we could potentially do without the position of buildings and grounds director and if our conversations with Gifford or the school district go out we could potentially farm out the buildings and grounds duties to their maintenance crews they already have a full maintenance crew they have somebody who supervises them and our building and the ground position would essentially just be we can go to for an immediate problem our pipe at city hall or a town hall broke because we had a plumbing issue we would go to them and have them work with their contractors to fix it or if we have our emergency generators that need to be serviced once a year we can go to them and say this is the job this is what you need to do these are your checklists you need to do them for us it's still a preliminary conversation it's still in flux but if the savings are there we can do some activities that could be incorporated with the school district maintenance team or Gifford maintenance team then what I could then do is bring some options to the board and see if we can work something out with those agencies and that is it that's what I have for the manager's report so we intend to have an executive session which I'm interested in one BSA 313M Attorney Town Communities


What is going on everybody? JR Fisher here. It is Saturday the 19th The countdown of 2021 looks like everything's opening up people are starting to feel good to get some energy. We got summertime coming Let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. I know we're just packing We're packing every day because we got to move to Austin Actually, it's Georgetown, Texas. We're going to but I know it's an everyday packing thing Welcome everybody. If you're new here, do me a favor Say hello in that chat box there. Let us know a little bit about you Got a lot of regulars in here today people pouring in and it's gonna be a good day today I'm gonna be talking about SEO and it's a big mistake. You're probably making however If you've got any questions about starting running and growing online businesses, feel free to put it in that chat box I will be happy to answer any questions you got there I want to make sure you can hear me. Somebody just type in there if my Audio is working. Just want to make sure that's working and that's going good Don't want to be talking for no reason and don't forget to subscribe.  Okay. It's important that you do that Please do that do that subscribe thing and I know my man James always reminds me thumbs up thumbs up. He says loud and clear. Yes, I've hit the like button I appreciate it. It's a like button down there guys smash that like button make it look good Building two more sites. Dang Richard.  Thank you so much That means I'm getting all the way over to the UK, which is also very good Where's Paul today? Hey James. Did you not wake Paul up today? What's going on with him today? Why is he not here? I want to know where Paul is But he is apparently a late or not coming today. Oh, well, we'll do it without him We'll make it somehow without him guys. I'm so happy to be here today Got so much going on in life got so many good things going to go out and have dinner with friends tonight Friends of 34 years 35 years I've known him just really great people And we're gonna talk about SEO so what could be better, right? What could be better now? We're gonna make SEO interesting. I know you're thinking ah SEO so boring so boring. It's not I'm telling you What I'm gonna talk about today is pretty darn interesting. I think you're gonna like it I know you're gonna get a lot out of it I would suggest taking notes on this because some of this stuff is something that you probably are not doing And you're gonna want to do it. You're just gonna want to do it. It's it's important stuff All right, let me get to where all my notes are for everything today I've been looking at restaurants because we're trying to find a restaurant to go tonight and unfortunately here in San Diego There's too many choices. There's too many choices. And when there's too many choices, what do you get you get? You get confused, you know, we got just too many choices here. Alright, so I'm closing some of my windows here So I can get to my notes, but don't forget to put questions in there guys Even if it's not about SEO, you know, anything that you want to ask me that has to do with starting running and growing online businesses I want you to feel free to put that in that chat box there. I'll be happy to answer them for you And I am to all my notes right now. I'm just looking things over see what I got going on And you know, these are more things that people are making mistakes on than anything else You may not know about them. So I want to share with you today so you can Get all these things corrected. It's super important It really is because if you're building websites like Richard there, we want people to come to it There's always something to learn about SEO there is and you know It's one of the few things that is really simple and easy to do and most people don't even do it. They don't So the first thing I'm gonna tell you and this is probably not the first thing This is probably the 11th thing, but I just I have it in a wrong order I guess but you can write SEO, but if Google can't crawl your website, you're not gonna rank So how Google Docs crawl your website? Basically, you just need to add your site map into Google Okay, and I think I could spend you know an hour on showing you how to do that But I don't want to do that. Just want to tell you you need to get it done Each theme and plug-in work stage.  It's easy to do You know when you're building your page all you got to do is set what you want the name of the page to be So that's really important and that's part of your SEO and those people totally ignore that They just make a page and they don't realize that there's a permalink in there that there's a name to that page Which is super important Get a sip here real quick Next thing a lot of people do this they choose number three. They choose the incorrect theme now Most of us don't even realize that the theme could be important in SEO, but it actually is Your theme is part of the backbone of your website Okay, it's not only important for your website to be visually appealing, but also SEO optimize and picking the right theme will have a lot to do with that Many times these SEO optimized themes are paid So you may have to pace up before but that's okay, right because we're gonna make money anyhow But that doesn't mean that there are not free ones too. Okay, there are some free ones out there So you can look at something like theme forest, but there's so many out there So how do you know if it's SEO optimize? Okay? Here's some important things to check for SEO optimization number one Does the developer update the theme very often? Okay? So if you see a theme and it hasn't been updated in a year or two, I would not use that theme I wouldn't do it. Okay. Number two does the theme test page speed rank Well on your ping or your you know, Gen-Tex or whatever it is So check that out before you actually pick it and you know There's a lot of free things where you can ping the page and see how well it loads next thing number four is To use the correct headings. Okay, correct headings is another one of the common SEO mistakes That can easily be fixed. I mean, this is simple guys again Hand in hand up in the air for this one if you haven't done it when writing a blog post The heading you choose is actually super important when Google crawls your website below What I'm gonna talk about now and you can put that in the comments right here below in the comments Let me know what you've been doing, but here's what you should have there should be one H1 heading Just one H1 one. Okay, and you can actually highlight the words and make it a H1 heading You can do this an actual word so you can do it a word dot, but you can do it wordpress It'll automatically become your H1 heading when you do this The first the first sentence on your page will automatically become an H1 heading if you're doing this wordpress The H2 heading should be the bulk of your headings with H3 and H4 being subtopics of your H2 And these are all these are as different size of fonts guys That's all it is think about your headings like chapters of a book Your heading should resemble a chapter or an important topic that you want to talk about So let's say your your main topic is going to be an H1 heading And then your first main point of that topic would be an H2 and your second main point would be an H2 And your third main point would be an H2, but anything underneath those main points like a sub main point Those would be H3s and anything below that would be an H4 And all that is is the size of the font. That's all it is. It's nothing fancy Next thing is people not putting alt text on their images Super important that you do this guys anytime you do a post you should always try to add the imagery whenever possible But every image you have uploaded to wordpress gives you an opportunity to put an option in there for alt text and all alt text is is a description of What that picture is and this is for the visually impaired, but it helps your SEO in terms of SEO It's actually important to add keywords as long as it makes sense with the image Okay, by adding your keywords to your image you could also rank for the topic in Google photo filter So when people are searching photos your photos may come up that may click on it and they'll go to that page So that's another way to do that. It's all under images when they're searching in Google Let me another sip here real quick Next thing Make sure you optimize your image. This is number six You can keep in track and make sure you optimize your image There are many reasons Your website could be running slow and most of the time it's caused by this common SEO mistake the image size Heavily affects your web page load time.  Well, the two megabyte file sizes could be killing your load time in your SEO So how do you fix this? There's a couple ways you can download a plug-in such as smush. That's SMUSH Let me put this in here SMUSH Let's see image Tim Yes, okay, smush. Okay, check that out And what that'll do is that'll reduce and compress the image size generally you'll want your image size to be under 300 kilobytes. Okay, so even though you want these big beautiful images, they're going to slow down your pages Realize your images to fit your website's pixel layout You know when I first started putting stuff online, I would upload images directly from my DSLR camera Okay, which was really dumb because the pixels for these images were 3,000 by 4,000 Big no-no now I resize my images to fit the pixels of my website which is around 900 to 600 okay by doing so this brings the file size down and Eliminates my website having to resize the images when your website has to resize that takes more time So we don't want to do that But you can also resize them yourself in Photoshop and then use the export and save for the web type thing This helps reduce the file size without compromising the quality too much So I know there's other tools out there you can use you could use any of those other tools That's not a big deal, but make sure you do it make sure you do it. Okay, and now we are up to Number seven, okay Using a bunch of extra plug-ins. Don't do it.  I'm telling you not to use extra ones if you don't need to Unless they're essential don't do it Google isn't too fond of slow websites and it turns out plug-ins slow down your speeds Or if you're not using them get rid of them You can use different tools out there There's one called GT Metrics let me put that in there GT metrics Okay, so you can check that out Tricks check out GT metrics They'll give you a ton of details on what areas need work and you know as you delete plug-ins You may even see your speed go up. You probably will actually a Plug-in most bloggers recommend to delete is jetpack so almost a delete Jetpack Okay, you don't need it delete it. Okay, and the reason is it's really heavy with features And a lot of them go unused So there's just a point to have a rule of thumb is if you can manually do a task you are better off in terms of speed And even web safety really But if you need it you need it I get it So that's that's cool, too. Time to get another sip here. Hey guys, feel free to put some comments in there This isn't a one-sided thing. This is this is a discussion. This is a group thing So put your comments in there. Let me know what you think. What are you doing on your websites? Hey, Richard? You're building websites. What's some of your input on your websites? Ah Give me a big drink. I'm drinking Lemon water now and I gotta say my throat's doing a lot better in the morning.  You right? We got to do it And I was one of them. I was like I just want to get some content up. I don't spend all this time Richard says good. He's got some information here for us when initial setup on WordPress sites It is best to get rid of the clutter from the get-go. Yeah, that's a really good point guys Don't wait until you've built a site for three years and then try to figure out which plugins you're using That's that that's terrible. And you know, I've been guilty of that myself In the very beginning when you start your website get rid of all the crap You're not going to use just get rid of it You're not going to use it get rid of it right then then build your website on a clean slate best way to go about it I like Yoast a lot You know, so I would use Yoast. It's really really good and it's going to help you with the keyword research Richard also says keywords anywhere. That's a good one uber suggest is excellent. I use uber suggest also They're all very good. I think that's Neil Patel. Is it Neil Patel or is it? Gosh, what's the other guy? I can't think of him now Ah slips my mind. I know him. I met him. I was at a convention with him get rid of hello Dolly. Really? I don't know about hello Dolly. Is that is that something that is just in wordpress Richard? Hello Dolly I don't know that one Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that you can use to take the guess word out of picking your keywords You know, you can use stuff like public. You can use Moz. You can use Google Trends. Yes, Neil Ubersuggest. Yeah, that's what I thought. I wouldn't I wouldn't 100% sure but I thought so So, you know, if you have a budget and are really looking to take your SEO and keywords to the next level Or you want to be able to monetize your blog or you know website, whatever it is There is a tool you need. Okay, I keep hearing bloggers talk about it But since I wasn't making you know money from one of the blogs I had I didn't worry about it, but Let's see here. I got to the point where I thought it was really really helpful And I suggest you getting some tools out there to use on your sites, too Super important to do so. All right. So next thing up Next thing up I've got for you and so oh answer the public is a really cool one guys Go to answer the public and you can put any subject matter in there And what it will do is it will branch out into a whole bunch of other subjects or keywords that you hadn't thought of I like Moz. Moz is also very good. You can use that What else here I had some tools here Google Trends, of course, everybody knows my Google Trends Or I don't know I say that and then like somebody's gonna go I've never heard of Google Trends But basically Google Trends. Oh, Richard says that it comes with all WordPress websites That's really good to know that probably is stuck on my site somewhere But you know a lot of people ignore a lot of these things and they go I just want to build a website But the thing is if you build this website that loads slow and nobody's coming to it It doesn't matter you got to get it cleaned up got to get it cleaned up Okay, and the next thing number nine is Understand the importance of domain authority and backlinks You know as you build your site You're going to realize a domain authority means a whole lot to you domain authority according to Moz is a Search engine ranking source or excuse me score Developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank or search on search results Which is s e r p s search engine results page Okay, so a domain authority score ranges from one to one hundred with the higher score Corresponding to a greater ability to rank so you want that score as high as possible Backlinks are super important. You were right Richard and I was going to mention that too. It's also important when you're doing backlinks guys That's you and what what that is just you know Richard just put that in there But what that is is what sites are your sites linking to I know what what sites are linking to your site So your if your site is on another site and there's a link back to your site That's a good thing, but it's a better thing if it's a high ranking site So if you got yours on some dot gov or some dot edu sites and they're linking back to you That's a lot better than if you got them on a waffle making site, you know Unless you make waffles, and then I guess that would be awesome But the point is you want to make sure they have authority those sites that are linking back to you Do not do not do not pay for links ever ever ever don't pay for links don't pay for subscribers Don't pay for likes don't pay for comment Don't pay for any of this stuff you don't need to and the thing is it'll actually hurt your SEO a whole lot more than It's gonna help it and it could cause you to get blacklisted your site to get blacklisted So don't ever pay for links ever ever ever don't do it Because if that was the case anybody who could buy a bunch of links would have great sites. That's just not the case Richard says Cora and Wikipedia have authority. Oh, definitely. Yeah, they definitely do Because Wikipedia obviously is like a dictionary online Quarters where people go in and ask questions and I did it for a while, but it's so time-consuming that I Just kind of fell down on that because I didn't think it was worth my time But they are great sites to link back to Another mistake that people do is Using keywords that you're never going to rank for you're never going to rank for them You know if you if you have let's say you're selling bicycles And you decide the keywords you're going to have is best bicycles You're never going to rank for best bicycles now You may rank for best bike bicycles for teens and young adults that would be a great long-tail keyword, right? It's a link on your site But if you just take one or two short keywords like if you put soup and you wanted to rank for soup The the odds of you ranking for soup are not good or like I sell survival cave food If I try to rank for Meat just meat it would be really really tough now. I do rank for Can survival food can meet if you search that I rank for that Because that's a longer tail keyword that I can actually link for so When you are getting these green lights on Yoast, it's a good sign So look at your yo see what Yoast is saying about it It doesn't mean you're you're actually going to rank though on Google I would love to be the first search result on Google for the keyword, you know survival food, but I'm not I'm not My site is just not going to do it I don't have the domain authority to do that unless your wife your website is Extremely established with crazy high domain authority It would be very hard to rank for very general keywords Like if I was a travel blogger and I put travel or if I put Thailand or if I put France The odds of you ranking for that are not good. So long tail keywords are more precise phrases They have more targeted search volume. They've got lower difficulty for rankings. So instead of you know putting survival food on my website I may put survival food For families and young adults. Okay, that could rank for that. That wouldn't be so bad So that would be something you'd want to do Media releases are also excellent too. Yes press releases. We call those press releases And you can do those and I would say do I'm on a regular basis. I have not done those in a while And that is a sign of Too much success and I had too much business So I kind of fell down on some of those things and quite honestly guys You can't do everything you can't do everything, you know Some people say well that guy says he's so good But his SEO is a good or he doesn't have a good YouTube channel or his Facebook president is good or he doesn't have much on his Instagram You can't do everything. You can't do everything.  Well, he has a media company. Okay, so that may have something to do with it Give me another little drink here. But the point is do what you can do Okay, do what you can do because you can't do everything doesn't mean you shouldn't do something though That's a big key distinction because you can't do everything Doesn't mean you shouldn't do something Now the last thing I want to put on here is forgetting to add no follow links. Okay. Now. What is this? Okay? Think to yourself What the heck is a no follow link again I've been there. I've done it. I know I understand it so when you add a link to your website WordPress automatically tags the link has to Excuse me do follow As a backlink in your website when you add it This is great and handy, but you're adding affiliate links do follow links are a huge no-no Okay, we don't want to do that. So without getting into a whole bunch of technical stuff Basically when Google crawls your website it follows the links. However, Google does not support Advertising and can penalize your site for this This is why you want to add the no follow link telling Google not to crawl that particular link. Okay, so How do you add a no follow link so that you can earn some money without Google? Kind of cursing the soul of your website after you add your link to your post Hit the tab next Hit the text tab at the top right of the WordPress text box This will bring you to the HTML coding. Okay, then you scroll to your link and look for target And you want to have in there underscore blank? Okay in quotations and then our EL equals no opener So let me put this in here because I know there's a lot of stuff to say here. So it should look like this Okay, let me get this here There we go I'm trying to find there it's okay. So I'm gonna put this on the screen for you guys. It should look like in K There should That in front of it Here have a hard time clicking on this, but I'll get it. I promise I'll get it. All right. So we got that You get that All right, and let me put the rest in here guys. Give me one second REL Equals I know this this sounds difficult, but all you do is copy this one time and you'll have it over and over again No Opener there we go Then we want that I want to make sure you're all like correct Okay, so I just put that code in there of what you want to have for no follow link Once you find that section you have to type in no follow right after the REL So you'd want to do that So the new snippet of code should actually look like what I put on the screen there So let me let me put the whole thing on there so you guys can see it. It should say target Equals this is a little difficult, but you can do this guys target equals underscore Blank I Put I wrote this out in advance so you guys would have this so I'm kind of I'm cheating with my own notes here blank And then we're gonna have REL And we're gonna have equals I'm sure you're all getting this right. I'm sure you are Equals no follow Follow And this is super important. Okay, so you don't have problems with your website on down the road And it should say no opener and correct me anybody out there who's looking at this right now There you go, okay, and Richard Brown apparently agrees with me and you can check my Cooting there make sure that's correct, but I think that's correct. So you want to have the one there So basically, you know doing these things guys is really gonna help your website These are mistakes that people make everybody else takes well I did SEO because I put my you know heading and I put my meta tags I put my keywords I put a description that's fine But if you don't do these other 11 things that are mistakes, then it's gonna hurt your website So it's really important to do that So there do you have any questions on any of this guys you you're welcome to ask me any questions Put any comments on there and I always forget there's people who watch this video when it's not live So if you're watching them when it's not live go to the comments section put any questions that you have in there Feel free to do that. Okay. If you put those comments in that section there.  I didn't do the older ones So I gotta get back and do the older ones. I'll try to do that today and get in there and answer some of those But feel free to put any of those questions in there if you haven't subscribed yet, please do so Don't forget to ring the bell turn on the bell notification so you're notified each and every time I go live We are getting closer and closer to that move to Texas guys I have boxes and crap everywhere else. It is a wreck in here And I'm trying to figure out well stop doing my lives because at some point I've got to pack up all these lights in here I've got to pack up this desk all my cool stuff for my desk has to go with me So at some point I got to pack all that up guys And I won't be around for a few days and I don't want you to think I quit you anything Maybe I could just do some lives on my phone and I can talk to you guys. I could do it that way I won't have the office set up. Unfortunately. I've got like whiteboards over here. I've got padding on the walls I've got all this stuff that goes with this office set up if you saw this office Which I've done a video of it before but if you saw the stuff that's in here you would have said Oh my god, how does he even work in there? But you know, it's really necessary for these videos. I do it's necessary for sound. It's necessary for lighting So I use all this Cameron Cameron showed up. Let us know. Let's see here Richard says Neglect SEO at your peril. Definitely. You won't get traffic without SEO. That's for sure and Cameron I know was doing his finals. He was so nice the other day. He sent me a message He says I'm so sorry for not showing up, but I was working on my finals and your finals are important Okay, this is important too, but your finals are important Road trip videos would be good. Hey Richard. I did one. I did one that Gosh, I gotta finish editing it when I went to the East Coast I actually I did a review of the hotel. I was in the flight everything. So that's coming real soon I'll put that up probably on this channel, but it's it's a pretty good one I mean, it's gonna let you see around the town of Gosh, what was the name of that town? I can't think of it now Little tiny town Highlands Highlands, North Carolina is where I was at And it's pretty cool. So I'm gonna take you through some of the shops there Some of the restaurants. There was a exotic car show there. It's a really cool video I've got to get off my butt and finish it. Maybe I'll work on that today Let's see here James says peace and blessings everyone. I see y'all tomorrow. No see y'all Monday. That's right Good on you. Thank you so much And I'll have those those road trip videos. Yeah, in matter of fact, and I know what you're talking about You're talking about the one for Texas. I'm gonna try to do that, too I'll try to film that and what we're doing We're not doing anything fancy I got me a big old u-haul truck in a trailer for my car because I couldn't get a moving company It's impossible. Everybody's leaving California. You can't get moving companies for months. So that's a problem What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? So guys, I really appreciate you being here I appreciate you Subscribing ringing the bell giving me a thumbs up all that matters so much put your comments below and I will see you guys on Monday Love each and every one


Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the start on the 11th show, West Ham United vs Everton, let's get straight into it. Jordan Pickford in goal for this one, Lysl made his way back onto the bench last week, is that a sign? No, Jordan made a really good save last week from Glen Murray to keep Everton's lead, so he obviously continues in goal. Right back, a Gibril said to be, will start at right back for me, just need them to attack and not do anything silly, simple as that really isn't it? Just attack and do not and silly, and I think you'll be alright. A left back, Luca Dean will continue at left back, picks himself most games so no problem there. My two centre backs would be Mason Hallgate and Jerry Mina, obviously Michael Keane played last week, but they are my preferred centre backs, although there is talk that Mason Hallgate might be rested in this game to allow Keane and Mina to play together. Obviously because we've got a game on Tuesday night against Newcastle, there might be some rotation, but they are my preferred partnership and I'd have them for every game, but we'll wait and see what he does. Into sentiment field, obviously there's no Guilfee Sigarton, so I'm replacing him with Fabriann Delth, he's come on last week against Brighton, he was alright, he came on against Liverpool, he's getting back from having the injury that he sustained recently and I just think he's more of a natural fit for us. Morgan Snideland I think the less we see of him the better, I just think it's time to just bomb him out of the club and I think Delth for me is the more natural fit anyway because he is more in the Guilfee Sigarton role of how he uses the ball. The manager might decide that he wants someone to break up the play, so have someone like Snideland, but I don't think West Ham's midfield is that good that we have to really look at them, I think we should just look at ourselves and how we play and trying to keep hold of the ball and get ourselves into good areas. So I would start Fabriann Delth and next to him I would have Tom Davis continuing from last week sorry, so Fabriann Delth and Tom Davis in the centre of the park. On the right I would continue with Theo Wolcott, again there aren't too many choices, in fact there aren't really any other choices unless we change the formation or push Jibril Siddiw into right midfield and have Colin behind it, but I'll continue with Theo Wolcott. For what his critics are, I think he still works hard, I think he's a really good professional, I think we need someone better on there, but I think what we've got at the moment I think for me I'd start him in this game. On the other side I have Bernard continuing out there and thought he was excellent last week, thought he was the best player on the pitch, the way he picks up the ball on the left and cuts inside and obviously he scored I think in the last two games in West Ham didn't he, home and away, so obviously hopefully he keeps that going, I know you want for him to just have a good game and play his own game and as I said he can pick the ball and run through the lines and get it closer and higher to the forwards from midfield positions, so he will start on the left for me. And up front obviously no Richard Lawson so I'm going to bring in Moise Keane, again there's no one really else is there Moise Boeck, I will bring in Moise Keane and hopefully playing in the two and playing as the foil to the other striker, which is Dominic Abellein obviously. We can take the pressure off him a little bit and let's hope that he can finally get that goal that he's been searching for. I think he's picked up in recent weeks, I think he's had more game time and I think he's doing better and I think now is the time to just show that on the pitch, he's getting a start and he needs to try and get a goal or an assist, just do something positive in the game and we'll see what happens.


Today I'm going to be taking a look at the recent release of KOS. KOS is an independent Linux distribution. Independent means it's not based on a parent distribution. It's not forked from something else. It's its own thing. And KOS, it's always been a rather interesting Linux distribution. They focus on the KDE Plasma desktop. And of course KOS maintains its own repository of software being an independent distribution. About a week ago they had a big release. They released KOS version 2022.06. So I'm gonna download that ISO and I'm gonna take it for a spin inside a virtual machine. So I downloaded the ISO for KOS. I will say that when you go to their website and go to the downloads page, they don't offer a torrent download. They only have an HTTP download and that thing takes a long time. I'm talking it could take hours. So that is one thing I wish the KOS team actually did is had an official torrent that was available. Because right now the download speeds for this thing are very slow. Now one thing I will also mention is KOS. The name, the spelling, K-A-O-S, you would actually think that's pronounced chaos. And that's actually the way I have pronounced it on videos in the past when I've taken a look at KOS. But it's actually supposed to be KOS, not chaos. Which I think is unfortunate because I actually think chaos, calling your operating system chaos, that's kind of cool. That would have been great. I'm gonna go ahead and choose the first option here at the boot menu. I'm just gonna go ahead and get into the live environment. And we boot into our live environment. Now the way they have KDE Plasma set up I find rather interesting and a little bit strange because they have a side panel which you often see these days because so many people now have these ultra-wide monitors where you've got a lot more horizontal space rather than vertical space. So it kind of makes sense to throw your panel on the side. But typically you throw it on the left hand side because in most situations everything is done left to right on a computer. It's really weird to have a panel on the right because how often are you going to the right side of a screen? Think about all of your controls for like your web browser and things like that. It's kind of weird to just throw all of this on the right hand side of the screen. It would have made a lot more sense from an ergonomic standpoint actually put it on the left hand side of the screen. I'm sure you can change that. But let me go ahead and run through an installation. They are gonna use the Calamari's installer. They're shipping with the latest Calamari's 3.3. So I'm gonna click install KOS. First we get a welcome message and we can choose the language for the installer here. American English is the default and that's fine for me. I'm just gonna click next and then the time zone. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US and it's kind of strange. Their Calamari's installer actually has a map and it's using some kind of geolocation to determine exactly where I am. That is actually kind of cool. I've never seen that before in anyone else's Calamari's installer. I'm wondering if that is an option that any distribution could use and maybe most of them just don't choose this option with Calamari's. But that is interesting. But it's chosen America slash Chicago which is the central time zone for me. So that is correct. I'm gonna click next and then the keyboard layout English US is the default and that's fine for me. But of course you can change it if you need to. And you can also test out the keyboard layout by typing a message here. You know whatever it is you want to type. You can type in this little test box here. I'm gonna click next. Then you get to the little packages screen here. And do you want Libre Office installed or not for purposes of this VM? I'll actually not install Libre Office because I don't plan on using it. I can't. I can't actually tick that off. Maybe I have to tick this one. No Office Suite. If I tick that one, that one automatically sets. So I see they control each other.  They also have a minimal install option. But I'm gonna go ahead and let them install their full suite of applications minus Libre Office because I want to see the default packages that are installed on your standard KOS installation. So I'm going to click next. Now we need to partition our drive. You have two standard options here in Calamari. So you have a race disk, which means this will give the entire virtual hard drive of my virtual machine to KOS. So typically if you're installing an operating system as the only operating system on that disk, this is the option you want to choose. Manual partitioning is the option if you have some weird custom configuration partition scheme that you need to set up, or if you're dual booting, then it makes sense to do a manual partition. But I'm going to choose the first option, a race disk. You have the option of no swap, swap, no hibernate, swap with hibernate or swap to file. For purposes of this virtual machine, I'm going to do swap to file because it'll save on space. And then we have our file system. They are defaulting to XFS for the file system, which is fine. It's very old and stable. A lot of servers use XFS. You also have extend for which is another Linux standard file system. It's very stable. And yeah, I'm just going to choose their default with XFS for purposes of this video. Let's go ahead and click next. Now the boot loader, what do we want? Do we want to use grub? Absolutely. Or do we want no boot loader? You absolutely want a boot loader. Don't choose no boot loader unless you absolutely know what you're doing. You only want to choose no boot loader if you already have a boot loader installed, especially if you're already a dual booting with another operating system, then choosing no boot loader might work for you. But otherwise, not installing a boot loader means that your system won't be bootable. So I'm going to click next. And now we need to set up our user my name. What is your name? I'm just going to call my name DT. And then my login name, of course, will be DT. And then we need to set the hostname for this computer. I'm going to call this computer KOS-vert. Then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the password. Then I get a warning message that my strong and complicated password is too short. Can I just ignore that? Yes, I can just click that. And then reuse user password as root password. Sure, why not? That way, I don't have to remember two different passwords for the DT user and the root account. You do have the option to tick on login automatically without asking for a password. I don't recommend that for privacy reasons. I would always recommend having to type a password to get into your computer. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble. Then I'm going to click Next. And then we get a summary of everything that we have run through so far. Everything looks good. I'm going to click the install button. We get a warning saying the KOS installer is about to make changes to your disk. In order to install 2022.06, you will not be able to undo these changes. So it's about to format the hard drive and start writing to it. And that's exactly what I want it to do. So I'm going to click install now and away it goes. This portion of the installation on my hardware typically takes about five to 10 minutes for most Linux installations. I'm going to pause the video and I'll be back once the installation has completed. The installation has completed. That took seven or eight minutes probably for the installer. And now we have the option of close the installer so we can still play around in the live environment or click the button to restart the system. And that's what I'm going to do. So let's go ahead and restart our freshly installed KOS. And we get to our login manager here. And I really like the look of this login manager here. Let me move my head so we can change users, shut down, restart, sleep. And of course, I just need to enter my password to log us into our KDE Plasma desktop. And we're logged in and we're greeted with a very attractive welcome program. I noticed the name of the program here in the title bar is Crow Esso. I'm not sure what that means. I'm assuming that is a word that means hello or welcome. That's typically what people name these kinds of programs. I believe the country of origin for KOS, the distribution, is the United States. So I'm not really sure what language this word Crow Esso is. But if you're ever in need of actually looking for the welcome program, you're going to need, of course, to know the name Crow Esso because if I just type welcome, yeah, something else comes up splash screen. Hello, hello, doesn't return anything. So that is an unfortunate choice in a name. I think you can't actually search for welcome and actually get the program in the menu system. But luckily, it auto launches the very first time you log in. But this is a very slick welcome program. You can adjust various theming options. For example, widget styles. I'm assuming that's for the KDE plasmoids. You can change mouse behavior. You can change the theming, the icon set, your font settings, yada, yada, yada. And then you have tabs at the bottom. So this was the customized tab here, the main screen. But if we go to packages, yeah, we can play around with installing some different software. If I go to web browsers, we can install Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Otter browser. We've got some different options. If I go back and I choose email clients, we can install KMIL, Thunderbird, Trojita and Cube. I've never actually heard of Cube. I might have to try that out. That's a new email client to me. We have a wallpaper tab here where I guess we can download various wallpapers, I'm assuming these are coming from Unsplash. So that is rather nice than you have the docs tab here where you get some more buttons so you get documentation about various things such as Pacman. Yes, they're going to use Pacman for their package manager. Even though it's an independent distribution, it's not a arch distribution. They are using Pacman, which isn't that unusual because you will see some non-arch distributions use Pacman, for example, because it's not like it's designed strictly for arch. If you build a distribution, an independent distribution like KOS, for example, you can choose any package manager to build your distribution around. You could have chosen an app or RPM or a zipper or something like that, DNF. You could do a lot of different things. For example, I know at least one Red Hat based distribution or at least RPM based distribution, PC Linux OS. It actually uses Debian's apt package manager for their package manager rather than Yum or DNF. So not that strange. You also have documentation about switching to the various NVIDIA drivers. Now in this virtual machine, I'm using free drivers for the virtual machine, but NVIDIA users, especially on KDE Plasma. NVIDIA and KDE Plasma, sometimes they have issues. So that's good that they have some information about that. Additional kernels, if you want to install a different kernel. We have the advanced tab here, which gives us more options for firewalls, adding users, network management. This is this is one of the best welcome applications I think I have ever seen. If not the best. Like the way it's laid out and it's packed with so much useful information about KOS tells you a little bit about the distribution, then the news. Of course, we get the latest release announcement for the latest release. Then you have the quit button. If I go back to customize and go back to the very first screen, you will notice that this is set to auto start every time you log in. If you don't want it to auto start all the time, of course, you would want to tick that off and close it.  Crow ESO. Then you could get it back up. So I'm going to go through the menu system and see what is installed as far as the default suite of applications. So let's break it down by category. So let's go into games. They only have one game K patients. And in graphics, we really don't have anything here as well. When view, which is KDEs image viewer, and you also have ocular, which is KDEs PDF viewer, their document viewer. Under the internet category, we have Falcon or the web browser. That would explain why they had the web browser thing in the welcome screen as far as do you want Firefox, do you want Chrome? I didn't realize they were shipping such a horrible one browser by default. This is actually KDEs web browser. It's part of the default suite of KDE applications, but I doubt most people would want to run this as a web browser. So you're probably going to want to go through that welcome screen and actually install something like Firefox to get something that's a little better than Falcon. Also, under the internet category, you have KGIT, which is a download manager, part of the KDEs suite of applications. Quasol, which is an IRC client, really nice IRC client. It doesn't look like it was going to auto connect to like a KOS support channel or anything. I always think that's a nice touch when distributions actually have their IRC clients automatically join their own channel. That way, people that are having trouble maybe installing that particular Linux distribution can actually get help immediately. Also, under internet, we had C-File, which is a desktop sync client. I've never actually played with C-File before. We have a multimedia category. We have Alisa, which is a music player, part of, again, KDE app. So everything here is going to be either a default KDE applications or at the very least, it probably should be a Qt-based application. Also, under multimedia, we have K3B, which is a disc burner. It's actually my favorite disc burning utility. I know not everybody burns disc anymore. I still do. And K3B is by far the best free and open source disc burner out there. I always install it. Every time I install Linux, that's one of the first programs I install K3B. I know that makes me sound like a boomer. I'm still burning CDs and DVDs and Blu-rays. But, hey, you know, I still find a need for those. We have Haruna, which is a video player. I've never heard of Haruna. So this is a new one to me. If I go to about Haruna, a configurable video player. This is version 0.8.0. It looks like it is part of the KDE apps because it's using KDE frameworks 5.95. Also, under multimedia, we have Komoso, which is our webcam program, MPV, which is just a video player. It's probably a dependency for Haruna. We also have simple screen recorder, which you can use to record your desktop under the office category. We don't have anything because I didn't install LibreOffice. But if I had to tick that on, obviously the LibreOffice suite would be here in the office category. Then we have our settings, which is the plasma system settings, which let's go ahead and get into that because I want to see a little bit what we can do with theming. For one thing, I'm not crazy about the default theme. It's a little too bright for me. So let's see if we can turn on the dark mode. So if I click on apply, let me move my head there, the apply button was down here. I noticed when I hit apply, though, it's still white here at the bottom part of that window. So I think that's a little bit of a glitch, but it did change the theme. If I go into appearance, we can also change a breeze to breeze dark to breeze twilight. I'm not sure what their default was. It looks like see, I can't even read what the buttons are saying. If I chose breeze twilight, it's a little glitchy, changing the themes at least inside this VM. I'm not sure exactly what those buttons were saying. It was asking me something, but without being able to read it, I have no idea. I wonder if I logged out and logged back in with the theming. Be correct. Let me actually try that. So let me go ahead and log out. Log back in. All right, and let me get into the menu system and do system settings. Yeah, it's still a little strange, the appearance here. And if I try to choose this, yeah, there's something very off with the theming, especially the dark theme, but even the default light theme that was turned on by default. If I click on it and then click apply, I think it's going to still have the same problems if I go to appearance and go to breeze twilight. Yeah, I can actually read it now. So yeah, I guess I'm going to have to stick with the light theme just for the sake of the dark theme is kind of broken where I'm going to have dialogue windows that I won't be able to read. So I better just stick with the default theme. I noticed our wallpaper went away. We had a little crash for the wallpaper. I wonder where I can actually change the wallpaper. Let me do a search here because I'm not that familiar with Katie plasma. Oh, well, when I tried to close the window, the wallpaper came back. I get this. The settings for the current module have changed. You want to apply the changes or discard them? Yeah, apply. And then it went back to the dark theme, didn't it? That's a little glitchy, right? It's a little glitchy. Apply and then try to close. OK, that time it took. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's again, it's a little bit of a bug or it could just be user error. I don't use Katie plasma that often and it's not like I ever live in Katie plasma. Typically the only time you guys see me use Katie plasma. That's all I ever use Katie plasma. I never run it on my own time, right? I always run tiling window managers, typically. But if I go to right click on the desktop, configure desktop and wallpaper, let's see what kind of wallpapers we have available. I'm assuming it's just going to be like the default KDE wallpaper pack. Yeah, a lot of the same stuff I've seen before. But you know, Katie does have really nice wallpapers. I love the abstract art stuff. Here's one that's really nice. That is a beautiful photograph. Let's try safe landing. That's the name of this picture here. That is bright, kind of busy for me. Here's an oldie but a goodie. The shell wallpaper and utopic city. Yeah, that's not bad. I'm going to go to one of my familiar favorites that I often use on plasma. This one here, that's rather nice. Now let's check out this really interesting panel here. So obviously you have the menu here and this is the kickstart menu. If I right click, you could configure application launcher. You've got some things you could play around with if you wanted to and then you had the session buttons right up under the menu. Again, that's not typically where you'd want that because you could accidentally hit those and it's not really, I don't know. It's probably not where I would have put that. Then you have your sticky note application. You have your calculator. People, some people obviously use a calculator all the time, but most people have no need for a calculator to be there. Then you have your workspace switcher. Again, kind of an odd place amongst all of these launchers here, these program launchers. Then you have Dolphin, which of course is KDE's file manager. And it looks like, yeah, I like how the hidden files and directories are kind of grayed out, right? You can kind of barely see them. I probably would.  But even when you show them, they're kind of blurred out. I'm sure there's an option to actually change that because that's kind of annoying to be honest. And then you have Kate, which of course is plain text editor, part of the KDE suite of applications. And then of course, our web browser, the Falcon web browser. Let's open a terminal. Would Control-Alt-T open a terminal? No. So let me hit Super and type console. So KDE's console, of course, which, oh, I don't know why by default it opened with that geometry there because that was a really, really tiny window. Also, it's kind of a tiny font. But let me make that full screen the font I can correct because I can zoom in. I like the prompt here. I wonder if they're using a bash or ZSH or maybe even fish. I could check if I type ZSH. ZSH is not found. So I'm assuming, of course, we're in bash, so I just entered a bash subchill. Let me exit back out of that one.  So let's do a sudo pacman dash S-Y-U. Let's see what programs are available for an update. This has been out for about a week and it looks like there's about 10 things that need to update, including our login manager, SDDM, and also Pulse Audio is getting an update. Let's go ahead and take that because none of these programs are very big. It should just take a few seconds. Now let me do a sudo pacman dash S and I'm going to try to install something, something that I would expect to be on most Linux distributions. Now KOS focuses mainly on KDE Plasma. They don't have any other desktop environments or window manager additions like officially. So I wonder what Xmonad actually be in their repositories. Target not found. OK, so this is one of the things with KOS being an independent distribution. Their repositories of software very small. The only package a little over a thousand packages in the KOS repos where obviously something like Debian and Arch have tens of thousands of packages in their repositories.  Now that's for me because I use a lot of weird stuff for your normal kind of computer user. They're probably just going to install KOS. The default suite of applications will be fine. They'll never really need to go search for anything weird and certainly normal programs like your everyday things like Firefox and Chrome and all that, of course, is available. And also these days because Linux, we have these universal packaging formats like Snap, Flatpak, App Image, most mainstream programs are going to be packaged in one or even all of those available formats, which all of those should work on KOS. KOS does use system D as an it's a knit system. So no problems running Snaps, Flatpaks, App Images. I wonder if Htop is installed out of the box. Htop is not here. Surely Htop has got to be in their repository. It is. All right. I was about to throw my hands up in the air and frustration if Htop wouldn't have been in the repos. That's a standard like a Linux staple right there. Let's see how system resource usage is. Now, I've opened a bunch of programs here. So the RAM number could be a little high because there could still be some background processes running from some of the stuff I've opened. But it's using almost no CPU because we're not really doing anything about 2% CPU. And it's using 900 megs of the six gigs of Ram that I gave this virtual machine. Let's do a username dash R. Let's get the kernel there on kernel 5.17.15. Let's get a count of the programs installed out of the box. So if I did Pacman dash, I believe it's capital Q lowercase q right to get a list of all the programs that are installed. And if I piped that into the word count program, so pipe that into WC and give WC this flag dash L for line count, meaning this output where everything is on its own line. I want a line count of it. 917 packages installed out of the box. That is pretty minimal actually. And I didn't choose the minimal install. So the minimal install probably would be really minimal because that's not a lot of programs for a full desktop environment and suite of applications. One thing we should also take a look at is do you have to install software at the command line? Or is there a graphical software center? So if I type for software, they are using Octopi. Octopi is actually really nice. Octopi kind of reminds me of the old Debian Synaptic Package Manager. So Debian has a graphical package manager called Synaptic that breaks things down by category and has a search field where you can search the entire Debian repositories. And Octopi kind of looks a little like the old Synaptic Package Manager. Not exactly on Synaptic. I don't believe is a Qt app. I believe is a GTK app anyway. But they do have that same kind of look and feel. Zero AD is in the repositories for KOS. I think that's a very important application to actually have in your distributions repositories. A fantastic game for you and open source. So that's nice that they have some kind of GUI package manager was Discover here. I typed for Discover. No, what's the other KDE store? But anyway, software, when you just type the word software, the only thing that comes up is Octopi. So I'm assuming that's the your only options is either use Octopi or just use Pacman at the command line. Now, one thing that kind of bugs me and I want to change, I want this panel to move. So if I right click on it and go into edit mode. And now can I drag to move? Yes, we can just drag it over here, get the close button. And I think that makes a lot more sense. Click the close button over here. I think that makes a lot more sense for that panel to be right there than where it was. So I think I'm going to leave that as is. I'm going to keep this VM around. I do think KOS is interesting. I think it's nice to have these independent distributions that are doing their own thing. They're focused on KDE Plasma. That's a very unique KDE Plasma desktop, especially the way they had that right hand panel. So job well done. KOS has actually been around for a while. This is probably the third or fourth time I've taken a look at it on this channel in the five years or so. I've been doing this channel, but I know it existed before I started doing the YouTube channel five years ago. So it doesn't get a lot of attention. And I think part of the reason it doesn't get a lot of attention. I think that small repository of software they have, I think it hurts them a little bit. I think that's often the problem with these independent distributions. I know I've complained about Solus. Solus is a fantastic distribution. It's up for the fact that there are certain programs I want to run that are not packaged in the Solus repositories. And that's going to be the case with KOS as I could never personally run KOS. There's too much stuff I rely on that I couldn't actually get installed through the traditional means using KOS. But if you're a much more generic kind of normal computer user where you just install KDE Plasma, you're fine with the default suite of applications and you're good. I think it's a fascinating distribution and one I am going to keep up with in the future. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Michael Mitchell, Paul West. Why you bald on me? Alan Armoredragons, Chuck Commander, Rengarita Yohkai, Dylan Marstrum, Erion Alexander, a piece of Archimdor, Polytech, Riala Teetz, for less, Red Private Steven, Tools Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at KOS would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. Without each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, I couldn't do what I'd do. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys, the community. If you like my work, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. I still think they should have pronounced it KOS. That's a missed opportunity.