Advice My Clients Probably Won't Read » How to . . .

Great laptop spill tips

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:33:50 +0000

See these tips from Atiwa before you spill coffee on your laptop!

Blog Woes

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:43:17 +0000

Just an fyi for my clients… I noticed this blog wasn’t coming up and proceeded to spend 3 hours trying to figure out why. Spent some time on the phone with tech support, and we confirmed that the config file looked correct, etc., but it wasn’t until I went to the hosting management screen and then File Manager and then checked the box for the config file, that the database connection was restored and, voila!, it’s back and working again. I recall that with some shopping carts, after you make changes or sometimes “just because”, simply “touching” the config file out on the server will jump start the application again.

I just thought you’d like to know you aren’t the only people whose websites or blogs can get screwed up. Misery loves company, I know.

Outlook vs. Webmail

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 14:26:19 +0000

Webmail is any mail (our webmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.) that you cannot access when your internet service is down. It is not a good idea to use webmail. It’s a very bad idea actually since webmail is not backed up.

Our support page shows you how to set up Outlook to include an account that will retrieve mail from your mail account with us – assuming I host your site on my server in Dallas.

Facebook – fan or thumbs up

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:43:24 +0000

If you’re looking for the link to become a fan on someone’s Facebook page, give up. They’ve replaced it with the “Like” button.

Computers-Repair or Replace?

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:52:42 +0000

I took a class at UT (actually I took several since I graduated from there), but this one in particular was Cost Accounting. Can you say Sahara desert? That’s how dry it was.

But it has proven very helpful over the years in making repair/replace decisions. The general rule of thumb is that if you can get your money’s worth out of an item, you should continue to invest in it. But that’s theory. In real life, at some point you just have to say enough.

That’s what I’m looking at with my laptop. It’s almost 4 years old and the screen goes funky after a few minutes. I did a format and restore and it still does it. Toshiba says it will probably cost $425 to repair. And even if that fixes it, then I’m still left with a 4 year old laptop that’s liable to have something else go wrong with it.

Decisions, decisions. Since it’s a tablet pc, I’m thinking I might get it repaired, but also get me a plain old laptop that will suffice when my desktop goes down next time. Laptops are so cheap these days, I can get a pretty good one and get the tablet pc repaired for the cost of getting a new tablet.

Sorry – this wasn’t very educational for you probably, but it was useful for me to clarify my thoughts.

And it reminds me to remind you – at least once a year, turn off your desktop, unplug it, open it up and blow out all the dust. Depending on how many pets and people you have in your house, you might be surprised to see what can accumulate and make your fan work harder, etc.

Tags on Wordpress

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:56:12 +0000

Tags are keywords, separated by commas, that you enter so if someone is on your blog and wants info about a particular subject, they might can find it in the tag “cloud”. Each posting should have 2 or 3 tags which you can also think of as keyword. A single tag can be one word or a 2 to 3 word phrase, like “tags on wordpress”.

Over time, your tag cloud will get bigger and the tags you use most often – which should correlate to your most written-about topics – will appear bigger.

On my blog, the last time I looked, “SEO” was listed prominently in the “tag cloud”. A visitor to my blog can click that word and see a list of the articles that I tagged with “SEO.”

Tags are important for search engines being able to index your blog and, more importantly, for your readers. Use them, but don’t abuse them.

Send email to a phone as text message

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:56:35 +0000

Very cool: This explains how to send an email to someone’s phone so they get it as a text message.
E-Mail Text Messages to a Phone – PC World

But be considerate. Many people have to pay for each text message they receive so don’t go crazy unless you know someone has a plan with unlimited texting. Or they have unlimited money.
We wish.

Utterly Basic Wordpress

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:11:56 +0000

When you log in, you’ll want to be in “My Dashboard” not the Global one.

Click Posts on the left. Find the Add New button and click it. Start typing in the big white area.

To insert an image in your blog, find the words “Upload/Insert” just above the the white space where you type. See the rectangular gray icon? Click that and then you can browse to find an image and insert. Make sure you click the insert button. The first time I tried it, I kept uploading it but it wouldn’t show up in the blog. Then I realized I was uploading to a gallery. When I finally hit insert, it showed up in the blog.

Create categories to put your posts in – if appropriate. Let’s say you sell hand-painted t-shirts. Maybe you want a category called “Inspiration” and that’s where you put any postings that talk about what inspires your art. Maybe you want a category called “Fashion Do’s” where you talk about ways/places/how to wear your t-shirts. The goal of categories is to make it easier for someone to find postings that might interest them. It’s also to help search engines find what you write.

Be sure to fill in the the Excerpt when you write a new article. Keep it short and to the point.

And include 2 to 4 tags for your post (enter them in the box in the right column). Think of them as keywords.

When done, click the blue Publish button on the right. Or Preview (the button above that) if you’re one of those anal types that likes to catch your mistakes before other people see them. You can also change the date to something in the future, which is useful if you want to have a bunch of articles publish automatically when you’re on vacation. You can leave a posting as Draft and use it if you’re sick and don’t feel like writing one day.

Podcast Basics

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:40:00 +0000

HowStuffWorks “How to Create Your Own Podcast”
The link above is a great article about creating your own podcast.

Summary: A podcast is simply an audio (usually) recording that people can download and play. What makes a podcast different from simply having a link on your website that plays an audio file is that people can subscribe to a podcast simply by clicking a button on a website.

So, if I wanted to record myself speaking all this invaluable advice I lavish on you, I could do that and make it available as a podcast. Ideally, I would do it with a decent microphone and recorder which plugs into my pc and then have an audio editing program so I could edit out any long pauses or telling my dog to “drop it” or whatever else wasn’t pertinent to the subject.

You could subscribe on my website, and then anytime I uploaded something new, you would automatically get it delivered to your computer. You could play it on your computer or download it to your iPod or mp3 player and listen to it while you run your 3 miles a day (or sit on the back porch watching the hummingbirds).

Our cheapo web hosting (for do-it-yourselfers) service offers a Quick Blogcast/Podcast website that starts as low as $3/month and makes it easy to upload your mp3 file and create the podcast feed without even understanding what a feed is! Pretty cool.

Email Spoofing

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:14:52 +0000

Sometimes you get a bounced message that you didn’t send in the first place and the reason for that is that someone has spoofed your email address. They have formatted an email to appear that it came from you when it really didn’t. They are usually hoping that you’ll click some link in the email to figure out what’s going on and then, yippee, you’re taken to some annoying, perverse or otherwise malicious website.

There’s not much you can do about spoofing. Just delete the emails and hope they get tired of doing it. I did have spoofing become such an issue with my original email address, which I ignorantly used all over the internet when I first started, that I had to quit using that email address.