Tech Wise Guy

Technology Frustrations happen to everyone: loosing a document you worked 2 hours on, having your computer not cooperate while working on an important project, not being able to get on the internet when you need to get some web work done, …. Doesn’t it seem like the computers know when the most inopportune time to have problems would be and choose that time to play a trick on you? It often does to me.

You might be relieved to know that these things happen to Big Business too. The computer imp does not discriminate.

I am in the heart of the San Francisco Financial District helping a Big Business move. We have 8 technical people all ready to move the computer room ( a room with about 30 servers that provide the company with essential services like email, file storage, product development, ….) when the imp strikes.

The air conditioning is not working in the computer room

The fiber cables going down 19 floors to connect us to the internet are all bad

And these things happen just hours before we are supposed to make the move. And all of these highly paid computer specialists are unable to do anything about it. So we do other things to put our highly trained selves to good use: we assemble telephones, we sort computer cables by color and length, we un-twist wire ties. Lots of fun stuff!

Does this sound similar to those experiences we all have with technology? Well, I guess there is a slight difference. At least we can commiserate as group instead of alone.

About a month ago I started getting PDF only spam - an email with no text and PDF attachment. This is a new kind of spam. It gets around spam filters because spam filters use the contents of the body to determine if an email is spam or not. If there is no text in the body, then it can not match spam rules (These spammers are smart … or is it that they are just persistent?)

So one month later, my corporate spam filter is still not catching these. So I decided I needed to take things into my own hands. I first obsess for about 5 minutes about why people still respond to spam. Email users responding to spam makes spam profitable and makes spam proliferate. But educating every user on the internet is too big a problem. I will settle for helping the ones who are looking to learn.

So how did I filter these PDF emails out? With a little help from Steve Bass, I created an Outlook Filter that so far is is 100% successful. It catches 100% of this kind of spam with no false positives ( unless you happen to get legitimate PDF emails with no body ).

The rule is “delete any email with a PDF attachment unless it has a, e, or o in the body”. Any legitimate email with a PDF attachment w ill have some words in the body, and therefore will get excluded from this rule because of the vowels. It should take about 2 minutes to setup this rule.

Choose your preference in the instructions below - one has pictures showing the steps and one does not.

Creating the PDF Spam Filter in Outlook (no pictures)

1. While looking at your Inbox, go to the Tools menu and click on Rules and Alerts
2. Click on the New Rule button.
3. At the top of the New Rule box, choose Start from a blank rule, then press Next
   
4. In the Step 1 box, check the boxes in front of:
   with specific words in the message header
   which has an attachment
   
5. In the Step 2 box, click on specific words. In the new window, enter the text pdf, click Add, then click OK.
6. You should now see this. Press Next
   
7. Check the box in front of delete it and press Next.
8. Check the box in front of except if the body contains specific words
9. In Step2 click on Specific Words. In the new window, enter a then click Add. Repeat for e and o, then click OK.
10. You should now see this. Press Next.
    
11. Name this rule PDF Spam. Check Run this rule now on messages already in Inbox.
    
12. Click Finish, then click OK to get out of Rules and Alerts.

Creating the PDF Spam Filter in Outlook (with pictures)

1. While looking at your Inbox, go to the Tools menu and click on Rules and Alerts
2. Click on the New Rule button.
3. At the top of the New Rule box, choose Start from a blank rule, then press Next
   
4. In the Step 1 box, check the boxes in front of:
   with specific words in the message header
   which has an attachment
   
5. In the Step 2 box, click on specific words. In the new window, enter the text pdf, click Add, then click OK.
6. You should now see this. Press Next
   
7. Check the box in front of delete it and press Next.
8. Check the box in front of except if the body contains specific words
9. In Step2 click on Specific Words. In the new window, enter a then click Add. Repeat for e and o, then click OK.
10. You should now see this. Press Next.
    
11. Name this rule PDF Spam. Check Run this rule now on messages already in Inbox.
    
12. Click Finish, then click OK to get out of Rules and Alerts.

That didn’t take too long, did it? Any PDF spam from your inbox should be gone and all future PDF spam should be deleted automatically.

Outlook has a “feature” that alerts you every time you get an email. While this idea is noble, I find it to be a complete distraction and a productivity killer. Turning this feature helps you to be in charge of your email communications, not visa versa.

Think if you were trying to get a project done and had someone interrupt you every 2 minutes. It would make it quite difficult to get anything done. All you work at home moms know exactly what this feels like. While I can only sympathize and commend the moms who work with this level of distraction, I can do something about my emails.

I usually get at least 50 emails per day. This is after all of my rules weed out the automated messages that I do not need to see, and my spam filter weeds out the spam. 50 emails per day is about one email every 10 minutes for a normal 8 hour work day. But I do not want to stop what I am doing every 10 minutes. So I have decided to say “No! what I am working on is more important that the newest email. I will then check my email at some later time in the day of my choosing.”

But that statement will only work for me if I reduce the temptations to read my email. The Outlook popup that shows the sender and subject of an email is often too much of a temptation, so it has to go. I have just turned off those notifications, and you might want to do the same. Here is how.

In Outlook 2003, to get to the notification options:

1. From the Tools menu, choose Options
2. On the Preferences tab, click on E-mail Options
3. Click Advanced E-mail Options
4. Look for the section When new items arrive in my Inbox.

The Options

There are four options. Uncheck the ones that you do not want.

• Play a sound - I do not want a sound every time I get an email, so I unchecked this
• Briefly change the mouse cursor - the cursor briefly changing is not a big distraction to me, but I am trying to get completely away from emails while working on a project. So this one goes off too.
• Show an envelope Icon in the notification area - A little envelope down near the time is pretty innocuous , but I do not have a need for it, so I turned it off as well.
• Display a New Mail Desktop Alert - this is the BAD one that pops up the sender and subject. Turn this one off!!!

With the notifications gone, I am not distracted by email, allowing me to work on those important tasks. I hope it helps you too.

Now that you have a basic familiarity with the Wordpress Admin console, we are going to setup the options for your website. What we do here will only need to be done one time, so you do not need to worry if you do not understand everything you are doing.

Note: Below are screenshots of the pages you will be modifying. Click on the screen shot to see the full size image.

General Options

First click on the Options tab. You will see the General Options

On this page, you will need to set the title for your website and a tagline. The tagline is a brief description of your business, and is used by search engines as the short description for who you are.

After that, we have a technical issue … where wordpress is publishing your website. You want wordpress to be what your visitors see when they type http://yourbusinessname.com. If the Blog address has something after the .com (like /wordpress shown here), then they will not see it unless they add /wordpress to the URL. TO fix this, contact your hosting provider and as them to “Change wordpress so it is at the root of my website”. For a technical person, use the to be different from the directory link to see directions on how to do this yourself.

Last on this page is your email address. This is what wordpress uses to tell you about happenings on your website, like when people leave comments. This email address will not be shown or given out.

Well, not last, second to last. The Time zone might need to be modified. -8 (Pacific) -7 (Mountain) -6 (Central) -5 (Eastern)

We are done with this page. Click on the Update Options button.

Privacy

The default Writing, Reading and Discussion options are usually fine for a website. Here on the Privacy tab, you need to decide if you want to allow search engines. I recommend allowing them.

Change the selector if needed and Click Update Options.

Permalink

Click on the next tab - Permalink

Permalink is the URL used to access your pages and posts. By default it uses the page ID. This does not look good, and is not liked by search engines. Click the circle in front of Custom, specify below and then enter the following: /%postname%

This will make the URL be the page name. For example, the about page, the URL will be http://bobsoapdishes.com/about
Click Update Permalink Structure

All Done

Your settings are done. That was not too hard, and I think we are probably under our 1/2 hour. If you have more time and brainpower, consider working more on your About page. This page will introduce visitors to your company, so it should be something interesting and informative. Look at other website’s about pages to get Ideas for yours.

That’s it for today. Next time we get into a fun topic - your website’s Theme.

So you are interested enough to read on. Good! I am going to try to break Easy Small Business Website using Wordpress down into bite sized pieces ( hopefully about 30 minutes) so you can get thorough this without getting technology overload. Being a technology worker, I can ingest a lot of new technical information, but even I get to the point where my head hurts and I do not want to have anything to do with the computer.

So here we go.

Basic Terminology

• Post - a post is an article that will go on your main webpage. As you add more posts, the older ones will eventually drop off. You will use the posts for telling your customers current information about your business.
• Page - a web page. You will use pages to build the structure of your website and give your users information about your business that is not quickly changing. Examples are “About Us” or “Contact Information”

We will keep the new terms to just two for now.

Logging In

Your first action item is to login to Wordpress. Your hosing provider should have provided you with an an administrator login for wordpress. If they did not, and you can not figure it out in about 5 minutes, this is a good time to learn how to submit a technical support request. Every Hosting provider has a different method, but it is usually not too hard to find.

The Login page will generally look like this

Dashboard options

So you have logged in. Good. Now you are at the Dashboard. From here you can get to all administration functions in wordpress. Across the top are links to the various administrative pages.

Below is a list of definitions for each button. Don’t worry about remembering all this, or even reading all of the below bullet points. We are only going to look at the first two for now. You can reference back here when you need to.

• Write - where you write a new post or a new page
• Manage - edit existing posts and pages
• Comments - if you allow this, people can give you feedback on your posts. This is where you can review any new comments.
• Blogroll - a list of websites that you like and want to share with the people on your site.
• Presentation - This is where you change how your website looks
• Plugins - Manage plugins - mini programs that can enhance what Wordpress can do.
• Users - create and modify users. You can create a new username and password for each person in your business that wants to update the website.
• Options - changing wordpress settings to change how wordpress works

Creating a Page

Lets finish up by creating a page. Click on the Write button. Now you will see a second row of buttons across the top. Click on the Write Page button. Now you should see something like this:

So go to the Title box and enter About. Then go to the editing box below it and write a sentence or two. Don’t take too long thinking of what to write - you will come back later and make the about page more complete.

Below the edit box is a Publish button. Click it.

Good. You have now created your first page.

To see and edit that page, click on the Manage button. You now have a list (quite short at this point) of your pages.

To see your page on the website, click the View Site link next to the site name at the top of the page.

That’s it for today.  If you still want to do more, you can make a few more pages, like “Contact Information”.  Otherwise, we will pick up next time and Set Basic Wordpress Options

The Wise Guy interrupts the normal blog to bring you commentary from the big event here in Nevada County - the Nevada County fair. Now you may wonder how the fair fits into a blog about computers and the Internet. Well, it does not really, but what is a technical guy to do.  There is no WIFI at this fair.   No WIFI!   How can such a thing happen.   Its not like we are in the middle of nowhere ….   Well, we kind of are.     And I hope that they never have WIFI at the fair.

So what does Tech Wise Guy think about when he is at the fair and not able to connect to the internet. I start by noticing how similar the fair looks compared to when I was young. It is the same fair grounds, and many of the rides look the same: the Zipper, the Scrambler, the Ferris Wheel, the Mirror house.

And then my ecclectic mind drags out the memories from 20 years ago, which leads to the question: “Are these the SAME rides?” Is the zipper the same zipper I rode on 20 years ago? It certainly looks the same. Do you think that fair rides last for 20 years? I wonder.

So as I watch my daughter ride the Orient Express for the 5th time, I ponder that question.

And my highly unscientific conclusion is this: I think so.

And even if they are not the same rides I rode 20 years ago, it is still a wonder that these rides are assembled and disassembled 20 times per year, operate virtually non-stop for days at a time, and still are considered safe?

A 20 year old ride is safe?

I think this is an amazing testimony to technology.

And that is what Tech Wise guy ponders while at the fair.

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Does your small business need a website? Does your existing website look a little too home-made? Do you have to pay a “professional” to make changes to your website? If you said yes to any of these, consider creating a new website. You can do it! You can create a professional looking website yourself, without a lot of technical expertise. Sound good? Read on to learn how.

A website generally consists of three parts: a Web Server (i.e. web hosting), Site Design (how the site looks), and Content (the information about your business). My earlier article Getting web hosting experts on your team addressed web hosting. Now we need to tackle Site Design and Content. Lets assume you do not want to pay someone to design a site and put all the content in. Good, because we can get designing done for free and you can put the content in yourself, using Wordpress.

Wordpress as Web Design software

As a blogger, I use Wordpress. It is a free tool that allows users to easily publish content to the web without being technical. But Wordpress is not limited to blogs. You can create a website for a small business as easily as you can create a blog. Wordpress has an easy to use web interface … no software to install on your local computer. You can design and publish web pages right in your web browser.

Wordpress uses Themes - a package of files that define how a site looks. In other words, a theme is the wordpress answer to Site Design. And because of its popularity, people create themes for Wordpress and make them freely available - thousands of them. So you can find a free theme and use it on your website.

But Wait, there’s More

Wordpress has another big bonus … Plugins. A plugin is an way of easily adding new features to wordpress. Want a calendar of events? Wordpress has a plugin for it. Want a google map to your business … a plugin is available for that too. There are hundreds of these plugins that can be used to create a website that is just what you need.

Summary

Wordpress is an excellent tool for creating a small business website. It provides

• A browser based, GUI tool for creating and publishing content
• Themes for customizing Site Design
• Plugins for adding additional features to your site

So now we just need to make it happen.

Next Steps

• Setup an account with a web host that provides Wordpress - see Getting web hosting experts on your team
• Learn the basics of the Wordpress tool
• Set basic wordpress options
• Find and install a theme for your wordpress site
• Create your site content
• Add plugins for additional Features

Tomorrow: Learn the basics of the Wordpress tool.

Calling one person at a time can be limiting. Talking with your designer, printer, and warehouser at the same time could really help to resolve a problem in your product packaging. Or having a phone seminar with your readers could really help build your blog. Whatever the reason, having the ability to at will setup a conference call with the people you select is invaluable for business.

Large Business uses conference calling all the time. Small Business should to. And what about if I said you can conference call for Free. Interested?

A conference call is a way of connecting many people on one call. conference calls use special equipment (a conference bridge) to allow participants to hear and speak on the same call without loss in quality due to the number of people, which can range from 3 to hundreds. This equipment is not cheap, so it is not practical for most businesses to have their own service. So conference call providers purchase the equipment and “rent” it to people wanting to have conference calls. Typical conference call providers charge per minute, something like $.05 per minute per participant. Add up the cost and you find that a 4 person call costs $12 per hour.

While researching conference call providers I found several that provide reasonable functionality with no cost. For a small business watching every penny, having a free conference call service might make the difference between using and not using a conference service. So this article topic changed to focus on Free conference services.

Being the inquisitive type, I tried to figure out how they made their money. They say there are no string attached, and that they make money offering premium services. But I am not sure that those extra services can pay for their business expenses, plus the google ads that they use. So my highly unscientific and likely incorrect conclusion is they somehow receive a cut from long distance phone companies. One of them uses phone number from an Area code from Iowa. It is a safe bet that 99% of their users dial long distance.

How To

Many of these services required no sign-up of any kind … just go to their Website and follow the easy instructions ( and most looked pretty easy ). Some gave more services if you signed up for a free account.

Recommendations

• Try out several and find the one that works the best
• Setup several test conference calls with one or more co-worker/friend to get used to using the service

Necessary Features

• Your own PIN - I want my own PIN, so I can always use the same dial-in number and PIN.
• No pre-scheduling - use your conference call number at any time without first having to go to the website and schedule a conference
• Maximum users - my average conference calls connect up to 5 users, but for flexibility I want at least a 10 user maximum. Many services provide a 50 user maximum, which is better for conference presentations.

Nice Features

• Mute - Mute all other callers during a presentation
• Recording - Record the conference call and download it to your computer
• Moderator PIN - A secondary PIN for the moderator that allows only them to start a meeting.

Provider List

• http://www.foonz.com
• http://www.powwownow.com
• http://www.freeconference.com
• http://www.instantconference.com
• http://www.freeconferenceservice.com
• http://www.freeconferencecall.com

In person meetings are costly. Preparation for the meeting takes time, including personal time for dressing in business attire and doing makeup. Then traveling to the meeting and being early in case of traffic problems uses more time and money.

How can we save some of this cost?

Online meetings provide a cost effective alternative to in person meetings. The online meeting saves the personal time and travel time. In addition, you do not need to find or rent a meeting facility. I believe you will find your business partners are happy to replace many in person meetings with online meetings, enjoying the same savings as you.

What Is it

An online meeting is a conference call with the ability to show attendees information on their computer. The information shown could be a simple powerpoint presentation, or it could be viewing pages on a website (or multiple websites). If you can do it on your computer, you can show it to your attendees.

Requirements

All attendees must have a phone and a computer with internet access and a Web Browser.

How To

Online meetings are scheduled and run through a web browser. Typically, you schedule the meeting date, time and duration with your meeting provider. Invitations to the meeting are automatically sent by the meeting provider.

At the time of the meeting, you join the meeting as the presenter and dial into the conference call number. The meeting attendees Click on the link in their invitation, enter some simple information (name, meeting password) to join the meeting and dial in to the conference call.

Recommendations

• Sign up for a free trial period and try it out
• During the trial period, schedule at least 3 meetings with friends or co-workers to get comfortable with the process of setting up and presenting an on-line meeting
• Ask for help from the meeting provider. They should be happy to help you get started and get used to their service (in hopes you will choose them )

Necessary Features

• Dial in number - unless you already have a conference bridge (a dial in conference number that supports many people), the meeting provider should have a dial-in number
• Fully web based - there should be no manual download and install of software needed. Most meeting providers automatically download their software the first time you join a meeting … That is OK.
• Mute - You should be able to mute/unmute meeting participants.
• Application/desktop sharing - you should be able to let the participants see just one application or your entire computer screen.

Nice Features

• Remote presenter - a participants computer can also be shared, so they can be the presenter. You should be able to easily switch the presenter back and forth.
• Remote control - a participant shares their computer and you can remotely control their computer. This is essential if you are working with customers on computer problems.
• 800 number - This costs more, but might be worth the extra cost depending on your audience.

Provider List

• http://www.officescape.com
• https://www.gotomeeting.com
• http://www.conferencecall.com
• http://meetmenow.webex.com

I have been having a battle with wordpress. It has been a relatively quiet battle, except for an occasional rant of frustration to my wife tea party girl. But it has been ongoing for a couple of weeks now. And like many battles with a computer, I did not know the problem until I found the solution.

Symptoms

The problems start with not being able to enable a new wordpress plugin: Ultimate Tag Warrior. When enabling it I get a Fatal Errror. Over the next two weeks, while trying to make it work, I had the following symptoms:

• Manage Posts page does not show any posts
• After writing a post, get a blank screen (post.php)
• Enabling a plugin fails with Fatal Error
• Clicking on Manage tab prompts to save the file edit.php (instead of just displaying it on the screen)
• Entire blog website goes blank (visitors get a blank page )
• Editor toolbar is missing - just see post text with all the HTML junk in it.

Solution

I finally decided to see if my hosting provider was the problem. I transferred a copy of my blog to another hosting provider, to see if the same behavior would happen there. It did. But there was a subtle difference. Instead of seeing the blank pages mentioned above, an error message was displayed “Unable to allocate memory ……”. Yahoo! Finally a piece of information to help me find this problem.

To keep this short, the problem was in PHP, the computer language Worspress is written in. The language has a maximum memory size for a single process ( ie clicking on manager, saving a post, … ). On my server, this maximum was set to 8MB. I increased this memory size and almost all of my problems went away.

If you are having problems like above, consider checking your memory settings for PHP. Choose the answer below based on your technical skills.

Checking php memory - non-technical

Contact your hosting provider. Tell them you are having problems with a php application on your site, and think the problem could be the php memory limit. Ask them check the memory_limit in php.in. If it is set to 8MB, increase it to 16MB.

Checking php memory - technical

If you have rights to change system settings and are familiar using the command line to edit server files, then here is what you do ( commands in parenthesis ).

1. Find php.ini (find / -name php.ini ). I have seen it in several locations, including:|
   /etc/php.ini|
   /etc/php/php.ini
   /etc/php/apache2/php.ini
2. Edit the file (vi /etc/php.ini )
3. find memory limit ( / memory_limit )
4. If the value is 8M, increase it to 16M ( move onto the 8 and cw to modify the word )
5. Save the file ( esc :wq )

You might need to restart the web server for this to take effect.