If you need to access your backup, please contact us as soon as possible to have the greatest chance of recovering your important files and website.

Including the default non-secure version on an “https:” SSL secured page will cause your client’s browsers to display ‘insecure’ messages, or fail to display the lock icon and certificate information associated with a secure page. This can reduce consumer confidence in your service, as well as look unprofessional.

We’ve developed a fix for it – with just a small upload and a change in the default Skype web status code, you can now include your web status on ANY page, secure or not. You can see an example of it working on our website contact page.

Download the Secure Skype Web Status code for your website.

We welcome your comments and any questions regarding the installation and use of this code.

If you missed our original Skype web status article, check it out here on how to keep your Skype web status online behind a firewall.

All of our clients who are running managed/preconfigured WordPress on their site have now been upgraded to the latest version. Please let us know if you have any problems.

For those who haven’t heard about WordPress, it’s a blogging platform especially designed to be easy to use, and allows you to edit the pages of your website, as well as post news, blogs, images and video to your website.

As well as installing, configuring and managing WordPress websites, we also create custom themes, plugins and widgets. We can create you a brand new theme, or convert an existing website design into a WordPress theme. Our custom plugins and widgets can provide your site with that extra functionality you need, such as a user forum or custom post types such as a magazine. Please contact us to find out more.

There are several ways to get answers and statistics about your website.

WordPress Stats plugin

If your site runs on WordPress, you can install the WordPress Stats plugin. It’s a bit fiddly to install (you have to sign up for an API key, and then link it to your WordPress blog), but if your WordPress site was created by Trystal Tech, you’ll already have this up and running!

You can view the statistics of your website on the Dashboard, where you’ll see a graph of how many visitors per day, as well as a quick reference of where users are coming from, and what search terms they’ve typed in to find you.

AWStats

AWStats will show you page view statistics regardless of what you’re running on your website. Even if you use WordPress Stats, you can still find more accurate information in AWStats. AWStats is included free with any Trystal Tech hosting package.

To access your AWStats page, login to your hosting ControlPanel. You can access it via http://www.yoursite.com/controlpanel. If you don’t know your login, contact us to find out.

Once you’re logged in, find the box labeled ‘Logs’, and press the ‘Awstats’ icon. On the next page, click the magnifying glass next to your website. If you have subdomains, they have separate statistics, so select the one you’d like to view.

The statistics page will now appear, and you’ll see the colourful graph of visitors, pages and bandwidth.
Scrolling down, you can view your website visits grouped by days or hours, as well as by country.
Near the bottom of the page you’ll see a box titled ‘Connect to site from’, which shows you the sites that your visitors came from (for example, by following a link to your site).
Just under that are the search phrases used to find your website.

You can also view the results for previous months, or even the whole year, just change the month at the top of the page, click OK and wait for the stats to load.

However, lately I’ve noticed that my Skype connection appears to drop “offline” after a while. The Skype program on my desktop was happily set to ‘Online’, yet the Skype button on my website would change to ‘Offline’ after a while, and my contacts would tell me I was not online on their screens. Changing my status to ‘Away’, then back to ‘Online’ again fixes the problem for a while, until it disconnects / times out again.

I’m asuming this problem has something to do with firewalls, or my router, closing old connections that haven’t been updated in a while. So to combat this, I wrote the SkypeStatusFlick program, which uses the Skype API to update your status every 5 mins, and keep you online.

• If you’re on ‘Away’, every 5 minutes it will switch you to ‘Do Not Disturb’, then back to ‘Away’ instantly.
• If you’re on ‘Appear Offline / Invisible / Logged Out’, the program will not change your status at all.
• Otherwise, every 5 minutes you’ll get switched to ‘Away’, then instantly back to whatever your status is on.

Installation

Download SkypeStatusFlick

You’ll need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 installed to run SkypeStatusFlick. Then just extract the ZIP file and run SkypeStatusFlick.exe!

When you run the program for the first time, you’ll need to set Skype to allow access to SkypeStatusFlick.exe. Run SkypeStatusFlick, then open up your Skype window, and you should see a popup requesting access. Click Accept to allow SkypeStatusFlick to run. You only need to do this once, unless you reinstall or move SkypeStatusFlick.exe.
If you don’t allow access, SkypeStatusFlick will popup to tell you that it cannot access Skype, and you need to follow the directions above.

Create a shortcut to SkypeStatusFlick and put it in your StartUp folder to have it running in the background just like Skype. It doesn’t matter if Skype’s not running – the program will just wait until it is to start working.

Note: sometimes when Windows starts up the ‘Unhandled Error’ screen pops up, as Skype hasn’t fully loaded yet. Just hit ‘Continue’ and the program will continue to work in the background.

Ensure the security of your customer’s online transactions by purchasing an SSL certificate. This allows you to display the ‘lock’ icon in the browser when viewing your website, as well as use ‘https’ to access your website.

Providing an SSL certificate assures your customers that their credit card and personal details are encrypted using 128-bit encryption. SSL certificates are a requirement for online stores collecting credit card numbers.

SSL certificates require a dedicated IP – for pricing, please see our website hosting page. Installation and configuration of your SSL certificate on our servers is FREE!

Each hosting package supports PHP, MySQL, Perl and CGI. Your account will include cPanel so that you can manage your email addresses, subdomains and files, and also keep track of your monthly bandwidth usage.

If you don’t yet have a website, why not ask us to design one for you? Purchasing a website and hosting from Trystal Tech entitles you to a discount, and you get it all set up and ready to go without needing to worry about a thing.

Please check them out here: http://www.trystaltech.com.au/website-design-development/website-hosting/
If you’d like to sign up, send an email to info @ trystaltech .com .au with the package you’d like, and whether you’d also like to purchase a domain name, or bring your own.