National Communications are an Australian company, selling telephone line equipment, door station products, and digital audio hardware. They approached us with the dream of having a fully automated shopping cart, with the ability to accept credit cards and PayPal payments instantly and securely. NatComm had brand new product images (as well as some exciting new products!) to add, plus some new product descriptions and brochures.

First, we asked one of our fabulous designers Amy to create a brand new website image for National Communications. When everyone was happy with the design, we built it into an online shopping cart system, and imported all of the old and new products, images & documents from their existing site. Shipping rates were set up, as well as different products for different regions – for when NatComm expands their online presence overseas.

Our shopping cart site accepts various payment methods – PayPal of course (we’re certified developers!), and direct credit card, securely transmitted over an SSL encrypted connection. We built the credit card integration into Commonwealth Bank’s gateway from scratch, and gained approval for our module from the CommWeb online merchant team.

We invite you to head over and check out their new website – and take a look at their fantastic products too!

Should you have a virus, a computer that won’t turn on, or a clogged up Windows system, please call 03 9008 6334 to organise a pickup appointment. Appointments can also be made out of hours – in the evenings, or on weekends.

Our existing number is now solely for web development & design  (03 9008 6332).

Creating your Facebook Page

If you haven’t already created a Facebook Page, here’s how:

• Visit: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
• Follow the instructions to create a page
• Make sure you put a link to your website in your business details section
• Once your page is created, you’ll be able to access it via the ‘Account’ menu at the top right, then click ‘Use Facebook As A Page’

One of the most difficult concepts to grasp once you’ve made a page is switching back and forth from yourself to the Page. When you login to Facebook, you are ‘You’. When you switch to ‘Use Facebook As A Page’, you become the ‘Page’. Whilst you are the page, you can ‘like’ other Pages, post messages on other Pages, and post on your own Page. The messages you post will appear to come from ‘Your Business’. However, you can’t access your personal friends until you switch back to ‘You’.

Now, go out and get some fans – the first one should be you, of course! Make sure you are logged in as ‘You’, not the ‘Page’, and click the ‘Like’ button at the top of your Page. Get your friends involved by clicking ‘Invite friends’ on the far right, and ticking the box next to friends you think will like your Page. They’ll receive an invite and a link to your page. Below you’ll find some more advanced tips and tricks for becoming a master at Facebook Pages.

A Custom Facebook Address/URL

You can secure for your Fan Page a custom URL, such as facebook.com/TrystalTech, instead of having to send people to facebook.com/pages/Trystal-Tech/333705765841. It looks far more professional, and is a lot easier to remember.

Once you choose your Custom URL, you cannot change it, so think carefully about what you want your users to see.

Visit www.facebook.com/username to get your own custom address for your page!

UPDATE 15/09/2011: You no longer need to have a minimum of 25 followers to get a Facebook username for your page – anyone can do it!

Tagging other Pages

Linking to other fan pages is a great way to send some love to your fellow businesses! And hopefully, they will link back to you in their own update if they feel that their fans might benefit from what your page has to offer.

You can tag your ‘liked’ pages by typing the @ symbol in the status update box, and the first few letters of their name. The list should display Fan pages that match those letters, and you can click on the right page to select it. Then when you post your status update, the fan page you mentioned will get a notification from your Fan page.

Tagging your Fans in your Statuses

Tagging one of your fans from your Fan page is a great way to get their attention – but be careful, it’s also one of the fastest ways to lose followers if you tag too often, or your tags aren’t relevant. It’s a lot like email – if you keep getting emails that you aren’t interested in, you’re likely to unsubscribe, or send those emails straight to the bin.

You’ll notice if you are logged in as your Page, that when you type the magic @ symbol to link to another profile, you only get a list of the other pages you like – you can’t tag a personal profile, even if they’re a Fan of yours.

There is one way to get around this for status updates, as long as the fan is also your friend. You need to set your Personal profile to ‘Always post as your Page’.
Go to your page, and hit the grey ‘Edit page’ button at the top right of the screen. Then click ‘Your Settings’ at the top left. The first option should be “Posting Preferences: Always comment and post on your page as Your Page even when using Facebook as Your Profile.” Make sure the box is ticked, and click ‘Save Changes’.

Now go back to your Page (click the ‘View Page’ button at the top right). Click ‘Use Facebook as Your Profile’. Now you can type the status update in, use the @ to tag your friend, and when you hit Enter, the post will come up as being from Your Page, and they’ll get a notification that ‘Your Page tagged you in a status update’!

Tagging your Fans in your Photos

When you tag someone in a photo, all of their friends get to see that photo in their updates stream, and therefore link back to your page.

You’ll notice if you are logged in as your Page, that when you click the ‘Tag This Photo’ button, you only get a list of the other pages you like – you can’t tag a person, even if they’re a Fan of yours.

The answer is, they need to be a friend of your personal profile before you can tag them. Then, make sure you are using Facebook as Your Name, and you should get the option to tag the person in the photo. However, they’ll be notified that ‘Your Name’ has tagged them in a photo, not ‘Your Page’.

If you liked this post, why not ‘like’ our Trystal Tech Facebook Page?

If you don’t know what Skype Status Flick is, here’s a quick overview: if you use Skype behind a firewall/router, your status often ‘times out’, making you appear offline to all your contacts, when in fact you are still logged in to Skype. SkypeStatusFlick addresses this problem by sending an update to the Skype servers every 5 minutes, reminding them that you are still online.

You can read more, add a comment or download the latest SkypeStatusFlick from the original article.

Every time you create a new document, download or install new software, or copy files and photos, the computer writes that data to the hard drive. It will start by writing those bits of data in order, so that they can be accessed all at once. However, over time, different parts of the files will need to be saved to different parts of the hard drive, and therefore the file becomes “fragmented”.

Here’s a very simple example. Say you have two files, file X with data XXXX and file Y with data YYYY. When you save file X, your hard drive will look like this:

XXXX

Now you create file Y, and your computer will store it just after file X:

XXXXYYYY

But now you want to add some more data to file X. Since the second file has taken up the space directly after file X, it will need to find somewhere else to put the new data. So now your harddrive looks like this:

XXXXYYYYXX

File X has become “fragmented”, meaning that pieces of it are split into different areas of the hard drive.
When you “defrag” your harddrive, you are re-organising each file so that it is stored as a complete item. After defragmentation, our example harddrive will look like this:

XXXXXXYYYY

So why does fragmentation affect computer performance? When you open a file, the computer must find all of the parts of that file first, so performance suffers if the file is scattered into several different places. In addition, file fragments can block up access to free space on the drive, causing your hard drive to appear more full than it actually is.

The picture on the right shows the fragmentation status of one of our client’s hard drives. This particular drive is extremely fragmented, at 58%. Just at a glance, you can see that the red squares occupy most of the hard drive, and these indicate fragmented areas. A healthy, defragmented drive would show mostly blue squares, and little, if any, red squares.

If you find your computer running slow, checking the fragmentation level of the drive is a good idea. For more information, check out our Computer Performance Tweaking package, or contact us.

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.

* Resellers are responsible for their own backup and redundancy procedures.

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.

Update May 2011:

As requested, here is a cURL PHP version for if you cannot use allow_url_fopen on your webserver:

Download the Secure Skype Web Status code (cURL version) for your website.

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.

Extract the ZIP file, then double click on register_skype4com.bat to make sure the Skype API is installed (you should receive a DLL Register successful message).

When you run the program for the first time by double clicking on SkypeStatusFlick.exe, 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 yellow box popup at the top right requesting access. Click Accept to allow SkypeStatusFlick to run. You should 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.

Now you’re ready to go! 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.

Changelog

v1.2

• Added a second function to switch to ‘Offline’ and back every hour (in addition to the 5 minute ‘Away’ checks)
• Added a secondary check for those who are using ‘Allow my status to be shown on the web’. SkypeStatusFlick will check your Web status, and if it says Offline, you’ll be notified via a message box popup. To enable this check, right-click on the SkypeStatusFlick icon next to your clock, and click ‘Check Web Status’ to enable it.
  * If you turn off ‘Allow my status to be shown on the web’ in Skype, then this check will always think you are offline. Disable the check via the SkypeStatusFlick icon’s menu to stop the popup.
• Built with Skype API v1.0.38

v1.1

• Included latest Skype API DLL and a register DLL shortcut, as Skype removed the Skype4COM.dll from the 5.3.0.120 update
• Fixed: ‘Unhandled Error: Not Attached’ on startup, when Skype was still loading
• Fixed: ‘Please accept request…’ message coming up again every 5 mins when it was already on the screen
• Changed build target to x86
• Built with Skype API v1.0.36

v1.0

• Initial release
• Built with Skype API v1.0.31