Ideas on things you can do to enjoy a better approach to computing.
FITB (Fill In The Blank) – Google is ending support for NPAPI – this includes JAVA and Adobe Flash?
OK, I recently wrote an article detailing the end of support for JAVA in Google Chrome.
http://www.rouzell.net/2015/05/04/do-you-need-java/
Now, I see Google Chrome is reporting that soon support will end for Flash. As often as I see Google reporting Flash has crashed, I’m almost happy with this development. 
How many blog posts start with the words, “By now you’ve heard…”?
It looks like at least one of my accounts has become a target for fraudulent charges. The sinking feeling I have is not for the potential loss of less than twenty dollars for the two charges, but for the loss of time involved in phone calls and other activities I’ll have to suffer through with my bank or banks to clear up this malady. In my business, every hour spent chasing down demons feels like another hundred dollars into the fire. I don’t even get to enjoy the heat.
While I cannot pin this down to the recent hacker activity at Target, I did a search for “CEWCS fraud” to find the entity trying to bill me for $9.84, twice in one account, on Christmas Eve, no less! I found another blogger had posted exactly that same name and transaction amount billed to a card he was sure he had used at the store. That is one long way of saying there are probably many people who will find similar charges on their accounts.
This writer has never been in the “misery loves company” camp. No tidings of comfort or joy are in this holiday season regarding this unpleasant event.
Bah, humbug, indeed!
Check your accounts. Only vigilance will save your money. Your time, however, will be spent.
This morning, there was a message in my inbox from a “local SEO guy” and until I read through to the bottom line, it seemed the content was the work of the sender.
This was not so. The content had been lifted from the page properly cited below. Man, that just seems a little sneaky, slimy to me!
Questions raised by using someone else’s work are something I hope to avoid. Without exception, my blogs are filled with original material, unless I quote someone and then I always try to properly cite the source. Heck, I’ve even written and railed about the need for originality – probably after receiving the same material in three different email messages on the same day!
But, enough about me and my want for others to be creative….
Share the good stuff, yes. And, give me links to the original work, so I can do my own research.
Just be sure to say so up front, so questions won’t be raised about your intentions, your character, etc.
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229645#ixzz2kRXMtiO4
@mattcutts Got it! More links to your pages is what really helps your site ranking. Thanks, @mattcutts #LocalSEO
— Brian Rouley (@Rouzell) October 28, 2013
Following people in tune with what you are doing makes Twitter far more meaningful and useful to any business.
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
OK, where were we? Ah, yes, that third way is far more labor intensive and makes far less sense than a cloud based backup plan.
If you came in in the middle of this conversation, scroll down or click here, to see the first part of the article.
The big upside to an external drive is the same as its greatest downside, it’s right there with your computer. On the upside, if your computer crashes, your data is already right there, you only have to plug it into a healthy computer and run the restore process. On the downside, if your computer is destroyed by some natural or unnatural phenomenon, most things nearby are also ruined. Or if your computer is stolen, (this actually happened to one of my clients!) your external drive will also be stolen. You may argue that you use a USB flash drive and keep it in a safer location and I’ll say that’s good, but they are portable and they suffer wear and tear, so there is a greater chance that they will be lost or damaged beyond repair. Enough said; you probably see the number of ways an external drive solution is not the best.
3a. Regardless, we press on with two ways to use your external drive to back up your data or your system. Actually, those are the two ways. You can use whatever backup program you like, or the one that came with your external drive, to complete a data only or a full system backup. The learning curve on this is pretty flat and you can figure it out in one session.
3b. another way you can get a full system backup is to use a disk image utility. I’ve been using a product by StorageCraft for several years now and it does a flawless job of creating an image of the entire drive. You can even use this image to completely restore a failed computer, with all programs and settings intact, on another computer, even if it is not the same make and model. This same backup and restore process can be used if you are installing a larger hard drive in the same system. If you are only moving data from an old computer to a new one, this image transfer will ensure that you have not left behind some obscure directory of data files essential to little things like email or contacts.
Yes, we could go on about all of the ups and downs of backup and restore processes here, but those are the three ways, including part 3, a and b!
Almost any technical person will agree that any kind of backup is better than none. There must be survey results available on how many tech people would agree that cloud backup is a better approach than on-site or external drive backup systems. However, there is always that security concern with the cloud. And, businesses that deal with sensitive information may have restrictive guidelines with data management that prevents the use of cloud-based systems. That’s material for another article.
Find a way to protect your stuff. Implement it immediately. That proverbial rainy day will come and you’ll be glad you brought an umbrella!
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
You collect stuff on your computer. In the latest versions of Windows, it’s all under your user profile, and in Libraries on Windows 7 and 8. Libraries are pretty nice shortcut management tools for your stuff, introduced in Windows 7. The standard set contains your documents, pictures, music, and video files. Under your user profile, a.k.a., your personal folder on Windows 7, you’ll also find important folders, like Contacts, Desktop, Downloads, Favorites, and possibly others, related to applications like Google Drive or Dropbox. Saved Games and Searches and Links are also here, but are likely less important to the task at hand.
Protecting your stuff means you’ll still have your precious photos and documents if your computer should fail. And, yes, this is YABA (Yet Another Backup Article), but one that is focused on what must be done if you are going to rebuild, upgrade, or revert to your old OS after an upgrade, on your current computer. Such is the life of users in the Windows world. There is simply no guarantee that your data will remain intact after any change to your OS, so it’s a good idea to continually either synchronize it, or back it up, with cloud based services. For the purpose of this article, synchronization means you use more than one computer to access your files. Backup means you will have to execute a restore process to get your stuff back on the computer, after you’ve made changes to the OS.
For my money and time, synchronization makes the most sense. Because I use at least four computers to do my work, I need my data to be the same in several locations. This may not apply to you, but there is great comfort in knowing that if one of my computers should fail, I can simply carry on with one of the few remaining units, while I decide on how to replace the one that failed. If you have more than one computer – for some of my clients that means one desktop and one laptop – synchronization will simplify things for you, and provide one of a few forms of data backup. Dropbox and Google Drive and SkyDrive all perform this function. A detailed description of those services does not fit the scope of this article. However, consider synchronization to be the first of three ways you can protect your stuff.
You may use any one of several cloud based backup solutions. You can simply search; “cloud based backup” and read all about it. Carbonite gets a lot of attention and seems to have many affiliates, as I hear people on radio and Kim Komando constantly pitching for the company. MOZY is probably its closest competitor, in terms of similarities. Most lists of cloud based backup solutions include synchronization providers, so consider my premise of having to do a restore, versus already having a synced directory. Again, you’ll have to do your homework here. I’m testing iDrive and will likely try out Amazon’s S3 solution in the near future. This second way of protecting your stuff is best for someone who has only one computer, or who does not see the need for the benefit of synchronization.
The third way of protecting your stuff is the old tried and true external drive implementation. In my opinion, this is the least reliable and most labor intensive method, but it is still way better than nothing. It is tempting to simply end things here, since I don’t recommend this choice, but it makes sense to review image backup versus file and folder backup. Consider this parts 3a and 3b, as your external drive system may be used in at least two or more ways.
I’m publishing this post at 8 a.m., and will continue later with an expansion on that last point. For now, I’m off to help a client with backup of his system prior to reverting back to an older OS!
Enjoy. 10/26 8:03
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
OK, here is the end of the story.
So, we’ve downloaded our Fb history to a zip file on our computer. We’ve extracted the text from that file and have done all the find and replace functions to get each record on one line in Excel, with each record having an individual time and date stamp. That took some work, since there were three components to the original download text and we had to do a couple of passes, employing delimiter creation for the purpose of separating text to columns. All of this took just a bit of trial and error, but we got it done in part 2 of this story.
Finally, today, the original goal of reversing the chronological order was achieved by simply numbering the lines (or rows, in Excel), then using that series of numbers to do the sorting. Since Facebook lists your most recent activity and status reports at the top of the timeline, if someone wants to see that same story starting from the beginning of time, this work had to be done.
This is the end of this tale. Thanks to Mardi Boettcher for posing the problem. It was definitely a worthwhile challenge and I learned a few things along the way.
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
If you are following this thread, you will recall I had been challenged to manage some data downloaded from Fb. You can download your timeline, with everything in it and then do what you will with same.
One of my associates wanted to put the text into an Excel spreadsheet with one line per record. But, Fb doesn’t bring it down quite so nicely. Your time stamp is on line one, the status description is on line two, and if you’ve uploaded photos, and probably in a few other status updates, where there are multiple lines of text, that stuff is on yet another line. What’s a poor user to do?
It’s a neat trick, but nothing new. You have to use Word, or some other editor, to do a find and replace. In this case, all time stamps ended in PDT (or was it PST?) – so, I replaced PDT, paragraph mark, with PDT, semicolon. For the records where there were no multiple lines and no photo uploads, I got a nice clean separation of date field and status. Then I did a second pass, where I replaced Uploads, paragraph mark, with Uploads, semicolon. This parsed about 98% of the records.
Now I had several hundred lines, with one record per line, with the fields separated by semicolons. Excel does a nice job with that delimiter, so all that was left to do what the old, “Text to columns” function in Excel and almost all of the records were in neat columns in an Excel spreadsheet.
I’m sure you can figure out how to do this with your word processor and spreadsheet applications. Oh, I almost left out a step. Peculiar to Office 2013 and not evident with Office 2010, I had to paste the original text data into Notepad, to get the paragraph markers, then copy paste it from there to Word. Figure that out and get back to me.
Enjoy!
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
After a couple of years with Bluehost, I’m now looking around at other hosting providers. I cannot go into details about why I may switch, except to say that I am looking for better response time. If I can get that, it will be worth the trouble and the pain that goes with changing service providers.
With every change I make to WP websites, I have to wait (only) several seconds for the update to be processed, before I can see the results on a page. You might think I’ve become impatient, but honestly, I think if you can have something in two or three seconds, instead of five or six, you may start to do the math. Simply put, if you could reduce the time it takes to get a thing done by cutting it in half, you probably should.
That’s all I’m going to say for now. Tune in later for results of my exploration and discovery.
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
Are you looking for the Best SEO in Palm Desert? If so, click that link and come on into Mousehelp @ Rouzell.
Today, I listened with interest to a friend on the radio. Dominique Fruchtman is one of the owners of Desert Cow Computers and she now has her own time slot on the radio, Saturdays, at noon, on 1450 AM.
So many things I write today are all about communications in its many forms. Radio takes us right back to “old school” where there is nothing to post, nothing to read, no time to contemplate a well crafted response. You simply listen to someone who knows what she’s talking about, you drink it in (or take notes while having lunch, as I did), then it’s over. There, you had an hour to hear someone answer questions on technology – everything from viruses to backup and minimum specs for your next new computer, was yours for just tuning in and paying attention. My advice, tune in again, next week!
I’ll be back for more. For now, let me just say, congratulations Dom! You knocked it out of the park with your first at bat. I’m happy to call you friend.
I’m going to strengthen my SEO chops with a challenge:
Soon, a link to the page on the Screenmobile Corporation website for retractable screen doors will appear on the first page of Google search results. Let’ see how long it takes to make this true! I first posted this challenge on Facebook on November 17th. Perhaps we’ll see our result before the end of this year, 2013.
First, we need a few sentences with our target phrase in the mix. Since we want Google to see where we mention retractable screen doors, that phrase is linked to Screenmobile’s web page for that family of products; we’ll have to provide a few morsels of spider chow with that association in place. Yes, we’ve already done it a few times on this page, but if you go to their site, you’ll find that Screenmobile offers no less than nine different manufacturers of retractable screen doors for our linking pleasure.
So, let’s talk about those nine choices right here!
Screenmobile has 9 different choices for Retractable Screen Doors
Are you looking for the Best SEO in Palm Desert? If so, click that link and come on into Mousehelp @ Rouzell.
Palm Desert Computer - Local SEO Expert 