Do you have a Social Media Editor?

From a marketing angle, you may consider social media to be very important to your organisation, and it is of course. However it is a bit like preaching to the converted if you think about it. It is not likely someone will find you on social media unless they already know about you. So that means the audience you are sharing your social media stories with are already fans and followers. It is a way of keeping in touch.

Many organisations I work with have strong social media presence, but not such a strong presence in the news on the website. Is this a problem? Well yes, I think it might be. Here’s why:

Do you want more people, or the same people?

Ask a marketing professional and they will always want more people exposed to a story or message. Particularly that group that is not currently engaged with the organisation. Within that group might be future; donors, contributors, volunteers, members etc. That is really what is important. Of course you do not ignore those people that have signed up or following you already. We are talking about a superset of people, not just regular engaged fans.

Work smarter not harder

So, let’s be clear here, this takes a little more effort, but over time it will be much less effort, and you will reach far more more people.

Without exception, if I look at the statistics of those sites that have a rich and varied news feed, they also have high numbers of visitors. There are some technical reasons for this in terms of how the website works. But let’s keep this simple.

Here is a new strategy

Get your social media guru to add things to the website first. Do what they were intending to do in a post on your website rather than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

That in itself gives you an advantage over twitter because you are not restricted on your content. When you have added the item to your website post. Display the post in isolation from the news page. (When you view it on the news page with other posts, you need to click the image, title or read more link to open it). Now copy the URL or web address for the item in your website.

Next go to Twiter, and paste it there. Then go to Facebook and paste it there. Both systems will try to grab something from your website. So you don’t have to rebuild it all in Facebook, Twitter et al.

Now you have met the requirement to keep your fan base in touch with what is going on. However it will also drive up your website visitors as a result. For those people that happen to come across you while surfing the web, they can see it too. They would have missed it before if it is exclusively on social media.

Check your results

Most of you have a Google Analytics panel on your dashboards, you can see and monitor the results of this change if wish. The net result in terms of effort, is you create it in one place only (your website) and do not need to recreate it any where else. Everywhere else including feeds you simply add to, you just paste the URL. When you do this, you will see a big spike on the number of visitors to your website. Many of those will be first time visitors. Some of those will also become fans too.

Windows 7 Support Ends

Microsoft is no longer going to support Windows 7 from January 14th 2020. If you are still using Windows 7 this article may be of interest. I have also seen somewhere that free upgrades may still be available from Windows 7 to 10. If I locate that again, I will add in in.

Article can be found here: https://www.howtogeek.com/469843/windows-7-dies-today-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

Alternative Home-Start Menu

Clikc on the image to see a larger version.

I have just completed my 30th Home-Start rebranding project for Home-Start North Somerset. While engaged on this excersise and looking around at some other sites I found a way to remove the normal menu system and substitute it with a customised one. I am still working on this, and it is not as simple as throwing something together because it has to cater for different screen widths.

I have had a few requests for donation buttons, and have generally placed them in a section below the menu at the page level. However if you are interested in this solution I would like to know if it is worth pursuing. Right not it is incomplete, I have developed a desktop version (as per the image above) a tablet version which is smaller and simpler, and just started a smart phone version. I think there is a substantial amount of work to refine it, so I am shelving it for now.

The three new header sections (desktop, tablet and smartphone) are tied to the top of the page and scroll off of the screen. One problem I need to solve is how to keep the menu at the top of the page using this process, or substitute another one when the user scrolls down the site.

Anyway, if you would like to know more, drop me a line please. If I have enough interest I will provide this for free to all of those people I have upgraded over the past 8 months.

← Staying in control Windows 7 Support Ends →

Staying in control

The primary reason I help charitable and not for profit groups is because they have the least resources and are often limited on what they can achieve with their budgets through the normal IT channels such as web design and development. They are all largely dependent on external help either through volunteers or through contractors.

When I first enter into a relationship with a client, there are a few questions that get asked to establish how much control they have over their current website and IT systems. Often I find that they do not know the answers, or there is someone else that knows the answers. In one case some years ago the person that owned their domain name had passed away. So it was likely with no action taken their website and email systems would fail when the domain name was not renewed.

Tips on what you need to know

Make sure you know the answers to these questions, if you don’t and cannot find anyone that does, it represents a problem for you that may be part of a crisis later. So, make a note of them, and store them somewhere safe, and reference them from your IT policy.

1). Where is my domain name held?

Why?

The domain name is like the golden set of keys to everything. You should know where it is located, and have access to it. If for any reason you needed to leave a relationship with a developer or hosting organisation, it starts with moving the domain name out to somewhere else. You need to know the web address, the password and the email address/ user account. If you do not have access to the email account associated with the domain registration, change it to one you do have access to.

Continue reading Staying in control

Handling Junk email

Annoying Spam Messages

I read somewhere last year a scary statistic which suggested that 95% of the email circulating the internet is spam. I don’t know whether it is true or not, but sometimes it can feel that way.

What can you do about it?

Usually the first line of defence is to have some spam detection in forms. This can be a question, or image where you are asked to identify something. These rely on human interaction and image recognition. They can be annoying too, arguably more annoying than the spam they are supposed to prevent. Google has a function called Recapture that is used on many sites. The latest version is very good, but it appears to work most effectively if the user is accessing your site or form using Chrome. If they are not then the images pop up and you are asked to match things. We cannot guarantee that visitors are using Chrome of course.

Another method is a hidden field in a message that a computer can see, but a user cannot. The form logic detects whether some data has been added into the hidden field, and does not send the email if the form has been filled in by a computer.

Personally I tend to try to avoid quizes and image recognition, I think they put people off. But sometimes you get a persistent message coming through your website. I have one case like that now.

Continue reading Handling Junk email

Domain Name Scam

I received the message below this morning. It is a scam, I have seen them before, but it is easy to be caught out. You may receive one of these around the time your domain name is up for renewal. It is possible for a third party to find out when your domain name is due to be renewed, and therefore generate this email. An unsuspecting person might assume it is to do with the domain name, and was expecting a bill. If you see anything like this and you are not sure send it to me.

Taking it apart

When you first look at this you can see it is related to a domain name, it is something for accounts payable, and there is a line in there which says “This notice for www.domainname.com will be terminated on December 14th 2019.” At this point you may be feeling anxious.

Looking more closely it is a proposal to add your domain name to a search engine, or “search engine registration” something I do for you for free, and only takes a few minutes anyway. There is also the veiled threat that “……. cancellation of this proposal making it difficult for your customers to find you on the web”.

Other things to watch out for

The telephone number is a random set of characters, the link to their website is obfuscated. So you cannot tell exactly where it is going to unless you click on it. If you click on it, you do not know what will happen. At best it is someone fronting a dodgy scam that is probably not illegal, but is highly questionable designed to catch people out. With those types of links they forward to another link, but register that someone has clicked it.

Don’t Panic

Call me, or send me a copy if you receive something like this. Other common scams are from people allegedly offering to sell you more traffic. On the basis that more traffic will yield more contacts. Chatty emails that say “Hi, I have just been looking at your website, you should be getting more traffic, I can help you…….” No third party can know how much traffic you get without access to the hosting, or to a Google Analytics account. These are scams too.

Looking around sites some seem to be targetted more than others, and depending when you look, they may get tired of one site and switch to somewhere else. While we can detect and stop computers posting spam on sites, there is no fix for people posting messages through forms or contacting people directly. Only where the message is a common message and it has been detected as spam, and provided you are using spam filtering will it get caught.

I have looked at the originating IP address of many of these messages in the past. A lot of them come from India and the Philippines. Both places where people can be exploited for a few dollars a day.

Changes in WordPress

There has been a recent upgrade to WordPress over the past month. I am not sure if the “new features” in this release, or whether it was the one before have introduced some monitoring functions on the installation. WordPress continues to improve all of the time. There is a large network of people across the world who develop and test new releases.

Careful with that axe Eugene

I have some websites which are centrally controlled. I hit an update button and the websites update. It is not perfect, it sometimes stalls and often leaves a trail of error messages that I need to follow up. After coming back to the UK following a 4 week vacation, I opened the application and ran it and got a screen full of errors. It is fortunate I did not do this while I was on holiday. Starting at 4am on the 11th of November when I hit the button it took me 5 hours to go through 15 sites which had now broken. (I started at 4am because my head was still in a differnt time zone!).

What happened?

When I went around to look at each site, some or all of the updates had failed to update. The controlling program had reported that the websites were “unresponsive”. I logged into them and checked them, then ran the updates from within the website. I updated the plugins first. Then the template. After updating the plugins I received a message that “The site is experiencing technical difficulties……” It turns out there is also an email which outlines the technical difficulties. I had not seen this before. The message in the email turns out not to be directly related to the cause. In all cases the sites eventually came back online.

New Health Checking Features

It looks like I had triggered a recently introduced function in the wordpress core which monitors exceptions (crashes) of processes. It had identified something was wrong and halted the site. While it is good to have such features, it turns out they were not wholly reliable in identifying the problem.

It looks like an upgrade in some but not all cases may trigger this event to happen. What follows is a white screen for around 5-10 minutes with a message on it saying this website is experiencing technical difficulties. It will eventually clear down. If you initiate your own updates and see this, don’t panic. In all cases where this happened to me, it was resolvable. I have already taken action to upgrade the PHP Scripting language the websites run on to the latest version (a possible reason).

I am talking to the hosting company about this as well, as it is not entirely clear why it is happening. It may be because of some housekeeping function which has not triggered, and that needs to run before the website becomes stable again. It may just be a new “feature” in wordpress.

If you see a white screen at any time with just one line of text in it, send me a message and note the time, and what you did at the time. I will check it. These should only be transient events. All sites are set up to upgrade themselves, they usually do this without any problems, but they do not do it immediately the upgrade is detected.

Hosting Infrastructure

I have been through all accounts in the hosting and made some changes to the infrastructure that the websites run on. If you see anything broken, or any odd behaviour please bring it to my attention ASAP. These changes will impact your website and email handling (in certain cases).

PHP7.3

PHP is the scripting language which is used on the server to support the websites. It is a type of operating system for servers. The wordpress websites make requests to the operating system for various support functions. Up until yesterday (12/11/19) we had quite a large range of versions in use. I have upgraded all of them to above version 7.1 most are at version 7.3 the highest version available.

Why is this important?

I saw some reports coming from WordPress installation monitors that advised to update above version 7 because there were some security vulnerabilities in the PHP 7. That was the motivation to make the changes. Continue reading Hosting Infrastructure

Newsletters and MailPoet 3

I have been a fan of Mailpoet (integrated newsletter plugin) in sites for some years now. Around 18 months ago MailPoet changed from version 2 to version 3. Development work stopped on version 2. I have upgraded, or some of you may have upgraded yourselves to Mailpoet3. One significant change is the presence or absence of images in Newsletters.

Featured Images in Posts

When you create your newsletter you add existing posts into the newsletter. Mailpoet 2 used to pick up the first image and include it your newsletter. Mailpoet 3 does not work that way. It means that you may have had vibrant interesting newsletters before, but now they are all text.

Annoying Bug

This is for anyone working with Office 365 and the latest version of Outlook having problems with setting up a new or existing email account.

At the time of writing it is not clear whether this bug relates to something that Office 365 Outlook is doing, or within the hosting we are using. What we do know is under certain circumstances an email account that can be accessed with a known password using the webmail interface (https://stackmail.com) cannot be set up in Outlook when using Office 365. This type of problem can drive you mad and waste hours.

Circumstances

You have just installed the latest version of Office 365 on your computer, and you wish to connect with an existing or very recently set up email account. You know the email account works, you know the password and you know the email address, and have accessed it ok through webmail (https://stackmail.com).

When you try to auto set this up in Outlook, or use the manual instructions I have provided it reports an error. It does not matter what you change in terms of ports and encryption protocols, it reports an error every time.

Resolution

1). Firstly, make absolutely sure that the email address and password combination works by logging into stackmail.com. Do that even if you are 100% sure.

2). Go back to Outlook configuration and try it again using exactly the same information for the email address and the password. You should be able to use Auto settings. If that does not work, use the last guide I created for Outlook.

3). If it did not work. Stop trying to resolve it in Outlook. Go back into webmail and locate the setting which allows you to change your password through webmail. When you locate it, overwrite the old password with THE SAME PASSWORD. Yes I know that is counterintuitive. It forces the encoding of the password to be re-performed in the hosting. It also ensures any other email accounts you are using will still work without any modification.

4). Go back into Outlook, it is probably best to delete any partially set up account and start again. You will find that it will work this time.

Make sure any local IT person working in your office is aware of this if they run into problems. This problem does not occur all of the time withe latest version of Office 365, but it happened to me last weekend while setting up a new PC, and I have at least one other case like this. It is very odd. The hosting company when they watch the protocol exchange observe that the password you are using is rejected, probably because Outlook is not using the right key exchange protocol or encoding. Resetting the password seems to resolve it.