The Midwest Poker Series hired me to build eight custom poker tabletops featuring a padded rail, custom printed cloth, dealer cutout and chip tray for use in their poker tournaments at local bars and other establishments.
Jay
If you’re like me, you participate on a lot of social networking sites.
Part of signing up on these sites is picking a username or vanity URL (i.e. Facebook.com/JoeSmith). I try to keep my username consistent across all the sites I spend time on. I do this for three reasons:
- My personal brand is important to me and using something like “JayTheVikesFan22″ isn’t as descriptive as “JayLane”
- I want to make it easy for other people to find me and connect with me online
- It’s easier for me to remember my username or vanity URL if I consistently use the same thing
Nothing is more frustrating to me than when I go to a site to create a username and find out that the username/vanity URL I want is already taken. For example, I had to settle for Facebook.com/jaylane2 instead of what I wanted (Facebook.com/jaylane). I was able to get the vanity URL I wanted for my company Facebook page though (Facebook.com/JayLaneMedia).
I recommend going out and signing up for accounts on social networking sites (i.e. Twitter) even if you don’t have immediate plans to use them. They are free and it doesn’t hurt to be a little proactive.
There are great Web sites that will go out and check what usernames/vanity URLs are available for you instead of making you go to each individual site.
Check out a couple of the options below.
namechk
namechk is a free service you can use to see if your username is available on some of the most popular social media sites (145 of them to be exact)
In the example below, I’ve typed in “joesmith.” You can see that it’s available on quite a few sites.
KnowEm
KnowEm is a provides a similar service but they will actually go out and register the usernames for you depending on the type of account you sign up for. They have a free service similar to namechk.
My suggestion to you is to check on your desired usernames (your name and/or your company name) to see what’s available.
If the usernames are available, go sign up and protect your personal brand.
If you don’t, you might regret it later.
Have you found any cool tools for protecting your online personal/company brand?
This was the second poker table that I built. It was based off the plans I used for my purple poker table. I added a 3″ raised rail all the way around and used red suited poker cloth for the playing surface. Even though I loved this table, I ended up selling it because we didn’t use it very often.
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of SPAM emails with attachments. The “sender” tells me that I need to open the attachment to provide them with information.
This might sound obvious but you should never open attachments from people you don’t know, especially if it’s a weird-looking attachment (i.e. download.exe or certification.txt). No reputable organization is going to get information from you this way.
You can’t assume that your SPAM filter or software is going to keep all malicious emails out. The examples below were successfully delivered to my inbox:
Example #1 – There are a lot of tell-tale signs that this email from “Bank of America” is fraudulent.
- The email is from auto.bot@verify.com. Does that even sound legit?
- It’s sent to “undisclosed-recipients”
- There is an HTML attachment (restore account.html)
- I don’t bank with Bank of America
Example #2 – This one from “UPS” isn’t quite as obvious as the first example. Here’s what I saw:
- UPS would have probably left a notice on my front door. How would they have possibly gotten my email address anyway?
- The notice is almost three months after the supposed delivery date
- There is a text file attachment (_Certification_.txt)
- The copy in the email just doesn’t sound like something that would come from UPS. I don’t think they even say “United Parcel Service” anymore
Here are some things you can do to protect yourself from malicious email attachments:
- Don’t open emails or attachments from people you don’t know or that seem “fishy” (Pay special attention to the subject line and who the email is supposedly from)
- Have anti-virus software installed on your machine. Most of them will check incoming email (assuming you’re using Microsoft Outlook) automatically. AVG is a good free one
- Make sure that whatever email program you are using blocks images in all incoming emails (In Outlook, go to Tools>Trust Center to block images). Blocking images does two things. First, the spammer can’t track that you’ve opened the email (even if it was previewed in your preview pane). Without getting too technical, spammers need images to display in the email to track whether or not the email was opened. Second, malicious programs can’t automatically execute in these emails when opened
Just be careful with attachments. It it doesn’t feel right, don’t open it.
One of the quickest ways to negatively inflate/skew your Google Analytics data is to include internal company site traffic.
Many companies have their Web site set as the home page in their Internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome). Every time an employee opens their browser to surf the Internet, the company Web site comes up.
It’s not just visits that gets skewed. Your bounce rate shoots up and your average time on site goes way down. Plus, your home page traffic is not going to be proportional to the traffic on other pages of your site.
It’s easy to filter out your internal traffic. Here are 4 simple steps:
1) Find out your network’s IP address. Depending on company size, you may have multiple IP addresses. If you have an IT person, ask him. If you don’t have someone, go to www.WhatisMyIP.com. As soon as the site pulls up, you should see “Your IP Address Is:” and a number that looks something like “72.135.156.44″ directly below it. This is your IP address.
2) Login to your Google Analytics account. At the bottom right corner of the page you should see a “Filter Manager” link. Click it.
3) Click on “+ Add Filter” in the top right corner (denoted by the red arrow below)
You’ll be taken to a “Create New Filter” page.
Give your filter a name. I called my “Exclude company traffic.”
Since we want to exclude traffic from our IP address, select “Exclude,” “traffic from the IP addresses,” and “that are equal to” in the three dropdown menus.
Enter your IP address. Mine was “72.135.156.44.”
Select which Web sites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate Web site profile(s) and then clicking “Add>>”
Click “Save Changes”
4) You’re done! Sit back and relax knowing that your Web site traffic activity is a little more accurate.
If you’re smart, you’ll exclude your marketing team’s IP address as well in case they want to inflate the numbers in an attempt to show how good of a job they’re doing.
Additional resources: Google Analytics has a good help page with more information about excluding internal traffic.
An inevitable part of hiring someone to build your Web site is that they will need to set up various services or accounts on your behalf.
Some examples could include:
- Registering a domain name (www.yourcompanyname.com) for your Web site through a domain registrar like GoDaddy or Network Solutions
- Setting up Web site hosting
- Setting up Google services like Google Analytics, Google Adwords or Google Webmaster Tools
What’s the problem you ask?
Your programmer could get hit by a bus, go out of business or flat out refuse to give you access to something that he set up. I’ve seen it all (except the one about getting hit by a bus). It could happen.
Most of Google’s services (Google Analytics, Google Adwords or Google Webmaster Tools account) are non-transferrable. A programmer can give you access to these accounts but ultimately he can cut off your access at anytime or delete your account if he chooses.
If you’ve ever tried to access a GoDaddy account set up by someone else without the login information, you know that it takes an act of Congress to access the domains. I’ve seen situations where the client couldn’t get into an account to renew one of their main domains and had it expire. Then they had to pay a fortune to get the domain back. It’s a nightmare.
Here’s how to avoid disaster:
- If you need to register domains, go to GoDaddy (or other domain registrar of your choice – Network Solutions is another) and create your own account. It’s free and you don’t have to worry about the domains expiring. If you’re intimidated by the domain registration process, check out this how-to video I created
- Tell your programmer that you want all services set up with your contact information
- Don’t let the programmer set up Google services using his own Google account. My suggestion is to set up a Gmail account and roll all the Google services under that
- Make sure you have full control of all accounts and services (including your Web site hosting account) before the project is finished
None of the things mentioned above are a big deal as long as they’re thought of upfront. If you’re not prepared, you could run into major problems down the road.
Have you experienced any of the situations above? What happened?
Photo by sindesign
I’m a big time user of Microsoft Office. I’m constantly using Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a PC laptop running Microsoft Vista.
If you’ve used Vista, you know that there always seems to be a problem (at least there has been for me). Once every couple of months, Word crashes on me. I can’t open documents by double-clicking on them and I can’t select text. It’s very frustrating. Each time this happens, I have to go and look for the solution online. I found out that it’s a problem with a corrupt file in my registry.
Even though I’m planning on upgrading to Windows 7 eventually, I thought I’d go ahead and post instructions on how to fix this problem:
- Exit all Office programs.
- Open the Registry Editor by clicking on your “Start” button and typing “regedit” (without the quotes) into the “Start Search” box.
- Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
- Right click on “Data” and rename it to something like “olddata.”
- Exit Registry Editor.
- Start Word.
