“Starting soon, your stats page will be on the WordPress.com homepage only”

If you use the wordpress.com blogging service you may have seen this notification already “Starting soon, your stats page will be on the WordPress.com homepage only“, but have you tried the new stats page? I did and it is great. More information, easy to navigate and it looks fantastic. Of course you can still see the “views all-time”, the “views today” and the “views on the busiest day” as well as switching the statistic from “Days” to “Weeks” or to “Months”, but now you can also see for example “Views by Country”, which you can find below the overall statistic.

Before I go into more detail what kind of information you can find below the overall statistic I would like to mention a cool feature. The new WordPress stats page allows you to arrange as well as minimize your extra stats boxes. So you can decide which information are more important to you and need to be directly under the overall statistic and which details can be further below.

Website Performance – Simok33′s SEO Tip

A great looking website isn’t everything. If your site loads slow you probably loose a potential costumer. Just put yourself in the shoe of your visitor, think how you react if you visit a site that needs ages to load. Right, you probably will close the browser and try to get the item from a different source. That being said, speed is also a ranking factor if you want to see your site on a top position in Google.

So how can you increase the speed of your website?
One important “trick” is to have images in the right format and size. You definitely want to have high quality images for your printed brochure, but a small images for your website. Unfortunately just reducing the dimensions / size of an image isn’t enough. You need to make sure that the image itself isn’t big.

Example: If you have an image in the size 2560×1440, upload this to your website and reduce it to the size you like, your image will still be a couple MegaByte (MB). But an image on a website should be just a few KiloByte (KB).

INTERNeX International Exchange Facebook Page

Some of you may know that I am working for INTERNeX International Exchange as IT and PR Manager, but what exactly is it I am doing? Well beside fixing computer, taking care of the network and do other technical support I also try to find new ways to inform existing clients about activities and new clients about our services.

Today I would like to talk a little bit about Facebook and how Facebook helped INTERNeX to reach this goal.

We started almost two years ago (in 2008) thinking about a new concept. Trying to get our clients, who are from all over the world, more connected to us, to make them feel more comfortable in a new country.

For me the most logical step was to do that via social media. Our candidates are doing internships in different industries, work in the hospitality sector, may volunteer or stay on a ranch across Canada. Of course if they do a placement in Vancouver or Toronto it is a little bit easier to stay in touch with them, but some are in different location in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario or another Province in Canada.

So we started to use different tools such as Twitter and Blogs to connect them with INTERNeX to inform them about different topics. Another of this tools was and still is Facebook. But starting a Facebook Page wasn’t easy. We had questions about, How can you get Fan’s? How can you post relevant information? What are relevant information? Does Facebook help or harm or business? … Fortunately I had experience with other platforms such as Blogs and Forums and thought a lot about how to use Facebook as information tool for the INTERNeX candidates.

After setting up the Facebook page, we started in February 2009 posting about events and get togethers, organized mainly by INTERNeX. Step by Step we got more Fans and the PR department became one very important part of INTERNeX and Facebook became an important tool for us to stay in touch with our candidates, partners and host organization.

If you are interested in what INTERNeX International Exchange does, please check out our Facebook Page at http://www.facebook.com/INTERNeX our Blog at http://internexcanada.wordpress.com and our website at http://www.internexcanada.com and leave a feel free to leave a comment on my post.

Cheers

The “An important notice about insufficient funds in your Chase account” SCAM Email

I got a new SCAM Email today and would like to share it with you. This time the sender pretend to be from “JPMorgan Chase & Co”. The Email seems to come from Chase <account-confirm@chase.com> and looks like a real Email from that company.

But similar like the Scam that pretend to come from the Canada Revenue Agency (Careful SCAM Email), I posted a while ago, the links in that Email are the fake. Even the link to the “official” website is connected to a site that is fake. Because the scammer really tried to make the Email looking real I would like to post here an image of the Email I got.

To secure that people can find my post based on the text in the Email, I would like to post the text too:

Dear client,

This is your official notification that the service(s) listed below will be deactivated and deleted if not renew immediately.Previous notifications have been sent to the Billing Contact assigned to your account.

As the Primary Contact, you must renew the service(s) listed below:

SERVICE: Chase Online and Bill Pay services.
EXPIRATION: October, 6, 2010

What you need to do:

1. Log in to your account at www.Chase.com, by clicking the URL.
2. Enter your user ID and Password (that you selected during the online enrollment process).
3. Enter the requested information and your Chase Online and Bill Pay services will be renew.

If you have not signed up for online access, you can enroll easily by clicking “Enroll” at the bottom of the Login page.

Please do not reply to this message. For questions, please call Customer Service at the number on the back of your card. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Sincerely,

Carter Franke
Chief Marketing Officer
CardMember Services

This site is directed at persons in the United States only. Persons outside the United States may visit International Banking .

Links to third party sites are provided for your convenience by JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan Chase neither endorses nor guarantees any offerings of the third party providers, nor does JPMorgan Chase make any representation or warranty of any kind about the content, use of or inability to use, the third party sites.

© 2010 JPMorgan Chase & Co

To secure that you do not click on a link per accident I deleted all the links in that Email. But all of them are linked to a website where my system was sending me many warnings, not to open it.

At this point I really would like to recommend again the Browser Plugin from WebOfTrust. WebOfTrust (WoT) is a community driven tool, that shows you which websites you can trust and what sites you should better not open at all. If you like just check it out and decide for yourself if you want to install it. I use it already for quite a while and I am very happy.

So I hope my post will protect you from that SCAM and like always I would appreciate any comments on that.

Surf save folks

Skype for iPhone with push notification

We all like Skype, but Skype on the iPhone, without push notification never made sense to me. “Why don’t they have at least a push notification for the chat function?”, I always asked myself. It bothered me, especially because I have two Skype accounts. One I use as the IT Manager for INTERNeX and another one I use to stay in contact with family and friends. True it is possible to connect a “private” account with a business account, but I wanted to keep that separate for many reasons. So there I had the dilemma that I had to choose which account I am using on my Mac, because having Skype on the iPhone, at this time, didn’t made any sense… Again because there was no push notification…

Yesterday I updated a couple application on my iPhone, one of this application was Skype. I haven’t used it for a long time, but never deleted it as well. So I thought I will check out what’s new and was wondering that I had to reenter my password. Well I haven’t used Skype on my iPhone for quite a while so I reentered my password. On my Mac, because I was logged in with my INTERNeX account, I saw that I came online with my second account and on the site I noticed a new symbol.

The symbol looks like a little phone and I thought… Well that’s cool, Skype realized that I am logged in with my phone… After a while my phone went to the sleep mode and I still saw myself “online” on Skype.

Well for all of you who don’t have two accounts or simply never paid attention to that little fact, but it takes a while until Skype updates the status. So I wasn’t surprised that I saw myself still as “online”. But I stayed online and after a few minutes I thought I just send myself a little chat message… Seconds later I had that message on my iPhone, like a Text Message.

“Woohooo… that’s so cool. Finally a Skype update that make Skype really useful on the iPhone”, I thought, “Something that was missing for a long time.”

But it was getting better. Not only that you can send someone a chat/text message… No… You as well can “call” someone and even if your iPhone went to the sleep mode you still get the typical Skype ringing and can easily answer that call.

With that new update I am very happy with having Skype on my iPhone. Thank you Skype for that very useful update. Now I can stay online with my INTERNeX Skype account on my Mac and with my second account on my iPhone.

There is just one thing I would like to recommend. I tested the new Skype version on an iPod touch and unfortunately it seems that the push notification doesn’t work with an iPod. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that very useful feature on an iPod as well?