Sometimes when trying to diagnose an issue with how a computer has been set up, words simply aren’t enough and you need to see what the person at the other end can see on their screen.

One of the simplest ways to do this is to send a ‘screen grab’.

In Windows:

Make sure you can see the information on your screen that you wish to share with whoever is helping you, then press the ‘Print Screen’ or ‘PrtSc’ button on your keyboard. (Usually this button is in the top right area of your keyboard.)

This will copy a picture of everything on your screen to your clipboard. Then, if you open a Word document or an email program like Outlook, you will be able to paste (Ctrl+V) the picture into the email and send it to someone to show what you can see!

If you click ‘Alt + PrtSc’ you will take a picture of just the ‘active’ window, not the full screen. You might want to do this to send a picture of an error message you receive, without showing other sensitive documents or emails on your screen at the same time.

In Mac OSX:

Press ‘Command+Shift+3′ (the number 3 on your keyboard) – this will take a picture of your entire screen and create a file called something like “Picture 1.png”. You can then email that picture to your helpful remote expert.

Press ‘Command+Shift+4′ to chose a portion of the screen. A crosshair appears allowing you to drag and select just the section of the screen you want to show.

For more options in Mac OSX, you could open the ‘Grab’ software, which you should find in your applications folder.

A couple of customers called this week – they have their emails hosted with us, and are using our SMTP server to send. This usually means that wherever you are with your computer, as long as you have an internet connection you should be able to send emails – however, this week these two customers were having problems…

After some investigation on both computers, all the settings were correct and setting up test accounts on our system showed that our server was working. The only similarity between the two customers was they both had an Orange broadband account.

A quick search on the web shows that Orange have sometimes changed things about their system to try to combat spam, but this also means that legitimate emails are being blocked. I asked the customers to contact Orange to see if they could help. Orange replied that there was a problem (they didn’t expand on the details) and that the system would be back up and running in a few days.

A few days later… both customers can mysteriously send email again as if nothing had happened.

Exactly what had caused this? Possibly there was a technical problem with Orange’s service, maybe they blocked the ports used to send email; Orange haven’t told us the details, but it does show that sometimes, even though you are connected to the internet (websites appear and emails are received) this doesn’t always mean that the internet connection is not the cause of email problems!

If you are changing broadband suppliers, check:

That your new provider allows sending emails from ‘third party’ domains (for example myemail@mydomain.com)
If they do allow third party emails, is there a process to ‘authorise’ this email address to send? (Some ISPs have a number of hoops to jump through before they will allow this)
Which ports they allow for sending emails (sometimes ports are blocked to try to stop spammers)

When you visit websites, do the phone numbers appear in a strange format like this?

The formatting has been changed by Skype, to enable you to click on the link and dial that number through your Skype account.

This is all well and good if you want it to work this way, but many of our customers don’t want Skype to take over their web pages!

How to overcome this?

Depending on your settings, you will receive emails from LinkedIn with information about activity on your account.

You may wish to change the email address that receives these messages.

To do this you must first add the email address to your account, and then choose it as your ‘Primary’ address.

To add a new email address

1. Click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right of your screen
   
2. Under the Personal Information section click on the link to ‘Email Addresses’
   
3. Enter your new Email Addresses and click on [Add email address]
   
4. There will be a message displayed at the top of the screen saying your email address has been added and a confirmation email has been sent.
   
5. Now check your emails using that address, open the one from LinkedIn and click on the confirmation link.
   

Choosing your Primary Address

You can only choose an email address as your ‘Primary’ if it has been confirmed.

1. Click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right of your screen
   
2. Under the Personal Information section click on the link to ‘Email Addresses’
   
3. Under the Current Email Address section, click the circle next to the email address you want to nominate
   
4. Click on [Make Primary]

When it is successful the email you’ve chosen will appear at the top of the list with the label ‘Primary Address’.

If you’d like to know more about LinkedIn, we run regular seminars and workshops on ‘making the most out of LinkedIn’. Visit www.solve-the-web.co.uk/linkedin for more details.

Cat Young
STW
www.solve-the-web.co.uk

When you visit www.twitter.com (before you login) there is a section on the home page called, Top Tweets.

Top Tweets section of Twitter homepage

This scrolls through a series of Tweets in real time, that is as they’re being posted.  The quetsion is, how do you get your Tweets to appear in this section? 

Top Tweets are those that are themselves being ‘talked about’ in Twitterland.  As Twitter’s own help puts it, “Top Tweets are popular Tweets that have caught the attention of other Twitter users”.

They judge a Tweet to be popular because it has been retweeted, shared and interacted with by lots and lots of users. 

Sounds easy enough, but you’ve got to remember that this is measured across the whole world.  So you’ve competing with Twitterers from the United States, who are (as a rule)  far more advanced in their Social Media activies than we are here in the UK.

You can’t make this happen, you’ve got to have something of genuine interest, and have enough followers to create the necessray snowball effect.  Also the quality of your followers will play a part because if they choose to pass it on it will have a far wider reach than if one of your colleagues passes it on.

So, in summary, to get to the Top Tweets section you need to have something really interesting to say, and have lots of good quality followers who are keen to pass that something on (and on and on…)!

Here is the link to the Twitter Help Topic – http://support.twitter.com/articles/131209-what-are-top-tweets

With thanks,
Cat Young
www.stw-online.net