Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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How to Sync Outlook on Your Motorola Droid X Phone

This past week I bought a Motorola Droid X mobile phone. I wanted to have a portable office so I can go anywhere yet be working. Well, kinda of working. My biggest question was how to connect Outlook and my Outlook calendar with my new Droid phone. I have tested a few applications this week and wanted to share my experience with you.

Google Apps for Business
Actually I unloaded this application after I got it to work, but for larger offices this may be a very practical solution. With an Outlook plugin, you can see your email, calendar, and contacts on your mobile phone. Google works to sync your info to GMail and then your phone grabs it from there. With a $50 a year single user fee it is very practical. For me, I found the program however intrusive. It set up a second mail profile which after I unloaded it I was stuck with. The settings are complicated so don’t do set up on a weekend when there is no phone support.

CompanionLink for Outlook
I had hoped that this would be the perfect solution for me. One click syncing. I downloaded the free 14 day trial and had an endless look as the software tried to sync Outlook. I was willing to be patient for the first time sync but the menu did not give me an idea of what was happening, to me it appeared stuck. Price for this one is $39.99, but I unloaded it too.

Google Calendar Sync
Okay, now I am back to free. I was willing to pay, but just could not get everything to work properly. I set up a calendar with my GMail account, then I downloaded the calendar sync software. This was pretty easy. Allow several hours for all your appointments to appear in the calendar online which then your phone can grab. For me it took about two or three hours for the events to appear and in the meantime, I was sure it was not working. I recommend setting it up and then leaving it to work over night. In the morning all your appointments will be on both Outlook and your Droid.

The Rest of the Story
Okay so what did I do about mail and contact syncing? Well I set up my Droid to download my mail from my servers making sure that my desktop Outlook was set to leave a copy on the server. Then I manually loaded my cleaned up address book to GMail. It was cake to export a .csv file from Outlook and cake to load it to GMail. So now I am totally synced office to phone and phone to office.

If you are holding back from getting a smart phone due to the complication to figure out how to sync, learn from my trials and just start the easy way. Sometimes simple is best!

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Change the Name on Your WordPress Admin File

Here’s a cool plug-in to help you monitor, change, and keep up-dated your WordPress blog administration names. It is called Admin Renamer Extended. You may ask why not just use the WordPress control panel to update your admin names? Sometimes a hacker will hide the admin name from you to keep you from deleting their access. This renaming plug-in allows you to update, see, and change the administrative names for your WordPress account.

It is interesting to know that many blogs are set up with the name admin and lame passwords making their blog easy to hack. By default WordPress calls your main login simply admin. I recommend a much more difficult user name such as a combination of words and certainly a secure password with letters and number. I don’t recommend that you use your business name as the administrators name.

Try to make your administrator login complicated for others to guess and easy for you to remember.

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WordPress Security Tips

In this ever changing world where hackers look to hide spam links on your blog and hackers try to crack into your blog posts to try to spew their malware out at your expense, it makes sense to keep your WordPress blog secure.

Here are a few thing that I do and recommend that you consider to keep your website and blogsite safe. First, why do I say website? Well, it is not uncommon for a blog to be hacked and used as the springboard to compromise your website. So if you have a blog on your server, make sure you are keeping it secure to protect your website.

I use the following items for our managed blogs:

Login Lock Down
This plug-in protects you from brute force robot attacks that try to gain access to your blog by simply trying a million possible login combinations. This plug-in allows you to set login attempts to a specific number before access is locked for a specific time period you select.

Exploit Scanner
This is a very good plug-in and can actually let you know if your blog has been hacked and where the files are residing. I really like this one and have solved and cleaned up a number of hack attacks with its use.

WP-MalWatch
This is another very helpful plug-in. After installation look for it on the dashboard. It will let you know if your site has been compromised with the Pharma Hack and searches your locales.php file and file ending combinations.

WordPress File Monitor
Oh, I really like this one. Once you have cleaned up after a hack, this plug-in will advise you by email or text message when any of your WordPress core files is changed. This is very helpful if you are having trouble keeping your site clean from problems.

There are other great plug-ins these are just the top three that we use that come to mind. In addition to using scanning application, make sure that your logins are secure, you keep all your plug-ins up-to-date and keep your WordPress version on the most recent version.

If you don’t have time to keep an eye on your own WordPress application, get a blogmaster like  us to watch your blog and scan it monthly or weekly.

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Have You Checked Out LinkedIn Business Pages?

If you think that all the action is still only happening at Facebook, think again. LinkedIn has been quietly forging ahead with new innovations that you should be considering for your own business.

If you sell business to consumer you may not be interested in LinkedIn Pages, but if you also sell or only sell Business to Business, LinkedIn pages are certainly worth a look-see. As an example here is our LinkedIn business page. I have not invested a lot of time in set up, but you can see that you can add a logo, link your blog, and when you have time even add in products or services to your business page. For a full in-depth article showcasing eight new LinkedIn page features, I recommend you read this article.

I like the ability to link in your tweets and blog posts to your LinkedIn Business page, and it was easy to do. I have not added any products or services to my profile yet, but plan on doing so in the next several weeks.

If you haven’t noticed, LinkedIn is now even allowing you to promote your business with pay per click advertising as well. This may be a better marketplace for some businesses then advertising on Facebook as you will be having your ads shown to business decision makers not the receptionist who is killing time playing Farmville or Unicorn Attack on Facebook.