Exhibition stands have experienced a significant upgrade in their design since the days of a fold-out table and a hastily assembled four pole tent. Now, advanced laser printing techniques combined with superior hardware and media display options make exhibition stands a dynamic and engaging presence on the trading floor. Depending on the complexity of the stand, it may even feature distinct “rooms.” Hardware Part of the reason for the revamped designs has to do with the hardware used to assemble the stands. Many stands use a combination of traditional vertical segments with overarching curved struts or support beams. These beams frequently are integrated with lighting, which can add depth and unusual vibrancy to the rest of the stand. The stand becomes more of a storefront and less of a rigidly defined space. In many cases, the stand has no roof, but instead allows the visitor to gaze up into the heights of the exhibition hall. This prevents claustrophobia and makes each stand seem like a destination, and not merely a hold-over point stuffed with merchandise. The integration of audio-visual components, such as television screens, holographic displays, and digital ticker-tape displays add another dimension to the stand. A casual observer will

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From time to time, all software need upgrades for various reasons and this week was one of them. aMember released a security patch and also an upgrade. You don’t have to upgrade to patch the software and they do give you clear instructions how to apply the patch. Although it is always recommended you upgrade. We had to perform several of these this week since the patch involves the affiliate program – something all our clients uses heavily. If you need to do this, don’t know of someone who can do it for you and are nervous about doing so, head on over to our sister site TechBasedTraining for a short training video  how to upgrade aMember.

Another good question from our mailbag “The www seemed to have disappeared from my site when I visit it. I always use www in my links but when I go to my site it loads without the www in it.” Before I go into the likely fix, a little back story so you understand the underlying issue. Normally all sites are accessible using either www or without. However for SEO purposes, some web masters ‘force’ the URL to only www or without. If you notice TechBasedMarketing does NOT use www. Why? It’s just my preference. I think it shortens my already long domain name and I feel by now or at least going on out, people are more focused on the domain name than the www.  In short, I feel the www is redundant. Ok… so now you know you can ‘force’ your site to display with or without whichever you choose doesn’t matter as long as you pick one and stick with it. According to the question above, the site owner obviously wants the www in the URL back. Since she is using WordPress, the first thing you should do is: Log into WordPress ad admin, go to Settings

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Did you know that certain URL shortening services are blacklisted? If you do use such services now may be the time to re-think how you present URLs in your emails because it can get your messages flagged. Even if you use a third party email service like Aweber, there are always little things you can do to help your deliver-ability. So which shorteners are blacklisted right now? While that is certainly an interesting question and there is a published list. Please be aware. Just because you don’t see your favorite URL shortener on the list doesn’t mean you’re ‘safe’. URI’s get blacklisted and dropped on a daily basis. It can be a full time job just keeping up with all that – and really, who has time for that everyday? Not me. However, if you must look at the list, you can find it in this post on black listed link shorteners. What you can do instead is to use your very own URL shortener – a domain that you own and you know a spammer would not use. I have something like set up. Purchased a domain, set up WordPress on it and then used the Pretty Link Pro

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I’ve been following closely the WordPress 3.2 release in the past week and have noticed a small detail that some of us may not have seen. That is version 3.2 requires a minimum of: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.15 For most people who have a host that’s on top of things, this will not be a problem. Still, it never hurts to check! However, I wanted to point this out because I know some clients have sites that still run on MySQL 4 and even PHP 4 until very recently. So before you go and happily hit the update button, make sure you check your servers first. WordPress.org recommends the health check plugin. A note on the health check plugin. A lot of people get confused with the version numbers. For example, you may see: Your server is running PHP 5.2.17 and tells you, you are good to go. Due to the way we are all taught to look at numbers, you may be thinking 5.2.17 is less than 5.2.4 (the minimum). Actually it is not. What you should be focusing is the last number – 17. 17 is a later version (or larger number), after 4. In that sense,

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Here’s one of my newest projects. Making sure all my dormant domains are parked on my own system. Why? Well because right now, this is what some of my un-used domain pages look like when you go there. Yuck! I’m sure you’ve seen many sites like that right? It may not be the exact same thing but you get the idea. The registrar is using your domain to make money on ads and sell their products. Smart of them, not so great for you. After all, you paid for the domain. If you’ve been in this game for a while you know what you need to do. Set up a hosting account, upload your own holding page. So why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t I do it? My hold ups… I was too lazy to setup a site. The thought of having to break out the FTP program or Expression Web is tiresome. I didn’t know what to put on the holding page. If I did, I didn’t have a good template and lastly… I sure as hell didn’t want to set up WordPress just to put up a holding page because now I’d have yet another WordPress site

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I don’t do a lot of my web development on the Mac (although I find that changing a little because I’m bringing my laptop out more) . As a result, most of my videos and training instructions are done on Windows. Naturally, I often get people asking me what tools they can use as an alternative for Mac users.  I know first hand Mac apps can get expensive especially development related tools. But with this bundle you will certainly save a lot. Here’s what caught my eye in the bundle 1Password. I have this GREAT software to help you login, save passwords. Billings – A time and billing manager. While I don’t have this, any developer could use a billing and time tracking tool. Text Expander – This is very much like my little macro software. It does the typing for you. I use my Windows version to help me type up code, URLs, email templates just a lot. Arq Backup software -Oh yes. Always, always, always backup! And a ebook version of Rockstar Freelancer Now there’s a lot more in the bundle, just a few things that caught my eye. These are the tools I would use every week

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Earlier this week, there was suspicious activity noted at WordPress.org’s plugin directory. In short, someone has uploaded fake copies of several popular plugins. The three that were specifically pointed out were AddThis, AddThis, WPtouch, or W3 Total Cache. If you use these plugins and updated them sometime around the 21st you will need to update it again. For more on this, here is the official announcement. Photo by astrolame

I’m working on something for our fabulous BlogEnergizer Premium members that’s still kind of hush-hush at this time and hit a predicament. I have 81 CSV files that needed to be merged into one huge file.  I had all of them in one folder and sure as hell didn’t want to sit here copying and pasting 81 files. As someone who loves automation and tries to batch my work as much as possible, I had to dig for a solution and found one using good old fashioned DOS. You know, I love modern computing and the snazzy interfaces but at the same time a lot of ‘real computing’ knowledge like using DOS commands is also lost. I’ll admit I’m no where near a DOS ninja I don’t know how to do many things in DOS plus this stuff is kinda scary. However, this was easy. First, I opened command prompt. If you’re following along, you’d go to Start >> Run >> type cmd in the box and hit Open Then, I navigated to the folder where all my files are. For convenience and less typing you could simply move the folder containing all the files you want to merge to

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It is not uncommon for businesses to jump on the technology bandwagon and implement something new because it’s the latest tech, “everyone is doing it” and the fear of not doing implementing it makes you look like you’re not keeping up with the times. A great example (but not limited to this) are apps. iOS, Android etc. Should you build an app for your business or not? Here are a few things you should consider when you find yourself at these cross roads. If you implement this technology, will it: Be something your customers will use? In other words, within your customers or your target market, is this technology well adopted? Add convenience for your customers? Encourage more, better or different ways for customers to consume your product? Help you better serve your customers? Will it make your job of serving customers easier or better? Can you afford the upkeep? Not all tech requires long term maintenance but if you’re building things like apps, these are not things you can build once and forget. Because the application runs on new, ever updated operating systems, you may run into issues in the future where your app may not run anymore or

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