If you have previously submitted the CSV file to create accounts and haven’t heard anything, please revise your list using the above formula and resubmit it.

And as always, if you have any questions, please submit a support request.

After writing a new Article or Page you have three options for saving your work:

Save and Continue Editing
This option will save your work and allow you to continue writing or editing the same page. Use this option to save interim copies of your work.

Save
If you click on the Save button, your work will be saved as a Draft. Use this option if you are not finished with your work and want to return to it later. It will NOT be visible to anyone but you until it is published.

Publish
When you click on the Publish button, your work will be saved and immediately published to your website where it can be seen by visitors. Use this option when you are finished writing and/or editing your work and you want it to appear on your website.

Tip: You can also control the visibility of your Articles and Pages by editing the “Status” option.

The Status options are grouped with all the options in the right-hand column of both the “Write Article” and “Write Page” screens, and the “Edit Article” and “Edit Page” screens. They are the blue boxes you see with the “plus” symbol (+). To see the options, click on the + and the options will appear below it.

1. Requesting a Webmaster Account
2. Setting Up Your Group’s Email and Calendar
3. Creating Your Group’s Website

The new training videos are part of WBCCI.net’s Help section, which also contains introduction videos for Email, Calendar and Docs; User Guides in PDF format; a Knowledgebase of Frequently Asked Questions; a forum to discuss website ideas, etc.; and a Support Ticket system to request help if you are unable to resolve an issue in any other way. You will need Adobe Flash Player to view the videos.

Go to Website Training Videos >>

Another way to create PDFs besides using Adobe Acrobat is by using the open-source program PDFCreator.

PDFCreator allows any application that can print to paper to “print to a PDF” instead. This means pretty much any application that you might use to create a newsletter can now also generate an optimized PDF that can be uploaded and distributed from your website.

Download PDFCreator > 

This pigeon is around 235kb in size.

The pigeon below is only 72kb - less than a third of the above.

See any real differences? Optimizing your images does 3 things:

1. It makes images quicker to upload
2. It makes your page load faster for people looking at it
3. You can fit more images into a limited space

Simply making an image smaller does not necessarily make the filesize smaller. You need to optimize the image.

The original image of that pigeon is 1.2MB so that top image is already 1/6 of the size and the bottom image is 16% of the original size. But it still looks okay.

There are many programs which you can use to optimize images. Packages such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro will do it, but there is no need to spend money on doing this, when these are free:

• Irfanview
• Picasa
• GIMP
• Photofiltre
• FastStone
• Pixia

FireStats, a web statistic reporting plug-in, has been automatically activated on all WBCCI.net websites and is ready to use.

FireStats features include:

• Basic hit statistics (hits ever, in last 24 days etc)
• Recent popular pages
• Recent referrers
• Browser and OS trees, grouped by what matters
• Search engine keywords
• A detailed list of recent hits
• Excluding unwanted hits by IP address and byy user-agent (to be used to filter bots)
• Ajax UI, no need to reload the whole page - just press the ‘refresh statistics’ button to get the latest data.
• Designed to work on all browsers. (Tested on Firefox, Explorer, Opera etc)
• Compacts old data to improve performance and reduce used storage
• Excludes hits by Logged in user (to be used mostly to filter administrator(s))
• Can add flag, OS and browser icons to comments
• Can add statistics to your site’s footer.
• Can be used with Widgets

To use FireStats, just log in to your website’s Dashboard and click on the “FireStats” tab.

WBCCI.net Email now supports IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)!

If you use multiple devices, you have probably noticed that if you read an email on your PC, when you are checking it later with your mobile phone, the same message will appear unread. That’s because the protocol in use, POP (Post Office Protocol), lacks one critical feature: changes made on devices aren’t seen while using other devices. Instead you are presented with a list of unread mail, and you must re-read and re-sort everything.

IMAP is what lets you keep the same information synced across all your devices so that whatever you do in one place shows up everywhere else you might access your email.

For example, by using IMAP you can:
• read your WBCCI.net email using a web browser, then
• move it to the “Starred” folder on your mobile phone, then
• archive it by moving it to “All Mail” using Outlook, then
• see all of those changes on your Blackberry (or any of the above devices for that matter).

By using IMAP, you will be able to use WBCCI.net Email at work, in your Airstream, or just about anywhere on any device, and actions you take will be automatically synced with WBCCI.net Email on the web (and remember it works the other way too: anything you do on the Web will be seen on your phone or in your mail client). Just click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab in your WBCCI.net Email “Settings” and turn it on.