Facebook are constantly changing their policies hence user account settings are constantly being updated also.  I noticed last year that there are a lot more options to customize your account and news feed.  Having some free time on hand, and thinking about the friends I helped with their FB settings, I decided to write up a post on how to secure facebook account and make it somewhat "private" !  It's interesting to know how many people thought their page is private when in fact it's open for all the world to see :-)  Hopefully this post will be helpful to you !

First thing first, after you log into your FB account, let's set your account to private - as in only people who are your "friends" can see your page.

*NOTE:  all the settings are best done from a desktop or laptop.  Mobile devices are limited on the options it provide.

SECURITY & PRIVACY SETTINGS

Let's set up the privacy of your page !  After you log into your page, take note of the top blue menu bar of your page.  This is where all your account access and settings are located.  Click on the down arrow icon at the far right corner (also known as Account Settings in the picture below)

A drop down menu will open up, click on Settings (near the bottom of the list), then a new screen will open up like the one below.  On the left menu panel, select Security.

I circled the 2 settings I set up but feel free to set all the others (do take sometime to read the explanation next to the option.  If you don't know what it is, best to ignore).  The reason I selected those is because I know a few friends who got their accounts hacked.  The Login Approvals and Trusted Contacts will help me gain access to my account should the hacker changed my password or log in from an unknown browser.

Once the above is done, move onto Privacy settings.

In here you can set up how you want your page to look like to your Friends and others.  Click on Edit on the right side to set the settings.  

Most account options on Facebook has 4 settings: Public (everyone can see your timeline - what's on your page), Friends (only people you're friends with can see your timeline), Only Me (only you can see) and Custom (different viewing options).  I suggest you set all settings to Friends to keep your page viewable only those you're friends with.  I have mine set up as Custom because I have a friends and family groups and I like to keep them separate at times.  You can also use this Custom setting to block 1 or 20 friends from seeing a certain post or picture.

Next up on the menu panel is Timeline and Tagging Settings.  This section is where you set up others' rights on your timeline.  Click on Edit on the right side to select the setting you want.  I set mine to all Friends as I only want my friends to be able to post a message or a picture on my timeline.  

For the Review posts _ and Review tags _ setting options,  make sure to set it to ON.  This is to ensure that you get to review posts and pictures of you first and then you can decide if you want to approve or hide it from your timeline.

Want to block a friend from viewing your facebook page ?  the Blocking setting is for that.  Click on Blocking in the Settings menu, then add the name of the people you want to block to the Blocked list.  Some of you who read this probably wonder, who uses this ?  You'll be surprised !  many people are friends with people they don't really want to be friends with :-) but too nice to deny their friends request.  This is the solution to limit access to your timeline.

Last thing to do now is to clear all info. on Apps Others Use.  Click to open Apps, and on the pop up window, unchecked all the boxes here.  What are these ?  when your friends download an app, that app would ask to pull info from all of their friends (you included) and your friend most likely would click "YES".  All info from your page will be pulled by the Apps' developer and they most likely use it for advertisement, stats, track usage, or other things.  Avoid to release as much info. as you can !

MANUALLY APPROVE POST AND PICTURE YOU'RE TAGGED IN

If you want to have control of what is shared on your page's timeline by other friends, this is a good setting to enabled on your account.

To do this, on the top blue menu bar of your page, on the far right hand side, click on the down arrow icon (also known as Account Settings).  On the drop down menu list, locate and click on Activity Log.

A new screen will open up, on the left menu panel, locate and click on Timeline Review to see all the notifications on your page.  On the same line as the Timeline Review title, there're 2 icons on the right side.  One is a wheel icon and one is a magnification glass, click on the wheel icon.

This icon will open a pop up window.  On this window, click on the down arrow and select Enable this control.  When you're tagged in a post or a picture, you will be notified and you can decide if you want to approve - Add to Timeline - or Hide (not show up on your timeline).

HIDE YOUR FRIENDS LIST

If you're like me, I like my Friends list be private so friends and strangers don't know who I'm friends with.  To do that, after you log in, click on your name at the top bar to open your page:

Once you're at your page, click on Friends to view your Friends list.  At the top right corner of this list, look for a pen icon that looks like this:

Click on it and select Edit Privacy.  A window will open up and on here, click on the down arrow to select who you want to see your list.  To make it private, select Only Me.

That's about all for SECURITY AND PRIVACY settings I can conjure up at the moment !  hopefully this is easy for you to follow. 

Another thing to keep in mind when on FB is, any where you see an arrow sign, when you click on it a menu will open up.  In the image below, the first down arrow allows me to make my picture Public or Friends or Only Me.  The picture of people next to the arrow means only my Friends can see it.  If it's a globe picture next to the arrow then it means my picture is avail for all to see (Public).  

The second arrow on the right side opens up a menu to allow me to edit my post (text) or delete it all together.

Below is a little "bonus" :-)  I was so annoyed with my news feed (the Home page where you see all updates and shares from your friends) so I went and changed some settings and it is so much better now !  Enjoy !

NEWS FEED PREFERENCES SETTINGS

Recently my news feed is filled with way too many re-shares and posts of strangers and groups and companies that my friends "like".  I hate this new settings on FB.  That everything my friends "like" shows up on my news feed.  I don't really need to know every single one of their "like" do I ?  Anyways, fed up with more ads and self help articles and less about the people I want updates on, I decided to customize my news feed.

To do this, go into Account Settings, then click on News Feed Preferences.  On the pop up window, you can select who you want to see most (they get first prioritize on your news feed) and who you want to see less/nothing from (unfollow them).  This is done in the background so the people wouldn't know if you prioritize them or unfollow them.  I have a few over-sharers that I feel hi jacked my whole news feed so I have to unfollow them.  

If you don't want to completely Unfollow someone, another way to do it is to manually hide certain post from them.

On your news feed, at the corner of the person's post there's a grey down arrow.  Click on it to open up an option menu.  On here you can select Hide Post, Hide All from "friend's name", or Unfollow them.

*I used a group as example to get the screen capture below but it can be done for individual too.

I've got a few emails from people saying they don't know how to leave a comment on my post.  After looking over at my blog, I realized not too many people know that the main page is a summary page so to leave a comment, they need to browse to the actual post OR click on the No Comments at the footer of the page to post something.  It's so tricky so I decided to change it !

- First, you need to go into Template > click on Edit HTML (a menu will open up like one below)
- Then click on the Format template tab at the top to view all the codes

- Click anywhere inside the code window
- The press Ctrl button together with the F key button to display the Search window
- Type in the text below in the search box and press Enter

<data:post.commentLabelFull/>
:

- There should be 3 instances of them, change it on the 2nd occurrence.  Look at the code line # to determine which is the 2nd occurrence.  Delete "<data:post.commentLabelFull/>:" and put in whatever word or phrase you want !  I changed mine to Leave a Comment.  Any question please leave me a comment below.

*Note:  FYI, I use the Simple blogger template and edited the code to my liking.

privacy:  freedom from the intrusion of others

There I was, lurking over a friend of friends' page !  envious a little at their wonderful FB life.  You know who you are !  Ones who posted countless pictures of themselves at some far far away land, with the wind blowing through their hair, the sun kissing their perfect skin, and them indulging in some amazing food !  SANS kids pulling on them at every directions !!!  It's great that we're not "friends" and I still have access to all their albums and personal info such as birth date, address, and phone number.  It surprises me how many people set their page on public mode !  I noticed they posted up their birth date and their home address (set their event invite to public view).  Anyone in the business of stealing identity will be jumping for joy, because frankly, careless people like these make it quite easy for them to.

All that aside, yesterday I went into my Privacy Settings just to see if FB did any updates behind my back :-)  Nothing changed.  Then when I went and check on my Active Sessions (in the Security Settings tab), I saw that I currently have an active facebook session in Edmonton !  I never been to Edmonton !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Needless to say, I quickly click on End Activity, reset my password and click YES on logging me off all active sessions.

I feel uneasy knowing someone has access to my account.  The hacker didn't post anything < which is smart because if they did I would have known right away my account was hacked.  What I learned from this is that:  ALWAYS LOG OFF YOUR FB ACCOUNT !!!  I always forget to log out :-(   Learn from me, always log out !!!  Especially if you use free wifi from coffee shop or restaurant.  Actually, you should avoid login into any account on public wifi.  This is because if the hacker is on the same network, using free public wifi as you, they can easily hack into your session.  Avoid it if you can, and if you can't, remember to Log Out to end your activity.  Also, you should change your password every so often too !

After I changed my password and added my phone # for account verification, I decided to look through my privacy settings AGAIN to ensure I got all bases covered.  If you want to protect, want to make your personal info, posts on timeline, pictures/tagged pictures and comments avail. to you or your friends only, here's what to do:

>  Privacy:  Who can see your future posts?  Change it to Friends, if you want the world to have access to your info then leave it as Public.  I don't want stranger to look me up on fb, so I set the Who can contact me? to only Friends of Friends.   Who can look me up using my email address ?  Friends !  no stranger should have my email address.  And I don't want search engines to link to my timeline so I turned it Off

> Timeline and Tagging:  Who can add things to my timeline ?  I don't want stranger to post on my timeline (my page) so I set it to Friends.  And I also only want Friends to see posts I was tagged in.  I went the extra mile and turn ON the Review any posts that I'm tagged in, before it can appear on my timeline.   

> Blocking:  You can set up a Restricted List of people you don't want to see your post.  IF you do use this option, MAKE SURE you set the Who can see my stuff? (in the Privacy tab) to Friends.

> Apps:  I deleted all the apps !  You probably have a few in here, if you play games, entered in a contest or like a page or use Instagram, etc.  All these apps have access to your personal info, the pages you like, groups you belong to, etc.  I don't like giving companies my info. so I deleted them all.

> Ads:  I set it to No One on sharing my personal info. to Third Party Sites or Ads & Friends (another word is Advertisers).  I don't need my friends AND stalkers to know what restaurant I eat at or where I like to shop ! 

There you have it !!!  Keep your info. private people !!!

You went on vacation, took some great pictures and wanted to share them to your fb circle of friends.  After uploaded all the pictures and clicked the Post Photos button, you can't wait to see how they look on your page.  You clicked on a photo and first thing you noticed, the image looked blurry, fuzzy, pixelated, so far from the original picture.  What happened ?

FB Compresssion is what happened !!!  Whenever you upload an image onto an album, behind the scene (on the fb server), sets of codes are run and what they do is that, they shunk each image down to the size and quality resolution that is acceptable to facebook.  What a bummer right ?  So, there are 2 ways to go about this, 1. you can complain to fb all you want in the hope they will change their coding, or 2. embrace their codes and work with it :-)



I uploaded both on fb, one with 600px canvas width (fuzzy) compare to 1200px canvas width (more sharp/crisp)

I know FB will never change their ways, so I went with option 2.  Here's the short answer, when you're ready to upload your pictures to fb, if you want to retain some quality of the photos, resize the size of your pictures as follow:

- If landscape, set at 1200 pixel width at 72 dpi (if image is too big for your liking, 900 pixel width is kinda ok looking too)

- If portrait, set at 900 pixel height at 72 dpi (I noticed fb brings it down to 846px, which works too)

After you resized your pictures, create an album or open as existing one on facebook.  Click on add photos, and select all photos you want to upload.  Before you click Post, make sure to check the High Quality checkbox at the bottom left corner of the screen.  That's all there is to it !!!

I've been playing around with the sizes of pictures on facebook for a while and these are what worked for me.  I prefer quality and smaller photos but so far, 900 pixel width is the smallest :-(

I like instagram filters but since I don't have an iphone (omg I know !) I decided to google for photoshop how tos !  Upon my search, I found that there are many people already did the leg work for this :-)  Some are better than others.  I like the one created by Daniel Box most as the photoshop filters are comparable to the instagram filters.

Go here to download the action file:  http://dbox.tumblr.com/post/5426249009/instagram-filters-as-photoshop-actions

Here're the steps to load the action file:

1.  Open and extract the action file you just downloaded
2.  Open Photoshop (I use Adobe Design Premium CS4)
3.  In Photoshop, press Alt+f9 OR locate Window on the top menu bar, click to open up a menu; then locate Actions and click to open it

 

4.  On the ACTIONS window, at the top right corner click on the little arrow pointing down

 

5.  In this drop down menu, locate Load Actions... and click to open

6.  Browse to the extracted folder of the photoshop action file that you downloaded, and click on the ATN file to load the actions.

7.  Once the actions are loaded, click on the little arrow on the left of the action file (#1) to expand the file. 

 

8.  Select the filter you want to use (#2) by single click on the filter name.

9.  Click on the play arrow at the bottom of the ACTIONS window (#3)

10.  Let the action run its course and your picture will be altered according to the filter you picked.

*** there's also border that you can play with.  Always remember to press play to see the final result.


Highlight of today:  Honeybee and I went to check on our little garden and it's doing very well !  all the seeds have spouted and we can see beautiful green leaves lined up in crooked rows (it's hard to plant them in straight lines :-)  Thank you Lord for the warm sun and rain to help these plants grow !!!

If you're not using Gmail's Label, you're missing out !!!  With gmail, though it doesn't have a folder creation, you can use LABEL to act like a folder to file all your emails.   File/folder is the easiest way to sort and organize your emails, so that important ones doesn't get overlooked !  Once you created a label, you can then use filter to automatically send email containing certain key word(s) or from a specific email to their designated folder.  Here's how to do it.

1.  Log into your gmail account
2.  Locate the wheel-like looking icon, click to open up a drop down menu

3.  Select and click 'Settings'

 

4.  A new screen will open, locate the Labels tab and click on it

5.  Under the label tab menu, near the bottom left, click on 'Create new label'

 

6.  A pop up form will show up, give your label a name (think of label as your folder's name). 

 

* You can even nest a label under a label (like a folder inside another folder).  If you want to nest it, first you have to create the main label, when that's done, then create the label you want to nest under that main label.

 

 

7.  Now that you created the label, you need to create filter to tell the system to automatically file emails for you.  Click on the Filters tab at the very top.

 

 

8.  At the bottom right of the screen, locate and click on 'Create a new filter'

9.  A pop up window will come up.  Here you will fill in all the info. you want the system to check when an email arrived at your inbox.

 

>From:  put in any email that you want the system to group together in a folder.

>To:  fill this section if you have a specific email address that you want the system to look for.

>Subject:  certain word in the subject line

>Has the words:  here you can put in any word you want to check for (ie. invoice, payment, mom, etc)

>Doesn't have:  words the email doesn't contain

>Has attachment:  email containing a file or not

***You don't have to fill it all out.  Like the pic. I posted, I only fill out the From textbox. 

10.  Once you're done with this form, click on 'Create filter with this search >>'

11.  Ignore any pop up message that said something about changes has not been saved.  Click OK to discard the changes.

12.  Another pop up window will open up, this is where you tell the system what to do with the emails when they matched your filter criteria.

Choose Skip the Inbox if you want the email to go directly to the folder.  If you want to manually file it then don't check this box.

Mart as read & Star it (a yellow star picture next to the email) is pretty self explanatory !

You should check the Apply the label: box, then click on Choose label... to select the label you just created.  This will make the system add the label name to all your incoming emails that matched the filter criteria you set up. 

Then you can Forward the email, Delete or Never send it Spam

While you're filling this out , the system is doing a scan in the background to see if any OLD emails in your inbox matches the filter you created.  If any email (conversations) matched, it will display the # of matching conversation (mine has 0 matching conversations).  If you want to apply the label to old email, then remember to check the Also apply filter to # matching conversations.

13.  Click on Create filter to complete it.

As you can see on the picture below, your "label" will show up under your Inbox.  I opened all my new email so I can't screen capture one to show you.  But say, if there's any new email, the label name will appear bold with the total # of new email it contained.  For example: hosting (3) < means there're 3 new emails in the hosting folder.

Hope this is easy to follow !  Once you created one you'll get the hang of it and will see how easy it is.  I shortened my list in the image above, but in reality, I have over 20 labels (folders ;-)   These helped me greatly in organizing important emails that I need to check right away over ones that can wait.  If you have any question shoot me an email or leave me a comment !  Happy labelling !

 

 

It seems Java updates itself every week and it was so annoying I made it my mission to find a way to turn it OFF ! 

In Window XP you just have to go to Control Panel > locate Java Plug-in > click to open it > then click on the Update tab to turn it off. 

I recently upgrade my laptop to Window 7 and well, turning Java off takes a bit more work !  I took the long way, going through C: drive, Programs x86 (because my laptop is 64 bit), then Java folder and then the search for the cpl file everyone is talking about !!

1.  Go to Start and select Search
2.  Type in Javacpl.exe and press Start to commence the search
3.  When the file is found, right click on it and select Run as Administrator
4.  A Java window will come up, click on the Update tab

5.  Click to UNCHECKED the 'Check for Update Automatically' and another window will pop up:

6.  Click on Never Check, then this window will collapse
7.  Click Apply, then OK to close

Updates should not appear anymore !  I have mixed feeling about Disabling Java as I do want the latest and greatest from them.  So whenever I remember I would do a manual updates and I think you should too !  Java updates installed the lastest stable version of it (or so I'm told by them).  Well we will always need Jave so you decide what's best and convenience for you !  Enjoy !