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Rapid Touch uses dedicated servers and offers its clients web hosting on those servers. While shared servers offered by many hosters are perfectly fine for many small businesses, more and more of our clients learns that they need some 'real stuff' - a website hosted and serviced by Rapid Touch on a dedicated server. Here are some advantages of our hosting:
Please feel free to contact Rapid Touch at any time! Read More ...Sometimes you record some audio - music, speech etc, and you would like to burn it onto a CD and share it with your family and friends. Many new PCs come with excellent commercial software that allows burning CDs in general and audio CDs in particular. However if you happen not to have anything reasonable, looks no more and go to the CD Burner XP website and download CDBurnerXP. Note, that CD Burner XP supports Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/2008/Win7 (x86 / x64). After you download the CD Burner XP, run the installer, click on the 'Next' button a few times and wait a minute until the installer finishes. You will have a shortcut to the program in your Start/All Programs menu. Now you need your audio files - most likely in a wav or mp3 format. Make sure you know what folder they are in. When you are ready, start CD Burner XP.
Click on the Audio disk option, and then on the OK button.
Now, browse for your recording(s) using the top panel. Drag your audio file(s) to the bottom panel. Make sure that you only try to burn up an an hour of audio. While some CDs allow to burn up to 80 minutes, others do not. Let us stay at the safe side! After adding all tracks you want to burn onto the CD, select the number of copies you want to burn, and click on the Burn button to start the process. It should take about 5 minutes to burn a CD. When you are done, make sure you label the CDs with a marker. Read More ...It is always nice to have a fancy slide show on your Joomla based web site. It is even nicer to be able to put slide shows into articles. The process of creating a slide show is very easy and consists out of three steps: A. Creating a new 'category' for your images. B. Uploading images to the server. C. Assigning uploaded images to the category. D. Adding a special code to your article to display the slide show.
A Creating a new category for the images. 1. Open the administrator's page and log on.
2. Click on the 'Components/Phoca Gallery/Categories' menu.
3. Click on the 'New' button.
4. Type the title for the category.
5. And click on the 'Save' button located in the top right side of the screen. Now we have a new category and we can start uploading the images.
B. Uploading images to the server and Assigning uploaded images to the category. Note that due to the upload time and restrictions on some servers, images should be resized to a more or less 'screen size' - about 640x480 up to 1024x768. See how to resize images and how to resize multiple images. 1. Identify images you want to use for the slide show, copy them to the same folder, resize and rotate if needed.
2. Click on the 'Components/Phoca Gallery/Images' menu.
3. Click on the 'Multiple Add' button located in the top-right side of the screen.
4. Type the name of new folder on the server, and click on the 'Create Folder' button.
5. Click on the name of the new folder to enter into it. We want the images to be uploaded directly to the new folder.
6. Click on the 'Java Upload' tab, then on the 'Browse' button. Select the folder in the 'Folders' panel, and then select all images you want to upload in the 'Files' folder. Click on the 'OK' button.
7. Click on the 'Upload' button.
8. Select the category, check all images
9. And click on the 'Save' button located in the top right side of the screen.
D. Adding a special code to your article to display the slide show. 1. Let us start with checking the ID of the category you want to use.
Click on the 'Categories' link in the Phoca Gallery Control Panel.
The ID of the category will be shown in the very left side of the screen in the column called 'ID'
2. Add a line of code as shown above. Make sure that the categoryid is set correctly to the value read in the step 1. Set detail to 3 to get a autostarting 'fancy' slide show. Set the value to 0 to get more traditionally looking one. Read More ... Web browsers store (or cache) temporary files, browsing history, and other data on your hard drive. Is is bad? No, not in most cases. Sometimes you want to remove those files. Maybe for privacy reasons, or maybe because the browser keeps showing old (cached) versions of some images or content. How to do it in the case of Firefox 3.5? Follow the easy steps below:
Open Mozilla Firefox 3.5, click on the 'Tools' and then on the 'Clear Recent History...' menu.
Set the 'Time Range' to 'Everything', select 'Cookies' and 'Cache'. You can select 'Browsing and Download History' too. Then click on the 'Clear Now' button. Read More ... Web browsers store (or cache) temporary files, browsing history, and other data on your hard drive. Is is bad? No, not in most cases. Sometimes you want to remove those files. Maybe for privacy reasons, or maybe because the browser keeps showing old (cached) versions of some images or content. How to do it in the case of Internet Explorer 8? Follow the easy steps below:
Open Internet Explorer, click on the 'Tools' menu and then on the 'Internet Options' one.
Click on the 'Delete' button.
Check the 'Temporary Internet Files', and 'Cookies'. You may check 'History' too if you wish. Then click on the 'Delete' button. You are done now! Read More ... 'Contact us' forms - websites have it and it is OK. They allow you to type a message that will be sent to an employee and the user will get an answer eventually. Publishing a phone number helps a lot. It works great for local users. Some of them may be reluctant to long distance calls. Toll free numbers - they are as free as you pay for them. What is a solution then? There are several, but there is one of them that looks very tempting. Try Google Voice! You need to request an invite to be able to sign up. It is well worth it. After you sign up, you will need to 'link' the account to a regular US phone number. Then you will be able to create an easy web widget. Basically it will be an 'call me' button. When your client clicks on it, s/he will be able to enter her number so the widgets calls her and call you. Alternatively you can send her message to a voice mail. It is easy and free. Contact us to get such widget on your site! Read More ...Credit card payments are convenient. Thus (some) clients want to pay us using their credit cards. Thus we better accept the payments, or our clients find somebody else who can be more accommodating. As simple as that! Large corporations have been able to accept credit card payments for a long time. They can do it over the phone, online or in person. Would you like to do what 'big boys' do? After doing quite some research and dealing with some customer service lines and fees schedules, we found Paypal to be convenient, easy and inexpensive. All you need to do is to open a free account with Paypal, generate online basket HTML code with a few clicks and insert the code into your web site. What is really nice is how fast we get get the code and how easily the code can be implemented in either a simple HTML web site or in a complex Content Management System (CMS) based site. Go to the Paypal site, or contact the Rapid Touch Team for assistance. Read More ...Safe and convenient access to your computer is available now. Do you ever get stuck while doing something on your PC or Mac? Would you like to be able to ask somebody to help? Or maybe you just want to be able to access your computer while traveling or from the office. There is a number of ways of how to enable the remote access. Only few of them are simple and one of them is a brilliant product of logmein.com. The short video (pulled from youtube - thank you SpacePenguins) describes how to install logmein on your computer. We advise (at least initially) to install and use Logmein Free. Before you start the installation, remember: Right down the passwords and keep them in a safe place. Wach the video now:
Follow the video and install Logmein Free on your computer. Now what? Contact the Rapid Touch Team and we will assist you if you ever get stuck or have questions in the future! Read More ...There are many ways of sharing files. FTP is one of them. Is it the best way of uploading and downloading files? Well, it is robust, easy and sometimes you have no choice but to use it. Filezilla is probably the easiest tool for FTP uploads and downloads - so called an FTP client. It is free and can be downloaded from Filezilla Website. If you are using Windows operating system, download the recommended Filezilla...win32-setup.exe file, and install it like any other Windows application. More information about installation here. Make sure that you obtain the necessary information to connect to the FTP server: server name, user name, password, additional details (if needed). Such information will be provided by the FTP server administration. Start Filezilla - you will have a shortcut in the 'Start' menu.
Click on the 'Open the Site Manager' icon on the top right side of the screen.
Click on the 'New Site' button.
Enter an easy to remember name for the new site, e.g. XYZ Office. Enter the host name i.e. the name or the address of the ftp server. Leave the 'Server Type' as 'FTP File Transfer Protocol' unless instructed otherwise. Unless instructed otherwise, change the 'Logon Type' to 'Normal' and enter the user name and password.See a sample data on the form:
Click on the OK button to finish the setup. Click on the 'Open the Site Manager' icon on the top right side of the screen, click on the name of your site (Joes Office in our case) and click on the 'Connect' button.You will get connected to the site. Information about navigating on the FTP server, and the local machine, files' uploads and downloads can be found here. Read More ...If you do not have Infranview installed, download it from the Infranview official web site and download.Use default options - just follow the prompts. When you have Infranview installed, find the folder with your pictures.
Right-click on the image, select the 'Open with' option and left-click on the 'Infranview'
Click on the 'File' menu and select the 'Batch Conversion/Rename...' option.
Select the batch conversion, make sure that the output format is set to JPG, select the 'Use advanced options', and click on the 'Advanced' button.
Click on the 'Resize' option, then 'Set one or both sides to' and then on pixels. Set the size. For the web purposes, it can be 640x640, or 1024x1024. You can use different settings too, just do not set the resolution too high. Click on the 'OK' button.
Select the 'Output directory' where resized images will be stored, click on the 'Add all' button and then on the 'Start Batch'. After a few moments, or minutes depending on the number of images and the speed of the computer, all selected images will be resized and good to go.
Audio files can be HUGE in size. Some recording devices provide audio files in the wav format that can be as almost 700MB per hour. It is way to much if you want to move such files over the internet. Fortunately there is an easy solution that allows to compress audio files so they are 10 times smaller, practically without loosing the quality. There is a number of formats and tools to compress audio files and we will present a tool called WinLAME that allows to compress audio files to the MP3 format. In order to install the tool, read and understand the note on the site. http://winlame.sourceforge.net/download.php and then download WinLAME. The installation process is very simple - just double click on the installer, click on the 'Next' and 'Finish' buttons when prompted. Start WinLAME from the 'Start' button on your Windows computer.
Click on the 'Add files...' icon in the top right side of the window, and select the files you want to convert.
When the files are selected, click on the 'Next' button.
Make sure that you choose 'LAME mp3 Encoder' as the output mode. Check and modify (if needed) the output location. This will be the folder where the compressed files will be saved. Click on the 'Next' button.
For the internet use, select the 'VirtualDub' option. It will give you all quality you need keeping the output files small. Click on the 'Next' button.
Click on the start button to start the conversion. The mp3 audio files will be located in the 'output location' selected in a previous step. Read More ...If you do not have Infranview installed, download it from the Infranview official web site and download.Use default options - just follow the prompts. When you have Infranview installed, find the folder with your pictures.
Right-click on the image, select the 'Open with' option and left-click on the 'Infranview'
Select the 'Image' menu and then click on the 'Resize/resample'.
Click on the 'Set new size' radio button, type 1024 (or other value if needed) as width and set units to pixels. Then click on the 'OK' button.
Click on the 'Save as' button in the top-left corner of the Infranview window.
Type the name of the file. You probably want to use a different name than the original image. Make sure that the 'Save as type' is set to JPG. Click on the 'Save' button Read More ...So you have a new digital camera. You go places, take lovely 10 Mega-pixel images and try to upload them to the internet. You soon realize that the images are way too big as for your internet speed. And, quite frankly, you seldom need resolution greater than of your computer screen. You better resize your images to some 1024 x something size. It is easy with widely available tools. If you use Photoshop or GIMP, you probably do not need to read this article anyway. All others can resize their images with Microsoft Office Picture Manager that should be installed on your computer if you have MS Office, or Infranview - my favorite one. How to resize your images using Infranview How to resize your images using Microsoft Office Picture Manager Read More ...Inserting links on your Joomla site is quite a common task. The good news is that it is easy too: 1. Select (highlight) the text that will be used for the link's 'name'. 2. Click on the 'Insert/Edit Link' button
3.In case of 3rd party links, type the URL to the 3rd party site or article. 4. Set the target to open in new window. 5. Click on the 'Insert' button.
If you want to insert a link to a PDF document or other file, 1. Select (highlight) the text that will be used for the link's 'name'. 2. Click on the 'Insert/Edit Link' button
3. Click on the little icon at the right side to start browsing for a file.
4. Use the 'Folders' and 'Files' panels to find the file you want to insert a link to. You may use the 'New Folder' and 'Upload' buttons to upload images to the site. 5. After selecting a file, double click on it and click on the 'Insert' button.
When you need to insert a link to another article within the site, 1. Select (highlight) the text that will be used for the link's 'name'. 2. Click on the 'Insert/Edit Link' button
3. Click on the 'content'
4. Double-click on the section and category and select the article you need a link to, and then click on the 'Insert' button. Read More ...
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Click on the Start Button in the bottom left corner of the screen, and then click on the Computer menu item.
Click on the 'View' tab, and then click on the highlighted radio box to either show or to hide hidden files and folders
Read More ... New video camcorders give you great quality footage. It is great to play on an HD TV, but may be not too handy for uploads to the Internet. Same applies to DVD disks (note that we only deal with legally obtained content and unencrypted DVD disks). Since Web usually required much lower quality, you can go ahead and convert your videos to a different format that will be uploadable in a reasonable time. How do it?
Download and install Any Video ConverterDownload the latest version of Any Video Converter from the official web site: http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/
When downloaded, double-click on the downloaded file in order to install the application.
Copy your video from your portable USB camera.Recording videos and copying them to your computer is always easy. Finding your videos after months is easy when the files are copied to the right folders and are properly named. Note, that if you have a DVD with footage you want to convert, copy only the .VOB files to your hard drive. Folders and namingClick on the Start Menu and select the User Folder.
Double-click on the Videos folder. Create a new folder and type a name related to your project, e.g. project-drums, or bicycles-la Connect your camera to a free USB port of your computer. When the 'Autoplay' message appears, select the 'Open folders to view files' option. 
Copy the files to your Videos/<name of the project> folder. Review the videos and rename them to names more meaningful, e.g. sarah-talking.avi Click on the Start Menu and start the Any Video Converter.
Drag your video file from the Videos/<name of the project> to the Any Video Converter window
Set the profile to 'Flash Video Movie (flv), video size to 320x240, and Video Bitrate to 768 if you need your video just for the upload. If you want to do more editing, select the Customized AVI profile, video codec set to xvid, or h264 and the video bit rate set to 1024 or 2000.
Click on the convert button. The conversion may take a few minutes. At the end answer 'No, thank you' to the question asked by the application.
Open the folder with the new file in the flv or avi format:
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