Do you have a LinkedIn Company page ?

Have you employed the newly designed look and features?

If you haven’t created a LinkedIn Company Page, now is the time to do so.

The new layout makes it easier for people to find, follow and engage with your Company Page.

Some of the beautiful  new design updates and features that you can take advantage of on your Company Page are as follows :

• Spotlight group on Company page
• Banner Images
• Career and Products featured on Home Tab
• Product Recommendations more prominently featured
• Featured and Targeted updates
• Visibility on mobile apps

Impressions and Engagement

You can see the number of Impressions and Engagement percentages on your company profile page.

An impression is the number of times the update has been viewed.

Engagement measures how people react to the update; for example, comments, likes, clicks, or shares.

Sending Passwords in Email ? Is it safe ?

Sending passwords through email is a common practice. It is also a very bad practice. If you are on the receiving end of a password transferred this way, be sure to change it immediately after logging in. If you remain uncomfortable, ask the sender to reset the password and use the telephone to acquire the new password.

Be very wary about trusting sensitive information with any system administrator who insists that passwords via email are safe. What other practices are considered safe at this site? Would you trust this person to protect your credit card number, for example?

Emailed passwords are dangerous for all of the following reasons:

• email is sent in plain text
• email often is stored on several systems along the way to your mailbox
• email often is stored on your computer in plain text or other unencrypted format
• many copies may exist in many places, even after “deletion”
• even encrypted email can be broken in to, given enough computing time
• your account’s security may have been compromised even before you read your email (changing the password will not help in this case)

Whether you are sending or receiving a password, security best practices recommend that you avoid email entirely. Play it safe. It’s always the best policy.

Courtesy : The Bitmill^® Inc.

Background your Blog

Whatever you choose, a background colour or a background image for your blog, make sure it sets the reader’s mood.

Background colour can create mood, add emphasis and immediately indicate a brand, but it can also impact the legibility and readability of your type. So here are just a few tips .

Keep characters clear

Legibility refers to how clear the individual characters of a typeface are. The clearer they are, the easier they are to read.

Background color can affect legibility by ‘bleeding’ into your text and overwhelming the finer typographic details that help define a character’s shape, like serifs, stems, strokes, and cross bars. To avoid legibility issues:

• inspect the clarity of these features on your chosen theme
• try bumping up your text size; and
• experiment with the other themes available from your Appearance settings

Watch your contrast

Readability refers to how easy it is to read text as a whole – as phrases, sentences, or blocks of text. Lots of things can affect readability, including line measure, tracking, size, etc. But when it comes to colour, it’s the contrast you want to watch. Too little contrast between your background and type colours and readers will have to squint to make out the words. Too much contrast and it can be hard on the eyes and cause fatigue (plus just be plain ugly).

I recommend not to go for a background image because of the difficulty in selection of the type of images like continuous, discrete, grayscale etc. Difficulty in adjusting the colour, contrast, brightness and other attributes of the image. Deciding to use using single image or tiles with correct size and positioning etc.

But here are some important things to take into consideration when it comes to choosing your background image :

• Your background image should be seamless otherwise it will look awkward and unattractive.
• Your background image should contain either mostly light or mostly dark colours to facilitate choosing an appropriate contrasting text color.
• Your web page text color and the general color of your background image must contrast enough to render readability.

Hope you get the bulls eye(reader’s eyes glued) with whatever background you select.

All the best!!

Codecademy – Learn Free Online Programming

It’s a great time to be a programmer right now, for many reasons — one of which is the wide variety of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that are available that allow developers to build applications with sophisticated features more quickly and easily than ever.

Learn free programming skills at home

Codecademy launched last year with the mission of making it possible for absolutely anyone to learn to program. What makes it stand out from many other online programming tutorials in that students can complete all the lessons within their web browsers. There is no need to download or install any programming languages or development software.

Codecademy, the startup that aims to teach people everywhere how to code, wants to help make those APIs even more accessible. Today Codecademy is announcing that it has partnered with a number of established web companies to offer a host of new lessons that concentrate on the basics of building with their specific APIs.

New York University teamed up with Codecademy

New York University teamed up with the computer programming tutorial site Codecademy to offer a free, non-credit programming class for NYU students. The pilot program ran from Sept. 28 through Dec. 7, 2012.

Codecademy seeked to democratize computer programming by offering lessons via the web, and this NYU partnership had put a new spin on that mission — and added some legitimacy. According to Codecademy CEO Zach Sims, NYU had basically built a course around the existing Codecademy curriculum. “We’ve helped by recommending pieces of the curriculum and giving suggestions on how to run the program,” Sims said. In addition to Codecademy’s interactive lessons, the course included monthly guest speakers.

NYU has a history of offering creative ways to introduce coding to its students. For example, Adam Parrish teaches a course called “Reading and Writing Electronic Text” as part of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The course uses Python programming techniques to teach experimental creative writing. Students learn to use the language’s text processing features to manipulate or generate or rearrange text to create new works. For example, students could create an digital version of the Burroughs and Gysin cut-up technique.

Codecademy has widely expanded

In January 2012, the company launched its CodeYear campaign to get people to pledge to learn to program. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously made the pledge. Meanwhile, Codecademy’s curriculum is being used by companies to teach non-technical staff to code, and is starting to see some success.

Codecademy is starting to expand its scope as well. It started out teaching JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but in July the company added tutorials for the programming language Python. It also recently and also published a curriculum for those wishing to run after school programs for teaching code.

Launched API Lessions

Codecademy first launched API lessons last month, but this release brings a number of new big name API providers to the mix. Codecademy now has lessons for building with APIs from Twitter,Evernote, Box, and Gilt. The full list of Codecademy’s new API partners is rounded out by WePay, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, MailChimp, and Dwolla.

What can be done with these types of APIs is significant, Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims said. “Within a few minutes of starting lessons on Codecademy, users can do a few really awesome things,” he says. The Twitter API lesson teaches users how to read twitter from the code editor and create their own tweets, while the WePay and Dwolla APIs let users send money from the code editor and create invoices, for just a couple examples.

It’s a nice update from Codecademy, which has steadily iterated on its platform since its August 2011 launch and now has 17 staffers and $12.5 million in VC funding. Updates such as these makes the Codecademy platform a more robust one not just for beginning programmers, but also for people with a bit more experience that are keen to learn new things.