Using Remote Assistance

Requesting help using Remote Assistance

Sometimes the best way to fix a problem is to have someone show you how. Remote Assistance is a convenient way for a distant friend to connect to your computer from another computer running a compatible operating system, such asWindows XP, and walk you through your solution.

By following the easy steps in Remote Assistance, you can use WindowsMessenger Service or an e-mail message to invite a friend to connect to your computer. After he or she is connected, your friend will be able to view your computer screen and chat with you in real time about what you both see. With your permission, your assistant can even use his or her mouse and keyboard to work with you on your computer.

To start Remote Assistance

1. Click Start, and then click Help and Support.
2. Click Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance.

Notes

• Both you and your helper must be using either Windows Messenger Service or a MAPI-compliant e-mail account such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.
• You and your helper need to be connected to the Internet while using Remote Assistance.
• If you are working on a local area network, firewalls might stop you from using Remote Assistance. In this case, check with your network administrator before using Remote Assistance.
• If for some reason you are unable to send an invitation by using e-mail orWindows Messenger Service, you can create and save an invitation. On the first page of Remote Assistance, click Invite someone to help you. On the next page, click Save invitation as a file (Advanced), and follow the instructions to save the file. You can then send the saved invitation file to your helper in the manner you choose, such as copying it onto a floppy disk or a shared network location, sending it over another e-mail service or an FTP connection, and so on.

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Password Security in Remote Assistance

Using password security in Remote Assistance

If you send an invitation in an e-mail message, you should specify a strong password for the assistant to use, in order to protect your computer from someone pretending to be your helper.

Strong passwords are important because the tools and computers that people use to guess passwords continue to improve. Passwords that once took weeks to break can now be broken in hours.

Remember to communicate the password (for example, in an e-mail message) to your assistant beforehand.

The password should:

• Be at least seven characters long.
• Contain letters, numerals, and symbols.
• Have at least one symbol character in the second through sixth positions.
• Be significantly different from prior passwords.
• Not contain your name or user name.
• Not be a common word or name.

Note

• If you set a password, the person you invite will need to know it in order to connect to your computer. The password is not automatically sent to the invitee.

Windows file system

Before formatting a volume or partition, consider the file system with which to format it. Windows 2000 and Windows XP support the NTFS file system, File Allocation Table (FAT), and FAT32. NTFS is the recommended file system forWindows 2000 and Windows XP because it supports several features that the other file systems do not, such as file and folder permissions, encryption, large volume support, and sparse file management. However, you must format the volume or partition as FAT if you plan to access files on that volume or partition from other operating systems, including MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98,Windows Millennium Edition, and Windows NT 4.0.

Choose NTFS only if you are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP and you want to take advantage of NTFS features.

The following features are unique to NTFS:

• Compression
• Disk quotas
• Encryption
• Mount points
• Remote storage

In addition, NTFS is required on all dynamic disks and GUID partition table (GPT)disks.

For more information about installing multiple operating systems on a volume, see Installing more than one operating system on your computer.

Add some xfbml content

Add some xfbml content

Now it's time to add some xfbml content. This should be inserted as raw html code wherever you want it to appear in your page. A couple of examples are shown below.

Like button

urlofwebpage">

Replace the url of webpage as appropriate

Comments

unique_id">

Note that the unique_id should be unique for each separate comment thread you want.

You can find more social plugins on the Facebook developers social plugins page

You then need to repeat for any other pages that you want to add these features to.

Adding to Wordpress Template

Adding to Wordpress Template

In Wordpress you need to make the same changes as above, but these need to go into the Wordpress templates. You can also add a small amount of wordpress php code to ensure that each blog entry has it's own comment field.

This is all done in the theme for the site, and as such will be propagated across all relevant posts / pages depending upon which you update. You may want to create your own theme and edit that rather than the original, but you can just edit the original.

From the administration dashboard go to "Appearance" and "Editor", then choose the appropriate theme.

You then need to select the appropriate template file.

header.php (Header)
The xmlns tag should be entered within this template file.

footer.php (Footer)
You should insert the JavaScript code for the bottom of the page in this file.

single.php (Single Post) and/or page.php (Page Template)
These template files are used for blog posts and wordpress pages respectively. Update either or both of these depending upon which pages you would like to add your Facebook plugin to.

To include the individual post ID (eg. for the comment unique code) then add:

For example in my single.php file I have inserted the following just before the wordpress comments section:

"> ?>

Adding the Facebook JavaScript SDK to your site

Adding the Facebook JavaScript SDK to your site

To add this functionality you will need to update your web page html code. This will depend upon how you create your web pages as to how you add this. If you are using Dreamweaver you should switch to the code view; using Wordpress see later in this post; using a template based system you will need to edit the templates through a template editor; any other system you need to look for a source code edit feature.

Now start at the top of the page and look for an entity starting and add xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" at the end of the entity (before the closing angle bracket >). If you don't have an xmlns tag then create one as follows:

xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

Now go down to the very bottom of the page and insert the following just before the tag: You will need to change the appID to the one provided when you register your application. Note you could instead copy and paste this section of code directly from the example that Facebook provides when you register.

Adding Facebook Social Plug in

I've used the Facebook Connect social plugins to provide a comments feature to my website blogs (see: Blog comments using Facebook connect social plugins).

The reason I added this was because of the way that I create my blog. I use Wordpress as my blog engine running on my WatkissOnline web server, but then depending upon the category, some of the posts are exported to the First Aid Quiz (Health, Safety and First Aid related) website and some to the PenguinTutor.com (Linux, computer and technology related) website. This works well except for one feature, the comments are not available except on the main Wordpress site. Technically it would be possible to show the comments and even to create a proxy system to submit comments, but this would need a significant amount of time to develop properly. So I looked at what other options were available and came across Facebook Connect. This provides a number of facebook social networking features that can be integrated into other web sites.

There are a number of advantages to using Facebook such as:

• Easy to add to your web site (only a few lines of code)
• No additional data protection regulations (Facebook is responsible for those)
• Encourages other Facebook users to know and engage with your web site

It is the last of these that is very appealing.

There are some downsides as well such as:

• Lack of direct ownership of the comments
• Does not directly build your potential customer base - although creates alternative in form of "fans"
• It is only going to be as good as how well your users trust Facebook (which is working at alaying fears over privicy at the moment)

I believe that the potential benefits more than out way the negative aspects.