Tag: tools
What is a Bank Switch Kit
What is a Bank Switch Kit?
A Bank Switch Kit is a tool usually focused on automatic payments and direct deposits which help customers switch their account one bank account to another.
How does a Switch Kit differentiate your bank from others?
By shortening the time required to switch automated payment.
The Auto Switch Kit product helps the consumer fill out many forms in a matter of 2 to 5 minutes. Where it could have taken 10 to 30 using other methods.
The process of switching typically goes like this:
- User fills out their name, new bank account information and their employer information on a direct deposit change form.
- User fills out their name, new bank account information, power company name, address account number.
- User fills out their name, new bank account information, cable company name, address account number.
This form has to be filled out 5 to 10 times.
Auto Switch Kit
Our Auto Switch Kit takes a different approach to minimize the amount of work that the Bank Customer has to do in order to switch their account (making it easier for them to switch to your Bank)
User selects checkboxes from a preset list of local Vendor companies
User fills their name, new account, and local Vendor account numbers on a single form.
System displays all local company forms, filled out and ready for printing.
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| Generic | Auto Switch Kit | |
| How many forms have to be filled out | Filling out multiple forms with the same information, one form for every vendor | Fill out all information at once |
| Easy to select and remember | Must remember which companies, and then type out the names of each of them. | Prompts for the most common local companies such as power and cable and other utilities. |
| Faster, more accurate information | ou must fill out the company’s address information which likely involves researching the correct address and mailing procedure on it. | Uses the local company’s local form which has the logo, address information and mailing procedure on it. |
See for yourself how this tool can help you.
Request a demo
[contact-form-7 id=”9161″ title=”PDF Switch Kit Demo”]
Website Owners 6 Free Speed Security and SEO Tools
Website Owners 6 Free Speed Security and SEO Tools
6 Free Speed, Security and SEO Tools Matraex, Inc Uses
There are a plethora of tools out there to help you evaluate your website. We have built a few ourselves that help us manage multiple websites. The following list is geared towards a website owner and should help you to understand some important aspects of your website.
If you should ever need anything part of your website changed, contact us here at Matraex for fast effective help.
1) Pingdom Webspeed Test
A good, full page speed load tester, it gives a score and suggestions for improvements – http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
2) Google PageSpeed Insights
A phenomenal resource for understanding how you can improve the load speed and experience of your website. Google gives you a Mobile and Desktop Grade and then gives suggestions and advice with downloads. – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
[Matraex Website Performance Assessment Log – saves results from tools 1 and 2 above to help users ‘watch’ the effect that changes have on their performance]
3) Qualys SSL Labs test
A great free test to check that your SSL certificate on your site does not have any vulnerabilities, The site gives your SSL certificate a grade and describes any problems. This is a great repeatable test if you have a site looking to become PCI compliant – https://www.ssllabs.com/
4) Jitbit SSL
Scan your https:// site to see if you have any insecure content. This test can help identify images, style sheet, javascript and other linked content which runs over an insecure (http://) connection – https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/
5) Securi Site Scan
Run a scan on your WordPress website with securi, this will help identify malware or hacks on your site. – https://sitecheck.sucuri.net
6) SEMRush SEO Evaluation
Find how your site is performing – SEM Rush gives you a single overview page with almost too much information. Take a look at your results for organic search backlinks and keywords. The initial report is free however SEM Rush charges for more frequent and advanced reports. Their free report gives you a good general idea to allow you to decide whether you want to get more indepth – https://www.semrush.com/
We of course want to include a link to our free tool as well, our tool helps us to take an even smaller, faster look at a WordPress Website’s speed, security and exposure, take a look if it fits your type of site – https://www.matraex.com/website-check.php
If these tools gave you a good idea about how your website is performing for you, but you would like more info or you would like to improve it, contact us or give me a call to discuss your website – Michael Blood 208.344.1115 x 250
Custom network tools we use at Matraex
We had a need for some Network Tools and we could not find them, so we created them
As Matraex has been developing websites over the last 15+ years, we have used many tools to do it.
We often find areas which there are no tools, or we could automate time consuming or error prone tasks in order to get them done more quickly and efficiently.
For these areas, we have developed some Network Tools which help us to get what we need done.
DNS and Name Servers
Bulk DNS Lookup
One of areas we identified was when dealing with new customers with a large number of domains. In ideal situations, the domains would all be registered with a single registrar account and all using known name servers. However that has not always been the case. We built the Bulk MX, DNS Domain Lookup tool to help us quickly assess the domain name, where it is located, who hosts the Name Servers, domains and mail services.
Name Server Compare
In other cases we found that we needed help in identifying where multiple name servers is not set to the same value on different servers. For example if a domain uses three different name servers, there are times that those name servers many not be setup the same and may report different values.
For this we built the https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare-tool/
This is especially useful when moving a number of domains from one name server to another.
Website Performance
Website Performance Assessment Log
To help us track the performance increase (or decrease) for Websites we built the Website Performance Assessment Log. The tool has very little functionality itself, however it allows you to type in statistics from Pingdom and from Google’s PageSpeed Insights, then once you make changes to your site you can type in the next set of statistics. This is helps to track which changes made a difference and which changes did not.
WordPress Website Check
We needed to quickly be able to assess a new WordPress website. So we built the Website Check tool which grabs some quick speed and page load statistics, does some security checks and checks on what your WordPress site exposes.
Other less popular, but some times helpful tools,
- our CSS helper tool, this tool helps us identify duplicate and overriding style sheet definitions on a single style sheet.
- Our buik – unix time to date converter. You can paste in a block of text (typically I copy this from some syslog file which logged in unix timestamps) and the tool replaces any found timestamps to help us quickly read the results with Date/ Time stamps
Matraex Inc has other tools as well and we try to offer these tools free (within reason) in order to allow others to do the same thing we do.
WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas
WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas
When working with WordPress websites, there are three main areas we assess within the first few seconds, speed, security and exposure. To help us quickly do this, we built a tool, WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas, which pulls this information quickly and puts it into a single interface.
WordPress Website Check – http://matraex.com/website-check.php
While each of the three areas of speed, security and exposure go much deeper than this small scan, we are able to see some very important metrics very quickly.
Three Checks
Speed
We can see the download speed, the size of your home page, the number of external CSS files and the number of external scripts. This helps us to see how well the site has been optimized. Typically wordpress websites are made up of a Theme with enabled capabilities, as well as a number of plugins. Each of the capabilities and plugins will often have their own stylesheets and script files which can add up to a bloated website.
Security
WordPress websites are the subject of frequent hack attempts. Website scanners quickly find WordPress sites that have their admin and login scripts exposed. The scanner identifies the scripts. If the scripts do not block access after a number of failed attempts (with the username ‘admin’ and then with a random username) the script fails.
Exposure
WordPress websites often publish their version number as well as details about which plugins it uses. This information ideally is private and if possible should be kept private. When vulnerabilities in these tools are found, this is an advertisement to exploit your site.
The results can be saved and a link will be sent to your email so you can permanently have access to the results
The tool is our way of checking a site within seconds, and we offer it free. Our hope is that others find this useful ad will come to Matraex, Inc for their Website Development, Design, Hosting and Security needs.
Matraex, Inc
208.344.1115
Website Performance Assessment Tool Store Compare Page Speed Size Grade
Webpage performance is important and there are a plethora of tools out there that allow you to see your website’s performance.
The tools give a large amount of information and website owners can use that information to make assessments and improvements.
As we use these tools to help our clients improve the performance of their websites, we found a couple of needs:
- We needed a tool to quickly compare the results between changes
- We needed somewhere we could go to quickly lookup results next time that we evaluated the performance
So, we built the Website Performance Assessment Tool (matraex.com/website-performance).
This tool allows us to 1) Enter a web page url 2) Link to two third party performance tools(pingdom,PageSpeed) 3) Enter the results and 4) Save
The numeric results are then stored in a table and as we make changes we can see how performance improves.
With a couple of enhancements (the ability to track multiple urls and an improved User Interface) we decided to make this tool public and encourage others to use it.
The primary benefits we see are:
- The ability for non technical users to track their site performance
- Website owners can track and evaluate changes made by their website developer
- Website developers and website owners can use the tool to communicate performance expectations and results
Here is one example of how it can work:
- A website owner opens the website assessment performance tool and enters their website url
- They use the quick links to generate metrics for a Performance Grade, Number of Requests, Load time, Page size and a Desktop and Mobile Grade
- They enter the metrics into the tool and click Save
- They notice that the total Load time is more than 4 seconds so they ask their website developer to improve the results.
- Specifically they describe they want:
- the Load Time to decrease to less than 2 seconds and
- the Desktop and Mobile Grade should improve to better than 85% each
- The developer makes changes and tells the owner the changes are complete.
- The owner opens the Performance Tool and re enters the metrics and evaluates whether it is true.
- One month later the owner comes back to the tool and checks again and can see the history and whether performance has degraded.
Utility CSS Stylesheet finding duplicate selectors and declaration differences
Utility CSS Stylesheet finding duplicate selectors and declaration differences
Occasionally we run into a style sheet which has not been managed well and has duplicate style block and style definitions.
When this happens it can be difficult to evaluate which style blocks are duplicated, and which ones are still in use.
CSS Validators do not do a good enough job at identifying the duplicates and allowing me to make decisions on how to merge discrepancies.
So we came up with a utility that helps us to evaluate the duplicate selectors. The utility is here:
To use it we can simply paste in a giant style sheet block, or type in the url of the css and it will download it. Downloading it can be useful as you fix your style sheet and want to know how it looks.
The output of the utility is an ordered list of all of the selectors, in the case where there are duplicate selectors, the duplicated attributes are highlighted, if the value in the attribute is duplicated that shows red, if it is unique, it shows blue.
http://www.webuildplugins.com/css-stylesheet-evaluator/
The utility does not attempt to resolve the issues, it simply highlights the duplicates to potentially help you identify the issues.
The utility does not attempt to recognize which classes may override each other.
Future enhancements to this tool may include
- the ability to download multiple style sheets – to help identify styles that may clobber eachother.
- the ability to paste in an html block or url which then extricates the css style blocks and linked style sheets to help identify clobbering or duplicated selectors
- a utility which combines unique attributes from multiple duplicated selectors and gives a copyable text block with the combined text.
In addition to the need we have while building websites or taking over other customer sites, this too highlights our ability to build custom plugin utilities within WordPress. We also sell this WordPress plugin to customers that may need it.
Code Source Text and White Space Quick Count Evaluation Tool
Code Source Text and White Space Quick Count Evaluation Tool
I created a simple website utility which can be used to evaluate the white space in some code or returned from a website.
Paste in the code from your editor, or you can type in a URL and it will download the html and evaluate that
The results counts up all of your characters, shows you how much white space there is.
It also shows you how many blank lines you have, whether you are using tabs or spaces at the beginning of your lines (this is useful to me to help coordinate similar code indenting formats between developers)
This tool can be pretty useful when wanting to figure out things related to white space usage.
https://www.matraex.com/character-coding-evaluator.php
At the bottom of the reusults, every line is displayed with details of each line and how many spaces are at the beginning of the line
if you have suggestions, email me with ‘White Space Evaluation’ in the subject michael @ matraex.com.
Installing s3tools on SUSE using yast
Installing s3tools on SUSE using yast
We manage many servers with multiple flavors of Linux. All of them use either apt or yum for package management.
The concept of yast is the same as apt and yum, but was new to me, so I thought I would document it.
Run yast which pulls up an ncurses Control Center, use the arrows go to Software -> Software Repositories
#yast
Use the arrows or press Alt+A to add a new repository
I selected Specify URL (the default) and press Alt+x to go to the next screen where I typed into the url box
http://s3tools.org/repo/SLE_11/
and then pressed Alt+n to continue.
Now I have a new repository and I press Alt+q to quit.
At the command line I types
#yast2 -i s3cmd
And the s3cmd is installed, 15 minutes!