TOPS Home: TOPS Home E-Zine

Welcome to TOPS Home, the web site e-mail magazine (e-zine) for the TOPS Community Web Site Service.

NOTE: TOPS Software will be closed on Monday, May 30th in observance of the Memorial Day holiday.

With Memorial Day just around the corner, the start of summer also heralds the start the Storm Season for many parts of the country.

We've discovered that a number of our Florida-based Communities used their TOPS Community Web Sites as a way to keep residents informed during the 2004 Hurricane Season, and it proved to be a huge success. If you live in an area of the country affected by summer storms, we suggest you add a Storm Center to your community web site today. Here are a just a few of the ways Communities used their TOPS Interactive Web Sites to share all kinds of valuable information with residents, helping them get through some very anxious times.

According to the experts we can expect another busy storm season. With features like Online AP Approval and regular scheduled updates, a TOPS Interactive Web Site can help you preserve a sense of community during what can be very trying and chaotic time. Having the ability to continue your operations, get bills approved and vendors paid will be easier. Providing up-to-date information and the ability to track repairs will ease the concerns of homeowners while reducing calls to the office.

To learn more about TOPS Interactive Web Sites and how they benefit you, the HOA Officers, and residents go to www.topshome.com or Contact TOPS Web Sales at (800) 556-7852 or websales@topssoft.com

We will be hosting our next scheduled live chat for TOPS Web Site Administrators on Thursday, June 9th at 2pm EST. The topic will be recent enhancements, then we will open the discussion to answer any questions you may have about new features.

Please let us know that you will be attending so we know how many people to expect. You can email your RSVP to websupport@topssoft.com, or submit it on the site at www.topshome.com/admin. You must have a login name and password to access the site and attend the chat, so be sure to visit the web site and request your login info today.

We are regularly adding new information to the Administrators Forum, so be sure to check out the Web Site Features section, or the Message Board to talk with other administrators. You will need to request a login. Sign up today at www.topshome.com/admin.

We recently discovered that Google Maps has released a satellite function, which uses software purchased when Google bought the imagining company Keyhole in October 2004, as a part of their online maps feature. This technology offers an amazing new way to view satellite images. It is great fun and educational at the same time.

If you have created a custom "Maps" module on your web site to keep directions, street maps, and the like, this is the perfect addition to your web site! Imagine allowing web site visitors to view a recent, scrollable and zoomable satellite picture of your community. But the fun doesn't stop there!

By entering an address visitors can find their own homes, or scan old neighborhoods, locate schools they attended or find favorite places they've visited. You can even includes links on your Hot Links page to sites that are using the Google satellite images, such as the Google Sightseeing link, and make a fun game for the children in the community. The older kids will love searching for sights in North American like the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, or the Empire State Building. The sports enthusiast can check out all their favorite ball parks around the country. Eventually you'll be able to see the world! Imagine seeing a satellite view of the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China.

Because these images are gathered over time through multiple passes of the satellite, some areas may still be sketchy. Some satellite images have been intentionally distorted to obscure specific places from view for security reasons. And, to dispel the concerns of any privacy advocates, the shots aren't in real time, and are only updated about every 18 months. It's not as if you can peek into windows or even see cars parked in my driveway. It simply is a fun and educational use of technology.

The whole world is getting bombarded by German political spam lately. It is as a result of a mass-mailing worm called Sober.q.

The worm uses what's called "Zombie" machines - computers all over the world that have been infected - to send out the spam. We have real-time black lists, and are also manually adding the IP's as we encounter them, and we have filtered out a number of the subject lines, but there are still more coming.

I can assure you that the TOPS servers DO NOT have the virus. All of our virus definitions are fully up to date, and all of the machines have been fully scanned. Additionally, we have taken the time to add global message filters for all of the subject lines that have been reported thus far. If you are using the TOPS Email service and are still receiving these emails, please copy the text of the subject lines to a document and send it to websupport@topssoft.com as an attachment (otherwise it will get filtered by our SPAM blocker). We will continue to add these subjects to the global filter as we receive them.

Politically motivated spam is a relatively recent development, it's "propaganda spam," meant to spread political messages rather than sell a product or service. The spam may be considered extremely offensive to certain ethnic groups and highly political in nature, often with links to the sites of extreme right winged organizations.

E-mail users are advised to update their spam filters to guard against the new Sober spam. If you are currently unprotected against spam you may wish to install anti-spam software as soon as possible. Many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) offer anti-spam software as part of their service, check with your service provider today, or read the article in the first link below, which outlines local SPAM stopping methods.

TOPS Community Web Sites offer a wide range of features to help you add content to your web site, including text and pictures. But when it comes to adding more advanced content, you need to delve into the HTML source code to add anything really nifty. Unfortunately, learning HTML can be a little more difficult than simply typing text into a rich text editor. So this issue of the TOPS Home Ezine, we are bringing you some of the fancy features that the professionals use to make their web sites look good, in a way that is easy to implement on your own community web site(s).

Use this code to define an email link that, when clicked, opens the default email program with the email address and subject line pre-filled in with the content of your choice.

You can even include default text in the body of the email by adding the &body= command inside the quotes:

Use this code to set up text that scrolls horizontally across the page. This text can be formatted (change the font, color, size, make it bold or italics.) The example below shows bolded text that scrolls over a white background.

<MARQUEE bgcolor="white" scrollamount="2" direction="up" loop="true" width="35%"> <CENTER> This is regular text that scrolls vertically the "br" tags indicate a line break Use two to make a paragraph break</CENTER></MARQUEE>

Did you know that TOPS Software will provide you with a free community web site CD demo? Follow this link to apply for your free demo today!

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Here is a list of some of the most common contact data for TOPS Software:

Department	Contact	Email	Phone
Software Sales	Nicole Sezov	sales@topssoft.com	800-760-9966
Web Site Sales	Susan Sanders	websales@topshome.com	800-556-7852
Technical Support	Jeanne Plennert	support@topssoft.com	800-899-5689
Web Site Support	Brandon Kelley	websupport@topssoft.com	800-899-5689
Accounting	Cande Estrella	billing@topssoft.com	301-869-8144

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TOPS Home E-Zine; Issue #36 - May 2005

Experience TOPS Interactive Web Sites for Yourself!