Computer Document Naming Conventions Best Practices

 Here are some ideas for general naming conventions for common documents you might collect or create on your personal computer. 

The general purpose of naming conventions is to be able to more easily find a file again just by looking at its title. A secondary but useful purpose is to provide a consistent name pattern for repetitive files that are more useful if they are ordered alphabetically. This is especially important if you are working in a shared space such as a shared folder on a home network, a Dropbox folder, a shared Microsoft OneDrive or Google MyDrive folder, or a corporate shared drive. 

Basic principles: 

• Name all files consistently. Think long term. Your files could stick around for years. 
• Attributes should be used to provide the desired alphabetical sort order. 
• The file name should provide sufficient context outside of its folder or location.
• File names should be quickly readable. Use separators such as spaces or dashes between attributes.
• Capital letters are for cosmetic looks only. File names are not case sensitive (except in Linux computers). 
• Dates should be in computer sortable format yyyy-mm-dd, ex 2021-04-01.
• Consider separating files into folders by year, 
• Consider using "archive" folders to move older files out of a common use folder (when there are too many files).
• Think about how you will find this file again in the future. 

 

File Name Structure: (attribute 1)(attr 2)(attr 3)(attr 4).(ext)

Examples of attributes: 

• Statements
• Receipts
• Invoices
• Letters

Examples of Home Personal File Folders

/documents   Banking   Business   Financial Planning   Insurance   Investments   Medical   Owners Manuals   Real Estate   Receipts   Retirement   Statements   Taxes   Utility Accounts   Vet Stuff   zArchive

Note the use of the ‘z’ in front of the ‘archive’ folder. This makes it sort to the bottom of the list and out of the way.

Examples of Home Bank Files



Or by date:

How To Start 

Look through your folders and see what kinds of files you collect or create. How would you better group them? What attribute or name best describes the groups of files? Rename those files using that attribute first, then choose a second attribute to sub-sort them in the folder. 

How To Implement A Naming Convention or Process

In your personal computer at home or in a shared drive at work the folders are most likely filled with older files with poor names that are all in a jumble. The best way to get organized is not to fix the old stuff, just start new from today. Create a top-level folder with an appropriate name, then create relevant subfolders, then start to save files with new, useful file names. Before you know it you will blink and it will be a week from now, or a month, or a year. Your older files will be less useful or searched for and your new files will be much more organized than before. The point is to start today. 

Be diligent when you are saving files. Usually, we are in a hurry when we create a document (Word file or Excel spreadsheet) or save something from the Internet (ex. PDF files). So we give it a quick name so we can email it or move on to the next thing. Make yourself pause and think about how best to file this document you are saving. It is in this moment of saving something that organization happens. You are busy - you will never come back and clean it up later! Give it a proper name and location (folder) now. 

How To Order Your Blog Posts

By default blog posts are in reverse chronological order. The most recent post is on the top of the list and a new post pushes the list down. Normally this is what you want and it is the natural order for a continuous blog.

But if you want to write a blog documenting a vacation or trip you have taken, or if you want to tell a story, it might be better for your readers to start at the beginning and work their way down the list.

In other words, somehow you need to change the natural blog posts order from reverse chronological order to chronological.

The way you accomplish this is to change the date or time of the posts manually.

Blog posts are time-stamped automatically when you publish them. You can see the dates in the list of all your posts.

To change the date you click on the post to edit it. On the right side you will see a section called "Published on" where it shows the date and time that you last published the post.

If you click on that it will expand to allow you to enter a date and time manually.

You want to select a date and time and make a note of it. In your list of posts you want the dates or times to be sequential. So for each post you need to make the dates or just the times sequential. I usually make the date consistent and then add an hour to the time for each post.

How To Secure Your Home Network Devices

How To Secure Your Home Network Devices

By Jerry Matson, 12/10/2019

I saw an article in my Google News feed recently about the FBI recommending that you separate your computers from your Internet devices in your home network. Those devices are commonly referred to as IoT or the “Internet of Things.”

Put another way, your computers with all your personal information should be on a separate network from your smart TV, Internet-connected security cameras, WiFi switches, home control hubs (Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri), etc. Those devices are commonly hacked because they have security flaws or, more commonly, they come with default passwords (like "admin" or "12345") and people never change them. So hackers get in.

Here is a link to the article I saw. FBI Recommends Securing Your Smart TVs and IoT Devices

"Unsecured devices can allow hackers a path into your router, giving the bad guy access to everything else on your home network that you thought was secure," the FBI Portland Office says.

"59.7% of routers have weak credentials or some vulnerabilities" and "59.1% of users worldwide have never logged into their router or have never updated its firmware," said Avast in its 2019 Smart Home Security Report published in February."

"Your fridge and your laptop should not be on the same network," the FBI says. "Keep your most private, sensitive data on a separate system from your other IoT devices."

The easiest way to protect your data from a hacker that manages to compromise one of your IoT devices is to secure your home network by segregating them on a separate network.

Secure Your Devices By Separating Them

That got me to thinking about how to do that. So I Googled around a little bit and found a reference on how to create a "guest" network on your home router. That would allow guests to log in with a simple password and not interfere with your main network.

But a "guest" network could be the answer to how to separate the various devices.

So I logged into our AT&T router and saw that I had created a guest network sometime in the past. The primary network had both a 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios but the guest network only had a 2.4 GHz radio.

I know from experience that most IoT devices are only capable of 2.4 GHz. The instructions usually say that. But I also know that most modern laptops and cell phones are capable of using the faster and more powerful 5 GHz frequency.

So I thought of how to separate my devices. If I disabled the 2.4 GHz radio on my primary network then only 5 GHz devices could log into it (like our laptops and cell phones). The guest network only has 2.4 GHz so bingo - two separate networks on two separate radios and frequencies!

But once I did that I realized I wasn't done yet. Some of my devices were configured to use the 2.4 GHz band on my primary network - which was now disabled. So I had to go around to each and every device, reset it, and reconfigure it for the 'new' 2.4 GHz "guest" network. That’s a bit of a chore if you don’t keep your instruction manuals and have to Google around or search on the various vendors’ websites. 

And that's how I did it! I hope this makes sense to you. The biggest problem is that most people are not very technical and don't even know where to find or how to log into their home router. If this is you then look at your router and see what model it is, the IP address and password is usually written on the back or the bottom of the router. Or Google for a manual or instructions. Or search on your Internet provider's website (Comcast, AT&T, who else?). Or maybe call their customer service and make them earn their payments from you.

I hope you find this useful!

How To Create A Blog on Blogger

Here are the steps to create a blog on Blogger. Follow these steps to create a new blog, make your first post, and change some important settings.

To begin, you must have a Google account (Google, Gmail, Blogger). One Google account allows you to use all their services. Use that account to log into Blogger.com (or sign up if you need to).

If this is the first time you have used Blogger your page will be blank with a button to "Create New Blog".

Lone Star College - University Park Campus - ALL Program - Classroom Orientation

Here is a YouTube video for new and prospective instructors to give an overview on how to use the classrooms to present their classes.

Lone Star College - University Park Campus - ALL Program - Classroom Orientation

For more information about our program for senior adults see http://www.lonestar.edu/all

How To Access Your Lone Star Online Student Account

Here are detailed instructions on how to access your student account. For a short video you can go to tinyurl.com/LSCStudentLogin.

Stop Using Internet Explorer (Updated)

In my various classes and interactions with people about technology one topic that I always try to mention is to stop using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

When Microsoft released Window 10 in 2015 they included a new browser called "Microsoft Edge." They created a new browser because the old one was too slow and insecure. But instead of calling it "Internet Explorer 2015" they gave it an entirely new name. That's because Internet Explorer had such a bad reputation from years of neglect and bad PR they had to move away from it.