You have been hearing from me (and, I suspect, from other channels) about Catalyit™.

After two years of work, it is finally ready and is launching later this afternoon in our partner states — IIA of Wisconsin, Big I New York, IAB of Louisiana, PIIA of Colorado, Big I New Jersey, IIA of Texas, and IIA of North Carolina. We will be rolling it out to other states next month.

Why Catalyit? Because the number of ways agencies can leverage technology to increase profits and serve customers is nearly unlimited. But time, know-how, and fear of risk are getting in the way. Catalyit provides a solution. My career has been dedicated to helping agencies harness technology, which is why I’m thrilled to introduce you to the Catalyit platform. We’ve assembled world-class experts, guidance, solutions, training, and community to help agencies thrive.

Catalyit offers:

Technology moves fast. Sometimes it is fun to see what websites looked like in the past. There are other good reasons you might want to view an older version of a website.

Most websites change over time. The site may go through a redesign, some content might be deleted, and sometimes entire sites will go offline.

Viewing an older version of a website can be helpful in certain situations.

• You want to find older content from a website.
• You need to recreate a resource that’s no longer available online.
• You want to have screenshots to show before and after a website redesign.
• You want to discover the content that was on a site at a particular point in time for a lawsuit.

There are many examples of agency E&O lawsuits where the attorney has looked up older versions of an agency website against them at trial.

A couple of services keep track of websites and allow you to search for older versions by date.

Below are two tools that create screenshot archives of website pages. These tools crawl the web and record snapshots at different points in time and archive those website pages.

1. The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is maintained by the Internet Archive. It is a digital library of the internet. The Wayback Machine has over 554 billion archived web pages. It allows you to easily find screenshots of old websites at different points in time.

To use this tool, navigate to the Wayback Machine website, enter the website URL you want to check, and click Browse History.

You will see the results as a graph with the various dates where copies of the website were made. Click the top bar to sort by different years.

Below that, you see a calendar breakdown. When you click on a particular day, a popup will show the time the screenshot was taken.

Once you click the time you want, a cached graphic of the page will load for you to see. You can right-click to view the site in a new tab.

2. Library of Congress Web Archive

Another site to check out is the Library of Congress. They have a very large digital collection of books, audio recordings, newspapers, and websites.

They also have a website archive search tool that is similar to the Wayback Machine described above. If you can’t find an old version of the website with the Wayback Machine, give this tool a try.

To use this tool simply navigate to the Library of Congress Web Archives, enter the website’s URL, and click the search icon.

You may not need to use these tools very often, but they come in handy when you need to research what a website looked like in the past.

What other tools have you found helpful?

PS: As I have mentioned in an earlier newsletter, TechTips is transitioning to Catalyit. Changes are coming soon. You will need to resubscribe to continue receiving TechTips. So please pay attention over the next couple of weeks for specific instructions on continuing receiving this weekly. In the meantime, be sure to go to Catalyit.com and sign up for more information. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks.

Access to the Internet is vital in today’s hyper-connected world. And, it’s not always possible to find a Wi-Fi hotspot you can easily connect to. Because of my extensive travel, I used a Wi-Fi hotspot for many years to make sure I could connect to the Internet anywhere I had a cellular signal. It worked great but cost $50 a month for 50 GB of data download.

When Apple released iPhone 12, it included the ability to use your iPhone as a data hotspot. I quickly realized that I could use my phone to connect to the cellular data network to replace my separate hotspot.

I assume similar capabilities are available on the Android platform.

The availability of Wi-Fi has increased significantly over the last few years. I always worry about security using an unknown Wi-Fi signal. So, many times I may choose to use my iPhone hotspot instead of an available Wi-Fi signal. This is especially true if I want to do sensitive transactions such as accessing my bank account. Accessing the cellular data network is more secure than an open and unknown Wi-Fi signal.

Using your iPhone as a data hotspot is simple.

I have been talking lately in presentations and articles about “The Key to Technology Success.”

While I won’t go into complete details today, one of the themes for success is the eager adoption of external trends. The phrase comes from Jeff Bezos in his 2016 Letter to Shareowners.

The concept says that you need to see what’s coming and adapt quickly to remain relevant as a company. Bezos says, “Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision-making.”

He goes on a little later in the same letter to say, “The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them, and you have a tailwind.”

This is one of the reasons I have been focused in the last few issues on how you can keep up with technology changes.

Where did the day go?

How often have you asked this question at the end of the day? For me, it was way too often. Then I discovered RescueTime.

RescueTime is a monitoring tool that helps you keep track of what you do all day on your computer — the applications you use and the websites you visit, and for how long.

This tool works on Peter Drucker’s management principle that “what gets measured, gets managed.” Once you install the RescueTime client on your computer, it runs in the background and collects Internet usage data while you work. A dashboard shows useful charts that can help manage your time. There is a version for multiple employees if you desire to monitor everyone.