Word Blogger

The word Blogger comes from the word, “blog”, which comes from the word, “weblog”, which means an online diary or journal. So a blogger is a person who writes a blog.

There is not much to add to that! Only Google doesn’t think a webpage is serious unless it contains more than 250 words. That is about 50 this far. I’ll just have to keep writing about nothing until I reach the magic 250 and then maybe Google will find this short page.

Maybe not though. One thing I can do it to say the title phrase again, Word Blogger; there done it!

I think there are about 200 million blogs worldwide. Did you know that the bandwidth used by YouTube currently is the same as the entire world internet bandwidth of about 5 years ago? That killed some space.

What is an Internet Blogger?

What is an Internet Blogger? Some, indeed many people, still ask this and rightly so. For many of us blogging, the internet, website building etc. is almost second nature, like driving a car but for many millions it is all a complete mystery. Sometimes it is a mystery to me too.

This short post is designed to explain to people, who are curious about blogging, what is actually is. First some terminology:

• Blog: to write or edit an on-line journal
• On-line: on the internet
• Journal: A diary; an account of daily transactions and events.
• Blogger: a person who keeps and updates a blog
• Origin of the word, “Blog”: a contraction of the word, “weblog”, which is an online log of events.

Conclusion - definition: An internet blogger is a person who makes entries on a regular basis to a website that acts as a dairy of events. Blogs are characterised by pages being dated.

This definition can actually be comprehensively amended and updated because over recent years people found that the free software provided by companies such as Google (Blogger) and Word Press was so good and easy to use that it was very suitable to use it as a pure website. Accordingly many Blogs are in fact simply websites with a vestige of the concept of a journal remaining (i.e. each page is dated automatically).

Blogs usually have a theme, which is the bloggers area of interest. But this need not be the case. After all, Google Blogger provides “labels” to identify different topics. Many blogs are online newspapers. The concept of a blog fits well with news events, obviously.

To simply record personal events can, it could be argued, become rather pointless and uninteresting to others. A simple diary of events that is completely inline with the concept of a weblog has therefore become somewhat redundant as competition increased. This is one reason why blogs are often no longer pure blogs but websites in the classic sense but with a different blog style layout (i.e. dairy style).

Corporate blogs are thought of as marketing tools for the company in question. They can also be a useful way of communicating with customers. High profile people/organizations have blogs to get the word out. Barack Obama (White House) has a blog. The White House also has a Twitter account. Twitter is a form of blogging. One major difference being that the diary entries can only be a maximum of 140 characters long.

What is an internet blogger? A person who makes regular dated entries online on a website for the public to read.

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Delete Images with Caution

When amending or upgrading a page of your website delete images with caution. It takes a considerable amount of time for Google image search to favour your images; perhaps 18 months for an image to appear on page one of an image search results page.

If you are thinking of changing the image on the page that you are working on it is advisable to do a search in Google for images under the name of the html file of the page that you are working on.

For example, I am working on my “Cat Facts” page on which there are several images. On a Google images search for “cat facts” I noticed that three images from the current page are on the first 2 pages of results.

I will make sure that those images stay put and I intend to work around them, deleting text around the photo and rebuilding that way to preserve the hard earned success of the current situation.

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Flip HD and Windows Movie Maker

With the camcorder Flip HD and Windows Movie Maker it is easy to upload high definition video to YouTube if you want to use software other than the Flip software. One reason for using software other than the software that comes with the camera (which is fine, by the way) is because third party software provides a little more in the way of options. It allows you to do a bit more. Although Windows Movie Maker itself is a bit basic.

Flip HD camcorder – photo by momentimedia

One movie editing application that should be ideal is Sony Vegas Movie Studio v9.0. But try as I might I could not get it to render a movie in the required format of 1280 by 720 or HD 720p. The largest format that the software would allow was 800 by 600 as a custom size. Whenever I entered 1280 is reduced it to 800 and the same for the other length. This was disappointing. Sony Vegas is a good program, lots of options and flexible but unless I am mistaken they have fallen behind on HD video. Perhaps an upgrade is out or am I missing something? Note: Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 does permit rendering to HD output. It appears to be a question of which type of Sony Vegas one has. That said, Movie Maker is free and it works for HD!

Back to Microsoft Movie Maker. I always felt that this free download was a bit fragile compared to Sony Vegas, which costs about £50+ in the UK but I am changing my mind. It accepts the Flip Mino HD video files, which are MPEG-4 Files (.MP4). It renders the image in the viewer better than Sony Vegas and critically it renders the published movie in full 1280 by 720 format so that when it is uploaded to YouTube and you click on HQ (just below the video) a new page comes up and the video is a massive 1280 by 720 in full HD. Here is an example of a video I made:

And this is the YouTube page. When you get there you should click on the HD button on the video to take you to the larger screen. Here is another HD video:

What is the procedure? Very simple:

1. When you have put together your film in Windows Movie Maker click on “Publish Movie” at the top of the window.
2. Then select “This Computer” in answer to the question, “Where do you want to publish this movie?”
3. Click, “Next” and then select where to save the file and name the file.
4. You are taken to a new page where the program recommends that you select a file size that is, “Best quality for playback on my computer (recommended). Don’t select this.
5. Instead click on the third radio button down, “More Settings”.
6. Then click on the drop down menu and select, “Windows Media HD 720p (PAL) (5.9 Mbps).
7. Then click on, “Publish”.
8. This takes you to a progress bar and the file is rendered to a movie file on your hard drive, which in turn can then be uploaded to YouTube.

That is it. It will take longer than smaller file formats to upload but movies of about 2 minutes are very manageable in modern computers (dual core). I am pleased to say that Flip HD and Windows Movie Maker are compatible and there is a lot of incompatibility in the video making business.

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Technorati Tags: video,youtube,windows movie maker,flip mino hd

Flip HD and Windows Movie Maker - Photo of camcorder: published under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs creative commons License -- this site is for charitable purposes in funding cat rescue.

Back Up Blogger Blogs

We should back up Blogger Blogs. However, the chances of the Google Blogger team deleting your blog without notice or warning is extremely unlikely even if you have done something wrong and if you have breached their terms you deserve to be deleted! The chances of Google’s servers crashing and fatally losing all the Blogger blogs would seem to be infinitesimal as there are hundreds of millions of blogs and the Google guys are too smart to screw up and lose websites permanently. Google can, however, under the terms of the contract delete blogs (terminate the service) and/or suspend the entire service, without notice or liability (it is free after all -- see Summary Google Blogger Terms and Conditions) but it would be a massive blow to the image of Google if lots of blogs were deleted accidentally or under a change of policy. Their Blogger service is fantastic and it drives a lot of their business. Think of all the Adsense on Blogger Blogs for example not to mention the publicity to Google that these blogs bring. I guess if there was a change to policy regarding Blogger blogs it would be that the service would become no longer free, which would limit usage. That said I am sure 90% of Blogger sites are very small and don’t cause Google issues of storage etc.

So why back up Blogger blogs? Peace of mind essentially. And there is a remote chance something might happen that was unforeseen. What about terrorism, for example? Google is the epitome of capitalism; an icon of the capitalist society. It does concern me a little that a terrorist group might target Google servers to attack the West. That said terrorists need Google as much as we do!

What is the best way to back up Blogger blogs, the whole caboodle? The Blogger Tips and Tricks website (enviroman) says that the best way is to do it is manually by copying the HTML of each individual post to a Notepad (txt) file. That sounds good but mighty laborious, if you have a large number of posts.

Google Blogger have a much easier system; their import and export function. You can download the entire blog to your hard drive using the export function and if required import it back to the Google servers and publish all the posts at the same time. In other words return to the status quo ante. I am not sure if this includes the comments but I would have thought that it does as the Blogger team say that this feature allows us to “create copies of your own blogs” i.e. the entire blog – update: comments are also exported and can be imported. The kind of file that is exported and imported is the same as the file type that is downloaded and uploaded when you save the template when customising it. It is an “xml” file (a Blogger export file).

These are the steps to backing up your Blogger blog:

1. Go to what I call the “control panel”. This is the layout page. Get there by clicking on “customise” in the navbar at the top of the page or “layout” from the dashboard page. You see this:

Click on “Settings” and:

1. Select “Export blog”
2. A new page then shows “DOWNLOAD BLOG” – click on it
3. I save to desktop and place the downloaded xml file into a new folder.

That is it. If, in the unlikely event, the file has to be uploaded to restore the blog, the procedure as stated by Google is:

1. On the settings page referred to above select, this time, “Import blog”.
2. You will be taken to your computer files.
3. Select the stored file referred to above.
4. Fill out the word verification beneath.
5. Click on “IMPORT BLOG”.
6. If you want to publish the blog at the same time click the check box just above, “IMPORT BLOG”. (See Google’s instructions)

That’s it….

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Technorati Tags: Building a website,blogging,Blogger blogs,back up