One of my customers wanted videos, sort of like the thumbnails we do. "They have to be hosted on our site," she said. "You Tube won't do."

I said, "oh, heck!"

Now, that I can do it, I've got to make the rest of the uploading and embedding into a web page as simple as the thumbs. That includes emailing in videos. Which will be super cool for mobile video blogging. You know, blogging from mobile phones.
# Posted by Steve at 27/2/07; 10:00:08 PM
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Proof of concept

I've been wondering how far I run, when I run. Now I know. Well roughly, Google maps don't to rural England very well as satellite images, so I'll have to use multimap's satellite images to figure where I go and then plot it on this excellent service for runners.
# Posted by Steve at 18/8/06; 9:58:10 AM
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RecPath

Google AdSense Help Centre: What is section targeting and how do I implement it?: "

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasise or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting."

It's gonna take a while to keep iterating over this, Google's mediaBot comes but once a month. # Posted by Steve at 3/5/06; 10:48:16 PM
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AdSense is only showing Rss ads ;-(

# Posted by Steve at 2/4/06; 10:04:22 PM
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11.54

I've been discovering more features of my beloved Nokia N70 that I can use to aid my updating. Like using templates as a quick way to add boilerplate text or rather HTML: double line breaks for example <br /><br />. Maybe macros or shortcuts will be cool?

More interestingly, are the type of attachments. I can record sound and video. Only they're in a strange format .amr - sound and 3gp - video. It looks like Nokia provide a batch converter  :-) I think I'll be able to have .mp3 and .avi in my RSS enclosures straight from my phone.

Podcasting and vLogging. Rather, moPodcasting and moVlogging :-)

via email off my Nokia N70 mobile phone. # Posted by Steve at 13/2/06; 4:41:36 PM
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Symbian 60 to blog

As I'm writing plain old text emails. I should be able to merely put <p> tags in thusly...

and perhaps even double line breaks <br><br>like...

But we'll see if this works or not.

[Update:] Yip this works fine. So now, I'm fully equipped to update from my mobile phone. Though legion once reported that "shortcuts" don't work.
# Posted by Steve at 6/2/06; 5:24:39 PM
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Testing para breaks

Just testing something. Hang on a mo and please ignore.
# Posted by Steve at 11/1/06; 1:49:15 PM
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Building a community

Another day, and other demo ;-) This one at a small, town magazine. They don't have a website, been meaning to... I showed them a blog, how to post news items, comments, referers hourly hits, uploading a thumbnail, the stuff, all in a quick 10 minute whizz-bang tour.

Certainly, it was what they were looking for. Though, I wanted to build a community of blogs underneath, I think this may happen in the longer term, but not immediately.

They want their own blog, or news site (which is a blog in any other terms), and were particularly impressed with the comment feature. In the 10 minutes, there wasn't enough time to blow their minds with trackback as well ;-) And explaining trackback in 10 minutes is pretty hard.

They mentioned that they wanted to have another town newspaper soon, I wonder if they see the potential of other towns, even smaller towns, right down to the village? Certainly, the news could flow in with a blog, but, I figure getting the stories isn't the problem, it's the distribution and advertising.
# Posted by Steve at 16/6/05; 9:26:51 AM
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test

Another prospect. This time they're a very small company who repair process automation drives. Been in the biz for over 20 years, but only in their own new biz for the past 3.

Have good client list, but obviously want more. Plenty of prospects about, and they have lists of 1,000s. But biz is tight. There's lots of people doing it, and they're usually bound into a 2/3 year contract. There isn't much to mark this company out from the crowd, there isn't much to mark any of his competitors out from the crowd. No USPs in this game, you stand on the quality of your last job.

So here's the rub. How do you get the attention of the guy who needs to get his machine fixed? He doesn't care about the ins and outs of the machine, just get the bloody thing working, please. He's not going to look in Google, he's probably not going to look in trade press nor Yellow Pages. He's got a name in his head or in his address book

How are we going to get his attention?

Easy. Blog.

Eh?

Yip, blog. Blog long and hard about, well... anything. Call him, find out what he's interested in. Blog about it. Blog about his company. Blog about his competitors. And each time, when calling him mention the blog, or snail mail a little paragraph, nothing more, referring to the blog. Tell him he can post comments, stay up to date with the aggregator... Treating each prospect individually. Using the web as a one-to-one communication medium an extension of those, "hi, me again, any biz for us?" The usual chasing of the cream of the business and remembering to go after the minnows too, but with a twist at the end, or rather, a blog at the end. The blog, or rather the community they generate will be their USP.

Takes a long time, but it'll build on their reputation (existing customers will sing their praises, problems solved will be highlighted, etc., etc.). Do this with existing customers, remembering that the competitors are calling too—this is war. But now, you have a USP. A blog. One that's updated everyday, so is growing in Google. One that is drawing their community of suppliers, customers, friends, and biz acquaintances together. This mere word of mouth marketing, but exaggerated and boosted by the web. It's spreading their community wider and faster than they can otherwise.

That ought to keep their name at the forefront of their prospects' attention, when it eventually gets there. People are interested in other people. Stories are remembered and are retold. It just needs the prospect to visit one time, for them to remember, hell, they may visit a few times, but once is all we'll need.

The guy I saw was the boss. The CEO. He modestly said he was a good writer. He said he meets lots of people. He just needs to tell them he has a blog. "A what?" Sure, these aren't prospects, but some will know someone who is... A process engineer with a blog. Maybe we could get a story about it in some of the trade press? Hmmm... Now, there's another idea!
# Posted by Steve at 31/5/05; 10:17:38 AM
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Another quick demo

And another prospect visited and a brief collected. This time a geezer who runs a factory, who's bought, sold and bought another house in Florida. After finding all the pitfalls and gotchas he's decided to start another business, selling houses in Florida to Brits.

Has the realtor, the solicitors, the contacts etc., etc.. Now, needs a super-dooper website.

Erm... That's me ;-)
# Posted by Steve at 25/5/05; 2:35:17 PM
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Another prospect

Just showing a customer what this blogging stuff was about. The guy designs and builds sheds. Bloody big ones. For car companies, nuclear facilities... They are pre-fab steel, and damned nifty.

He wants to show some of the stuff he does to prospects, has 1,000s of images, but wants to tailor the presentation. This is a simple job for him with my thumbnailer. He merely drops the pix he wants to call attention to into a folder, flips the switch and has a web page specifically for that prospect.

He can post a news item directly to the front page, calling attention to pages of images, or a particular job, or a specific service, and when they phone him, he can say, "visit my website, the front page has a note on it specifically for you".

Neat-o!
# Posted by Steve at 25/5/05; 10:44:10 AM
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testing

For those of us who use news item Manila, I'm just testing a service which pings all the main aggregation services like Technorati, Feedster, blo.gs, syndic8, My Yahoo! and Moreover.

What this means is that your news gets out there faster. Like, immediately, more or less :-)

It's an automatic thing, no need to worry about it, it all happens in the background.
# Posted by Steve at 1/5/05; 8:04:23 PM
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Testing the pinging service

# Posted by Steve at 20/4/05; 9:37:26 AM
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Is that really me?

Just happened to find these moon images on the APOD site. Lovely aren't they? I'll be using the Krsna RSS panel to spot the new moons, for a bit of telescope viewing of stars.

When I got my telescope in January, it was bloody freezing, now it's getting warmer, I'm looking forward to some nice evenings and late nights in the garden.
# Posted by Steve at 14/4/05; 5:19:29 PM
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Mighty fine moons

We all know about this. This geezer put a post card in the local shop, "my phone's not stopped ringing."

I may do this, could do with the extra cash. But what do you charge for the four days I've spent fixing my own 'puter? What's the going rate? Guess I could phone up the competition...
# Posted by Steve at 29/3/05; 1:09:06 PM
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BBC: Technical support for the neighbours

Here's an example of a photo album. It took nearly 15 minutes to up 76 pix, and me on a 4Mb line. All I had to do, once I put them in folders, was hit the go switch and put the kettle on.

Still some fixing to do, with the stylesheets, and my file names which turn into shortcuts and captions which are being truncated. I think it's a hangover from Mac OS9 Classic days when you were restricted to file names of 31 characters. Easy fix. But looking pretty good. Very good.

All are ordered in oldest first order, no matter its size nor file name. I'll have to watch my spelling when creating the files, and capitalising file names, but I can at least edit the page to add or edit the captions. Heh! Content management for you ;-))
# Posted by Steve at 21/3/05; 7:19:25 PM
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Hoo Farm photo album

Now this should be easy enough for all of you. Remember your thumbnail plugin is switched on, so there'll be no stopping you if you have a digicam.

You just fill your 'Bits to upload' folder up with pix. Deciding which should be big, which should be small, 200 being the average, perhaps. No matter how big the originals are, even if they're from a 10 MegaPixel camera, before they're uploaded they'll be reduced and enhanced to (for now) 800 pixels which is a nice size for most people. So, fill up those folders!

Then they're written on, with the copyright, of your website, the date you took the picture, and whacked up the hole. You'll then be presented with the finished webpage.

If you like you can always resize the thumbnails, rotate, flip...

Coming soon!
# Posted by Steve at 17/3/05; 10:33:58 PM
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Fast powerful thumbnailer

I've found a really good installer for Windows. It'll uninstall too. The files, executables, shortcuts go everywhere they're supposed to. Lovely. I didn't think it would be so easy.

Question 1: where would the best place for the drop folder be? I figure there'd be a shortcut to it on the desk top, and it would exist in My Documents.

Thusly, when you drop a pix into:
My Documents/Bits to upload/200/pix of Bradley.jpg
It'll stay there till Frontier whacks it up the hole, then it'll move it to:
My Pictures/Uploaded/05/03/16/pixOfBradley200.jpg
So you'll always have a version locally, logically stored by date.

Question 2: would most users have the technology to edit or at the very least resize their images? My deepest worry is some poor fool trying to upload 50 images from their expensive 8 MegaPixel camera. I could install something that would check for this and would resize to something more reasonable, before uploading. Even better (but later) would be checking if they had Photoshop and then we'd be able to use all sorts of lovely actions to sepia tone, paint, border, etc, etc..


# Posted by Steve at 16/3/05; 11:14:11 PM
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Buzzed by bulk thumbnails

Ian's sign painter in Walsall came back to me. Wow! Much cheaper than I thought. £95.00!!! And that's for all three sides. It may well be the wrong car, but for that money I've got to think further.

What do others think?
# Posted by Steve at 14/3/05; 2:19:26 PM
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Cheap sign writing in Walsall
Low cost car signs

"And Lee with a plug for Steve's Shropblogs. Just had a late thought (too late, probably) - might be worth targetting all those new digital camera owners - a blog is a far better way to share pix (esp with foreign relatives) than e-mailing them."

All thoughts gladly received. A PR dude seems to think this is a good angle for a PR slot in the Shropshire Star. So, great minds, eh! It's too late for my 12,000 leaflets, it does mention it, "share your photo albums," but doesn't 'big it up.' But the PR item could. I thought a picture of my daughter with a digicam and the headline, "even 6 year olds can photo blog." Nah!, I'll have to think of a better headline. But then that will be the dude's job.
# Posted by Steve at 14/3/05; 1:43:18 PM
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Promoting Salopian blogs
Photo sharing in Shropshire

# Posted by Steve at 10/3/05; 12:25:17 PM
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Black 'n' white

It's been in my mind's eye for a while. Just had to get it visualised. Now, that I have, I like it. Certainly, it'll be good as me and my accomplice tootle around Telford dropping leaflets through people's doors. (On that I'm hoping that the printer will deliver on Monday). Probably can't afford expensive car decals just yet though. (Mine is a newer 'R' reg 900 BTW.)
# Posted by Steve at 6/3/05; 10:14:36 PM
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Would this catch your eye?

In email Legion says he "loves it." Kind words.

Still some work to do on it. For sure I'll need to take out the badge, before the logo police grab my gonads. The jpegging is a bit cheap, too much artifacting, I'll bump that up a bit. Not happy with the transition from blue background to sky, hidden behind the big 05. And I'm bored with the buttons, I'll think of something a bit crazier for the mouseovers.

Then it'll be ready ;-)
# Posted by Steve at 2/3/05; 11:11:35 PM
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Nearly ready theme

I'm just testing out a few more hourly hits pages. One for your XML files (your aggregator feeds) and one for just your home page. I'll test them here for a few days then issue them to all sites.


# Posted by Steve at 25/2/05; 10:34:53 PM
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More stats to baffle brains

Like brushes & kitchen gadgets, Sky TV, Mormons. I'm about to drop 10,000 DL sized leaflets around the posher ends of Telford. There in my be my first mistake—what's wrong with the scutters? Well, likely density of on-line homes is going to be higher. They'll have more dosh to slosh.

So here it is ladies and gentlemen, the back side if you will. The front will be an old post card free gift for them to keep, a nice picture, painting or other that they'd like to keep, with my marketing message on the back.



If you could click that and spot any missed mistakes, or other glaring problems, I'd appreciate it.


# Posted by Steve at 23/2/05; 11:07:30 PM
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Selling websites door to door

What do you think? Need to play a bit more with the colours? I know I'd get in trouble about the badge, so anything else I could use? What about the date? Or would you want that as your fav player's number? Or the year you won the European whatever?

I know nothing about this stuff, so suggestions for the text would also be handy. In fact if you use this them, I could write in the spaces whatever you wanted. Doesn't have to say "blogFootball.com"! If you don't want.


# Posted by Steve at 16/2/05; 11:24:09 PM
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Villa bloggers

I'm going to try selling websites on a market stall. They get a bag with a manual,

"fifty quid, thanks." We've got T-shirts, a stall with a banner, "Everybody wants a website," laptop, remote large screen, posters, "builders: get your websites here," "hairdressers...," "plumbers...," "lovers...," community groups...," "family albums..." Screen shots. "Local company, get yur websites 'ere, if you don't like 'em you can bring 'em back next week."

Ask them what they want a website for, "yes sir, it can do that for you no problem, " show them a few cached pages, an example, "easy to use, want one?" Create it there and then, with the Orange data card, so they can go home and use it, reading the manual on the bus home. Stick a sticker on the front of the manual with the details, pop it in the bag, "thank you very much sir. See you next week. Tell your mates."

I've just added a union jack theme :-) That'll look good on a poster.

I think it's strange enough to work. Everybody does indeed 'want a website' but not many actully use the internet to find out how easy it is. Buying one off someone you know will help you out, and for only fifty quid.

My neighbour used to work the tom. (That's tomfoolery, jewellery.) Was the first to sell software and ZX Spectrums off the market too. Made a killing. Long time ago, but still. He's keen on the idea and will 'man the fort' with me. He thinks, "Minimum of 5 a day, initially. More during the week online and more the following week, as we get better and word has spread."

Given good wind, the right pitch on a busy Saturday, how many do you think we'd sell?


# Posted by Steve at 16/2/05; 10:52:05 PM
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Del Boy

Here is a ping.

Later: and thanks for one back.
# Posted by Steve at 10/9/04; 10:49:01 PM
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Trackingback to BCV

"Would appreciate some feedback if the issue is still happenning or even better a mailed screen shot."

Pretty sure you're clean as a whistle, dude. Just checked with MSIE 6 (and my default, trusty Firefox, which is also prone these days to pop ups).

And trackback tests? Do you have them switched on in your editors only prefs? You need news items on also, with the trackback macro in the news item template. I'll walk you through it? # Posted by Steve at 7/9/04; 8:20:02 PM
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The Black Country Villan : Pesky Pop Ups

"Not sure how credible the source is?"

Someone linked to me from Corante. Of course I'm credible! And real! And not telling anybody if, I have really downloaded illegally copied stuff. I'm told to deny it all.

Not me, Gov. I wasn't there :-)

And, how did they find my brand new site? I only set up yesterday. Well, I guess that's the power of weblogs.com

And how did I find them? I was reading about RSS and BitTorrent, and recognised my text. Only confirmed by my referers.

# Posted by Steve at 17/3/04; 7:35:34 PM
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RIAA Monitoring BitTorrent?