Behind the Scenes in My Online Business
First thing this morning, I opened Firefox, and my home page (google.com) was showing a Doodle with birthday cakes.
What a coincidence, I thought. Some famous person must share my birthday. So, I pointed to the image, to see whose name was in the popup description.
Microsoft Excel is a big part of your life today, but it wasn’t around in 1952. If you didn’t have Excel to fill your days, what would you be doing?
In honour of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the BBC website has a glimpse of life in Britain in 1952. If you lived there, what would your life have looked like in 1952? What non-Excel career would you have pursued?
To find out, click the link: Diamond Jubilee: You in ’52. Then, click on Male or Female. Do not let the fancy hat sway your decision.
Then, select options from the drop down lists at the top of the page, to describe your lifestyle.
Here is what my life might have been like in Britain in 1952. Love those bright pink pants! I could wear them while teaching secretarial work and eating Mediterranean cuisine.
What would your 1952 life have been like? And thanks to Bryony, who posted this link in Twitter.
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While reading my morning RSS feeds, I saw an article about creating a custom Twitter background. Since I didn’t have anything else planned for the day, I decided to attempt an update on my profile.
Previously, I had a picture of a lovely orange day lily, with the Contextures web address added at the lower left side. It was better than using one of the standard backgrounds, but didn’t reveal too much about me, or what I do.
The RSS feed article had a link to a blog with Twitter background templates, and instructions for creating your own. My Photoshop skills are minimal, and I’m using a really old version of Photoshop, but I plunged in anyway.
The article gave me some ideas for adding things to my background, and links to some graphic effects (although a couple of them were dead pages).
Instead of lined paper, a coffee mug and stains, I went with the cover of one of my pivot table books, the Contextures logo, and a goofy picture of me. (Yes, I know that every picture of me has some level of goofiness!)
Then I added my email address and Contextures address. They aren’t clickable links, but at least they’re on the page for reference. The image background is white, and I changed the Twitter theme colours to have a white background too, so it will blend in.
Here’s the finished background, which I saved in png format, and uploaded to my Twitter profile. It’s not great art, but it tells people a little bit about me, and livens up the page. If I can manage to do this, imagine what you can do!
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I’m taking an online CSS course at SitePoint, and the instructions include some YouTube video tutorials. Yesterday’s video included captions, and so I did some poking around, to see how they were added.
To add the captions, you need a specially formatted file, with text, or text and time points. You can create this file yourself, or get some help from YouTube.
For newer video, the transcripts are automatically created after you upload the video. You can skip this section, and go to the Download the Transcript section, below.
For older videos, you can request a machine transcript of the audio track.
The message says it will take a few days to prepare the transcript, but I checked less than 24 hours later, and my transcript was ready.
I opened the file in Notepad++, to see what it looked like. Some of the transcript looked fine, like line 20 shown below. Other text, like line 23, weren’t so good. Sure, some of the video might be a bit boring, but none of it is gross!
So, I listened to the video, while making some corrections to the transcript. For example, line 23 was changed to, "When you see the warning, click Enable Macros."
Then I saved and closed the transcript file.
To upload the revised transcript file:
For the Type option, YouTube describes the difference between a caption file and a transcript file:
- A "caption file" contains both the text and information about when each line of text should be displayed.
- A "transcript file" on the other hand just contains the text of what was said in the video. If the video’s in English, YouTube can use speech processing algorithms to determine when the words in a transcript should be displayed.
On the video, click the Play button, and the captions start rolling.
There’s a Transcript button that you can click, to see the entire transcript. It’s interactive, so you can click on a line, and go to that point in the video.
There were many things to correct in the transcript file, but it was much easier to use that file, with the times added, than to create a transcript from scratch. Also, there was some entertainment value in seeing how my tutorial was translated.
The captions block the bottom 1/2" or so of the screen, and that might cover some of the tutorial material. However, for anyone with English as a second language, or a hearing impairment, the captions will probably be a useful addition to the video.
Here’s the video, so you can see the results for yourself. If you can’t see the captions in this embedded video, you can go to the YouTube page.
What do you think of the captions? Is it something you’d add to your own videos?
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Funny. Only a day after I mentioned TweetDeck, and its Group feature, Twitter launched its new Lists feature.
Now I can create lists, such as Excel and Microsoft, and include the people who I follow into one or more of those lists.
Even better than TweetDeck groups, you can make your Twitter lists public or private.
If another user adds you to one of their public lists, you’ll see that in your Lists screen. It’s an easy way to see a few more people with similar interests, without following hundreds more people.
So far, it looks like a useful feature.
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Some Twitter users follow thousands of people, and join in hundreds of conversations every day.
I follow just over 100 people (actually 123 – I like that number). Some of them are chatty, and others rarely post.
Even with that small number of people to follow, it’s hard to keep track of things. You can only see about 20 tweets on the front page when you log in, and that’s about all that I have the energy to read. So if something’s moved off the front page before I log in, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever see it.
A while ago I downloaded TweetDeck, and have been using it to read and post things in Twitter. You can create groups, so it’s easy to follow the people you’re most interested in, and skim through the other posts.
I highly recommend it. And no, this isn’t a snapshot of my TweetDeck. It’s from the download site.
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It looks like Facebook has finally lowered or removed the minimum number of fans required to register a vanity URL for a page.
When the vanity URL feature was first announced, a page needed 1000 fans. Then they reduced it to 25 fans, but only for a short time. Without warning, the limit was increased to 100 fans, so my pages weren’t eligible.
Today I noticed a vanity URL announcement at the top of a page, so I went back to www.Facebook.com/username to try again.
This time I was successful, and now my Facebook pages have vanity URLs:
http://www.facebook.com/Contextures
and
http://www.facebook.com/PivotTables
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Instead of using my personal Facebook page for business news, I’ve created two pages for Excel related updates.
One is for Contextures, and it has general Excel news and automatic updates from my Contextures blog.
The other page is for Pivot Table news, and has automatic updates from my Excel Pivot Tables blog.
It’s reasonably easy to set up your own Facebook page, but a few of the links and buttons are pretty well hidden. This blog post gives you step by step details for creating a Facebook page and adding the basic components. It will get you off to a good start, and you can fine tune it later.
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