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What Equipment Do I Need for Online Video?
When you think of video, you may find yourself thinking of massive cameras that cost more than a new car and weight almost as much as you do, big boom mikes swung overhead in a brightly lit studio. With every year that passes, however, video solutions are getting smaller and more affordable. The typical small business uses digital video recorders smaller than the hand of the person holding it. Video Basics Resolution Find out how many megapixels your device has. This may be specified as “3 MP” or “8 Megapixels,” for example. More is better and results in a higher-quality picture. This is constantly improving, so just use this to compare devices...
Read MoreEn-dash and Em-dash
Are you sick of using hyphens ( – ) and double dashes ( -- ) when trying to use a long dash? There are three types of dashes. You might wonder what the difference is between a hyphen, en dash and em dash. The hyphen, or minus sign, is used to show a word is hyphenated. The en dash ( – ) is so called because it is as wide as an uppercase N in whatever the current font happens to be. There are complicated rules on how to properly use the en dash, but in practice it’s rarely used. When it is used, it is most commonly used to indicate a range, such as “March–April.” You may have seen this dash because whenever you use a double...
Read MoreWhy Google Apps is Your Best Email Choice
Google Apps is a powerful suite of online applications. See the Google Apps Wikipedia article for great information on Google Apps. If you have a Gmail account, you may already be familiar with many of these tools, such as Google Calendar and Google Docs. Google Apps is simply hosting these on your own domain for a business or organization and allowing you to manage organization-wide settings and user accounts. This way, for example, you could have email addresses like “firstname@mycompany.com” and nobody would even know it was powered by Gmail. You can create forms that are only available...
Read MoreIntroduction to SEO
Search Engine Optimization Strongly recommended reading: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, quite simply, figuring out how to get your website to be at the top of the list when people Google for your business. When people search for something, they almost always look at only the first ten results (the first page); in fact, usually they only look at the first few results, so going from #11 to #10 or #10 to #7 or #7 to #3 can result in a huge difference in website traffic. Yes, there are a multitude of other search engines, but Google is by far the most important. Most search engines get their results from...
Read MoreQuickly Add Images to Posts with PicturePaste
How to Paste Pictures into WordPress? I’m sure any WordPress web designer, at some point or other, gets frustrated with how long it takes to add pictures to a WordPress post. Take a screenshot. Save. Edit. Save again. Upload through the media library. True, it doesn’t take that long, but on the web seconds can make a difference. Who hasn’t wished we could throw the pictures directly into a WordPress post? PicturePaste Crops, Resizes, Slices and Dices PicturePaste is a useful program. Install it, run it, then just take a screenshot. The PicturePaste window automatically shows the image on the clipboard, and allows you to zoom in and out (changing the...
Read MoreSending Confirmation Emails with a Google Docs Form
I love Google Apps. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Voice–all brilliant, indispensable products in my opinion. Being able to create forms in Google Docs for quick polls and surveys is also very handy, but the extremely limited feature set has been frustrating to me. One surprising lack is that of being able to send a confirmation email to the user. Granted, not all forms necessarily even have a field for the user to enter their email. [Original post 6/18/11. Edited 10/29/11 to add HTML email to the example. Edited 4/21/12 to add more screenshots and correct “Triggers menu” to “Resources menu”.] With a quick script, you can rectify this and...
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