The title of this post is the motto of a company called CommonCraft. They make nice little videos that explain stuff. I love the home-made style of their videos. Have a look at this one about Wikis:

Here's another, slicker version for Google Docs. This is the one I came across first because Google use it on the front page of Google Docs. It's style is very Google like - simple, no frills - which made me think it was an in-house production from Google.

Note that although it's slicker it's not more effective because of that. It's the method of communication that's the important thing here, not the adeptness of the execution.

There's a stack of videos on all sorts of things like blogs and RSS and social media. You can find them on YouTube or at http://www.commoncraft.com/. One of my favourite is the one on podcasting. Next time someone asks me what podcasting is, I'm going to send them a link to this video:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I had a problem when I posted up my last podcast. No more space on my Web host. I host my Web site with Euro-Reg and they give me a meager 500 MB of space. I had to remove one of my old podcasts just to make space for the new one to go up.

I looked at moving to a new hosting solution, but it was going to cost me $120 a year, and I've still got a few months left with Euro-Reg before I need to renew. Then I remembered about SkyDrive - part of Windows Live. Because I have a Hotmail account going back donkey's years I automatically have a Live account that gives me 5 GB of space for free.

So the solution to my problem is to put my MP3 files on Sky drive and just redirect traffic to the new location of those files.

Adding the files is easy. Just sign into Windows Live, go to SkyDrive, click Add files:

Once you upload files, you need to discover what their URL is. Unfortunately, they don't all live in their own directory. So, for example, I created a folder called podcasts, but the URLs of the files in that folder don't contain a podcasts directory which means I can't just redirect everything in the podcasts directory on my Web server to the podcasts directory on SkyDrive. Unfortunately, you can't rely on any part of the URL being the same for different files. This means you have to redirect each one individually. This stinks and we can only hope Microsoft realises this and fixes it. For now you've just got to work with what you've got.

Click on the icon for one of the files you uploaded. This displays it on its own page. Right-click the icon on this page and copy the location of the file. This will give you an ugly big URL like this:

http://ubpq3q.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prhoUMaUaRKTKYapF5RrPEgkMKc5XUgMd4tWocxrw5LDC0oWaw5IhRTBE_jSZOcKZUvzwwlhh9vs/ITauthor-podcast01-01Dec2005.mp3?download 

Remove the last bit. The long ID string identifies the file so you don't need the file name. This reduces the URL to something like:

http://ubpq3q.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prhoUMaUaRKTKYapF5RrPEgkMKc5XUgMd4tWocxrw5LDC0oWaw5IhRTBE_jSZOcKZUvzwwlhh9vs

Now you've got the URL, all you need to do is add a Redirect statement to the .htaccess file in the Web root directory of your Web host. This is a single line taking the form:

Redirect <old directory/file> <new URL>

Where the old directory or file is denoted as a path relative to the location of the .htaccess file.

So, to redirect the file  ITauthor-podcast03-16Dec2005,mp3 to its new location on SkyDrive I added:

Redirect /wp-content/uploads/podcasts/ITauthor-podcast03-16Dec2005.mp3 http://ubpq3q.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pC8IalwMyNgTVgzoON30m5vmKc0gRTei4qqcoQF88Nkbd1Oivca-2OmkaXPJr2kEK5WCDGzf82ns

Annoyingly, you need to do this for each file. What would have been nice would have been if my SkyDrive podcasts directory had a URL like http://alistairchristie.spaces.live.com/podcasts, then I could have done:

Redirect /wp-content/uploads/podcasts http://alistairchristie.spaces.live.com/podcasts

and all my podcasts would be picked up from SkyDrive without having to edit the .htaccess each time I add a new one.

Anyway, for now it saves me having to fork out cash just for more disk space.

I found this little widget for displaying an RSS feed. If you go to the Options you can grab the HTML for adding this widget to any Web page of your choosing. You can also click the little button bottom left of the widget to download it to your desktop. Not sure why you would do that though!

For more information, or to configure one for yourself, go to SpringWidgets.

Following on from my previous post. I was looking for a way of getting emailed whenever anyone updated a shared Google calendar and I came across RSSFWD.

Here's how:

1. Copy the URL of the RSS feed.

Note: For a Google calendar, go into Settings, open the settings for the calendar you want to subscribe to, scroll to the bottom of the page and copy the URL for the publicly available RSS feed.

2. Go to
http://www.rssfwd.com/

3. Paste the URL into the "Enter the URL ..." field (replacing the text that's in there already).

4. Click Submit.

5. On the next page, enter your email address.

6. Select an email format from the drop-down list.

Note: As of today, individual emails are only being sent out once a day. I got a clutch of emails all sent at 2.40 am. So, given that you don't get individual emails throughout the day, you may as well choose one of the combined email formats.

7. Untick 'Share at "popular feeds" page'
THIS IS IMPORTANT!

8. Click Subscribe.

9. Go to your email application and check for a new email from <feed name>.

10. When you get the email, click the link in it to confirm your subscription.

You will now be emailed updates to the RSS feed - for example, changes to a shared Google Calendar.

I never seem to have time to read through Google Reader to see what new blog posts have been collected there. I prefer to get stuff mailed to me so that I can read it in Outlook.

I'd set that up with a couple of blogs and then forgotten how I'd done it. Turns out I use FeedBlitz (as described in a previous post on this blog).

 
Here's how to do it:

1. Get your RSS feed URL (for example, the RSS feed for this blog is
   http://www.itauthor.com/feed).
2. Paste the URL into the field below.
3. Click Submit Query.