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Sunday, October 19, 2008
How To Get Free Books To Give Away On Your Blog
One of the most successful ways to bring in new subscribers to your blog is to give away a bonus when people sign up.
If you’re like most people, you haven’t had time to write a great book to give away as a sign-up bonus. Well, today I’m going to show you two very easy ways to get such a book:
- Create your own with an e-book template
- Use someone else’s book that is in the public domain (you’d be amazed how many great books are out there for free!)
Create Your Own eBook In 48 Hours With An E-book Template
About a year ago I stumbled across these excellent e-book templates which were being given away by Eben Pagan (he is a successful internet marketer and deserves all the credit for these, I didn’t create them!)
They have a professional design in nine different colors, come with instructions, and make it super easy to get a book done quickly.
Here are the steps which I’ve personally used to create an eBook in less than 48 hours:
- Use a “top 10″ formula. Writing a book from scratch sounds hard but anybody can come up with 10 tips in their niche. Even if it ends up being only 20 or 30 pages that’s ok for an eBook.
- Create a catchy title based on the top 10 theme, such as “10 Ways To Raise Your Grades By Studying Smarter, Not Harder” or “10 Secrets To Making Money Online”
- Come up with the 10 tips by brainstorming and looking at the best posts on your blog.
- Put the tips in a logical order and include several sub-points under each one.
- Now plug your tips and sub-points into the template and write a paragraph or two under each one (copy and paste text from blog posts you’ve already written when appropriate).
- Summarize your main points in an introduction and conclusion and you’ve got a book!
- Use Adobe Reader to convert it to a PDF for distrbution.
You should also familiarize yourself with Microsoft Word’s “styles” to keep your formatting consistent. If you want to change how a subheading looks, for example, you shouldn’t change it manually. Instead, you should edit the “subheading style” and it will apply your changes to all the subheadings. This will save you a lot of time down the road.
Finally, upload your PDF to your server and find a way to automatically send your eBook to new subscribers. In Feedburner you can include this link in the confirmation email (login to Feedburner and go to Publicize -> Email Subscriptions -> Communication Preferences). Similar options exist for Aweber and other newsletter providers. Some people also include the link in the bottom of every RSS post.
Second Option: Get Free Books To Give Away!
The second, and perhaps easier, method is to use a book that someone else has already written.
There are an amazing number of books in the public domain (and also under the creative commons license, more on this later) which you can give away on your site. For example, in my niche of entrepreneurship, I paid good money for three books years ago that I heard were excellent: Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth.
Imagine how surprised I was to discover that all three of these books were now available online for free! I found PDF copies using the method I describe below and started giving them away on my website. My subscribers started going up immediately!
So how do you find these books? Well, according to Wikipedia…
In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain. In addition, works published before 1964 that did not have their copyrights renewed 28 years after first publication year also are in the public domain…
Many books which are not in the public domain can still be found under the creative commons license. The Creative Commons license is somewhere in between a full copyright and a public domain work. Many times, the work can still be given away for free, but you are not allowed to sell it and you must pay attribution to the original author. This still works fine for our sign-up bonus however.
I’ve had the most success finding public domain and creative commons works at a site called Scribd.com.
They have tons of PDF’s of various works. And it’s easy to see the the copyright at the bottom of each page. Many of them use the creative commons terms like “attribution” (meaning you must keep the original author’s name in there) or “non-commercial” (meaning you can’t sell it). It’s probably a good idea to familiarize yourself with these terms by visiting the creative commons definitions page.
Once you’d found a PDF you like, you can download it directly from Scribd.com and use it in the same way described above.
How to Get Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog
“What is the best way to get Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog?”
Last week I spoke at a Search Engine Marketing conference in Sydney about my experience of blogging. As part of the presentation I was asked to talk about my tips on getting traffic from search engines. I thought I’d share a few of the points I made here:
1. Search Traffic has been an important part of my blogging
The amount of traffic that the blogs I’ve worked on get from Search Engines varies considerably from blog to blog but on my two current blogs I get 25-35% of my traffic from Search Engines (largely Google).
Here’s a chart showing how Search Traffic fits into the mix of my photography blog traffic (from a couple of months back):
You can see that Search Engine Traffic is not the biggest source of traffic (social media takes that award) but it is significant considering the site gets over a million visits a month.
2. Search Traffic isn’t Everything
Looking at the above chart you see that if I was to only ever focus upon Search Engine Traffic that I could potentially be loosing up to 67% of my blog’s traffic.
One of the main points I made yesterday is that people shouldn’t become obsessed by Search. While it has amazing potential - I find that sites grow best when they have a variety of sources of traffic (including from Search Engines).
Here is another chart from the presentation which shows the four main areas that I put effort into when thinking about driving traffic - Search, Social Media, Community and Content.
Search Engine Optimization, participating in social media, building community and producing content are four important elements of building a site that gets (and keeps) high levels of traffic. When a blogger becomes obsessed by any one of them (to the detriment of others) the site can suffer (or at least not realize its potential). When the four elements come together a blog can grow quite rapidly.
3. SEO is Important
Learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization is important as a blogger. While most blog platforms these days come fairly well optimized for Google there are always tweaks that can be made. For example on WordPress the title tags that are served up by default can be tweaked to not show your blog’s name on each post on your blog (or at least to put it after the post name).
There are also a lot of easy ways to optimize a post for search engine traffic while writing posts. For example formatting images well with SEO in mind and using good keywords in titles.
SEO really does make a difference and bloggers who learn the basics can see significant increases in traffic. It is well worth investing time into learning it.
Learn more SEO techniques in previous posts on ProBlogger:
- Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
- How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog
- Do a Search Engine Optimization Audit on Your Blog
Highly Recommended - Also check out Aaron Wall’s SEObook for some excellent training on SEO. Consider it an investment in learning how to drive traffic to your blog.
4. Great Content is More Important than SEO
I felt strange saying this at a conference where SEO companies were pitching for clients and talking about the importance of building links to a site - but in my experience the most important thing you can do to build your blog’s search engine traffic is to write the most amazing, useful, authoritative and inspiring content possible.
Here’s the question you need to be asking while writing each post:
How can I make this the type of post that people will want to share with others?
Search Engine authority has a habit of coming to those blogs who consistently produce content that enhances peoples lives, meets needs and solves problems. If you create something that does some of these things it is quite likely that the all important links that your blog needs to build search engine authority will come as people link up on their blogs, share the link on social messaging and bookmarking sites, email their friends etc
While great content doesn’t automatically equal lots of traffic - if you produce it consistently over time and actively participate in social media and within your blog’s niche it has a habit of building your traffic and search engine authority.
I’m not anti using link building strategies (ie asking people for links) but I’ve never really done it (I may have once or twice in the early days of my blogging). I know some bloggers who spend many hours each month ‘building links’ but wonder what would happen if instead they concentrated on using that time to build linkable content?
Perhaps I’m a little naive - but Google is in the business of ranking the best sites highest. They want to rank great content in the #1 position - so, my aim as a blogger is to write that kind of content.
Further Reading on Writing Great Blog Posts - How to Craft a Blog Post - 10 Crucial Points to Pause
How do you Get Search Engine Traffic To Your Blog?
There you have it my philosophy and approach to getting search engine traffic on blogs. What would you add?
Do you do much Search Engine Optimization? Is it something you put much time into or just let look after itself? What SEO techniques have been most effective for you?
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
DIY Helicopter
Building your own RC helicopter sounds like a daunting task but thanks to people like Ben Hui it can be as simple as following one step at a time.
"Flying RC helicopter is really very exhilarating. Their versatility gives a RC pilot a complete access to the three-dimensional space in such a way that no other machines can! I have played RC helicopter for more than one year but still find that I have just learnt a few tricks that it can perform. There are generally two micro-helicopters ( indoor ) in the RC market. I have already planned to buy one of them as they can fly inside the living room and even take off on ours hand. Unlike those operated by gas, these electric helicopters are very clean and give out no terrible noise at all. In one nightfall, I visited a web site, which is about how to make a hand made RC helicopter. I was totally impressed and started designing my own helicopter. Here is my helicopter:"
How to Skip Rocks
If you ever aspire to be a serious outdoorsperson (or at least have the appearance of one), then you need to know how to skip rocks. Even if you don't beat the Guinness World Record of 51 skips in one throw[1] you'll likely impress children when you skip stones like a pro.
How to Politely Turn Down a Drink From Your Host
When in a social situation, it is possible that you will be offered an alcoholic drink by your host. Once people get into the party mode they may be reluctant to take 'no' for an answer, but you have your reasons. How do you turn down the offer without seeming like a killjoy?
How to Make a Silk Pleated Evening Bag
This tutorial is for a delicious silk evening bag, as pictured. It has a balloon-shape that is created by inserting both pleats and darts. Silk works well because it responds in an effective manner to the sculpting of the darts and pleats. An original design by Lisa Lam (details below).
If you are an experienced sewer, this is a good project; it is not advised for those who are uncertain of their sewing skills.
In this project you will pick up/apply these skills:
a bit of pattern making - it's a pain, but important
inserting darts - great for adding 3D shape to bags
inserting pleats - great for adding 3D shape to bags
inserting a magnetic snap - easy and professional closures
NB: All seam allowances are 1 cm unless otherwise stated. You can click on any photo to enlarge it if needed.
If you are an experienced sewer, this is a good project; it is not advised for those who are uncertain of their sewing skills.
In this project you will pick up/apply these skills:
a bit of pattern making - it's a pain, but important
inserting darts - great for adding 3D shape to bags
inserting pleats - great for adding 3D shape to bags
inserting a magnetic snap - easy and professional closures
NB: All seam allowances are 1 cm unless otherwise stated. You can click on any photo to enlarge it if needed.
HOW TO - Kayak bike trailer
Instructables user hypokampito made this clever support for towing a kayak behind a bicycle.
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Reuse an iPod LCD
This cool hack shows you how to retool an old 2.5" QVGA TFT iPod LCD screen in order to use it for another project. Lots of really good info about the pinout connectors of this screen in order to get it up and running in no time.
iPod LCD Hacking, via Electronics Lab
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Build a frequency generator on the cheap
This tutorial shows how to build a frequency generator out of parts found at your local Radioshack. Pretty simple construction and nice detail on the enclosure with a nice array of dip switches.
How to make a Frequency Generator
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HOWTO build your own A-bomb
Today on MAKE: blog, the story of two plucky youngsters in 1966 who built their own homebrew A-bomb:
How to build an A-bomb
...the two amateurs were ironically aided by information published as part of President Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, which spread word of the benefits of non-military nuclear power around the world. And Atoms for Peace was only the most prominent example of a fad for everything nuclear that propelled a huge amount of technical detail into the public domain.
Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."
How to build an A-bomb
Grow your own house out of trees
When he met the second pig, the wolf huffed and puffed and blew down the house made of wood and sticks.
That was a long, long time ago in a land far, far away. Or once upon a time, even.
Fast forward a few years from now. That pig would be laughing.
That’s because some clever people are looking to use trees (live ones in the ground) to grow houses.
Academics in Israel, which incidentally is shaping up to be somewhere quite special for eco-innovations, are shaping trees to make all kinds of other structures too.
Tel Aviv professors Yoav Waisel and Amram Eshel are using known as tree shaping (which isn’t new) to build pilot projects around the world. On the cards currently, we have:
Park benches in hospitals, playground structures (maybe climbing frames?), street lamps, and houses of a sort…
It takes a while to grow these, but if you want to see more, check out Physorg.
(Via EcoGeek - nice one Hank)
How-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista Setup
Many people don't realize that rather than installing dozens of applications, you can control nearly any aspect of your computer with simple shortcuts that don't take up any resources.
You can even take this approach a step further and assign shortcut keys using the built-in Windows hotkey functionality, or access them from the keyboard using your favorite application launcher. In my article today over at Lifehacker, I covered some of the more useful shortcuts for controlling your computer.
Of course, none of these will be really news to the regular How-To Geek reader… this is the kind of stuff we cover all the time!
- Mute the System Volume
- Clean Up Your Computer
- Open Task Manager in All Users View
- Turn Desktop Icons On or Off
- Clear Your Clipboard
- Turn the Windows Firewall On or Off
- Create a System Restore Point
- Eject Removable Devices
- Start or Disable the Screensaver
- Shutdown, Reboot, Sleep, Hibernate or Lock Your PC
- Access Your Shortcuts Quickly with the Keyboard
Read the Article Here:
Control Your Computer with Shortcuts to Common Windows Tasks
Sometimes the most effective way to clean up Windows is to just wipe your hard drive and start over with a fresh re-installation, and that process can be so long and tedious—unless you know the shortcuts.
In the second article over at Lifehacker, I covered how to create a USB flash drive with a bootable installation of Vista, after first trimming down the installation to the bare essentials using vLite. The benefit to using a flash drive is much faster installation speeds compared to using a DVD.
There's some command line magic involved in order to make the USB drive bootable, but it's pretty simple to follow.
Read the Article Here:
Speed Up Your Vista Installation with vLite on a Flash Drive
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How-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista Setup - The How-To Geek
Geek Reviews: First Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
It's been a long time since Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8, which left me wondering what they had up their sleeve. After reading that they added a ton of new features in Beta 2 like private browsing, tab grouping and a new smart address bar, I just had to try it out and share with all of our readers.
Installation
Ok, we are off to find out what Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has to offer. First let’s take a look at the options during initial installation. I am writing about this screen for screen so if you have not yet explored this new beta your seeing each of these screens for the first time along with me.
During the initial install it looks like I have the option to get the latest updates. Sure, might as well.
After Installation is complete time to reboot.
Ok, looks like IE wants to help me discover websites by suggesting them to me. Normally I would not want this feature, but for this review I am turning it on. You can always turn off the suggested sites at any time.
Time to choose Express or Custom settings. If you want more control over the setup process you will definitely want to use Custom Settings.
Choosing Accelerator Providers
Accelerator Providers work with selected text on a webpage to perform different tasks such as looking up word definitions or get directions on a map to a street address. If you are familiar and comfortable with Microsoft’s services go ahead and select that option. For this installation I am selecting the option to see even more Accelerator option. There is an option to disable the Accelerator providers, but come on test things out! I am very excited about these new built in features.
SmartScreen Filter
Because I want to try out everything in this beta including the enhanced security features I am going to turn it on. This feature will protect you from phishing attempts and other scams.
Finally, choosing to let IE be my default browser, sorry but I am still a Firefox man for now. However, I will Import from Firefox.
After clicking finish on the previous screen I get the other browser selection screen.
Bookmarks and Feeds Import Successful.
Taking A Look At New Features.
Let’s start digging in! The first thing which caught my eye is the list of Accelerators to choose from which is a very comprehensive list. Expect to see more and more third party Accelerators as IE 8 becomes more of a standard. I will test these out later, moving on.
The next thing which caught my attention was a message saying that the MSN homepage may require an add-on. It is similar to the ActiveX warning but did not explicitly say it so I was not totally sure. You'll also notice how the domain name is highlighted in a different color than the rest of the URL.
I do wish Microsoft would stop this from popping up on their own site! I accept it and continue. (although you should weigh carefully before allowing ActiveX controls to run because they can be a security risk)
One of the cool things about this Beta is the amount of features already installed without having to download Add-ons. Many features are enabled by default such as Developer Tools.
It looks like everyone now wants an intuitive address bar. Firefox 3 has the so called “awesome bar”. IE 8 comes with a Smart Address Bar which tries to guess what site you want to visit based on past history. Only 5 history entries will be shown. If you want to see more just click on the expand arrow near the bottom. As I am using the Smart Address Bar, I find it more intuitive and responsive compared to “Awesome Bar”.
Better Tabbed Browsing
IE 8 offers new functionality to tabbed browsing, as you'll notice if you right-click on a tab… now you can Duplicate tabs or even re-open the last opened tab, features that required an add-on before.
The Tab Group feature will highlight tabs that were opened from other tabs, so you can visually identify a group of tabs by where you opened them from… or also close them all at once. Very useful for doing research and opening a whole bunch of tabs from Google, you can simply close all of the tabs that you had opened while keeping your other tabs open.
The Quick Tabs button shows a small thumbnail of each page you have open in different tabs. This comes in handy if you have multiple tabs open and need to access a certain page quickly. This isn't a new feature, but you'll notice that tab groups are now highlighted in this view.
With this version IE takes a lesson from Firefox and has included Crash Recovery. If the browser happens to crash you can get the last session back with all the open tabs. This is a feature that previously could only be used by installing add-ons.
Searching
The Search feature has improved a bit as well… here is a list of the different providers you can add. Even though you have one of the providers as default you can still add as few or as many as you want.
When searching you can choose a different provider and get results directly in the drop down box. Here is an example of searching for a product with Amazon.
You'll also notice that the drop-down for the search box now shows both your history as well as suggestions from Google or whoever you are using for searching. You can even click the icons at the bottom to quickly switch between them.
Improved Security With Private Browsing
Another cool built in improvement is two tools that allow better security and private browsing. InPrivate can be turned on from the Tools menu. This feature basically allows you to surf the web and none of your tracks (cookies, temp files, history, etc) will be saved. Tired of your “significant other” harping on you about sites your visiting? This feature is right up your alley!
Suggested Sites
Anytime you are at a particular site you can press the Suggested Sites button to find other websites with similar content. While trying it for this review I did have some problems finding similar sites for smaller blogs but I am assuming this will improve over time.
Compatibility
Whenever a new browser version is released, there's always issues for webmasters trying to make sure their websites work correctly in the new browser version. IE8 uses "Standards Mode" by default, which adheres much more strictly to web standards, but sometimes causes problems with certain websites.
If you encounter an issue viewing a website, you can click the new Compatibility View button on the address bar, which will switch to viewing the site in a more compatible mode.
Conclusion
This version of Internet Explorer is miles ahead of any previous version of IE, enough that it's actually able to compete in features with the default Firefox, at least.
If you are an early adopter, it's well worth trying out… but there are a few compatibility issues still, so if you depend on IE for your work you might want to wait a short while for the final release.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 - microsoft.com
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Geek Reviews: Manage And Organize Notes With Evernote
This article is part of Mysticgeek's Realm, a How-To Geek Blog focused on cyber geekery.
Since it is back to school time it seems appropriate to cover some tools to help you store and mange your studies easier. Evernote is a great free note taking application that can help organize the most disorganized people. Evernote allows saving notes, pictures, and web content to one centralized location and being able to access it from almost anywhere.
Evernote is free to download and gives you a free 40MB space to synchronize and store notes. First create a new notebook and choose the appropriate settings. You can even store it as public and a URL will be created to share with friends and colleagues.
Evernote has a very familiar explorer type user interface. After creating a new notebook the title shows on the left side menu.
Saving text and pictures from the Internet is only a matter of highlighting what you want and sending the selection to Evernote. Firefox has an easy to use plug-in and is also featured as a left click menu option.
With Internet Explorer you can go to the Web Clipper page and right click the icon and save as favorites. Or you can highlight to select the data you want to keep and right click Add to Evernote.
Anytime a note is saved a small notification pops up indicating a successful save.
Here is a look at some saved data within Evernote also notice the handy search feature. This will also find words in images.
Not only does that save the information to the Evernote local client, but also the your web account. And your mobile account too. This makes it possible to access your notes from almost anywhere.
Basic Notes are also possible with standard document editing functions available such as adjusting the font, cut, paste, etc.
Premium Accounts are also available for $5/month or $45/year which allow for up to 500MB of storage per month. You can always keep tabs on and / or upgrade the amount of space you have available by going into Account Properties.
Download Evernote For Mac and PC
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Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy Way
We've already covered how to use an Ubuntu Live CD to backup files from your dead Windows computer, but using the boot cd can sometimes be a little slow. We can speed up the booting process by installing Ubuntu to a bootable USB flash drive instead.
To accomplish this, we'll use a tiny software package called UNetbootin, which is designed to make the installation process simple and easy.
Create the Bootable Flash Drive
You'll first need to download the UNetbootin software and save it somewhere useful, since there's no installation required, just double-click to run.
I chose to use an already downloaded ISO image of the Ubuntu installation cd, and then chose my flash drive, and clicked the OK button. Yes, this step is as simple as that.
The process will extract the files from the ISO image (or download them), copy them to the flash drive and then install the bootloader. Depending on what you are installing, this really doesn't take very long.
Once the process is completed, you'll be prompted to reboot… which you don't necessarily have to do unless you want to test booting the flash drive on the same machine you are using.
Otherwise you can hit the Exit button.
Make Sure the Partition is Active
If you get a boot device error when you try and boot from the flash device, it could be that your partition is not marked as active. What we'll do is use the command line diskpart utility to fix this… if you are in Vista open an administrator mode command prompt by right-clicking and choosing Run as Administrator.
Now you'll need to run this command to figure out the number of your flash drive:
list disk
This will show you the list of drives, and you will use the disk number in the "select disk" command:
select disk 1
select partition 1
active
The "active" command will actually mark the current partition as active, which is why you need to select the disk and then the partition. At this point you should be done.
Booting From the Flash Drive
Now that you are all finished, you can try and boot from the flash drive. Every BIOS is different, but most of them will have a message like "Press F12 for the Boot Menu", which is highly suggested. The boot menu will allow you to select the USB drive as the boot device. (apologies for the simply horrible camera phone screenshots)
Instead of the regular Ubuntu boot menu that you might be used to seeing, you will see the UNetbootin menu, which has essentially the same options.
Useful Note
If you are having issues booting Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) on a Dell machine, you might want to switch back to using Ubuntu 7.10 instead.
I was able to boot all the way into the desktop in about 35 seconds using the flash drive… way faster than using the regular live cd.
Stay tuned, we're going to explore even more options for bootable CDs and USB drives that help you repair your computer.
Download UNetbootin from sourceforge.net
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Friday, August 29, 2008
HOW TO - generate MIDI from a theremin
Charles Martin's wrote a program for use with Pure Data which converts an incoming audio signals pitch and amplitude into a MIDI control value. In addition to the theremin it seems this could be used with a number of different audio signals - Theremin to MIDI control in Pd [via Create Digital Music]
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How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter
Twitter Search is a powerful tool for businesses, once you learn how to search, and once you better understand the terms your prospective customers might use on Twitter.
This won’t apply to every industry, but I was quite surprised with the tests that I ran, because I was able to come up with prospects for most anything I could think of searching as a potential business opportunity. Let’s go through an example, step by step, so that you can try it out for yourself.
How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter
- Go to http://search.twitter.com
- Enter a search term. In my example I put in “hosting.”
- Review the search to see if it found accurate or useful results. If not, try several other potential search terms.
- Click the “Feed for this query” button next to the orange RSS graphic.
- Add this to your RSS reader of choice. I use Google Reader
- Repeat step 4 on variations and alternate search terms until satisfied.
Once you understand this process, click the Advanced Search button to the right of the Search button. You’ll note there are all different kinds of variations on how you can narrow your search, including:
- Specific words, phrases, hashtags (#gnomedex, for example).
- Locations and proximities.
- Time spans.
- From specific users.
- With happy or sad emoticons. :) :(
- With links.
- And more.
With a bit of noodling, you can refine your searches such that they could potentially find business. For instance, on my above example for hosting, I found several people complaining about how their site had gone down, or that they were sick of bad lag time, etc. If I were selling web hosting, I’d at least offer a hand.
There are lots of variations on the theme. Have you tried it? What were your results? Would could you do next?
By the way, the Social Media 100 has been completed. I’m going to do “How to” posts as my next series. Feel free to suggest new ones.
Note: I use Skitch to do screenshots. It’s cool.
Photo credit, apbeatty
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How to: Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes
Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write Javascript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.
It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4 minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.
We hope readers will add comments with some of your favorite Greasemonkey scripts for people to check out as well.
What Is Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different web sites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.
For nontechnical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.
How do I Use It?
Below you'll find a four minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.
Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)
Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.
Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the video above are:
AutoPagerize
Better GMail 2
FriendFeed User Profiles
FriendFeed Better Recommended
Greased Lightbox
There's a whole room in FriendFeed dedicated to sharing and discussing new Greasemonkey scripts.
We wrote about Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict in May, but the options available grow fast and furious.
Add Pictures To MySpace
The following article explains how to add pictures to MySpace. The process itself is not overly complicated and everyone should be able to follow the steps. Please leave a comment if you have any questions about the process.
There are basically two possibilities to add pictures to MySpace. The first is to upload pictures from a computer to MySpace and use the code presented after uploading them to add them to the MySpace profile or blog post. The second option is to embed images that are hosted on other websites.
If you want to upload pictures directly to MySpace you need to know the requirements. Pictures may not contain nudity, violence, copyrighted material or other offensive imagery. The picture can have a maximum size of 5 Megabytes and has to be a jpg, gif, bmp, png or tiff.
The process to add pictures to MySpace would be the following. The user would click on Profile > My Photos to load his photo album. The photo album displays pictures that have already been added to MySpace. It contains a link at the top to Upload Photos. A click on that link opens the form where the user can add pictures to MySpace. This is done by browsing the computer of the user for pictures. Holding the CTRL key makes it possible to add multiple pictures at once to the upload form.
A click on Next opens the next options window which gives the user the choice to upload the pictures to an existing photo album or to create a new one for those images.
A click on Upload uploads the pictures to MySpace. A progress bar is shown during upload. The next button leads to another optional menu where the pictures can be tagged. Tagging makes it easier to find the images later on but is not required at all.
All pictures are then shown in the MySpace My Albums menu.
A click on an image loads that image in higher resolution and displays two links to the image on the right side. The important link is entitled “Photo code: copy it to your profile”. A click on Copy copies the code to the clipboard. This code can be pasted into the profile or blog post easily. Simply right-click the text area where you want to add the picture and select Paste.
Add Pictures To MySpace
The second option is to add pictures to MySpace that are hosted externally. Users can use image hosts like Imageshack to upload their images and paste them from there to MySpace. This has the advantage that the images can have a greater size than those posted at MySpace.
Imageshack posts all sorts of links to the image after uploading it to their service. A good choice are the thumbnail links at the top or the direct link at the bottom. Just click in the line that you want to use, right-click it and select copy. Then go to Myspace to add the picture and paste it there.
Make sure to test your page before publishing it to be able to correct errors that might have occurred.
Tags: add pictures to myspace, myspace, myspace photos, myspace pictures, myspace tips
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