Ever since Vivien at Inspiration Bit made me aware of speed painting from her post ‘7 Astonishing Minutes to Get Inspired‘ I have been amazed by the amount of talent out there and the work they are showing on YouTube. I’ve become a bit addicted to watching the videos actually, and manage to use up my time just watching what’s new and what people are painting.
For those of you that don’t know what speed painting is, it’s basically a recording of someone using software, usually Adobe Photoshop, to paint a picture. This recording is sped up so a painting that took several hours can be watched in several minutes. If you use Photoshop, then watching these videos is just amazing, even if you’ve never used Photoshop they are still good to watch.
Now, my painting skills are not up to the level of the speed painters on YouTube, but I thought about doing a similar thing for photo editing. So when I work on an image that requires a fair amount of work, I plan to record it then speed the video up so I can show my own speed photoshopping videos. To do this I need software to do the recording, so I did a bit of a hunt around to see what was available. Something free, or cheap, was what I was after and I eventually found CamStudio which is free to download and use. It’s open source and is a development of the software that eventually became Adobe’s Robodemo. Anyway, enough of the boring development history, it records what you do and saves it to an Avi file or even a Flash file, so it looks ideal.
I’ve not actually got a video to show you yet, but I will have. I’ve actually got to do a talk to the camera club I’m in and I want to use this technique to try and keep everyone awake during the evening so I should have something soon.
In the mean time, here’s one of my favourites from YouTube:
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I have been using mozilla’s email software for many years now as Microsoft’s Outlook or Outlook Express just didn’t give me confidence in security. I now use the excellent Mozilla Thunderbird which is a great stand alone email package. Fully featured, hot on security and simple to use, but anyway, that’s not what I’m posting about.
I was just looking through my inbox and noticed that I still had emails from the year 2000 in there. Did they have computers back then!! That’s 7 years worth of email, surely that’s too much. OK, I don’t have every email I’ve ever got in the last 7 years, a lot has been filtered off into folders or deleted, but maybe it’s time for a proper spring clean.
How do you manage your emails? I’ll be interested to know.
I’ve been reading the Self Made Minds blog for the last few weeks, and really like the writing style and the info that the dynamic duo Scott and Al produce.
It has, however, caused me loss of sleep trying to come up with that idea, the holy grail, that niche that will start to bring in some regular income and make a name for myself. So far, I’ve not had that moment of inspiration, but I am positive it will come…… when, well there’s another story.
So many people are out there making reasonable money from web sites. Some people are making a lot and there are a lot of people making money telling people how to make money. Now I’m not after making millions, although that would be nice, what I’d like to achieve is a regular amount that would cover some of my bills making working for myself a little more comfortable.
I always say that anything is possible on the web, it just takes time, and in most cases, money. I am lucky that I already have pretty much everything in place to try stuff out, I have hosting, domains, web design and development skills and experience. I can string sentences together, so content isn’t a major concern, it’s just that idea. Maybe I need to get out more for inspiration, or maybe I just need to try the ideas.
When I do have an idea, I am very good at thinking too much about it and eventually talking myself out of it. OK, you need to do some research to see if it’s possible and whether there is a need for it, but I get to the point of thinking “if I do that, I’ll need to do this, but in order for me to do that in that way I should do this” etc etc blah blah blah and I get to the point of turning every idea into some massive project that needs a team of 20 people to make it happen.
So, is it time for just going for it, make mistakes, fly by the seat of my pants a bit more, sometimes fail, sometimes succeed, or is a lot of thought a good thing?
I have set up another mini site, this time all about zoetropes, as a site to test a few thing on. If you don’t know what a zoetrope is then you’ll just have to check out my site.
I do have bigger plans for this site but they will not be happening for a while so I thought I’d get the site indexed and see what traffic arrives. I am using no ads, so obviously it’s not going to make any money. It is just a one page website with a page of relevant and original content and one image.
I’ll be using google analytics to track the traffic on the site and will report it’s progress.
From time to time I like to go on little trips around the world and explore areas of the world that I haven’t been to before. Last night I was in the mountains near Everest and the night before I was cruising around Monaco.
You may have guessed that I wasn’t actually there in person….. You did guess that didn’t you?
Google Earth has got to be one of the best free bits of software you can get. I spend quite a few hours on it looking for details and looking at places I’ve seen on TV or planning future holidays.
Anyway, the point of this post is that I found a chap on YouTube who’s done some rather good little videos. Basically he’s found some interesting details and places and made little “Where am I” type videos.
There, I’ve admitted it. It feels so much better to get it out in the open.
What sort of deviant I hear you shout….. well, it’s actually nothing bad, or sinister, or pervy….. so sorry about that.
I have joined deviantART. If you have never been to the site and you are interested in all things art then you need to come out of your cave and check out the amazing work being done by people on that site. There is everything there; cartoons, manga, photography, digital art, traditional art, poetry plus loads more and there is some truly amazing work. As I type this, there are currently 34,387,868 pieces of art, or deviations, on the site, and the number is increasing every second. In fact, in the time it’s taken me to type this sentence, another 60 deviations have been uploaded. What other site can boast that amount of user contributions.
As I use Flickr to share my photography, I’m going to try and keep my deviantART account for just my good stuff. Work I’d use for a portfolio. That way I can try and move towards a more commercial (as in selling prints etc) slant to my photography at deviantART while still experimenting and sharing using Flickr.
The only downside to this is that it’s another site that I’ll be spending hours on just browsing through other people’s work for inspiration and enjoyment.
I have been running a forum for owners of Konica Minolta or Sony DSLR cameras for a while now. The membership continues to grow, but slowly. So far there are nearly 600 members, although like most forums, not all of them are active.
Initially I ran the forum with phpBB, which although was good, seemed to be updated every other day which got to be a problem. So I made the switch to SMF or Simple Machines Forum which was opensource but much much better than phpBB in my opinion. The look of it and the operation and administration was a major improvement over phpBB, so all was good.
I ran adsense ads on the forum, a banner at the top and a long tower ad down the right hand side. This was bringing in a small amount, on average about $2 per day. $2 a day doesn’t seem like much, but that’s $60 a month which is enough to pay for my hosting so it was good for me.
When SMF updated their forum, I changed the forum theme to a nice looking new one, with a few modifications made by me. I dropped the adsense ads for a while as I needed to make sure the forum was running properly. I made the decision to keep the forum ad free for registered users, an incentive to register. So I am now trying to monetize the forum again, but for guest visitors only, and see if I can bring back the earnings to pay for my hosting, that’s my first aim at least.
Using the adsense ‘heat map’ for forums, which gives advice to where ads perform best on forums, I have now placed adsense ads before the first post on the thread display page and before the first board/category on the homepage, but only for guests. I’ll be monitoring this over the next week or two to see if it makes a big difference and I’ll report back here.
My first ‘mini site’ is a site I have had up for a little while now but haven’t really done a lot with. It is a site about the Sony Alpha 100 DSLR. It is a basic information site with some affiliate links to amazon on it and adsense.
While it doesn’t get a lot of traffic at the moment, the payout from the ads seem to be quite high. There are new Sony Alpha models coming out later this year, so some expansion of the site, maybe a different page for each mode, may happen.
I’m not expecting big things from this site in money terms as the content is not really written the best way for that purpose. I might go back to that at a later date. I also need to play about with the adsense colours a little.
After discovering and reading another useful blog called Self Made Minds and in particular this post about mini sites, it made me sit up and think why I haven’t tried it. As the article says, all you need are:
domain names, or to be able to register domain names.
a hosting account, preferably a reseller account so you can set up as many sites as you want.
templates for html sites, or the ability to design and make your own sites, well I’ve been making websites for the last 7 years so I think I’ve got that one covered.
a way to monetise the page e.g. an adsense account.
content for the site written well and taking into consideration the user, search engines and how things like adsense generate the context sensitive ads.
Well, I have 4 out of the 5 things, with content being the only thing left to find/create. So I thought to myself “Garry, get off your arse and do it!”
So, over the next few weeks I will be building a few mini sites to try and generate some regular income from adsense. It won’t be loads (at first!) but if it starts to bring in enough to pay for my hosting account then I’ll be very happy. Any more than that and I’ll be even happier!
