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Google Docs Tip: Including Published Spreadsheets

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I have published several Google Documents on my Google Account but couldn’t figure out how to publish them ON MY BLOG. Well, there is an easy way to do this, it is an <iframe>. It works simply.

Remember to add the width=’x’ and height=’x’ and frameborder= ‘x’ where x is a number of pixels. I usually use a standard 500px width for this blog. The code is shown in the jpeg below.

You can also obtain the code for sharing a document within your blog. In fact, you can look at some stats for Taiwan in September 2008 that I made available because it was stuck in an Excel worksheet.

google docs

Here’s the sample document inserted for you. Enjoy!

Need Video for your Blog: Turn your camera videos into FLVs for your blog, easily and quickly.

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I’ve been doing video for a while, and always found it a pain to transcode videos. Why? I don’t have a Flip camera but I just use the movie mode available for the smaller cameras (my Lumix for example). Unfortunately, I’m not an Apple FanBoy, which makes dealing with those QT movies a really pain in the butt. I tried different solutions for transcoding those and had limited success.

Transcoding Hamlet!

But for a recent project, I need to transcode some FLVs of Hamlet lectures like this. This was a project for the Taiwan Science Council and the website was the result of a project application.

hamletintaiwan

I didn’t have any time editing the videos, though that would’ve been ideal. I only had a little time to transcode and upload the videos. The results are surprisingly effective. And that was all thanks to a program called MediaCoder:

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

I found that for the first time I was able to transcode video easily from Quick Time to FLV without an intermediate step. Previously I had to create an AVI format and then use Super to create an FLV file. After that, uploading was time consuming but effective! Voila!

make an FLV

Simply drag the file to the transcoding area, then hit Extensions and “Other Devices” and Flash Video Maker. I set the quality as high as I dare which turned 1 hour of MPEG4 video into an FLV of about 150MBs. I also kept the audio as high quality as I could, given that it was a lecture, audio quality was more important than video quality. Other choices: 25fps, Hi-Quality, with 300Kbps bitrate and original resolution. Audio was default settings. The results are effective if a little grainy.

Adding Video to a Post

You can download one of the best plugins for adding Flash Video to your blog. It’s called Flash Video Player Plugin for WordPress and can be found at http://www.mac-dev.net/blog/index.php where you can download the latest version. Installation is easy: upload and activate.

To add a video to your post, you simply upload the file via FTP, then create a post and add the code as follows:

That’s it. Pretty easy, I think. I had some problems getting video to work on my other blog, but it was because of a plugin incompatibility! Once the offending plugin was turned off, it worked beautifully.

So if you have videos on your camera in unusable QT formats, download MediaCoder, transcode the files, and upload the FLVs to your blog. As an example, I’ve included my wife playing Jenga… and she loses, big time!

Enjoy!

When blogging and traveling: five tips for bloggers on the move!

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I’ve been away, ’tis true. This is the sole reason I haven’t maintained a healthy posting schedule, and for that, dear readers, I’m surely sorry.

When traveling in the UK (my home country), I was pleased often to find hotels that offered various forms of broadband or wifi. During my stay, I stayed with friends, small inns, student accommodation, and a formal hotel, and I was quite surprised how many places actually had good broadband. It’s quite a different scenario from just three years ago. But …

BEWARE: high charges and poor connectivity

But I realized that there are still too many places that charge an arm and a leg for wifi service that is at best mediocre, T-Mobile, for one, had spotty coverage and iffy bandwidth. Worse, they promised a full 24 hours but I was unable to login the last sixty minutes or so, purportedly because of IP issues. It’s not a great idea to pay so much money for iffy and intermittent connections.

There are many coffee houses that provide both good coffee and free wifi to attract customers, including the BeanScene in Edinburgh, so it’s wise to check ahead and see if you can find such coffee shops or other free access. Checking accommodation to see if broadband is provided is now a priority on my list of criteria for a decent guest house, so much so that I would prefer a place to stay without a TV, if it had some form of WiFi. But why on earth are ethernet cables so expensive here?

Great Websites: for Travel and Hotels

There are many great websites for booking rooms and flights, both company specific sites (like BMI of http://www.flybmi.com) and vacancy aggregators (such as LateRooms of http://laterooms.com). I appreciated these sites for several reasons: online booking from abroad was possible, credit card payments were accepted, and there was little hassle – bookings were made, checkins were swift and payments were trouble-free. So, as a traveller, I don’t tend to prebook a lot of things as it’s always difficult to accommodate last minute changes into a rigid itinerary, and just sometimes very early or very late bookings can get discount rates that will make your eyes water.

Preparing BeforeHand

While away, my posting schedule was really awful. Some days none, some days just one across the entire InvestorBlogger network. Mmm. I discovered that I was only able to really focus when I had peace and quiet, a good internet connection, and a good cup of tea. But when I was in Scotland, I rarely had all three in one place at the same time. This was despite the best intentions to keep up a regular posting schedule. But it all fell apart, and I was powerless to prevent it, or at least, lacking willpower to insist on personal space. I should have at least prepared some more irregular filler posts or published some feature articlels that are half-written or mostly edited. But alas! I didn’t.

Travel Equipment: Tools on the Go

Since buying my AspireOne, I have found it to be a wonderful tool, fully capable of supporting quality blogging on my blog. I’ve installed nearly all my standard ‘blogging’ applications without a hitch, and found that with Skype set up, it actually becomes a very powerful, very inexpensive communications tool slashed the exorbitant fees charged by my cellular company. Of course, a USB handset really helps set the mood. Additionally, a decent camera is essential, but photos taken on the SD Card can be rapidly uploaded to the PC, incorporated in a blog, and published within minutes. I know I’ve already done it. When I get back to Taiwan, I will register for a mobile broadband account, and should be able to blog from almost anywhere.

There are three tools that I would consider adding: a GPS tracker for USB or BlueTooth so I can find out where we are whenever we are lost; a decent mouse as the trackpad is frustrating for big fingers like mine; and (maybe) a larger keyboard. Other than that, I can’t see what I’d buy… Though I was envying a solar charger or a handpowered charger (just in case).

Quiet Time: Well, quite…!

But most of all, I’d try to make quiet time, time away from everyone, time away from books/tv/papers, etc.. It’s too easy to be swamped by stuff, and to forget that I have to make that quiet time to sit and think and reflect and write.