IT Tutor

Yesterday I wrote about niche priority determination and that’s still something I’m thinking through, I’ll get there in the end. Some action points

* Find a way to collect the stats better, or easier. Maybe separate spreadsheets or split the spreadsheet up into niches, or in a way that suits data collection.
* Is it a six monthly analysis and decision point?
* This all came out of the IM makeover for the new year so doing one for the summer makes sense too.
Ok, that’s enough for here, I need to come back to this after having looked at the spreadsheet itself.

So the other thing was the rapid video blogging pdf which planted a few ideas.

It reassured me that what I’m doing with the podcast blog is about right. I’ve found a way to produce lots of videos, I have a domain blog, I’m putting the clickable url in the right place. So why aren’t I number one yet?  Well maybe it’s because I’m not blogging each of the individual videos on the blog with the phrase in the title of the blog post and the video. For this topic, I can’t really overdo that. It’s my own name I’d be plastering on every post and video title. Interesting bit about the voice recognition too.  And the tech.

The flip camera for capturing HD versions of the video and the digital recorder with lapel mike to get good quality sound. Screenflow for combining the two. Would this  technique help with my podcasts video? I still don’t have a video podcast, so that’s a whole other way of getting stuff out there. My intention for now though, was to use the podcast as a way to concentrate on the audio and that’s going well so don’t get too distracted. Home recording studio. Can I keep up the content creation?
Well this is a slower way of writing, by asking myself questions and trying to work through stuff. Let’s just brain dump for a while. Blank.

Going to take the afternoon off and see a film probably or we could go to Richmond or Kew. A bit of Rest and Relaxation. Take binoculars.

Oddsense is a slow and unguaranteed way of generating income, but it can be residual and with a bit more effort I’ll be at the point where I can afford to invest time and effort into building up the niches that aren’t paying yet. I do that anyway, and spend a lot of time on music, which may never pay anything. I could approach Julian about the online guitar lessons and see if that’s something that might interest him. That’s with a view to setting up a membership site on which he’d be the subject of video tutorials. The other thing that came out was the idea of collaborating with Steve on his Scotland song. Take a video next time he performs it so we can learn it and develop it further. Why am I all over the place this morning? Bad night’s sleep with some stomach ache and things. Wake up worrying about stuff. This exercise will help to get it out of the system.

I can’t believe the word count is still refusing to go up at any speed at all. That’s because I’m not really engaged deeply with the content I’m writing about. And then I stop. Ok, I’m actually nearly there now, the numbers just don’t add up in my head very well. I was thinking about three pages of 500 words each, where the hell did that come from? I dunno.

Yesterday I spent too much time doing a video tutorial reply for a song which Wu wanted to learn. In the end the performance wasn’t brilliant and the youTube video ended up jerky and distorted because the uStream upload wasn’t working fast enough on a Sunday afternoon. Lesson learned about sticking to Tuesday evenings! Also it felt good to be making a friend and responding to the youTube comments. Engaging with the audience is a great idea, it brings about somebody who may well attend the live show next time. Building the base in ones and twos, one at a time. That’s going to be the way to do it, slowly but surely. And I liked the Friendfeed stream with one song per day as well. That’s an interesting project.

If anyone says “It just needs a standard USB cable” show them the above.

Here’s a guitar tutor video of the type which may be what you are looking for if you are wanting to play Loudon Wainwright songs, which you should really because they are great songs and easy to learn for beginners to guitar tutor video learning.

The Guitar Tutor here is called Andy Roberts and the song is “AM World” video tutorial with chords

I wonder how easy it is to find a guitar tutor in your local area? Would you want a guitar tutor that can travel and visit your house to save you the time traveling, or would you be willing to do the traveling yourself and save a little bit of cash if the guitar tutor is willing to have you in his or her own house or other suitable environment for teaching guitar lessons.

Eating my own dogfood here by getting this somewhat neglected blog back in order.

Sitemap Plugins installed, together with redirection to monitor 404s

Old urls blocked from robots

Meta tags updated

What else?

Happy New Year for 2010 from the IT Tutor blog.

In 2009 I posted 12 blog posts here on the IT-Tutor blog, which I admit is kind of sporadic.

I guess the early part of 2010 is going to be a time for making the decision as to where the blog goes from here.

Google Analytics is a system for tracking traffic to a website. By including a piece of code that appears within every page on a site, information sent voluntarily by visitors browsers can be accumulated over time and used to provide interesting statistics about the nature of the traffic to any particular site, most importantly where they came from.

I commissioned a WordPress plugin that does some fancy stuff with category code pages to include a table of contents. So far it seems to help a bit with navigation, which is the main aim. Time will tell if it makes any difference to findabiity

build a LEGO school

371 children use 1 million bricks to build their own school.

After considering changing my web hosting, for various sites one thing has occurred to me which may be worth an airing and that is that the act of migration can be non-trivial with larger sites these days. If you have a domain with a couple of established blogs and maybe a mediawiki installation then it’s not just a question of ftp-ing a few dozen files or so. The software itself takes up a lot of space for each installation, together with all the plugins and customisations, then there’s the content section which may have a large number of images each with thumbnails and size options, and finally the mySQL databases which are not always so easy to transfer. As far as I know there is no way to ftp across from one website to another so the whole process needs to be done twice, once to download an entire site to a local computer, and once again to upload everything to the new host. File permissions are often not re-created exactly the same as the original leading to access errors which all need sorting out.

One utility which helps with the process is a program called mysqldumper. It makes sure your database is fully exported and re-imported, getting over any file size limitations.