Media Maven Boomer Chick learnings….lesson #2 videos

I really need to post more items to this category as I learn.  As most of us know, adult learners learn most through experience.  So, as I embarked on this web world of delivering information, I am learning pretty much daily through the creation of this site. 

So, here are some recent learnings in the last week.  It all started with a desire to post a "welcome video" to our site.  Elizabeth and I used my little Flip video camera on a tripod to shoot the main part of the video.  I had learned a year ago how to create a video from a combination of phots and video files using Pinnacle…..so I added on front and end material with that program. 

Then the question, how large should our video be?  What format is best for posting on our website?  We had posted the "lemons" video on one of Elizabeth's posts very easily, so I tried to follow the same method for posting our welcome video to our home page.  And VOILA, it did NOT work. 

So, from there I started digging.  I found that when you have website, you can have a "secure webdisk" which is loaded to your own computer desktop by your website hosting company.  This webdisk is basically a network window into your files on your host's computers.  On the help information with our website it gave the filepath to drag and drop the video file into a subfolder of the "Media" folder on our webdisk.  When I did this, I could see the video file loaded….great!

But wait, great, but not great!  There was a big "Q" now on the webpage in view mode with no little screen to launch to play…..still non-functional. 

From there, I researched further, we needed to ensure that the parameters for transferring files and using files by posts and pages were set to the right level….in terms of MB.  On Semiologic's site (the software add-on that gives a bunch of additional functionality on our Wordpress log), they told me the file to go to and how to replace it with a simple file that had the right levels in it…..it was called the php.ini file. 

So, with that modification, I was able to get it work……now I am on to determining how to do progressive downloading….and get that working on our videos!

So, my takeaways: The tools to create and manage a website are still pretty simple, but it is useful to understand the basic organizational structure of the website on our host's server and learn where you can put content directly so that it can appear on a site.  Sometimes this is easier than using the downloading capability of your web-site program. 

Be prepared for somethings to not to work quite as you think…..and be prepared to learn a little more and adapt. 

Barb