The Random Blogger

I’ve recognised for a long time now that one of the best ways to get additional traffic to your website is to indulge in video marketing (YouTube is the second most visited site on the Internet), but I’ve always shied away from it as being too difficult, plus I’m really not that keen on hearing the sound of my own voice.

Now, I have been somewhat more active in the world of article marketing - after all, words are my thing.

So, I was delighted, a day or two ago, to find a web-based service that converts an article into a narrated video for you.

Use Coupon Code F0C17D97

The service, appropriately called Article Video Robot, has two modes - one, which is fully automated, converts an EzineArticles article into a video in a single click, and one that requires a bit more input from you, but the results are a lot better.

The EzineArticles converter may be simple to use, but I really wasn’t that happy with the end result at all - too much of the text in the article I selected was just lost - it wasn’t shown on the screen, and it wasn’t spoken out loud either.

The manual mode, however, did require a bit of fiddling to make sure that the text-to-speech software did a decent job of pronouncing the words in the article, but I have to say that, overall, I was very impressed with the quality of the TTS, and the various male and female voices you can choose from.

In this mode you can also add photos or video to each slide, either from its built-in stock ones, or from ones you upload and import yourself, and then you can also choose from a range of background images and music.

The final slide in the video shows details such as your name, email address (which is mandatory and which is something else I’m not keen on), and that all-important website link.

Overall, I think it’s a really neat tool with many other features I’ve not even mentioned here, so I do recommend you check out the demonstration video on the Article Video Robot website.

There are two membership levels, which cost $47 and $97 per month respectively, with the more expensive one having more features than the less expensive one (e.g. more distribution credits, advanced editing options, additional TTS voices).

However, the good news is that, although they do offer a free trial, I’ve managed to get a Coupon Code you can use to get a massive 50% off the standard monthly membership costs - all you need to do is enter (or copy and paste) this code into the appropriate box on the order page: F0C17D97.

Although I’ve used Paint Shop Pro as my primary graphics program for many years now (I’m currently using Version 7.04), it was only today that I discovered a plug-in that I’m pretty sure must have come with it (as I certainly don’t recall buying it) that adds a flame / fire effect to text or an image.

This turned out to be pretty handy, as I was all set to go Googling for some way to achieve the desired effect, and was beginning to be reconciled to having to delve into Photoshop, which I’ve always shied away from for some reason, when I chanced upon a menu option I don’t think I’d ever come across before.

So, I guess the lesson is, make sure you have a good look around the menu options in any software you use, because it may already do what you need without you needing to waste time and money looking for any buying something else.

Some time in the middle of 2008, we bought a couple of Alienware M7700 laptops, which for the most part have been very good.

However, towards June or July 0f 2009, mine started to make strange bleeping noises, and both the Caps Lock and Num Lock indicators would flash a few times - anywhere from two to six times, on average.

We couldn’t find any documentation that would tell us what this meant, although it didn’t look or sound healthy, so we contacted the company we bought the laptop from to ask them.

Weeks went by, and no response, but I thought, no problem, as the bleeping and flashing had stopped.

Until a week or two ago, that is.

Now, we live in a mountainous area of Arizona, where it’s permanently windy, with dust and other crap blowing around all the time, which means all of this stuff settles all over the house all of the time - especially as we have seven dogs as well to help spread it around.

So, we were looking around the laptop, to see what, if anything, we could find, and when we checked underneath, we noticed that all of the fans were more or less clogged up with dust bunnies.

I was all for ordering one of those micro-vacuum cleaners that are especially designed for computer keyboards, but we couldn’t find one that had good reviews, so in the end we bought (more…)

Today, I was shocked to learn from one of our customers that her vet had tried to charge her $12,000 USD to save one of her cats from Feline Distemper (aka Feline Panleukopenia, and which is the feline version of Canine Parvovirus).

Whichever way you look at it, that’s a huge cost, but what makes this even worse is that the vet failed to save this cat, and was all for killing the lady’s other three cats on the grounds that they would probably die in a day or two as well.

Fortunately, apart from the fact that one of her cats didn’t survive, the rest of this particular story has a happy ending - she refused to accept the vet’s recommendation to murder her cats (although they call it “euthanising” or “putting to sleep”), contacted us and was able to save all three of her other cats using safe, chemical-free natural products, and for less than $150 USD (and that included the cost of overnight shipping).

We see this sort of thing all the time, although not usually with such astronomical figures, and, sadly, far too many people will believe what their vets tell them and kill their pets without even giving them a chance of pulling through.

Most vets aren’t aware of these herbal alternatives, and those that are tend to be very dismissive - not that they usually have any experience of such products, of course.

Previous to this, I’d heard from a few other customers that they’d been quoted $10,000 USD to save a dog from Parvo, but $12,000 USD, for a smaller animal, is outrageous.

So, if there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, it’s this: question everything, because in our extensive experience of helping pet owners treat both Canine Parvovirus and Feline Distemper at home, vets don’t always know best, and are all too quick to recommend euthanasia (which can cost more than the usually effective herbal solution) without exploring other options that can be both cheaper and more successful.

A few days ago, I bought a website from somebody, and the first thing I did was accept the domain name transfer into my own registrar account.

Next, I logged into my cPanel to make sure I could access that, as the site was hosted with a company I’d never used before.

I also got hold of the FTP details so that I could download a copy of the entire site to my hard drive.

My next step was to log into the server using my FTP client, and begin the download.

And that’s when things started to go screwy!

Firstly, (more…)

Today, I continued my lessons on CSS.

I’d spent a fair while trying to work out why a new site I’m working on looked great in Avant Browser (which is essentially Internet Explorer), but in Firefox, it wasn’t picking up my stylesheet at all.

Being aware that Firefox does have a few “quirks”, I started doing my research, on Google, trying to find out what might be the cause of this problem.

I was led up a couple of garden paths before I came across the blindingly obvious way to diagnose the problem – validate your CSS!

As I had subsequently found that the same issues were present with both Safari and Opera and thus realised it probably was something fundamentally wrong with my code, I heeded the advice, popped over to the W3C CSS Validation Service, pasted in my CSS code and clicked the Check button.

Sure enough, it found a parsing error – there was a round bracket instead of a curly bracket! – which I fixed and, lo and behold, my stylesheet was now being picked up and used in all four browsers, looking exactly as it was meant to.

So, my lesson for the day is: validate your CSS code, as it’s a lot quicker than spending hours of frustrating research that may not lead you anywhere.

I wasn’t exactly looking for this information - in fact, I can’t remember what I was actually searching for - but I have filed it away in my swipe file of potentially useful code.

What are pull quotes?

Well, they look like this:

And if you want to know how to create them on your website, here’s the link:

http://www.sitepoint.com/test/pullquote.htm

I’m starting a new category today, called “What I Learned Today”.

I’ve always believed that if I don’t learn something new, every single day, then that day has been wasted.

So, this new category is an attempt at documenting what it is I learned each day.

Now, remember, this blog is random thoughts and random posts, so there’s a good chance I won’t actually post something every single day.

This does not mean that I didn’t learn anything (and even if I do post, it doesn’t mean I only learned one thing) – it probably means I’ve not found time to write a post about it, as time is the one commodity I have very little of, given my other commitments and projects.

Anyway, maybe you’ll learn something from what I’ve learned, so enjoy!