Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com?

I did a redesign of my website, EricBolstridge.com. All I really did is change the font and background, but hey, it looks a lot better and now it has several pages that I can add content to as I get around to it so whatever. I went ahead and added a page for "Web Cam," too. I'm going to look into how (if) I can stream images to the site from my desktop webcam here at work....

Embedded video and automatic charges

A couple updates for ericbolstridge.com:

First, I finally changed ericbolstridge.com to have my lil' demo reel on the main page. I was having some trouble getting into the FTP client from home, but no problems from work. Must be the uber-security the wife has set up at home. Anyway, I also added dead links to what will eventually be a page with my resume and more video samples. I also put CoasterRadio.com on there, just for kicks. I've been doing some reading about embedding video on websites, and it seems that the way to go is to build 'object' tags for embedding Quicktime and not use WMVs at all. So, I think I will try to get my videos all over to Quicktime and re-upload them.

Second, I got an email from GoDaddy that they automatically charged my credit card for another month of hosting! I know I definitely did not sign up for an automatic renewal, so I investigated a bit. I couldn't find any setting in my account to turn this off or preventing it form happening again, so I guess I'll have to live with paying the $6.99 a month until I decide to investigate hosting options. I'm fairly satisfied with the whole having a website thing, so I will eventually look into a long-term hosting plan with someone.

Google Snippets

A big part of this whole getting myself online thing was a motivation to get my old college Geocities website out of the top spot when people Google "eric bolstridge." Well, I've definately done that with my new pages, this blog, as well as updating my IMDb profile. But what really did it was simply going to Google and looking into how to force the solution.

Google bots troll the internet grabbing snippets from sites, and it doesn't update those snippets too often for unpopular sites. That's why my old Geocities page still had the old description. So, I added a tag ([googlebot metadata=nosnippet] or something like that) to my geocities page that would make the bot not list the site. Then, I requested the Google bot please re-scrape my site. A couple days later, the site is gone from Google. Yay!

MySpace.com

Hey, I'm on MySpace now. See my page here. I got my site name, added a video, a couple pictures, got a song on there, whatever. Tom (a friend who MySpace controls and you automatically get on your page when you join), has Mickey Avalon's song Jane Fonda playing on his page (featuring lyrics like "f- me f- me, you know you want me"). It's somewhat interesting to me that MySpace is fully accepted by mainstream society despite its explicit and easily accessible content.

On the www.ericbolstridge.com side of things, I activated my webhosting account and should be able to upload a bit of content.

ericbolstridge.com

I bought a year of ericbolstridge.com from GoDaddy, as well as a month of web hosting. All together, it cost me like $9. If I can figure everything out well enough, I'll sign up for a longer period and get a reduced price on a long-term agreement.

That was about a week ago. Since then, I haven't done much to get my website actually doing anything. Today I played around with writing something in straight HTML (a skill I used to have way back when), but I didn't really get far. I made a lame template using the Yahoo! Geocities Page Wizard, but that just sucks. I'll see about getting that up on there for now just to practice uploading and making my webpage "live." I suppose having something ugly up there will be something of a motivator for creating something better.

I was able to get the Sonic Roxio MyDVD software working how I wanted it to, by the way. I made a "real" DVD today, with chapter markings and music on the menu and everything. So that's pretty cool.

GigaSize file sharing

I put a couple high-res WMV files on GigaSize to see if it was a viable alternative to putting videos on YouTube (which makes them look like poo).

I was thinking that maybe putting links to GigaSize will be a creative way to save money on hosting space for when I get my website up and running. This is kind of a sucky solution to getting videos online though, since there's no online viewing - you have to download the file to your local machine. But, it's better then nothing - and it is kind of cool that there is a free biggie sized file sharing solution out there...

Anyway, that's the way this kind of "large size" file sharing works. So, feel free to follow the link to download and watch a short video I edited about absentee voting:

Absentee Voting PSA

DVD burning

I got the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Regional Emmy Awards call for entries in the mail today. Looks like they've decided to leap forward with technology themselves. Entries this year are only accepted in DVD-R format, which means there's a new thing on my list of things to figure out.

So, I went on my AVID at work and got to it. I've been able to make straight records to DVD for a while, using a stand-alone DVD burner that's connected to a video player. That's lame, though, because it's always been that dumb blue menu with no chapters and all that. Not much going on today, so I decided to dig into the SONIC program that I got with our AVID install. Within only a couple hours of playing around I was able to make a fairly decent DVD! I had a nice menu with an animated background, six little chapter buttons with video running in little thumbnails, and all of the chaptering and whatnot seemed to work fine. The video quality was not what it should be (I used Sorenson Squeeze - I think that compressed things too much) and I couldn't quite get music on the menu for some reason.

These should be easy things to fix - I'll just export from the AVID differently and I should be able to figure out the menu music... Anyway, I'm generally pleased with my results, so I'm confident I will be able to get a DVD made for the Emmys before the January 26 deadline. Plus, I'll be able to send out completed programs and work samples on DVD now, too.