Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

Ok, this is not quite a tech related post, but you can consider this your non-tech mechanical tip. You can donate your old car to charity - do good, feel good about getting that stinky clunker off the road, and receive a tax receipt to boot - without exerting much energy at all.

My old beater died and since I had no idea how to get rid of it, I asked some friends, one of which told me about the programs that allow you to donate your car to a charity of your choice. They come and pick it up, tow it free, take it apart and sell the good bits, give the proceeds to your charity, and dispose the rest properly. Some even super nicely - in an eco friendly green manner.

A quick Google turned up a few options for us Canadians on where to donate our cars. As usual Americans get a bit more choice.

Donate your car to charity

Charity Cars

Car heaven

Here are a few other reasons to pat yourself on the back:

You will be making an invaluable contribution to the less fortunate in your community.

They handle the forms for you, saving you time and trouble.

Most believe in eco-friendly recycling, making sure all standards of vehicle disposal are reached and kept. That means hundreds of tonnes of beaters are recycled annually. The balance of your beater is reduced in volume by 90% - and that saves a lot of landfill space.

Getting a beater off the road is good for the air. That’s the stuff we breathe, and here in Toronto, it gets so bad that we are told to keep our children inside so the cars can go out and play. Older than 1995 vehicles emit 20 times more hydrocarbon emissions than a 2001 vehicle, and 65 times more than a 2007 vehicle. That’s too much.

I am donating because it is simple, convenient and nice. I save time, and I do good.

Here’s my first quick post for the How to Market Cheaply and Effectively Using the Internet For Starving Artists and Other Small Businesses. It’s a quickie, and comes from an email I had with Alison Humphrey, who is working at Sarrazin Couture film production as well as at Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a multi-talented artsy gal!)

Here is my big time and money saver for companies in industries with notoriously small marketing budgets: use Wordpress blog software to build your web site.

You will get more bang for your buck.

Here are 2 sites I put up for tv/film production companies using Wordpress. These are using free Wordpress themes to dress up their site a bit.

• Streely Maid Films producers of Diamonds in a Bucket
• PWK productions producers of Puppets Who Kill

Wordpress themes, or templates, are kind of like “skins.” It’s the same Wordpress engine underneath, but the theme can make the site look quite different. It’s kind of like dressing up Barbie.

There are also fancier Wordpress themes called Premium Themes. These make Wordpress sites look more like a magazine site. For these sites below, we used the wonderful Wordpress Wordpress Revolution Magazine theme by Brian Gardner

• Author Paul Quarrington
• Moving Stories Film Festival. Watch for the June 15th big announcement at BookExpo.

You can also do an all out customized original Wordpress with your own design.

Production costs gets more expensive as you go from top to bottom of the above list, but looking at the Canadian TV scene, I think the top ones are fine. There’s little point spending thousands of dollars on a site if no one comes to it - or worse - when they get there, it really wasn’t worth the effort.

So - build your site using Wordpress, then take that extra money and build a Wordpress site for each of your film productions. Audiences are starting to expect this.

By using Wordpress for each film’s site, you can start your site early and build hype and Google authority. You can cross promote the site’s existence during your promotion and publicity, and then invite fans to come to the site, interact and leave comments. You build fans. You can also grab their emails so you can send them news about the show, or other upcoming shows.

With the money you saved building your web site, you can now put more money into other marketing initiatives - like building really cool EPKs or electronic press kits. These will have all the necessary things up on your site ready for press and journalists to download. The easier it is for them to gather their information, the more likely it is that they will write or talk about you.

The more I do this for clients (and myself) the more I think this is smart.

Wordpress is still becoming hotter and hotter. With a monstrously huge fan base that keeps developing for it, it’s become a huge Lego for web sites, allowing you to add really cool functions and plugins - like send to a friend, or forums, or notify me.

I can go on and on - but this is enough to get you thinking. I will write more about Wordpress in other posts

I love lurve Wordpress.

Quick apologies for not writing for a while. I have been really busy - yes the standard excuse - and though I have started about 20 posts all pretty much geared to helping small production companies, authors, theatre companies or businesses on how to market cheaply and effectively using the Internet, I haven’t finished any of them. I just haven’t had the time to complete them accordingly.

Consequently, I find myself saying or writing the same things over and over to clients in emails or telephone calls. Surely, there’s got to be a more effective way to get that information out?

Then poof - the answer came to me. Yes - I will blog it!

So, what I will try to do is keep that perfectionist streak at bay and just write quickly - preferably after I write an email to a client - and just use some fancy copy and paste work, and pop the info from email into a post.

That way it will all be here on the site and I can refer you to the right page and have fancy links or pics ready for you so that you can check things out quickly and see what I am referring to.

Perfect. We’ll see how it goes.

Here are a few things I have been busy with:

• Author Paul Quarrington’s web site
• Moving Stories Film Fest site
• Getting my second degree black belt in tae kwon do
• Directing and editing the cutest series of interviews for the Writer’s Union called Elevator Pitch - a Bookshorts production of course

And now big news. I am moving to Newfoundland!!! Yes - I am running away to fulfill a lifelong dream of being an artist, and have found the most wonderful community of filmmakers, people, and spirit right here in Canada on the Rock. St. John’s is like Paris in the 20s. Well, almost. Kind of. Pretty much.

No worries. I will be back-and-forthing a lot between St. John’s and Toronto (feeling guilty about the carbon footprint all ready) and we’ll always have the Internet! I love the Internet.

Have any questions you need answered? Email me irene @ strangeduck.com

I need to learn to use Skype with video. Anyone know a good tutorial?

Video! It’s all the rage. Video on the web is king. The future of TV is on the web. Using video to drive business yields the highest ROIs.

Yes, the media is all abuzz about the video on the web. And leading the revolution - are Fred and Sharon Spencer of fredandsharonsmovies.com.

PS. Sorry I haven’t posted that much lately. Been kind of busy - making videos for the web.

Tags: Fred Spencer, Fred and Sherry’s movies, Fred and Sharon’s movies, funny video, video on the web

Todays lesson explains the tech market for newbies.

From Wikipedia - A stock market bubble is a type of economic bubble taking place in stock markets when price of stocks rise and become overvalued by any measure of stock valuation.

Behavioral finance theory attribute stock market bubbles to cognitive biases that lead to groupthink and herd behavior.

Tags: tech market, bubble, overevaluation, stock trends, funny videos

Vector Magic takes bitmapped images and turns them into beautiful vector images.

Huh? What’s that mean?

Well, very simply, it takes photos or other complicated graphics and turns them into line drawings. Line drawings that can be stretched to infinity.

That’s the original photo on the top left. The other 3 squares have been traced using Vector Magic’s three settings - high, medium and low.

Yup. A Stanford University team has developed a tool that makes it super easy to do, and does it better than most other auto-tracers, like the one in Adobe Illustrator.

Basically, there are 2 ways a computer can draw pictures:

1. with tiny little squares, or pixels, called bitmap, or raster.
2. with a command that says something like “draw a circle and make it red with a circumference of 10 pixels. ” This is called a vector image.

The trick is to know when to use which one.

For example, ever try to take a jpeg and make it bigger? It turns all squarish and jaggedy - or pixelated - meaning you start seeing the individual pixels the image is made of. Now if you shrink the same image, it will get all blurry.

That’s not good for some things, such as logos. For those, you want them to be either teeny weeny, or something to paste on the side of a skyscraper. That means you need a vector image.

Now I can’t tell you the number of times I have received bitmaps instead of vectors when someone sends me their logo. This can be a big headache, especially if it’s sitting on a background colour.

Not anymore. If i get one of those nasty things, I will shoot it up to “Vector Magic: The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization” and change it to a more usable form for logos.

In fact I had to use this myself. I never made a proper logo for Bitter Tonic as I was in a big rush to get content up, and so a friend just made a great header for me. And being too busy, I never got around to doing the work. So I tested this by uploading a TIFF of my logo to Vector Magic.

I gotta hand it to them, it makes traces beautifully and the site is easy to use too. And even keeps your photos stored online for a whole month. Check out the difference. The top is a bitmap.

Magnifico!

Did I mention how fast it is?

I wish this team would develop for my ridiculously not-easy-to-use cell phone.

Click here for great tracing by Vector Magic

Tags: free tools, online tool, vector, auto tracer, Vector Magic, line drawing, trace, logos, Stanford University

If you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, self-employed, or an artist - you really should have your own domain name.

Having your own domain name says a lot about you. The first thing it says it that you’re willing to invest the $6.99 US* a year in your business.

Yup - that’s how little some domain name registrars charge for registering a domain name.

Along with proclaiming your commitment to your venture, and thus upping your credibility, having your own domain is the cheapest way to promote your business. Every email you send will market YOUR business name - instead of your Internet Service Provider’s. Why spend time building someone else’s brand when you can be building your own?

The third best reason why you should invest in your own domain name is that it will stay with you no matter where you go. That means it doesn’t matter if you move and have to change Internet Service Providers (your ISP, like Rogers or Bell in Canada, or Comcast or Verizon in the US) - it won’t affect your email, so you don’t have to notify anyone or worry about losing important contacts.

The fourth reason is that it’s better for search engine optimization. If your name is in your domain, it’s a much stronger match.

Want to look professional and show people you are in business and not so cheap that you won’t fork out the $6.95 on your own domain name? Then get yourself a real email address and start building your brand.

Here are 3 popular and cheap domain name registrars:

• Go Daddy - $6.95/yr.

• Netfirms - $5.99/yr.

• 1and1.com $6.99/yr. Free if you buy a hosting package with them ($3.99 a month but they don’t have one-click installs of Wordpress.)

Want to buy a .ca address cheap? This is tougher - some prices are still way out there. But you can try here.

• 10dollar.ca

• Payless Domains

If you want to make sure the company is Canadian, the complete list of registrars is at CIRA

Tip: If you own your domain name but pay a lot more than $6.95 a year, as was common a few years ago, you can try to negotiate a better deal with your domain registration company. They know competition is tough now, so are usually willing to do that versus losing you.

If they won’t budge, you can transfer your domain to a new domain registration company. There’s no reason to pay lots of money anymore.

Also - as was mentioned briefly above, if you know you are going to set up a web site, some web host companies throw in a free domain name if you buy a hosting package with them. Check out some of these web hosting companies.

Next: Why you should host your site on your own domain name.

And coming soon - how to set up your email. For all the people who have bought a domain name - please use it! Nothing makes me go crazy more than people having a URL, but not using the email address that come with it because they can’t figure out how. Such a waste! Sniff.

Tags: domain name, registration, registrar, branding, email, business setting up, small business marketing

This is a great deal from An Hosting, one of the more reliable hosting companies out there.

Thinking it’s time for a site or blog? No more excuses - now is the time to jump in because $4.95 USD is a great price for hosting, and this package is hot. It even has One-Click Installs Of WordPress - the best blogging software out there.

Here’s what you get for $4.95 US a month with their AN Hosting “One Size Fits All” Plan

• 999GB of disk space (up from 250GB)
• 9,999GB of bandwidth (up from 2,500GB)
• Host 999 domains on one account (up from 20 domains)
• Free domain for life!
• Free site move!
• 30 day money-back guarantee
• Free website builder
• 24/7 phone/e-mail support
• Free scripts library
• Only $4.95/mo with no setup fee!

To put this in perspective, let me explain what it means.

Most of the web sites I have built for clients come in under 5 mb, unless they have hefty media sections with a lot of press ready art.

7 years ago, 100 MB was considered a lot of hosting space.

999 GB of storage space is 4 times more than the average computer holds…so that’s a huge amount. I can’t think of how you can use that up unless you actually host 999 blogs on the site.

9,999 GB is a also a huge amount for bandwidth. Bandwidth means how much data is allowed to be downloaded from your web site. It’s a way of measuring your site’s traffic. Some hosting companies put caps on the bandwidth, meaning if your site is super popular, and lots of people are going to your site, hence downloading images, text etc from your site, and you hit the limit, you may have to pay a surcharge.

With shared hosting, this number can be deceptive, but the short answer is the more bandwidth the better. You’d have to be very popular to hit this amount of traffic, so I wouldn’t worry about it. The long answer is that your hosting company may still put a cap on you…but that’s for another post.

Host 999 domains on one account? Wow! Are you a filmmaker with lots of films to promote? Then this package is a great way for you to set up a site or blog for each one of your films. Or how about a blog for everyone in your family. It’s easy to do with one click installs. If you want your own blogging empire, this would be the way to do it.

You only get one domain name free for life with this package, so you will still have to pay for the other domain names every year. But domains start at about $6 USD, so you’ll save at least that much. Some companies are still charging (or rather, ripping people off) $34.95 a year for those people not in the know. Now you know not to pay that much.

You don’t want the web site builder. They build awful sites. Better to put up a Wordpress blog and use that as your web site. If you want it to look less “bloggy,” switch the home page to a static page, and title your blog section as News. I did that here on my writer/director’s site.

All the rest is standard. No one dare charges set-up fees anymore, so that’s nothing special. 24 hour support is another standard practice, though if they actually provide that is another question.

I just sent an email to these guys and it was responded to in under 5 minutes, so that is impressive.

All in all, a very good deal. Sign up before Nov 22, 07, when the price goes back up to 6.95 USD a month.

Tags: web hosting, one-click installs, specials, sale, AN hosting

Get it now before September 1, 2007, as this is a good deal.

The Avid Free DV video-editing software is geared towards students and those just starting out making videos. It is meant to introduce, and then hook people to the Avid interface and software, so that they upgrade and buy the pro video-editing tools which have a lot more functions and power.

It’s got what the new or casual user needs to start with. The Avid Free DV includes basic video and audio editing capabilities, up to two streams of real-time effects and support for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X platforms.
Avid’s professional line of products include the Avid Xpress DV software and Avid Xpress Pro systems. You can compare Avid’s products here.

Avid was the standard video editing software in the industrly until Apple’s Final Cut Pro came on the scene.