I’ve managed to embed a YouTube video into my WordPress website at newmotorcyclerider.com (site discontinued). Well, let’s see if it works here, where WordPress.com is doing the hosting. Hmm. I just did a preview. Maybe it will work.
For those that want to watch the video, it starts off very slowly. I’ll correct that with the next one. And for some reason, YouTube’s stabilization process made my video more stable, but my titles more shaky. Sheesh. Much to learn.
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I recently bought a Sony Cybershot DSC-H400 (external link) to replace my broken Nikon. I’m happy with it to a point. The telephoto is outstanding, memory storage fantastic with a 64 gig card, and the battery life is excellent. But the video files it generates are unfamiliar to me.
Instead of the web-friendly and widely distributed MP4 format, Sony uses their own file type, something called AVCHD™. It was created to make Blu-ray Discs™ and, I suspect, avoid paying any licensing or royalty fees to Apple. (Although see this external link.) In any case, the files are difficult to work with and when finally processed, using every trick I know, exhibit video that is choppy and clunky. Sigh.
I bought the new camera primarily for still photos and it does that quite well. I think now, however, that it may be best to buy a dedicated camera just for video. Making a camera handle both still and motion is perhaps too much to ask. If I do get a special video camera I will make sure it is MP4 compatible. Let me know if you have a favorite camera for video.
Halt! My mistake. Completely on my own, I have discovered that the Sony is also storing my files in MP4. Great news but you have to look around in your file directory. When you connect your camera, in my case to a Mac, three icons appear on your screen. One is labeled Untitled. If you root around in there you will find movies in MP4. Take a look at the screen shot below. Perhaps when I first exported the files from the camera it delivered them in its native format. Now I know how to get around that. Much to learn.
It’s agreed that statistics can be useful, perhaps invaluable to a website’s success, but I find they raise more questions than they settle. And are their statistics and keyword search results really valid to begin with?
According to Yahoo, 32% of the traffic to californiarockhound.com is from Semalt, a shadowy group thought to be Ukrainian spammers. Great. At railroadsounds.net, Google Analytics says that 29.4% of my traffic comes from people using Brazilian Portuguese as their language. Really? At newmotorcyclerider.com, 29.4% of my traffic is Brazilian. Of course, it is all a fraud. The average time these ‘people’ spend at either site in every session is exactly zero seconds. More likely this is all robot generated traffic, sent out to every website, for reasons only these web crawler companies know. I am now trying to find specific IP addresses for these groups so I can use Analytics’ filters to block them. But finding this information at Google Analytics is very difficult, indeed, I find Analytics so hard to use that I am discouraged from using it. Speaking of Google, have you used their Webmaster Tools?
Google’s Webmaster Tools is an adjunct to Google Analytics. You go there for more and different information than Analytics. I’ve registered three of my sites with this property, and I continue to mull it over with worry and wonder. Like, what does it all mean? For example, Tools says the second most used search term for people coming to my site is “hobbess.” I can’t remember ever using that word, whatever it means, and I can’t imagine Google providing a link to my site because of it. Yet there it is. On a more practical note, there are discussions worth having, something that keyword search results can foster.
Question. If the most popular search term used to find my plant site is “Colorado Blue Spruce,” should I be forever penning articles on our spiky mountain friend? Based on keyword results alone? I just did a Google search for Colorado Blue Spruce, and my site does not come up within the first four pages. My site is there, somewhere at Google, but obviously buried deep. And with thousands of sites mentioning blue spruces, I can see no profit doing more writing on the subject, especially since I don’t know why the Blue Spruce traffic was generated to begin with. Hmm. It is perhaps not enough to have the data, but to be able to interpret it correctly. I continue to work at that.
