Joe Hackman

Joe Hackman

Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0, Tesla, maker, and more...

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Howto create your own url shortening service (Video)

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Earlier this week you might have read my post about why it might be time to create your own URL shortener. Today I am responding to several reader comments and providing a detailed video on how to do it. If you are looking to create your own URL shortening service you may want to watch both of the videos in this post, this video is simply a test drive of the URL shortening service interface. I suggest you watch this one and decide if it is worth the trouble, or if you’re already convinced just skip it and view the second video below.

If the service passed muster and has the features you need, you will want to make sure you meet some pre-requisite items:

  1. Hosting account somewhere that supports MySQL databases and PHP (almost every host does).
  2. Domain name (the shorter the better, in this case I use 0b0.us)
  3. FTP Client (I would recommend Filezilla to Windows users)
  4. Will power to carefully watch the video below and potentially adapt the procedures to your own hosting companies MySQL setup.

Now that you’ve covered the checklist and without further ado, the goods:

I would love to hear if you completed this process yourself, let me know how it worked out. If you still need help feel free to post your questions in the comments below.
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Uses of the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress (Video)

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Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.

Powerpoint Tip Slideshow in a Window (Video)

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Ever try to record a screencast of a Powerpoint presentation? If you have you may have noticed like I did that you cannot easily run the presentation slideshow within a window small enough for a practical screencast. After doing some research I discovered that there are some not so well documented features for Powerpoint 2007/2010 that will allow you to run your presentation in a window. This would be particularly useful if you were doing some kind of mashup.

Getting the most from Blogtalkradio.com as a listener

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It seems like it should be simple, but there are a couple things that you should do if you plan to listen to a podcast on Blogtalkradio.com in advance of the episode you plan to listen to. It is really important to register in advance so you can easily participate in the chat channel that exists for most Blogtalkradio programs. I personally use this chat extensively for audience interaction and questions for my guests.

Sign up for an account

Before you navigate to Blogtalkradio.com to create your account login to Facebook if you have an account there. It will definitely save you time because you can “Connect with Facebook” option instead of the full blown manual account creation. Once you are at Blogtalkradio.com choose the Create Account option in the upper right hand corner of the landing page. That will bring up the registration page where you can use Facebook to connect or manually add the information. If the Facebook option doesn’t work or if you don’t have a Facebook account, just go ahead and fill out the information in the sign up form. You will need to confirm manual setup via Email, the system will send you a message to your Email address from service@blogtalkradio.com to the Email address you provided. Once confirmed you can login and complete your profile.

Using the chat, favorite programs, adding friends

Once you are authenticated to the system you can access the podcast(s) you want to and participate in the chat. While logged in you also have the benefit of favoriting shows, becoming friends with other users and even setting up your own free podcast. If you’d like to connect with me at Blogtalkradio visit my show’s page.

No Internet Access during the episode? No Problem.

Every episode has a dial in number that you can call. Just keep in mind the free accounts have a limit of 5 callers so you may have issues getting through. My program is upgraded and allows up to 50 callers so if you get a busy signal the first time you might want to keep trying.