As long as you have a web cam, you don’t need any special equipment.

This short video will walk you through everything you need.  Send me your webcam videos – PG only please  : )

Jim

Jim

I found this by accident (can’t even remember how) on the internet.  It’s a product by a company called “The Web Around”.  You can see their website at http://www.thewebaround.com

Very simple to use.  Cost was just right ($29), but shipping killed me ($11).  Maybe when they get their product in stores it will be a viable option for all those of us that have dirty offices/homes.

Jim

I’m pretty good at photo editing, and using Photoshop, I can reduce the resolution of the image (note – computer monitors can only show less then 92 dots per inch, and camera’s take well over 300 dots per inch). The problem with Photoshop, or other applications, is it’s not quick and easy.

I’m on the lookout for something easy – and I found it AND IT”S FREE!!!!

The application is Shrink Pic, and you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE

I’ve created a video to show how easy this program is – it monitors your email application, so anytime you send a jpg picture, it shrinks it.

I set my settings to “NOT” run at startup, so it doesn’t shrink images automatically. When I want to use it, I just start the program, and then send my images.

Watch the video to see how easy it is (Available only for Windows).

I paid $1000 for my system (AllCapture) four years ago. While it has some features I really like (like being able to cut elements), this one has new features I’ve always wanted, like webcam in video, record audio with video, or separately, etc… If you’ve ever had to walk a client through anything on the computer (even if it’s filling out your order form on your website), this free online system is a no brainer.

Jim

This probably sounds way too techy for the average person (or too expensive), but it isn’t anymore.  Adobe Flash, combined with Open Source projects, is changing the business landscape when it comes to collaboration technologies.

Here are two products that I use quite often that has made me look impressive to many customers.  Their purpose is to collaborate online, but I use them to get things done fast without traveling to meet in person.

DimDim (www.dimdim.com) – Webinar online meeting place

This is the free cousin of Webex and GoToMeeting.  Free  is correct.  You can host up to 20 people at a time, and you can have as many meetings as you want.  Use your own teleconferencing service, or they provide one for free.  Share your screen, power point presentations, PDF files, use a whiteboard, and best of all – record what’s happening in full vidoe.  Many of the recorded webinars you see on my site are recorded through DimDim.  Sometimes I’ll host a meeting that I’m the only participant of, just so I can record the presentation.

Have more then 20 people?  This is still a cost effective solution.  For only $20 per month, you can host as many meetings as you want with up to 50 attendees.  The reason I like this product is that there are no other free solutions that let you host up to 20 people. (note – looks like times are tough because it used to be $8.50 per month for up to 100 attendees.  Oh well, still a good deal)

One of the things DimDim is missing is passing control of your screen to someone else, or taking control of another’s screen.

Acrobat Online (www.acrobat.com) Resource Sharing and Collaboration
This is similar to DimDim, but the focus is on sharing resources – from files to your screen.  Very simple to use (even simpler than DimDim).  The Screen Sharing feature allows you to pass control, and take control of the computer screens.  I use this a lot when helping clients with simple problems (like using applications, training, etc…).

This is a free service too (or I wouldn’t be recommending it), but it’s only free for up to three participants.  Not much of a meeting there huh.  That’s why I only use this to either post files online and share them with colleagues, or more importantly, to share my screen with another person – or view their screen to help them with problems.
Both of these applications work well on PC and Mac – which has become a requirement for me lately now that Macs are more affordable and increasing in popularity.  They both also work with various browsers (like Firefox).

Hope this helps.

Jim

1. could write posts
2. had member profile page
3. could create private pages
4. be identified in the “list of members”

It took me a good month to find all the right plugins for wordpress to make it humm just like I wanted it to.  I was so confident in the setup, I offered to create a site for a friend of mine for her group.  Oh how the cocky fall hard!

Two days after my offer, she writes me a note saying, “Don’t worry Jim, I have it all figured out.”  Now I know she couldn’t pull the WordPress stuff together that quickly!  She also wrote in her note, “Check out Ning.com”

There you go.  This company Ning is to Social Networking what WordPress is to Blogs/Websites (almost).  Now they do have advertising on the site, and you have to live with the “ning” branding, but then 99% of all social networking sites have ads on them, so I don’t think that matters.  In fact, for $29 per month, you can take control of the ads (or get rid of them).

So let’s do a cost benefit analysis.  It took me a month to figure out how to tweak WordPress (let’s say 20 hours), and maintaining it is about an hour a month.  Even if I only value my time around $20 an hour, that’s $400 to setup, and $240 for maintenance.

Ning - 15 minutes to setup, and maintenance is seemless.  Even if I paid to remove the ads, we’re talking $360 per year.  While it’s a little cheaper for Wordpress, there are 1000 more features on Ning that I could Never code!

As for my opinion on the ads – who cares, leave them.  What about the domain name?  Who cares again.  For instance, look at the following:

Company A has a website:
www.companya.com

Their Blog is at
www.blog.companya.com

Their Social Network/Member site would be
www.companya.ning.com

Ning, Blog, blah blah blah – people aren’t so worried abou that stuff anymore.  I definitely dont’ think you should have ads on your website, but the rules on a social network site are much more relaxed.

Go find your passion, get your members, and go ning!

Why would this be necessary?  What I’ve found is that even though it’s extremely easy to create a WordPress site, there are some intrinsic problems that every techno-phobe faces.

First, the mere installation process, no matter how simple, is enough to cause paralysis.  The second is the pressure of maintaining (and updating) an entire site by oneself.  And finally, adding advanced features, like podcasting, is too daunting for many.

I thought WordPress could be reduced to the extreme basics for the members, and they can all contribute to the site, and leverage off it’s success.  I describe how I did this, and the features I included in this post.

Let’s start with the intentions of my effort, and then I’ll proceed to describe how I completed the project (including the pitfalls I faced) all with the free, opensource application WordPress.  If you’re modestly technical, you can probably replicate what I’ve created.

The site is for a speaking association.  Most of the members of this group are starting their own business, but don’t have the resources to run their own web page.  For those of us who understand technology and blogging, that might sound ridiculous.  Unfortunately, the reality is that even the smallest hurdle is enough to prevent many from having a web presence.

I have my own site (which your at right now), and I even have a difficult time committing to maintaining it.  I haven’t updated my podcast in over a month, and sometimes I’m moving so fast, I don’t have time to write a new post.  By creating this member site, all the members could contribute to the posts – and since the subject is professional speaking, they could all leverage off each others articles.  If each member writes one post every two months, there would be on average a new post each day.

I wanted this to be different from a news site in that I didn’t want the necessity of an editor that was responsible for the content (even though the admin does have final approval to weed out profanity and such).  I also wanted the site to provide a special page for each member.  They could then use that page as their primary web presence.  What makes this different then a Yahoo Groups or wordpress.com account is that all the members have something in common – the speaking association.  There are 40 Chapters in my association, and I wanted each Chapter to have the ability to manage their own Page to promote their efforts, and to create additional pages if they needed.

The site needed to be easy to use for the members.  I worked on the presumption that a member could type an email, and that was about it.  WordPress has a fairly simple user interface as it is, but it still has way too many options for some folks.   Finally, I also wanted to provide special pages that only members could see – like help pages – but I didn’t want the general public to see those pages.

Here’s how I did it (and I’m very happy with the results).  We’ll forgoe the Theme choice, because as far as that goes, it was mainly tied to visual preference.  I did have to find a Theme that supported dynamic sidebars though.  If you want to see the site before you go on, it’s www.nsaprotrack.com

Start with the registration.  I made sure a registration link was on the front page (sidebar).  I didn’t want to have to explain to the users that they had to go to a special place (domain.com/wp-admin) to log in.  Instead, I just used the plugin Sidebar Login.  Nothing fancy, just a simple login on the sidebar that keeps the members focussed on the site.  It even has the little registration link, and “forgot password” too.

I set new users as “subscribers”.  This allowed me a delay where I could set up their personal page, and send them an email on how to update it.  I used the plugin WP User Manager to add extra fields.  I wanted to collect three extra pieces of information during the registration process.  This pluggin allowed me to identify what fields needed to collected during registration, and I was even able to create a drop down list to direct their inputs.

After the member subscribed, I changed their role to “Author”.  I used the plugin Role Manager to modify the permissions of the Author role.  This took alot of time of trial and error, because I didn’t find any good documentation on exactly how each role affected things.  Here are the permissions my Author now has:

• Hide Dashboard (see below)
• Read
• Read Private Pages
• Upload Files
• Edit Posts
• Read Private Posts

These permissions allow the member to write posts, but they can’t edit something that’s been published.  They can save their work in unpublished mode, and continue to re-login to edit the post.  Once their finished, they have an option to “Submit for Review”, at which point, an admin would have to publish it.  The member can only edit unpublished posts that they are the author of.  If they want to change a post, they’d have to ask an admin to “unpublish” that post, and then they can edit it.  The Hide Dashboard permission is tied to the IWG Hide Dashboard plugin.  This plugin removes the dashboard from whoever is assigned the permission to “Hide Dashboard”.  I thought the dashboard was too confusing for my members to deal with, so I just got rid of it for them.  The one hangup I had was that you have to manually create a new capability called “Hide Dashboard” for this pluggin to show it in the Roles section.

Here’s where I started doing some tricky stuff.  I needed a page for each member, but didn’t want to have to give the member the ability to manage pages.  I thought about just using the bio that the user creates in their profile, but that was way too limiting – I wanted the page to be theirs to play with.  Here’s how I solved it:  when a member joins, I create a post on their behalf, and assign it to a category I created called “Member Profile”.  I leave it unpublished, so when they log in  (with their new role “Author”), they can edit this post.  I then used the plugin Advanced Category Excluder, and excluded the category “Member Profile” from Home, RSS Posts, RSS Comments.  Be excluding it from Home, the member profile posts don’t show up in the normal blog posts.  They, in a sense, become a third class page, separate from posts and pages.

I then had to figure out how to include a link to these pages in the site menu though.  I did this by using the sidebar list categories function to create my menus.  So I had a menu for the categories that werne’t member profiles, and then created a menu for the “Member Profile” category.  Here’s the code (I had to know the category ID for Member profiles to do this):

php wp_list_pages(’title_li=<h2>Site Menu</h2>&meta_key=display&metavalue=pages’) (I’ll explain this line later)
php wp_list_categories(’orderby=name&title_li=<h2>Posts by Category</h2>&exclude=4′)
php wp_list_categories(’orderby=name&title_li=<h2>Pro Track Speakers</h2>&include=4′
php wp_list_pages(’title_li=<h2>ProTrack Classes</h2>&meta_key=display&metavalue=protrack’) (I’ll explain this line later)

Notice that the value 4 is the id of the category “Member Profiles”.  That took me along time to figure out.  I was going to use a page for each member, but then I’d have to explain to the members the difference between a post and a page.  I felt like that alone was enough to just make the member profiles posts.  So the special menu item for “Pro Track Speakers” above basically is a special posts page of all posts in the category of “Member Profiles”.  The one thing I didn’t like is that the posts are organized by the date they were created, not name of the post (which is the name of the member).  Oh well, not too much of a big deal.

The next thing I added was the ability to see the member profile – the small bit of information they type about themselves.  I used the plugin Autor Exposed (and that’s the way it’s spelled).  This provides a link to the author’s name at the end of every post that pops up the author’s profile information when clicked.  I had a heck of a time getting this to work, and had to add the following code to the header.php before the </head> tag:

function toggleDiv(divid){
if(document.getElementById(divid).style.display == ‘none’){
document.getElementById(divid).style.display = ‘block’;
}else{
document.getElementById(divid).style.display = ‘none’;
}
}

Supposedly the Autor Exposed plugin was supposed to work wihout this, but I kept geting java errors.  Adding this code didn’t make the authors profile Pop Up, but instead expanded an area that shows the author’s profile.  Good enough, and met my requirements.

Controlling the Pages:  For pages, I wanted four types.

1. Pages that would show up in the menu.  There would be a small set, specifically, Home, Posts, and List of Members
2. Pages that would show up in a second menu that are dedicated to the Chapter Pages
3. Pages that were available as sub pages for the various chapters of our organization.  These wouldn’t be in the menu, but could be accessed by anyone on the web.  I’d expect the Chapters to create links within their pages to these sub pages.
4. Pages that were for members only – or Private Pages – but still showed up in some type of menu.

I controlled the first and second set by assigning a custom field (feature of WordPress) with a key of “display”, and a value of “pages” for the first group, and “protrack” for the second.  So when the code in the sidebar is executed, only those pages with that key are shown.  The two separate menus were created with this code:

php wp_list_pages(’title_li=<h2>Site Menu</h2>&meta_key=display&metavalue=pages‘)
php wp_list_pages(’title_li=<h2>ProTrack Classes</h2>&meta_key=display&metavalue=protrack‘)

.

The third set was easy to control – I just didn’t assign the meta key to them, and they don’t show up in the menu!

The final set was a little tricky for me.  WordPress by default excludes private pages from menus.  I found this code which shows the menu of private pages for a specific role type.  One limiting factor about this code is that you can only name one type of role (or so I think) in this code.  It was a bummer because I had three roles (admin, author, and contributor).  The contributor role is used for the chapter representatives, and they have the extra privelages to be able to create pages and submit for review.  It just dawned on me as I was writing this post that if I add a second call to the function, I can add the second role.  I tried a third call for admin, but that didn’t seem to work.  No biggy, these two worked great  – a menu of private pages for members only!

<?php echo private_menu(’page’, ‘author’); ?>
<?php echo private_menu(’page’, ‘contributor’); ?>

.

Almost there.  I mentioned earlier that one of the pages I wanted was a list of members.  How do you do this!  I had to use the pluggin Exec-PHP.  This plugin lets you execute PHP code in a page.  Before you can use it though, you have to modify the user settings of the account you’re loggin in as and turn off the visual editor.  Once I did this, I created a page called “List of Members, assigned the custom field with a key of “display” and a value of “pages”, and put this code in it:

php wp_list_authors(”hide_empty=0&show_fullname=1&optioncount=0&exclude_admin=1″)

.

You can reference the documentation on the wordpress.org site on this function, but basically it lists the members.  Any members that have a post that they authored is clickable.  When clicked, you go to a  page of all their posts (including their member profile).  Wallah.

Last thing – Podpress

Podpress – UUUUGGGGGHHHHH….. If you’ve used podpress on your site, you probably love it as much as I do.  I use Firefox, and have no issues.  I found out that IE 6 has a bug in it that doesn’t like PodPress.  Specifically, when you upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 or higher and install PodPress, the site crashes when you try and edit a post.  It even crashes with Firefox, but loading the plugin No Revisions stops Firefox from crashing.  THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IE6 FROM CRASHING!!!!!  I tried everything, and researched it to no end.  My only solution (and it works great) was to start all over from scratch, and install WordPress 5.2 2.5, then do all the stuff I noted above all over again.  You just can’t downgrade wordpress.  Too many database things going on.  I tried – it killed my site.  I was able to import my posts pretty well, but had to deal with re-establishing all the user accounts (20 of them).  If I would have started out with WordPress 5.2 2.5, I would have been fine.

The site works great.  Although it sounds like a bear to setup, once I was done, it’s relatively easy to maintain.  I found another member that shares admin roles with me.  Unfortunately, when a member submits a post for review, we’re not notified, so we have to check it daily.

Now members can create their own posts, create thier own podcasts, and have a custom page for themself.  They only need to know how to edit posts to use the system.  Perfect member focussed site!

But wait, there’s more – the Pièce de résistance

I registered the domain name, nsaprotrack.com, with google apps, and use google to manage the MX servers (or mail exchange servers).  This is a free service.  All members have the option of getting a custom email, for example, jcarrillo@nsaprotrack.com.  It can be set up as a simple forwarder, or a full fledged 7gig online storage email account.  Members can littearlly use this site as their entire professional web presense without spending a dime.

OK, I’m done (whewwww).  Hope you find something in this post interesting.  To be honest – I really wrote this post for myself …. internal documentaiton.  Hasta.

Stay away from the design templates!  Most of the templates are way too graphic intensive, and while they look impressive on your computer screen, they can be distracting to audiences.  The simplest presentation can actually put the attention on your content, not your PowerPoint skills.

To see some great examples of how others implement Less to create More, take a look at Prezi. This company has created an alternate to PowerPoint that will blow your mind with the  simple-ness. CommonCraft has made a complete business by eliminating the bells and whistles from their presentations.  Don’t be tempted by your applications special features. Spinning text never sold anything!

YUCK!

I found a better way!, and it’s easy and free (two of my favorite words).

.
A company called “MySignUp.com” created an online signup form system that works like a charm.  Not too many bells and whistles to confuse things, but just a simple clickity click sign up form.

Take a look at www.mysignup.com.

I also recorded a 15 minute training video on exactly how to use it if your interested (just press the play button).

UPDATE – As noted in one of the comments below, I completely blew the section about the URL (it was off screen).  All I was talking about is the shaded area in the image below – use that URL (the one you create).  I made the mistake of looking at the browsers address bar and copying the url once I went to the signup page (which is a much more complicated URL).  Just use the URL you create in the shaded area of the picture below, and you’ll be fine.  Click the picture to make it larger.

jim