June Kinetic Client News

Hi All,

Happy Summer!  Hopefully you all are getting more sun than we are here in Colorado this year :)   Following is your June Newsletter, enjoy!  As always let us know if you have any blogging needs.

Best Regards,

Chris and Kristen

>>Next Blogging Webinar

Monday, June 29th – Two times slots available:  9:00am and 2:00pm Mountain Time (11 & 4 EST) – you will receive email invitations very soon!

>>Cool Free Tools for Use with Your Blog

Embed a PowerPoint Presentation into Your Blog!

Did you know that you could upload and embed a PowerPoint presentation directly into your blog posts?  Yes!  It’s actually quite easy with a slick free tool called Slideshare.net.  Here’s a quick overview:

  1. Go to www.slideshare.net and create a free account
  2. Verify your account and login
  3. Upload your presentation via the “presentation” tab
  4. Once the system converts the file, click on it and find the embed code
  5. Copy the embed code to Notepad (start, programs, accessories) for now
  6. Login to your blog and go to write a new post or page
  7. Create your post or page – you will embed the slide show as the last thing you do
  8. Once you’ve got your page ready for the ppt insertion, click on the HTML tab (see inserting code tutorial below for a more in-depth explanation)
  9. Find the point in the page or post code where you’d like the show to appear and paste the embed code here.
  10. Save/Publish your post or page without going back to the Visual tab (this may strip your embed code as wp is overly protective and doesn’t like some code wrappers).
  11. Go check out your show!

This is a super handy tool and the presentation is of excellent quality.  Enjoy!

Create an online Magazine and Embed to Your Blog!

Similiar to SlideShare, there is another tool called Issuu.com that will turn your magazines, brochures and presentations into an online flip show.  You’ll likely need a pretty good scanner to do this unless you already have your publications in PDF format.  The process is basically the same:

  1. Go to www.issuu.com and create a free account
  2. Verify and login
  3. Upload your PDF file
  4. Once the system recognizes it, find the embed code and follow the same process as above.

Here’s an example of the online version (a real estate marketing brochure):
http://issuu.com/annamenzandjohnappleby/docs/snow_cloud_813

And, here’s the embedded versions of both:
http://kineticknowledge.com/testing-ppt-and-pdf-embeds/

>>Useful Blog Tutorials

Uploading audio or video files

  1. These are the accepted file types for upload: jpg jpeg png gif mp3 mov avi wmv midi mid pdf swf
  2. Login
  3. Go to the edit mode on the blog post you wish to insert your file into
  4. Click on the asterisk next to “Add Media” at top
  5. Click “choose files to upload” or the browser uploader if this button doesn’t work
  6. Find your file on the hard drive and open
  7. Fill in title, description and caption if you want it. (the title will be your active link text
  8. Insert into post
  9. When someone clicks this link it will likely play in a local quicktime player, here’s a test: http://kineticknowledge.com/testing-audio/ (this shows an mp3 link and a player embed described below)
  10. If you want to embed a player directly into your blog post you need an audio/video/podcasting product that will create the code for you and then you will need to follow instructions for inserting code into a blog post.

Here’s some code for a free player I found through Google (used in the above example):

<embed src= “http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_gray.swf” quality=”high” width=”300″ height=”52″ allowScriptAccess=”always” wmode=”transparent”  type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” flashvars= “valid_sample_rate=true&external_url=http://kineticknowledge.com/files/2009/06/piano-blues-1.mp3” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer”> </embed>

All you need to do to use it is change out the URL location of the mp3 file.
http://kineticknowledge.com/files/2009/06/piano-blues-1.mp3 in the above example.

Inserting code snippets into your blog post

  1. Login
  2. Go to edit mode on the post you wish to insert code into
  3. Create your blog post as normal, you will insert code LAST
  4. Once ready, switch over to the HTML tab top right
  5. Find the place in your post where you want the code to show up (it’s ugly but you should be able to tell where you want it)
  6. Paste the code into the editor in HTML mode
  7. Save your post directly from this mode – do not switch back to the visual editor.
  8. If you switch back to visual or save, go out and come back in your code will likely get stripped by the editor.  This is a safety mechanism for your protection but it means you’ll have to redo what you just did.
  9. For this reason it’s not practical to use code snippets on posts or pages that you will be editing often.  If you need to just make sure you have a copy of the whole code in Notepad so you can easily drop it back in!
  10. Be careful!  If you don’t know what a code is, don’t just drop it in willy nilly – it could mess up your whole blog.  If you are unsure, please send it to us for testing.

>>Extras

Some Good stuff in here if you missed them….

Reminders…

Your blog’s design is very important! Visitors have tiny attention spans and blogs are very text-based so the traditional look and feel can at times be less sticky. Our new blog site designs have reduced bounce rates [ours by 70%] and increased visitor page views [ours by 300%] for quite a few clients. For one client’s take see: http://kineticknowledge.com/blog/kinetic-blogs/top-edmonton-ab-business-forgoes-website-for-all-encompassing-blog/

And then don’t forget about other useful services we offer such as: