This post is for folks who **have** a website [not a blog] up and going, and want to do some minor text changes or perhaps even go further and add pages etc. If you want a more comprehensive tutorial that starts before you have the website, check out the Hart Collective’s online walk-through for setting up your online presence, from the workshop Sarah Jenny and I have taught across the country!

Basically, you’ll update your site one of two ways – you’ll either download/buy a software that you use on your computer to edit the web pages and then upload the pages to your server, or you’ll use the editor on the server where you host your files.

First Steps: Know everything you want to go into this update

• Gather all the new photos, videos, pics of press, etc. you want on your site. Are they web-resolution?
• Gather into one document the new text, blurbs, links and press clips you want on your site.

Now let’s talk about how to update existing web pages on your site:

Basically, you just have to access your website, launch your HTML editor, place your content and then get the updated pages online! Trust, it is not too hard.

Login and passwords, wow fun.

Collect all the login info you got from your host [the service who puts your website online]. You’ll need all of it; they surely sent you a long ass email at some point that you probably forwarded to the person who set up your server/site and forgot about. Find it. You’re looking for your username, password, FTP login info.

Computer-based editing for a website:

#1. Get a web design program. You can buy/borrow Dreamweaver, or if you want to stay free, try downloading Kompozer – web coding for Mac or PC, which I think is the best of the free web progams – but one or the other of the ones listed may be more comfortable for you to use.

#2. Utilize the Tutorials. I cannot stress enough that there are a MILLION good tutorials out there, by web geeks like myself and the makers of the programs. Take two hours and you will amaze yourself, AND save yourself headaches and wasted time down the road.

#3. Get files off your server via FTP, make a backup copy, and open the file in your editing program. Edit [see: tutorials] and be proud of yourself.

Server-based editing for a website

This is not a good place to do a site redesign, but text edits and photo adds/swaps will be easy here.

#1. Login to your server, and navigate to where the pages are. Each server is going to be different, but they all offer a simple WYSIWYG editor that will make text updates to your web page easy and fast.

#2. Open the page you want to edit and change the text you want.

#3. **Save** your work, and the page will automatically overwrite the old version with your edits.

Get Those files online!

Dreamweaver/KompoZer give you the option to input all the login info you have, in order to to use the editing software as your FTP as well, so you can pull files from the web, update them, and put them back online. As long as you are careful and make backup copies, this is pretty streamlined.

If you find setting up the FTP as part of your editing software confusing or just dont like it, you can download separate FTP software. Cyberduck is good and free for Mac, Filezilla is good and free for PC.

Either way, when you take files from your computer and send them to the server where your site is hosted, you will overwrite the old file and the updated one will appear online. Sometimes this takes a few hours to appear, sometimes it happens instantly.

Notes To Make This Whole Process Easier

BACKUPS: What is super important and what I cannot stress enough is this: make a copy of any page you work on before you make any changes. just in case. 99% you will not need this backup copy, but for the one time you do, you’ll be REALLY glad you have it.

SAVE: Also, save your work a lot. Free programs tend to crash more often than non-free. Notice a theme here?

TRACK YR FILE ORGANIZATION: This is boring and annoying, but it’s basically operation-critical. When things don’t link or don’t load, check the name you typed into the HTML, and double-check the path, eg, the <a href=”/xxx/freesound.iua.upf.edu/picture.jpg“> part of the link. this is what tells the browser where to look for a file, and if it is missing enough “/” [which tell the browser to go up a directory or folder], the browser will get lost on the way. It gets technical and you can google research “paths” but sometimes you just need to add a “/” at the beginning or end to send the browser far enough to find the file.

Links

There are a lot of links to programs and self-teaching tool on my DIY page and on the Hart Collective’s DIY page.

I love print design, and I’ve been at it for years; first my making zines in the 90′s and next by making newspapers, magazines and promotional media over the last ten years. So it makes sense that people ask me for tips and recommendations regularly.

Some examples are this page from Femme2010 program, and my print portfolio.

Collected in this post are some freeware/shareware programs that might be right for your print project, and a few tips I tell people when they ask about layout.

Learning page layout software is awesome and so satisfying — but time-consuming, just an fyi.

If you’re just making one book I don’t know if its worth it to learn ALL of any program, but you might find you love the process and thus learning a non-try-only version would be advantageous because then you could use it again.

FREE

Free/cheap layout software is one avenue in which the world of freeware is less prolific than in, say, freeware for web design.

Scribus appears to be the best of the free, as it is from 2010 and Mac/PC/Linux compatible – but I haven’t used it so I can’t say more than to read the reviews/manual and see if you think learning it is more time effective than plowing through using Word.

This article has a lot of free print-creation software listed; remember that you might want to edit the photos before you put them in, or you might need to try a few different programs before you find one you “get” the best.

FREE TO TRY

Lots of programs are “free to try,” and often this means you get temporary access to higher-caliber programs — but I’d be careful and test them by exporting one page of my book before laying out the whole thing to make sure that you don’t have to buy the software to export your final product as a PDF.

Here’s a decent, recent list of free-to-try programs; this one, Rag Time Solo, seems to have some recommendations behind it.

Adobe’s InDesign is what I’ve used and loved for almost a decade [!], it is free for 30 days,  you will be able to export your finished file in it, AND there are good tutorials online so you don’t feel overwhelmed. Its a technically heavy program but you dont have to use all the elements.If  you are familiar with Photoshop, the “layers” feature in InDesign is similar and can give you those lovely effects of images behind text etc. Drawbacks? After 30 days you can’t make any more changes without paying the big $$…plus pirating Adobe is getting harder and harder.

DESIGN TIPS

1. No matter how you lay it out, please do your sanity the favor of paying attention to giving yourself at least 1/2-inch margins all the way around the page so printing/copying doesn’t cut off any text. That would suck, right?

2. I recommend exporting final files as PDFs — especially if you’ll be printing from a computer that was NOT the one you designed on, to help avoid opening your project on another computer only to find out that it doesn’t have the special beautiful font you chose and your project looks wonky. Sometimes this happens with your PDF anyway, especially if you’re going through a “real” print service. If you pick a special font it can be advantageous to keep a copy of the fonts in the folder where your document is, just in case. But making PDFs is a good idea for your archiving purposes anyway.

Part of my favorite media strategy has always been postcards. I love them: I let them collect in my purses to remind me of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, and I think they’re a really effective strategy to let people know about your art, your project or your business. Below the cut I’m pleased to display four of my newest postcards, but first lets talk a bit about production and printing. I have some links to cheap printers and tips to make your cards look great!

Designing a postcard:

You need good images. Get a photographer friend and dress up, like we did for the Animal Print photo shoot. Or source something copyright-free or copyleft and shareable from Wikipedia Commons or the Library of Congress Digital Collections or NYPL archives. Or get your digital camera out and take a picture of someTHING in this beautiful world. And credit your source!

Once you have your image in your computer, make sure it’s set to print resolution and not web resolution! 300dpi! This is critical so you don’t get that weird little-crystal effect when you print. To design, you can use photoshop or indesign, or GIMP [free!]. The most important part when you’re laying out your postcard is a little something called margins and bleed.

Next, before you perfect your postcard, know your print specs. How big is your image going to be? 3.75×5.5 is far off from 4.25×6, when it comes to font size and layout. This means sourcing your printer ahead of time. Will your image bleed off the edge or have a border? Make sure that text is not too close to the margins, and remember that the way things look on your screen often don’t exactly translate to the way they look when printed, so beware of color values that are too close to one another side-by-side.

Printing. I like using overnightprints.com because there are a lot of good discount codes out there for them, and they usually get your order to you in about a week. I just ordered 500 full-color one-sided cards for $20+shipping. Sweet. However, walking into your local independent printer cannot be beat in terms of putting a face to your process, and in my experience, chain-print-place employees are often really rad and discount-y after the managers leave at 5pm.

Here are my most recent products, if you’re curious. And they got here just in time to take to the USSF!

Postcard for performace + creative arts

This is from photo's I got from many of the performers and presenters from the upcoming Femme2010 conference!

This illustration is by Cristy Road

INFORMATION

About Image Size for Printing:

The internet is great because it gives us access to all kinds of images of ourselves and others, but tragically for the print-minded among us, most of the images found on the internet [like most of what's on Facebook, or the small images on Flickr] are NOT suitable for printing. These web-optimized images have been scaled down to contain only 72 “Dots” [also called pixels] of color information Per Inch [eg. "dpi", also called "resolution"]. Thats perfect for a computer monitor, but for a medium or big pic in a magazine, flyer, brochure, etc, really for any print instance, we need to get images that are 300 dpi or greater — 4 times more dense with color information as web-optimized images! — to look good to our eye when printed on paper, and not blurry and “pixelated”, like when you see something looking all choppy with the little squares in it.

What does that mean and how do you know?

If you  have an image file that you want to use for print, but aren’t sure if it’s dpi is correct, open that file in your image editing software [try PC: Paintbrush; Mac: Preview, iPhoto; PC/Mac: Photoshop, GIMP]  and look at the image size information, however your program gives you that info*. It will tell you how many actual dots of image data [pixels] are in your image, what the current setting on the image is, and how big that is in inches. You can do some simple math to see how big it would be on a computer versus printed, by dividing the number of pixels by the output method [web or printing].

An example:
A camera phone may take a 600 wide x450 tall pixel picture, which you then copy onto and then open on your computer. *In the program you open it in, there will be a drop-down menu called ‘Tools’ or ‘Edit’. Pick that, and then “Get Info” or “Image Size” and a window will open, telling you lots of info, including that the image is 600×450.

In print terms, that picture is 2in. x 1.5in [600/300 dpi for print=2in; 450/300=1.5in]. Small for a magazine or postcard, probably ok for a brochure. For reference, an image that is 750×600 is about the ‘print size’ of a playing card.

That same picture is in web terms sizes out to be 8.3×6.25 [600/72 dpi for web=8.3; 450/72=6.25, or big enough for a computer screen!].

For printing, we need images that are 300 pixels per inch, cuz that’s what printers print at. For your postcard and magazine needs, try to find/take/get images that are at LEAST 1200×900 or bigger [4x3 inches]. A full page image needs to be 2850×3600 pixels [9.5x12]. A brochure image should be NO smaller than 450×450 [1.5 inches square]. We want to see your brilliant face!

Resizing:

Please DONT “Resize” or “Upsample” options to resize an image from smaller to larger!!!!! That’s how you can guarantee your pic will come out with all the weird little squares when printed.

You can’t just use the “Resample” or “Resize” tool for print purposes, because doing so asks the computer program to make guesses [using math!] to fill in the missing image data from all the pixels that aren’t there, and that’s when you get images that print looking  what is called “pixelated”, because you can see the individual edges of pixels. That’s BAD]. That’s why you want large original images to work from.

You can “downsample,” that is, go DOWN in size, because your computer is not missing any image data information, it’s only cutting out the extra. That’s ok. But if someone is asking you for an image for printing, just send them the biggest thing you have. They will  downsize as needed.

Oranization

When you send someone who runs a magazine or a conference called, say, Lick The Moist Cherry, a picture or bio, you might be tempted on your computer, to name your picture or bio “Lick The Moist Cherry” — so that you know what it’s for — and email it away. Not only is that awkward, at least 30 other people are naming their images and bios the same thing and sending it to that organizer, who now has 30 Lick The Moist Cherrys, and no time for her own cherry because she has to rename everything that gets sent her.

Do these nice people a favor. Save the image or document as your name, or the name of your troupe, or your presentation title. It will save someone a headache, I promise.

**a note about file extensions. Unless you are a “computer” person, don’t change a .jpg to a .gif or a .doc to a .txt willynilly. Leave it be and it will be better than if you get all cray. Also don’t delete the extension accidentally, they help the other person’s computer know what it’s looking at. If you are a graphics person, you know that .tif or .pdf are preferred delivery formats for print.

Example:

• picture: DamienLuxe_LTMC.jpg [I've used an underscore - _ - because it helps Macs and PCs read the filename easier than if you leave spaces]
• bio: DamienLuxe_bioLTMC.txt – [I also anally appended the acronym of the event this bio is for, so I know from my computer what I sent it to.]

CLEAR, DIRECT INSTRUCTIONS

- get your pic onto a computer

- look at the size

- make sure it’s ‘big’ enough for your purposes

- save it with an obvious name [your name_event.xxx]

- email it with an obvious subject line in the email

- sit back satisfied, knowing you did your best

RESOURCES

What do you do when you aren’t the web design mastermind behind your site/blog, you find yourself needing to update it, and your friend who made it for you is MIA or really busy? Read below to see what choices are available to you as you go along. Most importantly, you need to get EITHER the domain or access to the webfiles, the latter of which are the real goal.

Option 1: ACCESS YOUR FILES/GET THE BLOG LOGIN and update the content yourself [or get someone else to do it]

Whether you can get to your domain name or not [see next], it’s the web files or blog pages or CMS [content management system] that you need to actually access in order to update what appears on people’s browser screens when they look at your site.

Either the files are on your server that you pay for, or on the designers’ server, or on the server of a third internet party like a blog host. You need to get access to the server they’re on to update them.

If you can get ahold of the designer you can ask for copies of the files for your site or a server login – or double check if they gave you FTP, server, blog login or copies of the files from the get-go**  Don’t dally once you get this info — just go ahead and log onto the server to get access to your files. If it’s an FTP server, use Cyberduck or another free software to help you navigate. If you get to log onto their server to get these files please be very, very careful and don’t delete anything. Some designers will prefer to send you a copy of your files instead of giving you access to their server.

If you have a blog you can get copies of the files but they are usually in a funky .php format [a major blog negative, plus that it's a separate project to transfer them over to a new site/blog], or you could just copy and paste the content to a folder on your computer or to your googledocs [something I reccomend doing every few months].

Either way, capture the pages/content, place it on your computer and take a moment to think: “That was easy, look at that list of filenames, pagenames, extentions, and folders!” Now you get to either learn how to update blog pages [easy!], use one of the many free web editing softwares out there.

If your friend can’t give you the files and the site is still up, you can “View Source” to copy the code of each page as it appears online. This won’t work if you have .php or framing on your site, and you also can’t get the CSS [page styling code] but is a decent last-ditch effort if you really don’t have another option. You can either open the pages in a web editing program or just copy and paste the content into new blog pages, and you’ll just have to reformat the links and reupload the images.

Option 2: ACCESS YOUR DOMAIN NAME and direct the domain name to a new site you’re making/one you have access to

If you purchased your domain name [also known as a URL], then you have the login info to the registration account which leads to where mysite.com, ourblog.org, etc. is registered, and then you have quite a bit of power! You can log into the website of the service you registered at and direct your domain name anywhere using the nameservers or the redirect. To the site your friend made which you or they are updating. To a new blog/site you are hosting somewhere else because the old site can’t be updated. To xtube. It’s up to you.

If your friend bought your domain name for you, I do hope they either provided you with a login or you can get ahold of them to get the files [next] or have them redirect. Because without access to the domain name AND the web files or blog login, you are looking at some startover action my friend.

For more info about domain names, you can see my post on the topic. There’s a lot in there.

USEFUL TIPS SO THIS NEVER HAPPENS TO ANYONE ELSE

1. Talk The Designer’s Language. It helps.
When someone is making your site for the first time and storing it on their FTP, you can ask to be a “user” on their “server” and so get your own login and access updates to your site via the server’s WYSIWYG. They might not want to give you access, FYI, but maybe they can section off a parcel of server for you if you’re really special.

2. Keep backups – and a non-online list! – of your logins and passwords
I know this is boring and annoying, but isn’t it MORE boring and annoying to spend days tracking down someone for something you could just have on your computer or desk?

3. *If you are the “friend who makes sites”, please make sure people buy their own URL’s so you never have to redirect namservers or transfer ownership or accidentally forget to renew a URL which ends up costing a client or — way worse — a friendship. It’s happened to the best of us.

4.**Copies of the files and/or FTP logins. Such good ideas! Sometimes hard to remember to ask for but, still!

Top-Level Recommendations

•    Sometimes, brand counts. Not in pharmaceuticals, but yeah in electronics.
•    Buying from a place that lets you return something that doesn’t work for you is golden. B&H Photo Video in Manhattan was great. BestBuy wanted to charge a restocking fee so I didn’t buy from them. [So, not best.] Also that means that eBay or some guy on CL is not the best if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
•    Set yourself a price limit and prepare to adjust it by maybe $100. But don’t get crazy.
•    Buying the cheapest item means you get a dinky trifling chintzy piece of plastic. The bottom of the barrel is not a good place for electronics to be found. I hate this but it’s true.

Terminology Basics:

Consumer: The “low end” of video cameras where we will be loitering for much of this discussion. The cameras in the $100 – $1000 range. [All your bills for the month added up.]
Prosumer: A term which has the aura of relators’ ingenuity for making up words that mean “upsell.” Used for cameras that are fancier than point-and-shoot but not so fancy you could take them to Hollywood. Wait scratch that. In the $700 – $1500 range. [yes, that's a month's rent.]
Professional: Cameras over $2500 [and up to $60K] which I am entirely unqualified to use, let alone talk about. [All the money you'll make this year.]

Media Types:

MiniDV – The Old Guard of camcorders’ recording media, these are the tiny tapes you put into your camera that record analog which you then have to capture using final cut or another program. Just a note and thought, most Professional cameras still record to tape [or film, of course] and when you use tape, you are allowing

Mini DVD – A tiny DVD that you record onto in the camera. If you have a desktop computer/certain PC’s, then you can slap the little DVD into your computer and grab the video. I personally would be terrified to shove it into my MacBook, but I could be a priss.

HDD/Flash Memory – any of the growing number of devices that burn the digital encoding of the video directly to the camera’s memory. Sometimes you have to buy an additional memory card sometimes the camera has a ton of internal memory [our friend RAM!] Remember that 20 mins = 1 Gigabyte of data, so if you want to record an hour you’ll need 3Gigs+ [the more stopping and starting you do, the less time you can use, as the memory gets cut up for your little recordings].

Recording Formats:

DEFINITION
HD – High-definition images, 1920 x 1080 pixels, generally widescreen, the newest of the new in video reccording. You know how when you take a photo/video of your TV or old-tyme giant computer monitor, and all these horizontal lines were showing up? In HD there are twice as many of those lines, thus getting about double the image info — and taking up double the digital storage space. “We all survived fine without HD until a few years ago, so…?” the video guy at B&H said to me leadingly. Unless you have a HD TV or plan to make videos for the big screen HD might be overkill. Then again – many of the HDD/Flash consumer cameras out there ONLY record in HD. It’s an improvement, of course, and a recent shoot I did in HD got me beautiful footage — that took up 6G for 15mins. Ouch. Also, not yet common in Europe.

AVCHD – Sony/Panasonic’s extra high-def HD format. If you really want to try to capture for Blu-ray, maybe low-end video camera’s aren’t right for you anyway? I feel this is the end result of people thinking they need to see JOhnny’s every pimple in their home movies. But maybe I judge?

SD – Standard Definition. 720×480 pixels* is the NTSC [N America] screen size. What everything tv/video was produced as since TV started being in color in, oh, 1951. Has the benefit of the fact that everything pre 2004ish is in SD, so anything public domain you pick up on Archive.org to mashup, will be produced in SD.

FILE TYPES
Tape – If you record to tape, you set the file type according to your capture program. [Final Cut makes my videos into happy QuickTime .mov files.]

If you use a DVD/HD/Flash Memory device, there are a few formats, and not all of them play nicely with each other or with all the other programs or platforms out there. Listing all thevariations is a statistical impossibility, so this is really a word of attention needed here: You might be on a Mac and find that all the Sony software is only for PC and be frustrated. My friends’ Flip recorded in .avi and that needed to be rendered every time I moved it a touch in Final Cut. You might have to convert your footage before you throw it in your editing program.

Converting Among File Types – You recorded in MPEG and you want to edit in MOV. Try ffdshow if you’re on a PC, Any Video Converter for PC or on your Mac! Or you can get QuickTime Pro for $25 [as opposed to QuickTime Regular Normal, which is probably already on your computer].

Bells and Whistles

What is the Image Capture rate? Does it zoom? Can it make sepia tone?

• Zoom: Optical [what the lens does], Digital [what the camera makes up for you] – listen; fuck digital zoom. It’s like when you ask Photoshop to resize a web image to print quality, the camera/program makes up the missing pixel image data, and it never looks right. Just worry about what the optical zoom is, k?
• Image sensor – 1/4″, 1/6″, 1CCD, 3CCD
• Microphone terminal mini-jack – this is a really nice bonus that a lot of Canon [and a fair amount of JVC] camera’s have. Plug in a mic and you can get better sound quality from your tiny camera!

Lastly, follow my above directives, hewn from the pain of researching and being forced to separate from money I made doing something that was not living the dream, with these words of sage advice: time is not just money, it’s much more valuable than money can be. Get your tools and go make your art!

*did you know the origin of the term: PIcture(X) ELement

Programs

Audio on a PC has always been relatively easy because there are about a thousand good free programs out there for PC users to make music:

• Start –>Accessories –>Entertainment –>Sound Recorder–>talk — aaaand done.

• Being real, the last time I was on a PC [was when I made my first album using $40 of RAM I installed myself on a machine running Windows ME, but even though] my technology was crap, and I easily ran Modplug Tracker — great audio creation [not recording] software. So good and intuitive to use I sometimes bust out the PC virtualizer on my Mac so I can play with it.
• And you have Audacity…

Audio on a Mac has gotten basically awesome in the last few years, in part because of Garageband, yes, but also you’ve got:

• Audacity which is so perfect my friend who pays $$$ for techy grad school got taught it in class. It’s free and available for both Mac and PC and lets your record via your computer’s mic input and/or import all kinds of audio files to mashup and play with.

• and if you want to get cray* and record audio in other ways, say an interview via Skype, you can use Soundflower** [brought to you by the makers of Max/MSP/Jitter, the A/V program I want to marry*** and spend all my time with. Someone give me $$ so I can, please]. With Soundflower you can record any audio from one program to another: iTunes to Audacity, for example.

Hardware

RAM you probably have enough memory [RAM] on your computer to record sound without crashing the thing and frustrating the shit out of you. But just in case, do you?

Microphone You can get a mic at many dollar stores for $2. You can get a mic at radio shack for $15. You can get a mic at a pawn shop / on ebay for  $50-$100. You can afford it! Just make sure it has a 1/8″ stereo plug. If it has the common 1/4″ mono no problem – you’ll need to get two adapters at radio shack / your local electronics corner stort for $3 a pop. One will decrease the jack to 1/8″ and the next will go from mono to stereo.

1/8 - stereo, note the double black lines

1/4 - mono, note the one black line

*a familiar form of “crazy”
** thanks to Sébastien McLaughlin for pointing me to this software!
***maybe marriage is the right goal after all?

1. Pick a name[s]! Decide!
I know that picking a name is the hardest part, but luckily we live in a plentiful linguistic world — so you do that part and come back. Before you get soooooo excited please check that it’s not already registered to a real person or robot by typing it into your browser of choice or use a domain search tool.

2. Buy & Register it: Goooo creepy bueruacracy!
Get yourself* to godaddy.com or dotster.com [two larger domain registrant organizations] and search to see if your domain name was bought in the 2 days since you decided what to use. Go ahead and make an account and buy the name**. When it gets to checkout you can choose crazy hosting packages for your site, which are usually a little OOC and you can always buy them later, and you can also choose whether to pay more to make your registration private. If you don’t use privacy, people who creepily search WhoIs databases can see the last name, city and zip code of who each non-private URL is registered to. Sometimes that won’t bother you and sometimes you are freaked out by that and want to pay for the privacy – your call.

*my recommendation #1 – register it yourself. Don’t get your buddy who is helping you with your site to do it, because if tragedy befalls your buddy or your friendship, well then whoops – you can’t access your internet name when you need to update your site / it expires and a german porn site buys it.

**recommendation #2 – buy your government name, too: the one you pay taxes under, and for god measure the one you f*ck under/travel under. If you have the extra $10 each, do it! Otherwise someone else will.

3. Be like a Domme and Direct It
Since you have control over your Domain name, you can log into the account you bought it under and either:

- Direct the “namservers” of the domain name to point to server space you bought or your friend is giving you [the server space will have this information]
OR
- Direct the domain name to a free or other servive you are using, such as blogger, wordpress, freewebs, etc. You have two options

1. Forwarding – someone types in yourdomain.com and wordpress.yourwordpressname.com comes up in the address bar of the browser
2. Masking – someone types in yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com remains in the address bar. This is good if you have some janky-looking free service name [www.cheapofreebizsite.com/damienluxe] and want to appear more professional than that. Bad because people will not ever be able to get directly to a page on your site because the address bar is masked with just your domain name.

4. Mom…I changed my name/I have six names
That’s ok. The internet will never judge, it’s just a series of 1′s and 0′s electromagnetically linked. Some of us like naming, it’s cool. You just need to go through steps one and two above and then…

a. Move your existing site/blog to your new URL [that's a whole other post].
b. Keep your “old name”/URL site active, but just have one index.html page instead of all your content
c. Automatically redirect visitors from the “old name” site to your “new name site” by placing the following HTML in the index page of your “old” site in between the <head></head> tags of your web pages or blog:

<META
     HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
     CONTENT="1; URL=autoforward_target.html">
So 1 is the amount of wait time before the viewer is forwarded and the ...html is the page the browser takes the viewer to.

Today, we look at file sharing. Getting a large media file from my computer/camera/etc. to your email/social network/website/etc.

1. Email that sucker! Is it a sample of a picture for your CD cover or a draft of your latest song?? It’s probably small enough to email.

+ fast and dirty
- giant files clog up people’s email *especially* if their email runs off their website [me@mywebstie.com] and not giant email metropolises like gmail.
- now you have a hundred copies of your image/song/video out there, and maybe you don’t want that because it was a draft or a version that will be changed and that gets confusing [this is called version control! by the way].

2. use yousendit.com – it’s like a single-use email account for really big files, where you set up an account and people use yousendit to create a link that the reciever can click to download the big file.

+ send up to 100MB files
- only 100MB [not great for video]
- you have the file-duplication problem from email, though at least not in your email
- links you send people only last for one week unless you sign up for an account [$]

3. Use a server and FTP software to transfer the file, then send a link - doing this you basically make a “webpage” that is only the media item you want to share [the "page" is an automatically embedded  image, song or video file].  For example: http://www.hadassahsbizzare.com/mp3/Craigslist.mp3. That page is just the song, and I can send the link to people to say, “hey! isn’t Craigslist dating tragic? Listen!”

+ upload any size file and send people a URL [web address, readable in a browser]
- you need to have your own website server space**
- uses your servers’ bandwith
+/- You’ll need FTP [File Transfer Protcol] software. Your server might have a WebFTP or httpFTP [which might limit the size of files you can upload to 5 ot 10MB, smaller than gmail, so check  it out]

FTP software looks like this

. You can download Cyberduck FTP software, it’s free+ great if you’re on a Mac, or try download.com for free PC FTP software.

**You can get a free website account, however, and just use it for files that you need to share. A bit annoying because of all the sign-up time? Sure. Free. Oh heck, yeah.

4. burn a DVD/CD or use a portable drive

+ maybe the cheapest method
- you have to physically hand it off [with the drive, anyway] or mail it.

If any of you have better or other suggestions, I’d love to hear them! In short, it’s so awesome that we have videos and songs and giant pictures to share, but does get a little sticky when our work gets large.