Intro - Short but Sweet

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Los Angeles, California, United States
So many interesting things happen around us, Why not write about few of them?

Monday, February 14, 2011

Everybody needs a website.

Having a website is so important.
In fact it is becoming one of the necessities.
A personal website not only provides you an online space where you can host your work but also allows people all around the world to access your content 24x7!

It is the simplest and economical way to project your work.

But, How simple is to build a personal website?
What is required to build a website?

In simple words, A website can be defined to be made up of 2 things-
1) domain name.
2) file hosting server.

Domain name, is the name of the website you want.
for eg. "www.google.com" is a domain name... All we type in the address bar while browsing is purchased by someone.
So, first thing while building a website is - Purchasing a domain name.

These days there are many options available in domain names. A domain name can end in .com, .edu, .org, .info, .mobi, .us, .net, and maybe couple of dozen more to this list.
But this is just to differentiate your website.
.com stands for company.
.edu stands for educational institute
.org for organizations and so on..
Now www.google.com and www.usc.edu makes sense!

This was the first step! Second step is to get a place where you can keep all your files and images and videos and stuff.

File Hosting Server, is a place where you keep all your files required for the website.
Files can include text files, .html pages, images, videos, css, flash files etc.

Once you have these two things ready you are all set to get a website up.

A web developer can take on from here and can build a website as you want.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

YouTube - Is it good for uploading professional videos?

YouTube after taken over by google has emerged as one of the most popular video hosting website.
But the question is - Is it really good for uploading professional videos?

Here are few facts to help us understand more about these video hosting websites.
The user-made video hosting concept started in late 90's . Today there are more than 20(maybe even more) free video hosting websites. Out of which YouTube has its own share of popularity.

Because of this reason, I decided to upload few videos on YouTube . I think it is one of the simplest and easiest site where one can upload a video. But YouTube seems to degrade the quality of a video.
One of the main differences in YouTube and other sites is the freedom of selecting a thumbnail image. It might seem to be a simple thing, but is very crucial in case of uploading some professional videos. Following are few things which one should note when uploading a video on YouTube -
1) YouTube doesnt take the initial image for thumbnail of the video.
2) It provides you with 3 choices (approx. the image after the video is played for 25%, the image after the video is played for 50% and then third image when it is played for 75%)
for eg. if your video is of length 1 min. The three thumbnails you get would be approx. image at 15th sec, 30th sec and 45th sec.

This forces us to have the most important part of our video to be at exactly at the center of the video. I see this as a drawback and definitely a thing to be considered while using YouTube to upload professional videos.

As compared to others, Vimeo gives choice of 9 thumbnail images and so on.