Scott's Corner

This is a guest post by Shannon from Pursuing Serenity. She writes, inspires and encourages everyone to live their ideal life and find their inner serenity.

There is no denying media adds interest to a post. In today’s short attention span society, as bloggers, we need something to keep our readers attention. Having your readers watch something in addition to your text will accomplish that. An example of this is this post: How to Really Use Motivation

There are a few ways to go about adding media to your post. Today I will talk about how to share media using a sharing site.

Step one: Put on some creative inspiring music. This is very important.

There are a lot of programs available to choose from: Power Point, Scribd, Open Office, Windows Live Movie Maker, Vimeo, Google Docs. All have their advantages and disadvantages.

For illustration, say I want to put together a short video of a trip to Greece and post it on my site. To show you 2 ways of accomplishing this, I will end up with 2 versions at the end of this post. One with just pictures and one with pictures and a video. Depending on what you’re embedding in your post will determine which you prefer to use.

I will be using Scribd, Google Docs and YouTube. I will assume you are familiar with what kind of sites YouTube and Google Docs are.

Scribd is a web sharing site. The awesome thing about Scribd is your document is converted into HTML5. It can be read on any web enabled device. Anything you upload, power points, excel spreadsheets, videos, word files, will be turned into a static web pages that can be embedded to your post.

Getting Started:
I have a few options now. I could use Power Point, or Open Documents, or Google Documents. Google docs is free and there is nothing to download to use it. Using Google docs I will have the same end result as a power point plus it does video. If you do have not a gmail account you will need to sign up to use Google docs.

Once you have an account, open the documents section and click on Create new–>Presentation

The tool bar is pretty straight forward:

I have added two photos and some text for my presentation so far.

Next I would like to add a video. I took this video with my camera, its in the .mov format. I will keep in mind that the first image in my video will be a static image in my Scribd embedded post.

One downside to using Google docs is movies have to be uploaded to a website. The easier way to do this is use YouTube. Uploading a video to YouTube is pretty easy. Sign into your account. Click upload, find your video and upload. If you prefer no one to see the video outside of this post make your video private after you have inserted it into your presentation. If you mark it private before you insert it will not show up in your search results. When your video is up, you will see the link to your video in green:

When this link is active you can now upload your video into your Google docs presentation. It will take a few minutes for YouTube to submit your video to the search results. Now would be a good time to take a stretch break.

And we are back. You video should now be searchable. Click ‘Insert–>Video” You will see a search field, the easiest way to find your video is using your YouTube User Name

I only have 3 videos uploaded so it’s pretty easy to spot the one I want.

I made the video box to fit my screen and made the background black to add a border.

I will add one more slide of photos to finish my presentation:

The “putting-together-your-presentation” part is done! Good Job!!

Now is the fun part. Go to Scribd. Sign up. It’s free. You can also connect Scribd to your Facebook account.

You will see a blue Upload button. Click it.

Your uploading options are to upload from your pc, straight from Google docs, or entering text. Since I did my presentation right in Google docs I will upload from there. Clicking that option will show you all your Google docs that are available for upload.

I named this presentation Greece, it is the last one listed on my list. I will click the import button on the right side.

To get to the video screen click the name of your video

This will bring you to a page with a list of your screen shots and other information about your video. The first area on your right will let you download, print, convert to be read on a mobile device, or add to your collection. Here you can also edit your presentation.

Below the Google ad you will see a Share and Embed area. This is where I will get the embed code to add to my site.

Scribd gives me the html for WordPress. It’s as easy as pasting the code into my post. I like to use the standard html, below the html line I have the options to change the size, start page and how the video will play. Here I will use the Slide option. Play around with the different views to see what you like.

Also on this screen you can share your video on social media sites. Click on more options and you will see even more choices.

Below is the embedded code from Scribd:

Now for version 2, I had a video I wanted to have play. Scribd will turn that into an image as you can see in slide 3. But since I did my presentation in Google Docs, I can use that to generate an embed code:

Click “Share–>Publish/Embed”

On the next screen you will see a box saying your document is not published, click publish document. Don’t worry, on the next screen you will be able to change the settings.

After you select your options, copy and paste that code into your html area of your site, I did this below:

*I have the screens to advance every minute (starting after play is clicked) to accommodate for the video. The slides can always be advanced by clicking the forward button.

That is it! Easy as pie. I hope you will have fun adding content to your site and making it visually stimulating for your visitors.