GaryEimerman.com

Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way to give your visitors a call to action when they hit your blog? With so many entry points and constantly updating content I’ve found it tough to get a good call to action or announcement to everyone without cluttering the sidebar with a widget. That all changed today.This morning Scott, from Train Signal, sent me an email about a great new tool that is in beta called The Hello Bar. It is a bar that will display across the top of you webpage containing a message (85 character recommended max) and a link. And it takes less time to setup than it did to read this paragraph.

Why is this a big deal? Think of what you can promote with this feature:
- Do you have a email/newsletter list? Give your users a nudge to sign up with a “Get all the latest news and deals from us. Sign up here [link]”
- Do you have a killer YouTube channel you want promoted? “Check out out these free help videos on [link]”
- Want someone to buy you new book? “Get lost in the pages of this the greatest book ever [link]”

The possibilities are endless and they even let you put an RSS feed into it. If you look at the top of the page as I wrote this (until I come up with something better) I just decided to let people know and go to my personal blog.

But wait, there’s more. In the settings you’re able to manage a handful of different hello bars, so you can have one for your content pages and one for your home page and one for your personal site, or just about any combo you can come up with. You’re able to customize the color and they have a few good themes to help fit and standout on your site. Then in the settings you can get fancy controlling when it shows up, does it hide, how it effects the rest of the page, where does the link open, can the user close it, does it wiggle? (haven’t tried this setting yet) and which side of the page the tab show up.

Ultimately, I think this is a fantastic little tool that doesn’t require any coding and does give you a lot of flexibility. Once you’ve saved your hello bar all you do is drop the embed script they give you into your webpage just like a YouTube embed. Quick and easy. Right now Hello Bar is currently in beta and you’ll need an invite. I have a few left so contact me any way you know, leave a comment and its first come first serve.

I recently came across a new website/service called Dirpy. They are currently in the beta testing phase, but in my experiences with the product it has performed excellently. Dirpy utilizes the YouTube API in order to transcode the video to MP3 in real-time upon a request. What does this mean for you? It means with just a few clicks and just a few seconds (depending on your internet connection) you can download an MP3 of your favorite video. Additionally, if you want to be able to take the video to go with just one more click you can download the video as well. It supports HD videos if the video is available. I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume if you download the HD version mp4 file you’ll be able to load it up on your iPad if you want to take it to go. *The non-HD files will not work with iPod, iPad, iPhone as they are Flash files which aren’t supported by Apple. Here are a couple of quick how to’s with Dirpy.

How to create an MP3 from a YouTube Video with Dirpy:

1) Go to www.dirpy.com

2a) Enter in the URL of the YouTube Video
For the demo I’m going to use a video of my wife Erin during her grad school program she took an acting class and this is her final exam.

2b) Search for the YouTube Video
It’s a nice feature that if you don’t know the URL of the video that you want you can just search as if you were on YouTube itself.
3)Modify File Information
Notice that there are a couple of elements that you can modify on this page. First is the Filename. I like to keep all of my files with the same naming convention, so I normally modify this. By default this is filled with the title of the video, but you can quickly change this to your liking. Second is the transcoder settings. They start out giving you the ability to set start and end times. By default its the entire video, but if you just need a sound byte you can edit this to just be that segment. The bitrate can be modified, but unless file size is very important to you I’d suggest leaving this at the default (high – 128 kb/s). The ID3 tags is the info that displays on your MP3 player or searchable in programs like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc… I like a clean media library so I personally add as much info to this as I know, but it is all optional.

4) Click Download
Once you’ve clicked download your browser will start downloading the MP3 file. Next to the download button you will see an estimate of file size. Finish it off by launching the MP3 with your favorite media player or toss it on your mobile device and enjoy.

How to Download a Video From YouTube with Dirpy:

This process is almost identical to downloading an MP3 from YouTube using Dirpy

1) Go to www.dirpy.com

2a) Enter in the URL of the YouTube Video

2b) Search for the YouTube Video

It’s a nice feature that if you don’t know the URL of the video that you want you can just search as if you were on YouTube itself.

3)Modify File Information

Notice that there are a couple of elements that you can modify on this page, but really only one effect the video, the Filename. By default this is filled with the title of the video, but you can quickly change this to your liking.  The bitrate and ID3 tags are for the MP3 and don’t change the video file.

4) Choose Video Quality to Download
Here you get the choice of quality, 240p in a Flash FLV file or 360p in a MP4 file. IF the original was not uploaded as a HD video you will get an error trying to download the higher quality file.

The video download seems to be much clunkier than the MP3 and shows a few places for UI (User Interface) improvement. It would be nice to see the MP3 download button and video download links turned into three separate buttons labled “Download Mp3″ “Download 240p Video” and “Download 360p Video” respectively. It would also be nice if the options that only effect the MP3 be organized in a section title “MP3 File Options” so not to confuse users not familiar with what works with the video and what works with the audio.

Overall, I’m a big fan of this service. I’ve already ran into a spot where I came across an amazing cover song that isn’t available anywhere and downloaded the file and tossed it on my iPod to listen to in the car. I do have some concerns about what people can do with this. The quality is lossless, but if an artist has a good quality upload of a song this makes it way too easy to download that song. I could see a lot of hubbub (did I really just use that word…oh well) if this service takes off and gains popularity. It would be nice to give content owners the ability to choose if something like this can be done on their videos; however the realist in me knows there are always going to people and ways to illegally get content off sites like YouTube. *There is a way that content developers can already block sites like this. If the video has embedding turned off and must be viewed on YouTube, you won’t be able to use Dirpy to get the files.

All around I’m quite impressed by Dirpy and the use of the YouTube API. I like how the related videos is incorporate right into the Dirpy website. You can find yourself wondering through videos just as if you were on YouTube’s website. I’ll be starting a YouTube Channel with a bunch of the videos from the site. Once it’s setup feel free to head over to www.Dirpy.com and get copies for you’re own offline use.

A couple years ago I posted a how to guide on Train Signal Training about how to configure a static IP address in Windows Vista. During my beta testing of Vista I found that the way to get into configuring the IP address had changed quite a bit so I decided that it’d be a helpful tool to educate other admins and power users.
Well, I could have never expected the response. The post has been one of our top 5 articles still to this day 2 1/2 years later. A couple of visitors asked to see a video of the configuration so I’ve gone ahead and posted a video that will walk you through. If you want to see the whole post check it out at
http://www.trainsignaltraining.com/windows-vista-ip-addressing/2006-11-15/

The guys over at Maximum PC were busy over the last couple of weeks building a Microsoft Surface style computer. They did a great job documenting the whole process so if anyone is interested in trying to create one themselves make sure to check out the link below.

See the whole process at Maximum PC

There has been some questions on how To apply volume discount to the cart total in Ablecommerce. There is a radio button that isn’t part of the standard volume discount that dramatically changes how the discounts are applied. In this video I show you both ways so you can see the different ways and which is better for your needs.