Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.
There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.
Recently I migrated my photos from Instagram to a WordPress blog. The process took some trial and error. The first step is to understand how to read JSON files and format them in a way that WordPress can use. The next step is to import that data into Wordpress.
To request your data follow this link, request the data and wait for an e-mail telling you that the files are ready to download. When the files are ready to download download them and unzip the files.
Convert from JSON to CSV
You will find photo directories listed by year and month. You will also get a few JSON files but the ones you want are the media.json files. With a tool like the Konbert app you can convert the files from JSON to CSV files. When the CSV file or files are ready open them in Google Sheets or other spreadsheet software and look at the columns.
The fields you will find are
Caption
Taken At
Location
Path
Stories
Videos
Photos
Although not essential you can add fields like author. If you see “stories” and “videos” remove these columns. The CSV importer plugin I used cannot import videos and stories automatically.
When this is done you should have a CSV file that has caption, taken at, location, and path. Keep the photo file structure as it is.
Installing WordPress Locally
The simplest Wordpress installation I found is Local. Within minutes you can have a wordpress blog setup and running on your local machine. The reason you want a local install is that JSON to CSV conversions can be messy so if you make a mistake it is easy to reset and start again.
It took several attempts before I managed to import all the images and get them to display properly. If I had imported those files to my production Wordpress Blog I would have spent hours deleting thousands of posts more than once.
Folder Structure
When you import your images to WordPress with the CSV importer tool you have the option of leaving them where they are or of importing them into the uploads/year/month folder structure. Be warned that if you let the importer tool import the images itself it will import all of the images and generate thumbnails. If you have 3900 images you will end up with 12,000 images in a single folder as thumbnails are generated.
I would recommend:
creating a folder for every year that you were on Instagram
renaming every Instagram folder from /yearmonth/ to month, for example from 202006 to /06/ in the 2020 folder.
placing each month in the appropriate year/month folder in uploads.
Preparing the CSV file.
For the next step, I would recommend saving a copy of the document as it is so that you can go back to it if you make a mistake.
If you have changed all of the yearmonth folders to a year/month/ folder structure then you can use find and replace to update the folder names. You can find and replace 202006 with 2020/06 and work recursively. This will take more time, but be tidier. The CSV importer tool does not keep imports tidy. If I had known this ahead of time I would have taken this additional step.
In the CSV file the path is relative. To be tidy I put the photo folders in /wp-content/uploads/photos/ and had to update the CSV document to reflect that. Although you can find and replace in Google Sheets I used Visual Studio code for the next step.
Originally the path will be something like photos/202006/filename.jpg. but as the images are in wp-content/uploads/photos WordPress will look in the wrong place. With Find and Replace I selected “/photos/” and replaced it with “http://localhost:10003/wp-content/uploads/photos/”. At this point, the CSV files were ready to be imported.
If the CSV file is prepared correctly you should see Caption, Taken at, Location and Path. When I imported I mapped it so that so that Title and Content and slug would be the caption and for slug to be the caption. I then mapped Taken On to Publish date and featured image to the image path.
If you have kept the image folders as they were when you unzipped the Instagram download then select “Use media images if already available” and “download post content external images to media.” The images will be copied from the photos folder into the correct folder for WordPress to use.
If you have already organised your images by year and month in the uploads folder then you do not need to check “download external images to your media as they are already there.
The Final Step
The Final Step is to find a theme that reflects how you. want your images to be displayed and share the new location of your photo library to your various social media profiles and networks.
As a final step if you find that an image does not load for single posts you can add this line of code after the PHP tag.
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { // check if the post has a Post Thumbnail assigned to it.
the_post_thumbnail( 'full' );
}
This is a lot faster than going through 3900 posts and adding an image to each individual post.
Conclusion
If everything works as expected you can now export a CSV file of your test blog and upload it and the appropriate files to your online photo blog.
Over the past month I have seen an increase of 7000 views in relation to the videos I have posted on youtube. The two events that helped make this a reality are the Geneva Lake Parade and the Paleo Festival. For the Paleo Festival scantily clad girls were an attractive proposition.
As to the paleo it was taking video I had streamed live on qik and sharing it via a number of video sharing websites of which youtube was one.
To give an idea of the audience peaks we saw over 900 views for the Lake Parade footage and over 1300 views for Manu Chao. That’s a respectable audience.
The question is whether there are any events you would like me to cover (via live streaming from a mobile phone) and whether that would attract a big enough audience.
There was a time when I spent eight hours a day transferring footage from Beta SP, DV, DVcam, DVCpro and other tape formats to a digital format to be part of a media asset management system. A 63 minute tape would take at least 63 minutes to digitise. Back in those days we moved video files in real time.
When streamling live content I would wait for several hours for the program to end. I would watch basketball, curling and bobsledding, biathlon, but also NATO press conferences and more. You had to be there, ready to react if there was a problem. This was before YouTube streaming standardised things. I would set the akamai end points and start the encoders and recording, and then wait.
At the same time I would often have to wait for files to be transferred from the local computer to an FTP account. Sometimes this would add an hour or two to the shift.
Later on it was waiting for data to move from one drive to another. When I left for my walk today it said that I had about four hours left. Now it tells me that I have about two hours left. On a mac two hours means less than three hours and four hours means less than five. You add one hour to get a better estimate of time remaining.
On a mac there is a way to get a more granular view of how fast files are moving between drives. Right click and chose get info for the source, and the destination folders. You can then watch as data is moved between the two. When the transfer is finished you can check whether the byte number from Folder A is the same as for Folder B. If it is then you can assume that the transfer was a success. If it isn’t you can spend time finding why there is a difference. In this scenario I am not deleting anything so I will check later.
What I am doing now is time consuming but once I finish moving data from this drive it will be much faster. It’s slow because there are no duplicates yet. Once there are this process will go much faster. That’s the stage I am impatient for.
And Finally
Digitising footage or moving data from one drive to another is sometimes time consuming and boring, as is the case at the moment, but it’s because most of the work was done over the last two weeks. Now it’s about backing up that work. Tomorrow or Sunday I will start consolidating all that data and that will require me to be attentive again.
When I duplicate the eight terabyte drive I will use a Pi 4 for the task. I will set it to run and check it when it’s done.
Today I’ve been playing with Photophlow, a photo sharing and chat website that allows you to easily discuss and share pictures with friends within the interface as well as on tumblr and twitter.
Among the features that I find interesting are the ability to create personal rooms and invite flicks friends in. once this is done you can look at their personal photographs, favourite pictures and more. It’s a great way for photo buffs to share photographs without having to give hyperlinks all the time.
What I like about this photo sharing method is that it makes the entire process much easier. Much as you would pull out a photo album and start showing photographs and commenting on them you may do the same via this website.
The film Juno was screened to a crowd of bloggers of which both Loudmouthman and I were part of. As a result it gave us the perfect opportunity to do a twittervox. The video can be found here for direct download.
After meeting with Nik Butler and others for the screening of the film Juno several tweeters meet up at the Union bar to discuss both the film and other topics
Those present were danacea of Forbidden Planet, Loudmouthman of Loudmouthman.com, Rupert Howe, Beth, Robert Croma, Sizemore, Jess and many more.
I will admit to liking the response I have had so far from my fellow seesmicers and twitter users. It was a good night and I look forward to more of them in the near future.
According to a New York Times writer, Narcissism and the World Wide Web are increasing. “Narcissism is increasing…“
If our egos are obese with amour-propre, social media can indeed serve up the empty emotional carbs we crave. Instagram and the like doesn’t create a narcissist, but studies suggest it acts as an accelerant — a near ideal platform to facilitate what psychologists call “grandiose exhibitionism.†No doubt you have seen this in others, and maybe even a little of it in yourself as you posted a flattering selfie — and then checked back 20 times for “likes.â€
Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and others grew from a desire people had to connect with others. In it’s golden age both Twitter and Facebook were about dialogue and conversations. They were about mutual respect and listening. During the Golden age of social media we would get to know people so well via Twitter and Facebook that when we met in person we felt like we had known each other for years. For introverts and more reserved people this was excellent. We could hide behind the screen until we built enough trust and confidence to meet the person behind the username.
Fast forward to 2016 and the wrong people have been heard when it comes to social media and it’s purpose. Many people have the false notion that social media is about self-promotion and self-aggrandisement. This is incorrect. Social media is about dialogue and personal connections. I only follow people who will converse with me should I comment on one of their tweets. The images I share are of the beautiful world around me. Facebook is a network of people I have studied with, worked with or met at various conferences.
There are a number of topics that the article should have explored. The first of these is solitary living. How many of those who use social media live in a house or apartment alone. The second question is whether the commute to and from work allows these people to have a social life and meet friends once the work day is over. The third topic to explore is whether friends live next door or in another country. My friends are distributed around the world, from Australia to Europe and the Americas and Africa. Imagine keeping in touch with such a broadly distributed network of friends.
Social networks and social media, rather than lead to narcissism are encouraging the opposite. They are encouraging people to share their personal life with friends distributed around the world. It is because we live in McLuhan’s global village that social media play such an important role. Remember that just because one attractive woman has a million Instagram followers liking her pictures does not mean that there are not a thousand other people sharing images with a small network of friends from social media.
Don’t let yourself feel stigmatised for being a social media user. Connect with new people. Share your passions. Don’t let the Luddites question your motives.
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Hey Richard – I have been on a couple of times to test it out. I like the interface design. It looks like an interesting tool for a group of people who have a specific purpose for meeting, but for random conversation I greatly prefer Seesmic.
Yeah I agree with Randell, I gave it a test run last night at my cycling social network and I think that kind of specific use is where it will prove useful.
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Hey Richard – I have been on a couple of times to test it out. I like the interface design. It looks like an interesting tool for a group of people who have a specific purpose for meeting, but for random conversation I greatly prefer Seesmic.
Yeah I agree with Randell, I gave it a test run last night at my cycling social network and I think that kind of specific use is where it will prove useful.