Easy professional translations for YouTube video captioning

This quick-tip is about an extension to YouTube's captioning service. It's relevant to bloggers who focus strongly on videos as a complement to their blog content.

In Septemeber 2012, YouTube introduced a feature that let you or your friend translate the captions of videos (that you own) into additional languages.

Now they've partnered with some professional translation firms so you can get a quote, order, receive and pay for professional translation - all within YouTube / Google.    So you don't have to worry about whether your friend's high-school Spanish is really good enough for your international audience!

The first step to doing this is uploading a transcript file for your video. Something to bear in mind if you do this:  If SEO matters for your blog, then you probably don't want to put the transcript into both YouTube and the blog, because that would create duplicate content.

A simple time-management tool for bloggers

This QuickTip shares a template that I used to help me be productive when I was working as a free-lance blogger (and a other things besides).

Blogging can seem overwhelming: there just is so much to learn, to do, to read

And if you don't have a boss, official work-hours or school-pickup-times to structure the day, it can be easy to get to the end of the week and discover that you've done lots of research, but nothing has actually been finished and published..

I had a few months between jobs, and found that it really helped to plan my week, by:

• setting very small, achievable goals for each of my blogs, 
• allocating my time in two hour blocks.
• writing this all down on old-fashioned pen-and-paper on a one-page-at-a-glance sheet that I could hang on the wall, tick of my achievements and keep track of the progress.

A week-planner template

Here's the template that I used to do my planning every Sunday night.  

 It's licensed under Creative Commons, so you are free to copy, adapt and share it.

My tips for being productive:

• Choose a set time to review your plan each week.   Mine was Sunday night - but any time is fine, so long as it's consistent.

• If your blog is not your Number One priority, then allocate time, before you set goals. There's no point getting six goals for your blog if you can only spend two hours working on it this week!

• Make sure that there are some small, totally-achievable-in-one-hour goals, and some that are simply steps toward doing a bigger project.

• If you need to be flexible, fill it in using a pencil and adapt as the week goes on:  this is a tool to make life better, not a way to overburden yourself.

• Make sure you allow time for meals, housework, exercise, socialising and relaxation - and even sleeping in sometimes (but not every day).

• Give yourself some weekends and "annual leave" days: ones when you choose not to schedule all your time, or any of it.

What has worked for you?

What "Another blog or Google Site is already using this address" really means

This article explains what "Another blog or Google Site is already using this address" means when you see it while setting up a custom domain for your blog - and what you can do to fix it.

What is a custom domain

A custom domain is a "real" website address, instead of the free one that you get when you first set up a blog using Blogger.   It's one of he essential steps if you want to use Blogger to make a "real" website.   For example:

• You initially set up    www.yourBusiness.blogspot.com
• Then you hear that people will treat you with more respect if you have www.yourBusiness.com  or www.yourBusiness.co.uk. 

In this case, www.yourBusiness.com  and   www.yourBusiness.co.uk   are both "custom domains", ie web-addressed without "blogspot.com" or "wordpress.com" at the end of the address.

To use www.yourBusiness.com, you need to either use Blogger's custom domain wizard - available under Settings > Basic > Publshing +Buy a custom domain.

To use www.yourBusiness.co.uk   (or any other type of URL that Blogger doesn't offer), you need to firstly buy the URL from another domain registrar, and then use a similar procedure to use that URL for your blog.

Sometimes things go wrong

If you're lucky - and most people are - then setting up your blog to use your custom domain is a smooth process:   there are a few minutes where your new address doesn't quite work for you, and a few hours while it doesn't work for people around the works.   But the computers all catch up with each other fairly quickly and within 24-72 hours it's working perfectly.

But sometimes things go wrong - and that is when you see this message in one of Blogger's screens:

Another blog or Google Site is already using this address

Mostly (pretty much always, in fact), this doesn't mean that another blog is using the address that you just paid $10 for.

What it means is that something has gone wrong with the process of setting up the domain for your blog.   Nothing more, and nothing less.

You can check this by looking at what happens when you try to navigate to the address.   Most probably you will see something like this:

That's what I see using Google Chrome - other browsers will display it a little differently, and Google may change the picture from time to tile.   But the key part is the "404" error code, which says that there is no website currently using the address.

How to fix it

The Masterclass:

Chuck from Nitecruzr.net has recently published a comprehensive article about the various sources of this message, and how to fix it.    As he explains, it's not so much an error message as a symptom.   Basically, it's Blogger's way of saying "there's a problem with your URL setup".

His post may look daunting at first; there's a lot of technical language, and you need to delve into all sorts of places you may not have looked before, including setting up an administrator account for your domain in the registrar. And just to make it more complicated, Google changed they way that they offer domains (by removing free single-user accounts in Google Apps) in January 2013, so now it also depends on when you purchased the domain, too.   But it's worth trying to work out the problem, and its solution yourself, before asking for help (see below). You will learn about how Blogger works with custom domains, and it stops the help-forum people being overloaded with questions.

Methods that used to work

When I've had this problem in the past, the first thing I did was to check that Google Sites was disabled on my Apps account. This was easy, and often effective, but I suspect it's not so relevant any more.

Another older approach was to enter the custom-domain into the Magical Custom Domain Form, and wait 48 hours to see if Google have fixed it. In the background, the Google staff would check domain settings and fix up problems if they could. However it looks like that process isn't supported any more: clicking the link now brings up a message

We're sorry.The form at this URL could not be found. Make sure that you have the right URL and that the owner of the form hasn't deleted it. 

Asking for help

If you really cannot work out a solution, then post a question in the Blogger Product Forum - I usually use the "How do I" category.    Include:

• Your blog's URL     (eg   yourBusiness.blogspot.com)
• The URL you are trying to use   (eg yourBusiness.com or yourBusiness.co.uk)
• Whether you bought the URL thru Blogger, or from another domain registrar
• Details of all error messages you are seeing

Post the details into a new question (use the big red "Post a Question")button - don't try to hijack someone else's question, because their problem and solution will probably be different, for this particular error message.

Make sure your question has a meaningful title   (eg  "Custom domain - another blog or site is hosted"):   many helpers don't read questions with generic titles like "help" which don't give any clues about what skills are needed to answer the question.

If your question doesn't get answered in a day or two, post an update in the same thread - even something as simple as the word "bump" will take your question up to the top of the pile again, and tell the helpers that you are actively looking for help with the problem.

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Related Articles

Using Blogger to make a proper website

Using a website address from another domain registrar for your blog

Setting up an administrator for a custom domain purchased through Blogger

The "Single-Slash Double-Dot" rule for identifying spam links in phishing emails

This article is about email phishing, and spam-links in emails: how you can recognize them and what to do about them.

Understanding Spam vs Phishing

Most people know what regular spam is. Phishing is a more sophisticated type of spam, which combines information that the spammer knows (or guesses) with conventional spam techniques. Often phishing emails are addressed directly to you, and offer a "product" or "service" that you might realistically want. For example, they may offer to fix a security problem with your on-line banking (just as soon as you have gone to their website and given them your real on-line banking details).

Bloggers are particularly susceptible to phishing emails, because we write websites where we share information about ourselves. For example, anyone who reads Are-You-Blogger should have no trouble guessing that I use both Amazon Associates and Chitika, and that I have a domain hosted with DomainDiscount24.  It's not much harder to work out that I'm interested in folk-music, and know a lot about public transport in my city. And even though I don't display my email address on the blog, it isn't that hard to guess from some of the screen-shots I use, or by subscribing to my RSS feed.    And you might be even more vulnerable if you link your blog to your Facebook profile instead of a Page.

Protecting yourself from Phishers

ISPs and email services detect and delete most regular spam emails before they are delivered. But this is harder to do with phishing emails, because they often look genuine. So you need to protect yourself against phishing.

The best way to do this is to be curious-and-cautious about any email you receive. There are lots of suggestions below about what this means, and what characteristics to look for. None of them can give a 100% certain answer about whether a message or offer is dodgy. But being aware of the sort of things you need to check, and in particular the "single-slash-double-dot" rule for checking links, is a an excellent start.

How to spot phishing emails

An email message may be a phishing attempt if some of the following are true:

• You were not expecting the message, or any contact from the organisation it apparently comes from.

• You've never heard of the organisation or company that it comes from - or you don't have any dealings with them.
  (That said, sometimes unknown organisations do contact you - try to establish their legitimate website or phone number from another source, to check if they're "for real" or not).
  

• The message asks you to confirm account details by giving some personal information: no reputable company will ever want you to do this by email. Intelligent reputable companies will not expect you to do so by clicking on links in their website.

• The message tries to make you respond quickly, to stop something bad from happening. (Basically, they're trying to stop you from thinking about the message before you respond to it.)

• An email doesn't have your address in the To field - or it has your address and many others which you don't know.

• The message-body doesn't start with your name (eg if it says "Dear Customer" instead of "Dear Joe Soap")

• The from address, or the name as the bottom of the message (like the "signature" in a paper-based letter) is missing, or seems strange given where the message came from.

• Bad spelling. Bad grammar. Poor formatting. Odd looking graphics / pictures / logos. Strange sentence structures (either to try to trick you, or because the author doesn't know your language well).

None of those features guarantee that a message is dodgy. But any of them should be enough to make you a little suspicious.

But there are some features that are more of a give-away:

• The URL / hyperlink in the message isn't the right one for the company (eg it's from www.ebay.org instead of www.ebay.com)

• The message contains a link which doesn't match the website show when you hover the mouse over it eg www.amazon.com - notice that it's linked back to Blogger-HAT instead of to the real Amazon.
  NB Even if a link looks like a link, ALWAYS check where it goes to by hovering your mouse over and seeing what the "tool tip" text is.
  

• The message uses an URL shortening service (eg tinyurl.com, bit.ly, goo.gl) which stops you from checking where the link really goes.
  (This is a good reason why you shouldn't use link shortening services yourself:  they make it look like you have something to hide. Whenever I tweet about a post, I always put in the full URL: even though Twitter doesn't display all the characters in the message, they are available to anyone who hovers over the link).
  

A simple rule for evaluating links:

The last three points are the most helpful - but they rely on you being able to look at a website-link and know if it's spammy or not.

And spammers know that it's easy to confuse people by showing them long, complicated real links, that superficially look like real ones.  For example, consider

www.cnn.com.newslist.2013-01.headlines.trouble.com/headline-listing/xx03/index.html

Lots of people will look at this, see the "cnn.com" and think "ahh, that's a reliable news site, it must be fine."   But that's not actually true.

Fortunately there's a simple rule that you can use to find the real website that a link points to. It is

Single-Slash, Double-Dot

To use it, look at where the the link really goes (by hovering the mouse above it) and:

• Find the first single forward slash
• Look at the words between the two or three dots just before the slash
• Decide if the link is genuine, based on these words.

The Single-Slash Double-Dot rule explained

In the example above, the first single forward slash is actually half-way through the link:

www.cnn.com.newslist.2013-01.headlines.trouble.com/headline-listing/xx03/index.html

So the website that it is pointing to is actually trouble.com - which might not be a place that you want to visit.  Compare this with

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130129-blue-heart-of-the-planet

where the first single-slash is quite near the start, just before the very genuine www.bbc.com.

In summary, the website name between these two or three dots should match the one that is shown in the email, and should be the right one for the company. For example, one of these points to the real TradeMe, and one doesn't:

TradeMe 

TradeMe

(Yes they look the same:  remember you need to start by hovering your mouse over the links, to find out where they really point to.

Two vs three dots?

You sometimes have to check back three dots because some countries have two-level internet addresses. For example, instead of .com you will find

• .co.uk - in the United Kingdom (two level, so you need to check three dots)
• .com.au in Australia (again,two level, so you need to check three dots)
• .ie - in Ireland, (single-level, so you only need to check two dots).

So like the many internet security issues, there are still judgements you need to make, and knowledge you need to apply.   But still, it's fair to say that you can ...

Use the single-slash-double-dot rule to work out where the link in an email message really goes to.
[Tweet this quote].

What do to if an email or link is suspicious

With old-fashioned spam, the rule was always to delete the message, no questions asked.

With suspected phishing emails, it's a little harder.   You need to make a judgement:

• What are the chances that this is genuine?/

• What are the consequences if it is genuine, but I ignore it?

• Is there some other way that I can check out this out, without clicking on the link in the email? For instance by going directly to the banks' website by typing in the address myself - or by phoning the person to ask if they really did email me.

You need to weigh up these three factors, and based on them decide whether to investigate further (eg by going to the website directly, or emailing the sender for more information, whether to trust the email message, or to just delete it.

TL/DR:

Phishing emails use information about you to personalize spam.

Apply common sense and intuition to every email that you receive. Check that links go where they are supposed to - and don't click them if they don't.

Use the single-slash-double-dot rule to work out where the link in an email message really goes to. [Tweet this quote]

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Related Articles:

Displaying email addresses on your blog

Offering an RSS feed

Linking your blog to your Facebook profile

How to make a "tweet this quote" option.