Splicd allows you to enter a YouTube URL, along with a start and stop point, and then it outputs a link and embed code to put on your site.

For an example, I often like to share this clip of This American Life host Ira Glass talking about getting from the point where you don’t have the skills but want to do something creative, to the point where you have the skills:

powered by Splicd.com
The original YouTube video is five minutes long, and there’s a bit of talking before the clip I selected. But I was able to trim the clip to exactly what I wanted to share without having to load the entire 5 minute clip.

This would be especially useful for a student journalist who wants to highlight a certain portion of a press conference, for instance; or an instructor who wants to showcase a particular section of a YouTube clip that exists within a larger 10 minute clip.

I’m almost certain YouTube has a similar internal feature, but you have to have a YouTube account. This tool is available to anyone.

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I have created a page under the “Resources” tab at the top of the blog with a list of links to free online tools. This is a gathering place for links that I showed during a presentation at the National College Media Convention in Louisville (and also a couple of other workshops). I’ll be updating it in the future with other sites. Check it out here.

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Produle: This is an online Flash-based widget builder, sort of like Sproutbuilder. Also like Sproutbuilder, there are a variety of cost options. The free plan lets you have three widgets and 10MB of storage. You can’t track the use of the widgets, though, which is a little disappointing. The lowest-priced $$ plan costs $19/mo. for 15 widgets and does allow tracking. That’s $240/year, which might be within your budget if you don’t have any Flash whiz students on your staff. (thanks to @triptych on Twitter)

Jing: Jing is from the same company that produces Camtasia Studio and SnagIt, so it’s sort of a hybrid screenshot/screencapture tool that lets you share what you’re working on with others over the internet immediately. The free version records in swf video, while the “pro” version ($14.95/year) allows for mpeg-4 format and webcam recording, among other things. (thanks to @manfull on Twitter)

Blogo: Blogo is a Mac-only desktop blogging client, not unlike MarsEdit. The advantage of desktop blogging clients is that you can write blog posts when you’re not connected to the Internet, and – unlike using a text editor – desktop blogging clients have a similar interface to an actual blogging admin area. Blogo has drag and drop image editing and some other cool features. It saves drafts to your web server, which is also nice, and it will schedule posts in advance. If you like it, it’ll cost $25 after the demo period. I’ve been trying it out for the past couple of weeks and it works quite well so far.

Yugma: From the web site: “Yugma free web conferencing allows anyone, anywhere to instantly share their desktop and ideas online with others.” I found out about this software from Dr. James Danowski at the University of Chicago-Illinois, who shared his desktop to show me how to use a software program called Wordij. There is also a pro version.

gooseGrade: gooseGrade is a service that lets you copy edit any page on the web. If a web site owner has the gooseGrade widget installed, a gooseGrade user can highlight text that contains an error and add an edit to the text. This edit will then appear in the admin area of the weblog, and the site owner can approve/disregard the edit. Recently, gooseGrade opened up the system so you can copy edit any page on the web. The edits will show up in the gooseGrade system. This would be a good tool to implement to try to help your staff copy edit online stories after they are online. You don’t have to have a weblog system to use gooseGrade, but you’ll have to do the edits manually.

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The Adobe Creative Suite is an industry standard these days.  Many newsrooms already have their hands on the software, but with the 24 hour news cycle and reporters in the field, how do you access the suite outside the newsroom? Chances are, your staff isn’t going to pay thousands to get Adobe CS on their personal laptops.

There are plenty of low-priced and free browser-based tools that can serve the basic functions of Adobe CS (meaning it doesn’t matter what operating your reporters are running — as long as they have internet access).

Photoshop alternatives

It’s hard to find a program that can do as much as Photoshop, but then again, the average j-student probably doesn’t know how to really use all of Photoshop’s features anyway (I sure don’t).

The basic needs for you as a journalist: Cropping, color correcting, graphics

Photoshop express

The tool is free, browser-based and allows you to correct, crop, and resize – any basic functions you’d use in PS. When you’re done editing, you can then download the edited photos to your computer. The beta “decorate” feature allows you to add text, too.

There are plenty of other free, browser-based Photoshop options out there:10,000 Words has a handy list of 21 additional free photo editing tools and online slideshow creators.

Downside: Most online resources for photo editing don’t allow you to use layers, meaning your ability to create original graphics or collages is gone. But generally for breaking-news, in-the-field stuff, you probably won’t need to get fancy.

Illustrator alternatives

Aviary – Raven

The advantage Illustrator has over Photoshop is that it’s vector-based, meaning you can resize your graphics/text as large as you want without losing resolution (i.e. your graphics don’t get pixelated when  you zoom in). Until this week, I hadn’t heard of any free, web-based vector editing programs. Then Aviary’s “Raven” program was released last Monday.

In basic terms: It’s a simple version of Illustrator. It let’s you hand vector graphics without all the other bells and whistles.

Disadvantage: You cannot paste or import rasterized images or use text. I’m sure those options will come soon.

 Dreamweaver alternative

If you’re using a CMS, you’ll probably never need a Dreamweaver equivalent for anything. But if you can’t code and notepad isn’t enough, KompoZer is a free, open-source alternative with both code view and design view.

The downside though is that you can only create and edit .html files — no .php, .css, .js or any other extensions.

(Thanks Jessica Estepa for the tip on this one!)

Premiere alternatives

Free, web-based video editing just doesn’t exist. At first, the site Jumpcut popped into my head, but although their site still boasts it’s the “easiest way to upload, edit and share video,” clicking the upload button takes you to this page:

“We’re sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut.

We will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future so you‘ll still be able to play, remix and share your existing movies – you just won’t be able to upload anything new.

If you’re looking for a place to upload and share your video, we recommend that you head over to Flickr: http://flickr.com/explore/video

Thanks for all of your contributions to the Jumpcut community.

The Jumpcut Team ”

They suggest using free editing software like Windows Movie Maker for your PC or iMovie for your Mac and then upload to a video sharing site. That’s the same advice I have for you. iMovie and Windows Movie Maker can do the basics– and that’s all you really need: Transitions, titles, and lower thirds.

If Movie Maker and iMovie aren’t hitting the spot for you, Pinnacle offers Videospin for free. For an additional $14.99, you can buy the Advanced Codec Pack to created MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files and share videos for the iPhone.

Interactive tutorials to show ya the ropes: http://www.videospin.com/redesign/tutorials/featured-tutorials_002.asp

Flash alternatives

There’s not one all-encompassing free program that will replace all that Flash does. But there are many free things that can individually do small portions of what Flash does.

Interactive maps: Google Maps is the answer (and even if you do have Flash, you should use Google Maps combined with YouTube/Vimeo anyway). You can insert your custom placeholder icons onto the map and by clicking the “html” option when you’re creating a custom Google map. You can embed video, text and photos to pop up when users click your placeholders.

Tutorial here: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68480

Inspiration: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

Quizzes: Easily create an interactive, embeddable quizzes are easy to make at  MyStudiyo. They’re a clean, simple fun way to put a little interactivity on your site.

Video players: YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and many other free video-sharing web sites are great places to put your video. While it’s cool to have your own custom video player that you created in flash, that’s not always embeddable nor will they come up on a Google/You Tube search. Plus, using free sites means you don’t have to export to an FLV and then upload to a server– these sites do all the converting for you.

The following programs aren’t entirely free, but they’re a lot cheaper than the latest $699 version of Flash and a lot easier to use for interactive graphics:

Firestarter $49

• Add text, images, sounds, links, and shapes
• Control their motion, opacity, layer order, and more
• Import images from any format, and convert WAV files to MP3 format
• Can export as .swf files
• Use built-in FTP support to upload your movies.
  
• Use the HTML code generator to copy and paste code right into your site/blo

Swish $145

• Includes over 350 Preset Multimedia Effects
• Includes over 180 Ready-to-use Components and Vector Shapes
  
• Import Images, Graphics, Sound and Video from all popular formats
  
• Export Presentations to Flash, Video, EXE, GIF Animation or Image Sequence
  
• Tools to Control Motion, Draw Shapes, Edit Text, and more
  

Examples of how it can be used: http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?area=products&product=max&tab=demos

If you don’t have Adobe CS, look into all the above options and find out what works best for you. Get comfortable with using the alternatives so that if you do need them on deadline, you’re ready to get to work (instead of teaching yourself how to edit photos in-browser). If you know of any other free online tools, throw ‘em in the comments!

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The question we’ve heard most often since launching the new TheMiamiHurricane.com is, “How did you do it?” Below, Webmaster Brian Schlansky offers a comprehensive explanation of the process, from setting up our own Web server to installing WordPress to importing our College Publisher archives.For more background, check out these posts:

• VIDEO: The Miami Hurricane redesign
• The CMSes they are a-changin’
• New Miami Hurricane site begins public beta Aug. 1
• Announcing The Miami Hurricane beta site
• Recap of Miami Hurricane beta site feedback
• We have lift-off! The new Miami Hurricane site is live

Enjoy!

Greg Linch
Editor at Large for Online and Multimedia
Former Editor in Chief (fall 2007 to spring 2008)
The Miami Hurricane
To contact me, visit www.greglinch.com or e-mail greglinch[at]gmail.com.

—

How we did it: Moving from College Publisher to WordPress

By Brian Schlansky
Webmaster
The Miami Hurricane
webmaster[at]themiamihurricane.com

Our migration from College Publisher to WordPress was a very interesting experience. I will try to explain as much as I can, so anyone thinking about doing a similar migration has a guide. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

The new site uses WordPress 2.6.1, SlideShowPro Director 1.2.3, Vimeo and Issuu. We originally started with WordPress 2.5 and SSP Director 1.1.9 and have since upgraded.Our total cost, excluding man hours, was about $205.

PART 1: SETTING UP THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS

Hardware Setup (skip to Domain Setup if you already have or plan to purchase hosting)

Once we decided to use WordPress and the LiveWire 2.0 Premium News Theme (now part of Woothemes), I began the four-month-long process of getting us from a state of complete dependence on College Publisher for all of our needs to an entirely independent system.

The first thing anyone needs if they want to build a Web site is a host. There are a lot of very good hosts and most offer the same basic features, including a decent amount of storage space, FTP access and bandwidth for a relatively low monthly rate.For the Hurricane, we had a special situation. We were getting a new file server for all of our data, freeing up the old one for Web use. So instead of paying a monthly fee for a host, we ended up with a very powerful dedicated server hosted on campus.

If you have a dedicated server available, this will be the cheapest way to build a site since there are no recurring costs and the university pays for bandwidth. It also gives you complete control of the hardware.After I transferred all the data to the new file server, I wiped Windows Server 2003 and installed Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy Server Edition. I opted to install a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server along with an SSH server.

This edition does not include a graphic user interface and is entirely controlled from the command line. To make things easier to manage, I partitioned our already RAIDed drives into two partitions — one for the Ubuntu install and one for all the Web files.At first, I tried to install the graphic interface from the Ubuntu servers, but I could not log in after it booted back up. I ended up erasing the install and starting over.

If you are uncomfortable working with a command line interface, there are a few ways around this. If you are familiar with Unix based systems, secure shell (SSH) is a way to connect to a server through a command line without needing to be at the physical location. Nearly everything I did with the server was through SSH.

After establishing an SSH connection, I installed Webmin, which is available at www.webmin.com. This is a self-contained Web server that runs independently from any existing Apache server. It allows you to log in to control all the aspects of Ubuntu Server that you’d need without having to know any terminal commands.

This is as close to a CPanel (control panel) as I could get. If you purchase hosting elsewhere, a CPanel will provide you with the same functionality. I’m not sure how many other pieces of Linux software I installed, but I did need to install ProFTPD, for FTP access.

Once everything is configured, you will have a fully functional, Web server (Apache), PHP and database server (MySQL). All of these are WordPress requirements.

Domain Setup

I set up a virtual Apache host for WordPress and proceeded to install it using their “Famous 5-Minute Install” method. Once it was up and running, I added the LiveWire 2.0 theme and we were set with the WordPress install.

At this point in time, everything was running within the University of Miami network. Nothing was talking to the outside world and everything else we had was still controlled by College Publisher.Since I would be building the site from home, I needed access to the server from off campus. Our IT person at UM opened the necessary ports for me to connect to the server. This opened the server to the world and allowed me to connect our domain name to it later.

It was only after I had successfully set up the Web server and had a working WordPress install that we notified College Publisher that we’d be terminating our contract at the end of the summer.

This began a series of phone calls. Many things had to be dealt with. College Publisher had control of our Web site, our two domain names, our e-mail forwarders and they hosted our blogs. All of these needed to be transferred to us.We started by requesting our archives, which they provided in mid-May as a massive 1 GB zip file containing our database — with the articles — and a folder of every piece of media we have ever uploaded to the site. A separate database contained the attachment info for each piece of media and the article it corresponded to.

Due to this incompatibility with how WordPress manages attachments, we ended up dumping all images from the new site once all the articles were imported, which I’ll explain later.

The next step was to take control of our domain name. If you have a site with a registered domain, there are three pieces of the package: the domain registrar, the domain name system (DNS) host and the Web host.In our case, I chose GoDaddy to manage the domain names and DNS information, with the Ubuntu server as the host. In order to make beta.themiamihurricane.com lead you to our beta, many connections needed to be made.

In June, I purchased a domain transfer from GoDaddy and College Publisher was sent some codes needed to initiate the transfer. After about a week and many phone calls, I had themiamihurricane.com in our GoDaddy account; however, The DNS information was still on College Publisher’s servers.

Many things need to be taken into consideration before making any changes to a domain’s DNS records. Everything from where www.themiamihurricane.com points to how to route webmaster@themiamihurricane.com to our e-mail is stored in the DNS information.

College Publisher provided us with our DNS records and I switched from their servers to GoDaddy’s. The change can take up to 48 hours, but ours was up and running within a few hours. I immediately entered the DNS information to prevent any e-mail from getting bounced while the servers update.During this time, I also transferred the files and database of blogs.themiamihurricane.com to the new server. I pointed the “blogs” DNS entry to the server’s IP address and, within an hour or two, our blogs were running on our own server, independent of College Publisher.

After I knew everything was still working, I went ahead and set up a Google Apps account for the domain. All of the Hurricane e-mail accounts are Gmail accounts with @themiamihurricane.com addresses.I created the account names we already had on College Publisher and switched the DNS records from College Publisher to Google. We now had our blogs and our e-mail out of their systems, leaving only the Web site remaining.After a months-long issue regarding our other domain, thehurricaneonline.com, it joined themiamihurricane.com in our GoDaddy account. I didn’t change the DNS to GoDaddy until after we launched the new site. It now forwards to themiamihurricane.com.

I know this all seems like a lot of work — and it was — but the Hurricane chose to take complete control of our Web operation, from top to bottom, DNS to Ubuntu. I’m assuming that most other newspapers will elect to pay a company to take care of the site hosting.

PART 2: BUILDING THE SITE

Customizing WordPress is very simple. If a feature is missing, it can probably be added with a plugin. The Hurricane has nearly 20 plugins providing additional functionality.

Since WP is written in PHP, any customizations to the theme require a basic knowledge of the PHP syntax and the PHP variables WordPress understands. I don’t know PHP by heart, but it is very easy to customize once you recognize the patterns and relationships.WordPress.org contains a slew of documentation and forums. Other customizations involve editing CSS. The entire site is basically the stringing together of about 10 different PHP files that the server processes into a single HTML document.

Our server is actually hosting three separate sites: WordPress, our blogs and SlideShowPro Director. Needing a solution for expanded multimedia capabilities, SSP was a no-brainer.

While other journalism students may be familiar with SoundSlides, SlideShowPro (and its companion product, Director) provides much more customization options and allows everything to be edited from a Web browser. I built a few different player configurations and the source information is fed to the slideshow in the embed code.

College Publisher actually uses SSP for its slideshows, but they offer no customization options for the presentation.

Database

As for importing archives into WordPress, a basic understanding of MySQL is necessary. The database came in the format of a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file. I’ll try to explain the process as simply as possible.To prevent me from breaking our development site, I installed a virtual server on my MacBook using MAMP (Mac Apache MySQL PHP).

I then installed a fresh copy of a standard WordPress install. Just enough to create a database. Using PHPMyAdmin, I browsed the structure of the WP database. Basically the only tables you need to be concerned with are the wp_posts table, and the wp_term_relationships table. Create at least one test post, and all the categories you need represented on the site, so they appear in the database.All of the articles are stored in the wp_post table, but their category assignment is in the wp_term_relationships table. To import everything from College Publisher to WordPress, you must rearrange the CP data into the structure WP uses.

I first imported the CSV into Microsoft Access 2007. I have a Mac and needed to run Access 2007 and Excel 2007 in Parallels Desktop because Mac Excel 2008 could not handle the large file efficiently.

Once I had it imported, I eliminated any information that is unnecessary. For instance, I replaced the ID numbers with a fresh column starting at 1, all the way through 9,000(ish). All the equivalent columns need to be renamed to match WordPress and the dates need to be formatted to match the WP date format. Columns that are missing must be added.It’s tricky because all the section names need to be replaced with the WP category ID number. Then keeping everything in the same order, you need to separate the category IDs and the article ID into its own table that matches the wp_term_relationships table.

To prevent a discrepancy, I eliminated blank or broken stories from the database before lining up the category information.Once through with Access, I exported to Excel 2007. This allowed me to clean up the database structure and also add repeating information such as post type (post) and publishing status (publish). Also, I needed to add the author ID, which in my case was 1. We lost the author information in the migration process because it would have been too difficult to match up everyone with a WordPress user from the past seven years.

Once the tables were formatted in Excel I exported to a CSV. I then went to PHPMyAdmin on the virtual server running on my MacBook and went to the wp_posts table. I clicked Import and directed it to my .csv file. It is important to tell PHPMyAdmin to import as “CSV using LOAD DATA.”

It took about 10 failures to realize that. Then import the category information into the wp_term_relationships table using the same procedure. When the import is complete, you should find all of your archives in the temporary WordPress install. After some further cleaning up, I used WordPress’s export function to export all the stories into an XML file. I then imported the file into our real site.

It took about the equivalent of about three to four days of actual work, but I spread this out over a couple weeks as I optimized the process.

One important note, I was unable to import all 8,000 articles in one shot; it failed after about 4,000 articles. I ended up splitting the database into 8 groups of 1,000 articles and imported one group at a time.

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