Do not ignore Google Adsense

There is nothing wrong trying to make a bit of money from the web.  Of course, becoming a web-millionaire is quite impossible for most of us.  Making a bit of money, each month, is definitely a possibility.

We all know about Google Adsense.  We've all seen the ads from Google everywhere.  You can also be part of this by registering with them.  It's easy and it's free.

There are many services to display ads on your blog or website.  Adsense is the best of them all!  You need to consider quality over quantity when displaying ads.  You may have found another ad provider that will pay more but have you consider the quality of the ads displayed?

The main issue when displaying ads is not to drive away your traffic.  Some ad-providers will generate popups or redirection meaning that your readers will get annoyed by your website.  Your visitors won't make the difference between your website and the ads displayed.  If a popup do occur too often, they will assume that "your website" is generating this annoying behaviour.

Another issue is the content of the ads displayed.  If your blog is discussing the latest technology and the ads displayed are about dating websites (even worse, porn sites), you will lose credibility in the eye of your readers.  

Google Adsense is ensuring that ads displayed are related with your content or at least with your visitor's  traffic.  There is no porn, no annoying popups, no nothing.  Just plain-clean ads that should not annoy your fans.

Of course, you have to balance the amount of content with the amount of ads displayed.  Too much and you will annoy your visitors.  Not enough and you won't make a dime.

Adsense can easily integrate in your blog, you website and even your Youtube channel.  Thus, you can maximise your exposure on the web and hope for a bit of money each month.

And you, what's your experience is Adsense or other services?

Have a great day!

 

How to export your iPhone music library without iTunes

The iPhone is a great device but getting your iTunes purchases out of the device can be a pain when you are not relying on iTunes.

iTunes is available on Windows and OSX.  But what about Ubuntu?  Here a tutorial to show you how to do it using MusicBrainz Picard app (also available on other OSes).

ScreenStudio 1.2.8 has been released

A new version (1.2.8) of ScreenStudio has been released.

• Trying to fix the default location on the screen when having a second monitor to the left
• Minor tweaks
• Added animated splash

Get it at http://screenstudio.crombz.com

ScreenStudio 1.2.7 is available!

ScreenStudio 1.2.7 is available!

• Fixed Tray Icon display
• Added "None" as an audio source for both Mic and Desktop
• Added support for SteamOS (with support for FFMPEG)
• Fixed global shortcuts that were not updating

You can grab the latest version at http://screenstudio.crombz.com

Connecting to Twitter, Facebook or Google with Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a great operating system.  One neat feature is being able to connect to your online social network account.  See the tutorial on my Youtube channel:

Have a great day!

OOOOHHH! Twitter Analytics

A brand new tool has arrived in town: Twitter Analytics

It is now available for all Twitter users for free and it looks like an amazing tool to monitor your Twitter account and the activity related to it.  Twitter Analytics arrived just in time for me as I am currently investing more time into my account (@patrickballeux) to promote this blog and my Youtube Channel (www.youtube.com/patrickballeux).

With social networks, it is hard to evaluate the impact of your shared posts.  Using Google Analytics, you can do this monitoring on your blob/website quite easily.  But with your accounts (Facebook, G+, Twitter), it was near impossible.

Now, time to explore and investigate this new tools in my arsenal and start learning a bit more about my social network exposure.

Have a great day!

Monitor your network without IT knowledge!

Ever wished you could find out who is using your home network bandwidth?

There is an easy solution called EtherApe, available from the Ubuntu Software Centre.  Check it out!

The Ice Bucket Challenge funny pics

With the current trend of Ice Bucket Challenge videos going around the web, I got inspired to create a few funny pics...

Hoping it has brighten your day!

Note: Don't forget to support #ALS by donating...

Welcome to ALS Canada

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Promoting your blog, a few tips...

When sharing content with the world on the web, we are expecting to get a few fans with time. Be it a blog, a Youtube channel or some fan page, the goal is to have followers and having a small community that will have an interest in our projects.

Even if you post and share repeatedly with your friends, it can be hard to reach the whole world.  Here's a few tips and links that will help you getting more exposures for free.

Social Networks

Ensure that you share over the social networks like Facebook, Twitter and G+.  Make your profile public and use appropriate tags (hashtags) to maximize visibility.

Profile image

Show your face!  This is you and not some random cat that is working hard at creating great content.  A good picture, that people will notice, will help you being recognized.  The same goes for your banner.  Make it stand out.  Here's the current inspiration for mine...

This is my current profile image and as you can see, I spoofed the great Dr House M.D. to create a funny profile image, but still being the main character.

Sharing and curating sites

There are some sites will index your links in some specific categories.  You can be surprised how effective they can be just by sharing your content into those website for free.

• www.stumbleupon.com
• www.reddit.com
• scoop.it
• Communities on G+
• Exposing your Twitter on www.twiends.com

In the end...

There are many ways to increase your visibility on the web for maximum exposure.  Those links and tips have been helping me a lot with my blog and Youtube channel in the last year.

Have a great day and good luck!

Technollywood, here I come!

As a software developer, I can understand anyone wanting to protect their work from piracy.  In the past, I have also developed a few sharewares that I wanted to spread around the world and make a bit of money from them.

Over the years, I've realized that the thing that I liked the most was learning from those projects.  Supporting them, commercially, was taking over my free personal time.  In the end, it was not fun anymore.

I still wanted to create new ideas, explore new concepts and learn new technologies.  At work, we are always limited by all kinds of constraints like time, budget and many other things.  It's a fact and there is nothing wrong with it.  It is the world of business where productivity also means profitability.

But deep down inside, developers are full of imagination, curiosity and ambition.  We are creative and resourceful in many ways.  We are the aspiring new talents of the Technollywood!

Personally, I am more interested in creating and sharing than trying hard to push my software as a marketing product.  Those of you who know me from my previous projects will agree that I spend more time talking about my project, trying to build a community around it and having some crazy fun ideas to promote it on the web.  I'm a star cruising the streets of Technollywood.  And I like it!

Of course, a new project will take time before getting some followers so you better have a good idea to put on the table.  And then, one day, people will notice your idea and share them with their friends.

The Open Source licensing is a great way to share your work and ideas.  Some people will be interested in the final usable software while others will follow the development and contribute with their own ideas.  The final result is a community effort to create a great software and you are leading that team.  This is a fun way to learn working with customers, team members and reviewers.

An Open Source project is much more than a free software, it's the result of minds collaborating in a common goal.

Get access to thousands of free apps in Ubuntu!

We all love free apps!  The Apple Store and Google Play Store are full of it.

Did you know that you can have the same thing on your computer?  In fact, Ubuntu users have had this opportunity for the last 10 years and things just got better and better over the years.

Here's a tour of the Ubuntu Software Centre, where you can find literally thousands of free software, professional solutions and even developer tools.

Have a great day!

Manage your Twitter account, improve you social network!

As you work your way thru the social media experience, you finally reach a point where you may need some help with managing your social accounts.

In the last year, I've put my effort on getting better visibility with my Twitter account (@patrickballeux) as it is a great tool to promote my project ScreenStudio (and other stuff I do).

When I started this process, I had around 500 followers, coming mainly from my previous project WebcamStudio.  That means that each time I was announcing a new version of ScreenStudio, 500 people would be notified of my new release.  That's great, but not that much is we considered that my tweet could be buried by other tweets for each account.

I eventually build up my network on Twitter, G+ and also Facebook to get more visibility and I am now around 1400 followers on Twitter.  Then I realized that it was a bit too much to handle...

It's not about getting too much attention, it's about ensuring that my followers are real followers and that those I follow are not just bots.  It's a jungle out there, more than you think...

I've seen from time to time, promotion about Unfollowers.com.  Essentially, they provide you with stats about who followed you, who un-followed you, inactive accounta you are following, etc.

If you didn't know, there is a limit on the amount of accounts you can follow on Twitter.  Mine was at 2000.  I was stuck and could not follow more people...  I decided to give a try to Unfollowers.com and see what it could do for me.

I found out that I was following accounts that were deadly inactive.  Some accounts were completely inactive for several years.  Time for a clean-up!  Some other accounts were identified as "fake" or "zombie" which ended-up on my clean-up list.

It's not just about cleaning up your following list, it's also about improving your visibility on the web.  You can automate "Welcome" tweets, DM invitation and so on.  You have to be careful not to overuse their features to avoid falling into the spammer category.  But nevertheless, it does help a lot.

I do not easily promote services about social networking but Unfollowers.com got my "Seal-Of-Approval".  Well used, it is an asset to your social media network.

Have fun today!

Note: Follow me and let's share great posts!

ScreenStudio 1.2.6 is available

A new version of ScreenStudio was released: V1.2.6

Nothing really new in this release as it was meant to improve the error handling when something goes wrong.  A new menu as appeared that will do a "System Check", providing tips on what you may need to run ScreenStudio.

With this new release, ScreenStudio do not required "libjna-java" to be installed as it is providing its own "jna.jar".  This should help running ScreenStudio across different distros.

There is a small issue between the new ScreenStudio and Ubuntu.  If "libjna-java" is installed, it may conflict with the provided library.  The solution is quite simple:

- Remove libjna-java package

sudo apt-get remove libjna-java

- Delete "jna.jar" from the "lib" folder and create a symlink to the native "/usr/share/java/jna.jar"

ln -s jna.jar /usr/share/java/jna.jar


The DEB package should handle everything once updated so you won't have to handle this issue.  But if you are using the binary archive from http://screenstudio.crombz.com, you may have to solve this manually.

Thanks you for your support

Where it all began, before WebcamStudio

I was looking at my Youtube videos and went back to the first ones where I was testing the idea of recording my computer display using scripting and different solutions.

This was before ScreenStudio, before WebcamStudio.  To be exact, the first posted video was recorded on August 25th, 2008.  Almost 6 years ago...

Recording was blurry, laggy, low-res...  But this is where it started.  Eventually I made another one:

Not much better, but I was going somewhere...

The fist official demo of WebcamStudio! September 8, 2008...

For me, this is where the big adventure of streaming and videos started.  Before that, I was working on another project called NW-E00x Mp3 Manager that was quite successful also.

I want to thank all my fans and followers that have provided my with their help, their time and their support.

Long live WebcamStudio!
Long live ScreenStudio!

Thank you!

EDIT:  A Live Special Event will be held over Hangout... See it live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClaHYKlJpbk

iMovie for Ubuntu: OpenShot

As you know me, I like stuff about videos.  Of course, this means also doing some video editing once in a while.

I mostly use my iPad with iMovie when creating and editing specific Youtube videos (See my channel).  It's easy to use and the result is great.  But I prefer using Ubuntu on my laptop...

A few years ago, creating videos on Ubuntu (or generally speaking, Linux), was a pain in the @$$.  There was no good enough software to be creative.  Things have change a lot in the last 3 years...

OpenShot is one of the best video editor for Ubuntu.  As a matter of fact, OpenShot is one of the best video editor, period.

• Good looking
• Easy to use
• Lots of options, filters and effects
• It's free!

See my quick review on Youtube:

Please, subscribe and share!

Coolest pic I ever took!

This weekend, I was down-town in Trois-Rivières, Canada.  To celebrate the racing event for the Grand Prix de Trois-Rivières, fireworks were illuminating the sky!

The show was just amazing.  I was lucky enough to grab a few good pictures but I must admit, this is my favourite one:

It's just amazing!

ScreenStudio SVN Repository is online

A new milestone has been reached for ScreenStudio:  The SVN repository is now available.

I wanted to reach a stable version of the source code before releasing the it into a SVN repository.

It is now done!

ScreenStudio should keep its current form.  It will be easier to share the code via SVN than simply using a tar.gz archive as I did from the initial version.

You can browse the source code on Google Code: https://code.google.com/p/screenstudio/

I am currently working on making ScreenStudio a bit more friendly when reporting issues and errors.  The next release will be 1.2.6 and should be available before the end of August.

Until then, you can get the latest binary version of ScreenStudio at:
http://screenstudio.crombz.com

Have a great day!

ScreenStudio 1.2.5 is available!

A new version of ScreenStudio is now available.  This is a minor update fixing small bugs.

Get it at http://screenstudio.crombz.com

Enjoy!

Watch movies for free with PopcornTime

Ubuntu users are looking for the Netflix killer since Netflix service does not really work well on Ubuntu computers.

Here's an alternative that may answer your prayers: PopcornTime

Stream your movies to your AppleTV with Ubuntu

There a neat software called TorrenTV that is just amazing.  It lets you stream your movies to your AppleTV from Windows, OSX or Linux.

See my tutorial for Ubuntu on my Youtube channel:

How to be a good software developer

Creating software is not just a science, it's an art.

Of course, you have to learn about languages, databases, APIs, file management and so on.  There is literally thousands of stuff to learn.  But knowing all this does not make you a good software developer.

The be good, you have to follow those simple rules:

• Write your code so it's easy to understand without comments
• Think about the implication of your modification:  Is it a patch or a real fix?
• Have a design or a framework.  Behind every good source code, there is a philosophy
• Validate that it is working, in all cases, in all impossibles situations
• Check your code against these 4 operations: Add, Modify, Save, Delete
• Do not re-invent the wheel
• Read about others projects and why they are using specific technologies
• The latest is not always the greatest
• Think Object!

The key is to implement a framework that will help you and your team add new features without compromising the quality of your code.  It's not about creating a complex source code using all the twists available in your preferred language.  You have to put in place a canvas that is easy to follow, easy to understand and easy to work with.

Ensure that there is only one way to execute an operation.  Avoid having functions that will do everything by having optional parameters.  If there is only one way to do an operation, it will be easier to debug in the future.

You may fully understand your code.  Everything is in your head.  Have you think that others do not have access to your brain?  Ensure that others will understand how it works easily.  Source code is not meant for your eyes only.  It's a piece of work that is meant to be shared with team mates.

If you're the only one understanding your code, you're not smarter than the others, you just are a bad software developer...

A good software developer is a good communicator.

Have a great day!