Peter discusses last week's homework with his classmates

Friday

Last week's homework was to set up our profile, with a picture of ourselves and a voice clip.

Vicki suggested we use a free product called "Hello". I couldn't get this to work (apparently neither could anybody else because there's something wrong with it), so I just did my homework in the only way I could think of at the time.

When I came into class today I was asked how I did it. Here it is:

1. For some reason, Blogger wants the picture in your profile to be stored somewhere on the Internet (you the blogger have to make your own arrangements for this) and then you reference the URL where your picture is.
2. The same applies to your audio clip. Record it and upload to a place on the Internet, then reference the URL in your blog profile.
3. Brilliant! Why couldn't Blogger let you store it in the blog's storage area along with all your posts? Since Blogger is supposed to be user-friendly to allow non-experts set up blogs, this is quite a departure. Never mind. Here goes.
4. I uploaded (FTPd) my picture to my own website.
5. Then went into Blogger and put the URL of my picture on my website
6. Next, for the voice clip, I used my MP3 player in sound recording mode. In order to keep the file as small as possible, I set the sound quality to the lowest setting.
7. I connected the MP3 player into my computer and used Windows Explorer to transfer the .mp3 sound file to a folder (called My Sound Recordings) on my computer.
8. I uploaded this sound file to my website using FTP. (I have a commercial FTP program called "WS_FTP")
9. Then went into Blogger and typed in the URL of my voice clip (.mp3 file) on my website.
10. Tested and finished.

Hope this helps!

Tonight I changed my profile so that it displays the picture Vicki took of me today. This picture is on Photobucket, the photo housing site.

This still left my audio clip on my website. Aha! I think I'll be cunning here and put that on Photobucket too. No! It didn't work - When I attempted the upload, I got the following error mesage:

Upload Error
The file "070211_01_peter.mp3" does not have a valid image extension.Valid image extensions are: gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp, swf.

Meaning you can store pics and videos, but not sound files! Grrrr! SpoilSports!