Saturday, February 25, 2006
saturday
1. So here we go. Beth asked to get "skin" by madonna on her page. So I will fill you in on how that is done.
The easy way --- there are sites out that the will provide the html code for you to add videos and music to your site. Two I found are www.discoverclips.com and www.musicvideofun.com Be careful at these sites though as there are a ton of pop ups and shady sort of things going on .. so make sure you click "No" or "don't install" to any prompts you receive. Once at the site, find the video you want and copy the code from the box and then paste it into your blogspot template under the " !-- End of Profile --> "line, then republish the blog an you will have the video show up on your side bar. You might need to adjust the width of the video so that it fits properly , this can be down by lowering the number that is indicated after "width" in the html code you copied from the website.
The more challenging way..
First - the music that you hear when you go to a blogspot page is not actually stored on the blogspot webserver. The music file is "hosted" somewhere else and you put a link to the song on your blogspot page, so that when your page is visited by a user, their webbrowser goes out to the location that the song is hosted and downloads it to their machine. So that means that every time someone visits your site they will download the song to their machine. This is not always the case depending on some factors, but it is good to keep in mind.
So there are two ways to host the music file you want use on your webpage. The easiest way is to just find someone else who has hosted the file you want to use. The other way would be to sign up for an account somewhere and put the file up there yourself.
You might be thinking - I have the music file on my machine, why can't i just "host" it from here ? Most of us have consumer level broadband accounts, with limited upload speeds and restricted inbound ports. So it would be a big pain in the butt to get it to work -- not mention you could potentially irritate your ISP, which is never a good thing.
For beth's song we will go with the first option, just finding it out on the web somewhere and linking to it.
A great place to find publicly hosted files is www.altavista.com, then select MP3/Audio and type the name of the song and artist you want to use. The search yielded the following site.
http://www.coachb.net/goldengirl.htm
If you go to this site you will see that the song skin plays - so we have hit the jackpot. Now we need to extract the HTML code used so that we can use it on the blogspot page. You can do this by clicking "View" From the top of your Internet Explorer menu bar then select view source. Most likely notepad will open with all the source code from the page. Hit ctrl+F to open a find window and try typing in the song name, if "Search string not found" pops up, try searching on "embed" that should yield the beginning of the code that you need. Of course if this particular website has mulitple songs linked on it then you need to make sure that the the "Embed" tag that you find is actually the right one for the song you want. Then highlight and copy a few lines of code until the code looks like it talking about something else. I copied the following code out of the source of the site that links the "skin" song that beth wants.
EMBED SRC="music/skin.wav" WIDTH="256" HEIGHT="111" ALIGN="BOTTOM"
SRC is the location where the file lives. In this example, its a relative path which means that the entire path to the file is not listed. So I'm guessing that the path is http://www.coachb.net/music/skin.wav If you click that link you will see that the song just plays in your broswer (depending on your browser settings). So will need to use the absolute path (the full path listed above) when we reference it in our Blogspot code.
So now that we know where the song is, we can drop it into the blogspot page. After logging into beth's site, I click "configure site settings" and clicked on "Template" Then I hit ctrl + F and searched for " !-- End of Profile --> " Directly beneath that line I pasted the link code. I had to adjust the "Width" tag to a smaller number so that it would fit on the side bar of the page. Save the template and republish the blog and there you go.
However - heres the problem. Most hosting sites have a limit to how much you can download from your site each month or they charge you more. So if you link your page to someone else's hosted file, and then your page gets a lot of traffic, you might end up costing the person who is hosting the file some money. So its always a good idea to get permission to link to a file on someone else 's site.
If you are ambitious and want to open an account with a free web hosting service, you can do that too, then you can upload whatever music you want and link it to your site. I opened an account with www.freewebs.com and uploaded a music file , however I got the following error message :
FreeWebs accounts newer than 7 days are provisional and can only upload files up to 750K. Provisional users also can not upload .exe files. You can remove this provision immediately by signing up for a premium service
So I can't try the whole hosting thing for another week.
Also - Its not exactly legal to host copyrighted music for everyone to download for free. Am I worried about that ? Not really as long as you are doing like one song and not a whole album. You do run the risk of your files being deleted on the hosted site if they find out you have put copyrighted music up there.
So there you have it.. there are a ton of different ways to get music on your page, it just depends on how obscure the song is that you want to use.
Also, you can add a lot more then just music and videos, there are codes out there for games, polls, counters, etc..
The easy way --- there are sites out that the will provide the html code for you to add videos and music to your site. Two I found are www.discoverclips.com and www.musicvideofun.com Be careful at these sites though as there are a ton of pop ups and shady sort of things going on .. so make sure you click "No" or "don't install" to any prompts you receive. Once at the site, find the video you want and copy the code from the box and then paste it into your blogspot template under the " !-- End of Profile --> "line, then republish the blog an you will have the video show up on your side bar. You might need to adjust the width of the video so that it fits properly , this can be down by lowering the number that is indicated after "width" in the html code you copied from the website.
The more challenging way..
First - the music that you hear when you go to a blogspot page is not actually stored on the blogspot webserver. The music file is "hosted" somewhere else and you put a link to the song on your blogspot page, so that when your page is visited by a user, their webbrowser goes out to the location that the song is hosted and downloads it to their machine. So that means that every time someone visits your site they will download the song to their machine. This is not always the case depending on some factors, but it is good to keep in mind.
So there are two ways to host the music file you want use on your webpage. The easiest way is to just find someone else who has hosted the file you want to use. The other way would be to sign up for an account somewhere and put the file up there yourself.
You might be thinking - I have the music file on my machine, why can't i just "host" it from here ? Most of us have consumer level broadband accounts, with limited upload speeds and restricted inbound ports. So it would be a big pain in the butt to get it to work -- not mention you could potentially irritate your ISP, which is never a good thing.
For beth's song we will go with the first option, just finding it out on the web somewhere and linking to it.
A great place to find publicly hosted files is www.altavista.com, then select MP3/Audio and type the name of the song and artist you want to use. The search yielded the following site.
http://www.coachb.net/goldengirl.htm
If you go to this site you will see that the song skin plays - so we have hit the jackpot. Now we need to extract the HTML code used so that we can use it on the blogspot page. You can do this by clicking "View" From the top of your Internet Explorer menu bar then select view source. Most likely notepad will open with all the source code from the page. Hit ctrl+F to open a find window and try typing in the song name, if "Search string not found" pops up, try searching on "embed" that should yield the beginning of the code that you need. Of course if this particular website has mulitple songs linked on it then you need to make sure that the the "Embed" tag that you find is actually the right one for the song you want. Then highlight and copy a few lines of code until the code looks like it talking about something else. I copied the following code out of the source of the site that links the "skin" song that beth wants.
EMBED SRC="music/skin.wav" WIDTH="256" HEIGHT="111" ALIGN="BOTTOM"
SRC is the location where the file lives. In this example, its a relative path which means that the entire path to the file is not listed. So I'm guessing that the path is http://www.coachb.net/music/skin.wav If you click that link you will see that the song just plays in your broswer (depending on your browser settings). So will need to use the absolute path (the full path listed above) when we reference it in our Blogspot code.
So now that we know where the song is, we can drop it into the blogspot page. After logging into beth's site, I click "configure site settings" and clicked on "Template" Then I hit ctrl + F and searched for " !-- End of Profile --> " Directly beneath that line I pasted the link code. I had to adjust the "Width" tag to a smaller number so that it would fit on the side bar of the page. Save the template and republish the blog and there you go.
However - heres the problem. Most hosting sites have a limit to how much you can download from your site each month or they charge you more. So if you link your page to someone else's hosted file, and then your page gets a lot of traffic, you might end up costing the person who is hosting the file some money. So its always a good idea to get permission to link to a file on someone else 's site.
If you are ambitious and want to open an account with a free web hosting service, you can do that too, then you can upload whatever music you want and link it to your site. I opened an account with www.freewebs.com and uploaded a music file , however I got the following error message :
FreeWebs accounts newer than 7 days are provisional and can only upload files up to 750K. Provisional users also can not upload .exe files. You can remove this provision immediately by signing up for a premium service
So I can't try the whole hosting thing for another week.
Also - Its not exactly legal to host copyrighted music for everyone to download for free. Am I worried about that ? Not really as long as you are doing like one song and not a whole album. You do run the risk of your files being deleted on the hosted site if they find out you have put copyrighted music up there.
So there you have it.. there are a ton of different ways to get music on your page, it just depends on how obscure the song is that you want to use.
Also, you can add a lot more then just music and videos, there are codes out there for games, polls, counters, etc..
# posted by Brian @ 11:28 AM 
