YouTube has a global audience, so if you want to reach as many people as possible, you’ll have to make sure subtitles are available for your videos. You’ll want closed captioning to reach the deaf and hard of hearing, too. Thankfully, that process has shifted from relatively easy to an absolute breeze in recent months. Here’s how to make it happen.

Once you’ve uploaded a video to your YouTube account, you have two options for generating subtitles for the video: You can use the CaptionTube web app that Google has created, or you can upload a transcript you make yourself and use Google’s speech recognition technology to automatically assign the right times to each caption. In either case, you’ll end up with a text file that you can edit to make corrections if need be, and viewers will be able to either read the captions in their native language or translate them on the fly when watching your video.

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CaptionTube

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First, direct your browser to the CaptionTube website and you’ll find a well-realized web application for importing videos, adding and timing captions for them, and exporting the captions however you want them. You’ll have to sign in with your Google account. After you’ve done that, you’ll have two options for importing a video; you can either import a list of all the videos on your account, or you can specify the web address for a public video.

Whichever way you go, the path to importing the video you want is a pretty easy one. Click the edit button next to your video once it’s been imported to get to the caption creation screen.

Click the “Add Caption” button and then type in what you want your caption to say. Pick a start time in seconds and milliseconds, then specify how long the caption will stay on the screen. Once you save it, it will appear in a time line at the bottom of the app so you can see it in relation to other captions. When you’ve added all your captions, click publish.

Choose the “Download to My Computer” option (either file format will work) and CaptionTube will give you a text file that you can tweak as needed and add to your videos. To add the file to your video, go to your YouTube My Videos page, find your video, and click the “Caption” button to reach the caption options. Click the button to add new captions, browse to find the file CaptionTube gave you, check the “Caption file (includes time codes)” option, and hit “Upload File.” That ought to do it.

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Captions By Voice Recognition

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The CaptionTube method used to be the only easy way to add captions to your video, but Google introduced a new one towards the end of 2009: captions generated by voice recognition. Google’s computers use the same technology that powers Google VoiceGoogle Voice to listen to your video while reading your transcript, then automatically generate captions at the right times.

First you’ll have to watch your video and create your own simple transcript of the words spoken in the video. This should be pretty easy; no special formatting is required. Just save it as a basic text file using Notepad if you’re a WindowsWindows user or TextEdit if you have a Mac.

After you’ve saved the file, go to your YouTube My Videos page, find your video, and click the “Caption” button to reach the caption options. There you can click the button to add new captions, browse to locate your new text file, and select the “Transcript” option. Hit “Upload File” after that.

YouTube will think for a while, then your video will have captions. If Google’s voice recognition system made any errors, you can hit the download button from the captions screen to fetch a copy of the caption file with timestamps included. Make any modifications you need, then add your new captions using the “Caption file (includes time codes)” option described at the end of the CaptionTube segment of our how-to.

What are RSS feeds?

RSS feeds are the updates of the website that you subscribe to. For example you subscribed to onemanga.com, you won’t have to go to onemanga every time just to check for updates. You can just go to your RSS feed to read all of the updates that came from the sites that you subscribed to. And if you did subscribe to onemanga’s RSS feed, you will receive their RSS feed right away as soon as they have updates on the site or a new manga posted. This saves you time  and resources.

What is a RSS feed reader?

It is a tool that allows you to read the feeds that are delivered to you from the websites that you subscribed to. This tool allows you to read various updates from selected websites of your choice. It works like google mail or yahoo mail where you read emails, but in the RSS feed reader, you read RSS feeds.

Why are RSS feed very useful?

It saves you lots of time of having to go to a website just to check for updates. If you subscribe to an RSS feed of a website, everytime that website updates, you will be notified through your RSS feed reader. Not only will you be notified, you will be able to read the updates(which are in the form of feeds).

Below is a video from google with a very simple explanation of how RSS feeds and RSS feed reader work. This is about their RSS reader, the google reader, which is what I am using right now as my RSS feed reader.

RSS feeds makes bookmarking websites look oldschool. Back in the days, when if we like a website and want to visit it some other time to check for updates we bookmark it.

Today, most websites offer RSS feeds. Especially blogs like palahubog.com offer RSS feeds. This makes it easier for readers to read and get updates from the sites that they like.

Several websites design their RSS feeds to look attractive. RSS feeds today come in many designs and forms. Below are pictures of how they may look like.

If you like to track or get the latest feeds/updates from a specific website, you can just look for buttons that may look like any of these buttons. Just click them and subscribe to the feeds.

If you like palahubog.com and would want to know our latest post, you can read them from your RSS feeds reader. You have to subscribe to our RSS feed to get  our latest feeds. You will find our subscribe button as shown in the picture below.

Many websites today offer video streaming. You can enjoy watching the videos, but you can’t download them. These are very common on many well known websites. Why would they limit us from doing this? I really don’t know why but I think its because streaming these videos are already consuming much bandwidth from their connections, much more if you add downloading to it. Another very easy explanation would be they simply want you to come back to their website to watch the video again, rather than download and play it locally without having to add traffic to their site. There could be many other reasons but it does not matter, there are many tools you can use to download these videos.

Download Helper is a freeware add on for Firefox browsers. This add on allows you to download videos and images while you surf the internet. DownloadHelper also allows you to download files one by one, so that you keep bandwidth usage low for browsing other sites.

Just surf the Web as you are used to, when DownloadHelper detects it can do something for you, the icon gets animated and a menu allows you to download files by simply clicking an item.

You can download the DownloadHelper add on here.

Below is a screenshot on how to use DownloadHelper after installing it.

I have downloaded lots of videos using DownloadHelper and I have tested it on facebook, youtube, dailymotion, Google videos and some porn sites as well. This tool is very useful for downloading videos while surfing other websites. You can just  select videos to download and put them on the queue while the initial videos you selected are being downloaded one by one.

Ever had questions about who is the owner/admin behind a website?You may want to check if the site you are reading is give false information. You may want to check the owner of the site and contact him if you are interested with his website. You want to apply for a job using a website, is this a legit website? You may be sending your resume to someone who will take advantage of the information. It is important that you know how to check a domain/website for many different reasons. Many don’t know how to do this and have several questions.

These are very common questions below.

• Ever wonder who owns a specific domain/website name? Like facebook.com, palahubog.com, google.com.
• How do we find out who owns these websites?
• Where to we find relevant information for these websites?
• Like when they were created?
• When do they expire?
• Where are they hosted?
• Who registered these domains?
• Can we buy the website from them?

Many of these questions can be answered by a simple public database called the whois.

WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query/response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant or assignee of Internet resources, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system number. WHOIS lookups were traditionally performed with a command line interface application, and network administrators predominantly still use this method, but many simplified web-based tools exist. Below are a few of the web-based tools you can use for free.

http://who.is/

http://www.domaintools.com/

http://www.whois.net/

What will you find in a whois look up? Here are useful information on what you will find in a whois lookup.

Lets do a whois lookup on facebook.com and I will label the important things that you can find out about the domain. Below is the whois result for facebook.com and I have labeled the important information with Rastafari color in the results. Click the image for a larger view.

A domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity, accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) or by a national country code top-level domain (ccTLD) authority, to manage the reservation of Internet domain names in accordance with the guidelines of the designated domain name registries and offer such services to the public.

A registrant is the person who owns and probably did the registration of the domain. He went to a registrar company to register the domain so that he can use it for a website or an email.

A nameserver is the server or host of the domains. This can be a server pointing to another server where the website is hosted or stored.

Was that easy? This tool is very useful if you really are into websites. If you are buying and selling domains this would really come handy. Even if you are just speculating if this website is having legit programs or information, you can check it from the whois if they are who they say they are.

You want to slack around? Play some games on websites that you can’t go to? Want to go to Facebook and update your account, upload pictures or chat with friends? Yet you can’t do this because typing in Facebook and other websites redirect you to an error page or a page setup by your I.T administrator. Your network or I.T administrator probably blocked some websites in your computer(in your office network usually).

Well, there is one way of getting around this, you can use proxy servers. Yeah, sounds nerdy right? But it is so easy to use. First what is a proxy server and how it works? Here is a graphic stupid way to explain it.

Basically you cannot access some sites from your office because of security reasons/firewalls setup by the administrator. They may also be doing so you would focus on your work, not on sites that they are blocking. But who cares about their security measures, depriving you of your time to kill time. You should use proxy servers once in a while to enjoy the blocked websites.

How to use proxy websites?

1.) Go to a proxy website. Sample proxy sites are below.

http://cantblock.me/

http://hideu.info/

http://proxy.org/

2.) Type in your desired website in the http or URL field. Below I labeled these fields, this where you type in the desired website’s address. e.g. http://facebook.com

3.) After typing the address of the site you want to go to, just press go, browse or churva. Walah! You are on the prohibited website? Sweet!

I actually don’t enjoy doing this just to waste my time on other sites, I only use this for emergency situations.

WARNING: Do not abuse this. You may lose your job or get kicked out of school

Spam: If you have an email address I bet you’re fed up with the unsolicited mail you receive. The increase in spam has virtually relegated email as an adult only facility. Spam is a wast of our time. Many spam emails are obscene, many are offensive or insulting to one’s inteligence e.g. “I have a zillion pounds that I want to put into your bank account, please fax your bank account details to me…This is not a scam, honest!”.

There are two sides to preventing spam:

1. Stop them getting your email address: The rest of this page is about how the spammers get your email address and how to stop them from getting it.
2. What to do if they have got your email address. If the spammers have already got your email address I recommend that you change it to a new address – after you have read the rest of this page and taken the appropriate action to stop them getting your new address. If you can’t change your email address here is an excellent and free spam filter: Spam Bayes.

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Types of spam and ways to prevent it

To stop receiving spam it helps to know what kind of spam you are getting. Each type of spam requires a different method of prevention. Below are the types of spam (I am aware of) and free methods to preventing them.

• Harvested address spam

  What is it: This is probably the most common type of spam. The spammers use a computer system (spider or spam-bot’) to check almost every website on the internet (including yours). The ’spam bot’ looks at the code of every web page, it looks for the ‘@’ symbol. When it finds an ‘@’ it knows its found an email address. It then collects the bit either side of the ‘@’ symbol to capture your email address and add it to the spammers database of millions of harvested addresses. From then on that address will receive lots of spam!

  How to find out if your email address is published on a website: Go to Google.com and type your email address into the search box. Google can usually show if your email address is on any website. If google can find your address you can be sure the spammers have got it. Tip: Sometimes the website-page with your email address may be very long, from Google click the link that says ‘Cached’ and you will see the page and your email address will be highlighted.

  The solution: If the spammers have harvested your email address from a website they are not going to let it go. Get a new email address and make sure your new email address is not published online. If you must publish your email address on a website get your website designer/manager to encrypt your email address so the ’spam bots’ can’t harvest it as they robotically and relentlessly crawl the web.

• Virus Spam

  What is it? This is perhaps the 2nd most common type of spam.

  1. Somone else’s computer (not yours) gets infected with a virus.
  2. The address book on their computer has your email address.
  3. The virus sends a spam to every address on the address book.
  4. The virus ’spoofs’ the ‘from address’ in the email it sends i.e. the spam does not appear to have come from the senders email address, instead it says it came from another address taken from the address book.
  5. There is no point replying to the spam e.g. to say ‘don’t spam me’ or ‘your computer has a virus’ – as the ‘from address’ is wrong, which means it will go to someone who didn’t send the spam. (note this is why you might receive emails from people saying you sent a virus to them, when you know your computer is clean).

  How to prevent it: You can not prevent virus spam from being sent to you. The person with the infected computer needs to use quality anti virus software to clean their computer (see preventing computer viruses). You need a good spam filter to delete this kind of spam as it arrives.

• Domain name spam

  What is it? If you own a domain name for a website you are probably getting domain name spam. Spammers use the whois database to obtain a list of most of the doman names in the world (ie .com, .net. org). The spammers expect most website owners to set up generic email addresses such as sales@… and info@… They simply send spam to all of the standard generic words at email every domain name in the world.
  How to prevent it: Do not have a generic email address such as sales@ and info@. Instead have less usual addresses. Here is a list of all of the generric words (I am currently aware of) the spammers are using:
  - info@
  - mail@
  - sales@
  - contact@
  - contacts@
  - root@
  - home@
  - contacts@
  - enquiries@
  - webmaster@.
  
  Note: do not use ‘catch-all forwarding’ that forwards anything@ your-domain. Block all but specific names at your domain. Your website designer should be able to help you follow these steps.

• Dictionary spam

  What is it? You can sometimes receive dictionary spam when you use a well known email service. The spammers know that there is going to be a janesmith@bigmail.xyz. They setup computers to spam billions of names at that mail service simply by targetting every persons name.
  How to prevent it: Hopefully your email service provider has put anti spam systems in place to prevent this kind of spam. If they havn’t then you may have to find a better email servide provider.

• Windows Messenger Spam

  Do you get pop up boxes on your screen with the words “Messenger Service” in the title bar? If so you may be getting Windows Messenger Spam. Follow this link to learn how to turn off Windows Messenger Service.

• Hacked mail service spam

  Some ISPs or webmail services may be hacked by spammers or the addresses may be sold to spammers. Read the small print when signing up for an email account. Look hard for that box that says ‘we might give your address to a 3rd party, tick here if you do not want to recieve marketing info from other companies…’.
  If you can’t change your email address here is an excellent and free spam filter: Spam Bayes.

Hoax Spam

These are messages that innocent people may forward to you with some kind of hoax warning or way to make a fortune. Never respond to or forward this kind of message. They are hoaxes, see real example below. If you ‘CC’ (copy in) your friends and contacts you may be providing a way for spammers to harvest the email addresses of your friends/contacts. These rubbish emails sometimes end with something like: “Try it; What have you got to lose?”
What you have to lose is your privacy and credibility!

Typical example:
PLEEEEEEEEASEREAD!!!! IT WAS ON THE NEWS!!
Dear Friends, Please do not take this for a junk letter.
Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a cheque for US$24,800.00. You need to respond before the beta testing is over. If anyone can afford this Bill Gates is the man. It’s all marketing expense to him. Please forward this to as many people as possible. Try it; What have you got to lose????

More tools and tips to prevent spam

• Anti spam software: There are many tools you can use that check incomming mail and try to detect which is spam and which is not. The spam emails are sent to a ‘trash’ folder on your pc. This is the spam filter I recommend and its free: Spam Bayes.
• MailWasher.net is a free tool to check and manage your e-mails before you download them. I used to use this tool when I received a lot of spam. Its easy to use and free. The main benefit is that you can reveiew your email before downloading it, and delete the spam remotely.
• Avoid CC (carbon copy) for group emails that you send out.
  If you send an email (to a group of people) that might be forwarded on and on, it could get into the hands of a Spammer, who you can be sure will add the nice collection addresses to their spam address database. Instead use BCC (blind carbon copy), this means the recipients do not see the list of email addresses that your message has gone to. Also encourage others to use BCC for groups instead of CC.
• Never add your friends email address to a mailing list.
  You will not get a free prize and your friend will not thank you for the extra spam they receive.

Why doesn’t my anti-spam software prevent all of the spam?

Much anti-spam software identifies spam by the following methods:

• Blocking email from known spammer addresses.
• Identifying obscene words in the email.
• Identifying a form e.g. ‘click here to buy this rubbish’.
• Identifying certain sales/marketing words.

Many spammers use systems to do things like the following

• Each individual spam email of the millions they send appears to come from a different address.
• The invite to buy something is actually an image of text not real text so it can’t be read by your computer. The text behind the image is random words that you don’t see but look innocent to your computer.
• The invite is to click a link for a website, so there is not a form on the email. The form to buy something is on the website.