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Our good friend Gene Rosen from Photogenec, a screencast tutorial development group, and the newest member of the BatchBook experts program, has developed a terrific screencast to demonstrate a lead generation web solution he created using Freeway Pro WYSIWYG Mac web design software and his BatchBook web forms.
We love the way this screencast brings to life the real-world problem of overcomplicated, unreliable web site design and marketing. Screencasts are a great way to quickly communicate the problem your product solves – and the folks at Photogenec add fun personality to it, as well.
Thanks to Gene for the effort and great resource for BatchBook! You can see more about Gene’s services as a BatchBook expert on our new expert’s page.
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Tags: batchbook, screencasts, tutorial, webinar
Webinars make your fingers go faster!
You may have had the chance to work with our amazing Customer Service and Onboarding Specialist Stephanie Sweeney. Did you know that she also runs our Webinar program? At least twice a month, Stephanie provides free online training on how to better use BatchBook to run your business. Recent topics include “Using BatchBook for Fun & Profit”, “BatchBook for Sales” and “The Small Business Webinar”, which looks at how BatchBook integrates with some other cool small business web apps like MailChimp, Freshbooks, Zendesk and Shoeboxed. And there’s always a Q&A session at the end, so you can ask specific questions that you may have about how you’re using BatchBook.
Register now for today and next week
The schedule can be found on our Onboarding page, but I’ll save you the click. Today at 2pm ET we’ve got “Using BatchBook for Fun & Profit” (which is kind of our BatchBook 101) and next Thursday, January 28th at 2pm ET is the very popular “Small Business Webinar“. Click the title of the session to register.
We encourage you to check out a webinar if you haven’t had a chance to. If you can’t make it, we have some recorded and posted on the Onboarding page for viewing at your leisure. And we will be adding more in upcoming weeks.
We’re always looking for ways to help our customers succeed with our product. Please let us know what webinar you’d like to see and maybe we’ll add it to our webinar schedule!
UPDATE: Due to a scheduling conflict, the Small Business Webinar date has been moved to Thursday, February 4th at 2pm EST. Still plenty of time to register here!
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Tags: batchbook, Community, Customer Service, training, tutorial, webinar
This is the final post in a three-part series about how I made the BatchBook Screencasts. In Part 1, we recorded the screencasts. In Part 2, we encoded the screencasts and embedded them on the web. Today, we’re going to take your screencasts and turn them into a video podcast. We’ll also submit the podcast to iTunes.
Making the screencast into a podcast
First of all, what exactly is a podcast? Sure it’s audio, and you can subscribe to it, but really… what is it? Luckily, we included “Podcasting” in our glossary of tech terms!
Podcasting is a kind of audio broadcasting that uses the Internet, like an on-line radio show. The name was created by combining “iPod” and “broadcasting”. Podcasting involves making one or more files available in an RSS feed. A pod-caster (the creator of the podcast) makes a list of music and/or other audio files and makes the list available for other users to retrieve.
So, once you have a few audio or video files, all you need to make them into a podcast is an RSS feed. That’s what your listeners/viewers can “subscribe” to in an RSS reader or podcasting client (such as iTunes).
What’s an RSS feed? That’s in the glossary too!
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a document that contains either a summary of content from a web site or the full text of a website. RSS feeds makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites automatically rather than checking them manually.
What does an RSS feed look like? It looks a lot like an XML document (because it is an XML document!). Here’s an example of a feed—our BatchBlue News RSS feed (truncated after the first news story):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>BatchBlue News</title>
<description>News updates from BatchBlue Software, LLC</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com</link>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:21:00 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:20:14 -0500</pubDate>
<generator>FeedForAll Mac v2.1 (2.1.0.1); http://www.FeedForAll.com/</generator>
<item>
<title>BatchBlue Launches New Social CRM Solution Specifically for Marketers: BatchBook for Marketing</title>
<description>New BatchBook for Marketing Includes Functionality to Manage Queries from Peter Shankman's Popular Help a Reporter Out (TM) Service</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com/pr-090122-batchbook-for-marketing.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">BF056ABF-4EAA-4872-8FC5-247166D68DBE-3971-000031C872E078D5-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:21:00 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
...
Looks scary, huh? If you look carefully, it makes sense… the “channel” is what the feed is about (in this case “BatchBlue News”). There’s the date last updated, link to the feed’s author, some technical jargon, etc. An “item” is an individual entry (or in this case, a news story). Each “item” has a description, a link, a date, etc.
Luckily, you don’t have to edit this by hand. There are some nice tools out there to help you do it. The one I use is called FeedForAll. Specifically, I use FeedForAll for Mac ($40).
The interface is much less scary. In fact, it’s downright inviting. Here’s the “channel”:
And an individual item:
So, that’s an RSS feed. But there’s one more thing needed in an RSS feed to make it a podcast: an enclosure. In a podcast feed, each “item” will contain not only a <link> but an <enclosure> (a link to the actual media file). What’s the difference? When a podcast episode is published, it will often be posted on a web page or blog. The <link> is that page. The <enclosure> is a direct link to the media file (audio or video) itself. That way, podcasting clients such as iTunes know what file to download.
Here’s an example of an item from our screencasts feed. The screencasts have an <enclosure> (the video file) as well as a <link> (a direct link to that video on our screencasts page).
<item>
<title>Manage your contacts and social network</title>
<description>Manage your contacts and social network</description>
<link>http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts.html#contacts-video</link>
<enclosure url="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/contacts.m4v" length="8750577" type="video/x-m4v"></enclosure>
<guid isPermaLink="false">0BB7B405-54E1-4BD3-85D8-9E43757ED8A7-29077-00011275E171D3F1-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:05:32 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:subtitle>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:03:56</itunes:duration>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>
Getting the podcast on iTunes
The first thing everyone wants to do when they get a podcast is submit it to iTunes. Why? iTunes has the largest, most popular podcast directory built into the application. You can submit your podcast to get it listed on iTunes. An iTunes listing looks like this:
To submit your podcast, open iTunes. Then go to the iTunes Store. Choose Podcasts. Near the bottom, you’ll (eventually) find a “Submit a Podcast” link. That will bring you to a screen that looks like this:
That’s all it takes to actually submit your podcast. Within a few days, it will be approved.
Now, there are ways to enhance your feed for iTunes, to make it look better. iTunes uses a slew of additional tags for the RSS feed. For example, here’s the “channel” for the screencasts feed:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>BatchBook Screencasts</title>
<description>BatchBook is an easy-to-use customer relationship manager (CRM) designed for small business owners. The BatchBook Screencasts will show you the ins and outs of using BatchBook.</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com/screencasts.html</link>
<copyright>2006-2008 BatchBlue Software, LLC</copyright>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<language>en</language>
<lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:33:55 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:33:44 -0500</pubDate>
<generator>FeedForAll Mac v2.1 (2.1.0.1); http://www.FeedForAll.com/</generator>
<itunes:subtitle>BatchBook Screencasts</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>BatchBook is an easy-to-use customer relationship manager (CRM) designed for small business owners. The BatchBook Screencasts will show you the ins and outs of using BatchBook.</itunes:summary>
<itunes:category text="Technology">
<itunes:category text="Software How-To"/>
</itunes:category>
<itunes:keywords>small business crm, contact management</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:author>BatchBlue Software</itunes:author>
<itunes:owner>
<itunes:email>adarowski@batchblue.com</itunes:email>
<itunes:name>Adam Darowski</itunes:name>
</itunes:owner>
<itunes:image href="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/itunes.png" />
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
...
As you can see, the iTunes info contains such data as a summary, categories, contact information, artwork, and more.
Here’s an example of an “item” in an iTunes-optimized screencast feed:
<item>
<title>Manage your contacts and social network</title>
<description>Manage your contacts and social network</description>
<link>http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts.html#contacts-video</link>
<enclosure url="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/contacts.m4v" length="8750577" type="video/x-m4v" ></enclosure>
<guid isPermaLink="false">0BB7B405-54E1-4BD3-85D8-9E43757ED8A7-29077-00011275E171D3F1-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:05:32 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:subtitle>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:03:56</itunes:duration>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>
Thankfully, we don’t have to edit that by hand either. FeedForAll can handle iTunes data just fine. Here’s the interface for adding “channel” information:
And here’s the additional info for an “item”:
Every time you add a new item (or episode, or screencast), simply update the feed and iTunes will automatically update as well.
And you’ve done it!
If you’ve followed along since the first post, you’ve got a bunch of screencasts, they’re embedded on your site, they’ve got a feed, and they’re listed in iTunes. Sweet! I hope you found this series helpful!
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Tags: enclosure, FeedForAll, how-to, itunes, podcast, rss, screencasts, tutorial, video
Earlier this month, I kicked off a three-part series about how I recorded the BatchBook screencasts with a post about the hardware and software I used to record the screencasts. I also included tips about scripting and recording the screencasts.
Today, I’m going to talk about how I exported the screencasts and embedded them within BatchBlue.com and BatchBook, our small business CRM.
When we last left our heroes, we had just recorded our screencasts (with Screenflick), done some simple splicing with QuickTime Pro, and saved a full-size, full-quality QuickTime video. This video looks and sounds great. The only problem is, it’s too big for the web. I’m not just talking about the file size. For example, the uncompressed version of the “Manage your contacts and social network” screencast came in at 27.1 megabytes. That’s not bad for a four-minute video.
The problem is the video’s dimensions. Before resizing, my videos were 1038 pixels wide and 758 pixels tall. While many users have large monitors now, there are still a ton of 1024×768 screens out there. That’s pretty much the size of our video. Factor in menu bars, task bars, browser windows, browser buttons, and other toolbars and we quickly realize we need to shrink our video.
While we’re shrinking our video, we might as well make a decision on what format to use. As a Mac guy, I love QuickTime. But the reality is the Flash Player is going to be on more computers by default than the QuickTime Player. And quite frankly, when you’re looking to sell your product, you want to get in front of as many eyes as possible. So, Flash it is!
Encoding the screencasts
Wait, why not put it on YouTube or Vimeo? I mean, they’ll host it for you with no bandwidth costs! That’s true. But the quality of those sites is absolute crud. Particularly for screencasts. I’ve just never had any success uploading something that looked good enough to put my name on it. By hosting the screencasts ourselves, we have full control over the quality.
As an aside, if your goal is to spread your video virally, you’d be nuts not to put it on the video sharing sites. But this video isn’t a viral marketing piece—it is a tutorial. So, image quality matters much more than sharability.
I’ve had good results encoding to Flash using Adobe’s very own Adobe Flash CS3 Video Encoder. The Encoder comes with Flash CS4 Professional ($699), but can be found packaged with other applications in the many Adobe bundles. I know there are other applications that export to Flash Video, but I haven’t tried any since I have Flash handy.
I export using the highest quality. I figure if you’re taking the time to watch a screencast, you probably don’t care about downloading a couple extra megabytes to get the best image quality possible. Here are the settings I use:
Basically, I used the default High Quality setting and then resized the video to 800 pixels wide. If you are compressing multiple videos, you can select all before entering these settings. That will apply the same settings to all videos.
So, now you’ve got a bunch of .flv files. But, how do you get them on your site?
Embedding the screencasts
I did quite a bit of Googling to find the best way to embed your own Flash videos. I was completely impressed by JW FLV Media Player. It’s open source, it’s cheap (€30 for a commercial license, free for personal use), it has great support, it has all kinds of add-ons, and it is accompanied by simple tools like this setup wizard.
JW FLV Player comes with two files you need to upload to your site—player.swf and swfobject.js. Then, in the page’s <head>, you need to link to the Javascript file like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
Then, where you want your video to be embedded, you drop something like this:
<div id="contacts-video" class="screencast">Screencast: Manage your contacts and social network</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject('player.swf','mpl','800','604','9');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('flashvars','&file=screencasts/contacts.flv&image=screencasts/title-contacts.png');
so.write('contacts-video');
</script>
Just to explain what is going on here, we’re creating a <div> (with the id of contacts-video) that the screencast will live in. The text “Screencast: Manage your contacts and social network” is what will appear if the user does not have the Flash Player installed (the iPhone is handy for testing this scenario!). After that, we have a script that takes the player (player.swf) and customizes it based on a whole bunch of parameters. Then, the “so.write('contacts-video');” part replaces that text with the Flash video.
And huzzah! You’ve got this!:
Screencast: Manage your contacts and social network
Next steps
Congratulations! You now have your screencasts embedded on your web site! Next time, I’ll talk about how to make an iPod version of the screencast, build a feed for it, and get it listed in iTunes as a video podcast.
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Tags: embedding, encoding, flash video, how-to, jw flv media player, screencasts, tutorial, video
We recently published an all new set of BatchBook screencasts. I often am asked how I record our screencasts, so I’m going to write up the process in a series of three blog posts. Today, I’ll tackle the actual recording of the screencasts. Part 2 will discuss encoding and embedding in your site while Part 3 will discuss building a feed for your screencasts and getting them on iTunes.
So, let’s get recording! First, what do you need?
Hardware
My personal philosophy in pretty much everything I do is to do as little as possible to do the job right. So, my recording setup doesn’t have any mixing boards, high-end microphones, or silly things that make my p’s and s’s sound better. It has a laptop and a microphone. Specifically:
- White MacBook: I do love my BatchBook-issued MacBook. I’m not quite as lucky as Matt (he has one of the new MacBooks), but this is still my second favorite Mac I’ve ever had. If you’re not a Mac person, I apologize in advance for the Maciness of this post. I’m sure you can do all of this with Windows. I just don’t know how (that’s what comments are for!).
- MacMice MicFlex USB Desktop Microphone: This microphone might (I said might, not admitting anything) have accidentally come with me from my last job. What’s to love? It’s USB. It’s bendy. It has a stand if you need to bring it further away from your computer. It’s perfect. And it’s around fifty bucks.
And that’s it. Don’t go crazy. Your interface is going to change in 60 days anyway and you’ll need to record these again.
Software
My setup doesn’t involve a ton of software either:
- Screenflick: Screenflick is a solid video capture app for the Mac that only costs $20 (regular is $29, but they’re running a special). I’ve gotten quite used to it, though I have to admit that if I was going to start from scratch I might use Screenflow. The effects in Screenflow are gorgeous—but of course, they also increase production time a LOT. Screenflick doesn’t have many bells and whistles, but that also makes it dead simple to use.
- QuickTime Pro: Screenflick exports to QuickTime. Once you accept the fact that you won’t get it all done in one take, you’ll record your screencast in well-planned segments (more on that in a bit). I use QuickTime Pro (at $29.99, still one of the best bargains in software) to splice these together and re-export as a new QuickTime movie. Then they’re ready for Flash or iPod encoding.
I do use other software for my screencasting process, but those are related to the encoding (Part 2) and feed creation (Part 3). If you’re just looking to record the screencasts, this is all you need.
Script
My best advice about a script is to have one. However, don’t script every word and action. When you’re recording and clicking around the screen, you won’t have much attention left to devote to a piece of paper. I used a bulleted list of topics I knew I needed to cover. I could use whatever words felt right at the time, but I knew I needed to hit everything on that list.
The most important part of the script, for me, was setting up a BatchBook account specifically for the screencasts. I needed to make sure I had the correct data in place (at the right time) to show what I needed to in the screencast. This can become a pain when you re-record because of mistakes, because you need to remember what to delete before you start recording again. Nothing like starting to talk about adding a particular Affiliation that you then notice is already on the page. You immediately trip over yourself and need to start over yet again.
So, take 90% of the time you assumed you’d devote to the script and instead focus on creating a useful, tailored and REALISTIC account for demo purposes.
Environment
I work from home. But I also have two small children. Recording audio can be a challenge. So, I did what any rock star would do—I started recording at about 10pm. While the six screencasts actually total about 23 minutes in length, recording them took more like 4 ½ hours, bringing me to 2:30 am.
Despite the late hour, this definitely had it’s benefits. Not only was it quiet in the house, it was quiet outside the house. No garbage trucks or school buses go by at 1 am. I went as far as turning off the heat to make sure it didn’t kick on as I recorded. When I used to try to record podcasts in an office building, the air conditioning was the bane of my very existence.
I also have a new, small office in our basement. Turns out that when I closed the door it had excellent natural acoustics. I didn’t add any audio effects whatsoever.
Tips
Here are some things that I picked up and will definitely do again next time I record:
- Record them all at once: The day of recording, we decided we should probably have an Import screencast. While my first thought was “eh, I’ll just do it later”, I changed my mind and wrote the script that day so I could record at night. The reasons to record at once are plenty—your cropping settings are the same, your data is the same, your voice levels are the same, the environment sounds the same, etc. Basically, the one way to ensure that all the screencasts feel like they belong together is to do them together.
- Strategically pause: As I mentioned before, you’re not going to be able to do the whole thing at once. Focus on nailing one main concept, then if you’re not 100% sure how the next section is going to go, pause. But don’t just pause, pause strategically. Be completely silent. Do not move your mouse. Leave your mouse in a spot where you can easily put it when you start to record again. It can be frustrating when you need to re-record a section, but you realize that you talked straight into the mouse clicks of the next section. That means you need to do both of them all over again. Keep the mouse still and be quiet—you’ll thank yourself later when it is a super-easy cut and paste in QuickTime Pro.
- Repeat, repeat, repeat: At some point it is going to feel like you’ve said the same thing 500 times. You probably have. But every time you go back to re-record because of a messup, it comes out better. I promise you. Keep at it until you get it right. It’s worth it.
So, there you have it. Now you’ve got a whole bunch of screencasts recorded and trimmed and edited in QuickTime Pro. Next time, I’ll talk about how to encode the screencasts for the web.
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Tags: how-to, micflex, quicktime pro, screencasts, screenflick, screenflow, tutorial, video
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