Help creating your niche blog

YPSILANTI, Mich. — Here are some videos that were created for the online journalism class at the Univeristy of Michigan-Flint, but walk through the steps necessary to:

• push your blog to Twitter
• create a Twitter gadget for your blog
• set up a Facebook Fan page
• create a fan page gadget
• push blog content to your fan page
• create social bookmarking options for your blog

Help with video assignment

UPDATE 3-30-10: I just changed the width of my sidebar and the blog post area, so I've made the necessary width adjustments.

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — A student recently asked a question about embedding a video welcome into the sidebar. Note, how I embedded the Welcome here on the left. I created it by using a HTML/JavaScript gadget. I did this by copying the embed code from YouTube into the content area. I had to adjust the height and width to fit the sidebar space.

Note, the embed code arrives with a width of 480 pixels and a height of 385 pixels. That needs to be adjusted to fit the sidebar, which has a width of 150 pixels. I did a proportion calculation (150*385/480) to determine the corresponding height — about 118.

There are other ways to do it, too, such as through the YouTube video bar gadget or through VodPod (by creating another HTML/JavaScript for Vodpod), but those bring other videos along, too, so you would need to limit it to the one video. That might not be practical as more videos are created.

Hi JRNL 310

This is my test for Twitterfeed.