iMovie is great for small projects because it allows you to create video for the web with simplicity and speed. I use it at work quite often, and can usually crank stuff out pretty fast. The main topic of this post is around importing video, but one thing I want to mention before I get to iMovie Importing is: If you are using badly recorded audio in your video because you think people won’t notice or care, stop it. You can easily record the audio separately with Garageband if you don’t have all the fancy audio recording software. Seriously. It’s really all about the mic you use. Go buy yourself a decent condenser mic and a Presonus Firebox and hook it up to your mac with Firewire. You can later import the audio to your video project. Importing quality audio is just as important as importing all of of your video.

Ok, on to the main topic of the post: iMovie Importing. Anyone who has ever used iMovie knows it takes FOREVER to import video files into iMovie using the traditional method: File–Import. It can churn away for hours and hours. So… if you already have a bunch of video files that are ready for iMovie editing, take a second to smile because your life is about to get easier. If you want to quickly import video into iMovie without officially ‘importing’ them through the program, you can do this little trick:

• 1. Go to your iMovie project file.
• 2. Hold down the Control Key and click on the file. A Menu will pop up. Choose ‘Show Package Contents’. A new window will appear with some folders in it.
• 3. Look for the Media folder.
• 4. Drag all of your video clips into the Media folder.
• 5. Now close all the windows and open the iMovie project.
• 6. A notification may pop up to tell you have items in the trash. If it does, click view items.
• 7. If no notifiaction appears, click on the little trash icon in iMovie window.
• 8. You should see all of your transferred video in the trash.
• 9. Hold the shift key down to select the videos.
• 10. Drag all of them over into your iMovie ‘clips’ pane.

Bingo!! A quick way to import video to iMovie. Now that I just saved you a whole lot of time, you can go buy that Pumpkin Spice Latte and still get your project done on time.

Let’s get right to it. Macs are great, but what if you want to view the files that are hidden by the OS? Here is an example scenario: You need to add some url redirects in your .htaccess file, but you can’t see the .htaccess file in your root directory because the Apple OS hides any files with a ‘.’ at the beginning of the file name.

If you use Dreamweaver:
There are a few ways to do this. First of all, if you are planning to open your .htaccess file in Dreamweaver for editing, you don’t have to do any modifications to the Finder. Just go into Dreamweaver, choose File — Open, and navigate to where your .htaccess should be. You should see a drop down box at the bottom of the dialogue box that says, ‘Enable:’. Choose ‘All Files (*.*) from the list. You should now be able to select your .htaccess file to open.

Other Options:
If you don’t use Dreamweaver, or you just want more of a complete OS hide/show visibility solution, there are a few different methods you can use for accomplishing the task. You can use the terminal to show all of your hidden files, or you can download a program to show or hide your hidden files. Here is a great post that talks about some other options:
http://http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/04/show-hidden-files.html If you choose to show hidden files using the Terminal method, make sure you are careful to type everything in correctly!

I use an svn plugin, SCPlugin on my mac at work. It’s been really great because the plugin integrates with the finder to allow you to right-click on folders or files and perform all the needed svn functions.

Two days ago I upgraded my mac to the latest OS, Snow Leopard. I was excited, and totally forgot about svn.

I went to do an svn update today and guess what? No svn options appeared when I right-clicked. Then the little lightbulb turned on above my head about the same time, ‘DOH’ came out of my mouth.

I emailed Jack Repenning, the Project Owner of SCPlugin asking when/if SCPlugin would be available for Snow Leopard. It sounds like it will be available soon, although no date was specified. Here was his response to my email:

My Question: Any rough idea when SCPlugin will be ready for Snow Leopard?

Watch the users@ list for announcements; I’m pulling a road map
(without dates) together now. One feature is that I’m hopeful we can
get at least limited functionality live in Snow Leopard within perhaps
a month.

UGC- User Generated Content has been a buzzword lately regarding the future of the web. In the old days it was all about building pages that looked cool with annoying flash intros leading the way. If you are still on that bandwagon, now’s the time to jump off. One of the best ways to build traffic to your site is to add a bit of user interaction to it.

Of course there are a lot of other things you need to do to build traffic and here is a great article from Ian Lurie that I highly recommend.

Here are seven tools I think are extremely valuable to help build up user interaction and pave the way towards returning visitors.

1. Wordpress – Wordpress, in my opinion, is the best blogging platform available. It is very easy to customize to match the style of your regular website and can be installed on your own hosting provider account. This blog is using Wordpress and is hosted on my account with GoDaddy. I modified it a bit to match the rest of my site. Blogging is very important for keeping your visitors in the loop. Don’t think that every day the same people will visit your blog page on your site. Most likely people will subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed. An RSS feed pulls your blog posts from your blog into a feed reader where someone can monitor your posts from another site. I use a service called Netvibes and have at least 15 different feeds coming in that I check every day.
2. Clearspring - I highly recommend Clearspring and would say that they offer the best widget creation and management tools around. What is a widget? A widget is a little tool that people can install in Netvibes, iGoogle or even their own web page, that can pull in virtually anything. Think of a widget as a wrapper. In that wrapper, you can pull in news, a flash-based tool, images, ebay listings, the weather or a calculator. I created a guitar tuner widget which I make available at http://www.guitar2ner.com. To date, there has been over 4,000 installs. In the widget, you can put a reference or link back to your main site. BAMM!! Instant advertising that people will see every day when they install your widget.
3. Wufoo - Wufoo provides an nifty way to place forms on your site and track them very easily. Forms are a pain in the butt. They always have been. With Wufoo, you can create drop downs, multiple choice options and more in a few simple steps. The form styles can be easily altered to match your site and you can customize the redirect web page and confirmation messages. Required and hidden fields are a breeze as well.
4. Buzzdash – If you want to add some quick interaction to your site while getting some valuable target information, take a look at BuzzDash. Easily create a poll and watch the votes grow as you see what people really think about well…anything.
5. Ning – I’ve got three words for you: Customizable Social Network. If you have a niche site and you know you have some contacts who would really enjoy being a part of something, you can create your own branded social network through Ning. Ning allows your users to add friends, write posts, send messages and more. Now you can create that social network for Hairy Guys with Modified Snowblowers.
6. vBulletin – vBulletin is perhaps the best solution out there for creating forums. No it isn’t free like phpBB, but it offers more flexibility and customization and is worth every penny of the license you’ll need to use it.

One other note about forums: You can actually install a forum on Wordpress as a plugin so that you don’t have to have two databases going that have to talk to one another. You can integrate a forum with Wordpress using the Simple:Press forum plugin.

There are many other useful tools out there, some of which I will talk about in the future. The tools listed above are specifically related to user interaction that can be generated from someone’s own website. Please feel free to leave questions or comments, and I will do my best to respond.