Last week we updated our Community Guidelines here on the site.
The snappily named community standards and participation guidelines are a plain English guide to what we feel is acceptable here on Talk About Local. They outline what we expect from you when you engage with us and leave comments and also what you can expect from us in return. Read more
Every now and then I come across a Twitter user who puts a ✔ after their user name or uses the words Verified Account in their profile. They do this to add an air of legitimacy to the account, to make them more plausible. I have seen an increase in and reported spammers over the last week who are using these ‘tricks’ to make them appear to be legitimate accounts.
The spam users have been trying various phishing tricks to get people to part with various bits of information, usually with a link to a legitimate looking webpage for a bank or courier firm. Pretty much what you see in the phishing e-mails, I guess you can say it is evolution.
Twitter verifies very few accounts in the great scheme of things, they did at one point have a public verification system in Beta test but this has now been closed and now they only verify things like, brands, partners, major celebrities, bands, politicians, law enforcement & government departments.
If you are using twitter.com when you look at a legitimate verified account from Twitter it will have this icon
after the user name like this
it won’t be in the profile, it won’t be after the @staffspolice user name, it will be clearly shown at the end of the bold user title at the top.
If you are using one of the desk top Twitter clients the verified logo may look like the one above or it may be more subtle like this.
in the iPhone app the same account looks like this
with a tick in a blue cut away corner denoting that the account is verified by Twitter.
If the Twitter account doesn’t have this icon next to the user name then it isn’t verified by Twitter, which means that they have not had to provide whatever proof Twitter require to prove legitimacy. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t necessarily an ‘official’ account, just that Twitter haven’t given it their stamp of approval.
Thanks to the work done by @nickkeane all the main accounts for UK Police forces are verified with Twitter, most of the ‘sub’ accounts for specialist units like Dog Units, Air Support Units & Neighbourhood Policing Teams aren’t, but you could check the validity of these by looking for a page like this from Staffordshire Police that lists all their official social media channels on your local force website.
If you want to check any twitter account yourself, you can do this by going to https://twitter.com/ to get to the Twitter home page (make sure you use https and not just http) then in the address bar enter the user name, without the @ after the / and press return.
https://twitter.com/staffspolice
this will return the user home page for that account and you will be able to see clearly on there if the account is verified or not. As I said earlier if the account isn’t verified, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t an official account, just that it isn’t verified by Twitter.
As ever the usual safety rules apply with Twitter, if some person or company contacts you out of the blue asking you to provide them with personal details or sending you links to pages where you have to enter personal details then ignore them.
We occasionally get asked about how to create tables in posts like this
| column 1 | Coumn 2 | column 3 |
| row 1 | ||
| row 2 | ||
| row 3 | ||
| row 4 |
It is easier than it looks, you could create your table in your favourite word processing package and just copy and paste it in to your blog, but this will probably give you some strange results with fonts & text sizes that may break in different browsers.
The more elegant solution is to create the table manually so you get just the bits of code you need.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this in the in built editor on a wordpress.com site so you have to hand craft the code, but don’t panic this is not as daunting as it sounds.
To create the table above I used this HTML code:
To get it to work and so the code does not look like it does above, you must paste it in to the HTML tab of the create / edit post or page window. If you don’t then you will just see the code as it is above rather than the table at the top of the page.
A bit of information about the code to help you understand it better and to help you adapt it for your requirements.
<table width=”90%” cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″> <- this sets your table up to be 90% of the width of the page with no spacing or padding around the cells.
I always make the table less than the width of the page as it looks nicer, make sure you use a % and not pixel width. Pixel (a number without the %) is a set width and if you change your theme at any time the width of the table could be bigger than the width of the page and it will break and look ugly.
<tr> <- this tells the table it is a new row
<td> <- this creates a new column, what you put in here will show up in the first cell as long as it is before this -></td>
</tr> <- this closes the row
All you do is repeat the code for each row you need.
The number of columns on each row needs to be the same other it will start to cause problems.
Feel free to copy, adapt and use the bit of code above or you could ask Google to find you a HTML Table Generator.
You can of course go it to great detail with your tables and set rows to different heights or columns to different widths, add padding etc. You can find out how to do this by asking google
As we all know, we can’t advertise on our wordpress.com blogs, which is rather annoying as many of you have found out over time that adverts ‘do’ appear on your wordpress site. WordPress do place their own Google ads on your site, but the chances are you will never have seen them as they are only displayed to users who are not logged in to the service. This is all covered by their Terms of Service.
9: Advertisements. Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account.
Anyway that is changing, you can now display adverts on your wordpress site and urn revenue from them. Before you go dashing off to sign up Bill the butcher for a £5 a week ad on your site, I should make it a bit more clear..
WordPress have announced that they are launching WordAds, with their partners Federated Media. This deal will allow WordPress site owners to sign up to show brand ads from Federated Media on their own sites and earn revenue.
So you can’t go and get local ads which are relevant to your site but you at least will be able to earn a small return for the ads on your site.
You need to have a custom domain on your site and not the standard my site.wordpress.com URL. Buying a domain and having it mapped to your wordpress site currently costs £10 ($17) if you do it all within WordPress.
I can’t see what the rates are for site owners, so it isn’t possible to say if you would cover your £10 investment or make any income from the adverts but if you have a popular blog hosted on wordpress.com, already with a custom domain it might be worth a punt.
To sign up for WordAds you need to be signed in to WordPress and then go to http://en.wordpress.com/apply-for-wordads/
Signing up isn’t a guarantee that you will be accepted according to this statement on the sign up page.
Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted. Entering the form below does not commit you to the advertising program. It just signals your interest in learning more.
It also doesn’t make it clear if when you sign up to WordAds if it replaces the Google Ads or is additional to them. If you do sign up, please let us know your experiences and what the revenue rates are.
In this step by step guide you will be shown how to add subtitles to a youtube video by using Universal Subtitles. Universal Subtitles is a free service.
I have already uploaded my video to youtube. Now we are going to add subtitles to it. This is the video we are going to use.
First of all, copy the link of the youtube video that you wish to add subtitles too.
Click the ‘share’ button. A link to the video will appear. Copy the link.
Next, go to the Universal Subtitles website.
You will see a white box underneath the text that says ‘Subtitle a Video Now’
Paste the link to your the youtube video into this box.
Then click the dark blue ‘subtitle’ button.
The video will be uploaded to Universal Subtitles.
Just beneath the video, you will see a button called ‘subtitle me’. Click that to proceed.
A pop up window will appear asking you wish language you wish to use. Select your preferred language.
You will then be given the option of watching the Universal Subtitles How To videos. I recommend you watch them. They are very short in length and explain clearly how to add subtitles.
On the next page you will see a an option to select a speed mode. I suggest you chose the ’8 second mode’ if you are a beginner. You can always change it if you feel it’s too slow.
Next, it’s time to type!
Press the green button that says ‘Play next 8 seconds’. It will play 8 seconds of the video with audio.
As the video plays, start typing the text in the white box beneath the video. If you need to, you can reply the last 8 seconds again by clicking on the blue ‘replay last 8 seconds’ button.
If you start to type too much text into the white box, the frame around it will start changing colour to warn you to start a new line.
It will go from yellow, orange to red. If the frame has turned to red you have certainly put too much text into one line. Remove some text, press enter and start a new line.
When you have typed your text and pressed enter, it will appear in a screen below the video and text entry box.
When you have finished transcribing the audio into subtitles, click the grey ‘Done? Next Step, Syncing’ button.
Now it’s time to put any finishing touches to your video such as making sure the audio and subtitles are in sync and you can also double check for spelling mistakes or add any subtitles that you missed.
Play your video. Keep an eye on the text box below your video. When you hear the audio speaking the words that are in the text box, tap the purple button.
Keep watching the white text box, and as soon as you hear the word in the next line of text being spoken, hit the purple button. This is how you will make sure your subtitles are synced to the audio.
If you find you have made a spelling error, or want to add/remove text, just click on the text that you want to amend and you will be able to edit it.
When you are happy that your audio is synced with the subtitles, click the grey ‘Done? Submit your work’ button.
A pop up message will appear, telling you that your changes have been saved. Click ‘ok’.
You will then be asked to log in or create an account. You can also sign in via twitter, OpenID, Google, or Facebook.
And that’s it! You now have your subtitled video and it’s ready to share!
You will have to option to post your video to Facebook or twitter or to email the link. You can also embed the video on your website and you will be given the Permalink too.
Here is the video we started out with above that has now been given subtitles via Universal Subtitles.
