Introduction
Integrate pictures into your page
Integrate video into your page
Integrate MP3s into your page
Integrate third-party rich media into your page
Making your own PodCasts
Introduction
One of the first misconceptions to get over with GooglePages (or any WebService) is that you might think that will host all your video and MP3s. It isn't designed for this kind of storage but it will allow you to build a page to point to the content that you have. Don't worry it's not as bad as you might think. There are plenty of free applications out there which will host your content for free and show you the code you need to insert into your GooglePages so that they will display. There are three main types of rich content you are likely to want to put into your pages. These are pictures, MP3s and Video. The limits on GooglePages are either 100 pages or 100 MB of storage.
One point to note, GPC will remove your advanced tags such as embed, javascript etc; so this document assumes that you will save your file to local disk, edit it and then do an upload.
Links to all of the services I've mentioned are contained in the top left rail.
Integrating Pictures
For pictures, you can use the free service Flickr which is the one that I am using. Create libraries of photos and then create badges which can be inserted into your pages. There is an example on the left rail. This code is auto-generated by the service based on your choice. Flickr is free and you can use your Yahoo User Id if you have one. The user interface is very intuitive. Create an album and give it an appropriate name. You can then decide if the album is public or private. If it's public, you can create either a Shockwave version or a HTML version. The code can be embedded in your GooglePages or other service. One of the nice features is that if you have a Blog, which many of us do these days, you can post your photos directly to your Blog. In the case of BlogSpot, Flickr will auto-generate an email known only to you and you can use it to post your photos to the Blog. You can then decide to embed the Blog inside your GooglePages. I have another write-up on this if you're interested in the left rail. Additionally, you can tag your photos for use with Technorati. The competitor with Flickr is BuzzNet which hosts both pictures and video. You'll see the video embedded below.
If you want to share individual photos you must choose a unique alias. Choose carefully as you're locked into it. Then using this alias, you can show people your alias or share individual pictures.
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/seadarie/">My Flickr Alias</a>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/seadarie/
130491208/">Flying High Photo</a>
Another approach is to embed thumb-nails into your page. There are two types of thumb-nails. (a) HTML thumbnail. You'll see this on the left-rail (b) Shockwave thumbnail which is far more polished but you'll need the plug-in. It's not so much a big deal anymore in my opinion.
My Flickr Photos
This was my day out in BettysTown and I've explained this in the commentary on the photos. Once again, Flickr uses a Wizard style interface and auto-generates the code for you similar to Google AdSense. Then just cut-n-paste.
Recently, I returned from Bratislava, Slovakia where I took some some photos. Although Flickr is really nice and so too is Buzznet, you may not want your photos stored on a remote site - you want them stored locally in some designated stoarage site which you maintain. The advantage of this is that you don't have to go for the professional versions of the online software which you'd need to store your entire photo collection which could run into many hundreds over a few years. However, you want to put some photos into your Blog. Using Blogger there are two ways to do this (1) A manual upload (2) Install Google Picasa on your machine and use it to publish the pictures to your Blogger Blog. I've done both (1) is very manual and tiresome (2) is great because Picasa indexes all the photos on your machine and let's you know which ones are most recent. There are other features other than Blogging pictures in Picasa but I'll discuss this one now. Plus, you can add as many photos to your Blog as you'd like within reason. Picasa is a standalone program that you download onto your PC. It takes the perspective that you own the photos and don't want another service to own them. Take a look at my Blog entry Using Picasa for Pictures which has a few Picasa-added photos inserted.
Once you have them imported into your Blog, you can then link
to them in
your Web page. You don't have to place the pictures in your Blog, you
can use another
program which will host your media files. I discuss one such solution
for MP3s but there
are many others.
You can also create Collages which are a nice effect.
ThumbNails. There has been some talk about how to create your own thumb-nails. There is a Shareware program which will create ThumbNails, called 'Eazy Thumbnails'. It will build your thumb-nails for you if you wish to build your own Web based solution. You can also save your thumbnails to a Web page using a HTML template that you can easily customize to create your own layouts, and there's helpful documentation that includes full instructions and some useful tips. Easy ThumbNails
A service I would recommend and one I saw promoted by a Google member, visit HuckTunes is PutFile. Register free to PutFile and it will store your media. It's free and gives you reasonable storage. Then you can pop it into your Web page. Here is where you can possibly store your pics and their equivalent thumbnails.
A nice aspect of this service is that you get a customizable home page based on your Web User Id, which in my case is Seadarie. See My PutFile Home Page which includes my rich media.
<a href="http://www.putfile.com/seadarie">
My PutFile Home Page</a>
<a href='http://www.putfile.com'>
<img border='0' src='http://x402.putfile.com/
4/11714355537.jpg' alt='Hosted
by Putfile.com'></a>
So you can store your files here and save your GooglePages space.
I've also added some Buzznet photos from my back garden in the left rail. Buzznet is closely aligned with MySpace so if you have party photos it's a good place for them.
JAlbum for everything
Now, let's say you don't want to host bits on another site. You want to host it all on one site, video, pictures the lot... How can you do this? There's a great freeware tool out there called JAlbum which was recommened by a GooglePages member. Using this tool, it will generate all the html code, js, css - the works. I transferred my 26 photos from my trip into the product and it generated the main page and the thumbnails. I used a different 'skin' from the standard ones becuase it had a standard header and footer which I modified for my own purposes. Now, here's the kicker. It generated 126 files. So, if you're a googlepages user, you've just exceeded your limit with just one photo album. However, I signed up to a free web hosting service called freewebtown and it also has ftp access so I used the integrated ftp facilities in JAlbum to upload the pictures. There are lots of free sites out there but they don't have the cool 'Google' effect, so you might use other services for features like this and link out to them. That's the other thing. You don't get ftp access with googlepages so JAlbum isn't going to work too well with this. However, what it produces is quite wonderful and you own it all. Here's My Bratislava Trip Recorded Using JAlbum
Picasa for Thumbnails as well
You can also see my trip using the 'Save as Web Page' feature in Picasa. It produces less files than the JAlbum but is not as customizable. With time, I'm sure Picasa will have the same versatility. The main problem is that GPC has no ftp facility and it Picasa also uses folders which GPC doesn't support, so you're facing a pain-staking task if you want to convert this to GooglePages. I'm sure that GPC will offer this type of functionality further down the road to be competitive. I placed the ThumbNails here.
Moving with the times, Picase now has a free service up to 1MB of storage (this may increase since I have posted this) where it will host your content on the Web in an album. I've setup an example which can be viewed here. It will also host your video files.
There's also the ability to view the Community Photos. I did a search for pets here.
My FreeWebTown account linking to both Picasa and JAlbum view is here.
Integrating Video
For video, you can use either the free video.google.com service or the YouTube service which seems to be becoming the market leader at the present. You must submit your video for review and then when it is published, you can add a link to it. On my WebSite. Technically, the HTML code requires uses the embed and object tag. I'll show examples of this with each video feed.
