I’ve had a few email inquiries about a Facebook page for this site. The answer to that, for now, is there isn’t one. Likewise for a Twitter page, or Reddit, or any of the other social network places. Fact is, I’m finding it tough to keep up with the week-to-week on this site, and now that I’ve added the electronics site, the pressure to get some meaningful content on there has me on my butt in front of the computer during most of my free time. The woes of the one-man operation.

I’m not complaining, just putting the info out there.

I decided early on that I would focus on YouTube as the “marketing engine” for this site, rather than the social network sites. So far, that has worked out better than I thought it would, with YouTube the top referrer of traffic and, as of today, responsible for about 43% of new visitors to this site. Google comes in at number two, and this is due, in part, to search terms like “ibuildit” and other variations. My assumption is the watermark on all of my videos is the driving a lot of that traffic as well.

So, no Facebook, but you are certainly free to contact me using the contact page (2017 – no longer active). Putting anything like an email address in text form on a website invites a torrent of unwanted emails from spambots. Occasionally they manage to get one through the contact page, as well. The contact page requires you to enter your email address before it will send the message. Problem is, it doesn’t verify that it’s an actual, working address. As long as it conforms to the basic format, with an “at” and a “dot”, then it assumes it’s real. Here’s the thing: I occasionally get emails from people asking questions, and when I try to answer, the message bounces back – invalid email address. So, if you are reading this and have contacted me through that page, but haven’t received a reply, you may have mistyped your email address. Please check it over before sending.

On the subject of email, I’ve received a few that are less than complimentary. These are sent via the contact page, and exploit the weakness outlined above: the sender can enter anything that looks like an email address to send me a message, anonymously. The comments are laughable, and I can’t fathom just how bored someone would have to be to waste their time doing it. Certainly it has no impact on me; anyone that has a legitimate complaint about this site, and was born with a backbone, can contact me properly.

Last week’s project was the steel work table, and for that I made four videos. Each video is about 12 minutes long and I tried to show a lot of the detail without getting bogged down in the minutiae, or spending longer on an operation than was needed. A project of this size, which I’d be covering in depth, usually results in about 14 gigabytes of raw HD footage, in as many as 40 clips. To edit this into four reasonably concise videos takes time. It took, no exaggeration, a full day from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night to do the editing on these. That’s on top of all of the actual work in the project and setting the scenes to film it.

I use PowerDirector to edit the videos, and like a lot of other sophisticated computer software, it can tell when you’ve invested considerable time on a particular sequence of scenes and transitions without saving your work, before it decides to crash. Twenty minutes down the drain.

Then there’s the time spent watching through the final rough cut prior to rendering to look for mistakes. Then to watch through again, after the sequence has rendered to find that you missed something and have to go back and redo it. Then there are the times when the video renders, but, for some reason I can’t figure out, is corrupted.

Again, this is not me complaining, just a cautionary tale for those that think that making videos is fun and easy.
Here’s another thing: I haven’t gotten much (yet…), but I see that others are often criticized for saying “ah” or “um” too much, the critic usually has the very solid advise that we all should be reading from a script… Not as easy as it sounds. I’ve tried that, and failed miserably. Reading from a rehearsed script is great for trained actors, or if you happen to have some innate acting ability (I have none, you know it), but for the rest of us, we’ll come off sounding mechanical and unnatural. Heck, I have trouble sounding natural whenever the camera is on, even though I’m the only one that has to see it. “Just being yourself” can be really hard to do when you are trying to explain something on camera.

Something that is a little off-putting is that whenever I want to get started on a new project, I can’t just dive in and get going. No, I have to stop and get the camera to set up, fix the lighting, tidy up the shop some, clean my nails, comb my hair, put on a clean shirt and make sure I’m not doing anything that looks too dangerous… It can take the shine off, just a bit.

From what I’ve written above, it may seem that I don’t like doing it, what with all the bellyaching I’m doing here. That’s not the case. I look forward to making the video nearly as much as I like building the project, and probably a bit more than I like writing the article for this site. Being relatively new to this, maybe that’ll change at some point.

I hope not, and hopefully I don’t run out of interesting things to make to present here and in the videos.