Making a cat blog. I can see you but you can't see me yet.

I think that's my cat

The first several days of cat blog-making has felt administrative as we’ve been settling in the roots for all of the basics.

Account and social media basics

-    Creating accounts for popular social media and content sharing sites (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Blogger). Some of these integrate well with each other.

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Create accounts for other necessities

o   Email to use for all other accounts and for communication (Gmail)

o   Website domain (godaddy)

Soon after it was clear what other areas needed account creation to synchronize much of the online media content. This linking would save a lot of time by having certain posts in one area (such as on the blog) re-post automatically in another area (like Facebook). Some of the social media sites already allow for accounts to be connected. These methods add convenience but really need to figure out certain issues such as redundant cross-posting and whether all aspects of a blog post can be re-posted or not (in other words, posting to YouTube which will automatically re-post to the Blog, but then will the video show up in an automatic Twitter re-post). There are many widgets and HTML modifiers out there that help with this. Fortunately minimal programming experience will work for the simple solutions (but still trying to figure some of them out).

-     -   IFTTT.com for automatic reposting

-     -   Feedburner

Next, we needed content-specific and viral-potential accounts to help distribute our message further. Cat related websites are good for this, such as Cheezburger. Other sites like BuzzFeed to try to catch extra viewers and sharing.

Editing content

We have lots of videos and pictures, plus planning to obtain much more. Thus, we need to process and edit all of this to make it into a presentable format for a general audience.  With almost no graphic design and other design experience, some of the basic and free software should work for us.

We started with VSDC and Windows Movie Maker for video editing. A combination of PhotoScape and FastStone Image Viewer for picture editing, as well as www.befunky.com for really cool image modification. The PhotoScape program is better than all of the previously mentioned movie and picture editors specifically to add Text to overlay on the files (with the most options of types of fonts and ways of editing various aspects of the letters/outline,etc.)

That’s where we are right now, with plenty of room to go forward...