• Arrgh! I’ve hit the 300 barrier in YouTube stats. If you reach around 300 plays too quickly, YouTube puts a block on the video stats – for no apparent reason. My Angry Lion drawing got stuck like that for a couple of months. I deleted it and reloaded it in the end.

    It’s so frustrating. You get a bit of luck on one site but the site that viewers get directed to doesn’t like it – thinks you must be up to something. I’ll never know what this day of good fortune has meant to the featured video. Thanks YouTube. You give such an amazing service to the world, but this little thing is incredibly irritating. There are many videos complaining about it too!

    That has been the story of the internet for me for the last thirteen years or so that I’ve been doing websites and stuff. The internet gives and immediately takes away.

    It has always been that I find something good, start to exploit it and then the rules change. Youtube downloads is one such thing – I put on my site a message to teachers to download my videos and take them into school as they can’t view Youtube through the school’s firewalls. Now YouTube has stopped downloads! Duh! The rumour is they will charge 99c for downloads – that’s okay, I’d get a cut (I hope), but yet another rule change that ruins my plans.

  • I woke up this morning to find lots of messages sent to my inbox from my blog, which is hosted on WordPress.com. One message said, “congratulations on being chosen for the WordPress home page!” It’s true, I had to take a screen grab for posterity. It may never happen again.
    The highlighted page is, “How to draw a Kangaroo.” There has been a whopping hike in my blog stats and a significant hike in my YouTube videos being watched, which is very gratifying for a stats junkie like me!

    I’ve been blogging pretty well everyday since December, in an effort to prove to my publishers that it is a waste of time. Maybe I’m wrong? My stats graph is slowly, inexorably rising. The only drag with WordPress is that you can’t put advertising on it, but then I made a choice about that at the beginning. I get a bit fed up with ads flashing all over blogs. The odd link to related material is fine, but stuff fed from a central server? you don’t know who is using you to sell their products.

    Thanks for the recognition WordPress.

  • It seems it’s not possible to download videos from Google anymore – without a bit of specialised software, anyway. I’d relied on this being available for teachers to be able to show my videos in school from a home-made cd.

    I’d tried uploading to teachertube before, but I’d found it hard work. Something has changed and their uploading process seems to be working a lot better so I’m duplicating Drawing School on Teachertube. It will take a little while to get it all uploaded, but at least I’ve started.

    As I understand it, TeacherTube is generally allowed through school firewalls so you can show my “how to” videos on whiteboards. Please let me know if this works.