Blog Entries

24. 09. 2022 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video (Tutorials), Part 10: Animation

Since one apparently just can’t have enough parts of a multi-part blog post, why not one more? Let’s depart slightly from the usual themes, because I want to talk about something that’s applicable to videos that are slightly more marketing oriented than your typical tutorial videos. Of course you could always make full-blown marketing videos…

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30. 06. 2022 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 9: Interviewing an Expert

Welcome back to our ongoing series of how to improve the video tutorials you make, especially when you’re on a tight budget, and by that I mean both money and time. Today let’s look at conducting a live, one-on-one in-person interview. Note that online interviews and documentary-style off-screen interviews are their own full, separate topics)….

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28. 04. 2022 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 8: It’s All About That Audio

So your video shooting and editing skills are at a high level now, and you’re comfortable and even confident appearing in your videos. You’ve acquired a good quality microphone, greatly improving the resulting audio. But down deep you know there are still some things about the sound you could improve. I’ve already written a bit…

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29. 03. 2022 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Tutorials, Part 7: Script Delivery

You might remember from the last post in my series on creating video tutorials that we talked about improving the quality of picture-in-picture video tutorials. I broke it down into two parts, the background and the presenter, with this summary for the latter: What’s realistically the most natural way you can present yourself in the…

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20. 12. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation, PHP

Intermediate Features in the Grav CMS

In my last post I described an easy, developer-oriented setup for a website based on the Grav file-based content management system, along with the EasyDev PHP development suite that contributes PHP, Apache and MySQL (although the latter isn’t necessary for Grav to operate). Used together, you can build quite sophisticated user-facing sites. Today I’m going…

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25. 08. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation, PHP

A Dead Simple CMS/WAMP Development Environment

Suppose you need to set up or maintain a simple but professional looking website on Windows (maybe even on a budget), be able to develop using tools like PHP, have it all work even when you don’t have web access, and then once you’re done, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to compile,…

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30. 06. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 5: Publishing on YouTube

Congratulations on finishing your first tutorial video! So now you can put it on your corporate web site, and maybe email or tweet out a link to it. But what about visibility? If your business is large enough to have a marketing department, you (or they) will likely want your tutorial videos to be part…

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20. 04. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 4: Editing and Compositing

In my previous blog post we looked at how to use a green screen to add an extra touch to the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, particularly focusing on the ambient space for filming, the lighting (both the screen itself and the subject), and the necessary audio and video equipment. The goal of using…

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26. 02. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Tutorials, Part 3: Using a Green Screen

In my last blog post we looked at practical suggestions for improving the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, focusing on tips for audio recording, video recording and editing, writing the script, and uploading them. Now suppose you want to take the next step that will (hopefully!) add some impact to your tutorials: putting yourself…

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11. 01. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own YouTube Tutorials, Part 2

In my previous post I described the kind of tasks, resources and software that we had to master in order to create YouTube IT tutorial videos like the 20 Alyvix videos we made in 2020. As we looked back to compare the first few videos we made with the last few, it was easy to…

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30. 12. 2020 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own YouTube Tutorials, Part 1

In a recent blog post I described our new Alyvix YouTube channel that contains the 20 Alyvix tutorial videos we’ve created this year. Each video is a self-contained tutorial that showcases one aspect of how Alyvix can be used for visual monitoring, both practical application examples and for learning basic concepts and operations. Since one…

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21. 12. 2020 Charles Callaway Documentation, Unified Monitoring, Visual Synthetic Monitoring

The Alyvix Video Tutorial Channel on YouTube

This year we introduced an Alyvix YouTube channel to complement the written Alyvix user guide. It now contains a number of videos that explain how to monitor specific tasks as well as explaining background knowledge about the building blocks you can use to create your own Alyvix test cases. At the end of this year…

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03. 12. 2020 Charles Callaway Documentation

Creating Documentation in Sphinx

Most small open source documentation projects use Markdown to create their project documentation. After all, it has a minimalistic and thus easy-to-learn syntax, does all the basics well, renders very quickly (even quickly enough to create a real-time WYSIWYG viewer), and is almost universally supported across popular web platforms like GitHub. At some point, though,…

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01. 12. 2019 Charles Callaway Documentation, NetEye

Squaring the User Guide Circle

The official Icinga 2 user guide is quite extensive, but it’s not always complete.  That’s normal in today’s world of fast changing software where the focus is on delivering new capabilities quickly.  Even here at NetEye most of the documentation we produce for our user guide is written when we add new modules and features,…

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08. 07. 2019 Charles Callaway Documentation, Unified Monitoring

“How To” Improve the User Guide

Every software suite needs documentation. But the more features we add to NetEye to meet customer needs, the larger the user guide becomes.  Over time, it’s important to make sure that the guide continues to meet the needs of NetEye users despite this. In particular, modern methodologies like Agile that we use in NetEye often…

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