How to embed Instagram Photos and Videos into your web page, a easy guide

With millions of photos and videos being uploaded on Instagram every day, many people feel the need to embed the photo or a video from their Instagram stream to their website.  Well this tutorial helps you with that.  

Please thank the makers of this free tool, Digital Inspiration who have provided with a website for conversion of the code to html5.  

Okay, on with the tutorial, its rather simple.  Go to the Instagram photo or video page of the photo or video you want to embed in your web page.  Copy the entire url from the address bar.  It should look like instagram.com/p/xxxxxx.  Now head over to the free conversion tool page by Digital Inspiration here.  Paste the url in the blank window and press generate.  You are done.

Now you can head over to your blog code editor or blogger draft and paste the code in html.  The photo/video size given is 612 x 612 and the code is in HTML5 so it should be seen or played on any browser. 

Google's Feedburner taken over by Martians, giving nice mumbo jumbo messages since yesterday

All bloggers and webmasters should check their feedburner page for once!  Google's Feedburner seems to have been taken over by Martians from outer space or Google is playing a neat little trick on the bloggers and webmasters.  The bizzare messages first started appearing yesterday afternoon and everytime you refresh the feedburner page lo and behold, the message changes into more bizzare message then the earlier one. 

Have a look at some of the screen shots I took of my feed page.

1. Martian language

2. My Feeds say, "Let's play two!"

3. My Feeds might come out of their shell

4. My Feeds think the rotation doesn't look like much after all

5. My Feeds need to socialize

6.  My Feeds go up, down, strange, and charm.

7. My Feeds dot dash dot dot dot dot dot dot dot

8. My Feeds are bracing fro winter/preparing for summer (this one looks like straight out of Game of Thrones)

9. My Feeds have no hand crank

10. My Feeds never appear in blister pack

11. My Feeds take it one game at a time

After the first one in the martian language appeared my feeds started showing 'zero' subscribers but as soon as the third one appeared the subscriber count is now back to normal.

Looks like Google is playing games with its feeds because today is the last day of Google Reader!

Six months old blog, my learning and experiences during these last six months

Friends and readers today I have completed 6 months of blogging on vvpvijay.blogspot.in which I recently ported to www.comboupdates.com.   This past six months have been a big learning curve for me with some days of despair and some of delight.  The 28th Jan was worst day for me as only 8 visitors visited my blog that day and the biggest day was 30th April when 4700 visitors read my blog.  Some days I felt like stopping blogging and some days I felt like posting a 100 articles in one day.  Only when I had crossed 50000 visitors did I feel comfortable with any number readers visiting my site.

image courtesy techcode.in

I know every blogger goes through this kind of a mindset in the initial stages of blogging and there are lot of tutorials and sites giving you minutest instructions about SEO and stuff like that.  But I want readers to reminded of one thing, content is the KING of blogging.  Even Google bots seem to be programmed for this fact hence if you post a good contest in your own style, you are going to be successful.  I have seen many blogs succeed without any SEO and stuff and many big ticket SEO blogs without any visitors.

Plagiarism or CTRL + V is a strict taboo in blogging.  It may give you higher ranks but in long term somebody will find out that you have copied content on your blog and you will lose all the goodwill garnered during all the blogging years.  My own experience with plagiarism was when a blogger called Sanjay Gunam copied the entire text including my name on his blog.  I got to realise it when I so a page ranked above me having same words like me.  I was dumbfounded as to how can a person copy something fully from another.  I opened a DCMA ticket with Google guys and they were quick to respond.  But Alas, this bloke was smarter, he started another blog and copied the same content, again with my name on that post.  Again Google had to be called in and only this time he lost his blog.

Regarding SEO and other backlinks stuff, I have been lucky to have friends like Rehmat Alam of supportivehands.net and Robin Sharaya of Askoverflow.com.  Rehmat Alam helped me get this very niche TLD url comboupdates.com and these guys have really helped me find all the necessary stuff, make the necessary changes in my blog and about SEO techniques.  I am grateful to them for the help they have been.  

Blogging also brings social responsibilities.  You have to post only those articles which you believe in. I have followed this principal without any compromise. Many of the sites today don't follow this principal and will surely meet their fate.  I have come across scores of fake sites which do not help you in any way other then make a few quick bucks for themselves.  Google has and will always take stern action against such sites but sadly they get good visitors and make good money till the time they are online.  

Blogging has changed my mindset also.  I have become a more social person after I started blogging.  Earlier I had Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Orkut accounts but rarely visited them.  Blogging made it necessary for me to indulge in social networking and somehow I started enjoying it.  Over the 6 months I have made friends from all over the globe and it is much fun to interact with these friends and know what is happening in their part of the world.

Recently around 3 months back I became a member of a Indian bloggers club called Indiblogger.  It is run by Renie Ravin and has been a tremendous help to me.  I have made very good friends with some of fellow Indibloggers like K2, Abhishek Jha, Rotorman, Ranjith, Jack MySay, Harsha Bhuyan, OurJaipur, Sourav Das, and Sakshi Nanda.  If you are a Indian blogger you have got to be the member of this prestigious group.

I started blogging as a way to give information to people about the complicated things in most simple way.   I am helped in this venture by Vijay Deepak Chibber, who dutifully posts the Photo of the Day every day at 6.00 am without fail.  I intend to continue that with your help, comments, suggestions and of course reading my posts.

Hope to keep blogging and make technology simpler and easily understandable for you.