Friday, September 2, 2011

For formal docs (like the Beowulf essay), use Scribd.

When you're writing an analysis about your personality, composing kenning-filled poems about your epicness, or showing video of the important elements of your life, a blog post is a great format for sharing your work. However, if you're doing something a bit more formal, a blog post just isn't the right format. This is where Scribd comes in. It's a website that allows you to display PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, and a variety of other documents with a more professional feel to it. For these Beowulf essays, Scribd is a great place to store these papers. There are three parts to this process: the initial signup, an on-iPad part and an on-a-real-computer part:
  1. Sign up for Scribd. You can sign up by connecting to your Facebook account, if you want, or you can just sign up separately without Facebook. However, if you sign up with Facebook, I've found that your password acts a bit funny, so you'll have to add in a separate one. To do this, at the top of the page, click, underneath your name, on Settings.


    A bit below on that page, you'll have the option to add or change a password. Click on that and change the password to whatever you want. Even if you just change it to what your Facebook password is, that's ok—you just have to change/add/re-add the password to the account.
  2. Write the essay. Obviously. Hopefully, you've already connected your Quickoffice App to your Dropbox account. Either way, make sure you, somehow, add your completed, finalized essay to your Quickoffice app.
  3. Upload to Scribd. Drag your essay to the Document icon (to the right of the Trashcan and the Email icons) the bottom of the page.


    Once you do that, it'll pop up an option to upload it to Slideshare, Scribd, and .docstoc. Obviously, you'll go for the middle option.


    Add in a description of what you're uploading to Comments and then click  Upload . It'll then tell you once it has it uploaded. From here, you'll need to go to a real computer.
  4. Get that Scribd document.  Now that you're logged into Scribd on your computer, go to your document Shelf. Your recently-uploaded document should now appear on the screen. Click on that document.


    Your document will show up now in the middle of the screen, but at the bottom of the screen, there will be a black bar. To the right of the bar will be an icon that looks like < / >, for Share and Embed. Click on that, and then, on the popup, press Embed >>.


    The screen above will pop up. Make sure, under Embed this document (in the middle) that Auto is checked for Width. Then, where it says Copy, click that to automatically copy down the HTML code for your document into your computer's clipboard.
  5. Add it into your blog post. Now, create a New Post in your Blogger. I'd write a short introduction to what the paper is supposed to be about, etc, and then click on Edit HTML. Then, towards the bottom, paste in your code. It'll be awfully long and will look like this:
    <a title="View Test Document on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/63726099/Test-Document" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Test Document</a><iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/63726099/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-qvz5w4c4vy6yvv6c7tk" data-auto-height="true" data-aspect-ratio="0.772727272727273" scrolling="no" id="doc_44069" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">(function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();</script>
    Finally, publish your post. 
Embedded into your blog will be a little something like this:

Test Document

Pretty cool, right? And so much more professional. Now, when you're trying to share formal documents or Powerpoint presentations, use this little trick, and it'll be perfect!

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