Demo Girl

Facebook Timeline turns your average Facebook profile into a dynamic history of photos, wall posts, life events and more.  I’ve had Timeline enabled for a few weeks but today I noticed that quite a few of my friends do not.  And it made me wonder…

It made me wonder if it was either too confusing or just didn’t make sense.  Because it didn’t make sense to me until I read up on it and then took the time to actually edit my Timeline and put important events that I wanted to share, front and center.

Along with my wondering came, of course, the need to create a screencast to share a few easy ways to make Timeline a fun aspect of Facebook.

I’ve been using Facebook for years.  My Mom is even on Facebook, although she refuses to log-in because she thinks “it’s weird.”  She would “rather use Google.”  Whatever that means….Hi Mom!

Anyway, what I had not done was something that I believe to be a huge mistake.  I didn’t have a Facebook page for DemoGirl.  What? I know. Dumb.

DemoGirl puts food on the table, introduces me to awesome new people and recently, turned me into a celebrity judge!

So if you have a moment, and you really mean it, please like DemoGirl on Facebook.  I have years and years to make up for.  Another reason I should be exceptionally disgusted with myself?  I recently stumbled across an old screencast tutorial I made on just this very subject.

I’ve been running a Quickcast special for quite a while now, and it’s almost time to say goodbye.  I thought it would be a great way to find new customers and to give businesses a less expensive option for a screencast that only needed to cover one specific feature.  It did both of those things, but unfortunately, it also connected me with people who didn’t realize that my time is just as valuable as everyone else who is trying to run a business. And I am running a business. 

No worries though! The Quickcast was always intended to be just that, a special, and it will be around until mid-January and I’m sure it will be back again – think of it as the McRib of screencast specials…

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since my last post on the DemoGirl blog, and I hope blog silence will be a thing of the past. I have a pretty good excuse though; at least I think so…

As some of you may know, I started screencasting in blog form in 2006 – meaning I would find cool Web apps and create screencasts in place of blog posts to show them off. This “idea” of screencasting anything and everything I found and blogging about it was the brain-child of my two older brothers, who were actually paying me to do this. Seriously. They wanted me to screencast my butt off so that when it started to catch on (only took about 3 years…) I would already be ahead of the game and we could get right into becoming a professional screencasting business. After about a year of learning the best way to capture the very best assets of a Web app, and in a short amount of time, I got my first paying gig. Not so long after I did work for these guys, they were bought by Google and became the foundation of a little service known as Google Voice. I will forever be indebted to the team-formally-known-as-GrandCentral for giving me tips about how to work with clients and how to make a better screencast. They are what I would call “dream clients”.  I hope the screencast I did for them never, ever makes an appearance.  Remember, this was the beginning and I was still learning to fly.

Now I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m not leaving the screencasting business any time soon. This is not a goodbye to screencasting post. It is, however, a goodbye and a thank you to Centercloud, the company that paid me to screencast for so many years. Centercloud is owned by my brother, completely family run, and is primarily a software development company. They’ve been in business since I was in diapers and continue to rock. But we realized that DemoGirl was becoming more and more of my thing and not really a way to sustain an entire company. Our pricing model was aimed at start-ups who had little cash (not too little ) and needed a great video to get their product noticed. While their dream of starting a custom screencast company really did succeed, they decided to let it go. Thankfully, they let it go to me! So, thanks to Tom, Joe and Mo. You guys were great to work with and I’ll see you at Christmas.

And if you, my dear readers, are looking for drama and back stabbing, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Family comes first and this was a very friendly split.

So that’s the latest from the DemoGirl newsroom. In other news, I’m still busy making screencasts and I have a killer special going on now.

Thanks for sticking with me over the years. I’m not going anywhere. Unless it’s a tropical island…