How To Archives

The main subject of this site: how to get something done, further divided by tags.

How to login to the Google Play Podcast Portal

Google have done a fantastic job at hiding the option for us to submit new podcast feeds on Google Play. It’s easy to login and listen to music and podcasts, and seemingly impossible to login to the section in which to submit either.

I usually get there somehow by looking at my history, but I can imagine that’ll be lost at one point – so I did a bit of URL testing and tweaking and found out. Here’s how to find that mysteriously hidden URL.

Read more

How to fix the greyed out option for Scheduled Videos on YouTube

For several times I’ve experienced an issue with the YouTube Creator Studio Classic, in which I can’t seem to schedule new videos. The error manifests after hitting upload, with all appearance options available except for Scheduled (so Public, Unlisted and Private are all available, but Scheduled is greyed out). So what’s going on here? I … Read more

How to centre an element in CSS

In the olden days of HTML development, in the late 90ies, we only had inline styles. Centring an element was done using the <center> property. That approach isn’t very elegant anymore in modern CSS 🙂 Today we can use something like this: #your-id .your-class { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } It’s slightly more … Read more

How to find your Public Profile on Amazon

As much as I like Amazon, UI design isn’t their strong point. They have so many links to so many things hiding in their interface that it’s difficult to find what you’re looking for at times. Your Public Profile is one of those hidden gems.

It’s a collection of all your community activity you’ve engaged in on Amazon, such as post reviews or videos, your wish lists, Spark posts, Reviewer Ranking and so forth. Here’s a screenshot of what mine currently looks like:

Read more

How to build an Amazon link efficiently

When you want to share a product on Amazon with someone else, the easiest thing to do is to copy whatever is in the browser bar at the time and paste that elsewhere. While this works, it’s not an efficient way to link to a product.

The URL is often extremely long and contains additional parameters that tell Amazon’s systems either how the product was found or referred, or what else to display on the current product page. Most of that additional information makes the URL longer than it needs to be.

In this article I’ll show you how to build a short and efficient link without additional parameters, such as tracking information.

All we really need is the regional Amazon domain and the ASIN of the product and add these two together, separated by the letters “dp”.

Read more

How to find the URL for your own YouTube Playlist (2018)

I’ve seen a lot of web interfaces in my time. YouTube’s has got to be one of the worst ever. Fact! I am frequently shocked how unintuitive the simplest of things are, and how cumbersome and ugly the whole design is.

Take something as simple as sharing your own Playlist. There’s this unbelievably unhelpful Google article that apparently explains how it works.

Which it doesn’t. At least not at the time of writing.

Here’s how to find and share your own YouTube Playlist’s URL (with screenshots, as of August 2018).

Read more