G+ Business Page - Simple tutorial

There was a lot of fuss when G+ and Youtube were linked, people complaining that they had to use their real names on their Youtube accounts now; well you actually don't, if you link a G+ Business Page to your YT account.

I've put together a simple tutorial on how to do this below that I hope will help.

• You must be logged in as your main G+ profile.

• Go to https://plus.google.com/pages/create

• Choose business type, I went for Brand

• You will then be taken to this screen where you can set up profile pic, settings, etc and post as your business page.

• You will still be able to access all of your other pages and your main ID.

 

• To link a page to your YT account go to settings

• In settings scroll down to third part tools and click on set up a password.

• You will then be prompted to enter your main password

• Create password, this will allow you to sign in as your G+ business page.

• You should see this screen.

• If you now log out of your main user area you will be able to sign back in using the business page username and password (in this case the username was test-page-1645@pages.plusgoogle.com).

• To add a gmail account to your G+ business page (which also has the nice side-effect of making your username/log in for the business page a bit more user-friendly), go to https://accounts.google.com/b/0/AddMailService#inbox, as long as you are logged in as your G+ business page the gmail account will automatically be assigned to your new business page.

• You will now be able to log in to your business page as your new gmail email address.

• To create a new Youtube account linked to your G+ business page make sure you are logged in as the business page and go to http://www.youtube.com/account_advanced.

• If you have an existing YT account then you should be able to link it to a G+ business page using the settings on Youtube (make sure you have your login and password for your G+ business page.)

25 Quick and Dirty Map Tutorials

I've recently been looking at the 25 Quick & Dirty Map Tutorials Guide Google+ community on the net; the community contains numerous maps created by Michael Tumey and some good tutorials on how to create maps using most modern graphics packages; although the tutorials that I have read so far assume a certain level of technical competence. I like to think that i'm fairly intelligent when it comes to computers but, not having used certainly features in Photoshop before (the package that I have on my computer), I did have to avail myself of Google and some experimentation to get the desired results.

Part of the aim of the community is to drum up interest in the kickstarter for the printed Guide that will be starting at some point in the near future, in addition to providing a forum where people can have discussions, show off their work and ask questions about all things map related. I think that the community fulfils its purpose admirably although it may be a little daunting to anyone not experienced in using a computer graphics package.

Official website for the Guide is here:
http://www.quickanddirtymaptutorials.com/

I've posted the two (rough) sample forest maps that I worked on using one of the community's tutorials below:

Addition 26/06/13 23:45 

I asked Michael Tumey about the lack of specific information related to the most popular graphics packages and was told the following:

"That would be the advantage of having the book, as there will be a chapter on Explanation of Terms where we look at what is the intent of a given task, with corresponding subsections for Photoshop, GIMP, Xara, Inkscape and several other common applications, giving more specific instructions on which tools in those applications needed to perform the same task."

Given this additional information I will certainly be planning to support the kickstarter and would have no problem recommending the book (even at this early stage) for those interested in map/world creation.