Blodget’s Blog

SlideOO.com offers a free web service for creating horizontal slideshows like this one using your photos from Flickr.

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Merry Christmas everyone. This slideshow is done using Picasa.

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You can use delivr.net to create unique Christmas e-cards from your Flickr photos. You can even put a link in the description of the Flickr photo so people can send a card using your photo. You can use returns in the message to keep lines short so they fit in the narrow message box. You can also use commas in the Send To field to separate multiple email addresses.

Merry Christmas

Originally uploaded by jimblodget.

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Crayola has a great online drawing tool. You can choose between a variety of different markers, pencils, and, of course, crayons. When you are done, you can print your creations. Lot’s of fun.

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Your results:
You are R2-D2

(This list displays the top 10 results out of a possible 21 characters)

Click here to take the Star Wars Personality Test

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I just added the free Snap service to this blog. It provides a small preview of links so you can see what you’re linking to before you click the link. Check it out by pointing to any link in the blog. It was very easy to install. All you have to do is sign up on their site by providing a URL to your blog and an email address and they give you the code to embed on your web page or blog. Since this is a WordPress blog I also downloaded the free WordPress plug-in, installed it, activated it, and set my unique 32 character key in the options and it worked. The service also works with Typepad and Blogger blogs.

Snap

What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.

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Flickr picture

I just downloaded Flock and I’m trying it out. It looks like a nice
browser. You can connect to your Flickr account and upload images from
within Flock. I’m writing this post using Flock’s blog feature. You can right mouse click on something on a web page and choose Blog This which is what I did with the photo.

It also has a built-in RSS reader, but I prefer the Google RSS Reader. There are a lot more features to check out, but my early impression is good. Firefox goodness with easy multimedia manipulation.

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Splashr is a free web service that creates wonderful slideshows from your Flickr pictures. Just pick a tag and a username and a slideshow style and viola you’ve got a slideshow which you can embed or link to in your blog or web page.

This is just one example of several different styles. I also like this gallery version.

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I just discovered Imagewell. It’s a great little free image editor and ftp client for the Mac. Just drag and drop your image file to Imagewell and you can resize it, rotate it, crop it, add a caption, change the filename, add a drop shadow if you want and upload it to your web space. Imagewell will even copy the URL to the clipboard so you can paste it into your blog post like I did here.

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Wow! I just installed Vanilla which is a free open source discussion forum. I’m impressed. It was very easy to install and customize. I downloaded a truck load of add-ons to make it one sweet forum. I can now add an announcement at the top of the forum and I added a members page tab. You can add attachments to messages and comments and if you attach an image file it shows up in the message. When you compose messages, you can use plain text or html. You can even embed videos or other media using the object, embed, or iframe tags. I also added a spell checker and the ability to add smileys. But wait, that’s not all. Just about everything has an RSS feed so you can track new comments or even searches! Everything is customizable with CSS or you can adopt a ready made style.

I’ve added a link to the discussion in the blog’s main navigation bar. See it up there? But why not just click here.

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