Today’s tip. Charge your Batteries. Make sure you know they are charged. Check them again. That is all.
Drew writes five blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. He recently completed taking 1000 consecutive photos in 1000 days. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker and Read To Me, Dad
Happy New Year’s to all of my blogging friends on the FuelMyBlog community and elsewhere. Today’s topic is basically my blogging resolutions for the year of 2008. they are in no particular order of importance.
1. – Consistently blog each Tuesday for FuelMyBlog.
2. – Continue to blog on The BenSpark on a Daily Basis.
I’ve been 365 before 365 was cool.
3. – Continue with the Photo-A-Day Project
On Thursday I will hit the 1000 Photos milestone.
4. – Keep my blogs clean and quick loading
5. – Consistently post to each of my other blogs a couple times a week.
They are listed in the footer of this post.
6. – Make double the income I did in 2007 through my blogs.
7. – Shoot at least 6 Wired Kayaker Podcasts
8. – Learn to be a better Photographer
9. – Get control of my Diabetes.
10. – Love every minute of life in 2008 with my family.
Drew writes many blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his main blog, The BenSpark. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech, The Wired Kayaker, Read To Me, Dad, Google is Not God and The BenSpark’s Mobile Blog.
In my past Tech Tuesday posts I have been really long winded and, oh yeah, on Tuesday. However, I took Tuesday off from the Internet to spend Christmas with the family.
I hope that everyone who celebrated Christmas enjoyed their time with their families.
In my house my wife’s family lives in Florida while we live in Massachusetts. And we have a new baby. So being away from each other has been very difficult. Here are three tips to use technology to help bridge the distance during the holidays.
Tip #1 – Take a ton of pictures with a digital camera. Digital cameras and memory are Cheap, Cheap, Cheap. There are tons and tons of places online that you can use to host your photos. If you do not want to plaster your mug all over the net there are also ways to make your photos private and available only to friends and family. Maybe grandma and grandpa aren’t as tech savvy as Eva’s Mimi and Grandpa Dano are. That is okay, because you are or you can be.
Did you know that you can upload all the photos you want to Kodak, and then make a quick photobook. Then you can have it mailed to your family or sent to be picked up at a CVS or various other stores? It is true and it is very easy to do. I’ve been taking photos of Eva since she was born and each month I upload the past month’s photos to a folder on Kodak Gallery and then I share that gallery just with friends and family. That way if anyone wants a photo they can easily get their own. And if someday we make a photobook all photos are up on Kodak Gallery for us to use.
Tip #2 – YouTube, YouTube isn’t just for videos of idiots doing idiotic things, people are using it for honest to goodness creativity. Allison and I visited her brother and his wife this past weekend. I recorded a quick little Christmas wishes message for my in-laws and then added all the photos from the weekend set the whole thing to music using Windows Movie Maker and uploaded the 3 minute video to YouTube on Christmas morning. I set the video to private and invited my in-laws and brother-in-law to join YouTube so that they could see the video.
Tip #3 – Digital Frames, rather than printing out the photos that you take add them to a dedicated memory card and watch them all on a Digital Frame. There are so many varieties of frame out there so there are many choices. And to get the most photos on one single frame follow this advice: Check the size of the display image in pixels and edit your images to be that size. Sure you can shoot a photo on a 10MP camera and pop the memory card into the frame and view it. However, the size image that a 10MP or even 7MP camera takes is way bigger than what will be displayed on a digital frame.
We got our parent’s digital frames for Christmas. They were 7 inch frames. The display size worked out to be 480 pixels X 234 pixels. Photos that come off my 10MP camera are 3872 X 2592 pixels and are 3MB each. On a 2GB memory card I can hold a couple hundred photos, but I wanted to be able to hold many, many more.
I selected all the images that I wanted to use in the frame and then put them in a folder on my computer. I then used Adobe PhotoShop Elements to process multiple files and used that to make each image 480pixels X (And I left this blank so the proportions would be filled in automatically) and 96dpi. This made each image about 105K, which is very very small. The images that I got out of that process when compared to the full sized images straight from the camera were virtually the same. No one would be able to tell the difference on the frame except that the full sized image would take longer to load than the small image.
I selected 250 images for my parents and put them on a 2GB thumb drive, I used about 1/90 of the space on that card or less. So there is plenty of room for future images of Eva and any kids down the road for all the grandparents.
Happy Holidays and I hope everyone “Fuels in the New Year!”
Drew writes five blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker and Read To Me, Dad
Building on Kevin’s latest post about the importance of tagging and labeling your blog posts don’t forget tagging, labeling and geotagging your photos.
If you know me then you know that I spend a great deal of time with photography sites. In fact my daily regimen is very very structured. I go and shoot my photo-a-day image, edit it and then blast it all over the Internet. This month I am participating in Trevor Carpenter’s December Challenge to take portraits all month. This has been a tough month as taking portraits is not my strongest photography skill.
Once I have taken my photo I edit it in Photoshop Elements, edit, crop color correct and whatnot. Then I start my uploading. Some blogging platforms allow you to upload your image directly to your blog and that is okay. I prefer to post my images to a photo hosting site and then copy and paste the image into my blog post. There are so many different hosting platforms and I am on a bunch of them. I usually upload my Photo-A-Day to Buzznet, Flickr and Zooomr.
Why all three? Well, for one thing it gets my content in front of many sets of eyes. Each time I post an image I can tag it or label it with keywords that people can search on. I can also geotagg on Flickr and Zooomr so if someone is looking at a map in an area where I took my photos then they may see mine.
So for example If I post an image of my cat I would tag that image with the keywords “cat”, “pet”, “tuxedo”, “shorthair”. That way when someone is looking for shorthaired tuxedo cats as pets they could easily find my photos of my two cats Duncan and Oliver. I also add a link to my Photo-A-Day blog post on each of the descriptions on my uploaded images. This way I now have three links to my blog post (one on each platform).
There are people who strictly use photo hosting platforms and are loyal to one or the other, by posting my images to multiple platforms I am able to put my content in front of many diverse audiences. By putting your content in multiple places and using tags, labels and geotagging you can certainly begin to attract more readers to your blog.
This all may seem very time consuming and for the most part it does take a while for me just to post my daily photo, write the blog post and get the word out. However I have also been using a site called Utterz that has greatly enhanced the way I do my posting each day. I still post directly to Buzznet and Zooomr but now instead of posting to Flickr directly I post to Utterz.
I make a phone call to talk about my daily photo then I go to Utterz where that message has been instantly stored. I now have 10 minutes to add a title, text, photo and description to that Utter. Once that is complete my Utter is posted automatically to my Flickr account including tags, and the image gets put into the sets that I designate. The Utter is also automatically posted to all my blogs, my twitter, facebook and MySpace. Getting the word out, using tags and labels will certainly bring in new readers, write great content or take great photos and you will see a return on the time you invest into your blogs.
Here is what Utterz has done for the holidays. I can choose to take one of my Utterz and add it to this themed player. So here is an example of what I did with one of my daily photos.
Drew writes five blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker and Read To Me, Dad
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