Fun with Photos

Image via Wikipedia

Today's Giveaway of the Day was some kind of program to create shapes with your photos.  After reading through the comments, I decided not to download it, but I grabbed some links to programs I can get later if I want.  The first two are for photo mosaics,which is more what I was interested in.  They take your photos and create an image, like the seagull here.  The last one takes photos and arranges them into shapes, which could have some fun uses.

• Mazaika - photo mosaic tool
• Foto-Mosaik-Edda - photo mosaic
• Shape Collage - free automatic photo collage maker

Now, if only I can find the time to play with them...

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Changes in my Feed

Image via CrunchBase

I've been using twitterfeed for a while now.  I love it, because it automatically tweets my blog posts.  You just have to add your blog's RSS and enter your twitter information, and you're good to go.  The only problem is, my posts stopped showing up on twitter.  I finally figured it out - I had to change my twitter password, so twitterfeed was using the wrong password, and couldn't post to twitter.  All these automatic things are great, but if anything changes, you have to remember to make those changes everywhere.

The only problem is, that since I've updated my twitter password, and twitterfeed has told me it checks out OK, only one post has actually been tweeted.  So far I've only posted on my other blog Beth & Cory's Mom, so this post is mostly a test to see if this feed is working properly. 

After reading the following related articles, I'm thinking I might start using Google's Feedburner to tweet my posts.  Decisions, decisions.

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Read Books Online

Image via Wikipedia

I recently found a site called OnRead.com.  There are all kinds of books available - best sellers, new releases, etc.  Each book is available in several versions: .rtf, .txt, .pdf, .epub, .PalmDOC, .FB2, .lrf, downloadable and  playable on various media devices.  From what I can tell, you can download books for 99¢, but you have to load your account with a minimum of $10 to get started.  It's a little confusing because I haven't actually added any money to my account, so I'm really just guessing about that.  That's a pretty good deal for books, but that's not what interested me.

What interested me was the option to read the book online for FREE.  I don't have any devices to read books on, except my computer, so I really have no need to download the books.  How much online reading will I actually do?  I don't know, but it's kind of fun to play with.  You can choose book or document format, choose your font and font size, and even add bookmarks to the books you're reading, so you can find  your place later.  It even keeps a list of the books you've looked at recently.  It might just be a good way to check out a book I'm thinking about reading, before I request it from the library.

I also want to check out Read Print. It doesn't have the new books, but there are a lot of books available - a lot of  classics, which I almost hate to admit that I've never read.  I guess I have no excuse now, except for the usual 'So many books, so little time' that I always use.

Screen Capture Tools

Giveaway of the Day offered a Screen Capture program today that was not very popular.  I didn't bother to download it, because I've been using PicPick for a while, and I really like it - and because everyone who looked at or tried this one had nothing but bad things to say about it.  The good thing about that is that there were a whole lot of suggestions for free screen capture programs and tools.  I went through all the comments and tried to list them all here:

• MWSnap
• FastStone Capture V5.3
• Screenpresso
• Gadwin PrintScreen
• Jing by Techsmith
• ScreenHunter
• greenshot (I like the little frog on this one, but that's beside the point)
• jetScreenshot
• Screenshot Captor
• Snippy
• and Windows Vista or Windows 7 include a program called “SNIPPING TOOL” to capture items from your screen and store in a folder of your choice.

I haven't tried any of these, except Jing, which I liked but never re-installed after I re-formatted my computer.  I really should, I liked it.  But if you need a screen capture tool, I thought it would be nice to have a list to choose from.  Hopefully something here will work for you.

Keep Your Widgets

I'm thinking about changing the layout on my other blog, eventually. I've found a layout I really like, and I've even messed with personalizing the header. But what about all my widgets? You know how you start to upload a new template and blogger asks you to confirm widget deletion? I don't want to have to delete my widgets and then have to build them all up again. The HTML/Javascript ones would be OK, because I could just copy the code to notepad and add it back, but things like blog lists take a lot longer to put together.

So, I started searching for ways to change my layout without losing all my widgets and ran across a really good tutorial on keeping your widgets when changing your template. I tried it out on my test blog, and even though I didn't have many widgets there, Blogger wanted to delete them. So, I followed the tutorial and saved them all! I've got a few tweaks to make on the template and some code I need to grab from my blog, and I think I can change my layout relatively painlessly. So maybe eventually will come sooner rather than later?