Have you tried Picnik? It’s a great online tool for editing your pictures from various online services such as Flickr. It should definitely go on your list of Web 2.0 tools in your toolkit. And best of all, it is free for the basic services (which are plenty) and is only $24.95/year for the premium services. Here are a couple of posts about Picnik that I’d written previously, that explain all the features.

And now they are offering new shapes, fonts and borders for free, for the holidays. Read about it here, then check it out at Picnik.

Create Your Holiday Greetings with Picnik! Available for FREE immediately, Picnik offers you a fabulously fun and easy way to create holiday greetings. Use a new library of awesome holiday shapes, new fonts, and custom borders to creatively turn any of your photos into a smashing holiday greeting. Then use Picnik to print or email directly to your friends and family. The combinations are endless. Unleash your inner Santa! Check it out now at www.picnik.com. Start Picniking! Help spread the word, share this email with a friend!   New Holiday Features: • Santa hats! • Holly borders • Beautiful ornaments • Gorgeous gifts and bows • Holiday stickers • Christmas stockings • Holiday stamps • Snowflakes galore • 8 new holiday fonts and much more! Happy Holidays! Team Picnik — Mike, Darrin, Jonathan, Peter, Brian, Justin, Monica, Steve, and Charlie

1932 1st Ave Suite 716

Seattle, WA 98101

blog.picnik.com

www.picnik.com

~Susan Mellott

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In Blog Tip: Adding Pages to Enhance your Blog - Part 1 I talked about adding pages like “About Me” or “Our Location” (or whatever you want) to your blog. Now let’s look at adding sub-pages and a few widgets to enhance your Wordpress.org (self-hosted wordpress) blog.

But before that, Christopher was kind enough to leave a comment on Part 1 explaining how to simulate multiple link list widgets in Wordpress. I knew that there was only 1 link list widget (blogroll) in wordpress, but what I didn’t know was that if you give the links you add different categories, it will break the list down by that category so it functions as different groups of links. You can see this in action on this blog. I have a list of links called Blogroll and another list of links called Life. You cannot separate the lists, they appear one after the other, but you can get different groups of links. So if you were a company, you could have one group called “Our Locations” and another called “Our Distributors” (as examples). The heading of each group is based on the name you used for the category.

As Chris points out: Just go to the blogroll in the admin and select categories. Add a category for whatever topic you want like ‘books’ and add the new links to that category. They will show up as their own list. These instructions are actually for a wordpress.com hosted wordpress blog, but it is very similar if you have a self-hosted wordpress.org blog. Go to Admin—>Blogroll and add or edit a link. When you are on the page to set up the link, pick (or add) the category for the link from the list at the right and when you save it, it will show up with that category as the name of the list it is under. You can also do this if you have a wordpress.com blog, but only if you have already added the category previously. If not, you have to add the category through admin—>Blogroll—>Categories first. I don’t know why wordpress.com makes you do that extra step, but it does.

Anyway… On to sub-pages!

A sub-page is a page that has another page as its parent other than the main page. This is used to relate a set of pages to a particular page other than your main blog. As an example, you can see how I have set up an “Our Travel” page that appears in the list at the top of my blog. All pages that are sub-pages of other pages do not appear in the main heading of the blog. That lets my “Our Travel” be a completely different section of my blog and is similar to a website. In fact, this lets you almost use your blog as a website with more information than just your blog. You can keep lots more on your blog than just posts.

In Google Blogger, you cannot create pages, so obviously, you can’t create sub-pages either. But there are still things you can do to simulate sub-pages and/or use your blog for more than just a blog. One thing you can do is to create a back-dated post (see Part 1) as say, your “Locations” page that you put in your “Pages” link list in your sidebar. Then you can create several more posts with your different locations and then add links in the text of that post to each of your locations posts. You can get an idea of that by looking at my “Our Travel” page. I have added links on it to my sub-pages for 1996 and 1997. And on my 1996 sub-page, I added links to additional sub-pages for each of our travels in 1996. You can do the same thing in Blogger, by just substituting back-dated posts for sub-pages.

Another thing you could do is create a link list called “Locations” and then add links to each of the back-dated posts you have created for each location. Then you could add another link list for say, “Distributors” and add links to a post about each distributor (or a link to their site). Anyway, you get the idea. Pretty much the only thing you don’t get is the list of pages across the top of your blog like you do in Wordpress.

On to Wordpress: In Wordpress, you can create actual sub-pages that are attached to a page and that won’t show up in the tabs across the top of your blog (only pages that have the main page as a parent show up on the top). What this means is that you have to have a “Pages” widget in your sidebar in order to access these sub-pages (unless you link to them from within the text of your page, which I have also done in my Our Travels pages).

In most Wordpress themes (both wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress), in the pages widget, it will show all your pages, with the sub-pages indented below each page they belong to. Unfortunately, this particular theme Prosumer 1.4 that I am using does not do that. All pages show at the same level in my Pages list. That really isn’t very nice and it is much nicer when they are appropriately indented. Hopefully they will fix it at some point. If you go to my All Things Web 2.0 wordpress.com blog, you can see how it looks indented. And here is a clip of the Pages sidebar widget from my wordpress.com blog.

Doesn’t that look a lot nicer than the one in this theme? I do like this theme though so I put up with some idiosyncrasies.

And for self-hosted Wordpress blogs, there are several plugins that you can use in place of your standard “Pages” widget. It is a little tricky to install a plugin on your self-hosted blog because you have to get the widget files from their site and then upload it to your own site where your blog is. If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with doing that, you can just use the regular “Pages” widget.

My favorite is the Flexi Pages widget by Srini G. It has several option for displaying that the regular Pages widget doesn’t have.

You can name the list whatever you want. And have a lot of different sort options such as by Page Title, Menu Order, Date Created, etc. You can also pick certain pages that you don’t want to show up in the list. You can have an entry on your page list to the home page (main blog) and call it whatever you like. The rest is pretty self-explanatory (except that the theme I’m using doesn’t indent the pages regardless of whether or not it is chosen).

The custom depth level means how many sub-pages of sub-pages down you want to show. Blank means all of them. You can see that I have entered -3. That is a little trick that is not really explained or mentioned that I found buried in the widget information. You can see how it works by clicking on my Flexipage widget to go to other pages. Here is what it does (from the info):

“Have the child pages, parent pages, sibling pages and top level pages displayed on a page while still leaving out the siblings of parent pages. This is not possible with older versions. Version 1.2 doesn’t include this as an ‘option’ though. You have to specify the ‘Custom depth’ as -3 to achieve this.”

Another Pages widget is the MultiPages Widget by Jerome LeCoq. It is more difficult to use because you have to know the ID of each page (which you can find by going to Admin–>Manage–>Pages and the ID is the number on the left of the title. It doesn’t really give you any extras over the flexipage widget either, except that you can have up to 9 of the multipage widgets. So unless you need more than 1 page list, the FlexiPage widget is the best and easiest of these two. Here is what the setup looks like for the MultiPage plugin:

And if you look at the very bottom of the Admin–>Presentation–>Widgets page, that is where you choose how many instances of the widget you want. NOTE: This is also where you choose how many of various other widgets you want also. I always forget where it is when I need to increase the number of a widget, like if I need more text widgets.

You can see how these different widgets/plugins work by looking at my left sidebar of my blog.

So try out some pages and increase the power of your blog!

~Susan Mellott

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First of all, I’d like to give a huge shout-out the Grabill Library Branch of the ACPL who were featured in a talk that Jessamyn West  gave on 11/8/07 called What Works: More My Library, Less MySpace. If you look on slide #32, you will see a screen capture of their Grabill Branch Library blog, that shows how they successfully use the Twitter stream to promote their branch.  Way to go!

Also, thanks to David Lee King for writing about The Big Juicy Twitter Guide by Caroline Middlebrook.  This is a great online guide about everything Twitter, with an emphasis on how it can be used to market your product or services.  Which is exactly how Grabill Branch of the ACPL is using it!  Here is a brief overview: “I have tried to present a complete picture of Twitter and show techniques / tools / guidelines for Twitter usage for all kinds of people”.

And last, but not least, here is an email newsletter that I received from Biz Stone and the Twitter Team that I thought I would share since it has lots of great Twitter info.

Hello Twitter-ers,

There have been raging wildfires and rumbling earthquakes
inspiring avalanches of Twitter updates over the last few weeks
out here on the West Coast of the US. In Tumultuous times, people
turn to Twitter. In fact, there’s been a steep increase in the
number of SMS and IM devices activated recently. This is probably
due to the Track feature which allows folks to follow keywords or
phrases in real time. Is your phone activated?

Activate: http://twitter.com/devices

Do You Owe Someone A Beer?

Foamee.com is a fun IOU system built on Twitter that helps you
track who you owe beers to (and vice versa). All you have to do is
follow the account “ioubeer” and then send it @replies. So, say
you owe me a beer for helping you change a flat tire, this is what
you’d send to Twitter:

@ioubeer @biz for helping me change that flat tire

Then, your IOU will show up on the front page at foamee.com.
There’s even a way to tell it when that beer has been redeemed.
I think a root beer version is in the works. Maybe even a latte
version? Those are foamy too. Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits design
is the mastermind behind this fanciful creation. We think it’s
really cool. Thanks Dan, we owe you a frosty one!

Visit: http://foamee.com
Follow: http://twitter.com/ioubeer
More: http://simplebits.com

Other Cool Stuff

Foamee is part of a growing list of interesting applications that
interact with Twitter. Jott, for example, has created a way to
send a Twitter update by speaking into your phone–your voice gets
converted to text and sent out to all your followers. This is a
much safer solution for people who insist on updating Twitter when
their attention is required elsewhere–like driving!

Twitter by Voice: http://jott.com
More Twitter Apps: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

Featured Twitter-ers

We have a sidebar on the Twitter public timeline page where we
occasionally mention accounts you might want to follow. For
example, during the San Diego wildfires, KPBS News, LAFD, and the
LA Times had important live updates. The following accounts are
less of an emergency situation but interesting, nevertheless.

SkinnyJeans is wondering if Twitter can help her lose 10 pounds.
http://twitter.com/skinnyjeans

Jamie Kennedy is experimenting with Twitter.
http://twitter.com/jamiekennedy

Maureen is serving up a steady stream of tiny recipes.
http://twitter.com/cookbook

Sara Bareilles is sharing the details of her budding career.
http://twitter.com/SaraBareilles

On the subject of emergencies, that earthquake we had recently in
Northern California was highly Twittered. This blogger captured a
lot of the action: http://tinyurl.com/2xv5el Also, if you’re a
Bay Area resident you might want to follow the updates of this
profile http://twitter.com/SFSurfrider regarding the recent oil
spill in San Francisco Bay.

Twitter on the Mobile Web

In case you didn’t know, Twitter has a mobile web site that you
can access from your phone’s web browser at m.twitter.com. Twitter
developer Britt Selvitelle has been quietly improving the site
recently. It’s a great way to check out what people are up to when
you’re waiting for a bus or taking the subway home from work.
Britt’s Twitter profile is http://twitter.com/bs in case you want
to @ioubeer @bs for making the mobile site!

Happy Twittering!
-Biz Stone and the Twitter Team
http://twitter.com/biz

~Susan Mellott

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Not too long ago, I wrote a post about Picnik - A Cool Free Tool to Edit Your Online Pictures. At the time, Picnik was allowing users to try out their premium tools for free. I just got an update from Picnik and they have officially launched their premium tools so they are not free anymore, but they are reasonable for the features you get and very much in line with the charges that most online Web 2.0 tools have if you want to upgrade beyond their basic services.

They charge $24.95 per year for the premium package. As a sample comparison, Flickr also charges $24.95 per year if you want to show more than 200 pictures. As a matter of fact, most of the ‘free’ web 2.0 tools have a charge beyond their basic services, which are probably not adequate if you really use them. I have a post in the works about some of the “hidden” costs of “free” web 2.0 tools. (stay tuned)

In any case, Picnik is a very nice online picture editing tool with lots of neat features for free and many more advanced editing features for a very reasonable $24.95 per year.

Here is the update I received from Picnik:

Holy Hannah, a lot has happened in the seven months since our last email: Picnik has gone big time, with more than 2.3 million visitors, rave reviews everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the BBC World News, a partnership deal with Flickr (more to come soon!) and the launch of Picnik Premium. Start Picniking! Help spread the word, share this email with a friend!

Look at what Picnik Premium can do: And that’s just a taste! Only $24.95USD a year. That’s, like, 12 quid!

	Since our last email, we’ve been busy with the additions and now Picnik offers 26 effects, 5 frames, a totally new touch-ups section, and nearly 200 fonts and shapes! We’ve added Facebook, Photobucket and Webshots to the list of sites you can open, save and share to, and our integration with Flickr is about to get a whole lot better (stay tuned!). We will of course continue to offer a great set of editing features free, but for full access to the oodles of tools, effects, shapes, fonts and frames, you can sign up for Picnik Premium. It’s only $24.95 a year (that’s less than one latte a month!), and is absolutely the best photo editing value anywhere. We’d also like to thank all our early users, beta testers, bug reporters, criticism senders, fan mailers, Facebook hordes, and word-spreaders who have helped us get to this point. You’re the best a company like ours could have hoped for, and we’re looking forward to continuing to provide you with the very best photo editor out there. Happy Picniking! Team Picnik — Mike, Darrin, Jonathan, Peter, Brian, Justin, Monica, Steve, and Charlie

1932 1st Ave Suite 716

Seattle, WA 98101

blog.picnik.com

www.picnik.com

~Susan Mellott

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NOTE: it is back up now. It was just down last night for a while.

I received an email from my cousin Jason who was trying to view my blog and was having trouble getting in. So I went to my blog and I too was having problems getting my blog to load, although I could get the admin screens just fine.

So obviously it was a problem with one of my plugins. I deactivated the Google Analyticator plugin first (since I’ve had some small problems with Google Analytics in the past) but that didn’t solve the problem.

Then I deactivated the Odiogo plugin and my blog loaded just fine.

I went to the Odiogo Blog and the Odiogo Website and neither one would load. Clearly they are having some sort of problems.

But in the meantime, if you are having this problem and you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you just go to your Plugins tab and deactivate the Odiogo plugin.

When the problem is fixed (which we should be able to tell by going to the Odiogo blog), then we can reactivate the Odiogo plugin.

~Susan Mellott

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Thanks to a tweet on twitter (unfortunately I can’t seem to go back and look at all older posts from everyone I follow so I can’t give them credit), I found out about a great new online tool for photo editing called Picnik. Picnik is a free online tool that allows you to edit your online pictures from Flickr, Picasso Web Albums, facebook or photobucket. Or you can upload a picture from your computer, edit it and save it to any of the above.

It has auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure (including advanced setting like shadows, contrast, highlights, histogram, brightness and more. Note: these may be premium settings). You can edit the color (saturation and temperature) and sharpen it or fix red-eye.

It displays all your pictures from the online photo album of your choice. I use Flickr so I could see all my pictures, or I could see all the pictures in each set. It also shows an “order by” dropdown and a search text but neither of these worked for me. Maybe it depends on the online photo place you are reading from.

You can select a picture and edit, delete, email, rename, save to or open the flickr page. When you rename, you can type the new name right there and it will rename it on flickr. You can also search for photos on Yahoo or flickr or grab a picture from your web cam.

They also have premium features that can be used for free this week (being the week of 9/25 I guess, although I checked today, 10/3 and they are still usable for free and at the bottom it says free for this week so I guess through fridayish). They will then cost $24.95 per year.

Update: As of Oct 16, the premium features are still free.

Some of their premium features are on the ‘Create’ tab, which includes free effects like black and white, sepia, boost, soften, vignette, matte, and the premium effects: nightvision, infrared film, lomo-ish, holga-ish, HDR-ish, cinemascope, focal b&w, soften or pixelate, pencil sketch, doodle (write/draw on it), gooify (drag bits arounds) and pixelate.

I really liked the focal effects, which focus on a certain area (you can change the size and move it around) and highlight that area. Here is a picture of my dog, Koshi that I messed around with. Nothing special but you can sort of get the idea.

Here is their release news from 9/25/2007:

Picnik Release 28 / v1.0! (September 25)

“Picnik has officially launched! Today is the day we take our beta banner down and throw it on the ceremonial bonfire. We’re also introducing our Premium Feature Stream which will be available for the super-affordable price of $24.95 for a whole year. This gets you get complete access to special edit tools, effects, shapes, fonts, and a whole bunch more just around the corner. To celebrate, Picnik Premium is free and open for everyone to preview this week! There’s also a ton of new features, so here’s what’s new:

Photobucket Support: Our mission of connecting Picnik to anywhere your photos might be continues and today we add Photobucket to the list of major photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Facebook, which you can get photos from or save your photos to!

Effect Painting: Many of you have asked to apply an effect to precise areas of a photo. Now you can with Effect Painting! Choose a Black and White, Sepia, Boost, Soften, Tint, or Pixelate effect and click the new Paint Brush button. You can brush in the original through the effect or check the Reverse effect box to do it backwards: paint in the effect just where you want it.

New Effects: Lots of these! There’s Holga-ish, Night Vision, CinemaScope, Invert, Cross Process, Focal Pixelate, Pencil Sketch, and Pixelate, all under the newly organized Effects section in Create. In fact, the whole Create section has been reorganized, with three new sections…

Shape Tool: Add shapes, symbols, speech bubbles, hearts, arrows, paw prints and the odd spaceship to your photo. You can choose your color, spin it around, make it as big as you want to shape up that shot!

Touch-Ups Tool: Whiten teeth or remove blemishes with these tools. Put your best face forward!

New Frames: We’ve moved Frames to their own section, and have added Museum Matte and Polaroid to the ranks of Border, Rounded Edges, and Drop Shadow.

Stay tuned as we open the floodgates on our Picnik Premium Feature Stream!”

So go check it out and if you hurry, you can try the premium features for free too! At least you could make a couple of cool pictures while it is free.

~Susan Mellott

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I was looking at a Blog called Just Giblets and I noticed a widget at the top of each of their posts that said “listen now”. So I clicked on it and it read the entire post by converting the text to speech! I tried other posts and it did the same for every post. And as I was going down their posts, I found one called “Do you notice anything different?” that explained more about Odiogo.

So I went to the Odiogo website and started looking at how I could add it my own posts. As it turned out, I ran into yet another limitation of Wordpress (hosted on wordpress.com). It does not allow you to use this feature since it restricts some of the things Odiogo needs to use. So I re-signed up with Odiogo for my Google Blogger blog instead. After I got the confirmation email (it takes about a day), I followed the instructions, which required me to do nothing more than click a couple of links and buttons and voila! Each of my blogger posts had a “listen now” button. I didn’t even have to add it to each post, it is automatically added for me. Here is how it looked when I clicked on the listen now button. It is in the process of reading the post.

As you can see, there are other formats you can also listen and download the post as. Odiogo also creates an audio feed stream that you can access from the blog using this button:

This takes you to this page where you can sign up for the audio feed of the posts using various feed readers, or can just listen to them from the page.

We are in the process of converting over to our own hosted site and I will transfer my WordPress blog there, which should allow me to add this to that blog (although not as easily as you can add it to a Blogger blog).

They also market it as a way to create podcasts easily by just writing your text and then converting it to audio. That is interesting but I’m not sure how much easier it is than just reading and recording it and that way you also have a human voice rather than a digital voice. But I didn’t really look into that much from their site and I’m sure they have a lot of other good uses for it. You can go here to learn more about their mainstream media, or here to learn more about adding it to blogs.

It is free to add to your blog and for some people, may generate revenue. I’m not sure what they are referring to by “ad income”, I have not really noticed any ads except for saying it is from odiogo. But in any case, it is free. This is what the site says “Not only is Odiogo free, it may be able to generate advertising revenues. Once your listenership reaches a significant level, you may qualify for a share of ad income! More technical details about the solution can be found here and in our FAQ. So what are you waiting for? Give your blog voice, and legs, now! ”

Since I could not add this to WordPress, you can see this in action at my Google Blogger Blog “Along the Path to 2.0“. On the some the earliest posts, when you click the listen now button, it says “Sorry, this article is not available yet.”, but most all of them are available now.

Here is a link to the Odiogo FAQ page. I noticed that people have been trying to find out why their feeds were being cut off before they were done. You can find the answer on this FAQ page by looking under “How do I activate RSS full text option on…” and they have one for Typepad, WordPress and Blogger.

I have friends and family with low vision and this seems like a wonderful addition to a blog to make it more accessible. And I believe that this is something that needs to be considered as Web 2.0 apps are being developed. Part of the concept of Web 2.0 is inclusiveness and being accessible and this shows how easily you can enhance your blogs to make them easier to access for everyone.

I hope this sparks your interest and helps people think about creating and looking for Web 2.0 applications that help make it accessible by everyone.

~Susan Mellott

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Through my usual browsing and following links, I happened upon a very interesting site called “What I Learned Today“. And on that site, I found a post about WikiMindMap. This is a fascinating site that takes whatever you are interested in and maps it out in a parent-child diagram (or “mind map” I guess they are now being called) that shows supporting topics in a way that is very easy to read and follow. I tried to capture a picture of what the site returns, but couldn’t get it to size right and finally decided it wasn’t worth messing with. But if you go to the WikiMindMap site you can see for yourself.

I mapped Learning 2.0 and got some very great links that I am still exploring. Be sure to drill down where applicable to get the full picture. One note, it seems to come up searching wikipedia.de instead of wikipedia.en (english). So be sure to change it on the first page where the search box is located.

Then I thought I would see what other wikipedia tools there were and found this on the wikipedia site. I haven’t had a chance to really look at it yet, but it looks like there are a lot of interesting tools to explore.

It would be nice if WikiMindMap had some interfaces to it, but I couldn’t find any reference to them on the site or doing a general browse.

~Susie

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