Photo-A-Day #1245

Each Day I try and take the best possible photo for Photo-A-Day. In All honesty, they can’t all be that great. I chose this one today because of the things I got wrong in the shot. First off the blur. I was using my point and shoot with no flash. The flash really washes things out and I wanted a more natural color. I was using the Kids and Pets setting but that didn’t do any good. So Eva is out of focus, but that is also what I like about this shot because it is Eva in motion. She is always in motion now. There is no slowing this kid down. She is an eating machine and her favorite sign is “more”. Tonight she used it in a context other than food though and I was so proud. We were in the back yard playing with Taylor (My sister Tara’s dog) and Tara was kicking a soccer ball to Taylor. She stopped and Eva made the sign for more. I was so thrilled that she made a non food connection with that sign.

Only one more day of work before the big 2 week vacation. I am so stoked.

I’ve been sending many friend requests through facebook to people I actually know and the connections being made with people from so far back in my past is amazing. I’ve been surprised on more than one occasion about who friends have as their friends and finding out that some people know each other that I would have never thought would have known each other. So fun.

Today I got a comment on The Wired Kayaker from a site called Wowzio. With Wowzio I can take a feed, (Mine, Yours anyone’s), and with that feed I can generate a widget. I can even have up to 15 feeds on one widget. Wowzio looks at the feed and pulls out the blog posts as well as the photos or images with each post. Then It gives you six widget options. With each you have customizable options and the ability for the widget to autosize.

Option #1 – Panoramic Slideshow – This displays photos from your chosen feeds and the post or photo titles. Click on the photo and go right to the post or photo.
Option #2 – Live Activity. – You can see the latest activity on your blog and so can everyone else. They can see where people are coming from and what they are reading on your blog.
Option #3 – TagCloud – This is a cloud of all your popular tags. It extracts them from your blog as well as from Technorati.
Option #4 – PhotoGallery – This is great if you want to put together Flickr feeds of your favorite photographers. You can select a specific display option for the gallery and with autosizing it can fit anywhere.
Option #5 – Feed Content – This will display the content from your feeds including blurbs about each posts and images.
Option #6 – Slideshow – Like Option #1 except the images are smaller and you have a prev and next button to flip through images.

So I’ve made a few of the widgets. I’ve made a Feed Content one that has all my most important feeds. It contains all four blogs, Flickr and Zoomr. I will be adding a version of that to each of my blogs near the top of the page. Because the information is dynamically changing it will catch the eye of the reader and maybe they will see an image that they may enjoy.

I’ve made a Slideshow one called Blogger Spotlight with a few of the bloggers that I read each day. Since I can only put in 15 feeds I apologize if yours is not on the widget. The feeds contained are:

Sparky’s View
We’re In A Fight
Average Dudes
Stephen The Dog
Fuel My Blog’s Blog
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection
All Narfed Up
Photo Projectz
My Thoughts, Ideas and Ramblings
Always Alli
Julie’s Journal
Table for Five
Rebecca Gardzina.com
Steve DePino Photography
I’m Just a Blogger

I’m going to play with the roster a bit so this is certainly not the final. I plan to also create widgets of 15 of my favorite photographers from Flickr and if I think of other options I will create those as well. Wowzio seems to have some great options and they are looking for feedback. Check them out.