Tag Archives: Tech Tuesdays

Grab Bag

Tech Tuesday with BenSpark #18

This was originally posted on FuelMyBlog’s Blog by me.

Not my best one though. If you have a tech question that you’d like me to tackle for next week’s Tech Tuesday post, let me know in the comments section.

Each week I look at the technical things that I have around the house and what sort of projects I am working on with my blog and try to determine what I should talk about on a Tech Tuesday post.

One thing that I really enjoy is my iPod. Last week I talked about having an iPod and a Zune. I meant to do a comparison test on battery life but it looks to me like iPod is going to trash the Zune on that one. Makes sense, bigger screen needs more power, less battery life. At least that is how I see it. I would like to say that I rigged up a way to make sure that my Photo-A-Day photos are always synchronized to both my Zune and my iPod.

I moved all of my media off of my computer onto and external hard drive. And I synced the media folders with both Zune and iPod. It worked pretty well. Last week I synced the whole Photo-A-Day folder with both devices and that wasn’t as great as I expected. You see, I am a very organized person. I make sure that each and everything that I do online has a redundancy to make sure I have copies of things. This is especially important with my Photo-A-Day project.

My process starts like this. I go out, I take my photos. In the field I will most likely shoot 200 photos in a session. I will probably erase about 15-20 on the camera. I then go back to my computer. I load up the photos and pull up windows Preview. You put your mouse over the file and right click and choose Preview or scroll down to Open With and choose Windows picture and Fax Viewer. This will give you a large image to look at. I go from image to image and when I get to one I want to edit I right click it and choose Open with PhotoShop Elements (You can use whatever image editor you want, elements works well for me). Usually I get about 30-40 images I want to work with. Then I get them into Photoshop Elements and I work with The Quick Fix first. I wrote all about that in Tech Tuesday #8. You can refresh your knowledge of that by reading the previous post.

The important thing here is the way that I do my saving. I make all my edits to the file and the last thing I do is crop. So I crop my image to 450px X 350px, It is a size I choose long ago and have been happy to use. No idea where it first originated from though. Then I choose save as. You may be tempted to save for web and that would strip the image of essential EXIF data. By saving as you retain that data. I save a copy first to a folder called iPod_Zune_PAD. Then I save the image again in the Photo-A-Day folder. But I want an original size image in case I do something with that image later. I choose to go to Edit and then undo crop, crop was the last thing I did in the edit process for this precise reason. I then save the original in a folder called 2007 originals and in 2008 I will make it a 2008 originals folder.

I like to name my images so they can be easily identified. Each day I name with the month, the day, the year and underscore and then the number of the PAD image. So they all look like this. 091807_893.jpg. If I do more than one PAD, my PAD bonus images then I add a letter suffix to the image. For example, 091807_893b.jpg. So at any time I know if I am missing any of my PAD images. I have a laptop and a desktop and edit photos on the road, they don’t always get transfered to the external hard drive right away.

At the end of each year I make a new folder that say the year and PAD, so at the end of this year a folder called 2007_PAD will be created, I will move the 2007 Originals folder into that folder and then also all the PAD images from 2007 into that folder. This way I have all my images exactly where I want them to be.

I seem to have not really given you much of a technical tip but rather a look into my anal retentive overly organized mind. That may be good advice for some and bad advice for others. As always I welcome your ideas for Tech Tuesdays topics in the future.

When I started this I wanted to talk about Blog Rush. But like all of my writing I got stream of consciousness and end up taking all sorts of twists and turns before getting to the point sometimes. If you haven’t seen this new tool for increasing your blog’s presence on the web then you might want to check it out.

Basically Blog Rush breaks down like this. You get a widget to put on your blog. The number of visits you get on your blog counts as impressions that you can have of your posts on someone else’s Blog Rush widget. So if you have 100 visitors in a day you can get 100 impressions of your posts on other blogs that are in your category. But you can also get other bloggers signed up with your own referral code. My code is attached to the Blog Rush links. I am disclosing this to you so that if you want to sign up and not be a referral of mine just type in http://www.blogrush.com. I would not want to trick anyone into becoming one of my referrals. What happens with the blogs that you refer is that you also get credits for the page impressions on their blogs. So if you refer 2 bloggers and they each get 100 visitors a day you get 300 impressions of your posts on other blogs.

The people that you refer also get impressions from the people that join under their referral code. The cycle continues. You get credit up to 0 levels below your blog. So potentially you could have 1000 page impressions of your blog posts each and every day across the web. So far it is a pretty decent program and I have had two referrals. The program is in beta and is for English blogs only. It will probably eventually be for all blogs once the beta is over. It is free to join and I sent an invite to Kevin to see about adding it to fuel.

I would also like to point out that today I found a great photographer and kayaker through Blog Rush. His post was on my blog The BenSpark and I clicked through to learn more about the site. And his name is PhotoKayaker, how appropriate. It wasn’t until I went to his site and left a comment that I found out that a week ago he had linked to my blog The Wired Kayaker. Small World Wide Web.

Speaking of a small world wide web the Blog World Expo is coming in November and FuelMyBlog and blog World Expo will be giving away a free two day pass to the event. You can enter the competition. I’m already going but wanted to raise some noise about the completion on my blog Flatwater Tech. I said I wanted to meet Matt Mullenweg, well I just got a comment from Dave Taylor that said that he’d introduce me to whoever I wanted to meet. That Dave is a nice guy. I look forward to meeting him and also to meeting as many FuelMyBlog bloggers that are going to Blog World Expo.

BenSpark Writes four 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.

Benspark is also a contributing writer for blogs such as Photowalking.org, The Blogging Den and most recently Blue Ribbon Bloggers. He is also expecting his first child in October and never sleeps and will somehow sleep even less in a month.

Grab Bag

Tech Tuesday with BenSpark – #9

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This originally appeared on FuelMyBlog’s Blog. Written by me.

This should be titled something like blog anywhere, anytime about anything. Today’s topic is mobile blogging and I am going to talk about four blogging programs that you can use to post via your mobile phone. The first is a blogging tool that most of us use or have used and that is Blogger.

Blogger has tools to allow you to blog via your mobile phone but there is some set-up involved. Blogger has a great tutorial on how to set this up. It has been a while since I set up my ability to blog from my cell phone. In fact I thought I would use it more often when I was stuck in airports and whatnot but it seems that I haven’t used it quite enough to warrant setting it up in the first place. However this service has helped me on more than one occasion.

Being able to blog through my mobile phone has helped me keep certain deadlines and restrictions that I have placed upon myself in regards to my Photo-A-Day project. I have been taking a Photo-A-Day now for 829 consecutive days. And I have a rule that the photo has to be taken each day and uploaded to my blog that same day too. But what would happen if I was somewhere without Internet access, well I had my camera phone as a backup. And with my camera phone I could snap the picture, give it a title, write up a little something in the body of the post push a button and Whoosh, it flies over the cell service and lands smack dab on my blog.

Setting up mobile blogging for blogger is the most involved of the four programs I will talk about. Luckily there is an easy to follow Tutorial that you can use to make this work.

First you send a message via MMS to [email protected] you will get a message back with your a code. This is a token code and you use that to claim your token for your blog. Once that is done Blogger automatically sets up a mobile blogging blog for you. However you can link that blog to an existing blog so that new blog posts that you make go directly to the blog that you choose. I don’t think you can do this to multiple blogs on Blogger however, which is a bummer because I would love to post photos on the fly while I am out on the water kayaking.

The Tutorial on blogger will guide you thought the rest of the nuances of this feature. It is very simple to set up.

Here is my latest blog post via my cell phone to BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo. If you didn’t realize it, I need a better camera on my phone. This image stinks. But I am also able to put the SD card from my camera into my mobile phone and send that image to a post with my mobile phone. I am using a Treo 650 phone that I got specifically so that I could text my wife and do mobile blogging. Make sure that you check with your carrier first to see about data usage and other hidden charges before mobile blogging. I got nailed in my first month because of the data plan I had (I do not have an Internet plan and Treo’s are different than other Verizon phones and once they go online at all they stay there, so I got walloped on charges that I fought and got most of the money back. So check your plans and make sure your phone has MMS.)

The next two programs are for posting photos directly to your Flickr and Buzznet accounts. These are photo hosting accounts and each provide you with e-mail addresses that you can use to send new pictures to your account.

For Buzznet you need to click Settings and then under the header Make a Post click Post From Email. This will show you a box with the email address that you will use to send photos to your Buzznet account. All photos sent this way appear in your default photo collection. You can edit your photo later to put it in another directory. Here is an image I uploaded via my camera phone. Since each photo is so awful I named my folder Craptastic Treo Images.

Craptastic image of Duncan on the Door

You can also email photos to your Flickr account. And you can also have those images automatically post to your blog as well. You will have two separate addresses that you will use to post photos, one will post just to Flickr, the other Will post to Flickr as well as to your blog.

First the address for your Flickr Account, you can find this by starting at you home page on Flickr. From there you will click on the link to uploading tools. You should see a paragraph on the right hand side titled Upload by E-mail. Click that and you will then go to the page that will give you your Flickr email address. With that you can upload photos via e-mail or through MMS on your camera phone. The subject becomes the title of the post, the image is what you attach and then the body of your message becomes the content of the post.

Here is the photo I uploaded directly to Flickr.

Experiment from Mobile Phone

Here is a photo I uploaded to Flickr and had automatically post to my blog. This is taking some time because I uploaded a large file through the phone, hope I don’t get nailed on charges again. I will post this and the link as soon as I get that up. The cool thing about this is that if you have multiple blogs you can get a special email address for each of your blogs. This is one of the best ways to get photos automatically added to your blogs.

Tech Tuesday with BenSpark Experiment

Here is the photo I wanted to post originally but had to take at a lower resolution.

Tech Tuesday Test Post

One thing I learned about sending images that were taken by a full fledged digital camera by popping the SD card from my Canon SD80 and putting it into my Treo 650 is that I can’t send a huge image. First I need to change the qu
ality and size of the image and then try to send the message and image together. So here is my second attempt to send a photo that originated on my Canon Camera to Flickr and have it automatically post to one of my blogs.

And those photos and post text automatically posted to my blog at The BenSpark and also as 2nd Tech Tuesday Test. As far as the one that I took with my Canon Digital Camera and then sent, it is still in my inbox so if it actually gets sent sometime I will add links to that as well. I need to get a better camera phone. But my contract is up in January so I have to wait. A qwerty keyboard is also important.

And another blog tool that you can use to do mobile blogging is Twitter. This is easy. You set up a Twitter account, then click settings and choose Phone & IM. Once you put in your mobile phone number you send a message to twitter and the number that they give you. Send a message through SMS (not MMS) and the text message you send gets posted to your Twitter account.

Just a couple more tools to use to enhance your blogging life. If you have other mobile blogging tools that you use let me know.

BenSpark Writes four 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.