A picture is worth a thousand words or so the old saw goes and it is certainly true that an image can greatly help the look of a blog post.
Several people have asked me recently how to add images to blog posts so I thought I’d put up a blog post explaining how I do it in case it would be useful for others.
I store my images online on Flickr. When I want to use an image in a blog post I use the copy of the image which is stored on Flickr. This has the advantages that:
- it saves me diskspace from my hosting account,
- it saves me bandwidth from my hosting account and
- it is easy because Flickr provides the code to use the image from their site!
Being a simple soul, I like it when things are made easy for me.
How do I do it?
Well, click on the image you want to use in your Flickr account. If you don’t have a Flickr account, get one! A free account will allow you to upload 200 images and if you need more than that it costs around $25 p.a.
Once you have selected your image, click on the All Sizes button above the picture.
This brings you to the Available Sizes screen. Here you decide which image size you want in your blog post and select it. I generally go for images around 500 pixels wide (although the one selected below is 240 pixels wide).
When you select the size you want, the code required to place the image in your blog post is in the field under:
1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:
Copy and paste that code into your blog post et voilà , you now have an image in your blog post.
Google’s Picasa photo sharing site has released an uploader for the Mac! It is available for download here. You will need a Picasa Web Albums account to use the Uploader.
The download contains a standalone uploader
And an uploading plug-in for iPhoto
I setup a Picasa account to try it out and it seems straightforward enough. The advantage Zooomr and Flickr have over Picasa is how easy they make it to include pictures from either app in your blog posts. Picasa doesn’t make this function available (or I couldn’t find it).
Having both Zooomr and Flickr accounts, I don’t see any advantage to having a Picasa one as well. I suppose if you had a Picasa account and recently got a Mac, then this is useful. Otherwise (unless I’m missing something rad in Picasa), use Flickr or Zooomr.
Evoca is podcasting made simple. So simple, even my parents could do it!
What is Evoca? Evoca is a site which allows you to record and upload audio to the Internet. Think Flickr for sound.
How do you record and upload the audio? Well, there are several options. You can:
- Record the audio yourself and have Evoca simply upload your audio file or
- You can use Evoca’s built-in recorder to record (using your computer’s microphone)
- With a Pro account you can record from Skype, or even easier still
- You can ring Evoca’s server “Emily” from your phone and it (she?) will record and upload the phone call for you
This is fantastic - you are out in the car, perhaps listening to a podcast. Something in the show makes you want to respond - you grab your phone, dial the Evoca number and hey presto! your response is out there.
Or you are a journalist and a story/interview opportunity comes up suddenly - no prob, whip out your mobile, dial Evoca and you are away.
And if you want to save your phoned-in recordings as private (think company exec/journalist/legal or medical professional)? That’s as easy as toggling a switch in your account’s settings.
Evoca made this even easier for Irish users today by launching an Irish phone-in number. If you are an Evoca user and you are based in Ireland, simply dial 01-657 5601 to record your sound clip.
How much does it cost? Well, like Flickr, a basic account is free and a Pro account costs ($4.99 per month in this case). A basic account entitles you to upload 60 minutes audio while a Pro account entitles you to 200 minutes and Evoca are open to negotiate if you need more than that.
What else can it do?
- Do you want to apply a Creative Commons to your recordings? Bing! No problem, you can chose from a range of CC licensing options (including none)
- Do you want your recordings transcribed or translated? Bing! Evoca have that covered too.
- Do you want to make money from your recordings? Ka ching! Evoca have an option to allow you charge for your recordings!
- Do you want to blog/podcast your recordings? Bing! Evoca gives you the html with which to do that (see below).
Evoca is only out of beta a couple of weeks but already has loads of functionality covered. There’s a lot more I’d love to see it do - a blog sidebar plugin with the most recent 5 recordings, for example but for such a new application, I’m well impressed with what they have covered so far and am looking forward to see how Evoca develops.
Previously I wrote about how easy uploading photos to Flickr is using Flock.
Since then Thomas Hawk turned me on to Steve Cohen’s cross-platform, open source photo uploader JUploadr.
Why do I like it?
- Well, it is GPL’d for a start.
- Cross-platform
- It allows me to upload photos to my accounts on Flickr and Zooomr
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It allows batch editing and uploading
- I can tag my pictures and
- I can upload directly into my Flickr Sets
Why JUploadr isn’t on Flickr’s Tools page is beyond me. It beats the tools there and it is free (unlike the iPhoto plugin linked to there).
Photo-sharing site Zooomr re-launched its site with a new version (2.0) in the last couple of days.
Zooomr screen shot
Hosted on
Zooomr
The launch of the new version of the site was delayed by a DOS attack on the servers but Zooomr seem to have put that behind them quite successfully now. The main differences I see in this version of the site are a re-write of the Geotagging process which makes geotagging your photos even easier through Zooomr.
I haven’t tried the Zooomrtations (audio annotating of photos) so I can’t say if this has changed in any way in this release. Very little else has changed radically with version 2.0 (that I can see). In terms of photo sharing I still prefer Flickr’s ability to share your photos with groups. Still the Geotagging in Zooomr is kinda cool and Zooomr are offering pro accounts to bloggers for the moment so you may want to try it out.
I have been playing a bit doing some research on YouTube. I realise YouTube has been around a while and I have watched many videos on it but I hadn’t looked into uploading video to YouTube until now.
YouTube is a site which allows you to upload video clips (in the same way that Flickr and Zooomr allow you to upload photos) and share them online.
I setup an account and uploaded some quick videos.
Why am I playing with it? Well, my wife is Spanish and her family are always interested to see how our children are doing. I can take a video of the kids using my camera phone, copy to the computer, and upload to YouTube in a few short minutes. Each video gets its own url and I don’t get hit for hosting or bandwidth charges.
The interface is very straightforward and it seems to accept most video formats.
This has great possibilities for anyone interested in online video.
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