Keep Your Widgets (updated)

I updated the template on my photo blog yesterday.  I've pretty much ignored that one for a while, and I was still using an OLD Blogger layout.  Anyway, I found a template I like and decided to install it.  And that's when I noticed that Blogger now lets you choose to keep your widgets when you upload a new template - instead of having to lose them all, or manually find them in your old template and insert them into the new one.  I'm not sure when this started because I haven't changed a template in a while, but this is going to make changing your template so much easier. 

Thank you, Blogger, for realizing that after we put all that work into adding our widgets, we don't want to lose them just to change the look of our blogs!

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Twitter Followers on Your Twitter Background

I'm thinking it's about time for a new background for my twitter page, but I'm not sure what I want.  Do I want to create a custom background, which would take some kind of idea and artistic talent?  Or do I just want to pick a free one from one of the many sites that offer them?  I still haven't decided, but I noticed one of the people I follow on twitter was using a background from Twilk - so I had to check it out.

It looks like fun.  Basically you sign in with twitter, and Twilk creates you a background made up of the profile photos of the people you follow, or your followers, or both - however you want to set it up.  The more you mention, retweet, or interact with someone, the more they should show up in your background.

I haven't decided if I'm going to try it or not, but it does offer a very unique background for everyone - unless, as someone said, you have the exact same followers and interact with them the exact same way as someone else does - highly unlikely.

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Free Photoshop Brushes

I came across this list of free Photoshop brushes today - the best brushes in various categories.  There are some nice looking ones here, and I think I could have some fun with some of these.  I haven't downloaded or installed any of them, so I'm saving this list for later.

Free Books

I came across a couple sites for free books today.  One is for audio books, and one is children's books.

You can download free audio books from BooksShouldBeFree.com. There are quite a few books available in different genres.  Most of them are older books, so you won't find any recent best-sellers, but definitely worth a look.  There are quite a few books I've never read and might enjoy listening to, as well as some old favorites I haven't read in years.  Books can be downloaded into iTunes or in MP3 format.

Free children's books can be downloaded at Children's Books Forever.  There are some really cute books here.  It looks like most, if not all, of them are written by Hans Wilhelm.  The books open with Adobe Reader, so you can read them online, save them to your computer, print them out, and even use them on Smartboard, PowerPoint or overhead projectors (non-commercial use only) - so it looks like a great resource for parents and teachers.

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Multicolr Search Lab

Lady Banana shared this on Twitter today, and it's so much fun.  You can select up to 10 colors, and it searches for Flickr images with those colors.  I'm not sure if there's any practical use to it, but it's fun to choose different colors and see what comes up.  If you find a photo you really like, you can click to view it on Flickr.

 

Check out Multicolr Search Lab and try it for yourself.

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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