Towse

: views from the Hill

Thursday, February 28, 2002

Computer Bits April 2002 - digital photos

The April column for Computer Bits flew off this morning a day ahead of deadline. I finally settled on a focus for the "digital photo" issue -- wrote a column covering photo "album" sites on the Web. I also snuck in mention of Dick Harper's photo/art gallery and Kathy Vincent's gallery of watercolors. Beautiful stuff.

Posted by Sal at 10:45 AM

Monday, February 25, 2002

Computer Bits Feb 2002 - updates to links

URL Updates - 'twixt then and now, the following URLs referenced in the Feb 2002 Blog article for Computer Bits have changed, disappeared, taken a hike. It's too late for the print edition and the magazine doesn't update the Web version either, so here's a list of things that have changed:
  • The Mercury News, wouldn't you know, revamped their whole site after I submitted my article. The new link for Dan Gillmor's blog is http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/
  • I sent a note John Paczkowski at the Merc to find a link to the 9-11 blog that was also referenced in the article. John sez they're moving the archival stuff over to the new Web location and it should be available in a few days.
  • Dave Winer's http://www.weblogs.com has been re-vamped for speed and currently hangs Netscape 4.7+ If you'd like to check out the link, use IE.
  • Ev's blog at http://www.evhead.com/ doesn't show all content with Netscape. It did at the beginning of January, honest! If you'd like to check the site out, use IE.

Four links out of thirty-two and it's less than two months since I sent the article in. Ouch!

Posted by Sal at 10:57 AM
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Saturday, February 23, 2002

More URLs with digital photos and albums

More URLs with the photo theme.

My friend Ravi just sent me a link to some photo sets at Yahoo! of his lovely daughter and his two-month-old son. When we got back from Nepal-Bhutan-Tibet, one of my fellow travelers sent a link to her sets of photos from the trip. Resources available for photo sharing and/or printing, storage on the Web
  • http://www.activeshare.com/ - Adobe ActiveShare. Free download (like Adobe Acrobat). Photo correction (red-eye, cropping, "instant" fix). Direct connection to Shutterfly.com for sharing &c.
  • http://www.cartogra.com/home/home.asp - Cartogra from HP Photo: set up albums, order photos, fiddle with photos (make ePostcards, greeting cards, &c.). HP Photo Manager lets you setup thumbnails for easy browsing, upload large numbers of photos at once, &c.
  • http://www.ClubPhoto.com - ClubPhoto.com lets you send in your film or upload digital pictures. Albums. Order photos. Order gift merchandise.
  • http://www.digitalfridge.com/ - Digital Fridge "a place to create and share online collections of your favorite photos and videos." Free. File size limits.
  • http://www.dotphoto.com/ - dotPhoto. Upload, build albums, share, print, sell your photos. No "adult" content.
  • http://ezprints.mye-pix.com/ - EZPrints.com - view, order, print photos.
  • http://www.fototime.com/ - FotoTime. Software to download. Fee-based after 30d free trial. $23.95 -> 250MB of storage. Each additional 250MB costs $23.95.
  • http://picturecenter.kodak.com/ - Kodak Picture Center Online. View, enhance, albums, share, print. Cannot download high resolution pictures. Must order Photo CD from Picture Center. Max 200 orginal pictures included in free storage. Account is kept active if a roll of film has been developed or pictures ordered in last 30d.
  • http://www.ofoto.com - Ofoto "a Kodak company". Get your photos online, share, "enhance" and print.
  • http://www.photoaccess.com/ - PhotoAccess.com - like EZPrints - upload images, click to order, photos sent. Also photo gifts. Permanent unlimited online storage FREE. Friends have access with "key" and can order too.
  • http://www.photoloft.com/default_new.asp? - PhotoLoft.com. Fee-based. Online photo album. Creative photo greetings. Share photos.
  • http://www.photopoint.com - PhotoPoint.com - "is currently offline"
  • http://www.Printroom.com/ - Printroom.com. Online photo-finishing services. Upload. Share. Print. Free 200MB of storage. Professionals can sell photography over the Web.
  • http://www.Shutterfly.com/index.jsp - Shutterfly.com. Web-based photo service. Storage. Photo correction (red-eye, cropping *c.) Free, unlimited storage. Share. Film developing, too.
  • http://photos.yahoo.com/ - Yahoo! Photos. Upload, enhance (crop, rotate, &c), share, order, photo gifts & cards.
Posted by Sal at 6:40 PM

Monday, February 11, 2002

Image searching on the Web

Photographs online - resources to track them down Specialized collections Art
  • http://www.nga.gov/search/search.htm - Search the National Gallery (USAn)
  • http://gallery.euroweb.hu/welcome.html - Search the Web Gallery of Art: > 9,200 "digital reproductions of European paintings and sculptures created between the years 1150 and 1800" includes commentary and artists' bios. Fourteen "guided tours" present collections of paintings with commentary. e.g. "Tour #13: English art in the 15th-18th centuries Description: This tour presents English painting and sculpture from the 15th to the 18th century, i.e. the Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo periods. After a long period of dominance by a series of foreign-born artists, English art produced in the 18th century some great artists like Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough." Some tours require browsers using frames. You can add period-specific background music from the Classical Archives
  • http://www.artcyclopedia.com/ - Art Cyclopedia - the fine art search engine. Designed by John Malyon. As of a year ago indexes "700 leading arts sites, and offer more than 24,000 links directly to an estimated 80,000 works by 7,000 different artists."


Posted by Sal at 1:48 PM

Friday, February 08, 2002

Links to blog articles

Must be in the air:
The Fortune and PCMagazine references courtesy of Jason Shellen in a note to blogger.com's blog on 08Feb. The Time reference courtesy of Ev in a note to blogger.com's blog on 03Feb. The Business 2.0 and Wired references also courtesy of Ev. The remaining article references courtesy of http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ -- BlogDex -- from MIT, which strives to track pop culture by ranking sites by the number of references to those sites found in the blogging community.

The info page http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/info.asp provides links to yet more information on the blogging phenomenon, including some links I didn't provide in the article.

Posted by Sal at 7:21 PM

Blogs and blogs and blogs

The February Computer Bits went up yesterday. I've already received a handful of nice notes. One of the bloggers I mentioned in the article wants a hard copy for her scrapbook: I put in a request to the Big Kahuna on her behalf.

I added a zillion links to the http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/ site this past day or two. Most additions were to the [reference] and [business] sections.

The http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/ counter spilled over the two thousand count yesterday.

I was doing a little happy-dance until Joanne Jacobs mentioned to me that her http://www.readjacobs.com/ -- Read Jacobs -- blog (mentioned in the Computer Bits article) is getting a thousand hits A DAY, over twenty times my hit rate. At least she's given me a goal to shoot for.

Wonder how many of those hits are from fans who miss her column in the San Jose Mercury News?

Maybe if I wrote about more interesting things?

Posted by Sal at 5:07 PM

Monday, February 04, 2002

Tracking those hits and tweaking the sites

Finished up the March column on RPGamers on the 'net yesterday and sent it along to the powers-that-be at Computer Bits .

Noticed that someone had clicked through to this blog from my February Computer Bits article on blogs and hustled over to see if the February issue was up yet. Nope. Must've been someone on staff checking the link I had in the article. Should be up soon, though.

The transfer of towse.com from ciHost to the new host completed during the last couple days of January. February 1 I get a note from ciHost that they'd charged my account for $240 for the next year's service. Fired back a note saying, in effect, um. no. You aren't hosting me anymore, or hadn't you noticed?

I've finally got all of my Web sites registered with the same registrar ( http://www.godaddy.com), which means I can keep better track of when things expire. GoDaddy is also a cheap registrar. Check it out.

The FREE Bravenet visit counters have been working out fabulously. Nice to see http://www.internet-resources.com/writers get the attention it has been. Yesterday, a Sunday, it got ninety hits, mainly because someone who saw it liked it and posted about it to a handful of writing groups. I can also see when people come through from searches in Google News archives and check out what article of mine they'd clicked through from. Fun. Bravenet lets me choose whether to use the counter as a hit counter or a visit counter (only one count if the person pokes around throughout the site) and also lets me explicitly say "here's my IP address -- don't count any hits I make myself" because, of course, I'm using the links page as my home page and could drive up the stats like nobody's business. Looking for a page counter? Check out http://www.bravenet.com - Bravenet.

Posted by Sal at 3:22 PM
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