I just finished working with Embracing Excellence, a company out of Alexandria, Minnesota that provides professional development for educators and others. Dr. Ed Porthan is the main presenter at Embracing Excellence; he provides motivational and instructional speeches.
The needed a new web site that would attract search engines and better represent their business. Like many small businesses they had bought into a content management system, which technically allowed them to update their site – but in practice did not provide them with any more time to update their site.
Remember I talked about 23 Things on a Stick a few weeks ago. It’s a program through Minnesota libraries to encourage people to learn about web 2.0 applications. Well, going through my 23 Things today, I learned about a couple of online image generators, two of which I loved!
Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/) will walk you through making a wide range pictures using your digital photos. I created a billboard with my kids on it. You can also create:
Badges with images (for a serious business application)
Fake Magazine Covers
Blog Header
A Slideshow (Great for vacation snaps)
And more…
Image Chef (http://www.imagechef.com/) has a series of template images and you can add your own text or photos. If you looked hard or had low standards I think you could come up with a quick logo or banner for a web site. I picture a banner on someone’s birthday invitation rather than law conference.
OK today’s Byte is very, very specific. I just wasted an hour trying to figure out why my WordPress blog had suddenly gone wonky. The sidebar/navigation on the right dropped down to the bottom of the page.
I also wanted to send a fun link, since this is so specific. Here is a fun webcam look at Dublin. I thought you might enjoy watching us from afar on St Patrick’s Day next week: http://www.visitdublin.com/multimedia/DublinWebcam/dublin.aspx I’ll try to wave as we parade by the camera.
OK back to the blog issue … I had posted a new entry on (http://blandinonbroadband.wordpress.com/). I post here often. Well suddenly, the right hand side bar disappeared to the bottom of the page. Also I noticed a tiny emoticon smiley face next to the top post. It was in a place that I could not have put it.
I read where this might happen if you post an unusually large amount of text or a large image in a post. So, I removed all of the images – none of which were that large. Still, no go. I tried looking at each entry as a separate post – and nothing.
I hadn’t used any large images. I hadn’t posted longer than normal posts, but I had used a “click to read more” feature right after a bullet point, which threw the “click to read more” feature out of whack. It retained the tab from the bullet point, which pushed it further to the right than it should be. In the end I moved that feature a line or two (dodged the bullet) and all was well again.
It took forever to figure out because I couldn’t see the more/continuation feature when I looked at the individual post because once you click on the full post you drop that feature from the post view. Therefore the individual post looked good and only threw the sidebar out of whack when it was abbreviated.
So what about a smiley? I found that that the smiley face is part of the stats program. She’s called Angela. To track stats, they need to put a small but of code/text on the page – generally you can find her at the bottom of a WordPress blog, if they use WordPress stats.
I had a little time today so I thought I’d dive back into the 23 Things on a Stick. Here’s how I fared:
Thing 3: RSS
RSS (really simple syndication) is not new to me. I have used it on several web sites to help tie in a blog with a web site. For example for the Minnesota Sesquicentennial, I built a standard web site. All necessary changes go through me. But I also set up a blog and a Flickr account so that the Sesquicentennial fellows could post blog article and pictures without my assistance. I used the RSS feeds to tie the blog and pictures into the web site homepage. So we have regular changes that I don’t have to administer.
I am not a use personal RSS user. I’ve signed up for RSS feeds with various readers in the past – but still I generally work through email. Today I tried signing up for the Google Reader and I subscribed to a couple of RSS feeds. I figure that Google was the way to go for me because I spend so much time with my Google account that I might actually stop to read the news as I work.
Thing 4: Flickr
OK I’m going to let myself test out of this. I have used Flickr for several projects. I think the best application, especially for librarian types is posting conference and meeting pictures via Flickr. It’s quick, it’s easy, and people can easily comment on the pictures.
I set up a Flickr account for a Minnesota Resort. That has made my life easier too – now the resort posts their own pictures, which saves me time but also we can post many more than when we posted them on our own web site.
I did enjoy checking out the Library of Congress Flickr account. I wish that they would set up an account of copyright-free photos to share online, if they have such things.
Today’s Byte is a super quick resource, a search engine cheat sheet: http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm
It’s a table that matches the type of search you might want to do (people, exact phrase, file-specific, sounds and more) and the best search engines for that type of search.
It’s a great list and I found a few search engines that were new to me on the list.
Thanks to Mary in Minneapolis for sending me the list.
