Thanks to Mary in Minneapolis for sending me info on a very fun widget (small web application) – StoryMaps: http://outside.in.
In you like to look at things on the web, it’s a fun site to visit to get news from your town or neighborhood. (I learned that the Vatican is bringing artifacts to the MN History Center.) You don’t need to sign up; just visit and it will know where you are. (You can sign up to get email updates.)
If you have a blog, you can sign up to have StoryMaps crawl through your site and create a map that marks areas you have talked about. It’s cool. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work with WordPress, which is the blog tool I tend to use but here’s a sample map from my Family Blog: http://outside.in/maps/6482
I really like it in St Paul – I would have loved it in Dublin. It’s a fun tool for any placebloggers.
This isn’t going to change the world for you – but the other day I noticed something fun with Google Maps and directions (http://maps.google.com/maps). The next time you get directions from Google Maps, before you print them out for the car, check out the little cameras on each step. They now provide quick video/scan pictures of your turns. They don’t seem to have every turn in their database – but they have a lot.
It’s fun to check it out if you are away from home and a little homesick or if you are more visual than map-focused. I thought it might also be good to check out if you were going to someplace where you didn’t know the language – but I tested it out with some directions for my old neighborhood in Spain and there were no pictures, yet.
On a related note: I took an informal poll of former Mapquest fans and we all felt as if we were now better served by Google. We felt that the directions were better. There’s nothing scientific about the poll – but if you haven’t tried Google Maps, it’s worth it.
This is a test to see if MyContactForm works within a WordPress page. Please feel free to help us test.
| What is your favorite season? |
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall |
| E-mail Address: * |
|
|
| |
| * Required |
|
|
Sorry I was MIA last week. The Republican National Convention was held a couple miles from my house and I became a news junkie. I have to admit that I was more interested in what was going on around town because of the RNC than what happened at the RNC – but it kept me busy.
This week I wanted to share a quick tool that will help you edit photos.
Picnik: http://www.picnik.com
You don’t need to register – you simply upload your photo or other image. Then you can do basic editing, resize, rotate, crop, change contrast, colors, sharpness and red-eye. Then you can save it to your desktop, your Flickr account, Facebook, or email it to a friend.
It seems to deal with only the most popular image formats (jpeg, gif, bmp, tiff and a couple others). But say you had a digital photo you wanted to post online or send to someone without overwhelming their email in-box, you could use Picnic to resize and you’re in good shape.
