Blog Technology

I've had a few people ask me about how I put together the blog. First of all, any digital camera will do. Mine is a 4 pixel Canon PowerShot that I got fairly cheaply off of E-bay. Then I use Picasa, which is free software distributed by Google, to manage my pictures. Picasa will take the photos off of your camera, and organizes pictures into directories that you can easily navigate. It also has a bunch of really useful editing tools. The one I use the most is the "red eye" fix, which removes red eye from photos and is very easy to use. It also has a number of other tools that help you to adjust color, enhance photos, and print.

The best part of Picasa is that it connects automatically with Hello!, which is another piece of free software that makes it really simple to place pictures on a blog. Once you download and install Hello!, you tell it the name of your blog (for instance, mine is zychsters.blogspot.com) and your login id and password, and it will automatically place your pictures on your blog.

It sounds complicated, but it's not at all. You just navigate through your pictures in Picasa, and select the ones that you'd like to add to your blog. You then click the button in Picasa that says "Share with your blog using Hello!" and the Hello! program opens up. You then type a caption for each picture, and click "Publish." Hello! then formats each picture automatically, and places them online.

It's also easy to add pictures using my cellphone. I have a Treo 650, which is a PalmPilot-cellphone combination, and I use Sprint PCS as my provider. There's a free picture service called Flickr, which provides basically the same service as Hello!, except for cellphone users. I set up an account with Flickr, and they gave me a custom email address that I input one time into my phone. Then I take a picture using my phone, and then click on the email address, which is saved in the phone. I can type a caption in using the keypad on my phone, and when I click the "send" button, the picture is automatically placed on my blog, along with the caption I entered. Since my cell phone's camera has a very low resolution, these pictures aren't as nice as the ones taken with my digital camera, but they look ok on the blog. Since I always have my phone with me, I can always add a picture to my blog, wherever I am.

This all looks and sounds really complicated, but all it takes is a couple of hours of time to download and install all the software, and then it's incredibly easy to place pictures online. It's really amazing how many people have told me that they check in regularly to see the family. I can keep all of our relatives and friends updated, and it only takes me a few minutes to upload the pictures and add captions. Best of all, I have a digital journal that I can keep forever. By the way, there's yet another free piece of software, HTTrack Website Copier, that I use to create a complete copy of the blog. Once I make a copy, I burn it to a CD, and then I have a permanent record that I can use to embarrass the kids when they get older.

Sorry this post is so long, but since several people have asked me about the software I use, I thought I would pass it along to save everyone else the headache of researching all of the different pieces of software. I'm sure that there are plenty of other setups that will work just as well, if not better, but this is what works for me.

Looking back on the post, I realize that it makes me look like a big nerd, but if the shoe fits ...