jonnybaker

make your own wrapping paper

make your own wrapping paper with your flickr images using xpapr

fun idea but i'll never bother printing it out as my printer is a)knackered and b)ink is too expensive

[ht dave]

flickr idiot's guide - let me try and convert you

flickr is brilliant - if you follow the blog you'll know i am a fan. i have been accused of being a flickr evangelist. when i discovered it i described it here but i thought it worth an update after 3 months use so let me give you an idiot's guide to flickr and try and convert you (again)...

flickr is an online photo sharing application  - you should be interested if
a) you take photos
b) you look at photos
c) you use photos in presentations/worship/desktop/artwork

go to flickr and sign up. you will be able to look at photos and participate much better if you sign up. it doesn't cost anything to sign up.

your own photos
upload your photos
if you take photos you can then upload them. the free account lets you upload up to 20mb a month and see 200 pics. you quickly realise that it's worth paying for the pro version which is incredibly cheap and gives you a huge amount of space each month. as well as being able to upload within flickr itself there are free tools to upload photos for both mac and pc - i have downloaded two for mac - one so i can upload directly from iphoto and one that is a stand alone uploader. both are incredibly easy to use and especially useful for uploading in batches or sets..

i upload photos at full size - for me it provides a great way of backing them up. flickr is worth it for that alone. flickr resizes them into a number of different sizes for people interested in looking at or downloading them from thumbnail through to the original size.

tag your photos
you can tag any photo with as many words as you like. this isn't so much a description as a facility to enable you to retrieve your photos at a later date either by you or others when you search on a particular tag or combination of tags.

decide who you want to see your photos
you can set who can see any photo as family, friends, contacts, or public (anyone).

arrange your photos
it is easy to arrange photos into sets - you can then share them with people by them watching them in a slideshow - it's very well done. so you might have favourites, art pics, london photos or whatever...

share your photos
flickr is a photo sharing site - this is where it is really brilliant.
a) add family friends and contacts
you can have a set of family, friends and contacts. you can either invite someone or add them when you see photos you like or if you know them. when you have added contacts, you can check your contacts page and see who has uploaded any photos - you will be shown their latest photo. at first i added people i knew - family and friends but quickly realised that contacts are worth adding if you like particular peoples photos or if they like yours.
b) choose what level of copyright you want
your photos are protected by copyright but this can limit what other people do with them (technically anyway). but you can choose to have a creative commons license that means you give permission for people to use your photos in different ways. the one i have chosen means anyone can use my photos and manipulate them as they wish for any non commercial use.
c) add your photos to groups
flickr has hundreds of groups. to add a photo to a group pool you have to join the group. then when a photo is open you simply click on a button to select one of your groups to add it to. there are groups for everything imaginable - light, colours, portraits, religious kitsch etc...
d) create a group
if you want to share photos on a particular theme create a group. i've created gracelondon so we can share pics from grace. there are also discussion boards as part of the group.

cultivate interest in your photos
this may or may not be of interest to you. i confess that it is of interest to me. if i take a great photo there's nothing like having other people notice it. rather than me share from my limited experience read thomas hawk's article top ten tips for getting attention on flickr (btw have a look at his photos - fab). these include making peoples photos favourites, adding them as contacts, joining groups, adding your best one last so it is top on your contacts pile, and so on...

see if any of your photos have made it
flickr identifies 500 photos a day as interesting - these then change over time. you can use scout to see if any of yours have been deemed worthy. i have had three make it...

blog your photos
if you have a blog you can set it up so that you can blog directly from a photo page in flickr which is pretty neat. this relates to the previous point as well as it lets people know about your best photos.

print your photos
there are various third parties who work with flickr so that you can print books of your photos - anyone tried it? qoop looks pretty good... i haven't tried it yet but no doubt will.

other peoples photos
there are loads of photos in flickr. so there must be loads you would love. when you find one you like just click favourite to add it to your favourites so you can find it again. and while you are at it why not leave a comment on it to let the person know what you think of it. if you look at their photos and decide you like the look of their photos then add them as a contact as well. you can come back and look at your favourites any time and if you make someone a contact you will be able to see their latest photos at any time.

how do you find good photos?
thomas hawk has saved me the trouble again by writing a piece top 10 ways to find great photos on flickr but this is what i do (and it's much shorter)...

add people whose photos i like as contacts and track them

use flickr leech - this is an unbelievably brilliant search tool. i mentioned it before but it was down at the time so you probably didn't check it out. you can use it to either type in a date to search by interestingness, a tag, a group or a user ID and it fills your screen with a sheet of thumbnails. i generally have a look at the 500 photos labelled most interesting each day by flickr - it sounds a lot but they are all on one page of thumbnails. here's a screen grab (click on the thumbnail to see it) so you can see what i mean... it's simplicity is its genius. i have found it loads better than using the flickr explore page though that often highlights interesting groups and picks out a good photo.

Technorati Tags: flickr

flickr - online photo sharing

i've mentioned flickr already a couple of times and said i'd say more. i actually feel like i have been a bit slow on the uptake. flickr's been around a while (long enough for jordon to upload 3000 photos anyway!) and i've seen plenty of people blog about it. the thing that delayed me was having photoalbums in typepad provided already which are a great feature (see left hand sidebar to link to some of mine).

anyway here's the deal:
for free you can upload 20mb of photos a month. yes free! the 20mb is bandwidth so to upload plenty resize your photos first.

the interface is great - simple and easy to use. sign up and then upload. my flickr page is here. you can see i haven't uploaded many yet but the latest are there. when you upload a photo it is resized for you automatically into several sizes. for example click on a photo and then you'll see above it a little button that says all sizes. if you click on that you can select what size you like. if you sign up as a member you can leave comments on peoples photos. you can also download some tools to make uploading easier - i have downloaded the one for mac which is fab.

when you upload a photo (or after) you can add any tags (yes them again) to the photo. a tag is just a word you want to associate with a photo - add as many as you like to any photo. this is a very powerful way of filing photos for retrieval. so in my photos at a later date i would be able to find all photos of cornwall or the big chill just by searching on that tag, or i could search on a family member's name and so on. over a period of years this will be invaluable. i can search in this way within my photos or all public photos.

you can organise your photos into sets. this is easy to do. and when you look at a set it creates a very neat slideshow option - brilliant for sharing photos with family and friends by sending an e-mail with the link. here's a set of snapshots 2005 that i created to share with friends and family at christmas. and here's a set of some long thin shots that i like.

if your photos are private or you are worried about who can access photos you can choose to make photos just available to people you have indicated are friends and/or family which is neat. i haven't done this yet but i guess once family members start sharing photos we may want to do that with some photos.

flickr is part of what's being termed social networking software. in other words it's not just about you and your photos - it's about sharing photos with a network of friends and family (and the wider public). so you can invite other people to be your contacts very easily. to do so they need to sign up with flickr. to see the contacts you need to be signed in. i am in the process of persuading some of my  brothers and sisters to sign up so that we can share photos and i have added several friends. whenever i go to the flickr page now i see the latest  photos added by friends and family. i should say my son harry beat me to it - he signed up with flickr before me - see his photos.

within flickr it's easy to also create groups that have a shared interest on a particular theme. a couple i noticed were banksy - over 700 photos of banksy stencils (or supposed banksy stencils). i will probably join and add my ones to that when i get round to uploading them. there are also discussions within that group. and another weird but fun one is cameratoss - yes photos taken by throwing your camera up in the air often with stunning results. the canadian emerging church/alt worship network resonate have their own group where they share photos for worship, media and graphics. any images are protected by copyright and some people choose to have a creative commons license but they are there to use within that. i haven't worked out what to do about creative commons and all that yet but i guess i should.

you can upgrade to be a pro user. this gives you unlimited storage (well 2 gig a month) and is cheap. so i have already signed up to that. it means you can upload large images without worrying about it and access your original files. and it creates a backup of all your photos online.

there are other features as well but not much more you need to know. so what are you waiting for?

let me know any cool groups you discover...

Technorati Tags: flickr, banksy, resonate

blog clean up for 06

well i followed my own advice to use the christmas/new year period constructively when it comes to the blog. these are the things i have done...

signed up to technorati and begun tagging posts

having realised the usefulness of categorising data i am going back through the blog posts since i started with typepad (almost done a year) and adding in lots more categories. according to a comment i was left this will also be recognised via technorati as tags which will be a bonus. i started adding tags to each post but after a few months worth gave up - it was just too boring... i don't know why i just used a few categories in the first place. it's so simple to add new ones and much more useful for me (and anyone else) now to find my way round the posts. the categories so far are: advent | africa | alternative worship | alt worship | applications | art | articles | australia | big chill | blah | blogs | Books | canada | chelsea | emerging church | family | Film | football | grace | greenbelt | holland | india | ireland | justice | labyrinth| linkage| liturgy | london | middle east | mission | Music | new zealand | pentecost | photos | podcast | politics | prayer | proost | shopping | spirituality | theology | USA | video | vj | web | Weblogs | worship tricks | youth ministry and no doubt i will add some more. some categories will only have one or two posts. to find categories in the future they are on the left hand side bar.

added an up to date photo into the blog banner/header (though i may change it again - not convinced).

changed the make poverty history photo (this was actually a photo of my hand that i took and i have since since seen it on several other blogs). this isn't because i don't want to make poverty history but the campaign was a focus for 2005... i've added in another image i like.

got rid of the calendar

rejigged my archives a bit

added various buttons to sites i have joined - technorati | my del.icio.us | blogtopsites | britblog | londonbloggers | rss feed - see bottom of right hand side bar. i've made a couple of the buttons so that they are all the same size (80 x 15).

i have joined flickr. i am going to blog about this separately. but i have added a flickr badge to the left hand side bar that links through to my photos. they are currently just some personal/family ones that won't be of much interest to most blog readers. as i mentioned before i like typepad photo albums a lot and will continue to use them but having another online store of photos with the ability to share them with other friends is brilliant. helping my son harry get going on his blog was what made me realise how cool flickr is. i am going to pay to get the pro version.

i have also added the firefox del.icio.us extension so that i can add pages to my del.icio.us with the click of one button in the browser bar which is very cool.

so that's about it. i guess i'll gradually keep going back to finish off the categories but then leave it alone for a while and get back to blogging content which after all is probably more important.

Technorati Tags: applications, blogs, del.icio.us, flickr, tag, technorati

tagging - the latest way to search the web

the lead article in today's media guardian is on none other than tagging. seems like everyone is on about it! it's actually a good straightforward article if you want to know what everyone is on about...

tagging - the latest way to search the web

...tags have a larger lesson to teach to media. They present a clear demonstration that the web is not about flat content. The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools - pencils, presses and Dewey decimals - thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself.

Technorati Tags: guardian, tagging, web

top 10 web 2.0 apps 05

top 10 innovative web2.0 applications in 2005

travbuddy looks brilliant if you want to create travelogues and share pictures and stories - i like the way the journies are plotted on googlemap

gchart is a simple way of finding the time anywhere in the world. i usually do this by switching the timezone on my mac but this is a lot simpler

givemeaning is simply astonishing. this kind of thing could totally change the way people give their money...

Technorati Tags: applications, blogs, web

mosaic body of christ - worship trick 32 [second series]

good to see seb again at greenbelt. he is blogging again and has started his own series of worship tricks. i'm sure they will be worth watching as he is very creative...

anyway the first one is a simple idea using an app called MacOSaiX to transorm pictures of your church/group into an icon of christ. i won't nick all seb's tricks and add them to mine but thought it would be a good way of flagging his up... this is how he describes it...

A visual idea for getting across how the body of christ was broken for all of us.

Ok so here is the idea before the service or in advance of the service (depends how organized you are!) you take a picture of every one that attends your church ie youth groups, all the different services, meet and eat groups and so on try and very the back grounds in all the pics you take. Then you will need to put all these pics in one file on your computer. Then download a free app called MacOSaiX. this app will enable you to create one image like the one above out of all the pics you have taken!

Or you could use the same method above to get across the idea of 1 Corinthians 12:12 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.

The image above is a old picture of jesus but made up of loads of pictures of different parts of bodies

Technorati Tags: christ images, worship tricks, alternative worship

newsreader for windows

a friend was asking about a good free newsreader for windows... being a mac user i have no idea. any suggestions?

arkaos upgrade

arkaos 3.5 is out. i have upgraded (free if you have v3). not time to try it out but VJ village has...

processing also looks interesting but no danger of me having time to explore that either...

sharing music via itunes

in our house we have a wireless network of computers. one of the cool things you can do is set your itnues preferences so that you can listen to music located on someone else's computer. i noticed today in the popular del.icio.us links a site called blue coconut - the title intrigued me so i had a look. blue coconut is a little application that enables you to copy any file to your computer that you are listening to on a shared network in itnues. it's dead simple as well...