Photography on Google+

Possum sharpening her claws

I’m spending most of my time on Google+ lately. Photographs are shown in much higher quality than on Facebook. But more importantly, the range of photographers is huge. From serious professionals to hobbyists, we are all there sharing photos.

There are photography groups on G+. You can post every day to a special interest group: whether it be four-wheelers or sky shots, grass, spiders, or your town. Click here to view an updated list of the groups and instructions for how to participate. I have participated several times and am a regular participant of the Google+ Project 365. My project album is here.

I hope you come join Google+. Be sure to include me in a circle — you can reach me from the badge on the sidebar of this blog. Next on my tasks is haiku folks on G+.

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Cats That Look Like Hitler and Other Links

1. Cats That Look Like Hitler!
2. Stage6: The Last Stop: Videos (public domain videos for free download)
3. Block Posters - Create large wall posters from any image for free!
4. DailyLit: Read books by email and RSS.
5. Open Source: Blog Archive: No Artist Left Behind
6. Open Source: Blog Archive: Pharma: The New Drug Lord?
7. Open Source: Blog Archive: Bug Week (Part 2) with Bernd Heinrich UVM professor and the author of my raven books.
8. Open Source: Blog Archive: William James: Son, Brother, Hero Brother of Henry James.
9. The Story of Spider Web Farm - Williamstown, Vermont
10. Will Knight's Spider Web Farm, Williamstown, Vermont TODO
11. Vermont Scrap Wood: While we are talking beverages Vermont Vodka?
12. eBird || Vermont Institute of Natural Science A Database for Vermont Bird Records
13. Google Earth Hacks - File Downloads - Vermont

Carving Pumpkins, Without The Mess… | The BenSpark

Carving Pumpkins, without the mess… | The BenSpark

Drew has two great links on this post, and I had to get them both. I "carved" this pumpkin at theoworlds.com. You are given a pumpkin and then you use a free hand or straight edge tool to carve, creating your own e-greeting card to e-mail to friends. The shot above is mine (I used only polygons on my pumpkin. Do you know the names of the polygons?) There are also Christmas and Valentine cards you can make. I like to blog the cards. You can grab your cards with Skitch or Preview (both Mac only apps) and create jpegs to upload to blogger. By the way, I still have 4 beta invites for Skitch (for Mac only). Drop me a line and one will be for you.

The other link Drew had was for a Photoshop Elements podcast: Adobe Photoshop Elements Killer Tips (clicking on the title will take you directly to the podcast page in your iTunes browser. It is a free podcast subscription. Still don't have the free iTunes app? Click here.)

I wish I had been visiting blogs last weekend so that I could have been playing with these things while I was sick. Today is the first day that I have begun to visit other blogs again. I missed a lot of great stuff. Never get sick over a holiday.

No Photo Hunt for me today. I have midterm exams to correct, midterm evaluations to do, bills to pay, a book to read, and neglected kitty and dog time to make up for. I also want to visit as many blogger friends as possible and thank all of you for your e-mails and messages. So many comments to reply to!

On a blogger note: there are noteworthy blogger advances to mention:

• If you want to be notifed of follow-ups on comments, click the little box for that when you make a comment. You need a free gmail address (who doesn't have a few of those?) and you are automatically updated when I comment on your comment.
• You can now add Google gadgets as a page element to your blog. You have to use Blogger in draft by logging in at http://draft.blogger.com/. Go to your layout, click on "add a new page element" and there is a choice for adding a gadget. The problem? Which gadget to choose. There are thousands of them. I tried a couple on my test blog and they seem to work fine.
• All gmail accounts are now IMAP! I haven't configured my Apple mail.app for it yet, but it won't be a problem
• There are many new things on Google Earth and Google Maps. Check my Starred Items on my right sidebar for links to them.

Technorati tags: iTunes Photoshop+Elements+Killer+Tips halloween e-cards virtual+pumpkin+carving Blogger gmail Google+gadgets
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How-To: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail

How-to: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail

gmail is going IMAP, which I have waited for for a long time. In fact I wouldn't use gmail for a time because it was not IMAP. But it will be any moment now, and here are the instructions to set up mail.app on your Mac. (Also instructions for iPhone, which is not legal in Vermont).

gmail IMAP mail.app Macintosh
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Google Earth’s Hidden Surprise: A Flight Simulator

Google Earth’s Hidden Surprise: A Flight Simulator: "Hidden inside Google Earth is a secret Flight Simulator that takes full advantage of Google’s extensive satellite imagery."

The reviewer says it is "as good visually as the paid Microsoft Flight Simulator, and in terms of actually presenting real objects it was better."

Click the link for directions.

technorati tags: Google+Earth, flight+simulator

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Halp! Backlinks Don't Work!

Safari does not see the Lat Long backlinks.

I want my backlinks to work on my blog. Right now, I am using the "related article" in the post-footer that gives an actual link to an article that I may have done a "blog this!" to. Or to any article that I want to put in the link field when I create a post.

But there is supposed to be a way to get backlinks to show up on your individual post page and mine don't. And before you ask, yes, I have enabled backlinks in the settings section of my blogs.

• I have asked the blog template designer for help. They acknowledge the problem and said they would work on it. No word yet.
• I have started three threads on the Blogger Help Group. No response.
• I have asked Vin at Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta but his response is not do-able.
  

Firefox sees the Lat Long backlinks.
Early in August, I posted a Google Earth Challenge story about Google Earth and am still getting a lot of traffic off of that (over 200 hits because of my article). The reason? The backlink at the Lat Long Blog. Using Safari, I went to see the backlink to me on the original post and could not see any backlinks. I went there with Firefox and saw all the backlinks. Sometimes Safari does see the backlinks (sometimes it sees them but they don't work, too).

Safari sees the Blogger Buzz backlinks:
Part of the problem is the browser. Hopefully that will be fixed in October with OS 10.5.

But the basic problem is still my template. Firefox does not see any backlinks (and I know they are there after a Google blog search for links). Vin has told me to use Firefox on a PC to see my backlinks. That isn't going to work. I only see a PC at work, and the school took Firefox off of all the PCs after we had huge problems with java scripts.

Google has the backlink code but I haven't been able to figure out where to insert it in my template. I always get parsing errors because I put it in the wrong spot. The instructions are not clear about where to put it.

Ever try to get in touch with anybody at Google with a question? It don't work. There is no e-mail spot to ask. The moderators on the Google Groups are becoming rude and unmangeable. So if any of you know how to fix this frustrating backlinks thing, please let me know.

Google, Blogger, backlinks, trackbacks, related+article

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Wordless Wednesday: Flume Brook, Dixville Notch, New Hampshire

Visit this site on Google Maps.
Please click on the photo to view it full size on a new page.

Technorati tags: Flume+Brook Dixville+Notch New+Hampshire Wordless+Wednesday

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The Barton Fair: Create Personalized Google Maps

Google Street Map - map-generator.net

This is an interactive, clickable, zoomable map of the Orleans County Fairgrounds in Barton, Vermont. The fair, usually called the Barton Fair, opens tomorrow and goes through Sunday. My favorite parts of the fair are the poultry exhibits and the demolition derby. (Yes, I want chickens!)

The fair has a notorious history. You can read about it in this lengthy but excellent article that I found that gives you the flavor of my area. Edward Hoagland wrote in the article "Natural light: Life among Vermont's hippies, hunters, bears, and moose" about his life in Barton for Harper's Magazine in October 2000 that :

In Barton we had a wild, cruel county fair with (deleted) girlie shows--$3 for (deleted) – famous among carnie types as far south as Alabama, that the Quebecois poured across the border by the thousands to see.

In her book A History of Barton, Vermont, Darlene Young writes that the Vermont attorney general's office "concluded that the shows at the Orleans County Fair were 'the roughest of any in the state' and included illegal activities." She continues:

The fair did eventually eliminate the "girlie shows" [in the last half of the 1970s] from its attractions, but it was only partially in response to the public outcry. When Canadian spectators decreased, the fair directors lost their main justification for the "girlie shows": the shows simply weren't making as much money.

By that time, the fair had discovered a new moneymaker. In 1975, the Orleans County Fair hosted its first demolition derby.

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I am experimenting tonight with an embedded Google map of the location of the fairgrounds (about 3 miles from my house). I read in Create Personalized Google Maps: "The Google Operating System Blog" (it is not an official Google blog) that Google announced today that next week embedded maps will be available for blogs. You will be able to embed an interactive map just like you embed a YouTube video. That will be great because right now you have to jump through hoops to get a map here on Blogger. (See the Google Earth Challenge posts to see what many of us have done).

At this time, according to another post on this blog, Embedding Google Maps, you have two methods to embed a map in your blog post. I tried them both. Both are free.

Map Generator is the easiest to use if you know the exact address of the location you want to map (often very difficult in this area). After I found the address of the fairgrounds on Google Maps and put that address into Map Generator, it was a snap to get the code to embed my map here. However, I had to alter the code for the embedded map so that it would fit within the middle blog column. If you are not willing to do that, you could end up with a very messy blog. My Maps Plus was very difficult for me to use. I did not like the map it created at all.

However, if you can wait until Google makes embedded maps available, you won't need to use either of these sites. Have fun with your maps! Watch the Google Earth Blog and Google LatLong Blog for announcements.

If you are able, come to the fair. It's clean and fun!

Technorati tags: Google+Earth Google+Maps Orleans+County+Fair Barton+Fair demolition+derby Barton Vermont embedded+maps

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10,000

Today I passed 10,000 visitors to my blog. I've been keeping the data since December 2006. And I know who you are, Robyn.

Instead of correcting exams and writing a final exam for tonight, I have been installing software. I got Adium (OS X only) becaue iChat was irritating me with warning windows that continuously popped up, unbidden. As soon as I configured Adium, I learned why iChat behaved like that: I had not turned off a Chax plugin. I'll keep Adium for awhile because it has my jabber, AIM, dotmac and yahoo chat accounts all in one list and all connected at the same time.

I also trashed my Weatherpop. It has not been performing well, and the support and updates are gone. The website is dead. But VersionTracker had a comment about Meteo, which is open source, resides in my menubar as I prefer, and has the radar and graphics that I desire. You can download Meteo at sourceforge.net by clicking here.

Meteorologist is a full featured, free, and open source weather program for Mac OS X. This version of Meteorologist supports multiple cities, new version checking, and many more features.

I never put up today's photo of the day and I need a Wordless Wednesday photo. So I had better get outside to get some good shots. A great blue heron has flown by the front door every morning for the past week. Yet I still fail to take his picture. What's up with that? I'll be more vigilante the rest of the week.

I am considering not renewing my dot Mac account this October. I can't believe I am considering this. But Google has all I need for free. I can buy server space at Google for cheaper than Apple. I wouldn't be considering this except for the talk of Apple and Google cooperation. But I'll lose syncing and neat web publishing that is fluid with Apple software.

There will be no shortage of photos next weekend because this is the week of the Barton Fair! And I am going to the demo derby.

Thank you again, Robyn, for being number ten thousand!

Technorati tags: Google Apple dot+Mac Adium Meteo

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