Tag Archives: google

Backing up your photos

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While the bushfires were raging in Victoria, Australia, I’m sure many of us were thinking what would we take with us if we were in a hurry and we knew our house would probably burn down. Many think of their photo albums, but these days most of our photos are on the computer. Of course one could run with the hard disk, but rather bulky when you only have minutes to get out. An alternative is to have an extra external hard drive which would be easier to take.

We used to have CDs to back up our photos to and we still do, but how to find them in a hurry unless you are well organised? We also now have USB memory sticks but these items are also ones which cannot be in the house if you don’t have much time to get out.

The answer is to store them on someone else’s server.

If you have your own self hosted blog or web site, you can easily upload them via FTP (Filezilla is free) to your host, depending on the plan you have and how much room is there. They don’t have to link to your web site or blog;  just let them sit there. Create a folder called ‘photos’ on your host’s server. Of course, if you change your host remember to download all those photos to your own computer again. I lost quite a few photos by forgetting that once.

Then there is Flickr You can store as many photos as you like here and you don’t have to show them as public photos.

Everyone has an ISP. Most of these allow you to make a small web page for free. You could use that.

Also there is Google’s picasa - you can upload to this and make your photos private.

Off-site, online storage is really your best bet. Now, all you have to do is upload!

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Google's New Custom 404 Page Creator

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Google has launched a new tool in their Webmaster Tools suite that allows website owners to create custom 404 pages. 404 pages are those that don’t exist and therefore return a “not found” error when users try to view them in their web browser.

Visitors can stumble on to a 404 page for many reasons including:

• The URL they are entering has been miss spelt.

• They have followed an old link to content that has been moved or deleted.

• The link they are following has been truncated in an email message etc.

When visitors land on these pages, it’s very likely that many of them may just leave because they can’t be bothered searching through your website to find the correct URL. To combat this, instead of returning a “File not found” error page, try using Google’s “Enhance 404 pages” tool to create a much more useful 404 error page.

The first step is to configure your web server to display your new 404 page. This is usually quite simple but varies for each hosting setup, so please check your server or web host documentation on how to do this.

Once this has been done, visit the “Enhance 404 pages” section in Webmaster tools and copy and paste a javascript snippet into your page. Because this page is designed in HTML, you can also customize the look of the page to match your sites overall design.

Google says the feature is currently experimental and they will work on improving it in the meantime.

Storing your data on the web, not your PC

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There is a trend to store your data on the web, rather than your PC, so that if your computer crashes and you haven’t backed up (and how many of us do this regularly enough), you will still have access to your data.

1. All data related to your own web sites and blogs are generally on your host’s servers.

2. If you use web mail, like gmail, your emails are on the web. I advise forwarding many of your important emails to gmail. There’s certainly enough space for them.

3. Google has begun the process of allowing free storage of spreadsheets, word processing, maps and videos.

4. Images, videos and podcasts can be stored on web pages.

5. I have heard of places where you can store data for a fee.

Now Microsoft, in its eternal competition with google, is using a beta form of this, called Live Mesh, but it will cost. It is currently offering 5GB of online storage to 10,000 people in this beta form.

Facebook and My Space are joining the race also. They allow third party developers to write applications for them.

Google is rumoured to be developing a web based operating system that ties all of it’s online applications together. It already has Google Gears which allows access to Google applications while offline.

Amazon too allows huge storage on its servers.

To see the video which Microsoft has developed for it’s Live Mesh you can visit it at Live Mesh

Who would use these storage spaces for a fee though, when so much is free on Google? We’ll have to wait and see. I’d certainly spend time moving most of my stuff over to a storage space on-line. This seems to be the trend, so get going folks! No more worrying about PCs crashing.

Google adsense referrals

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When I use Google adsense codes I just rely on the ads matching my content. However, Google referrals allows you to choose categories yourself and you can see how much a referral will pay.

As of June 2007, Google began their AdSense referral program (the one with non-Google products). Go to AdSense Setup > Referrals page, set your language (like Germany, English), and pick some product categories (like Entertainment and Telecommunications) or specific products. You’ll end up with a code snippet for your website as usual.

The crucial difference between referral ads and normal AdSense is that you won’t get paid per click, but only if the visitor who clicked the ad buys something from that site, too (or performs another action, like a newsletter subscription). And there’s one other layout option which normal AdSense doesn’t have: the link-only ad type, because this link will automatically adjust to your page’s font settings, and not break the text flow (and it will also not carry any Google-branding, or disclosure).


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How to make a tube in paint shop pro if image has a white background

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Adobe Photoshop CS2 – How to Manage Your Images

I subscribe to google alerts. Google tells me every time someone searches for one of my keywords. In this case it took me to another site and not my own. I was surprised to see it was about how to make a tube but in a much easier way than I do it. My methods are on my site here.

I’ve just checked out this tutorial and it only works if your background is white.

1. Open a picture with a white background in psp.

2. In Layers, you will see Background. Right click on this and select Duplicate.

3. You now have two layers of the same image. Click on the Magic wand and select the new image. Click the Magic Wand on any part of the white background while clicking the Delete key at the same time. It looks like nothing happened but it has.

4. Go to Layers again and right click the layer marked as Background, then delete. You will now see some ants round the image and a grey and white background.

5. Export that to your Tubes folder. Go to File> Export> Picture tube. Name it. You can now close the image.

6. To test the tube, open a new image about 200×200 pixels. Go to the picture tube icon.

picturetubeicon.gif

Find the tube you just made and click on the new image you just opened. Bingo!

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Wikipedia search engine

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wikipediatrans.gifDespite knowing that many contributions to wikipedia are dubious, depending on the politics of the contributer, and also knowing that the FBI and CIA monitor it fairly closely, here is a new wikipedia search engine.

Wikipedia, if accurate, would surely be the most searchable database, but it still does not have that reputation. On topics that I know about, it is not so much what is said as what is not said. I’d be telling my students, that as it is a database that anyone can contribute to and edit, that they need to check its authority as a reference.

Nevertheless, it is an excellent start for many students.

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How to make money with digital photography

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I have been a photographer for many years and have done courses and developed my own photos. Now though, I only use a digital camera a Canon Power Shot S30 in fact. I bought a digital camera very early on and paid a fortune at the time. Since then, digital cameras have come down in price and my 3.2 mega pixel capacity is not as I’d like it. Nevertheless, I can still take quite large photos of excellent quality with the camera set on ‘large’ resolution. You can get 10 pixel cameras now for quite small prices.

Now, to get your photos ready for stock photo sites, for which you will get some money if your photo is bought, you will really need Photo Shop. I know it is expensive but it is the best. It has every feature you would want for web design, brochures, leaflets and any thing else that these stock photo sites like. You can look at my free editor page but none of them do the job that Photo Shop does and if you are serious about photography you need it.

There are heaps of Photo Shop tutorials free on the Internet, but to have them all together and to be able to look up an index, a book still serves the best function. PhotoShop for Windows & Macintosh is one of them.

Uploading to stock photo sites

I upload to Big Stock Photo, stock-xchng and dreamstime

Stock Photos, Search and Download Now!

I have been most successful on Dreamstime

You can use these stock photos at Cafe Press. Make a calendar, or any product and sell it. Or use them for brochures, book covers, web page backgrounds.

Should you want to set up your own stock photo site you can use the software package PhotoStore. PhotoStore is a professional, user friendly, web based software package that enables you to publish and sell your photographs, images, artwork, prints and products online. PhotoStore was created specifically for photographers to easily sell their photos online. With its advanced features it can also be used to run stock photo type sites.

For the personal web sites set up to share photos between friends Google‘s Picasa now has a web album

You can see mine at Picasa web albums

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