Creating order out of digital chaos

Are your digital photos badly in need of organization? Are they collecting in ominously large numbers on various hard drives, disks, and online sites, randomly sized and named? When you think of how important some of them are to you, and how you could lose them all in one theft or flood or fire - does it make you feel so bad that you're in denial about the whole thing?

Well, what if I told you that for about $2/month, and a little of your own time, you could have them all in amazingly great order, stored safely on reliable servers, and have tools available to you to share them easily with others, order prints - or just keep them private?

Sorry for the corny introduction, but I'm really pleased that I finally tried out Flickr.com, and it's so useful that I'm feeling like everybody should know about it.

For those of us who are trying to lighten our material possessions and live the virtualista lifestyle, Picasa is a godsend.

Okay, the basics. You can sign up for a free account which is pretty good, but won't serve the purposes I describe above. A free account allows you to upload 100 MB of photos per calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of server space. When a new calendar month begins, your limit is reset, and you can upload another 100MB. They'll keep all of your photos, but the catch is, you only have access to the most recent 200 of them. (In comparison, a free Picasa account allows you 1,024MB storage, period.)

Just as their business model is designed to do, I tried out a Flickr account, realized how awesome it is, and pretty quickly upgraded to a paid version.

A Pro account is $24.95 per year. That may sound like an annoying bill to have to pay, but think about it -it's only once a year, and works out to only $2.08 per month. When you realize what you get for it, and how it is completely capable of solving your troublesome digital photo problems, it may seem well worth it, as it does to me.

A Pro account gives you:

• Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets
• Archiving of high-resolution original images

But it's not just that you can dump all of your photos into an account. Flickr also makes organizing all of those pictures doable. I was going to say "easy", but the truth is, you have to make the effort and spend the time to organize them - but the tools they offer (a "photostream", "sets", "collections", etc.) are top-notch and are working really well for me.

But wait - there's more! (And I'm really not getting paid a cent for this!) If you want to email photos, or post them on your blog or web site, you can easily link to each one. Your original high-resolution photo (if that's what you have) is stored, and you can instantly access each photos in any one of several smaller sizes, and grab a URL which you can send or embed anywhere.

And then there's the slide shows - I really like this feature. In one click, you can create a slide show from just about any selection of photos, and embed or link to it, so that your email friend, blog readers, etc. can easily view it in that form. Here's an example:



You can also order and purchase actual prints from any photos, if you're into that! (I actually plan to - something I've been procrastinating on for years because it was just too hard to get organized to do it.)

The Pro account also allows you to upload videos. I haven't used this feature yet, but it may very well be a nice alternative to YouTube.

Flickr has a whole community aspect - sharing your photos with all kinds of people - which doesn't really interest me, but if you're a social networking web site fan, you may enjoy it. There are a lot of features designed to allow you to communicate and collaborate with others there.

But, if you just want to store your photos privately, there are a whole set of options for determining who can see your photos - from only you, to anybody at all, and several levels in between.

Obviously, I'm sold. It may not be the perfect thing for you, but if you have an hour to play around with it, a free account will allow you to find out.

Having a taste of del.icio.us

I've decided it's high time I learn more about social networking web sites. I've used Facebook a lot and MySpace a little; this week I decided to give Delicious (also written as its actual URL, del.icio.us) a try.

According to its self-description: "Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet."

The main draw for me is to get my own browser bookmarks (1) organized, and (2) stored on the Web, where I'm trying to store everything important these days, so that I'm not dependent upon my own laptop and hard drive.

It was easy enough to get started: I signed up for a free account, and then agreed to have all of my bookmarks from Firefox imported into Delicious. By choosing certain options, I allowed Delicious to add tags to my bookmarks, based upon its own internal logic.

Having done that, I had my entire set of bookmarks stored on Delicious, and categorized by tags. The tags needed a lot of work to be really useful, but they were a good start, and tags can easily be edited. Especially interesting was the "tag cloud" view, offering a non-linear view of the relative predominance of various subjects among my bookmarks.

I haven't gone much farther yet, to sharing of bookmarks among other users, exploration of the most popular sites, broken down into countless categories, and connecting with others of similar interests and concerns, which is the central purpose of social networking web sites. But I've at least had a taste!

Outsourcing to far-flung places via Elance

Today I finally tried something I should have tried a long time ago: soliciting a technical subcontractor via an online employment site.

A client of mine has asked me to get a web-based project done which I don't have all of the skills for. She readily agreed to my trying out Elance.com, one of the premier sites of this type. So I signed up for a free account and submitted a detailed description of my project and the skills that would be necessary in a provider.

The process wasn't hard to figure out and didn't take long. I was required to pay a $10 deposit which, I was promised, would be returned in full, no questions asked, in one week. It sounds like this effectively discourages those who are less than entirely serious from using the site. I provided my name and email address in order to get an account, and filled out the form for advertising a job.

This was all pretty straightforward. According to the FAQ files I read and tutorial videos I watched, the next few steps will be a little more involved - reviewing the proposals that will come in , choosing a provider, negotiating the specific terms of the job, including checkpoints and associated payments, and then proceeding with the work. But these are nothing different than I would be doing if I were hiring someone in a more traditional way.

Elance protects both the buyer and the provider by a number of methods. For example, typically, funds are deposited by the buyer into an Elance escrow account, where they are held until the the provider meets certain designated checkpoints in the project, at which point the buyer authorizes them to be released. This, along with the fact that the checkpoints are clearly spelled out in advance, ensures that the money is there for paying the provider, and that he only gets paid when he completes the work he agreed to.

The exciting part was when the responses started coming in, almost immediately; the first from Serbia, the second from India. Both made reasonable proposals and showed recommendations and portfolios.

It looks as if we'll have our contractor very soon. What the larger ramifications may be to this instant globalization of technical work, we don't yet know, but for now, it's serving my client and I very well.

Something new in my web development career

I usually try to keep this blog non-personal, but I've been learning a little more about blogging, and apparently I'm supposed to be spontaneous and write about the things that matter most to me. So here's my first post in that vein.

In the past few weeks, I did something I've never done before in my web development career: I accepted a contract job with a company which is not in the web dev industry. I'm still very much self-employed, so this is, in many ways, simply another client. But it will be a different work situation than I'm accustomed to. Over the past ten years, the great majority of my work has been creating new web sites from scratch directly for my clients, the people who pay me. I've been the webmaster, the person solely in charge of the site.

Under this new contract, I'll be much more of a cog in a bigger machine. I'll be working with other web developers, and being assigned to various portions of numerous different projects. I'll probably seldom meet the actual owners of the sites I work on, instead working through the company who has hired me. And rather than making all decisions myself, I'll be following the instructions of others and collaborating.

I still have other work and other clients, but this is the direction I wanted my work to go in: less clients, with whom I work more closely. So I'm pleased, and looking forward to this addition to my work life.

Getting soft on hand-coding?!

Just now I was writing an entry on another blog, and needed to put in a link to a photo - and to my horror, I had to think for a minute how to hand-code the HTML!

I started out hand-coding more than 10 years ago, so I'm no stranger to it. But the truth is, with programs like Dreamweaver, I've gotten way too soft! It made me realize that it's important for me to keep code in front of my eyes frequently so that it never stops being second-nature to me.

Tried iGoogle yet?

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with iGoogle, Google's dashboard-desktop application. Right now, it's "on" again between us.

I'm continually trying to improve and smooth the way I work on my computer, particularly since I gave up paper almost entirely, and this is part of that effort. I depend heavily upon GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs; in fact, those three applications are crucial to my operations these days. The iGoogle page allows me to see all of them on a single page, creating a sort of central control panel for my digital and online life which I like. Sometimes.

iGoogle also offers hundreds of other widgets, gadgets and thingies that can be added to this desktop - clock, weather, quote of the day, puzzles, currency converters - you name it, there probably is one. Most of these are created by third parties, so your mileage will vary, as they say.

It may be "off" again between iGoogle and I in a few days; we'll see how it goes.

Getting Set Up With Skype

[Reprinted from my other blog.] Among the multitude of systems and tactics I've put in place so that I can work my regular job from Mexico this winter is my phone arrangement.

I just finished putting the finishing touches on it, testing and debugging it, and I'm more than pleased with how well it works.

I'm going to use Skype for most of my business calls. Skype is a telephone-over-Internet system. I have their free software installed on my computer and a $10 headset plugged into my USB port, and with just this setup I could make and receive calls all over the world, for free, with anyone else using Skype.

But that is not all - oh no, that is not all. I signed up for two Skype services which I have to pay a small amount for, but get a whole lot out of.

The first service is a "Skype Out" subscription which allows me to call any landline or cell phone in the U.S. or Canada and talk as long as I want. This costs me $2.95 a month.

The second service they call a "Skype Online Number", also known as "SkypeIn". The one I signed up for is a Raleigh, North Carolina number, local to my home base. Anybody can call that number to reach me from any kind of phone anywhere, and it costs them whatever it would normally cost them to call Raleigh, North Carolina. In other words, for my local family, friends and clients, it costs nothing. It costs me $30 a year - $2.50 a month. (This is a deal you get for already having a subscription.)

So my total cost for what amounts to unlimited calling is $4.45 a month.

My next move was to forward my landline to my Skype number. This was a function of the landline service, and was easy enough to do: dial *72, wait for the beeps, enter the forwarding number, and let the forwarding number pick up.

Then I spent a few minutes making calls to myself. Using my cell phone, I dialed my landline number. Yay, it rang on my computer! I answered the call using my laptop and headset, and talked to myself back and forth just a little to make sure it worked.

Then I set up the Skype voice mail, which is included in the subscription. Tested that out; it works great. The caller leaves a voice mail in the normal way, and I see a notification on my Skype screen, and just have to click a little button to listen to the message.

I then unplugged my landline from the wall socket and the phone jack, since nobody here will need to use it, and tested again; everything worked great.

I found a finishing touch by browsing around in the Skype software's options: I set it so that when a call comes in, the rings comes through my computer speakers as well as through the headphones. That way, if I'm across the room making a cup of te caliente con crema, or just don't have the headphones on, I'll hear the call.

It seems just about perfect. Except for one thing... I'm kicking myself a bit for not having ordered a wireless headset, since it's too late to have one shipped to me before I get on the plane on Monday. I don't like being tethered when I'm on the phone, and love the idea of being able to wander around la casita talking on the phone as I normally do at home. I didn't know there was such a thing as a wireless headset! Well, maybe I can find one in Playa del Carmen on the way down to Tulum.