Playing with gadgets

A new thing! I've been trying to email to my blogs from my regular phone but there's something wrong with the settings that I've never been able to solve. I can email home only. Delightfully, my work gave me a Blackberry and the plan is unlimited emails! Wow - can email my blogs!

Sent via Blackberry!

Skipping and volcanos

I'm going to skip widgets because I don't like to load other programs on my computer without knowing more about what they communicate back. That would be needing more research than I'm inclined to do. They may be useful on one of my blogs, but most of the blogs I use these days have their own set of widgets and I'm quite happy with them. I know what they are and how to use them but there's also been a few bad reports about widgets installed that have been less that open and ethical.

I already have a Flickr account that I use quite a lot, but lets see what PhotoBucket can do...

I like the idea of creating an album of something that appeals to me. At the moment I've been interested in volcanos. I get Google news alerts for volcano so now I know when the volcanos around our planet all decide to go off. So now I'm creating an album of photos already on PhotoBucket that have volcanos in them.

Ok, it's easy enough to figure out how to copy to my album. Hover your cursor over the pic and a list of options appear at the top, one of them being 'Add to my album'. Cool. Ah! The options doesn't appear for all the pics! So I guess there are restrictions on some of the pics these days...

Here's my effort: http://s622.photobucket.com/albums/tt301/jayoval/

I'll keep adding pics as I go, and I think it's another thing to entertain my kiddies with. I think they'll like volcano pics!

Moving on: Learning 2.1

Moving onto Learning 2.1. http://explorediscoverplay.blogspot.com/

It's always a risk when going back to net technology that was written about in 2007 that the application won't be there anymore, or it's morphed to the point of not being recognisable. Luckily the first two are still there and working perfectly.

I love Zamzar, the online conversion tool. My file was emailed back to me within minutes even though they warned it could be 24 hours. You upload a file and pick what you want to convert it to, and the email it back to you. I'm going to make sure everyone at work knows about it because we do have students coming in saying they can't open odd files.

Letterpop is a way to create newsletter format online files. I found it a bit fiddly because even though there were lots of templates I couldn't find one at first that gave me what I wanted. I'm now wishing there was a way to create a newsletter without using the templates. My own background image in particular. I was quite happy with it in the end and emailed the result to my niece, but it took me a while to get there.

Ah, going through all the templates (73 pages worth at 4 templates per page) I finally found templates near the end without background images or header images. The format can't be changed, but the images are all your own.

I read someone else's comment about not being able to delete a newsletter and you con only have 10 on the freeby version. This is the first time I've come across a web 2.0 version of shareware! Try before you buy, but it isn't meant to be an ongoing free web 2.0 thing. I'll make another newsletter later...