Blogging Sueblimely

The internet has come alive with free Christmas gifts for download. It was hard to choose from all that was available but I have tried to bring you a selection of the best. I have spent hours searching, likely a subconscious excuse to put off wrapping Christmas gifts.

Graphics and Icons

Smashing Christmas Icon Sets Smashing Magazine always has great resources.

Nicu’s holiday gallery contains these:

There are 16 icon sets to be found at FreshFreeStuff.net including social networking and RSS buttons – Free Christmas Holidays Icon Roundup . This is a selection from the sets available:

Gifts From Designers To You: Best Of 2008 – goodies include icons, fonts, wordpress themes and headers.

50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008 including this Christmas set:

A set of Christmas smilies is offered by Christmas Corner, many of which are animated:

DigiScrapDepot.com has 3516 Christmas Freebies if you want to
decorate the pages of your Christmas photo scrapbook pages.

1stWebdesigner brings us a range of Photoshop brushes- 48 Snow, Ice, Snowflake and Christmas Brushes

Mel’s Photoshop Brushes gives us a set of Christmas Illustrator Brushes

A search for Christmas on Adobe Exchange shows a plethora of Illustrator and Photoshop images, gradients, patterns, shapes, styles and brushes.

Desktop Wallpapers and Screensavers

25 Outstanding Christmas Wallpapers to Decorate your Desktop! from sagacious of Weird Resources

Vlad Studio has a whole range of Christmas Images/Desktop Wallpapers (higher resolution by subscription) and E Cards.

Wallco.net has a huge selection of free Christmas wallpapers in various resolutions – 42 galleries to date. I really went to town with these and created a whole folder of them to use as a My Pictures Slideshow Screensaver.

To create your own Christmas screensaver slideshow (or any other sort) in Windows XP – go to Desktop/Properties/Screensaver and choose “My Pictures Slideshow” in the drop down box. The default folder is My Documents/My Pictures but in settings you can choose any folder of pictures you want.

Not free but a good bargain – Woo Themes have a 4 for 1 special going until 24th December – $70 USD for a single licence and $150 for a developer licence.

Christmas Image Tutorials

Strobist lets us into some secrets of How to Photograph Christmas Lights using even a basic digital camera. I love Christmas lights although the ones I have appreciated the most this year were the new green and red lights in the car park of a newly renovated shopping centre which showed me the way which spots were free.

Smashing Magazine gives us 60 Beautiful Christmas Photoshop Tutorials

PS Lover has a whole range of Photoshop Christmas Image tutorials but turn your speakers down as they advertise those very annoying smilies who keep saying “Hellooo”

What not to do when blogging

Finally but not least, Michaela Lica of eWritings has provided us with some good Christmas blogging reading by publishing her ebook Blogging Tips: How to be Cocky and Vexatious – a collection of blog entries that followed her 10 Ways to Make Your Fellow Bloggers Hate You meme.

Thanks to Design Bliss for putting me on to many of these freebies in their – Over 100 Free Christmas Design Resources – A Design Bliss Mega-List post

I am now off to join the teaming throngs at the shopping centre which is enough to provoke this Christmas emotion in anyone:

Popularity: 17% [?]

"If you drink then email , you’re a bloody idiot" (to misquote a popular Aussie ad slogan for drink driving). Google seems to agree and has kindly provided us with Mail Goggles, for Gmail, a way of attempting to help stop us sending emails which we may later regret.

Its method: prompting us to answer some maths problems at designated times – by default Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as "this is the time that most people are likely to need it",. You can change the timings; which is handy if you are prone to long drunken lunches or are an alcoholic.

If your math skills are lacking you can use your windows calculator, if you can find it in your state. If you are really determined to send the email you can, and live to regret it – unless you forget you have sent it. In this case you may live forever in ignorance or wonder why someone is no longer talking to you, has deleted you from SU/Digg friend, is leaving you nasty blog comments …. or the opposite: arrives at your place with all their worldly possessions, asks when you are going shopping for rings…

If you get the maths questions wrong then a new box appears with new questions with the comments “Water and bed for you. Or try again.” If you are too slow in answering the message is “Oops, looks like your reflexes are a little slow. Try again.” I bet they had some fun trying to think of the messages to use here and some of them would not have been quite so politely phrased.

Can you tell that I find this feature amusing? When I read about it I had to remind myself that it was not April 1st and even then go into Gmail to make sure Mail Goggles really existed.

You can turn on Mail Goggles via the Labs tab in your Gmail Settings and then customize it via the General tab.

If, like me, you receive your Gmail via POP mail and have not visited the Labs Tab (how long has it been there I wonder?) there are a few other interesting and useful features that you can enable for Gmail. For example,

• Email Addict which lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat. I wish they could come up with a way of blocking my desk inbox (or the pile of things in front of me that need doing) and let me email and chat for fifteen minutes.
• Old Snakey game – for when you want a break from everything.
• Forgotten Attachment Detector which prevents you from accidentally forgetting intended attachments by prompting you if you mention attaching a file, but have not done so.
• Quick Links which adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. It can be used for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, etc.
• Quite a few other ways to customize and improve your Gmailing experience.

Popularity: 12% [?]

.Lijit is a search tool that offers a lot more features than the run of the mill default blog searches. I have just installed the Lijit Widget (Wijit) in my sidebar. Automatic installation is available for Blogger and Typepad via the widget setup and there is a brand new Lijit Wordpress plugin that gives you the option of using Lijit as a stand alone search or incorporating it into the default Wordpress search widget.

Features

• Optional addition of some or all of your bookmarking, social networking and photo sites to Lijit will allow search of not only your blog posts but of sites you have bookmarked, your blogroll sites and your social networking contact’s posts and their contacts and bookmarks. Most of the popular sites are included although my favorite bookmarking site, diigo, is as usual not included. There is also a feature to add feeds and site url’s so adding my diigo bookmarks feed solved this problem for me.
  The search result window shows tabs for results from your blog, your network, your content (on any site), and the web. You set your widget’s default search to show one of these tabs as the front page of the results. I have set mine up to show search results from my blog first. I recommend this as you will keep searchers on your own site longer if the search term brings up satisfactory results in your blog (in terms of what the user wishes).

• Choose to have your search results show up only on the Lijit site or in your blog window via a pop up screen.
• Statistics available on your Lijit page will give you information about:
  • the number of times you have been searched,
  • the results that have been clicked,
  • information sources that have provided the most clicked results,
  • blogs that have linked to you,
  • searches that have brought people to your blog .

You can choose to make your statistics publicly viewable.
Widgets can be created to display some recent reader stats on your blog via a list or map:

• An optional “Surprise me!” button produces a list of random content from your blogs and added services – and the results did surprise me as MyBlogLog blogs, that I was not even aware of, showed up there. (MBL automatically adds blogs that you have visited a certain number of times) I may remove MyBlogLog from my options so that results are more relevant to my blog topics.

• A feature named ‘Re-search’ displays extra information for those reaching your blog via a Google search. Here are the results which showed up after I had done a Google Search for “blogging sueblimely images”.For this example, I had to use my blog name in the search terms so that I guaranteed that one of my posts came up in a google search! Options allow you to either display these results below your widget or across the top of your blog.

Below Lijit Wijit

Top Placement – this image was created by a Lijit preview feature

• The widget can be configured to show ‘Popular Searches’ and ‘content’ icons’ I chose not to include these features on mine, being mindful of above the fold sidebar space and page load time, but this is what they would have looked like had I installed them:

• Along with search results comes an option to add a search of the blog you are searching to your browser search engines.
• Lijit uses Google search but also has its own search infrastructure. Om Malik reports that there are plans to add an opt-in ad network to search results and to allow publishers to sell their own keyword inventory in as well as giving them the opportunity to “use Lijit to back-fill the advertising spots”

Advantages of using Lijit Search on your blog:

• Lijit search stats are very useful and are displayed in a simple to understand way.
• The browser search engines feature is useful for yourself to add for a quick search of your own blog as well for others to add to encourage others to revisit your content..
• Searching of your blogroll and social networking contact sites. This could be seen as a resource for your readers as well as a way of recognizing your blogging contacts – another form of link love.
• When results
• Search of your bookmarking sites is another resource for your readers to tap into. I consider my online bookmarking sites a research tool for you, adding links that I think you would find useful relating to topics I cover here, rather than using them for personal purposes. I already display my diigo bookmarks so for me the Lijit search is an extension of this principle. As you will know, if you read this blog often, I tend to ignore SEO recommendations for more incoming links than outgoing as I wish to provide useful information, whether written by myself or others, and to give recognition to the good blog content of my contacts. .
• Keeping the search result window on your blog, rather than purely on the Lijit site, will retain your readers on your site for longer.

Setup was simple and, if you change your preferences, you do not have to alter the widget code as new or changed features are automatically added. The widget itself did not seem to impact my page load time although the search results are a little slow to show up. Disadvantages – yet another widget added to your sidebar and for me another tool to divert me away from my tasks at hand today – my (semi) regular news post and a tutorial on Yahoo Buzz – which now allows anyone to add content a la Digg but with some different and useful features.

Popularity: 16% [?]

How do you go about finding free images for your website or blog? I recently talked about the best sites for good free images but you may prefer to do a general search rather than looking within one particular site. This way you are likely to have a wider range of images to choose from.Some of the free stock image sites are aligned to non free sites and the free images may not be distinguished from the paid. It is frustrating to find an image you like on a free site to discover that it is from the paying site. Although it may not cost very much, you cannot usually just buy one image and have to purchase multiple credits. These credits will buy you more images but you may not need more; or not during the time you are given to use up the credits.

Image Search Tools

Creative Commons Images

• Creative Commons Search by Creative Commons – searches Google, Yahoo and Flickr for Creative Commons works. If you want to use an image on a non commercial site then you can use any image you find here. Additional search options allow you to look for:
  • only CC works that you can modify, adapt, or build upon, and or
  • works that can be used for commercial purposes.

Source: g-hat Flickr

• Compfight is a site that provides a quick method of searching for Flickr images. The results are displayed as quick loading thumbnails, 250 to a page. Clicking on a thumbnail takes you to the photo’s Flickr page. The option is provided to search within tags or all text for Creative Commons usage only or for Creative Commons commercial usage allowed. Still check the CC licence if you intend to adapt the image to make sure this is allowed.

• Flickr’s Creative Commons Page search for photos according to their type of Creative Commons License. I would use this if I knew I was going to edit a photo otherwise I find Compfight is quicker.
• Every Stock Photo – a search engine for free photos from many sources. View a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos or use the advanced search function to choose which sort of license you want.
• Firefox – Use the Creative Commons search engine that is built into Firefox by choosing the CC icon from the drop down menu to the right of the Firefox search box.

• Wikimedia Commons is a database of 3,089,392 freely usable media files which includes images from these sites.

Source Cool Image Bank Ios – memories of holidays long past

Images without Creative Commons search criteria

• Google Image Search comes up with a treasure trove of images but, as the search results contain images from all Google listed websites, you are unable to use a great deal of them; for copyright reasons. I do use this search but only for ideas when creating my own images and for personal browsing purposes. Today for example after doing an interview with Kuanyin on Blog Blond my interest in Maui was peeked and I ended up searching for images of Hawaiian volcanoes.

Source: mattsabo17 Flickr

• Pixsy – a search engine for images and videos, including stock photos. Allows search to be customized by criteria – vector graphics, black and white, greyscale and backgrounds, digital photos. Categories covered are: News, Celebrities, Sports, Travel, Viral, Video, Entertainment, Music, Stock Photos, Edge and Miscellaneous. (Pixsy is the search engine powering Compfight, Lycos image search, Mokoseek and various other sites that distracted me from writing this post)

Images from people you know

Ask a fellow blogger if they would mind you using an image from their blog – they may be pleased to allow it to get a backlink. How are these for pairs of crocs??

Source: Ultraviolet Observations aka Sueblimely’s daughter

I have justed added a new site to my free image post – a smallish collection as yet but very impressive – unprofound.com

Popularity: 15% [?]

You have likely heard of Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge, as it is now in its third year, but if you are not in the business of making money from your blog you may not have taken too much notice. I suggest you do consider joining in even if you are not interested in the money making aspects of blogging; because of the resources and tools you will learn about which are useful to all bloggers. Over 30 days Ed presents a series of video tutorials (with transcripts) with the aim of showing how to make money from blogging. Easy to understand step by step instructions are given for participants to follow. To accompany the videos there are forums to answer questions and provide support. Joining in a Challenge group is a good idea to develop a closer support network with a smaller group of fellow participants. Each group has its own forum. There is even a browser toolbar available to make it easier to follow the challenge.

Although I have not ventured into online money making I have joined the 30 Day Challenge for the second time. I was newer to blogging the first time round and learned a lot about blog promotion, social networking, blogging tools and search engine optimization. Knowing that new content is produced for each Challenge and that the tools available to us rapidly increase and change, I felt that I would again benefit from participating. There is no pressure to follow each step rigidly and if you cannot find time to view the daily offerings you can catch up another time.

The Challenge actually starts/started on 1st August but it is not too late to join in. There are some recommended “pre-season” preparation activities which are useful in their own right. Not being patient enough to watch videos I read the transcripts of these so that I could pick out areas that I thought may be new to me. This time round the use of the Flock browser is being recommended and there are guides to help you get started with it. I am close to moving over to Flock from Firefox and will do so once I have configured it with my favorite extensions. At present, I always have it open alongside Firefox for its social networking, Flickr and YouTube tools.

I followed Ed’s example by creating a Google Subscribe Link for Sueblimely. You can subscribe via the “Add my expertise to your Google web searches” in my sidebar. Here are the FAQs for Google Subscribe Links if you are interested in creating your own.

You can join up by via my 30 Day Challenge Refferal Link or via the 30 Day Challenge site directly and find me in Team Lightening There are prizes to be won for those with the most referrals. I don’t expect to be anywhere in the running for these but it would be good not to have a referral point value of zero

Popularity: 10% [?]