Blogging Sueblimely

As I was preparing my recent posts on images I came across image generator tools you may find a place for in some of your less serious posts.

Yearbook Yourself

Its amazing how much I look like my mother once I add a 1960′s look.

Wigflip

A range of generators including:

• Superstickies

• Easy Street – street sign generator

• Say What – add speech bubbles to an uploaded photo
• roflbot Add text to an image -create lolcat or lolband type images

Dumpr

Another site with multiple generators. e.g.

• Rubics Cube Generator – upload an image and turn it into a rubics cube

Doppel Me – create your own avatar.

Reflection Maker

Image Chef

There are many different kinds of generators at Image Chef – example:

• Fun Generators

Comic Strip Generator – choose backgrounds, characters and add your own text.

Create a graph

Why would you want to do this for fun you may be asking – well, you may want to submit them to graphjam:

Big Huge Labs Flickr Toys

LoonaPix – add frames and borders and trim your images

Why would you want to create silly images?:

• As a break from tedious work.
• You need more practice perfecting procrastination
• To add special effect images to your blog and possibly get them Stumbleupon Photoblogged – hint hint.
• You want to be a star contributor on:
  • icanhascheezerburger sites (lolcats, loldogs, pundit kitchen….), althouth they do provide their own generator (if you need to learn lolcat speak try the Definitive Lolcats Glossary) or take a PAWS Universitee course
  • graphjam
• Just to be silly – the only reason needed?

Thanks to the Generator Blog for putting me onto some of the image generator tools- it would have saved me a lot of time if I had found this site to begin with.

Here is a little bit of light relief for you to help you relax.

Smores keyboard – for when you have published something you regret and need to eat your words perhaps?

phonemyphone calls your phone for you on schedule. Think of the possibilities: You can tee up a call as an excuse for:

• Rushing off to the computer when you have an irresistible urge to blog.
• Keeping the kids quiet – "shhh, you know you shouldn’t be noisy when I’m on the phone" – it works sometimes.
• Escaping from a boring meeting/date
• Your ideas?

For those of you who have a different perspective on what you read, Wordle may be for you. Create graphic representations of words you choose or enter your del.icio.us name to create a customizable (although not clickable) tag cloud. Save it to the wordles gallery with a link to your blog (every link counts!)

For those of you who enjoy taking photos of yourself in mirrors (with your clothes on!) Karen Chan invites you to join her in her Facebook Group "Doing The Karen Cheng". You are not alone, there are almost 1,000 others there to give you support in your unusual pastime.

You may not thank me for this one – The Impossible Quiz I have got as far as the duck image – sometimes fun can turn to frustration . It was too large to embed here so the image is just a link.

Look what happens when Google leaves its teenagers at home. I know this video will slow down this page but could not resist posting it.

(Warning – It does include some strong language that may offend some people)

This cartoon pretty much sums up my feelings, after spending time importing and organizing feeds into Newsgator’s FeedDemon desktop RSS reader.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.

I was able to quickly import my existing subscriptions from Bloglines into FeedDemon, keeping the folder structure too – a large amount of feeds that I have collected over 4 years or so making many of them out of date, or no longer read, meaning a long reorganization for me.

Newsgator has recently made all its RSS suite of products free. In addition to FeedDemon they also offer NetNewsWire, the Mac version, NewsGatorGo for mobiles and NewsGator Inbox for Outlook.

All these RSS services synchronize with each other. For example, I can add feeds to Newsgator Online and they will appear in FeedDemon too. Other tools offered by Newsgator are Feedstation, which allows you to download multimedia content and synchronize it with your iPod or other portable media player and NewsGator Desktop (Beta) which resides in your system tray and informs you when there is an update to one of your feeds.

I thought I would give this method of reading feeds a try; although I still prefer to get some feeds delivered by email and some via email news reader, I found that I was not visiting Bloglines frequently to read the others.

Another useful tool from Newsgator is NewsFriends for Facebook users. “With NewsFriends, you just select friends and automatically get the news they are reading. You can also pick packages of popular feeds on topics like entertainment, sports, and top news selected by NewsGator editors or add news feeds directly.”

I could not resist reading instead of organizing and came across We Blog Cartoon by Dave Walker, which is where the above image comes from. Not only does Dave offer the use of the images for blogs but gives you the the link code to use the images directly from his site. After having a pleasant respite looking at his amusing cartoons, I had better carry on trying to get out from under the RSS pile. Before I go I thought I would share this one you too.