Welcome and a Happy New Year. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

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: 6% [?]

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3.5 (2 people)

If, like me, you download themes or templates for future reference or while deciding on a theme for a new blog or planned update, keeping track of them can be difficult. I always create a separate folder for each theme I download and make sure there is an image of the theme in there too. It is a quick easy reminder of what the theme looks like. Rather than using the little thumbnail images that are often included in a theme I save a copy of an image from the download site or do a screenshot of a demo page. I save this image as folder.jpg which, on windows XP, gives you a good preview of the image when looking at the folder in thumbnail view - This is not so useful in Vista which hides most of the image.

 

When you download a theme, add on (or any other software for that matter) where extra instructions are needed (for installation or usage) create your own text file and copy and paste the information from the site into this. Give this a distinct name so you know it is your own file. (I used to call all mine sue.txt but this was a real problem when I had to restore all my files from a disastrous reformat. I had hundreds of files called sue.txt and had no idea where most of them belonged.) After this I started adding the name of the application too. I only tend to do this when I may forget where I downloaded the files from - otherwise it is as easy just to go back to the site for instructions.. To quickly create a file In Windows - right click in a blank space in the explorer file window, click on "New" and then on text file (or Word or Excel etc depending on what you want to record). Name your file. Open it and copy and paste the information you need to record then press Save and you are done. It may be enough just to add the url of the site to go to for the instructions.

 

I use the Firefox Download Status Bar extension. A bar at the bottom of your browser window shows the files that have been downloaded. You can open files from here (to view images, unzip, install etc) and right clicking gives you the option to go to its containing folder. This makes it easy to quickly go to the folder where you installed a download to do what you need to do with it and to create a text file as mentioned above.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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3.2

Diigo is a Bookmarking, Annotation and Social Networking site that has got me all excited. I think I am in love.

I first tried Diigo when it came out in 2006 but it did not turn my eye; it was a touch too young and inexperienced then. Diigo 3 was launched 20th March 2008, showing a new maturity. After seeing its attractive new features I have been unfaithful to Delicious, my bookmarking partner of 5 years, and fallen in love with the younger and more versatile diigo.

I have always stayed with Delicious, despite its lack of sparkling design and social networking features, because it allowed me to organize my bookmarks well. I used it as a resource for research and referral purposes.

What I like about diigo

• Bookmarking
  - As well as bookmarking and tagging:
  • Create lists to add specific bookmarks to and produce interactive web slides from these.
  • Importing of bookmarks from your browser and other bookmarking sites is easy to do.
  • You are able to automatically add bookmarks to Delicious and other bookmarking sites too. I am two timing for now. If you do not want to automatically duplicate bookmarks you can do it manually via the “publish” button next to the diigo bookmark.
  • An RSS feed is available for your bookmarks and your lists.
  • A widget can be created to display items on your blog - as you can see in my sidebar.
  • Tag communities show you bookmarks by tag and the members who have used that tag.

  

• . Diigo allows you to annotate web pages.
  • You can highlight areas you find of interest and add sticky notes, (or highlight just to add the text as a description of your bookmark). The highlights remain when you return to a page, which makes it easy to find the areas that you were interested in.
  • If a page has changed since your last visit you can view a cached version with your annotations in place.
• Social Networking is possible via adding friends and joining groups. Knowledge sharing is one of the main aims of the site.
  • You can find friends by searching your email addresses for existing diigo users or inviting those who are not yet members.
  • You can browse for those who share similar interests, search for those you know and see who is currently online.
  • Invite members to groups you belong to.

Groups allow you to find those who share your interests. (When bookmarking you can choose to share it with a group, with your friends and add to a list.) Voting for a group bookmark via a thumbs up raises its profile - the idea is that the more popular better content becomes easier to find.

• Search by tags is possible and you can set up watch lists for specific tags.
• Diigo lets you see everyone who has bookmarked your site and what they saved - a handy tool to research what is popular on your blog.

Diigo operates via a browser extension which installs a toolbar with options for interacting with diigo and a sidebar showing your bookmarks. I am impressed by their features.

The Toolbar

The toolbar allows you to:

• Highlight parts of a page for future visits.
• Add sticky notes to the highlighted areas.
• If you have selected text before bookmarking, this is added to the bookmark’s description.
• Bookmark it to diigo (and to your browser favorites and other social networking sites).
• Add comments relating to the page you are on.
• Send the page to your diigo friends, to your blog, twitter or Facebook.
• Send messages and receive message alerts.

Sidebar

The sidebar is split into 3 tabs:

The URL tab:

• Shows you other members who have bookmarked the page you are on.
• Displays annotations that have been added to the page by yourself and or others.
• Allows you to leave a comment via the sidebar which will be visible to all diigo users who visit the page.

The Bookmarks Tab

• Shows your bookmarks, tags or lists:

The Friends Tab

• Lists your friends and allows you to message them via email or diigo messaging system. My mate Colin has found me but I have not yet found anyone else I know on there. My profile name is Sue Blimely hint hint.

Diigo’s interface is well designed and I found it easy to find my way around its features right from the start.

I suspect Delicious and I may separate but still remain friends. After all I am still throwing bookmarks its way and will visit from time to time to add any new tags to the right categories.

I really hope diigo becomes extremely popular as I would happily use the site as my main social networking venue if more of my friends and contacts were to join.

As usual I am a little late with the news of the new diigo because I had to give it a good work out before I reported on it. I have spent hours playing with it, uploading my bookmarks from Delicious, creating lists, annotating, adding sticky notes, joining groups ….

I created a list specifically for my own blog posts and one for diigo. This link takes you to all the posts and diigo tutorials I have bookmarked for you to browse through and learn more. A snippet of these is displayed in the tag roll widget to the right.

Thanks to Phil Butler whose article alerted me to the diigo changes and motivated me to go and take another look. He says “Diigo has refined a social annotation and collaboration service into an even more effective “personal and group oriented tool” - which is how I would have defined it if I could have thought up something so concise and meaningful!

I am off to be sociable now - join some diigo groups and find me some friends. I hope to see you there.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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2.5

I have been trialling the Wordpress ‘Yahoo Shortcuts‘ plugin for a week or so now. As I found it a little tricky to come to grips with, I thought I would give you a bit of a run down on how to use it and a review based on my experiences. The images and popup links in this post have mostly been embedded using the plugin.

This plugin uses Yahoo Shortcuts to add Yahoo search popups and Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos to blog content.

The image to the left is an example of a Yahoo Shortcuts “badge”.

As you are writing your post, the plugin searches for media relevant to your content. A message, at the top of the sidebar in your post window, alerts you to the number of ‘Shortcuts’ that have been found, allows you to review the post and choose whether to include all or some of suggested links and images:

The information suggested is based on various Yahoo search topics and services. A ‘Shortcut’ may lead to a Flickr image, a financial data, stock quotes , a map , a news item or information about specific companies, products, and people. More services are to be added (maybe maybe sports, movies, and music?)

If you want to view and add what has been suggested for inclusion in your post, click on the “Review this Post” button. You will be taken to an edit screen, which shows your post with the suggested shortcut ‘keywords’ underlined with a blue dotted line and a small arrow icon to the right of them. Hovering over the underlined word gives you a preview of the link suggested. Clicking on the arrow brings up options based on the type of content suggested. From here you can delete the link. Where graphical representations are available you can choose to convert the link into a badge, which embeds an image instead.

A section at the bottom of the Yahoo post review window post shows Flickr thumbnails based on keywords in your post. If there are no images to your liking, a search function allows you to browse for more within the same window.

Hovering over a thumbnail will produce a popup window showing you a larger version of the image. If you decide to include it, clicking the “Add to Post button in this window produces another popup window where you can choose the size of image. Pressing “Submit” here will insert the image into your the review post window. Once you are happy with the shortcuts included, press save and you will be taken back to your post window.

Opinion:

Flickr Image placement - if you wish to move the image from its automatically embedded position at the top of the post to somewhere else, care has to be taken that your post layout is not messed up and that text is not floating in places you don’t want it to go. Center placement may be the safest. This image came up for the words “Flickr Image” and he is cute so I thought I would leave him here:

I have not found much use for the linking and badge features, but it was only its Flickr image capabilities that initially attracted me to the plugin.My blog topics do not lead to many automatically suggested and relevant Flickr images. I can, however see this feature being of great use to some blogs.

Once I got used to the interface the plugin became much quicker to use.

Let me try some words to see what the plugin comes up with:

“Funny Sign”‘

“Chocolate”

That is too tempting, I feel a chocolate attack coming on.

Links:

• Yahoo! Shortcuts page
• Yahoo! Shortcuts Download page.
• Yahoo! Shortcuts Demo Video

Popularity: 5% [?]

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2.5