geeky tutorials, tips, guides and reviews
Grab your own open source vector graphics editor, for free! With capabilities similar to Illustrator, Xara X, CorelDraw you can create some really amazing graphics with just a little practice. If you are wanting to create some original icons, art or anything else for you website layout, this is the program to use.
Of all the image editing programs out there, Paint.NET is slowly becoming my favorite. Not only is it totally free, but it really stand the test against a lot of expensive image editing tools when it comes to functionality too.
Ever wonder if there was a search engine devoted to just searching Twitter images? Oh there is – and its name is Twtimage. This website is a Twitter photo search engine. It will fetch search results from twitpic, tweetphoto, img.ly and yfrog.com. So, how does it work and is it worth your time?
WordPress is a great publishing platform to use when you want to circulate your own collection of video or images on the Web. Thanks to a few great plugins, you can take your dull text-based blog and really snaz it up with some great internet imagery. Want to great a photo gallery? Want to plug YouTube into your web site? I have collected twenty of the best multimedia plugins for you to use with your own WordPress powered web site.
Page Flip Image Gallery – Flipping Book plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your WordPress blog.
Post videos and photo galleries – Post your videos and photo galleries/flash slideshows easily and in seconds.
NextGEN Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.
WordTube – WordTube is your Media Center plugin for WordPress.
A new online tool, JustPaste.it makes it easy to share text and graphics over the Web. This service allows you to quickly paste text directly from your word processor of choice onto the online page. You can then spruce up your documents with text formatting, colors and more.
Now there are too many free image hosts out there on the Web today to name, so if you want to impress you had better do something slightly different than all the rest. Pict does that job very well, by shortening the free image hosting process to one step.
How simple is it? All you do is click on one of the empty “Upload Image” boxes, select the image, wait and you are done.
Really, that is it. No more. It is that simple. How simple? This is such an easy image uploading process that Picamatic decided to do almost the same exact thing.
Now you can often hear me singing the praises of Paint.net, because it is an awesome free alternative to some of the most expensive photo and graphic editors out there. Another good one you should try is Photobie. It is a free download for photo editing, scrapbooking, animation, screen capturing and more.
Here is a screen shot of the program’s interface:
Here is a little more about the program from the developers:
Photobie is built upon .NET framework 2. It contains all general photo editing and painting features. It is a perfect screen capture tool for you to do screen capture and editing in one place. It is also a perfect digital scrapbooking tool that allows you to apply embellishment, masking and templating easily and efficiently. And it is a perfect animation tool that allows you to create GIF animation efficiently. It supports many embedded filters as well as Photoshop free 8bf filters. It supports user customized brushes, textures, masks and regions.
Now that might look like a lot of bells and whistles to play with. Thankfully, they have a lot of tutorials too. Here a few of my favorite Photobie tutorials I have found thus far out there (I’m sure I’ll find many more later!).
You can pick up this free image editing tool at Photobie.com. How do you think it stacks up to some of the other free image editors out there?
Need to create some badges in a hurry? The Clockmaker Icon Generator, which funny enough has nothing to do with clocks, is a great Adobe Air application that will dynamically create you an icon to use to spice up your latest project.
You can make two different styles of icons. One is based around the CS3 look and feel and the other is your basic Web 2.0 style star badge.
To save your simple creation, just use the “Create icon” button, and you are good to go. This is perfect for any webmaster who has been looking for a quick and easy way to make some stylish graphics for the web site they are working on.
You can pickup the Clockmaker Icon Generator on the Adobe Marketplace web site.
Free image web hosts are a dime a dozen, and with that said here is another time for your piggy bank of free web hosting options. ImgLot delivers free image hosting with the idea of simplicity in mind. Trying it out, I uploaded a test image here.
Site features include:
The only thing that the web site’s creator is asking in return, is that you tell others about the ImgLot hosting service. After you upload your image, you are given the option of a direct link, a page, forum code for linking and HTML code too. You can also share your image on a number of different social news and networking sites.
Give them a shot at ImgLot.com and follow them on Twitter (@ImgLot) for more news and updates.
What is a favicon? It is that tiny icon you see in most modern browsers, right next to your web address.
Think of it as a visual reminder for the browser of what site you are on. This is really handy when it comes to favicons in tabs, because you can quickly see and think “Oh, there is an ‘m’ there, and it looks like Mitch’s layout – that tab must be where I loaded Mitchelaneous.com”.
Favicon creation is not that hard, as long as you have a good graphic editing program. What you need to remember is keep it 16×16 pixels and name it favicon.ico. Also it will need to be in the root folder for the domain in question – so for example on most Linux-based/cPanel hosting plans for your primary domain name that would be your public_html folder. If it is located somewhere else you can specify a location with these strings in between your <head> and </head> code on your web page:
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />
Going back to the favicon creation, there are several good resource online to help you get this done quickly and easily. Here are some of my favorite favicon generators:
There you can quickly create, edit and download your own personal favicon to use. It cuts some of the work out of the overall chore of getting your favicon ready for public consumption.
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Mitch Keeler is nothing more than your average Joe trying to leave his mark on the world though both his professional work and his online projects, articles, podcasts and more.
