It might sound a little strange to say it out loud, but I like to see pictures of other people’s desks.  Thankfully though, this is the Internet – where people have other odd traits like odd obsessions with furry anime characters – so when you stop and think about it, checking out other people’s desk setups might not be that odd.  Deskography is a website dedicated to showing the world where you work and has tons of interesting desktop setups that might even inspire you to change your own corner nook around a little ‘bit.

At Deskography, you have two options.  You can either upload a photo of your own desk setup or you can browse through all the photos already submitted.  I like to organize things so seeing how others have set up their own desks makes me think, "Oh, maybe I could move X, Y and Z around to look a little better?".

Go check out this guilty pleasure of mine (desktop peeping?) over at Deskography.org.

Flickr is a great way to share your photos online, but using the browser tools might seem a little cumbersome to some people out there. If you want to upload photos directly from your PC to Flickr with only a few clicks in between, then you need the Flickr Uploadr.

With this free program, you simply right click on any image you wish to upload to Flickr, choose “Send to Flickr” and you get the window that is pictured above.  You can also drag and drop files into the Flickr Uploadr too.  From there tag your photos, write descriptions, give them titles and more.  When you are done, upload and all your images you picked will be up and online on your Flickr profile.

The Flickr Uploadr supports both Mac and Windows, so go download it and start adding new pictures to your own Flickr profile.  You don’t have an excuse now to put it off any longer!

In need of a photo to polish off your website design? There are a lot of places you can go to get images – but most people either steal barrow them from other websites or they purchase them from some overpriced website.  What if you could get all the free stock images you need all for free?  Today, I will be sharing with you five resources where you can grab all the photos you need without feeling guilty or becoming broke.

Here are my five favorite free stock photo resources, right from my own collection of web development bookmarks:

Public-domain-photos.com – The domain name says it all with this one.  This resource offers 5,000 free stock photos that are public domain.

TurboPhoto.com – Browse and download 2,000 free stock images here from 10 different categories.

EveryStockPhoto.com – This is a fancy stock image search engine that has over 5,000,000 images to share. Just pay attention here to the license agreement listed if you want to use the images on the website for free.

Sxc.hu – This is another great resource that has over 394,409 photos and images online to use. You have to sign up for free to be able to download, and there are certain license agreements here too that you must agree to before using images from this place.

Studio7Designs.com – The free stock photography collection here is a little light, but is still fantastic.  You are asked to give credit back to them for the image use – but that isn’t too bad when you are getting something for free.

Hope these come in handy in your next big design project, blog article or anything else you might be working on.

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.

Going into the history of the program, it was originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint program that has come with Windows for years.  Over time though it has simply overshadowed that tool, and is now mentioned more within the ranks of Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP.

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Want to give it a shot? You can download this almost perfect image editor from getpaint.net. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think.  It might be the best free image editor out there.

Tired of searching for new wallpaper monthly or even weekly, to keep your desktop decorated?  Maybe you are looking for a program that will do the work for you?  John’s Background Switcher will take your boring desktop and decorate it with photos from a number of different sources automatically.

Once you have it installed, the first thing you will want to do is select a new default set of pictures for it to grab wallpaper from.  You can add pictures from your PC, Flickr, Facebook, Vlad Studio, RSS feed, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, Webshots, Google image search, Yahoo image search and Bing image search.

Here is a little more about John’s Background Switcher from the developer:

JBS sits in your system tray (down by the clock) and changes your background at the time interval of your choosing. You tell it where to get pictures from and how to show them – maybe you just want to see one photo at a time or maybe you’d like to see a ‘Snapshot Scrapbook‘ of photos thrown across your desktop. It’s up to you and you never know what’s coming next!

By default your switching options are set to every hour, scale and crop to full screen, and to use the same picture on multiple monitors.  These three settings can be tweaked though to fit your needs.

Go download John’s Background Switcher and tell me it isn’t the best background switcher for Windows out there today.

Looking for a way to embed articles or images into your own website layout?  Embed Anything is an interesting new service that delivers you the chance to embed both on the fly.  The idea here is simple, let your visitors embed your content – rather than just taking it.

Here are a few key reasons for giving Embed Anything a shot.

• Embedded content comes with a link back to build SEO and traffic
• Embedded content is invisible to search engines
• Ad space contained within each embed lets you monetize embedded content
• Reporting and control over which sites are embedding your content

So when somebody sees an image or an article on your website they would like to use, they will be offered the chance to embed it, rather than just copying it locally.  This gives them an easier way to grab your content and re-publish it.  It gives you the chance to gain a few more eyeballs with a link or two you might not have gotten without the service.

Overall I think it is a neat idea.

So if you want to offer a new way to share your content out there, I would say give Embed Anything a shot.  I am really interested to see some real world feedback on it, to see how useful this service and tool is in the long run.

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.

Flickr Photo Album – This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site.

Lightbox 2 – Plugin used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.

Smart YouTube – Smart YouTube plugin allows you to insert full featured YouTube videos into your post, comments and in RSS feed.

SEO Friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes the tags w3c/xHTML.

Thumbnail Viewer – A minimalist image viewer with an effect similar to Lightbox JS, only much faster with a whole lot less Javascript.

Flash Video Player – The flash video plugin for WordPress allows the addition of video (and other media) to a WordPress website using standards-compliant markup

PhotoXhibit – PhotoXhibit provides an interface to set up gallery widgets using Picasa / Flickr / SmugMug / WordPress Uploads and jQuery.

Shutter Reloaded – Darkens the current page and displays an image on top (like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc.), but is a lot smaller (10KB) and faster.

WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that displays videos from many video services. Enter [videosite id] at a post and you will see a video.

Random Image Selector – Selects a random image from a specified folder, and provides.

podPress – A dream plugin for Podcasters using WordPress.

Yet Another Photoblog – Convert your WordPress 2.5+ installation into a full featured photoblog in virtually no time.

PhotoSmash Galleries – PhotoSmash – user contributable photo galleries for WordPress pages and posts with options. Auto-add galleries or specify.

All in One Video Pack – Easily add full video capabilities to your blog.

WordPress Media Flickr – You can post with Flickr photo, on visual editor toolbar.It’s very interactive interface than other plugins.

TubePress – Displays gorgeous YouTube and Vimeo galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar. Please visit http://tubepress.org for more info!

With any mixture of the above plugins for WordPress, your web site will be taken from a text-based bore to a multimedia powerhouse.  Have any other suggestions for plugins I might have missed?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Well, you could spend a lot of money for a program like Photoshop, take hours learning how to create custom banners, fonts and designs, or you could just go to magcover.com.  I’ll let you pick how you would like to spend your Christmas week.

How does it work? With this web site, you can easily create your own unique magazine cover.  All you do is pick your photo, edit your headlines and you are ready to go.  There are over 100 magazine templates to choose from – so the only thing limiting you is your imagination.

You can also get your custom magazine covers printed, framed or put on a shirt.  Might be too late to create one for Christmas this year – but might come in handy for your egotistical friend’s birthday.  To create your own magazine cover, go visit magcover.com.

Time for part 3 of my video game collection here.  This time around, I am going to go shifting through drawer number three which is home to my old Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games.  As you can see, my n64 game collection is a little on the low side – however, my SNES collection is pretty large.  In there you have such greats as Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Goldeneye and more. 

The first thing you see when you check out the site is this blue monster guy asking you what you would like to do?  You can tell it you want to upload a photo or shorten a URL.  Pretty simple right?

Well that is only half the web site.  The other half gives you the popular posts from a number of different resources, like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Hulu, Yahoo Buzz and more. 

A virtual mix of both link sharing and shortening – this web site has a lot of potential, however my first suggestion would be to shrink down their monster guy on the top of the page.   Why?  There is no way I would want to scroll that far down every time I check out the page to see some of the popular headlines out there from their various news sources listed on the site.  Go see how viral Virl is for you.