vdebolt, Author at Web Teacher

Questions about Flickr, Picasa, iPhoto and Google+ Photos

What are Mac users doing about photos since Google+?

My current status is to use iPhoto and upload what I want to share to Flickr.

Whether Flickr is going to fade away due to neglect on Yahoo’s part, or whether Google+ is going to take over the world – it looks to me like it might be wise to think about an alternative to my current status.

Which brings up the question above. Here are some questions I have.

Google+ Photos only work with Picasa. Are Mac users installing Picasa in addition to iPhoto?
Can Picasa import photo albums, modified photos, and folders from iPhoto?
Is there a way to upload to an online Picasa space from iPhoto?
Does Picasa import photos from Flickr?

Have you seen posts that answer these questions? (Links welcome, but only one per comment will be allowed by the spam filter.) Are you a Mac user? How are you doing it?

HTML11 labs

In case you hid under a rock all weekend and didn’t see this, you must go look right now.

Introducing HTML11. The future. Today. Be sure to go through the menu of new tags.

I hope you had as much fun learning about the new tags as I did.

The creators of this site are not saying who they are, but I want the thank them for being so creative. Several minutes of sustained giggling = priceless.

My Endless Tech Support Calls to AT&T

I have an iPhone. It’s my only phone, so when it fails me it’s serious. I’ve been with AT&T for years – no jailbreaking involved. For all those years, I’ve had great service in my house.

About 3 or 4 months ago, my service in my house went bad. Dropped calls, failed calls, calls that never happened, voice mails received days after they’d been left. A mess.

I called AT&T. Little did I know that I would make probably a dozen such calls over a period of weeks until I finally got satisfaction.

I want to share some of my agony with you, because it might help you solve reception problems of your own.

The first few calls I made were difficult. The people I talked with didn’t speak English very well, and could do little more than read through a series of scripted steps for me to take with my phone.

I went through all those steps several times with several different tech support people. It didn’t help.

Each of the tech support people pulled up a map of my coverage and told me I had towers all around my house and I should have great reception. I didn’t.

I received calls back to check if any of it helped. It didn’t.

Finally, I started connecting with people who spoke American English and I could understand what they said. And I could tell they were actually talking with me, not reading a script.

One of those support people suggested connecting me with a second level support person. I felt a glimmer of hope.

The second level support person pulled up the map of my coverage and said it looked good. But then she asked me if I was using the 2G or the 3G setting on my phone. I said 3G. She said I was right on the edge of the coverage region for 3G. I was smack in the middle of a 2G coverage region.

I disabled 3G and immediately had 5 bars. So now I use 2G in my house. If I’m going somewhere else and want to switch to 3G, it only takes a second. My phone is now ringing, calls are not failing, and I’m a happy AT&T customer once again.

I don’t know if only the second level support people can tell whether the coverage maps they are looking at are for 2G or 3G, or if I finally connected to somebody smart enough to figure it out.

I learned two things.

Try 2G if your 3G coverage sucks.
Ask for a second level support person if you call a few times with no results. I should have done that myself much sooner.

Guest Post: How to Synch and Send Files Between Your Phone and Computer

Image Credit: Andrew*

How many times have you created a document on your laptop but aren’t in a WiFi-accessible area when you really need to send the file—or picture—to someone? If you have a cell phone that is Bluetooth(r)-enabled and you have room on your data plan with your cell phone provider, fear not. You can get that document or picture where it needs to go in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Make sure your laptop is Bluetooth(r)-enabled. This is not the same as having a WiFi-accessible modem. If your computer is not Bluetooth-enabled, you might purchase one from a larger computer or electronics store. Most independent devices are connected via a USB port. Once installed or verified and on, continue to Step 2.

Step 2: Turn on your cell phone. (Yes, but it has to be mentioned for the dweebs who don’t think of it.)

Step 3: In your Bluetooth(r) options in your phone’s Tools area, click the Bluetooth menu listing.

Step 4: If your phone has a separate Visibility option, scroll and open it. Make sure your cell phone is “visible.” Make sure your laptop is “visible.”

Step 5: Once both are visible, either search for new devices or…

Step 6. In the same menu area, scroll and open Add New. Find your computer. You might also click Trusted Devices and search from that option. The end result will be the same. Also, you may have to enter a security code; if you didn’t change it from the default, most default codes are identical at 0000.

Step 7: Be patient. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to secure the link between the two and may take more than one attempt.

Once the two are recognized and communicating, called synchronized or just synched, your laptop should recognize your phone as an attached device through the Bluetooth connection. If nothing else, search your computer’s Directory via the My Computer icon to ensure its accessibility.

Step 8: Find the file on your computer. Right-click on it, scroll to “send to” and find your phone on the list of available destinations. During the transfer, you should see a progress bar on most phones. Again, be patient. Most phones display a transfer confirmation message when successfully completed.

Step 9: Simply send the file from your phone to its final destination.

Step 10: Pat yourself on the back for being a genius and strut to your favorite coffee shop in celebration.

If for some reason, you cannot synch your laptop and phone but have Bluetooth(r) successfully installed on the laptop, if you have the room on your data plan to duplicate bandwidth, email the file from your computer to yourself, often as an attachment. Access your email from your phone and forward it to your recipient.

Yes, you could have done it that way to begin with, but almost every cell phone service provider has data plan limitations. If you transmit or send via the Bluetooth transmission to the Internet AND forward to another destination, you are mounting up the bandwidth quickly. After all, it’s not what you watch or play on your phone’s Internet bandwidth, it’s just how much you use doing whatever you’re doing.

Save money where you can. The Bluetooth(r) accessory for your computer is an expense, but it’s a one-time or one-off expense. Your (excessive) bandwidth use on your cell phone plan is a recurring one.

Article written by Holly Adams of Coupon Croc, where you can find Littlewoods discount codes for existing customers 2011 to save on this year’s hottest gadgets and electronics.

A Bloggers Guide to HTML5

Are you someone like me who thinks HTML is the most interesting topic on the planet?

No?

Not surprising, really. Most people have other things to think about.

But even those among us – you! – who would rather think about other things have probably noticed a lot of headlines and blog posts that talk about HTML5. Maybe you’ve wondered if HTML5 is something important enough for you to start thinking about. Maybe you’ve noticed that WordPress themes are coming out in HTML5, such as these from WPMU, and you’ve thought about whether you should switch to a new theme on your blog. Maybe you’re worried that your current blog/web site will be out of date if you don’t make a move to HTML5.

This post is for the wonderers, the worriers, and those who are only marginally interested in HTML. I’ll do a little ‘splainin’ that may help you learn enough to make some decisions.

Fact One: HTML5 is still HTML

If you know a little about HTML already, everything you know is still good and still works. HTML5 is an evolutionary growth step, it’s not a completely new invention. HTML5 is backwards compatible. It works with whatever version of HTML or XHTML you already have on your web page. Here’s the kicker – you can take an existing web page and change it to HTML5 with just a few keystrokes.

Change the DOCTYPE to HTML5 and you’re suddenly using HTML5. For example, your existing DOCTYPE (it’s the first thing in the code on your page) might look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>

If you replace that with the DOCTYPE for HTML5, your web page would still work. It would still look the same. Backwards compatible, remember? What’s the new DOCTYPE?

<!DOCTYPE html>

That all there is to it. Several other things are much simpler in HTML5, like links to scripts and stylesheets. Nice, eh?

Fact Two: Choose Your Own Syntax

What if you’ve been using XHTML – with all those forward slashes at the ends of tags like <br />? In HTML5, you can still use that type of syntax if you want it. Or you can do the plain old <br> minus the XHTML required forward slash. You can write HTML the way you like best. For example, you can capitalize tags if you want to, like this:

You can use quotation marks or not. So you could do this:

HTML5 can deal with all of it. Nothing will get broken and not work.

Fact Three: New HTML Elements

There are some new elements. Some are meant to make things more semantic. Most HTML tags are self-describing. This semantic self-description among HTML elements is a very good thing. You document makes more sense to both humans and machines if the correct tags are used to mark up the content as whatever it is semantically meant to be – for example a list or a heading.

Bloggers might really be interested in the new <article> element. Think of an article as a single unit, something you could pick up and move around. Like a blog post. Each post on your blog could be an <article> in HTML5. Inside that article there could be the new <header> element with the post title, and the new <footer> element with info like the author’s name, or permalinks, or comment links.

We’re used to thinking of pages only having one header and one footer, but in HTML5 other elements can have headers and footers when they make sense – and there’s an tag for that.

Fact Four: New Form Types

You might have noticed this implemented on your phone already, though most browsers aren’t doing it yet. There are some new input types for forms, for example email, website, and phone. When you use one of those types in a form field, you get a keyboard to match. For example, if you were asked to enter an email address in a form field that was type=”email” the keyboard shown might include an @ and a period. Other new form elements may help make it easier to pick a date or select from a range of numbers.

More? Yes, There’s More

There’s more. There’s always more. For example there are new <audio> and <video> elements, but using them is still a pain. There are lots of other new tags and form types I didn’t mention. And there are related technologies that make HTML5 look really cool, like CSS3.

While I didn’t tell you everything, I hope I did tell you enough to help you decide if you want to learn more, and to not be frightened if you want to use a blog theme or template that’s written in HTML5.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

Useful links: Google+ on WordPress, HTML5, YouTube SEO, Responsive Design

Three Ways To Display Your Latest Google+ Updates On WordPress from wpmods.

searching for signal gives us: The Most Important Parts of HTML5, or Why audio and video are Boring, or The New Web Platform, or an Introduction to HTML5. Yes, all that.

YouTube Tips: Blown Away by Phyllis Khare tells you some tips that will improve SEO (and accessibility) for your YouTube videos.

Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design from Think Vitamin is a good resource/reference for getting people started with responsive design.

Useful links: HTML5 media, real names, Jonathan’s card

HTML5 media is a new site that promises their script will let you get HTML5 audio and video working with just one line of code. Supposed to work for all browsers and phones. Haven’t tried it – have you?

In the previous post, I linked to danah boyd’s thoughts on real names. Now Kathy E. Gill from Wired Pen chimes in with Google+, Facebook and Online Identity: The Problem With “Real Names” (And Why It Matters To You). She says,

Whatever its root cause, this is a line-in-the-sand moment. Corporations are re-designing Internet architecture in ways designed that counter the Internet’s fundamental support of anonymous, distributed, geographically-neutral behavior. The only beneficiaries of that change in architecture are governments and corporations.

And that’s politics.

An interesting social experiment with a Starbuck’s coffee card by Jonathan Stark. You can buy a coffee with his card. You can also add funds to his card. Fascinating watching what people are doing with it.