I just saw that in early June, Windows Live writer released the next version of Windows Live Writer.  They call it a Technical Preview.  They say its still experimental, kind of like in beta, pre-released stage.  But I decided to go ahead and give it a try!

First of all, I have to say I enjoy using Windows Live Writer to publish my blog posts.  Even though the editor in Wordpress is decent.  If you work with images, videos or other media, you will get tired doing the tedious uploading and linking of the images.  That’s the beauty of Live Writer.  I copy in the images from my computer/desktop/clipboard.  It takes care of the uploading, linking to larger images, & creating thumbnails of all the images.  

A good many of the updates in this version relates to the video and image edits.

You can now crop your image after you pasted it in:

Here’s the one I like, you can tilt your photo to give your user’s more visual interest.

They added some new borders.  Here’s the rounded corners.

and here is my images centered, tilted, and with a reflection border.

How cool is that?

They also added some features for Uploading videos to Soapbox,  MSN Videos.

Some other features:

• Auto Linking:   Not too exciting.  You can set up a list of links that you commonly link to and then when you choose web link, you can choose to pick from a list of auto links.
• Word Count:  Can go to Tools | Options and find the word count, characters, etc.  If that’s important to you.
• Tabs are at the bottom to switch between Edit, Preview and Source.  That is quicker than the drop-down menu in the previous version.

Seeing the Windows Live Writer in action:

If you want to see what it likes here’s some videos from Windows Live Writer about the current public version:   Writer Videos: Come and Get ‘Em!

I like to see a tool that I use and enjoy continuing to improve.   I have found I can easily put up tutorials, tips, examples of layouts, etc with ease on to my blog with Windows Live Writer.  I have tried a few other blogging tools but have to say Windows Live Writer has them beat.

How many email accounts do you check? Be honest now! I have 6 - 8 feeding into Thunderbird, a yahoo account that is rarely checked & my work email on Outlook.

As I prepare to travel for a week & half, I needed to have a way to read them away from my personal laptop. I could have forwarded them all into gmail but to be honest I can’t stand the threaded reading. I really like reading them in Thunderbird & my accounts are set up by purpose.

Fuser.com offers a solution to me when I travel. It’s the equivalent of online web access to several accounts. I wouldn’t use it everyday, but for these trips it will work great!

It’s easy to set up & is user friendly:

• It easily recognizes gmail accounts
• It reads messages & Wallposts from Facebook & Myspace

How it works:

• You can read all the accounts & all the messages are mixed. (scary really!)
• Click on All Accounts Off & click on the account that you want to view (much more manageable!) - I have 5 accounts there

Some downsides:

• One irritation is that it doesn’t give me the option to remember my login info.
• Fuser recognized my Outlook account but won’t update it after the initial time. (but I will have my work laptop with me, so it’s ok).

It supports many types of email:

If you know me, you know that I like my chatting. (My sister is nodding her head!) I’m very much a people person & I enjoy chatting real time in contrast to email.

Now you’re maybe thinking, why is she talking about options for chatting? Well, I quickly found that my friends preferred various chat clients. I tried to convince all of them that Hello was the best, but that didn’t work. Some are on Yahoo messenger & other’s prefer MSN messenger. There is also AIM & Google Talk.

So what’s a girl to do? Well, there’s something like a blog reader, but it’s for chatting. It’s called Meebo.com Here’s how it works:

• create an account
• enter your log in information for each chat account you have (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Google Talk) & you don’t need to have all 4 - I use two of them
• To log in to chat is easy:
  • Open this page & use one log in
  • All of your friends will be in one box (yes, they can coexist)
  • And you can ‘undock’ the friends box outside the browser so that it can be minimized.
• Downside - you need to keep that browser open
• Upside - MSN was giving me headaches by logging out all the time & that doesn’t happen anymore. I’m also thinking that I can uninstall MSN from my computer (which is famous for spyware) & just chat thru Meeb. Meebo remembers your last session with a person when you open the chat box with them - I like that!

Finally there is Hello.com that we all know & love! Hello is ideal because you can transfer images so fast. And the chat logs are easily accessible & they contain the images. Files can also be transferred thru Hello. Unfortunately Hello isn’t a part of Meebo, but logging into only 2 is quite workable.

Here’s another way to upload photos to the net, or take images from the net to post on your blog

Picnik.com is quite an interesting little application! Here’s why:

• nothing to install & it’s free
• uploads directly to photo sharing sites like Flickr & Picasa Web
• it’s an image editor as well as can apply special effects
• has a Firefox plug-in - so it HAS to be good!
• works on Mac & Windows!

People were asking for something to post images on their blogs fast.

Here’s how it works -

• Open www.picnik.com (you don’t need to be signed in)
• Click on Get From Computer, Browse to your image
• After Picnik uploads it, in the Create tab there are some photo editing options
• Click on the Save & Share tab
• If you’d like to upload to Flickr, you sign in
  • you can have the images private
  • once the image is at Flickr
  • Rt click & choose Copy Image location
  • Paste into your blog

Do you have an easier way to upload photos to a blog?

Miss Terra from DST (she’s the queen of the newsletter there) asked about a quick way to post photos & layouts to her blog. This isn’t a one click, but in playing with the widget, I think digiscrappers may REALLY like it for there desktop too.

I can feel another series coming on! I’ll do a 2nd post about how to take fast screenshots to put on your blog. Both of these are dependent on your having a Yahoo account & use Flickr.

Now if you haven’t heard, my sister will tell you how much I love widgets. (she’s probably rolling her eyes about now!) So this is a set of widgets available from Yahoo. First I’ll show you how it works, then how to get it.

What it is - the widget is a picture frame on your desktop with a nice black frame:

• it can be resized & made large enough to almost fill screen
• slideshow of photos from Flickr or another photo source
• lots of flexibility - you can view your photos or anyone’s (it’s cool!)

How do you upload photos with it?

1. In the top right there is a button for uploading
2. This widget opens & you can click & drag image(s) in from ACDSee Photo Manager or Explorer
3. Fill in the information for Flickr, add tags, choose privacy level
4. Click on Upload Photos & you can see it uploading, then it appears in the frame - it’s that easy!

Now to get it the image(s) on your blog:

• In the little upload box, click on Edit Uploaded Photos on Flickr
• That opens Flickr in your browser.
• Double click on your photo, then click on Open Photo Page under image on the right
• Right click & choose Copy Image location & paste into your blog
• If you’re in Wordpress, use dimensions of 99% x 99% if the image is too large.
• This is what you get (I didn’t use the 99% for this - it’s called constraining)

You can download & install the Yahoo Widgets here.

A couple of comments:

• After the install, you get a toolbar of widgets on the right of your desktop.
• I deleted many of them.
• I don’t know how much junk comes down with the these things.
• I like the slideshow playing though. I’m not sure if it will slow down my computer.
• I’ll let you know on these things.

Update - I deleted many widget & hid most & am quite happy with the result.  I think these will be quite useful!  Want to see?  You can put a webcam image in there Heidi!  (She’s getting a new one on Monday…)

Heidi’s input on creating a wiki:

Want to create your own free wiki? Want to know where to start?

1. First, figure out what you would like to do with your wiki.
   • Do you want a public (viewable by all the web) or private (viewable by a select few)?
   • Do you want it editable by the public or select few?
   • Then look for wiki’s that meet those criteria. (i.e. Wetpaint only offers public wiki’s.)
2. Next, go to one of the free wiki websites listed below and play with them. Some provide a sandbox. A sandbox is really a place to try out the wiki and make changes.
   • In the sandbox, Try to edit something and see if you like the editor.
   • If they don’t have a sandbox or place to edit pages, just sign-up for a wiki and try edit a few pages.
   • If you don’t like the editor or it’s not user friendly, people are not going to want to use the wiki.
   • Try to add a page and see if that is easy.
3. Find a site you like the editor and adding pages is easy? Then sign-up and get your own free wiki. But before you invest hours into it. Play with the settings (change the style, add a few pages, add a little bit of content.) Do you still like it? You are not committed to it yet. If it isn’t easy, go to another one and try it out.
4. Once you have picked a free wiki that you like, add a little content and THEN share with your friends or family.

Free Wiki’s that I have tried and my thoughts on them:

Wetpaint.com

Wetpaint is probably the easiest wiki to start using. You sign up and start creating. The editor that you use is probably the most user friendly of all the wikis that I have seen. If you have media content (photobucket slideshow or Youtube video) that is super easy to post with their widgets.

What I didn’t like about it was the ads and the restrictions.

• Google ads
• All wetpaint’s are viewable by the public
• Wetpaint wikis can be changed editable by all or by specific wetpaint users
• Limited Styles of the look of your wiki
• Restricted type of content. For example you can not put certain types of widgets/ads in your wiki.

PBWiki

The pbwiki is by my favorite free wiki that I have tried and use for a private collaborative project. The editor isn’t quite as friendly as Wetpaint’s editor but is still easy too use.

• Only ads are seen in bottom right hand corner and they are from pbwiki wanting you to upgrade past the free account.
• The wiki can be private (seen only by those you give the password too) or public.
• Allow if everyone or particular users can edit the wiki.
• They have youtube widget for video, and Bubbleshare or Slide widgets for photos but no Photobucket widget.
• Allows you to enter in code given on websites to insert in your own widgets. (Switch to Source mode and paste in your code.) This allows you to easily insert photobucket slideshows, ads, etc.
• Very few styles but allows you to make changes to these styles
• Easily backup your wiki with their tool.

Here are few other free hosted wiki sites you can try:

• Wikispaces
• @wiki
• Seedwiki
• StikiPad

Here is website that compares wiki’s in a nice clean format. I have already selected the 6 free hosted wiki’s for you to view them side by side:

Wiki Matrix comparing the 6 free hosted websites.

And if you want to host your own wiki, that is altogether another thing. That involves technical knowledge of web hosting, choosing the wiki software, installing the wiki, configuring it, and then you can start using it. For more info on that, visit WikiMatrix and start reading…

In this post, What is a Wiki? , I gave a definition of what a wiki is. And the video does a great job of showing that it’s an online site where you edit, revise & save. To be honest the planning for a camping trip reminded me of our preparations for scrapping retreats!

But feedback was that people didn’t understand the correlation between a wiki & a website. Ok, let’s try to make that clearer. Today I’m going to share some examples of wikis that you can visit to get the idea of a wiki being used as a website. Then we’ll tell you how to build your own wiki that can serve as a website!

Browse the wiki that I made using Wetpaint’s free wiki platform. I created that in 3 hours. It’s very fast & easy to do.

DigiScrapInfo.com’s first Wiki - check out the Navigation panel on the left

These are two of my favorite pages (and keep in mind I created them & my technical skills are average)

Examples of layouts done in ACDSee Photo Editor

Slideshows from photobucket

Wetpaint.com is a free solution for wiki’s, and I loved how easy it was for me to use, but my sister didn’t like the Google ads & thought it was too limiting. She had a larger vision, so she went & found new wiki platforms that were more flexible. And I think what she has done with our wiki to create DigiScrapInfo.com is amazing! She added our forums & blog to the wiki & it makes a great website. There is no comparison if you look at both of them.

If you’re considering using a wiki as a website, then you should definitely look at other digiscrapping wikis. There are a few out there. DigitalScrapWiki.com is growing fast! And I really like the great job that Tracy is doing. Building your own website/wiki is one thing because you have control over structure. But Tracy is brave in inviting everyone to help her! Over 35 people have contributed. It’s an up & coming resource! Go add your blog or your information as a designer. Even if you don’t have either a blog or store, I’m sure that there’s some information that you can add. That’s what our digiscrapping community is about - sharing & learning from each other! And if you sign up for a wetpaint account (it’s easy & free) & contribute to Tracy’s Wiki, you’ll find that she’s doing an awesome job of building a community spirit there! (last week she was asking where my avatar was?).

So if a Wetpaint wiki looks interesting to you & you don’t want to be bothered by technical issues, give it a whirl! Even if you move to a more advanced wiki later, it’s easy to copy & paste the content over (that’s what we did).

What do you think of the format for the Wetpaint wiki? Do the Google ads bother you?

It’s almost time for the first blog carnival. I had joined in the one that Christina Smith had going & that was fun. Hummie has taken the time to put this together & has more info. here on her blog.

What is a blog carnival? It’s a list of blog posts related to new sites, trends, tutorials, contests, and news about digiscrapping all in one place. Submitting things is really easy! You just go here & paste in the permalink to a specific blog post. When you click anywhere, it will autofill the other lines. Then it will be included in the next carnival.

Hummie is hosting the June 15th one. We here at DigiScrapInfo are hosting the July 1st one. There’s a widget down in the bottom right of our blog where you can see who’s hosting in the future. It should be fun!

Tonite Heidi & I worked on some things.  She has something exciting coming, but that’s all I can say.  She’ll be asking for your input once it’s ready!

Then we were talking about people coming over from Ellie’s Treasures, so I added it to our blogroll.  I was looking around at what she has there - it’s amazing!!!  Let me give you a quick tour:

Scrapbooking tutorials, blogs, sites with freebies,  forums

Paint Shop Pro tutorials 

PSP Tubes & Masks 

PSP Foreign Tutorials - Dutch, English, French, German

Photo Impact - English & foreign languages

Photoshop/Elements Tutorials - English, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Italian

 Groups/Forums

And if you’re wondering why I listed the languages, it’s because Google Analytics tells me that we have people visiting our site from 46 countries!  And ACDSee products are offered in English, French, German, and Dutch.

And, sadly I had to remove the link to the Iron Orchid Designs blog.  :(  I miss the spirited chats with those girls!  But the blog hadn’t been updated since December.  They are designing for a paper company & are involved with DST’s newsletter, so you can catch them there.  But I always loved their photo - so I’m posting it here.  Isn’t it just the best?  (*hint, hint Heidi!* can you guys help me convince my sister that we need a photo of us together?)

IOD Sisters

Do you have a long blog roll? Have you checked the links recently? Do you have web page with many scrapbooking links? Have you checked those links recently? Web users really don’t clicking on a link and it is broken or not working. It happens but if you take a few minutes, you can reduce or eliminate the bad links on your blog or website.

It takes a long time to click on each one and see if they are valid. That is a waste of time. There are tools out there to check for bad links. There are free tools and tools you can buy. I am going to mention the free online web tools that I found and like.

The link checkers are easy to use and quick. Since they are free, they do have their quirks/issues.

W3CLink Checker

The first one I like is W3C Link Checker

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. Click Check
3. Wait Patiently. This can take anywhere for 1 - 10 minutes depending on how many you links you have on that page or blog.
4. Click on the results or just scroll to the bottom for the results. It will tell you which links you should check:

Some notes on using W3C Link checker:

Robot Exclusions: If the error comes back that the link is not checked because of robot exclusion roles, it means that site isn’t allowing computer generated checks. Those links are probably fine. In my example, I got this rule for my google stats and I know it is valid. If you don’t know, check them by hand (copy and paste url into browser to see where you go.)

Redirects: You can either leave them as is or change your web page to reflect the new place. The web owner was nice enough to say, this page no longer exists and has been moved to here.

Lastly, sometimes this tool doesn’t give results and just appears to hang. (Hey, its free you can’t complain much.) Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the last link it was checking. The tool seems to hang periodically when it can’t find certain types of pages on a valid host and the host doesn’t return an error or takes a long time to return an error. Check the last link by hand and it probably isn’t valid, update or delete the link on your blog/webpage and rerun the tool.

Link Valet

Link Valet is a tool that runs too quickly and gives a few false errors. What I liked about this tool it would check multiple pages, results are easy to scroll through and doesn’t hang.

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. For recursion depth, check 0 if you only want it to do that page, check 1 and it will check that page and links on the pages that it links to. Checking 2 will probably take a long time.
3. Click OK
4. Wait Patiently. This can take anywhere for 1 - 10 minutes depending on how many you links you have on that page or blog.

Once you get results, scroll through looking for Red squares. Those are the ones that you need to check. Also, you will notice that some have timeouts. This will happen for slower sites. It’s those false errors and you can check those links by hand.

AnyBrowser Link Checker

The last one is quick tool that is incredibly easy to run. AnyBrowser Link checker What I didn’t like about it, is I have to scroll through the results and find the bad ones by hand (no colors to highlight the bad ones.) It also only tells me OK or BAD and no reason.

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. Click Check Page

Search through the list for BAD and check those links.

See how easy that was to check for dead/bad links? Once you know that these tools exist, where they are, how to run them, and what the results mean it doesn’t take long to check your blog/webpages periodically. The web is always changing and those links change too.

I listed three tools because everyone has their preferences. I like W3C link checker because it gives a lot of information. Link Valet is quick, with nice results, but some false timeouts. And my least favorite, AnyBrowser Link Check, because it only says OK or BAD and you have to look through the results. Try out one or all of these tools to clean up your blog roll or web pages.