It's About What We Say

It’s been several weeks since I’ve posted a weekend round-up or a Saturday morning coffee and there’s definitely a reason….nothing has been happening.

Yeah, it’s been a weird kind of Summer for me and perhaps not in a good many ways.  I won’t go into detail, but I’m either looking forward to classes starting again, or to getting a full-time job again.  Either way I need to get myself back into some kind of gear.  Having the engine going and the shift selector in neutral is just wasting gas.

Went to my folks place a couple weeks ago to lay laminate flooring down in their downstairs room.  Surprisingly, it only took a day and a half, but it looks great.  They were going to finish all the trim pieces themselves.  I didn’t take any pictures of it this time like I did when we laid their kitchen flooring.  Oh well.

Saw Mamma Mia! on Friday evening this last week.  It was good, and worth an evening price if you’re looking to have a fun date night.  The music is catchy (Of course it is, it’s ABBA), but be sure to plug your ears when Pierce Brosnan starts singing.

After a few days of having a marine layer over the Pacific Northwest keeping things cool, it appears today that it’s worn off.  It’s actually quite warm today

I’ve been writing several posts for Windows Live Community Clubhouse.  Will have to wait again until inspiration strikes again or until someone says, “How do I ……” 

Still unknown whether Europe trip is on or off.  More waiting.  Only one month to go, so it’s not looking good.  I guess maybe next year.

Well….see what I mean that nothing special has happened?  Man I hate down time like this. Keep your fingers crossed for me that something good comes up soon.  I did a cold-call mail to the owner of the local second-run house.  They weren’t advertising for anyone, but I said I’ve got great management experience and know how to put a great team together and get a cinema going well.  But small screen owners are notoriously bad at making decisions, most not having a huge lot of experience in cinema themselves.  Would they know a good idea if it bit them?  I wouldn’t mind getting back into exhibition full-time anyway.  I know that it’s something I can do superbly well. 

well….signing off for the week.

My Dad is a good great cook! He has a killer cinnamon roll recipe that puts Cinnabon to shame.  He's not willing to share that with me just yet, along with many other secret family recipes, but he has shared some great recipes with me though that I like to cook and share with others. 

Usually the recipes get emailed to me in the body of an email, which is fine if I'm printing it out for myself, but what if I want to share it on my Live Space?  My first instinct would be to copy/paste the recipe into a blog posting.  It sounds like the quickest and easiest thing to do, but once it's in a blog post in the text body, it's hard to print or do other things with like put it onto a recipe card short of copy/pasting it again. 

Instead, I save my recipes into an MS Word document,  (HINT:  Did you know you can get a number of recipe card templates at Microsoft Office Online?) and upload it to a public "Recipes" folder on my SkyDrive.  From SkyDrive, my friends and family can download the recipe to their own computers for printing or putting into their own recipe cards and cookbooks. 

There's a couple ways I can share the recipe now....

1.  I can use the "SkyDrive Embed" plug-in to Live Writer to sign in to SkyDrive and embed the file into a blog posting from within Live Writer

or...

2.  Enable the SkyDrive gadget that's built in to Live Spaces by going to Customize->Add Modules-> select "Files".  This will place your publicly available shared folders, like a recipe folder, in a module on your Live Space.

Then your friends and family can freely download your recipes from your SkyDrive folder.  There's nothing like good food and friends!

Let’s face it, some people are resistant to change.  As it is with my parents, the thought of using unfamiliar technology or ways of doing things scares them.  I know my Mom writes great letters (You know, like those holiday newsletters) and she emails her church girlfriends several times a day, but I still have difficulty getting her to use her Live Space to share what’s going on in her world with the people she cares about.  She’s afraid to try new ways of doing things.  My grandmother would say, "If it ain't broke, it don't need fixin'" 

So I enabled email publishing on her Live Space so she could continue to use something she’s familiar with, email, and post to her Live Space.  This is a pretty simple process:

Sign in to your Live Space, click “Options”, and select “E-mail Publishing.”  You’ll be taken to the page where you can turn on email publishing and make your settings.  Tick the box that says “Turn on e-mail publishing”.  Enter the email address you’ll be emailing your postings from, enter a secret word, select and album to save images to if you’re emailing images to your blog, and choose whether to publish the entries straight away or save them as draft for later (HINT: If you set for "Save as Draft" you have to go back to your Live Space and sign in and publish them later.)  You’ll then get an email address that you send email to to publish blog entries.  It should look something like this (your space name).(secret word)@spaces.live.com.   Now enter this email address into your address book with the name “Blog” as the contact name.  Then when your write your posting via email, just search for your "Blog" contact and you won't have to remember the whole email address.  Make your blog posting and hit "Send".  You've just published your blog entry via email. 

Later...when your parent's start asking you, "Well how can I put pictures in my blog entries?" or "How can I do something more?"  Then you can introduce them to Live Writer!

For us more savvy or adventurous users, email publishing can take on an entirely new dimension, MoBlogging.  When you're out and about around town and see something interesting to write about, you can send an email from your mobile device to your Live Spaces and publish what you're thinking, or doing on the moment, just like I did when I saw a gorilla walk down 6th Avenue in downtown Seattle!  Use the same process as above to turn on your email publishing, and save the email publishing address as a contact to your phone or mobile device address book.   Then just write your email to your "Blog" contact and send away!  You've just become a MoBlogger. 

When I set up a Live Space for my parents, I knew that eventually both of them would be using it.  Although my family could probably tell who was writing just by the style of writing, I thought it would be nice to do something cool to give each their own personal voice to their blog postings.  So I stole an idea from MSNBC.com’s blogs.

For each person who would be posting to the blog, in this case, my Mom and Dad, I created a little photo speech bubble which they could preface their blog posting like this:

I created the photo speech bubble using Paint .NET which is free alternative to Photoshop.  Be sure to save your speech bubble in a format that is Live Spaces friendly.  That’s GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP or TIF format only.  (HINT:  I matched the background of the speech bubble to the background of my blog post area so it would blend in seamlessly)  Once the icon is created, upload it to your Live Spaces album.  You can create a special album just for icons like this, or put it in the “My Blog Photos” album.  Whichever you prefer. 

Here we’re going to take a departure from the process I outlined in the earlier post about using Live Spaces albums and Live Writer to put photos in your blog postings because we don’t want that little bit of text below the photo like it shows in my vacation photo.

Since we don’t want to upload the picture multiple times each time we make a new post, we’ll just use the URL of where the icon is stored in the Live Spaces photo album.  Using your browser, go to the Live Spaces photo album where the icon is located, and select it so it shows as such:

Right-click on the image and select “Copy this image URL”.

Now start Live Writer and your new blog post.  Click “Insert Picture” then select the “From Web” tab.  Paste the URL we copied from the step just above.  The speech bubble icon should appear in the preview, then click “Insert" and the icon should now appear in Live Writer for your blog posting. 

While not a completely elegant solution, it is a neat way to give a personal voice to individual blog postings if your  Live Spaces blog is written by more than one person.  If someone has an alternate way of doing something similar to this, I’d certainly like to hear!

I’m kind of a stickler for keeping things organized so I don’t have duplicates of things running amok all over my computer’s hard drive.  So I keep folders for the photos of each trip I take, but I also upload that folder as an album on my Live Spaces place.  Then, when I write about my trip in a blog posting, I’ll use the photos from my Live Spaces album to illustrate my blog posting (see this post for an example).

There is a couple ways to do this.  Since Live Writer doesn’t include a way to import your Live Spaces photos, you can hunt down the URL for the photo, copy it, then paste it into the Add Photo dialogue box when you’re making a post OR you can install an add-in to Live Writer.  An add-in adds extra capabilities that Live Writer didn’t originally come installed with.  One of my favorites is the Live Spaces Photo Album Plug-in written by Scott.  This allows you to browse your Live Spaces photo albums and insert a photo into a blog posting. 

So here’s my usual work flow when I work with my vacation photos and want to write about my trip:

First I import my photos from my digital camera into Windows Live Photo Gallery.  I always create a folder for each vacation or trip so if I’m looking through Windows Explorer I can still locate the photos I’m looking for quickly.  Once the photos are in Live Gallery, title and tag your photos.  I start with generalized tags first, then start narrowing down.  For example:

Taken from It's About What We Say: Vacation 2006 - 02AUG to 09AUG

This photo was from my vacation to California a couple years ago.  It’s tags in Live Gallery appear something like this:  Vacation, California, Sonoma, Fort Ross.  Live Gallery uses the digital date information from the camera by default so I don’t need to include dates, unless I wanted to.    If there were people I knew in the photo, I’d add their names (Mom, Dad etc.), or if it was a specific event, I’d add the event name (Birthday, Anniversary, etc.)  Tagging photos in Live Gallery makes searching exactly what you’re looking for so much easier, and secondly, tagging photos just after you’ve imported them keeps you from having a huge bunch of un-tagged photos that you’ll later have to spend hours sifting through and tagging later.  I speak from experience in this! (TIP:  You can add a tag to multiple photos at the same time by selecting all of the photos, or during the import process.)

So, once your photos are imported into Live Photo Gallery, titled, tagged etc.  Then I publish them to my Live Spaces by selecting the photos I want to publish, then clicking the “Publish” button at the top of Live Gallery and selecting “Publish on Windows Live Spaces.”  Create a new album, or select an existing album to add your photos to.  I always tick the box that says “Optimize photos for printing”, just in case my family wishes to print the photo or order prints from the online webservice.  Then click “Publish”.  Voila!  So now you’re photos are online.

When I write about my vacations, I’ll generally use Live Writer.  Don’t forget to have installed the Insert From Spaces Album plug in!  Once the plug-in has installed it will appear under the Insert menu or on the right hand column panel under “Insert”.  When you’re writing your vacation entry and want to insert a photo from your album, click the Insert from Spaces Album button, enter your Live Space name and click “Load Albums”, select the album you wish to view and click “Load Pictures”.  Select the photo you want, then click “insert” and it will insert itself into your blog posting.  Resize your photo by dragging the corners to fit into your blog post. 

Now you can illustrate your vacation blog postings with all your great travel photos and still have your full photo album on your Live Spaces albums and keep everything organized without your photos ending up in multiple albums.