Admins @ Work » Google

Share Your Photos with Picasa

Erin Colbert — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 03:47:37 +0000

Thanksgiving is over and you had a great time with family and friends, but how are you going to share all those pics you took? Attaching multiple photos in an email is archaic and will probably end up in your recipients spam box or not delivered at all because the file size was too large. Try Google’s Picasa web albums instead.

Sign up and Get Started

To sign up for Picasa go to http://picasaweb.google.com
Sign in to your Google account
If you don’t have a Google account, click “Create a new Google Account” – it is not required that you sign up for a Google Gmail account to use Picasa
Follow the steps to get started

Upload Photos and Create Albums using Picasa Web

Click “+Upload Photos” from the right hand side
Create a new album or add to existing album
Fill in all the blanks and follow the instructions to create an album

You can also download Picasa software for your computer and store all your photos there. If you do this then you don’t have to manually add each photo one by one using the “browse” then “upload” feature. They offer 2 versions – one for a PC and the other for a Mac. The Mac software allows you to seamlessly upload iPhoto pictures into Picasa.

Share your album

Click on the album to enter it
On the left hand side there are a list of options – Upload photos, Embed Slideshow, Link to this Album, Delete Album
Select “Link to this Album”
Copy the text in “Paste link in email or IM”
Place the link in your email and send

For advanced users you can click on the “Embed Slideshow” link and place the photo album within your HTML webpage or blog as I have done below. Or, send the link to your web developer for placement on your company’s Intranet.

Customize Your Homepage

Erin Colbert — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:23:19 +0000

Approximately 70% of all internet search goes through Google and they clearly dominate the search market. They became popular for their clean, uncluttered, and advertisement-free home page, but now, as the fifth most valuable company in the world, they offer a unique array of products with complete customization.

The Google home page, or iGoogle, is a dashboard of widgets that you can drag and drop to make a page as creative as you are. The widgets, a graphical user interface that allows 3rd party content to be placed on a web page, are created by both individuals and companies. There are basics such as clock, weather, maps, and multiple news sites. A few of my other favorites are:

Google Reader – allows me to quickly view the top posts from my RSS reader (read my post on creating an RSS Reader)
To Do List – keeping personal items on your work computer is difficult and dangerous, since anything you put on your computer is property of the company – keep your to do list right on your home page so you can access it quickly and easily at work or home
Google Calendar – lets me sync multiple calendars to view on one page, including iCal, Outlook, and Yahoo! Calendar – as with the To Do List, you don’t want to keep personal items on your work computer so sync to Google calendar and you can keep your work and home calendars together
WikiTravel – links to breaking travel news and destination highlights from their website
Flight Stats – widget that allows me to quickly check the flight status of any flight by route, flight number, or airport
Fandango – movie show times at my local theater
Local Gas Prices – shows the cheapest gas prices by zip code
Wikipedia – I never have to go to the site directly, I just search straight from my home page

To get started go to www.google.com/ig. You must add the widgets straight from iGoogle, since there are no links from the individual websites linked above. If you already have a Gmail account then log in using that, otherwise, click the link to “Get Started” and follow the instruction. There are thousands of widgets and you can arrange them in any way to like to make browsing and searching more efficient and fun. And, change your theme to suit your mood. Right now, I’m using Hong Kong to get pumped about my upcoming trip next March!

RSS – It is really that simple?

Erin Colbert — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:07:05 +0000

Yes! RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is very easy to set up. An RSS document, or “feed” contains a summary of content for a website or blog. Subscribing to an RSS feed allows you to view new content for a website in a simple and clean format without always having to go back to the original site. Whether your favorite websites update daily, weekly, or monthly, you’ll have access to the most recent information as soon as it posts.

There are a lot of RSS readers available that allow you to view feeds from multiple web sites. Personally, I use Google Reader because I use a suite of other Google products and like to keep as many things in one place as possible. To sign up for Google Reader you will need a Gmail login. If you do not have a Gmail account, I highly suggest setting one up, as I’ll be reviewing a host of other applications from Google in later posts. Plus, it’s always handy to have a second email box where you can send all of your junk mail.

Once you have created an account with Google Reader, get started by adding the Admins @ Work RSS feed. Select “Subscribe to Feed” on the left hand navigation bar.

Select “Add to Google” and add to your Google Reader account. The next time you log in to Google Reader you can view the Admins @ Work feed, along with your other favorite websites.