I have a couple reviews of things I have just discovered that are making blogging fun again (not that it was un-fun, it had just gotten tedious for me in my busy, time sensitive life).
The first review is of a handy little scanner called the Flip-Pal. I scanned all the pro photos from the last couple posts (of my dancers, of the bishop and Missy, of dad and girls) with this little machine. It runs on AA batteries (not sure how that will be if/when it starts eating batteries...I guess I'll switch to rechargeables) and has a scan bed about the size of a 4x6 photo. But, the really cool feature is the flip part (and I haven't even played with this yet). You can take off the cover, flip the scanner over, and scan a larger photo (or album page!, piece of art, a quilt, whatever) in segments. Then stitch those photos together with software that comes with the scanner.
I am giddy to start scanning in the boxes and boxes of photos in the basement that I know I will never put into "real" albums. And, I cannot wait to try the stitch feature when I scan in my "real" photo albums to get them into a digital format. I'll let you know how those projects go as I get into them.
My second review is for an app I discovered today in my frustration about not being able to get photos directly into Blogger from iPhoto. I was moving photos to a separate folder and uploading from that folder. I know it may not seem like a big deal, but that extra step was driving my crazy. I just thought it should be more straight forward and surely I was missing some "easy" way to do it. So, after spending hours and hours searching through helps and faqs, test blogging, facebooking and e-mailing friends who blog (thank you Sue and KC), I finally got the bright idea of searching the App Store at Apple. I plugged in "Blogger" and up popped MarsEdit. I read through all the reviews, waffled back and forth about the price (about $40), and then noticed a try it free option on the website. Duh, I'll take that one, please!
I have been blogging away and testing it out. I am so happy. This is how easy it should be. MarsEdit is a separate blog post composer that links right into Blogger. I compose my post, choose media to uh-add media, and up pops a pane that interfaces directly with iPhoto. I select the photo I want in iPhoto, check the size, and about that quick the photo is in my post. When I'm ready to publish or save to draft over at Blogger, I click the "Send to Blog" button. Within a minute, the post shows up on my blog or in my drafts folder. Easy-peasy. Wahoo!!! Tears of joy!!!
So, two huge thumbs up for the Flip-Pal Scanner and MarsEdit!
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