Sunday, March 26, 2006

Under the Hood

For any and all interested, I thought I would give a brief overview of all the great and free technology and services that go into making this blog the amazingly interactive, well oiled machine that it is.

Blogger

Obviously without Blogger there wouldn't really be a blog here. While that is fairly apparent, I've discovered that there is more to Blogger than meets the eye. In addition to being able to edit/post blog entries directly from the Blogger website, it also allows you to post via email or text message, as well as use the Audioblogger to post audio directly to your blog from any phone. For those who don't know, Blogger is owned by Google so you don't have to worry about your blog suddenly disappearing due to the company going under as with some other fly-by-night free blog sites. Based on my research I'd say that Blogger is the best option out there as far as free blogs go. For those interested in hosting their own blog, WordPress seems to be a better, more powerful alternative.

Flickr

For those not familiar, Flickr has become the definitive free online photo storage service. Several features that make Flickr so unique are its incredibly intuitive interface, ability to 'tag' photos for easier organization and searching, and unbelievable amount of storage: a free account allows you to upload upto 200MB of photos per month, with fully unlimited storage. Those with even greater needs can pay the $25 a year for a Pro account which allows upto 2GB of photo uploads a month and unlimited storage. Finally, Flickr is owned by Yahoo! so once again you don't have to worry about your photos disappearing suddenly.

YouTube

While I don't have any yet, I plan on adding some video to the blog in the near future and making it a regular feature while I'm out and about. When I do get around to adding some video, YouTube will be the one hosting all of it for me. Another great free service, YouTube allows you to store an unlimited number of videos (in various formats: avi, mov, mpg) for free, with the only limitation being that each video must be under 100MB. As if that weren't sweet enough, YouTube enables you to embed your videos into any webpage you like.

FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a service that allows you to syndicate your blog and supports all versions of RSS as well as ATOM feeds. For those not familiar with RSS (Real Simple Synciation), please see my RSS Primer.

R|Mail

Another nice RSS related tool is R|Mail which allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed with just an email address, so that everytime there is a new post you will get an email of that post.

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