Since not everyone has Photoshop, is there a way for someone to re-size a large picture to be used on a website or to send via email without jamming the recipient’s inbox? Yes! With Google’s image tools, Picasa and Picnik, there’s an easy way to work with your images to resize them online and then use them however you need.

Step 1: If you don’t have one already, get yourself a Google account.

I love a lot of Google’s free services. There’s gmail of course, which enables me to receive emails on my phone with no hassle and gives me over 7,000 megabytes of storage. Then there’s Feedburner which allows me to offer subscriptions to a web site via RSS. Google Analytics is also another great tool to take advantage of. For this tutorial though, we’re going to look at two media tools; Picasa and Picnik. So go to google.com and sign up for account if you don’t have one already.

Step 2: Now that you have your Google username (email) and password, sign in and get started with Picasa.

Your Google account's top toolbar as seen from Gmail window

To find Picasa, sign in and then you will see more on the far right of the top toolbar.

Click that to open a menu where the last item is “even more”.

Click on Even More down at the bottom

Under the Media section, you will see Picasa on the left and Picnik on the right.

Google's Media Products

TIP: The direct url to your Picasa account is https://picasaweb.google.com/home
You should probably bookmark this page so that you don’t have to go through Google’s admittedly convoluted click-throughs every time.

Saving a bookmark in Firefox

Now you can get to Picasa without jumping through Google’s hoops!

Easy one-click access!

Step 3: Create your album and upload pictures.
If you decide to just start to upload photos that’s fine. Just understand that Google needs to sort them into albums so if you upload a batch of images today, Google will prompt you to create an album with today’s date (you can always give it a custom name).

Step 4: Once photos have been added to an album, select one to resize.

Link to your existing albums on Picasa's home page

Click on the album to open it

Click on a photo to open it

Click on the album that contains your images to open it. Then click on the image you need to resize. Once the image is in its own window, you will see a toolbar at the top with a little landscape icon at the top. Click on that to launch Picnik.

Click landscape icon to launch Picnik

You can also click on Actions and then select "Edit in Picnik"

TIP: If you want to bypass Picasa, you can just launch Picnik right away and upload photos directly from your harddrive. I just suggest uploading to Picasa if you are fairly mobile and you want to get the whole process done on the web as opposed to being chained to whatever computer has your images. Also, once the image is resized, you can always add it to your site via its URL on Picasa.

Step 5: Edit your image with Picnik.
Go to Re-Size on the leftside toolbar. Then simply enter in the dimensions that you would like the image to be to use on your site.

Editing toolbar in Picnik

Depending on the layout of your theme, maximum size can vary, but for the sake of example, I usually save my images at 450 pixels wide as the maximum width. Make sure you choose to retain the proportions as well.

Original photo's dimensions. Too big for a blog!

Enter in the new dimensions (width and height in pixels)

Step 6: Save your image and either download or get url.
Picnik will allow you to save your edits and then you can either download the image back to your computer or, on Picasa, you can get the url of the image.

Save to your Picasa album

Now you can download the re-sized image to a folder on your computer

Then, when you add an image into your WordPress post or page, it’s simply a matter of pasting that images url into the add-image pop up window. If you choose to download the re-sized image, then all you need to do is add your images the regular way and the smaller file size will take a load off your server!

Step 1: Find your Flickr upload email address.

This can be done by signing into your Flickr account. Then, click on You in the top left toolbar and then scroll down to Your Account. Once you’ve clicked on that, you will see a tab on the next page for Email. Click that and then on the next page you will see next to Your Flickr upload email, the address for sending photos that will appear in your Photostream.

Finding your upload email address

Step 2: Find your Facebook mobile uploads email address.

Sign into Facebook and go to your profile by clicking on your name in the top right corner. Then, go to the Your Photos tab, select an album and then click on Edit Album, then, Add More. Then, you will see an option below, “Got a camera phone?”. Click on “Upload photos straight from your phone.”, and you will be shown your upload email address in the top half of the next page.

Finding your Facebook uploads address

Step 3: Add the two email addresses to your phone.

This can be done by adding 2 new contacts, calling them Flickr and Facebook and then adding their respective email addresses.

Step 4: Take a picture!

Once you have a photo you want to send to both Flickr and Facebook, or, either one, simply select the email option in your camera phone and begin to type the email address. Once it appears as a suggestion, select it and then add the other as a CC if you wish.

Et voilà!

A camera phone photo uploaded to Facebook

Uploaded photo on your Flickr photostream page

Step 2.
Open up the “Kitchen Sink” mode (This is done by clicking that button on the right end of the display that has all those tiny squares), and click the arrow next to the underlined “A” to bring up the Color-Picker.

Step 3.
The initial Color-Picker window contains just a few of the hundreds of colors available. Click on “More Colors” to bring up the full range of options. By default, the window opens to the the full spectrum Picker, but there are other options as well such as the Palette (web-safe colors) and Named Color (standard colors such as “Red”).

Step 4.
Notice how clicking on any point in the palette brings up a series of letters and numbers in the lower right side box? That’s the code you will need to display that color. Choose a few colors and write down their corresponding code. Now, when you want to customize your CSS file, you will have the right code on hand to display the colors you want. (See example below)

I’ve talked a few clients through the process of registering their business with Google and, based on that experience, the idea of talking someone through the same process on Bing is a little more daunting, but doable. Here’s a comparison of the user experience for each site:

Google’s Home Page:

The process:

Step 1. Get a Google Account, if you don’t have one already.
Step 2. Go to Google.com and click on “Business Solutions” below the search terms window.
Step 3. On the next page, click on “Local Business Center” in the bottom half of the page.

Now you are all set to start listing your business with Google. One precaution: Make sure you are near your business phone so you can verify your listing with Google’s automated call to your business phone. They will call with a PIN that you will need to verify that this is actually your business.

Bing.com’s Home Page:

The Process:

Step 1: If you haven’t already, sign up for a Windows Live account (click on “Windows Live” in the top left corner of the page to get started)
Step 2: With your Windows Live email and password on hand, go to Bing’s home page and select “Maps” from the search options listed under the main search field.
Step 3: In the Maps page search field, enter either your business name or your location and business category.

Step 4: In the listing of search results, scroll all the way down until you see the words “local listing center” in page gray and click on that to get started with your listing.

Now for the real way to do this.
Go to: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
-and sign up from there.
I only listed these steps out to illustrate the fact that Bing’s method is; 4 (non-intuitive) steps as opposed to Google’s 2 somewhat obvious ones and that trying to explain this to a client over the phone is not high on my list of fun and easy activities. The only bright spot in all this is that, at the end of the sign-up process, Bing.com promises to send you a letter for verification about your listing as opposed to a phone call that can take some people by surprise.

I really want to get out of this gloomy dark green theme get some uniformity across the various sites and networks that I manage. The past year has been so crazy, what with running after a toddler, getting new projects out the door and keeping up with what’s happening on the web, that when I look at this site now, I see the haphazardness of it all. As each new tool or feature came onboard, they were sort of randomly thrown into the left or right sidebar, and now I’m ready to make cohesive design sense of it all.

I am in the process of updating a map for a site I developed and it involves googling almost every local retail business in order to link to their websites. Surprisingly, quite a few don’t. Instead, when I google their business name, what tends to come up are: 1) Newspaper articles that mention the business, 2) blog posts that mention the business and 3) Review sites such as Yelp and Merchant Circle.

The last category is where a lot of businesses lose out on a great free tool for getting their name out there. Some sites are membership-based, requiring people to join before they can post their reviews of local businesses. Others are more focused on the business owner and helping them to develop a business to business network. Here’s a list of the sites that I visited and a little about the ins and outs of listing your business with them:

• Superpages/Switchboard: When you land on this site, go to the bottom of the page where it says: “Add or Edit Listing”. Click on that and you’ll go to a page where you will be prompted to enter your business phone number in order to find out if you are already listed. If you are not, then you will need to go through the process of filling in your business info and then signing up for a free account. Of course, they will offer you options such as having your logo with your listing for “only” $25 per month, but there are free options out there, so try it, see how you like the services and then decide if it’s worth the money.
• Yellowpages: Just like SuperPages and Switchboard, Yellowpages is part of the Idearc Empire and, like any empire, they want to control the world. If you own a business, you’ve probably received a few sales calls from them, but, it is possible to sign up for a free business listing. The only catch is that they inform you after you’ve gone through the listing process that it may take 30 days to display your listing and “you will be contacted by a sales representative”. Oh boy. To get started, just go to the home page and click on the black button at the bottom of the page that says “Get your free listing”.
• Boston City Search: At the bottom of the home page, there’s a link entitled “List your business on City Search”. It does cost, and they don’t tell you how much it will cost until you start signing up for a plan. The “$30 off” offer tells me that it’s kind of costly.
• Manta: Manta pulls its listings from Dun & Bradstreet. Therefore, you should get a listing with them first before attempting to get into their listings. I wish they had told me this before I went through the fairly involved process of setting up an account on their site. The site seems to be focused on business to business interactions, so if you are constantly scouring the web for suitable vendors, then this may be worth your time to set up.
• Citysquares: Basically the way this works is that you search for your business, sign up for a free listing, and then they want you to pay upwards from $50 a month to upgrade your listing including being able to link to your site from the listing.
• Merchant Circle: On the home page, you will be prompted to enter your business number, then it shoots you onto a page where you can sign up for a membership. They email you, you confirm the email and then you go to another page where there’s a list of the plans offered. They range from $30-$250 a month. Never fear, there’s a light gray link next to the plans that says “But I thought it was free!” Click on that. Now, on the next page, in the top right corner, click on “No Thanks, set up my profile”. You get a pretty meaty listing, with a link to your own site and the ability to generate coupons. I signed up and within 48 hours, my listing showed up near the top of a search for “Web Design” in “Salem MA”
• Yelp: At the top right of the page, click on Yelp for Business Owners. From there, you simply follow the prompts to set up your business listing.

Then what?

Recruit your network of friends, relatives and loyal customers to support your business by asking them to post some reviews on the various sites. Trade reviews with other business owners, offer discounts/deals to customers who post reviews, cook dinner for people, whatever. Every little bit helps to enhance your presence online and drive traffic to your business!

Step 1: Take a survey of sites you find useful. These days, with everyone and their dog on seemingly every social networking site known to mankind, it’s a good idea to come up with some simple coping mechanisms to combat the information overload that can result from joining YASNS. Take a few sites that you visit frequently and gather a list of the social networking tools they employ. Basically, the whole broad topic of Web 2.0 sevices can be broken down into three basic categories:

Bookmarking Tools: Those little badges for services like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us make it easy for your readers to save a link to your content and then share their links on their profiles.

RSS Tools: These buttons allow a reader to add a feed from your site to a feed-reader service. While most blogs and feed-enabled sites already offer this via that little orange button you see in your browser’s address bar, there are plenty of services out there such as Netvibes and Google that make it easy to track your favorite blogs via a personalized feeds display. Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, is a good tool for maintaining your feed(s) and the service gives you a feed url to use as well as some button generating tools.

Social Networking Tools: Join a site like Facebook or Twitter and you can get the code to display a badge on your site that links to your profile. Other services such as Google’s Friend Connect and MyBlogLog allow blog owners to build an online network with other bloggers.

Step 2: Once you have a sense of the types of services you want to offer and info you want to display, create a way to keep track of everything. When I sign up for a site or service, I make sure I keep a record on paper of the username, password, screen name and url of my profile page if necessary. And, since a lot of these services like t send you a confirmation/activation email, I have a folder in my webmail just for membership-related emails. (I draw the line at subfolders though. There’s only so much OCD I can take.)

Step 3: Now that you have a way to keep track of your various memberships, go create them! Here’s a list of popular services, separated by category of service:

Bookmarking Tools:
Del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble
Reddit
Slashdot

RSS Tools:
Feedburner (if you only join one rss service, make it this one!)
Google
Newsgator
BlogRovr
MyBlogLog
My Yahoo
Netvibes
Amazon Kindle
Viigo
Bloglines
Windows Live
Wikio
Blog Networks

Social Networks:
Facebook
MySpace
LinkedIn
Twitter
Flickr
YouTube

Step 4: Now that you’ve joined everything, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of interconnectivity out there between services. You can post your Twitter Tweets to your Facebook Wall, your Flickr Feed to your Myspace page and put your LinkedIn badge all over creation. Don’t stress that yet. For now, you want to make sure your loyal readers know how to make the most of your site. It’s time to add some buttons to your site. Sign into your Feedburner account and burn a feed for your website.

Step 5: Once you’ve burned your Feedburner feed for your site, go to their “Publicize” page. Now you can do some “one stop shopping” for some feed chicklets! Click on the “Chicklets” tab and then simply choose the feed aggregator services you want from their 24 item menu. You can also head over to Top Rank’s blog and get even more chicklets. Tip: save the code generated by these services in a plain text file for easy access. You can then copy and paste the code to display these badges wherever you’d like on your site. For example, if you are using a WordPress site with widgetized sidebars, then you would go to your Widgets page on your dashboard, select the sidebar you want and then add a text widget. Then, simply paste in the code and save your changes.

Step 6: Now that you’ve added a way for your readers to get updates about your blog, you should add ways for them to bookmark and share your content. Addtoany.com is a great service that lets you grab a selection of bookmarking icons to add to the post template of your blog. Addthis is another site that lets you get one button that contains all the code for your bookmarking services.

Step 7: Once you’ve placed some feed chicklets and bookmarking buttons on your blog, you can get to work on your badges. Log into your account at Facebook. Then, underneath the left sidebar of your Wall, you should see a link that says: “Create a profile badge”. Simple enough. Twitter has a couple of ways to make your badge. If you go to your Twitter page, on the bottom there’s a link that says “Apps”. Go there if you want to have a badge on oyour site that displays all your latest “tweets”. If you want a button that says something like “Follow me on Twitter” then here’s a site that has an easy to use interface for creating your personal Twitter button. Extra Credit Project: since I can be a bit of what’s politely termed, “A Control Freak”, I created my own Twitter button, uploaded it to my images file and then linked to it in the sidebar with a surrounding hypertext link to a Twitter profile.

Step 8: If you want your readers to join a network of other bloggers and blog readers, then you can also insert a service for that. I’ve used MyBlogLog which offers an free trial period and then charges $25 for a “Professional Account” and they are pretty cagey about what the benefits are. Therefore, I recommend Google’s Friend Connect, a free service which is more user (and wallet) friendly. All you need is a Google account.
#Jenn Tip: I was able to fully customize the code in the Friend Connect badge to fit into a narrow sidebar and also switched out the hexcodes for ones that specifically matched a client’s logo colors.

Tip #1: Before you even start to look for help, create a WordPress Support account by going to http://wordpress.org/support/ and clicking on “register” in the top left corner. This gives you a profile on the support forum where you can go and track your threads and replies and other users can learn a little more about you. Another nice feature is the RSS feed for your thread so you can track responses from your Google homepage or Netvibes or what have you.

Tip #2: Now that you have a Support username and login, you can start your search. First, enter your search keywords into the upper left corner where it says: “Search WordPress.org”. This is just to make sure the answer you seek isn’t already in the Codex or Support forums. If your answer doesn’t turn up, then focus your search in the Support Forums by typing your search terms into the search box in the lower right of the page. It’s a good idea to make as thorough a search as possible before posting a new topic. If you don’t, not only will you be gumming up the forum with yet another question that’s been answered before, but the forum users who tend to respond with helpful answers will chide you in their answer for not being more thorough, if they answer you at all.

Tip #3: So, once you’ve gone through the first two steps, now it’s time to try Hot Topics. This is a tag cloud located underneath the search support forum box. Find a tag that’s the closest keyword to your issue and click on it. This takes you to a page that lists all the posts that have been tagged with that keyword. You’ll probably notice that some tags have hundreds of pages of threads to wade through. This is most likely because those who came before you didn’t do a thorough search, but you are a different breed!

Tip #4: OK, here’s the nitty gritty. If you clicked on a Hot Topics keyword, you’ll see that when you go to the page for that topic, the keyword is shown at the top right of the page and next to it is a link that says “Add New”. Click that, or scroll down to the bottom of the page. Eureka! There’s a window where you can add a new topic!
(This is also the reason that the WordPress team doesn’t create a link on the support home page that says something like “post a new topic”. They want you to do your homework first.)

Tip #5: If you need to post a new topic, make sure you make your post title as descriptive as possible. “WP Newbie Help!” won’t cut it, but “URL for RSS feed not working in address bar” might. Make sure you know which version of WordPress you are using. You can find out by going to the link in the upper right corner of your admin page where it says: “Dashboard”. If you have any special configuration for your WP install, such as in a subfolder of your site, make sure you mention that as well. Provide a link to your site so people can see the issue if they need to. Make sure you enter Tags (keywords used to find your topic) and choose a Section as well.

Tip #6: Keep checking back for responses to your post by signing into the forum and going to your Profile. If you manage to solve your issue, then make sure you change the status of your topic to “Resolved” this will “pay it forward” to other WP users. Good luck!

1. Create your note on your Facebook profile. Then, in another window on your browser, find the page you want to link to. Select that page’s url and copy it.

2. Go back to your note and find the text you want to transform into a link. Place your cursor in front of the first letter and type in these characters:

3. Now, after the first set of quote marks, paste in the url you just copied and then put another set of quotation marks followed by a bracket after it like so:

4. Next, go to the last character in the string of text you want to link to and after it type:

NOTE:  I have had a couple of readers tell me that this didn’t work for them.  If you try it and it doesn’t work as a link, please leave a comment below.  Facebook has an annoying way of changing things around so it never hurts to test again once in a while.