I’ve been playing around with a few ideas lately and one of them involved thinking about all the different tools I use for blogging throughout the day. I work with a number of clients that get started blogging or using WordPress as a CMS solution.

Frequently when talking to them about how to get started I begin talking about some other great tools that I use to organize your thoughts and create your posts and pages for your website. Most of these tools are free, or free with premium versions as well. All of them have been incredibly useful to …read more

One of the things that continually frustrates me is when people decide they want to share the photos from their recent vacation with you. They send an email to everyone in their address book (in the To:) field and attach as many photos as they can in their e-mail program at the standard resolution provided by their digital camera of choice.
Let’s talk about the size difference of these photos.
In the example image above the attached photo would be almost 2.5MB for a single photo. I’m not sure what the limits are in most email programs or what the restrictions are …read more

I’ve been working with a friend lately trying to find an affordable copy of Adobe Photoshop to be used in coordination with a non-profit’s efforts to do some graphic work. In this case the very talented person would be doing some work for both a church and another faith-based organization associated with a large state university. I will admit that if you’re doing serious, professional quality graphic design, you’re probably going to be using Adobe Photoshop. Yet, I’ll also say that you need to be charging professional rates to afford to use and maintain that Photoshop license use. That’s why …read more

I was reminded today of a real annoyance of mine when I’m trying to work with Outlook. Somewhat frequently in my week I receive an e-mail with a graphic or image in it that I need to do some editing. It’s not really any serious editing that needs to be done, just a notation or illustration to help a client or something.
Here’s where the challenge presents itself.
The images are usually embedded in the HTML message and aren’t seen as an attachment. If if right-click on the image I get a nice context menu as shown above in the …read more

There’s a new Microsoft employee in town and he comes to campus by way of the Adobe parking lot.
Former Adobe Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg has been hired at Microsoft and will be spending his time working on a new Microsoft product “SmartFlow“.
Mary Jo Foley reports that SmartFlow is a new graphics program that, with this recent hire, seems to be going after the higher-end photo editing crowd that focuses on what Adobe is doing in graphics.
Graphics and image manipulation is actually one of the largest areas that I’ve consistently not used Microsoft products. You might as well uninstall Paint …read more