Flickr vs. Picasa

I've been using both Flickr and Picasa for some time now and I've finally decided on which one I'm going to use from now on. My decision was based on what you get for a subscription fee around $20-25, but I'm also going to talk about the free memberships and the uploading applications in this post.


So let's start off with Picasa. I've been using Picasa for quite some time since this is a Blogger blog (all images uploaded on my blog are linked to my Picasa Gallery, or actually it's the other way around). It works great for my blog but that's where the lines goes. Picasa still feels a bit like a beta, it has potential but it's just a little too buggy and the features are lacking compared to Flickr's. Here's a list of what I find negative about Picasa.

• Organizing photos. You can choose to organize your photos by date, filename or manually. However, ordering by date (which probably is the best way to organize photos) doesn't really work at all. The first pictures I ever uploaded in one of the albums are in the middle of everything, when they should be either first or last depending on how I order them (ascending or descending). Oh, and it's not even possible to choose if you want to have them in an ascending or descending order.
  
  
• Tagging pictures. Tagging is a pain on Picasa, you can't tag a batch of photos, you have to tag them one by one. So tagging is really time consuming, and it's really boring.
  
  
• No sub-albums. You can't create sub-albums on Picasa, which means you have to use tags to organize your photos. And looking back at the previous point, tagging is nothing you want to do on Picasa.
  
  
• Browsing albums. Loading albums with many pictures can be slow since it has to load a lot of thumbnails.
  

But Picasa of course has it's benefits. The slideshow feature is really neat, even the embed slideshow works really well and is probably a feature I'll use on my blog in the future. The uploading software (for Mac) is good, you still can't tag a batch of photos at the same time with it though. I also find Picasa to be a bit faster when it comes to uploading, Flickr is sometimes slow when processing the photos. Another positive thing about Picasa is that you don't have to pay anything to be able to use all the features, on the other hand you only have 1024 MB free storage (upgradeable to 10 GB for $20/year).

So how about Flickr? Well, I haven't really found a lot of downsides on Flickr, as a Pro member. Everything works fine, I only got an error message once when I tried to organize my photos, but refreshing the page fixed it. The real downside however is the free membership. The free membership is so limited that it doesn't make any sense to use Flickr at all, for me at least. You can only upload 100 MB per month and others can't access the original files unless you're a Pro member. So if you're not willing to pay, you're probably better off on a free service like Photobucket. A positive thing about Flickr is that everyone's there, just like on YouTube. If you want people to see your photos, Flickr is the way to go, it's where the community is. On Flickr I can also easily set permissions on my uploads, that way I can upload my family photos and only show them to my family and/or friends.

Now I've finally decided on which one I'll be using from now on. Flickr is the winner and the most important reasons are listed below.

• The community is at Flickr.
• For $25 you get unlimited space and all features you need, while you get 10 GB storage on Picasa for $20 and not all the features you might need.
• No sub-albums on Picasa, I want to be able to actually organize my photos.

So what do you think about Flickr and Picasa? Which is better? Where do you upload your photos? I'm interested in knowing so leave a comment!

Visit my Flickr page

Image Hosting & Updates

I haven't posted in a while, I haven't had anything interesting to write about lately. I do have some interesting subjects I'm going to write about sooner or later, I also have some unpublished content that I'm not completely satisfied with, but I might publish it sometime. I want to encourage everyone to use a feed reader, since you don't have to visit my site all the time to see if I've updated or not using that. It saves you a lot of time!

Lately I've been trying out some new image hosting websites. I've been using Photobucket and ImageShack for quite some time, but I'm not really satisfied with them because of their limitations on file sizes and/or image resolutions. So I've been trying out Flickr and Picasa, which also have their limitations on certain things. Flickr is a good image host, but what I don't like about it is that you can't have more than 3 sets unless you pay a yearly fee of ~$25, you also need to pay that if you want to upload and share bigger photos. So Flickr is not good enough for me, which is why I've also tried Google's Picasa. I like Picasa, I can have just as many albums as I want and I can upload files as big as 20 Mb. However, Picasa also has it's downsides, for example linking to photos and tagging photos is a real pain. To link to a photo you can choose between using a direct link or a HTML link, but what I miss is a BBCode link for forums. Tagging photos is really time consuming since you have to tag your photos one by one, I at least haven't found a way to tag more than one photo at once. I also just have 1 GB free storage on Picasa while I have 6.54 GB on Gmail, which is kind of strange, it should be the other way around. However, I think I'll continue to use Picasa for a while, I'm a fan of Google so I guess I'll learn to love it, just like I did with everything else.


Yesterday I got an email from a man called Andrew (also known as Cruxay) about a link exchange. This led to a new partnership which I'm looking forward to continue working on in the future. Feel free to take a look around on his new blog about Japan in general, it's new but if you're interested in dramas, the otaku culture and reading about various places in Japan you should definitely pay a visit.

If you're interested in exchanging links or if you have anything else on your mind, feel free to contact me.

Feed aggregators

As I've mentioned before, I started using Google Reader a couple of days ago. I haven't really been a fan of aggregators or using feeds at all until I started using Google Reader. This tool really keeps everything organized and simple. I love how you can see all items in a list view, and sharing items like I'm doing in the far right sidebar is very nice. The problem is that having everything so well organized like this saves me time, time that I currently don't know what to do with. Of course this is just because I'm new to it, I'll find something to do with the spare time, hopefully. Google Reader also provides stats (or trends as they call it) like how many feeds you've subscribed to, how many items you've read from specific feeds, which feeds that are most frequently updated, top lists etc.



Google Reader can be found here. If you're interested you might want to pay a visit to the official Google Reader blog too. Besides Google Reader I also use these tools from Google:

• Google mail (Gmail)
• Google Analytics
• Blogger
• iGoogle
• Google AdSense

So yeah, I'm a big fan of Google's tools, but the point of this post is to tell people who still don't use an aggregator to try it out. I mean, before I started using Google Reader I had to visit every site over and over again to see if they've updated, doing that takes a long time. I'm currently subscribed to 33 feeds which means 33 websites to visit and probably just 3 or 4 of them updated since my last visit. Visiting 33 websites to find out that just 4 of them updated is a pain.

So are you using a feed aggregator already, if so, which one are you using? If not, are you going to start using one now? I'm interested in knowing, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Feed ya later!

5 easy steps to fix the Blogger line spacing bug

Now this bug might just concern those who are using the Minima template on their Blogger blog, like me (though mine is, as you can see, heavily modified). The bug appears when you insert a quote, a list or a picture in a post and makes the normal spacing of all following text really narrow.

It's very easy to fix, it didn't even take me a minute. You'll find the fix at the Med Journal Watch.

Happy blogging!

Social bookmarking icons for Blogger

You probably know by now that I have a couple of icons below all my posts. Those are called social bookmarking icons and allows anyone to bookmark my posts on their preferred bookmarking site. There are probably hundreds of sites like this out there but I've only added a couple of them, cause I don't want ruin the layout. However, to set this up I had too search for help since I've never done it before. And I found that a lot of sites had outdated instructions, so in this post I'll show you how to do it in the new version of Blogger.

Step 1
The first thing you need to do is to decide which icons to put on your site. Then of
course you have to find those icons, and a way to do that is by searching for images on Google (search for small images). Or if you're just going to use the same as me, you can save them and upload them to your own image hosting.

Step 2
Go to the layout settings, if you don't know where that is, click here and then click on "Layout". Then head over to "Edit HTML" and check the "Expand Widget Templates" box.

Find the line:

<p class="post-footer-line post-footer-line-3"></p>

(use ctrl+f or cmd+f on the Mac to search)

Below that line is where you put the code for the icons which I of course included here:

<a Title='Submit To StumbleUpon' expr:href='"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url="+ data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='StumbleUpon' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit To Digg' expr:href='"http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='Digg' border='1' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit To Del.icio.us' expr:href='"http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='Del.icio.us' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to Technorati' href='http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://www.sanokame.com'><img alt='Add to Technorati Favorites' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>


<a Title='Submit To reddit' expr:href='"http://reddit.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url' target='_blank'><img alt='Reddit' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit To Google' expr:href='" http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk="+ data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='Google Bookmarks' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to SlashDot' expr:href='"http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='SlashDot' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to Blinklist' expr:href='"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Url=" + data:post.url + "&Title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='Blinklist' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to Furl' expr:href='"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=" + data:post.title + "&u=" + data:post.url' target='_blank'><img alt='Furl' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to Spurl' expr:href='"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='Spurl' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to Yahoo!' expr:href='"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?t=" + data:post.title + "&u=" + data:post.url' target='_blank'><img alt='Yahoo' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

<a Title='Submit to Simpy' expr:href='"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank'><img alt='Simpy' src='INSERT ICON URL HERE'/></a>

Replace all & with &am p; (without the space)

Edit the Technorati URL and the URLs for the icons to your own, and you're done!

This might be helpful too: 30 Social Bookmarks 'Add to' footer links for blogs

If you need help to add another icon besides the ones I use, just post a comment.

Google Analytics

So while updating a bunch of things on my blog I found a great tool for tracking your blog's stats. Google Analytics is the solution and here's a guide for you to get started:

Quoted from Infektia.net:

How to set it up

• Go to Google Analytics to sign up or log in.
• When logged in, choose to create a new account and follow the steps. When you get to “Add Tracking“, open up a new window and log in to your Blogger account.
• Go to your blog’s settings and choose “Template” and then “Page Elements“
• Have a look at the footer (it has to be the footer!) of the design and choose to “Add a Page Element“.
• Find the “HTML/JavaScript” element and then “Add to blog“.
• Don’t write anything in the title column. Copy and paste the code from Google Analytics in the content box and “Save changes”.
• Then continue the steps on Google Analytics and you’re done!

They should've included this in the Blogger settings, maybe they will in the future!

For H!O users, you can probably track your H!O blog with this tool too.

Later!

Google is great!

Google... To me Google is like the King of the web, pretty much like Microsoft, only difference is that it's a lot better! (I'm not saying that Microsoft totally sucks though). The best part about Google, except for the great search engine is the way to handle accounts. I have the same account for my email (Gmail), blog (Blogger) and YouTube. It's just great, and now I just want Google to buy Last.fm and a good image hosting site like Photobucket. If they do that they'll be unbeatable!

Other than that I don't have much to say. I added pages to the sidebar today, about and a wish list. I'm also planning on adding a page for my graphics (wallpapers, avatars etc).

Later!