The past few years, I have been using a combination of flickr (photo hosting), vimeo (video hosting) and WordPress (self-hosted blog) to share our family’s pictures and videos. I had a pretty good workflow going for a time there. But after waiting forever for flickr to allow more customization, I decided to consolidate everything to SmugMug. You can see the work in progress here at er-fans.smugmug.com.

I had been looking at SmugMug over the past couple years, but always felt that it was too “professional” for what I needed. But after looking at it again and with some ‘arm-twisting’ by Alex, I realized that SmugMug could host both our family photos and videos (with HD) all together on one site. And with a little bit of customization, I could get it to replace most of the functions of our family WordPress blog.

There were some tools that I was able to use to help migrate most of our pictures from flickr, but unfortunately, it didn’t handle transferring video very well. So I am still in the process of uploading all of our videos. And also, since SmugMug is not a blogging platform, I have had to transfer all the post content over to SmugMug manually.

For the photo and video side, everything works really well, considering that’s what SmugMug was designed to do. There are some things that I wish it did better, like how links are shared, but the great thing about SmugMug is that the developers are much more responsive to fixing or improving the website, with an active discussion and support forum.

The main downside of choosing SmugMug to host everything is that since it is not a blogging platform, the customization is not as easy to do and also the publishing tools are pretty limited. But there are some workarounds.

Let me know if you see anything that’s not working right on the smugmug site. I am still not completely sold on not using WordPress on the side, so I for now, I’m holding off on moving our family domain, ER-Fans.net.

Nowadays, we are used to hearing about security holes in software that could compromise our computer systems. Software companies are getting better at pushing updates, to the point where they are becoming more annoying than helpful. But for open source applications and smaller software companies, they tend to rely on “word of mouth” updates.

I came up with an effective solution to stay up to date without constantly being spammed with notifications. The website FileHippo keeps track of software that’s been updated and they also provide an application that will scan your computer, checking to see if you have the latest software versions. I tried that a couple of times but found it to be a hassle having to periodically run another application.

So instead, I realized that FileHippo has an RSS feed for updated applications and by subscribing to that feed, I know when different applications are updated and can apply them as needed. A side benefit is that I also learn about new applications which I may not have tried yet.

In the past year, I’ve noticed that I have become increasingly less aware of what new movies have come out, even the supposedly good ones that win awards. And I think what I am experiencing is a disconnect with mass marketing channels which primarily try to catch our attention through television commercials and now even through pre-showing commercials in movie theaters (I hate those).

This first started after we got our Tivo a few years back and we got in the habit of skipping through commercials. It got to a point where I didn’t even know what the new shows were on the tube, and had to hear about it through friends or via online news feeds. It seems kind of ironic that by taking control of what I am watching, I became disconnected with knowing what was actually available.

In trying to find an image to visualize this post, I came across this diagram from Ogilvy (a big advertising company, go figure, I guess I’m not the only one thinking about this) talking about “Personal Circuits”:

The way that we consume media has changed significantly from the time where we were all glued in front of the television set, to the present where we have all these different “personal circuits” from which to be fed with music, videos, pictures, etc. I guess it shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that I feel out of the mainstream, when the mainstream itself is splintering into multiple channels.

I can see how this disconnect is going to become greater until mass media companies figure out how to breakdown their messages into meaningful channels that people want to watch. Especially now that I am barely even using Tivo, now that most shows can be downloaded. And who wants to go to movie theaters nowadays with all those commercials taking up the first 30 minutes and the hassle of it all. Then again, maybe media really does want to be free and we don’t have to rely on the big media companies to tell us what to watch.

Until this all gets sorted out, or some new way of aggregating, sorting and identifying media that I am personally interested in comes along, I’ll just have to keep my eyes and ears open for those stray pieces that catch my interest.

I can’t even remember when I first started to save and preserve my internet bookmarks from version to version, computer to computer, and even in the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox (I’m sure it didn’t go all the way back to my Netscape browsing days). Well, last week, I finally went through my old bookmarks that have been stagnating in my Firefox browser ignored and unused.

I used to spend a lot of time organizing and maintaining them, but in the last few years, I’ve slowly moved away from using them, having found more effective solutions online. Hence the title of this post, which is in reference to an increasingly popular concept, cloud computing. This is the notion that instead of storing information, in this example bookmarks, locally on my computer, I save them on the web, or “in the clouds”.

Here’s a list of web applications that I use in place of my old bookmarks folders and some descriptions of how I use them:

• del.icio.us: any interesting sites that I want to ‘bookmark’ go into this account, which I also publish as an RSS feed.
• Bloglines: RSS feed reader to keep up with news items published from websites that I follow.
• Google Maps: geographical tagging of locations which I frequent or would like to check out.
• Google Docs: organized notes of topics that I have researched online
• Google Web History: using the Google Toolbar I have an online accessible record of my browsing history which is also searchable in case I want to find a site that I visited before but forgot to record.
• Remember the Milk: task list of things to do, websites to visit, topics to research, etc.
• diigo: in conjunction with a Firefox add-on, I can annotate and highlight web documents.
• Amazon Wishlist: for products that I am interested in or want to keep track of.
• Review sites: keep track of those items which I have tried or would like to try.
  • Yelp: restaurants and stores
  • Flixster: movies
  • Goodreads: books

By definition, these applications are accessible from any computer or device that can go online. But that is also one of their downsides, since for the most part they cannot be accessed offline. That is until offline solutions like Google Gears are more widely implemented.

Another interesting thing that I noticed as I was putting together this post was that these web applications are more than just a repository for what I used to use as ‘bookmarks’. They provide a richer experience and collection of all the things that I do both online AND offline. I guess I should re-word the title, but ‘Stuff in the Clouds’ just didn’t sound right.

I recently finished a Bible reading schedule that we were going through in my men’s group, so now I was looking for something to keep up the discipline of reading the Bible on a daily basis.

Initially, I was looking for some way to create a customized reading schedule that I could receive automatically through an RSS feed, but unfortunately, that doesn’t exist just yet. an idea ahead of its time, possibly.

In the course of my search, I discovered that the International Bible Society, sends out a daily Bible passage called Daily Manna through an RSS feed, which I can get automatically. These are the guys who came up with the famous New International Version and their more contemporary translation, Today’s New International Version. This is great because it also gives me a chance to read through their new translation.

So, until something better or more definite comes along, I will try this out as part of my daily reading plan.