Screen Capture Methods

There are some good screen capture tools out there, but being the cheap person that I am, I'm looking for something free that will cut down on time.

I usually don't bother adding pictures to my posts because it involves doing a print-screen, pasting it into Photoshop, cutting out the part I want, saving it to my hard drive, uploading it to Flickr, then posting to the blog.

What I want to be able to do is: select the portion I want (from the capture tool), post it directly to Blogger. I have found a free program to select any part of the screen and it copies it to the clipboard.

Unfortunaltely Blogger doesn't allow pasting into the post editor, so I have to save the image somewhere and use the link to post. I don't think there's a way around this, but please correct me if I'm wrong! I'd love to know a way.

Blogged

Blogged is a reader-focused directory of 200,000 blogs, all manually added and reviewed for quality by the editors (read about page). It looks like a quality site which will allow me to discover many new blogs.

I like how each blog has a homepage (see mine), and how easy it is to review and rate blogs. There's also a widget (!) which I'm adding to my sidebar. If you've got a second give me a 10!!! Actually I'll take the honest 6.6 based on editor's review, because it's obvious my blog needs to improve.

I also need to verify ownership by inserting the following code/button

ShareThis

I noticed ShareThis on several sites including Technorati and decided to add it - glad to report it was a snap. I registered as a publisher, chose Blogger, and it took care of the rest.

At first it looked like it was adding a widget to my sidebar, but the ShareThis icon does appear at the end of each post. The code itself was actually added to the sidebar - how crafty! I just went back and deleted the title and nothing appears in the sidebar.

ShareThis only offers 14 social networking sites as a default, but it includes the most popular ones which is fine with me.

I give it top points for ease of installation, and for how it fits in nicely without taking up much space.

Page Rank: -1

I'd say having a PR of -1 is worse than terrible! This blog is running in the negative numbers, meaning that instead of adding to the web's collective wisdom, it's actually taking away. [I just realized -1 actually means 1. Still slightly confused.]

Website: http://e-kettle.blogspot.com/
Page Rank: -1 / 10
Alexa Ranking: 0
Indexed Pages: 0
Back Links: 0
(from http://www.whatsmypagerank.com/)

Thanks to web guru 100cute, all this may change. On her blogcatalog group, Web Guru Exchange Market, she introduces us to a powerful tool:

I am going to introduce a Genie for Social Bookmarking and a gold mine for PR3 to PR9 one way links to your web site, It can bring massive traffic and high link popularity to your web site.

Yes it is - www.Tagenie.com

Tagenie, here I come. Bring on the -9.

Widgets and things

Blogcatalog is fun and is allowing me to discover some interesting blogs I'd otherwise never come across. I'm going a bit crazy adding friends, but I do check out their blog(s) first to see if it's something I will enjoy following. Most people will reciprocate by visiting mine as well, which is a nice win-win proposition.

I'm considering adding coComment, which is a social tool to track and follow comments with others who are registered. There's also a neat widget to add which shows comments I've made on other people's blogs.

Speaking of comments, one thing that slightly ticks me off is when I write a comment to a WordPress blog, and it gets rejected because comments are only open to WordPress members. Sigh.

A really cool social site for those into genealogy - geni.com - makes it easy to build your family tree, add family members, build profiles, even birthday reminders. I like how intuitive it was to use, and how each member gets invited to add on to the tree.

Electric Kettle

Well it seems that Blogger is not able to import posts from other services. May have to do a bit of research on that just to be sure, but seems I'm starting from scratch yet again - thankfully this is no big loss to the Blogosphere.

I do like how easy it is to add widgets. I can see myself going a bit crazy on the widget thing. The first one I've added is from blogcatalog but more to come in the immediate future.

By the way, I'm not sure why I'm writing all these details about setting up this blog, other than out of sheer joy because it entertains me. Obviously I'm easily entertained.

Interesting to see how AdSense has picked up on the kettle thing, as the ads in the sidebar are for electric kettles, kettle corn equipment, and "need more blog traffic?" - funny - yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Maybe I should also dedicate the entire theme of this blog to tea kettles, electric kettles, and kettle corn equipment, which could also be entertaining as well as lucrative. A thought to ponder.