More Geek Tools - Online Photo Editor

I've been using Flickr much more since Cooper was born and started blogging regularly. Although I like it very much, the one thing I felt it was missing was the ability to quickly crop and edit the photos in your photo stream. It was a pain to open Photoshop each time just to crop a photo. Not anymore, today, through the PhotoJoJo.com newsletter, I was turned on to Picnik.com online photo editor. This is a very cool online tool because it allows you to grab photos straight from your Flickr photo stream and replace them with edited versions. It's fast, easy and best of all, FREE.

http://www.picnik.com/

New Look

You may have noticed the blog has a new look. It still needs a few tweaks but hopefully you like it. I didn't come up with the design but I did modify it to work with the latest version of Blogger.

I added Google Analytics to the blog about a month ago. It's a very cool way of tracking how many visitors the blog gets. We average 15 - 20 visits per day, which isn't bad. The coolest feature is the Geo Location and Geo Map Overlay. These show you what part of the world your visitors are from. I was surprised to see that we've had some international visitors from Canada, Australia and Argentina! We've had visits from all over the U.S. Most of them I can identify who I know in that state but we've had some visits from Utah, Rhode Island and Missouri that I don't know. So if you're a visitor who we may not know feel free to leave us a comment and let us know who you are and how you found us.

Of course no post is complete without a picture of my boys. Cooper and I felt Chris had been asleep way too long so I had Cooper wake him up. His method was quite effective.

Geek Tools for Parents

I won't deny that I am a computer geek so I thought the least I could do is share some of my geek finds with the other parents out there. These are some of the tools I use/plan to use for the blog and for digital photography/memories. Since I have all the things bookmarked why not start with that...

Del.icio.us	If you've ever had a hard drive fail you know what a pain it is to lose all your bookmarks. Del.icio.us (Delicious) is a social bookmarking site. You can store your favorites and organize them with keyword tags. You can also view other people's bookmarks and share with friends. FREE.
Blogger	It's what powers this blog...duh. FREE.
Google Analytics	This tracks how many people visit your blog. It's pretty cool because you can not only see how many visits but where the visits are from. There is a map of the U.S. and the dots are larger based on how many people visit from that area. FREE.
Flickr	Online photo management and storage. FREE(limited uploads) or $24.95/year (unlimited)
BlogCollector	Backup and Publish your blog. I haven't tried this yet but it looks pretty cool. It will download your blog and convert it to a PDF. You can then use the PDF on an online publishing site to make book out of your blog. Multiple versions FREE/$68/$198
LuLu	Self publishing. Print hard cover and soft cover books, calendars, photo books and more. You can even create a store to sell your books. I haven't actually published anything yet but the online tools seem to work well. This would should work together with BlogCollector. Prices vary depending on the product. Registration is free.
Picaboo	Create picture books. I haven't tried this either but it has lots of templates to create scrapbook style photo books. Software is FREE. Books start at $9.99
Windows Photo Story	Create photo slide shows with transitions and music. FREE
Winkflash	PhotoCard Announcements and photo prints. This was the only place I found that let you do a completely custom design for the PhotoCard. Prices seem reasonable and the quality is pretty good.