Last year, the kids and I made a framed handprint collage-like present for Julie and Mothers Day (right). This year I followed it up with a folksy photo of each of the kids holding up hand-drawn letters spelling out “LOVE.” This was inspired by this 2009 post on a blog called The Inadvertent Farmer.

The first step was getting pictures of each kid with a letter. It wasn’t too bad as I just had to take enough to get each one looking cute.

A trickier task was finding a frame to display four pictures. It took the third store before I lucked out. Because of the timing, I had actually printed the pictures before I had the frame and so had fingers crossed that the size would work.

Once made, the absolute hardest was getting a group shot of the kids with Julie holding it!

The glue services you don’t see:

• Google Reader. I still try to keep up with about a hundred blogs, mostly spiritual in nature. The old tried-and-true Google Reader still organizes it all, though I often read it through the Android app NewsRob.
• Diigo. This took the place of the classic social bookmarking site Delicious when it had a near-death experience a few years ago (it’s never come back in a form that would make me reconsider it). Whenever I see something interesting I want to share, I post it here, where it gets cross-posted to my Twitter and Tumblr sites. I’ve bookmarked over 4500 sites over the last seven-plus years. It’s an essential archive that I use for remembering sites I’ve liked in the past. Diigo bookmarks that are tagged “Quaker” get sucked into an alternate route where they become editor features for QuakerQuaker.org.
• Pocket (formerly Read it Later). I’m in the enviable position that many of my personal interests overlap with my professional work. While working, I’ll often find some interesting Quaker article that I want to read later. Hence Pocket, a service that will instantly bookmark the site and make it available for later reading.
• Flipboard is a great mobile app that lets you read articles on topics you like. Combine it with Twitter lists and you have a personalized reading list. I use this every day, mostly for blogs and news sites I like to read but don’t consider so essential that I need to catch everything they publish.
• Ifttt.com. A handy service named after the logical construct “IF This, Then That,” Ifttt will take one social feed and cross-post it to another under various conditions. For example, I have Diigo posts cross-post to Twitter and Flickr posts crosspost to Facebook. Some of the Ifttt “recipies” are behind the scenes, like the one that takes every post on WordPress and adds it to my private Evernote account for archival purposes.

The Public-Facing Me:

• WordPress (Quakerranter.org). The blog you’re reading. It originally started as a Moveable Type-powered blog when that was the hip blogging platform (I’m old). A few years ago I went through a painstaking process to bring it over to WordPress in such a way that its Disqus-powered comments would be preserved.
• Twitter. I’ve long loved Twitter, though like many techies I’m worried about the direction it’s headed. They’ve recently locked most of the services that read Twitter feeds and reprocess it. If this weren’t happening, I’d use it as a default channel for just about everything. In the meantime, only about half of my tweets are direct from the service–the remainder are auto-imports from Diigo, Instagram, etc.
• Tumblr (QuackQuack.org). I like Tumblr although my site there (quackquack.org) gets very few direct visits. I mostly use it as a “links blog” of interesting things I find in my internet wanderings. Most items come in via Diigo, though if I have time I’ll supplement things with my own thoughts or pictures. Most people probably see this via the sidebar of the QuakerRanter site.
• Facebook. It may seem I post a lot on Facebook, but 95 percent of what goes up there is imported from some other service. But, because more people are on Facebook than anywhere else, it’s the place I get the most comments. I generally use it to reply to comments and see what friends are up to. I don’t like Facebook per se because of its paternalist controls on what can be seen and its recent moves to force content providers to pay for visibility for their own fan pages.
• Flickr. Once the darling of photo sites, Flickr’s been the heartbreak of the hipster set more times than I can remember. It has a terrible mobile app and always lags behind every other service but I have over 4000 pictures going back to 2005. This is my photo archive (much more so than the failing disk drives on a succession of laptops).

Honorable Mentions

Embedded Link

Pick&Zip
Backup your Facebook photos and your friends’ in a single zip or pdf file.

Google+: View post on Google+

Photo: Sleeping Francis “helps Martin in lawn work getting ready for Saturday’s birthday party Enlarged photo. Sleeping Theo was helping from the living room couch.

Photo: Vegan food & messy boy at Maggie’s Mercantile off exit 91 of the Penna Turnpike, an hour or so east of Pittsburgh. Enlarged photo.

Photo: A new publication of the Neo Post Convergent Diaper Set. An irony I have to point out is that I’ve agreed to have the boys raised Catholic, the faith to which Julie returned after eleven years with Friends. Can I help it if the kids look so dern photogenic in front of Quaker meetinghouses? Enlarged photo.

Integrating the Flickr photo sharing service
with your blog is a wonderful way to easily add photos to your site.
With a little extra effort you can get Flickr to work for you.

Flickr in your blog

When you want to embed a Flickr-hosted photograph into one of your
blog entries, first start by going to the photo’s page in Flickr. Click
on the “All Sizes” button on top (with the magnifying glass icon), and
then pick the size you want for your blog post–small and medium work
well for blog entries.

Underneath the resized picture is a box with Flickr’s coding (you have
to be looking at your own account and be logged in to see this). Simply
cut and paste this into your blog entry and the picture will appear
there. If you want your text to wrap around the picture you’ll want to
add a little coding to what Flickr gives you. Somewhere inside the
“img” text you need to add wrapping instructions. An easy place is
between the text that reads:

height=“180” alt=“whatever it says”

…now reads:

height=“180” align=“left” alt=“whatever it says”

Change left to right to have your photo align that way.

Your blog in Flickr

Many users don’t realize that people sometimes find your Flickr
photos and not your blog. Google indexes Flickr nicely and Flickr’s own
search is popular. In the description of your photos you should add a
link back to your own blog. If you have a blog entry concerning that
actual picture, link directly back to that entry.

You’ll have to hand-write the HTML link for this (sorry, Flickr doesn’t have a link button). It should look something like this:

Description of the photo. For more read, <a href=“http://www.site.com/blogentry”>What I know about Flickr</a>.

Here’s a screen shot of the editing screen for this Flickr entry:

Results

That post about my trip to a legendary South Jersey locale is one of
the most visited pages on my personal blog. A good bit of it comes from
the links in Flickr!

Remember to put a lot of desired keywords into your Flickr title and
all link text. Keywords are those phrases that you think people might
be searching for.