Friday, May 21, 2010

Five free tools to better build your blog

BannerSnack
BannerSnack is probably the most user-friendly free banner creation tool on the Web today. The tool lets users create Flash banners (or banner ads) without the use of ActionScript or Adobe Flash. Animate your very own banner using text, images and a number of filters and transition effect. Simply create a slide, decide the duration of the slide and begin designing your banner. Below is a banner I created for the Ben Franklin Project.

Resizr
When I bought my iPad, I ultimately was excited to use the mobile device while i travel. In fact, once I can get my hands on the SD card adapter, I'll probably start using the iPad to get my photos back to the newsroom on a more time efficient basis. However, say I need to resize one of those photos so that by the time it reaches the newsroom, it's ready for Web.

Resizr, a free online photo resizing tool, allows users to upload a photo, set the constrains and download the photo in its new size.

Picasa (or Flickr)
Picasa can work like a color or photo server. Just upload photo albums to your Picasa account and then add them to your site using by either "copying the image location/address" or drag to your desktop and upload the image manually.


Embedr
Posting one or two videos to a story will usually do the page design justice. But if the page will ultimately host a multimedia story (videos, photos, timelines and maps), then a video player that can play multiple videos from one widget will work best. Embedr allows users to play over four videos from one Embedr player while providing an attractive way for users to choose which video they want to watch. To add a video, go through the back end and use an embed code to stream the video through the player.


TimeToast
Timetoast allows users to create Flash timelines without the use of ActionScript. Add "events" to your timeline to specify when specific events occurred. The tool does allow html coding to be added to posts so users can add "read further" links to their events which link back to a website. This tool is incredible on a visual basis. Unlike Dipity timelines, where events are always visible which causing the timeline to appear cluttered or messy, Timetoast marks events with black dots and users must place their most over the black dot in order to see the event's description.

6 comments:

  1. Cool stuff!

    And without your permission, let me add to your roster by sharing what free tools I've incorporated into my blog, most of which I'm assuming are known:

    * Statcounter.com: Analytics for your blog.

    * Tweetmeme.com: Adds a widget to show how many times your post has been tweeted.

    * Addthis.com: An easy button to help people share your post in every known network.

    * Formspring.com: A mini-social network that allows your readers to ask you anything. The widget can be incorporated into the blog.

    * Facebook: Make yourself into a page and get some feedback and fans!

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  2. Thank you for recommending BannerSnack, we appreciate it :)

    wish you a great week

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  3. Andy, thanks for the helpful post. I tried to use embedr with videos from The Macomb Daily website (a JRC newspaper like yours), but it said the embed code and links would not work. Will it work with our content management system?
    Thanks again.

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  4. Ivan,

    Thanks for the additional tools!! If you ever one to contribute to my blog just let me know!

    John H., I had that problem when I tried to add a Vimeo to Embedr but it worked when I used YouTube. What are you using?

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  5. Picasa has a nice feature to resize photos, too. When exporting you can resize to 480 pixels, which make them perfect for display on our sites (usually sized to 6 inches, or 432 pixels).

    Non-BFP, it's handy when you're out of the office and need to download images from MyCapture to get up on the website (you know, when someone forgets to do it the night before).

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  6. Thanks for the help. And @Andrew, I will try to use YouTube for the embedr.

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