mello-family.com

Stanley April 2006

This is the latest home movie from London of my nephew Stanley, his big sister Lily and the rest of the family. I’ve uploaded this video using VideoEgg.com. I’m very happy about all of the third-party solutions that are supporting TypePad.

Hopefully VideoEgg will come up with a way to set a better thumbnail for posted movies.  Most of mine fade from black.

Stock Photo Industry Blog

I frequently use free-to-use photos to add a little sizzle to my posts.  (See my entries about sites that feature free-to-use photography.)

For those whose interests include both free-to-use photos and stock photography, check out Andy Goetze’s blog about the stock photo industry.

Also, see Yotophoto CEO Mark Thomson's comments which help set the record straight about Yotophoto being the first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images.

Two Useful TypePad Hacks

There were a couple of things I wanted TypePad to do better.   Once was searching and the other was opening external pages in a new window - so that visitors could easily come back to the blog after clicking on a link.

TypePad has a widget for the new browser window feature, but even though it seemed to have code to handle the situation, it opened all links - even ones within the blog - in a new window.  You can imagine how annoying this is.

Skew.org XML Tutorial

Here it is, the skew.org XML Tutorial.  Mike J. Brown's reintroduction to XML with an emphasis on character encoding.  Everything else a developer needs to know about XMl (ok, maybe not everything) can be found on xml.com. 

More Photo Sites

In an earlier post I talked about FreeFoto and Stock.XCHNG, two sites with access to free photos.  A post on cnet brought two others to my attention:  Yotophoto and everystockphoto.  Yotophoto claims to be the "first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images", but those who have been reading this blog know better.  ;)

The Creative Commons web site is another good place to start when looking for works in the pubic domain.

Generations of Fun

South Park characters, road signs, newsprint headlines and Bush speeches are just some of the on-line generators you can link to from this generator blog.  Not only is it hours of fun, but it can come in really useful for web design and marketing ideas. 

A Couple of My Favorite YouTube Posts

If you haven't discovered YouTube yet, you're in for a treat.  My favorite posts are a game six of the 1986 World Series reenacted using the Nintendo RBI Baseball video game (also found on Google Video) and a live reenactment of the opening sequence of The Simpsons.