Keeping up with Photility

I've had a few people ask how to know when I post updates to tools or post new tools.

Someday I hope to have time to add an automatic mechanism to the programs so that they will upgrade themselves when new versions are posted. PictureMedley does this already. For now the rest are manual (you have to visit the web site and look for an update).

But the good news is that you can use RSS to automate that. I have Photility set up with an RSS feed and every time I post an updated version of a tool I write about it on the web site. If you have a subscription to the RSS feed the new post will show up in your reader automatically.

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. Here's a Wikipedia article with some background on RSS.

Depending on the web browser you’re using, you probably have RSS subscription capabilities already. Internet Explorer 7 incorporates RSS subscriptions into its Favorites/History bar. Firefox incorporates RSS subscriptions into its bookmarks toolbar. What’s cool is that the browser will check the site and see if anything is new, and let you know if it finds anything. Think of it like a “live bookmark” or “live favorite”.

To see what you’re working with, try clicking the RSS link in the top bar on photility (pictured above). If you’re running IE you’ll be taken to a page with this header:

If you’re running FireFox you’ll see this:

In either case, below the yellowish header you’ll see summaries of all of the recent posts to Photility.

Clicking subscribe in either case you’ll eventually end up with what appears to be a shortcut to Photility in a convenient place in the browser’s UI. (In IE it’s in the Favorites/History tab, and in FireFox it’s in a bookmarks toolbar). The cool part is when something new happens on one of those websites you’ll get some kind of “new” indicator telling you there’s been something new posted on the web site.

Here’s IE’s favorites tab – click the star (circled) to see this, then the “Feeds” button will show you the feeds you’ve subscribed to. If the entry is bold, there’s new content on that site.

Here’s FireFox’s bar – clicking on the feed name (photility) shows a dropdown menu of pages on the site.

This works with many websites – as you’re browsing watch this toolbar button – if it turns orange you’ll be able to subscribe to the site.

· IE:

· Firefox:

And of course there are many other ways of subscribing – many web portals (MSN, Yahoo, Live, Google) have RSS “aggregator” capabilities so that when you open your browser to its home page you can see what’s new on your favorite web sites. Or you can visit a site like BlogLines to manage them for you from any computer or mobile device. Microsoft Outlook has a nice RSS feed mechanism that makes RSS updates look like email messages so you can just review them while you’re reviewing your email.

A Medley Banner

In a piece of email today, Erica asked whether it was possible to include words in a Medley, perhaps one for a web site banner.

Of course!

I started with Paint, and quickly laid out the text and logo. I saved the banner image, then started Picture Medley.

Checking the pixel dimensions of the Paint image (1025x296) I came up with an aspect ratio of 3.5 to 1. So I used the "Custom Print Size" option to choose a custom size of 5x18 for the overall medley. Looking at the grid overlay I could see the tiles weren't small enough, so I increased to 40 tiles on the longest side and generated a medley using my collection of flower photos. The result was difficult to see because my collection of flower photos is made up of fairly consistent exposures. By using the "Exposures" tweak I was able to increase the contrast of the resultin medley (the Exposures tweak increases the number of images to choose from for each tile by creating higher- and lower- contrast copies of the main tile images). The result is above.

Click on either image to see a higer-resolution version.

Making a MiniAlbum

Here's an animation that shows how to assemble a MiniAlbum.