My Gadget Life

So last night I finally had time to play around with Flickr - you know, the trendy photo service that lets you “tag” your photos (i.e., personal metadata), and then search by tag to see just your own photos, or everyone else’s too. You can make up any tags you want and assign as many as you want to each photo or group of photos.

The thing that really made me want to try it, was the fact that you can set up an RSS feed for any of your tags. Now that is really cool! So it means that you can provide a feed that contains photos based on a certain subject or word and whenever you add new photos to Flickr with that tag, your readers who have subscribed to your feed will see the new photos.

Here’s my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nic221/

So for example, here are the feeds for:

• my whole Flickr site: RSS feed | view photos
• just the tag “friends”: RSS feed | view photos
• just the tag “glass”: RSS feed | view photos

I don’t have very many photos uploaded yet, but I’ll gradually add them. I can see right now that I’m going to want a paid account…. the free one only let’s you make 3 “sets”, and I want lots of sets. Though of course you could just use the tags as virtual sets, but I like the “sets” feature for grouping photos into albums.

Also, this makes me want to get a “real” digital camera… I only have my Nokia camera phone…. it takes OK photos, but not great or high resolution… it’s very basic. Another gadget I want to buy!

A couple of weeks ago I went to a magnet party. My co-worker, Christine, invited people over to her house to learn ways to make really great magnets with glass, glue, and magnets.

Here’s an example of the type of magnets we made.

I used the “index” print from some recent photos that I sent to an online photo service to be printed. You know, the tiny little samples of each photo? They were just the right size to make some cute, little magnets that were actually photos of my friends. I also used some abstract art cards and little Japanese stickers.

This was so fun… I want to make lots more magnets!