John Beales

Picasa Updates

According to a blog post by Google they updated Picasa yesterday, (although the Picasa Readme is dated September 15). It looks good and brings a bunch of new features most notably Picasa Web Albums, sort of a Flickr that goes along with Picasa. So, I thought I’d compare them side by side.

I’ll be comparing the free versions of both services since I think that’s what most people will want and I’m too cheap to pay for the advanced versions.

We’ll start with with Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums have a pretty cool AJAX based interface that’s pretty fast loading and easy to use. Also, the web albums integrate seamlessly into Picasa itself. Uploading is easy and fast and you can be shown the web album right away. It’s lots of fun and super easy.

You are limited to 250 MB of storage, (as opposed to Flickr that limits how much you can upload each month), but can upgrade to 6.25 GB for US$25/year.

There are several drawbacks however. The Picasa software itself is available for Windows only and you must use the Picasa software to create a web album. Also, you can only have a Picasa Web Album if you are invited so this isn’t truly open to the public yet.

Using the Picasa software you can geotag images using Google Earth and it’s pretty cool but the geotags don’t carry through to the web album. And finally, part of your URL for your Picasa Web Album is your Google username, which is also the first part of your Gmail address. This, in my opinion, is an invitation for spam.

Now for Flickr

The most basic difference between Picasa Web Albums and Flickr is that the Picasa system is built around the software whereas Flickr is built around the website and community.

Flickr offers its users unlimited storage but you can only upload 20 MB of photos each month. Also only 200 of your photos will show on your page, (although the photos will still be in the Flickr system somewhere). If you choose to upgrade to Flickr’s Pro account for US$24.95/year you get a 2 GB of upload bandwidth per year and your photos appear on your page forever.

Uploading your images to Flickr is perhaps slightly more challenging than uploading from Picasa but Flickr offers a piece of software called Uploadr to help you on your way. Uploadr offers resizing and drag & drop uploading and it tells you how much of your upload limit you have used. Flickr Uploadr is also available from Flickr itself for both Windos and OS X, and a version is available from a Flickr community member that runs on Linux.

Finally Flickr offers tagging and really easy geotagging, (using Yahoo! Maps and the tags & geotags are available for the world to see, (if you let them).

To wrap up while Picasa is great to organize photos on your own Windows PC if you really want to share your photos and be part of a photo sharing community Flickr is the way to go. That’s why you see photos embedded here from Flickr.

Font Size Reference

I usually designate a font size in my CSS on either the html or body tag using a percentage then size the rest of my document using ems. The reason I use a percentage value instead of just specifying the base font size in pixels is so that users can change their font size in their browsers if they choose.

Since most, if not all, web browsers use 16px as their base font size I can set my base font size using this formula:

percentage = 100(base font size/16)

Just insert your desired base font size in pixels into the formula and you will have the correct percentage to use in your CSS.

And now a handy cheat sheet if you don’t want to do the math:

Pixels to Percentage
Pixels	Percentage
8	50
9	56.25
10	62.5
11	68.75
12	75
13	81.25
14	87.5
15	93.75
16	100
17	106.25
18	112.5

A quick disclaimer: there may be a browser out there that doesn’t use 16px as its base font size that I don’t know about. Also, this works only if you haven’t already changed your font size somewhere else.

8:06 AM

8:06 AM

Originally uploaded by John Beales.

Well, this is taken from my living room, just after eight this morning. That is a jackhammer on the end of it. I thank that’s about all that needs to be said. Oh – my roomate said the water got shut off around 10, but I was out of the house then and it was back on by the time I got home.

Improved Wireless

"New" Router

Originally uploaded by John Beales.

My “new” wireless router finally arrived, (purchased on ebay), yesterday and I have it up and running with dd-wrt firmware. It seems pretty good so far, I can now use my wireless connection in my living room on the other side of the house, almost 50 feed and several solid walls away.

The next upgrade will have to be some antennas for full speed ahead and hopefully huge range.

Recognition for the Little Guy

In the past year or so as I started to think about working as a web designer, and then actually started working as a web designer, I have taken a keen interest in improving my knowledge and skill. In doing so I have found some websites that while they are quite well known are run by small groups of people or individuals more as a labour of love than anything else.

In the past week I have come across two specific instances where these sites were recognized and recommended not by some individual web designer like me but by multi-million dollar corporations. These two examples are QuirksMode, (recommended in the Google Maps API Documentation), and Position Is Everything is quoted in the IE Blog post on CSS changes in IE 7.

I was happily surprised when I came across these two links. It’s nice to see folks getting credit where credit is due, especially when it’s coming from huge corporations some of whom usually pay very little attention to the little guy.