New Pictures!

Arguably, one of the greatest benefits of the internet is in the ability to share information. Emails allow us to communicate with one another at a speed that was previously unattainable! A quick word or "hello" only takes a brief moment to send around the globe. For me, a great way to spice up an email is to attach a meaninful picture. As they say, "A picture is worth a thousand words." I may be a respectably fast typist, but attaching a picture to an email is still noticably faster than typing out 1,000 words. Clearly, photos are email time-savers! If your boss wants a progress report on your building project, take a picture of the building and don't say anything else. You wouldn't want to appear verbose, would you? If you've lost your leg from leprosy and your mother emails to ask how it is, just send her a picture of your bandaged stump. That will mean so much more to her than any drivel that you might be able to pen.

Pictures on websites are also wonderful. As a beginner web-designer, I feel that I can probably woo more people with pretty pictures than with fancy words. I read in a book somewhere that it works that way. Besides that, I have always wanted to be able to use my website as a sort of online scrapbook; a place where I am able to post photos that tell stories or offer a glimpse into my psyche (no, I'm not an exhibitionist).  However, sometimes posting photos is easier said than done. It sounds so easy...just post the pictures online, and voila. Well, in theory this is true. If you wanted, you could create one giant page and post every single sodding picture in your library on that page. Needless to say, this would take quite some time to load. Those with a dial-up connection would begin to think that the second coming would take place before the pictures ever loaded. Another "simple" option would be to place each picture on its own individual page. However, creating a separate page for every photo would be painstaking, and I'd probably just give up out of sheer frustration. What to do, oh what to do?

There are several web frameworks (e.g., Gallery2) that would allow me to imbed the photos into my site. I considered these, but found them to be complicated and slow. I even browsed to some of the respective "demo" sites. Unimpressive! When I signed up to facebook in late 2006, I was floored by their image gallery speed. However, photo quality was sketchy and people had to be logged in (and my friend) in order to see the pictures.

I have now begun using PicasaWeb. Alhthough not as popular and featured as Yahoo's Flickr service, PicasaWeb is super fast and offers a GB of free space...and we all know how much I like free stuff! Google also offers a super handy-dandy iPhoto plugin that makes it easy as pie to upload my pics.

There are several ways of accessing my Picasa pics.

First: Click on "My Photos" (in the sidebar)
Second: Go to www.picasaweb.google.com/jonvdveen
Third: Click here...........or here.