If you have a digital camera, or a collection of pictures stored digitally on your computer, you might have considered some ways to store and share those pictures online with your friends and family. For example, if you have a profile on Facebook, you may have taken advantage of their free photo-uploading utilities, and created albums of images to share with your Facebook friends.

Facebook is a great tool, but I think it’s sort of frustrating as a medium for photo sharing, being a student myself. Facebook limits the viewing of photos I have uploaded to myself and other “Facebookians,” which means that my grandmother can’t look at my “wild party pix” from last Friday’s “pong-a-thon.”

Fortunately for myself and others who wish that their pictures could be available to anyone who wanted to see them, while keeping the option of making them private or only available to friends, there is another free, web-based alternative called Flickr. Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, so if you have a Yahoo! Mail account, or use any of Yahoo’s subscription-based services, you already have a Flickr account, you just don’t know it yet. If not, setting up a new account is painless, and takes only a few minutes.

Once your account is set up, you’ll notice that the free account limits the amount of bandwidth you can use up in one month to (x megabytes). That is, once you’ve uploaded (x megabytes) worth of pictures to Flickr, you can’t upload any more for that month. I personally have never hit the bandwidth limit, so unless you take thousands of pictures, you should be fine with the free account. It also helps to make sure your pictures are scaled down to a web resolution, which reduces the size of the images, and also how much of your monthly bandwidth you will use up with each picture. Fortunately, the free Flickr Uploader utility, available on the Flickr website, will help you get your pictures down to a suitable resolution. I do 800×600 pixels, sometimes 1024×768.

By the way, the Flickr Uploader is another tool that gives Flickr an edge over other photo-sharing services. The utility is installed on your computer, and has several options for starting new albums, privacy settings, picture rotation and sizing, comments, etc. Using the tool, you can select which photos go into an album, and upload the pictures to Flickr.

Once your pictures are online, you’ll notice that you can add comments, tags, and notes to your images. Image tagging is pretty sweet, especially if you have a public album. Let’s say, for example, that you really enjoy taking pictures of fountains, and take a good one of the fountain in Palmieri Plaza (in front of Monroe Hall). You give the picture a “fountain” tag, and someone else who enjoys the same thing might do a search for that tag, and discover your picture.

In this respect, Flickr is both a free image hosting/storing site, and a global social networking community. Check it out.

After you’ve set up your account, and you have a list of sites you would like to share, you can start sharing by clicking the “post” button. Enter the URL of the site you’re interested in, add a brief description, and make sure to tag your URL. By giving the URL different tags, like Flickr, your opportunities for sharing increase. For example, let’s say you and some classmates are studying Macroeconomics. By finding a link and tagging it as “Macroeconomics,” and running a search for that tag, you’re bound to find other links — and people — who have posted links with the same tag.

Another nifty feature of Delicious is its RSS capabilities, which means you can view a feed of recently-tagged sites in Google Reader, for example.

It would be really nice if you could get all of your e-reading done in one place. Naturally, like most things on the Internet, it’s possible with Google. Specifically, Google’s free, web-based application called Google Reader, which can take advantage of websites which support the “RSS” standard.

RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication,” is basically a way by which websites can publish their information into “feeds” which are updated automatically, and can be obtained by applications like Google Reader. You, the end-user, subscribe to one of these RSS Feeds using the reader (an “aggregator,” in nerd speak), and the content is delivered to you automatically. If this sounds kind of confusing, that’s because it is!

Another way to think about it is like getting a magazine subscription. The magazines come from all different places, but by telling the publishers that you wish to subscribe, they are delivered to one place — your house. And, naturally, you can choose which magazines you want to subscribe to. Using this analogy, you, the subscriber, become the aggregator. Make sense?

To access Google Reader, you need to have an existing Google or Gmail account, which is free. Once you’re set up, go to www.google.com/reader, and you are ready to add subscriptions.

The question is, how do you know which sites have this RSS Feed support? How will you know if you can subscribe or not? Most major news sites and almost all blogs support RSS, but to be sure, look for a symbol in your address bar that looks like a little orange box with white “airwaves,” as I like to call them. That symbol means you can subscribe to the page’s content. If you’re still not sure, just try and enter the web address of the site you’re wondering about into the Google Reader “add subscription” box. If the information you’re looking for appears, you’re in luck. If not, you broke the Internet.

CHOOSE CAREFULLY. Have fun.

Now, you’ve probably heard of this “blog” thing before, and you might have even read a few of them in your time. Heck, you might already have one yourself, but if you don’t, you can get one for free. For the sheltered children, “blog” is shorthand for “web log,” or an online space where you can write and express your thoughts to others, who leave you comments and feedback on your writing. Think of a blog like a public journal.

There are many resources available online which offer free blogs, but my personal favorite is Wordpress. Wordpress is actually freely available software, and is the engine which powers many of the most popular blogs on the Internet. In fact, Wordpress powers the entire umwblogs.org site. Downloading and installing Wordpress applies to you if you have your own web hosting, but if not, you can sign up for a free, customizable Wordpress blog at www.wordpress.com. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can always sign up for a free blog at the umwblogs.org homepage.

Mash the big honkin’ “SIGN UP NOW” button on the Wordpress.com front page to start your own blog. Unless you have the brain of an iguana, which you don’t, because you’re at UMW, you should be able to set up your own blog by following the step-by-step instructions. Once you are set up, feel free to write and comment! Since so much of what we do revolves around Wordpress, expect more advanced Wordpress tutorials as this site expands, and the server cats continue their mighty quest.

Not that this is a necessarily bad thing, Word and Excel are pretty powerful tools, they certainly beat handwriting. Speaking of which, remember in 3rd grade how they taught us how to write in cursive? And then WE NEVER DID IT AGAIN. But I digress.

In the past, to get a document or spreadsheet to someone, you’d have to attach it in an email. How gauche. Alternatively, you could stick it on a USB drive and give it to a friend, only to find later that the USB drive mysteriously vanished. In both of these cases, the culprit leading to the loss of information is the infamous second step. If you could make your work readily available to others, or collaborators, who can work on it over the Internet, editing such documents might become a little less painful.

And this, dear readers, is where Google swoops in to save the day, with Google Docs & Spreadsheets (GDS). Another free Google service, which requires an existing Google or Gmail account, also free. Once that’s set up, point your web browser (hopefully Firefox) to http://docs.google.com to start. Once you’re set up, you can create your own documents and spreadsheets, which you can then export to MS Word, Excel, PDF, and other formats, for free. Many of the functions of popular Word processors and Spreadsheet editors are available, like formatting, charts, functions, etc. The documents are stored on Google’s servers, so you can access them anywhere you have an Internet connection, which is practically anywhere on campus.

So what? Where GDS really shines is in its collaborative abilities. You’ll notice that there are two tabs at the top of each document editing window. One says “Share,” the other “Publish.” If you click on the “Share” tab, you’ll be directed to a screen where you can invite, via email, people who can come in and edit your documents. Changes are tracked, and you’ll see who the last person to edit the document you’re working on when you login to GDS. One thing to remember — it’s a lot easier for collaborators to edit your document if they already have Gmail or Google Accounts. Just keep that in mind.

In fact, the draft of this blog post was written in GDS for pre-approval by the bossman before I put it into Wordpress. Booya!

You might ask yourself why you would want to go through the trouble of downloading and installing Firefox when you already have a perfectly usable web browser. I’m aware that Internet Explorer 7 and Safari are “totally legit, yo,” but Firefox’s enhanced security and stability, coupled with the availability of amazing add-ons (I like to call them extensions), make it the preferred choice for many users. Firefox is also available for Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista, so no excuses.

Firefox can be downloaded at www.getfirefox.com.

When you download and install Firefox, you’ll notice that it has the same features of your current browser. Customizable search box, pop-up blocker, address bar, refresh, all that jazz. If you have Internet Explorer 7 or Safari, you’ll notice that it also has tabbed browsing, which creates new pages in individual “tabs” at the top of the screen, as opposed to loading each page in a new window. If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, Firefox is worth downloading for the tabbed browsing feature alone.

Where Firefox really shines, however, is the availability of add-ons to enhance your browsing experience. I’m not going to go into the gory details of all of them because there are so many, but they can be used to do things like change Firefox’s look and feel, make the most of shopping, bookmarks, searching, blogging, etc.

The add-on directory can be found here: http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ . The add-ons, like Firefox, are free. w00t.

If you’ve stumbled upon this site either by accident or under advisement from a fellow student or member of the UMW community, allow me to extend my sincerest congratulations to you, because you officially have a technological edge over the other students at this fine educational institution for a couple of reasons:

1: You have demonstrated competence in the navigation and usage of the “Internet Tubes.”
2: You now have access to an incredible resource and repository of 100% free, powerful tech tools for use in enhancing your experience here at UMW.

Ho ho, dear reader.

You’ll notice that we have posts up already with some information about a few tools you can get already, but I recommend bookmarking this site, as we will update it often with both new tools and expanded information about the current ones. If you have a question about a tool, feel free to post a comment, and we’ll do what we can to answer.

Your question might even be featured in a post of its own! ZOMG!

Again, welcome to Mary Washington, from the entire ICHT project team.