A Friday Hodgepodge

The Intense Photography Challenge group at Gather.com finally has the February challenge up - unusual angles. I started playing with that today. I took some very odd shots down on the Cliff Walk, but only one made the final cut - a long shot down a stone wall in the SuperMacro setting and manually focused as close in as possible so that the DOF is dead flat. And when I got home I set the camera up to take shots down the neck of my mountain dulcimer while I played. One of those shots made the grade, too. And here they are:

Blog Facelift

I've been playing with things lately. I've been adding gadgets in the sidebar slowly but surely, but the best gadget I found wasn't from Google. While wandering around looking at everybody's Theme Thursday entries I noticed Coffee Messiah had an embedded music file that didn't start playing as soon as I opened the page, but instead relied on me to click it at my discretion. Now, I've wanted to put music on my blog for some time now, preferably as a playlist, but up to yesterday the only gadgets/widgets I was able to find were proprietary, hooked to a music service whose stable of musicians is all you have to choose from and whose music starts playing as soon as the page is opened (which slows down the page loading process). So this was a novel discovery.

On the player on Coffee Messiah's blog was a hotlink which led to a service called divShare, which offers online storage and media sharing. A basic membership is free, and for the free account you get 5GB of storage and 10GB per month of download capacity. Well, for what I plan to do with it, I won't come anywhere near those limits. So now I have a divShare player in my sidebar with a playlist of some of my favorite music in it. The current playlist is my "relaxing" music. I'll be making other playlists (I'm putting together a "funky music" one now), and I'll rotate them on the blog. Please - click and enjoy!

And that's my Friday hodgepodge.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger