VanJohnson.com

Well, I haven’t been back to work a full month yet but its already feeling like I never really left. Life is back to its crazy pace and I am back to feeling like I have no time anymore. I am trying to make sure I always take some time to reflex and keep things in perspective but besides that life is pretty normal again. It’s hard not to feel like I owe so many people so much where I just don’t know where to start. From work to family and friends, there have been so many people who have done so much for myself and my family.

OK, let’s not get started on that again. My sister has decided to hang out here for awhile and has gotten a job with Bek. It’s really nice having here around and she seems to enjoy being here which is nice. Since I was feeling better, I decided to go through some picture that I hadn’t gotten up on the website yet. I usually go through a process to up load pictures where I resize them all, optimize them for the web, run a small program to make the thumb nail and a few other steps. Well, I had been hearing so much about flickr.com accounts that I decided to give the free service a try and I must say it is working out pretty nicely. It seems very simple to use and I would probably recommend to any of you who would like to share pictures online. You don’t have to have a webpage, you can protect pictures if you don’t want them viewed by the world and a few other cool features. I would think even a pretty novice user would be able to use this. And the real reason I signed up was to get the cool flash badge you see to the right (assuming this article is still on the homepage). Most of the pictures are from before all the health events in my life, some are during and there are a few after (mostly the Disney ones). Hope everyone enjoys them.

While I’m on the topic on free online services, another one I have really gotten addicted to has been del.icio.us. This is a online/social bookmarking site. Being someone who works on many computers in a single day, it’s always been somewhat of a challenge to try and keep my bookmarks in sync. Switching to Firefox helped out to some degree because it offered a plug-in extensions that would sync bookmarks to a central server. (Quick side note, if you haven’t started using Firefox you really should look into it. It does everything Internet Explorer does and much, much more. And it if free. I won’t get too much on this soap box for this posting but will probably re-visit it later But even the Bookmark sync wasn’t a perfect solution. It had to talk to a central server, assuming you had one at your disposal, and sometime it just didn’t work that will.

At first I was a little leery about storing my bookmarks online. My first concerned was, what if I needed my bookmarks and couldn’t get online to get them. That was one of those slap on the forehead moments when I realized that if I couldn’t get online, the chances are I didn’t really need my bookmarks either because I had no internet connection to use them. Now if for some reason you do know of a reason why you might need your bookmarks offline,del.icio.us does offer the ability to export your bookmarks which you can then either keep as a standard HTML file or import them into another browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. And again, Firefox even has an extension which will go out to your del.icio.us account and sync up your local bookmarks with those stored on your del.icio.us account.

My other concern was the fact that the world can see your bookmarks. This freak me out for the longest time and was the biggest reason I was shying away from using the service. The more I thought about it, the more I was unsure why this concerned me. Bookmarks aren’t exactly secret documents, matter of fact more times than not they link to very public websites. So what did I care if someone was interested in what I considered “Bookmarkable”. As a matter of fact, you are more than welcome to check out my bookmarks on your own, just go to http://del.icio.us/Shocm. As you’ll see, most of them are pretty geek related but there are some other good ones in there. Now there are still those administrative links that I don’t bother to put on del.icio.us and just use the traditional bookmarks for. For the most part however, del.icio.us is the way to go for all my general bookmarking needs and now, as long as I am connected to the internet I will always have my bookmarks. I have found myself using this service everyday.