Instagram lets you post your photos directly to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Flickr. But what if you want to post quickly and directly to Blogger from your mobile device?
Here's what you have to do.
1. On your Blogger profile. Hit "Settings" and set up an email address under "Posting using email." You'll need at least a four-character secret word. It would be something like "LOGINNAME.SecretWord@blogger.com." 2. In Instagram, Pick up the photo you want. Hit the "..." icon at the bottom right of the image. 3. Instead of hitting 'Share post," hit "Email photo." Send it to your Blogger email and hit send.
Your subject line will be your title. You can add more text if you want. But the photo will appear like this:
* If using a desktop, you can visit http://statigr.am search for the image you want (not just yours),
Pin them to pinterest, and grab the Embed code for your image and post it in Blogger, so it
displays much bigger. Here's how.
Picasa is Google's photo sharing service. If you have a Google account, you have this already.
The idea, again, is to take photos with your phone and have a map automatically created from them.
1. Take photo.
2. Share to Picasa (native on Android; or via email on iPhone or through apps) in an album of your choice. Don't forget to have geolocation turned on.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 as needed.
4. Visit https://picasaweb.google.com. Login with your Google account. Your photos should be in an album. Click on your album. Noticed all your photos are already mapped. Similar to Flickr, you can view it in a map, or as a slideshow. But what if you want to embed the map?
4.Click "View in Google Earth." Don't worry if you don't have the program. Click "save File" instead and make sure the file has the extension KML (example: "freeman.kml")
5. Visit http://maps.google.com and hit "My Places" and "Create map."
6. Hit "Import" and upload your kml file. BOOM!
7. Hit "done" and the link icon to get your embed in however shape you want it.
8. Paste in your site and do a silly dance, because you're done.
----- Troubleshooting: Every now and then you'll get a "this map cannot be embedded."
HAHAHA. Funny Google, you.
Just get the URL and paste it in your browser. Then get your embed code.
The following is a 10-step process to take photos with your phone and make a map with the photos for your site.
You're going to need a Flickr account (You can sign in with Facebook or Google, and if you have a Yahoo! account you already have one).
1. Take photo with phone. 2. Share to Flickr (preferably in the same album) IPhone? You can email photos to Flickr (thanks to Siobhan Connally for the tip) or use the Flickr app. Make sure geolocation is on. 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 as needed. 4. Go to Flickr, your photos should be there.
5. Click on a photo and 'Add to map'
6. Your photoset (album) should have all your photos in a single map. Click on the map link.
7. Visit iMapFlickr.com and hit 'Create a map.' 8.Add your user URL, which is http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOURNAME/
9. Pick your album and hit 'Create a map.'
You can geotag your photos later too. Find out how to do this. 10. Grab the embed code and paste in your site. You can change the look and settings if you want.
This is something I've been asked here and there, and I've been tinkering and I think I've found a solution.
Ideally, Pinterest would/could offer the possibility of displaying a board or a search term in slideshow format, but there is no such function (yet? guys?)
So here's a nifty way of turning anything you find in Pinterest into a slideshow, using Storify.
For metaness, Let's say you have a board with a whole bunch of Instagrams (I do) and you want to display the photos as a slideshow.
3.Log in to Storify and check out your Storypad! You can add all of it with "add them all" (this will add everything on your Storypad, so you might have to erase some things).
4. Move the images in the order that you want (this also helps because you can't do that with pins in Pinterest) and hit publish.
5. The best part: Get the embed code in slideshow form.
BOOM:
Storify has an Instagram function, but it doesn't allow you (yet? guys?) to search for users. And you can't do slideshows with Instagram, so this doubles up as a tutorial for making a slideshow for your Instagrams.
NOTE: The links go to Pinterest, you'll have to click again to go to the link where the pin came from. But, regardless, if you want to change the order and make a slideshow of your pins, this is what I would do, until the Pinterest and Storify and Instagram guys figure it out.
Another note: You probably know this, but it's worth repeating. Adding '/slideshow' to any storify will make a slideshow of your post. The last slide is the embed code. Here's the FULLSCREENSIES!
Good morning! Journalists, members of Digital First Media and pretty much everyone else who wants to - are going to be taking part on the weekly Twitter chat at noon.
Today we're talking about how to improve a newsroom's engagement efforts.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below.
Type your question in the box below if you want some clarification.
As you might be aware, I host the Digital First Media Twitter chat, #DFMchat, at noon on Wednesdays, in which journalists and anyone who wants can discuss issues as they relate to our current digital environment.
Unfortunately, for the past weeks, a troll impersonating me, @Lvanlajara, which uses a lowercase "l" so it looks like me, with my avatar, has been bombing the hashtag, dropping irrelevant tweets and a whole bunch of curses.
The first thing to if you are encountered with a troll is to block and report, which is easily done on Twitter.
Hashtag blocking can be easily accomplish like this:
On Tweetdeck, if you are following #DFMchat, mouse over the suspect account and click on the name. The troll's identity can easily be determined by bio (if it's similar is a violation of Twitter's terms of service, and the account can be suspended, but in my case it's not). After determining the troll account, mouse over the avatar, pick the bottom right icon, and hit block and report.
If you are using New Tweetdeck (I don't like personally, so I still use an old version before Twitter bought the service), click on the avatar image and hit block.
This makes the troll disappear from the feed.
On Tweetchat simply mouse over the user icon to the right of the offending tweet and hit block.
I keep the curated, troll-less feed in CoverItLive, so I'm not just auto-feeding the hashtag. CoverItLive doesn't have a function to ban a Twitter user from an automated feed, since it is not its primary purpose, so I just do a search of the tag and add the tweets in real time, sans troll. Here's is today's archive.
I didn't expect to have an online impersonator, but this deranged individual (a local person with too much time, as it is obvious from the tweets) can be used in an unintended lesson on what can happen when you open up as we have.
An alternative would be to host the chat exclusively on CoverItLive, but I want to reach as many people as possible, so I'm willing to put up with the pest in order to reach a wider audience.
Good morning! Journalists, members of Digital First Media and pretty much everyone else who wants to - are going to be taking part on the weekly Twitter chat at noon.
Today we're talking about the best and/or favorite digital tools, how they can improve narratives and how they can help improve journalism. As always, we'll be bringing examples (otherwise this exercise would be, you know, just blah blah blah). We'll also try to address concerns and point to How-Tos.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below. Better yet, type your question in the box below if you want some clarification.
Let this serve you as a tutorial on how to make a timeline. What I did: I added an RSS feed from RSS feeds to Dipity. Done.
To do this:
Visit http://rssmix.com/. Copy and paste all the desired RSS feeds (you can narrow your post even further by selecting RSS feeds from tags like, say, "Idealab"). Create the new RSS feed. Visit dipity.com (join if you haven't). The online timeline tool allows you to add events manually or automatically (Twitter, Google News searches, photos from Flickr or Picassa, videos from YouTube or Vimeo, RSS feeds, Yelp, Digg, you name it). So add your newly created RSS feed. Done. Serve hot with pinch of parsley in either Timeline, list, map or slide mode.
Hello! Members of the Journal Register Company's Idealab - and everyone else who wants to - are currently taking part on the weekly Twitter chat, which started at noon.
Today we're talking about live blogging news events: what to cover, how to do it and what are the best practices.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#jrcchat" so it can automatically appear below, or post a comment in the field at the bottom of the chat box.
Good morning! Members of the Journal Register Company's Idealab - and everyone else who wants to - are going to be taking part on the weekly Twitter chat at noon.
Today we're talking about live blogging news events: what to cover, how to do it and what are the best practices.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#jrcchat" so it can automatically appear below, or post a comment in the field at the bottom of the chat box.
Good morning! Members of the Journal Register Company's Idealab - and everyone else who wants to - are going to be taking part on the weekly Twitter chat at noon.
Today we're talking about Facebook changes and what it means for journalists and journalism.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#jrcchat" so it can automatically appear below, or post a comment in the field at the bottom of the chat box.
Good morning! Members of the Journal Register Company's Idealab - and everyone else who wants to - are going to be taking part on the weekly Twitter chat at noon.
I've been using the tool for about a year now, and I've found that curation is but one use. I'm hoping we can use the chat to dredge more uses (and tutorials) and share them.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#jrcchat" so it can automatically appear below, or post a comment in the field at the bottom of the chat box.
So I tasked myself with improving our newsroom Twitter and Facebook presence (and your experience with us) back in late March and early April.
Sure, The Daily Freeman and its reporters are on Twitter and on Facebook. But pushing links (or asking questions for the sake of asking questions) is not really the way to go.
Here's what we did.
First, we needed some tools. I personally find the social media manager Tweetdeck immensely useful (here's why), so I decided to equip reporters with the program, and then add the link shortener bit.ly's API key so that we can keep track of what links works and what doesn't.
"Wait a second!" You are saying right now. "What's API? (And what's up with the stick man?)"
The application programming interface is basically a language that allows programs to talk to one another. All you do is grab your bit.ly account's "key" (also known as "a whole bunch of nonsensical characters") and add it to Tweetdeck's settings (needless to say, you need a bit.ly account and Tweetdeck).
All of this is basically to figure out what messages generate responses and clicks.
Second: Training. As mentioned in this space before, I set up training session for Twitter best practices and Facebook. Here's the whole enchilada, in two parts.
As a favor to you (because you probably don't have two hours to spare to watch me, me me), I've summarized it all neatly here:
Actually, for a real summary, you're probably better off reading this.
Third, execution time.
This is where the staff really shined. Unprompted, reporters are now routinely thinking in a way that incorporates these tools into their workflow. I don't have to tell you about Patti Doxsey's live-tweeting of a murder trial with an iPad, for instance. (If I do, check this out).
Here's why we're doing this, by the way, it's not just because we can:
I also like to think that our engagement on Facebook has finally created more conversations with you. We're getting close to 2,200 likes, and there has been more connections and interactions in the past for weeks than since I remember.
Yes, there's much room for improvement, but the seeds have been planted. And they're sunflower seeds. We're tweeting more, sure, but we're tweeting valuable stuff — and not to the empty Twitter forest, which looks like this:
And this brings us to the fourth step. Evaluation, troubleshooting and repetition of successful experiments. Using Patti's latest live-tweeting as an example. Here are some quick stats from last week's live-tweeting: The average reader of Dailyfreeman.com stayed with Patti's tweets for more than an hour. Her sessions along gathered more than 100 comments from you, some opinions, but many of them questions, which I tried to answer when I was moderating the comments.
(By the way, I used the live-blogging platform CoverItLive, so that those without a Twitter account could still follow her tweets. Here's how to use that).
Many people, incidentally, created Twitter accounts just to follow her.
Moving on. On Tuesday, we're doing a livestream of the Kingston school board candidate's forum. And we'll have a CoveritLive container for you to participate while it goes on. The livestream idea came from reporter Kyle Wind, a continuation of the many livestreams and digital-first initiatives we've had in the last year.
All this has been a bit bumpy, yes. But we're getting better and better, so hopefully you won't have to see things like this:
