Open sourced world

In a world that seems to become more commercialized every day, I delight in coming across inspired inventions and ideas that open up our world to ourselves. Today’s delight is ParkatmyHouse.com.  It’s site that allows people to rent out their parking spots.

At first glance it’s another marketing tool.  Looking deeper, however, there’s an efficiency created in our communities like what self-serve checkouts at the grocery store have done for those of us with only two items (granted, these still need debugging).

 The many-to-many power of the internet and now anywhere-to-anywhere power of mobile computing means we can use the spaces in our communities in an new way. And we get more choice as consumers (goodbye Impark monopoly). And we reconnect with the people in our physical space in a new way (take that texting nay-sayers).

Apparently my house’s parking spot could be worth $5000/ year. This remains to be seen!

Handy wordpress tip

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/add-intro-text-to-category-page

Top Recommended Plugins

After over two years of wordpress work, I have accumulated a list of plugins I find very useful.

• NextGEN Gallery — great photo management & display
• TS Custom Widgets – manage which widgets show up where
• Contact Form 7 – great options for forms & allows multiple in a site
• All in One SEO Pack — still testing but integrates well with pages for easy use
• Formidable – great forms that go beyond contact forms
• WordPress Importer – self explanatory and useful when needed
• WP Super Cache — to created a cached site/pages and great when content loads too slow with css files
• RSS Poster Free Version — for posting RSS content into a blog
• Flexi Quote Rotator — add rotating quotes into widget space
• WP Email Capture – Captures email addresses for insertion into software such as Aweber or Mailchimp
• vSlider Multi Image Slider for WordPress — Flexible photo loop tool. Made it fit beautifully here.

Great behind-the-scenes tools

• Drag & Drop File Uploader — makes management easier
• Scissors — crop images even after they are uploaded

Still on the hunt for good:

• Modal or Pop up tools (on trial are Modal Dialog and Super Popup)
• File access management (on trial are User File Manager and User Access Manager)

Friendly mention:

• Download Button Shortcode — Add a shortcode to your wordpress for a nice downloadbutton
• Embed Iframe — a great way to imbed YouTube or secure logins from 3rd parties

Ideal Find: Kodak Zi8

For Christmas, I treated us to a new handheld HD video camera. A little research online led me to the top two rated cameras in the category, the Flip by Cisco and the Zi8 by Kodak. The best review I found was on CNET which did a comparison of the two. There is an article as well as this video summary. Both have put out newer versions of the same cameras so it’s worth looking at.

Look for videos from yours truly going forward!!

Greg Gerla Photographer

On Friday, I had the unexpected privilege to work with one of Calgary’s finest photographers.

Greg is an artist of photography and with people. He put me at ease immediately and the photos speak for themselves.

[nggallery id=10]

Visit his site!