ekfamily.net

I always wondered what if “third cousin once removed” was just a made-up term. I guess not!

We had a little family party for Joshua’s 3rd birthday. It was great. We had Nana and Papa here to enjoy, a truck cake, and lots of presents.

Here are some photos. Hope you enjoy.

I got a message in my email today saying that my web site account is approaching the disk space limit, meaning that we are almost to the 200 MB mark. I am a little concerned about this because I am going to have to delete some files in the near future. I really don’t want to remove photos from the EkFamily.Net Photo Gallery, but I may have to. The Photo Gallery is the only good thing about the website (for anybody but me) and it would be a shame to have to remove any photos that have been posted. The problem is that pictures are really the biggest files that are on the site, and there are lots of them.

I have recently been experementing with various FREE online photo services… basically sites where you can upload your photos and they will host them for free. There are a few of them but the biggest players that I have looked at are Google’s Picasa Web Albums and Yahoo’s Flickr. Both provide about 200 MB of space for photos and they have really good managment tools for uploading and editing photos (although they approach photo management very differently).

Anyway, just as a test, I wanted to see how this Picasa slideshow works. I will be fidding around with the photo gallery this summer, so if things start to change, don’t be surprised. The slideshow is of Meredith’s trip this last summer to South Carolina when David and Ashley had their wedding reception (and also of muscle-man). Note that if you click on the slideshow it will take you to the photo album with the full-sized pics (you may have to disable popup blocking?).

Anyway, if anybody has any other ideas or feedback, shoot me a note. Or I guess you could also leave a comment here on this post… now that would be a first.

I frequently have the problem of needing to resize a photo that I have downloaded from my digital camera.  The problem is that photos that come off of my camera are so huge, and if I try to post them to the web (http://ekfamily.net/gallery/, for example) it takes a million years.  So before I upload the photos to a website I like to resize them to 640×480 or 800×600 so that they can be uploaded quickly, and also downloaded quickly.  I previously used Microsoft’s XP Power Tool Image Resizer.  It is a sweet little utility (you can find it by googling “xp power tools”) that will allow you to right-click on an image (or several at a time) and resize them quickly.  However, currently I am not using a Windows computer (Linux to be exact), so the XP Power toys do me no good.

Well I just found a sweet little site will do the image resizing for me quick and easy.  It is called QuickThumbnail and it allows you to pick the photo that you want resized (or even enlarged) and it will generate it in a flash.  Then you just download it to your computer to the desktop or a temporary directory and boom, you can post it to the web.  Check it out. http://quickthumbnail.com/

Once again I have redone the site.  Hope you like it.