Thing #6- Flickr Mashing

Spell With Flickr
is a neat little tool, however I wasn't able to intuitively find it within the Explore portion of Flickr. In fact when I went to the Explore:Flickr Services page I was really turned around. Initially I wanted to go directly to the Third party Flickr apps list on the right hand side. The first few Apps I selected were not working Mappr by Stamen Design stated they are no longer processing photos from Flickr, then I went to FlickrBooth by Tristan O'Tierney which only applies to Mac users (which I am not one of). This process seemed to go on and on, as I found programs that did not apply to me or that were defunct.

I then selected one of the Featured Apps. fd's Flickr Toys, which took me to the Big Huge Labs page I was trying to access under Thing #7 with no success. The website is actually pretty cool with lots of options to play with your photos. I decided to make one of my image transfers into a puzzle.
It also appears that you can create custom mosaics, fake magazine covers, motivational posters, calendars, wallpapers, and the list goes on and on.
One interesting thing I did find was an app called "Flickr DNA" which basically gives you a breakdown of information on your activity within Flickr. I personally liked this graph on the dispersion of tags used within all of the library photos uploaded to the Flickr account.



Something like this may be useful in a report about the library's utilization of Flickr.

Thing #7 Online Image Generators

So I skipped ahead a bit. I figured if I was going to actually accomplish all 23 things, I better not get caught up on Thing #3. In all reality, I've just been super busy and needed something fun and mind draining to pass the time.I decided to try out several of the recommended image generators.

I was off to a rough start when I came upon this roadblock. The first link I tried for Big Huge Labs left me with nothing more than a timed out connection. I tried this site more than once without any success. So I quickly moved on, doubtful to ever return.

Image Chef was fairly intuitive, however somewhat limiting in the types of images you can create. It appears that they base most of their image generators on symbols and some basic backgrounds. I think these would be a great resource if you were trying to add a theme to some of your programming literature.

I tried the direct upload to both blogger and myspace with relative ease. My only criticism of using the automatic upload to one of your favorite sites is that it formats the image without any justification. I've re-saved my images and uploaded them using Blogger here so that I could place text directly next to the images and not just below them.

Toon Doo is perhaps one of the coolest things I've seen. Although as you can see, I'm certain there are many, MANY, people out there who can get carried away with these types of projects. I did find it interesting that the ToonDoo site did seem to promote itself as a useful learning tool for kids. Laughter can make even the most difficult situations seem bearable, so I'm certain that when dealing with difficult situations you can use these comics to bring some relief.


Created from generator found on The Generator Blog. I wasn't very impressed. I know that this is a blog, and maybe that's why I didn't care for the layout. I found it very cumbersome to actually find something I was interested in using. I suppose if you subscribed to the blog you would get the hottest topics, but some of the titles on previous blogs were not intuitive as to what they were or what they could do.
(Also, note above I pulled the image directly into the blog and I'm unable to make modifications of its placement around the associated text. )

I did also briefly visit Letter James, however by the time I spent cruising through the rest of these pages, I was burnt out on image generators and the visual appeal of their website wasn't enough to hold my attention.