Picasa Templates for Beautiful Web Photo Albums, Slideshows

Google Picasa is more than just a simple photo editing and management software. You can create wall posters, screen savers, photo collages or even movies of your digital pictures with Picasa.

There's another very impressive feature - it can convert your picture collection into professional looking web photo albums that you can either publish on websites, email them to friends as Zips or just save locally - No CSS, HTML or JavaScript knowledge required.

Watch this YouTube video showing how an HTML photo gallery created inside Picasa looks like - took less than a minute to create the entire photo album.

To create a Photo album in Picasa, select the photos and put them in the Picasa tray by clicking the Hold button. Next goto Album - Export as HTML page. Select the picture size, web album template and click export. That's it.

While Picasa comes with an impressive array of templates, you can download additional templates from paulvanroekel.nl The above picture gallery was created using the awesome LightBox Picasa template available here.

These templates are available as zip files - extract the content to the directory \Program Files\Picasa 2\web\templates\ in separate folders.

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Put Your Social Bookmarking Icons in a CSS Dropdown Menu

AddThis [review] now offers a beautiful alternative to social bookmarking icons or those 16x16 pixel images that clutter the footer of almost every blog post on the web.

With AddThis, you can easily put links to all popular social bookmarking websites in a two-column drop down that appears only when someone hovers the mouse over the Bookmark button - the icons and links stay hidden or invisible otherwise.

If a visitor cannot find his/her favorite social bookmarking site in the AddThis menu, they can click the "More.." link access all other other social bookmarking services. Very cool!

Just add the following code to your blog template.

<!-- AddThis Bookmark Button BEGIN -->
<script type="text/javascript">
  addthis_url    = location.href;  
  addthis_title  = document.title; 
</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" ></script>
<!-- AddThis Bookmark Button END --> 

Though you can grab the AddThis button for your blog without registration, I seriously recommend getting a free account as you get access to invaluable stats.

Time to keep your blog layout free of social bookmarking clutter. AddThis also has a plugin for WP users.

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Add a "Save as PDF" Button to your Websites and Blog Pages

Want site visitors to print or download your blog posts as PDF documents ?

PDF Online, the free PDF conversion service that helps you create PDF files of your Microsoft Office documents, has released a new online tool for converting HTML web pages to PDFs.

Here's how the new service works - bloggers add a small Javascript snippet in the blog templates, visitors can click the "Save Page as PDF" button and the current web page will be rendered as a PDF document.

Though the "SavePagesAsPDF" service is in closed beta, you can still give it a try as show below:

<script type="text/javascript">
function savePageAsPDF() {
   var pURL = "http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL=" + escape(document.location.href);
  window.open(pURL, "PDFOnline", "scrollbars=yes, resizable=yes,width=640, height=480,menubar,toolbar,location");
</script>
<a href="javascript:savePageAsPDF()">Save Page As PDF</a>

Real Example - Print Google.com as PDF

When the SavePageAsPDF service goes live officially, you will be able to track all the PDF conversion activities on your website helping you visualize the most popular content  on your blog.

More on the service at pdfonline.com/ and pdfonline.blogspot.com/.

This will be in direct competition with HP Print Widget that also allow printing blog posts and RSS feeds as PDF documents.

Related: CSS for Printer Friendly Web Pages

Update: You can directly embed the URLs in your blog posts without using any javascript. Use the following values for cURL instead of encodeURIComponent(document.location.href)

Classic Blogger - <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>
Blogger XML Template - data:post.url
WordPress - <?php the_permalink();?>

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Cross Promote Your RSS Feed with Blog Widgets

Widgets (aka Gadgets) are now found everywhere on the web - people use them for cross promoting their blogs, running picture slide-shows in the sidebar, sharing favorite music or video clips, displaying Amazon Shopping wish-list and more.

Two of my favorite blog widget providers are YourMinis and Widgetbox - both offer detailed stats and an option to embed widgets in your Blogger, MySpace, FaceBook, Netvibes, Google IG, PageFlakes or other accounts automatically.

Let's look at them more closely:

WidgetBox Blidget - Type in your blog address and you instantly get a blog widget in wide or long skyscraper formats. They have some extremely nice color gradients, the font styles are very appealing and you can display just the article headline or even full posts inside the widget.

There's neither an option to resize the widget nor can you configure the colors according to your site design.

YourMinis RSS Widget - If you think normal is boring, you'll love YourMinis. They give you a Flash based design environment to help you create a widget from any RSS feed.

The YourMinis widgets are resizable (drag the corner handles) and you get to select font families, font sizes and background color schemes for your widget.

Visitors can read the first few lines of your blog post by hovering the mouse over the title itself - there's an optional inline browser to help visitors read full posts without leaving the webpage that they are currently viewing.

While both services offer the option to publish your widget to any blogging platform or social media website, YouMinis widgets can run in the Vista sidebar like other native Vista gadgets.

Alternatively, you can place the web widgets on you desktop if you have Adobe Apollo runtime installed - create once, publish anywhere. Watch both YourMinis blog widget and WidgetBox Blidget live in action at myspace.com/labnol

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Adsense Publishers Report Massive Dip in Earnings and CTR

Google's decision to shut down Made-for-Adsense websites and Adsense Arbitragers could be affecting the earnings of regular Adsense publishers.

Several members of Adsense forums at WebMasterWorld and DigitalPoint have reported significant drop in CPM and CTR values in the current month (June 2007).

Here are some Adsense CPM / CTR figures reported by members in the discussions:

1. Page views with Adsense: unchanged, EPC: down 25%, CTR: down 15%, Revenue: significantly down.

2. EPC down about 20% from last month.

3. I've gone into a freefall today. Epc down by 80% across a variety of sites and topics.

4. I'm beginning to think there has been a new flawed algorithm added with good intentions, but bad results, that is doing this and is causing a lot of advertisers earnings to fall.

5. Clicks, traffic remains the same. but the revenues are going down about %50-60

6. June - Down 50%

7. CTR is down 40%. Net result is less money.

8. At the moment we are looking at our stats, shaking our heads and asking 'what have we done to deserve this?'

9. I'm having a 40% reduction in eCPM

10. We are now down over 60% from ANY month last year, so tomorrow it will be adios to G.

11. My traffic and CPC are basically the same, yet Adsense earnings are still down by about 45%

12. The clicks that used to be over 2.00 dropped to 0.03. So strange and frustrating.

13. Same amount of clicks but I've got from about $5.00 a day to about $0.50

Full discussion threads available at Adsense Nosedive and Adsense Freefall.

Smart pricing could be one of the reasons behind this free-fall but it could also be attributed to some algorithm changes at Adsense. Or does it have anything to do with eBay suspending their Adsense campaigns ? [Picture: wiseacre]

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Preview the New CNN.com Website That Includes Widescreen Video

Starting next month, CNN.com website will sport a refreshing new design.

The new site will offer wider (575x325) video clips and they'll will be fetching related blog posts for every article using Sphere blog search engine. [expect some traffic if you cite a CNN story]

If you would like to preview the new US edition of CNN.com, visit beta.cnn.com. The international edition of CNN.com will however be unveiled only on July 1st.

Like all other video sharing websites, CNN too has moved from Windows Media to Flash Video - so you'll no longer require the Windows Media codec to watch CNN videos inside your web browser.

CNN has also added Live news video feeds and the entire archive of news videos on CNN.com will now be available to all for free.

Since the CNN news videos are now streamed from pdl.stream.aol.com/cnn/ as FLV files, it will be much simpler to save CNN videos locally.

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Blogging Slogans and Badges for Blog Addicts

  

More blogging taglines for T-Shirts on PrintPerfection and CafePress.

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