Editor, revised

I’m copping an idea from Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words (hat tip also to Palewire, who’s done a lot with word clouds).

I used Wordle to create a word cloud of stuff I’ve written about here (it’s above).

It was super simple.

1. Go to Wordle.
2. Type in the url for any blog or site that generates a feed (e.g. atom, rss)
3. Use the Wordle menu bar to customize the appearance.



4. Export it as you wish. I chose to use the Grab function in Preview to save a jpeg.

I didn’t realize I was using the word “posts” so often. How boring.

I recently stumbled upon the forums at twentysomethingjournalist and joined the party.

Realizing that as of mid-September I’ll only have a year of eligibility left, I took the occasion to check out what other forums for journalists are out there. Below is a rundown.

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How to make a paper rose from Andrew Zahler on Vimeo.

Before I went on vacation last week, I shot and edited a video to go with a story running in our Home section. The subject: How to make a paper rose.

I had never made a how-to video before. Here’s what the experience taught me.

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Since starting this Wordpress-powered blog, I’ve experimented with several Flickr plugins.

I’ve tried Wordpress Flickr Manager and Wordpress Media Flickr, which came highly rated by users and made it simpler to add photos to posts. But what I really wanted was something that would display photos in the sidebar. Because, you know, visuals help.

I’ve finally found it: Flickr Photo Gallery by Joe Tan. Look to your right, and you’ll see the fruits of my search. The plugin also came with some nice surprises:

1. Like the others I tried, this plugin has a function that inserts photos from my photostream into posts. I find this function cleaner than the others.
2. Flickr Photo Gallery can create a photo gallery page on your site, and all you have to do is create a URL in the plugin settings. Mine is right here.

White Rock Solutions has some accessible tutorials for getting started with Google Maps, which I discovered from a comment on an earlier post.

I like what I see here. Most of this covers areas I’m already comfortable with, such as creating a custom map, adding placemarks or lines and sharing maps.

But I appreciate White Rock’s step-by-step thoroughness, the effective use of screen grabs and the easy, tabbed interface.

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