How is this done?

You may be wondering what wondrous technologies are at work, to produce this wonderful blog.

Wonder no more.

Here's a bit of shameless self-promotion.

These are the tools I use to put these pages together

Blogger

This is where it all comes together. 

I have a few different blogs - this one is "Curse of Silence", my experience of cochlearisation.

I write the text you read on the pages, make links to other pages, links to photos and movies and documents. It really enables anyone in the world to have their say, no matter how trivial.

The images and movies and Calendar don't live within the blog - they are outside and brought in by "embedding" them using hyperlinks.

Macs or PCs [Firefox works better for editing]

Picasa

The images you see on the pages are stored at Picasa. It's a web photo album. I took the photographs with my digital camera [or I could scan photographs, or have photographs saved to a CD]. Once I had the images, they were uploaded [saved] to the Picasa web album.

PC users can download the Picasa program which works like iPhoto below.

Google Docs

When you complete one of the polls or use the 'Contact me directly' page you're filling in a row in a shared spreadsheet or database, in Google Docs. It works just like an Excel spreadsheet, except it's on the web and accessible for your comments directly from the blog page. The system also sends me an email when you send me an entry.

In a different application the spreadsheet might also be shared so that the results we collected would be available as-is, or registered users may have editing privileges as well.

Calendar

I keep a Calendar of my up-coming appointments. One part of it I've devoted to this cochlear process - if you're interested, why not share it with you? That's what I've done. I've shared the cochlear calendar with you via the blog page by including some code which says "put the upcoming events in to this blog-page" All I had to do was copy/paste it. The Calendar now appears and it's updated without me having to do anything, dynamically - it's always up-to-date.

Find all these web-based programs via the Google page located in your web-browser.

Companion programs

iPhoto

Included with every Mac since 2000-ish. Allows to to download images from the camera and basically edit them. Then upload them directly to Picasa [or Facebook, make websites etc]

iMovie

Included with every Mac since 2000-ish. Get raw footage from the camera, import it to iMovie.

Add titles, and captions [laborious, especially if you're hearing isn't 100%!].

Export to the desktop in this that or the other format.

Makes it very easy if time-consuming.

Now the shameless promotion part.

Got a project like this needs doing?

Need to know how to get the pics of your camera and onto the WWWeb?

Contact me [email best at the moment - phone coming soon!] and lets talk computers.