What's been on my mind

I often need to send photos via email, and because it's good practice and good manners not to block up the recipients inbox with very large photos (ie. leaving the photos the default size that the camera creates) I always used to use Adobe Photoshop to optimise them to a manageable file size. Recently, I started using Microsoft Windows XP's built in "Send to >> Mail recipient" which you can find by right clicking on the image(s) you want to send and choosing "Send to", and then "Mail recipient" from the menu, but found it to be a real pain and incredibly buggy, even though it was much easier than optimising in photoshop. So I decided to find out what other options existed to perform this simple function.

I've been desperate to see Metallica live since high school, and finally they're going to be playing in South Africa. They are the latest and by far the greatest band that's confirmed their place at the " COCA-COLA COLAB MASSIVE MIX" concerts to be held in South Africa on the 18th (Pretoria), 21st (Durban) and 25th (Cape Town) March 2006. For more information, check out the 5FM site and the computicket site for tickets.

If you're wanting to set up your own blog and don't know which software to use, check out this article on sitepoint. It takes a look at 3 of the biggest/well known blogging tools and goes in to some detail on the strenghts and weaknessess of each one. I personally haven't tested them all, but use wordpress on this site and find it very easy to setup and administer. The three blogging tools looked at are:

• Movable Type

Yesterday (the 15th September 2005) was the South African Johannesburg launch of Macromedia studio 8 at the Dimension Data Campus (Bryanston). Being someone who develops solely in Dreamweaver (not only for design but also for PHP coding), and who also uses Flash whenever I get a project that's suitable, I thought I'd check it out.

Top of my podcast list are the following (in no specific order): [I've given links to their websites and podcast feeds]

• Geek News Central :: website :: podcast
• IT Conversations :: website :: podcast

For those that don't know it yet, there has been a split between Miro, the original creators of the Mambo content management system and the Mambo developers. It seems that disagreements regarding how Mambo was controlled led to the split, and the developers have created a new project called Joomla!. This will leave many wondering which project to follow: Mambo or Joomla!

It looks like internet usage in South Africa is on the rise again in 2005, with the latest figures estimated to be at 4,780,000 users (Internet World Stats). That's about 10% of South Africa's population.

I heard Chris Pirillo interviewing Michael Robertson of the Gizmo Project, on the Chris Pirillo podcast. It's a great interview, and provides a more in depth understanding of how Gizmo is different to Skype.

Choosing a domain name is often a spur of the moment decision, and takes place when you want to register a domain quickly so that no one else gets it before you. This is normally not an ideal way to go about it, when a domain name is an essential component of your online identity and has an impact on your search engine rankings. Take a look at the following tips taken from a sitepoint article, to help you effectively choose your domain name: