(photo by Julie Michelle)

A couple of months ago, I wrote about some of my favorite San Francisco blogs … and through the magic of the interwebs, this connected me with Julie Michelle, author and artist behind i live here: sf. Julie invited to be here 90th subject, and we took a walk around SOMArts for the photo shoot. You can view the slideshow, along with my essay about discovering a community through art, here.

Now, you can reap the benefits of their hard work with this peek into the artwork created at this year’s MDR: http://soex.org/ImagePool/23.html. Also a great resource for geeky arts lovers (like me) who are always looking for new artist websites.

WordPress 2.7: Actually, Dan upgraded my blog to the new version. So far, so good. Haven’t had much time to check it out yet, but if installing widgets is easier, I may give it a try and mess up the design (!). WordPress also has an iphone app. Still trying to convince Dan to use his superior talents to design a blog for SOMArts.

RSS Readers: I am surprised that many of my contemporaries and older colleagues still don’t use an rss reader. For me, it saves a lot of time that used to be spent navigating from site to site looking for updates.

I still use Netvibes as a home for all my rss feeds, but am no longer sure this is the best option for me. In Connecticut, I was trying to “keep tabs” on arts activity and friends’ blogs around the state. Now that I am in San Francisco my internet habits involve more “search & explore” activity. I am trying Delicious as a way to categorize things until I figure out what updates and blogs are truly of use.

Plug-ins: When I had an academic discount through Wesleyan, I splurged on the photo editing and organizing software Aperture, then didn’t use it because Green Street had lots of wonderful volunteers who took great photos. Now that I am at SOMArts I am again taking photos, and have discovered a few plug-ins that make the process of uploading and emailing them WAY more efficient.

Plug-ins literally plug in to your existing applications to increase their usefulness and efficiency. The first plug-in I installed referred to a folder in my library that didn’t exist, but I simply created a new folder and it worked fine. Here are a few pics and pans:

-Flickr Uploadr: The first uploader I tried. Uploads large batches of photos to Flickr. Warning to arts organizations—there is a defect in this program which marks the photos as private no matter what public option you try to select. This means people cannot see your photos without logging on to Flickr. Very annoying.

-Aperture2Gmail & FlickrExport. Self-explanatory plug-ins which allow the user to export photos directly from Aperture to flickr and gmail. No doubt similar plug-ins are available for other photo editing programs … but until I had these I had to export my photos to the desktop then email them or upload them, then create all new sets and descriptions. Redundant, not to mention time consuming.

-Since I am not an IT person or particularly tech savvy, I am not sure if the Flickr app for Facebook or Amazon’s Universal Wish List are technically plug-ins. But I am all for uploading SOMArts photos once (to Flickr) and then linking them to the SOMArts Facebook page (rather than uploading photos twice). Also … I can see the Amazon wishlist becoming a helpful budgeting tool, allowing organizations to easily compare and contrast prices from many websites for, say, office equipment, with more info at their fingertips than there would be on a spreadsheet.

Of course, all my saved time will be wasted if I then use it to blog about saving time. It is very hard to get a sense of what is new and what’s already outdated. If you have any suggestions to share, please do.

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I would never get anything done, creative or otherwise, if it weren’t for inspiring people who push me along in one way or another. Although I’ve never met Stephanie and May, I admire the simplicity of their partnership: two photographers, 3191 miles apart, sharing photographs.

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Interview with photographer David Ottenstein, excerpted from The Art Agenda. Originally broadcast on 88.1fm, WESU, Middletown on April 11, 2008.

David’s exhibition Vanishing Landscape will be on display at the Exposure Gallery in New Haven through May 10, 2008.

Interview with photographer Kevin Van Aelst, excerpted from The Art Agenda. Originally broadcast on 88.1fm, WESU, Middletown on May 8, 2007. (Correction: the New York Times fashion magazine referenced in this interview is seasonal, not every month.)

Douglas knows a zillion people, is very curious about a lot of things, and makes all kinds of quirky connections that he writes about to share with others. Through his blog and his friendship, he has directly or indirectly inspired me to: read comics, cook, write, and take pictures. His latest blog, Mincing Up the Morning, will no doubt introduce me to some new music and hopefully inspire me to be better about remembering birthdays (sorry, Bill!).