Full size photo uploads: G+ winning the tech war on Facebook

// In the latest #googleplusupdate, you can now upload the full-sized photos and G+ will serve them accordingly: Initially you get a reduced (but great quality) version but you can zoon and pan to see more detail!

How to have this: To enable full-size desktop uploads, just visit your settings at https://www.google.com/settings/plus, and check "Upload my photos at full size." Afterwards, any files larger than 2048px will count towards your Google storage (up to 5GB free). Photo storage at 2048px or smaller remains free and unlimited.

Meanwhile, Facebook still can't keep up, probably not having enough servers/storage to handle better quality in their photos. See also this experiment by +Mike Elgan http://bit.ly/10y7JUH 

Finally, a reminder on how to zoom (try it on this 2448 x 3264 pixels photo from snowy Luxembourg :))
- use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out
- click and drag to pan right, left, up or down

Have fun!

Social media cross-posting with Fotostat

I've been expanding the number of social networks I use, almost like an addict lately :) So I've been looking for a way to administer my addiction in an easier way. I had an automation between G+, Twitter and my Wordpress blog (so I was only posting on G+) and additionally was cross-posting to Facebook and LinkedIn through Hootsuite.

Today I'm trying out Fotostat, a new service currently in beta for posting your photos (but also text, this post was written on fotostat) as well as gather statistics about them. To copy the service's description:
- Save time by scheduling your uploads to multiple social photography sites, blogs and merchant facilities.
- Discover how well each photo is performing by seeing all available statistics from each of your networks.
- Interact with your followers by commenting across all your sites from one easy to use location.

The service works very nicely: you first connect to your networks and your existing photos are imported to the service so you already have statistics on your content so far. You then can post new content, selecting each time to which networks you want to post to.

Currently supported are Google+ (Publishing to albums only, no post creation as yet.), Facebook, Flickr, 500px, Smugmug, Tumblr and WordPress. The effort is headed by Daniel Treadwell, developer of the G+ to WordPress plugin I have been using for over a year now, so I'm sure there are lots of improvements to come.

Try it out for free at http://fotost.at/

BP Imperial

A fun display font by George Triantafyllakos. Get it at http://www.backpacker.gr/font.asp?m=1&font=bp13

Just because you can: GUI icons with pure CSS

// Inspired by an elegant piece of CSS code by +Lea Verou, creating the WiFi code (see it here http://bit.ly/wificss), I searched for other examples of this and found this little gem: A demo of 84 icons created with just CSS by +Nicolas Gallagher.

Nicolas calls it's a "technical exercise" but given that this was done back in 2010 and support for the methods used is much wider now, the code should be working in all modern browsers. 

You can see it in action and dig into the code here http://bit.ly/css-gui-icons

Charts with Javascript: even more ways to kill Flash

// Javascript-powered chart solutions is a favorite topic of mine, so here are a few more options for you- NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) builds upon the powerful D3 library and currently supports 11 different interactive chart types

- Rickshaw (http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/) also built on D3, can be used for live-data time graphs with 4 customisable chart types

_ gRaphaël (http://g.raphaeljs.com/) is based on Raphaël and has 4 different chart types including a dot chart

- YUI charts (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/charts/) is part of the YUI library and supports 7 chart types

- Polychart.js (http://polychartjs.com/) has 5 chart types which can be combined.

Depending on your situation and needs any of this could work, but surely NVD3 stands out. For more on the topic, see here http://bit.ly/g-chart

Draft: cloud text-editing for any anything anywhere

// I've written about #Draft already a few days ago http://bit.ly/g-draft when it was "just" a web-based text #editor for #Dropboxand Google Drive with version control and collaboration features.But I need to write again as a #Chrome extension was released that redefined how you can use Draft. I'll just copy the developer's (+Nathan Kontny) description:

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News. Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text box will carry over). When you're done, there's a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from.

As I write this post on Draft, it's a much better experience of writing without all the noise of Google+'s interface. Highly recommended, get Draft here http://bit.ly/draft-chrome

Twitter Cards: Engage!

// Just 6 days after my submission for inclusion on the #TwitterCards program, I got in and in the screenshot you can see the result: whenever someone tweets a URL of my blog, an "expanded view" will be available with a title, short description, thumbnail, my name and #Twitter handleIt also works on the mobile (iOS at least) app. See it live here http://bit.ly/t-cardtweet and read more about it here http://bit.ly/g-twitter-cards