Below is a round-up of all of the posts from claycarson.net during the month of June.

Things Are Changin’ - A look at the future for the site.

Photoshoot With Zack Reeves - Statistics from a photoshoot with my good friend, Zack Reeves.

Finding Some Style With Photography - How I have developed and began to see what I like and look for in an image and how you can do the same.

New Links Page - Finally, the Links page is live. Check it out here.

Three-Finger Swipe in Firefox 3 - How to bring a powerful feature of Macs with the new trackpads from Safari to Firefox.

Netvibes: An Overview of Your Internet - Examining a powerful web service called Netvibes.

Please let me know which post(s) you enjoyed the most in the comments section below.

Netvibes is a personalized and customizable homepage that is much more resourceful than most conventional homepages. Netvibes allows you to add an RSS feed straight to your own private page. This is perfect for staying up to the minute with everything you care about on the web. Not only that but everytime you hit the web, you can save tons of time by quickly being about to see what’s new with many social profiles, your favorite sites, and anything else you enjoy on the internet.

Not only does Netvibes support RSS feeds but more importantly, it supports a large and growing number of widgets. One of my personal favorites is the Facebook widget. It supplies information about friend requests, pokes, messages, and invites. Furthermore, it shows recently updated statuses from your friends. Some of the other widgets and RSS feeds I follow are from my Flickr contacts, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. I also monitor what my friends have found interesting on Digg, StumbleUpon.

If you use any of these sites (including Netvibes) add me as a friend! It’s great to see what other people are interested in online.

The three-finger swipe (controls back page and forward page in Safari) is one of those things Apple does that makes me go “Ohhh, good idea.” Now, it is a burden to browse the web any other way. A problem arose upon the release of Firefox 3. I had been an exclusive Safari user but, like everyone, I had to see what all the fuss was over. I must say I am quite impressed but that’s beside the point; Firefox 3 does not support the three-fingered swipe!

Fortunately, this problem can be easily solved with MultiClutch. MultiClutch allows you the freedom to control and assign finger gestures to specific applications. In this case, just add Firefox as your application and select three-finger swipe (left and right) and use the Firefox shortcuts (”cmd {” and “cmd }”). I have also added an up and down swipe that I use to navigate throughout my open tabs (see screenshot).

I briefly wanted to mention that the ‘Coming Soon…” text has been removed from my links page and I have added my most recently added bookmarks on Del.icio.us. This way it will be easy to see what I’ve been into straight from my site.

For anyone who does not know, Del.icio.us is an excellent, and very versatile bookmarking service that allows for web based bookmarking that can be accessed from anywhere. Go have a look and see what I have recently found interesting online.

As in anything in life, everyone has their own style - how they perform, what is attractive, preferences; things like that. Developing a style may be one of the most difficult things for a person to deal with. Once you fall into that comfort zone though, things improve.

I have noticed this to be the case lately with my photography. Developing a style has been important for me so that I can pull some feeling out of a shot and I feel more like ‘I created this’.

How to…

The biggest jump I made in my personal style of photography came after beginning to take advantage of my favorites that I have tagged on Flickr. I took a careful look at what attracted me to the images that I had selected as favorites and why they were worthy of being favorited. This made me realize what I like to see in an image and further encouraged me to create images that I am drawn to and satisfied with.

If you are a Flickr user and not using your ability to favorite photos, I must strongly encourage that you do. Browsing, critiquing, and mimicking can be just what you need to feel motivated, inspired, and gain some creativity.

(Included image is of some of my favorite images on Flickr)

Friday morning Zack and I headed to the course for him to practice and for me to create some images. Here’s what we got…

Shooting Stats:

Images Taken - 438
Images Eliminated - 258
Images Posted - 21

Elapsed Time:

Shoot - 1 hr 45 min
Post Processing - Approximately 2 hrs

Equipment Used:

Camera - Digital Rebel Xti
Lenses - Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6; Canon EF 50mm f/1.8; Canon EF 28-135 IS USM f/3.5-5.6; Canon EF 70-200mm L USM f/4

You can see more images from the shoot here.

Over the past few months updates for the site have become few and far between. When launching the site I didn’t plan on updating every day or anything like that but I feel that once a month is far too little. The primary reason for the collapse in content is a swirl in interests. I have taken a heavy interest in digital photography and in addition to my photos page, I may begin to make postings about what I am learning and creating. I also plan to have less drawn out posts by using a Tumblr style approach. (A switch to a full Tumblr blog is being heavily considered)

Basically, there will be a more broadly represented field of content. With a focus on My fluctuating interests instead of being constricted to trying to included Mac-focused information.

I was searching for a solution to a problem and very quickly came across one. I wanted to have direct access to my del.icio.us bookmarks both in Safari and with Quicksilver.

Fortunately there is del.icio.us2safari; a free and very simple application based on the del.icio.us API. delicious2safari allows your bookmarks to be pulled down straight from delicious and organized in the Bookmark Menu, or in the Bookmark Bar. Furthermore, it can organize your bookmarks into folders based on tags.

This application is a perfect way to pull down bookmarks after a re-install or to have indexed copies of your bookmarks with Spotlight or Quicksilver for quick access to your favorite sites. Head over to tuxtina.de and give it a shot.

I know that I am a bit behind on the curve on this one but last week, 7 minutes after downloading the trial version of Connect360 by Nullriver, I bought a license ($20). I had been considering buying an AppleTV since its release but was never able to pull the trigger. Thank goodness!

Connect360 is an application that will sync the Movies folder on your Mac with your XBOX 360 over a wireless network (or ethernet port) and allow you to play them in the Media Player tab on your XBOX.

Advantages

1. Price - $20 vs. $229, Connect360 gives similar functionality at 1/10th the price.

2. Functionality - While similar, I feel that Connect360 has a couple of major advantages. The first being that it is not necessary to add any content you wish to view to your iTunes library. For example movies, if I want to watch a movie with AppleTV, it must be found in my iTunes library. However, with Connect360 your entire movies folder is indexed and synced, this includes the movies and podcasts in your iTunes library. Secondly and beyond iTunes is iLife. Connect360 can access iPhoto and display your photos and slideshows just as AppleTV does.

Disadvantages

1. A couple of features - With Connect360 you do not have access to the iTunes store and cannot rent or buy movies. You also do not get the YouTube nor the Flickr features.

2. XBOX 360 - If you do not already have one, obviously that will set you back a little more than the $20 for Connect360.

These are the main reasons for me personally for not dropping over $200 on AppleTV and solving my media center issue with a piece of software.

FYI: Nullriver also has an application that provides the same functionality for all you PS3 owners out there. They call it MediaLink.

Mail.app is wonderful; a simple user interface with many ways to organize your inbox and messages, however, there are plenty of ways to make it better. I wanted to share a couple of ways I make mail work better for me.

WideMail

The first plugin I would like to share is called WideMail. Since beginning to use WideMail, it is hard to even look at a mail.app inbox that does not have it installed. WideMail’s job is very simple, it takes your message viewing area (your inbox and message display) and changes things to a vertical view.

The current version (0.5.1) requires Mac OS X Leopard and can be downloaded here.

Mail.appetizer

The second plugin I use in Mail is called Mail.appetizer. This program might not be too significant if you are already a Growl user but for me, as many times as I have tried Growl, I can’t get in to it. That is why Mail.appetizer is so handy for me. Upon receiving new mail, Mail.appetizer pops up for a preset amount of time and gives you a full overview of the message that just arrived in your inbox. This way you don’t have to stop your entire workflow to see that you have just received an email of “12 dogs with Christmas Hats - Will Make You LOL”

Mail.appetizer will work with Mac OS X Leopard, Tiger, and Panther however, there is a disclaimer warning against use with Mac OS X Tiger. Download Mail.appetizer here.