• Rich text formatting – alignment, bold, italic, underline, quotes, colors, background color of text, font sizes, font family, lists
• True HTML editing
• Images – add from iPad, Flickr account, Picassa account, Google images
• Videos – add from your YouTube account
• Safari – add images and links by drag and drop

The Blogsy website has a number of how to videos that walk you through all the features and help files. The app was only $4.99 and so far has been well worth it. I’ll talk about it more after I have some more experience with it, but I think I have found my answer to blogging on the iPad. If anyone has had any longer term experience with Blogsy I’d love to hear from you on your experiences or any tips you might have.Check out Blogsy on their website.  

One of the things stopping me was a stupid requirement I imposed on myself for posting. I was using a feature called “featured post” that was a little section that faded out images from each post as sort of a preview.

It required me to create a 300 x 200 pixel image for each post and then tag that as the “featured image” within the WordPress theme, which is a framework called Headway.

Only problem was that I was using my iPad way more than my laptop and it was next to impossible to do from the iPad.

This morning I decided to scrap that section and start blogging again. I started this post on the iPad and am finishing it on the iPhone!

Oh yeah, the image is of my wife Ruthie from the New Years party we went to. it was edited in an iPhone app called SketchMee.

The site is for a friend, John DeMattia, for the Richardson, TX City Council Elections coming up on May 14th. The site address is: www.johnforrichardson.com and it’s a little six-pager I put together using my “Antares” website framework. The site is called: www.johnforrichardson.com.

John is running because he has witnessed the current city government mismanage funds and get the city into debt by making unwise choices. John wants to get Richardson, TX back on a fiscally sound standing and help the city by serving.

He is a member of an organization called The Richardson Citizens Alliance, which is running a slate of candidates to oppose the Richardson Coalition candidates, some of whom are the incumbents in the race.

Antares is a small framework I have been working on for a while and have finished and put the final touches on. This was the first real test to see just how much time I could save using it as a starting base of code for a site.

It essentially gives me a frame of header, content and footer with all margins, padding, divs, CSS, HTML, SlideShowPro (a flash based slide show software) and Lightbox (image zoom effect where the background grays out) all pre-coded. You just create a certain sized header and footer and add copy and images and the site fills in pretty quickly.

In this case, from start to finish it took 2.25 hours to make the site.

So that’s how we found out (yeah, I know, I’m slow to make a post) that our middle son David Rahmani and his long-time girlfriend Amy Goldman have gotten engaged!

David managed to get Amy to a mountain top near Bolder, Colorado at sunset, got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. She did say yes.

It looks like the wedding will be somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2012.

They are exploring different venues and options. Both Amy and David are both very excited and are really getting into the planning.

All we know for now is that it will be in Colorado and that there will be an engagement party near Austin this month. The plans are coming fast and furious though. David and Ruthie have had zillions of phone calls since the engagement was announced.

More on this as developments occur…

In fall of 2010 I launched the redesign or the Chess website in one of our new templates, which we call Venus. It was coded using Adobe Dreamweaver templates.

Since then, we have started rolling our some new sites using the WordPress MU platform, which is the multi-user version of WordPress.

The UT Dallas Debate website is the first site I have redesigned using WordPress and it just launched this past week. It also uses the Venus template, which first had to be imported into WordPress. It was the first Venus site our team in University Web Services had done so there was a big learning curve getting the template into WordPress in the first place.

It’s not totally like creating a WordPress template from scratch, which I have not attempted, because you are not using any widgets like most templates would use.

It was essentially chopping our already coded template up into the various php files that make up the pieces of a template. It was complicated by the fact that our Dreamweaver templates share CSS and other code from a templates directory on our server and that had to be preserved in case there are changes to the template down the road which will change all sites using Venus.

I think the site worked out pretty well and you cannot tell that the Chess site is static HTML and the Debate site is WordPress.

Has anyone else tried to do this with their different sites and what was your experience?

It’s called Audiogalaxy and lets you stream your music library from your computer to your iOS or Android device. It works over WiFi or 3G service.

When you sign up, you download a small helper file to the computer where your music is, in my case my iTunes music library with almost 7000 songs on my iMac at home. That’s where my master music collection resides. It works on both PC and Mac.

Once you have your free account, you can login to Audiogalaxy in your browser (works on most browsers) and it will start scanning your music in. Go have a cup of coffee and surf the web as this will take a while.

After the music is scanned in, the fun begins. You can play your music from the browser on any computer that you have logged into Audiogalaxy with. You can now also stream your music from your mobile device using the free Audiogalaxy app you download. Your computer with the music must be on and not in sleep mode for it to work.

I tried this at my job at UT Dallas, where they have a robust firewall and it worked great all over campus switching from 3G to WiFi as I went on my daily walk across campus with my headphones on. I never lost the streaming signal.

When you open the iPhone app, you get lots of choices of how to view your library. As you scroll through your collection it streams the little album icons if there was one (fast). Here you see it bringing in the last two in this page of albums.

The only thing I see missing is a view by song name, which would be helpful like I get in my iPod app on the phone. You can also save playlists of songs you have listened to in the app.

The Audiogalaxy web site gives all the details of what the service can do better than I can here, so go take a look. See Audiogalaxy in the Apple iTunes App Store and Audiogalaxy in the Android Market.

Yes, Audiogalaxy was a file sharing service back in the early 2000′s, which was shut down. It has been resurrected by three UT Austin former students, two of whom, worked on the original file sharing site.

Is there a reason not to download and try out this free app? I can’t think of one.

It’s driving me crazy. I already have Gmail and UT Dallas email accounts to keep up with and that alone is almost a full-time job.

I have noticed that I have mysteriously been signed up for email newsletter accounts right and left for obscure companies and big corporations and I have been spending way too much time weekly clicking on the unsubscribe link to get out of them.

So during the last two weeks, when my wife Ruthie was on a road trip with her parents to Florida, I helped them out by scouring the internet looking for good deals on hotels for cities they were almost in so they would not have to mess with it on the road. That worked out pretty good except for one time where I made it for the wrong city.

With most of the reservations I made, I asked them to email a confirmation to Ruthie so she would have the info on her iPhone at checkin. In a few cases I gave them my Gmail email for the confirmation.

Well, at one La Quinta I gave them my Gmail, but I did not get a confirmation email. I wound up calling the guy back twice more to find out why it did not come, each time I spelled out carefully the email address and he confirmed it. Nope, never did get a confirmation email from him.

It was frustrating and I finally gave up, content just scribbling down the number.

I think you see what’s coming…A few days ago I got this lovely email newsletter from La Quinta. One that I never signed up for. Odd how they have the right email for the newletter, but could not get me an email confirmation of my reservation.

I’d be curious to hear if anyone else is experiencing these phantom newsletter signups besides me? Please comment if you have any experience with this.

I wanted to see if the app would be good at actually showing the snow falling. I had taken a shot last week in the snow with the app and knew it could do it, but I wanted to expand upon the idea and match the iPhone 4 app against my Canon T1i DSLR camera to see which one did a better job with the shot.

So I set up the Canon on a tripod and framed a shot shooting through our front window out into the street. I tried to match the shot view as best I could with the iPhone. I took a number of shots with the Canon, shooting at different shutter speed/aperture combinations trying to get a slow enough shutter speed to capture the snow and sleet falling.

My results amazed me! I was using a Canon Ultrasonic 28-105mm 3.5-4.5 lens which gave me an f22 at the 28mm end. The shots I am showing were taken at 28mm f22 at 1/15th sec. exposure time (second shot) and 28mm f22 at 0.4 sec. exposure time (third shot). The iPhone 4 shot is at the top.

The iPhone 4 shot was the only one that really shows the snow and sleet falling. I just could not get any action out of the Canon DSLR in this situation. At 1/15th of a second, the DSLR had totally washed out the shot and obviously I needed at least a 3 second or longer shutter speed to capture the falling stuff.

The iPhone 4 handled it very easily giving me a shutter speed of 15 seconds at a sensitivity level in the app of 1. This was the best combo of settings I tested for the app. The actual size of the photo it gave me was 1936 x 2592 pixels, which is a good size, but not as large as the raw from the Canon, which was 4572 x 3162 pixels. I cropped them all down to the same pixel size and tried to keep the shot parameters the same. You can also click on these three shots to see a larger version of each.

Oh, and I did not use a tripod with the iPhone 4, I simply held it flush up against the window and held it steady through the 15 second exposure.

I will have to play around with this app some more using light trails and other experiments. You can take a look at the app on the Cogitap Software website where it goes into much more detail about the settings available and features. There is a link on the site directly to the iTunes store where you can read reviews as well or purchase the app.

For a buck this is a great steal of a photo app. If anyone else has tried this app I would love to hear about what you have tried to do with it.

My employer, UT Dallas has closed the campus Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday so I have been home for days. In these three days I have ventured out only three times from the house. Once to drop Ruthie off at her parents house so they could slide out of Dallas on the way to Florida, once to take my son Jon Jon and my mom to lunch and once to go to the grocery store for supplies.

It has been bitter cold, like 14-18 degrees most of the time. There are sheets of ice everywhere and walking is even more dangerous than driving (at least I think so).

The only ones that seem to be enjoying running around outside and that don’t really come zipping back in two minutes after going out – yup, it our two doggies, Allie and Tasha. They have been enjoying frolicking around in the backyard on the crunchy ice. Hey, at least it’s not muddy so we don’t have to clean up after them when they get back into the house.

Any fun ice/snow stories you would like to share? I know Dallas is on the trail end of this massive storm system that has gripped much of the nation, and it would be neat to hear from people in other parts of the country.