1. Open Office
2. Notepad++
3. Coffee Cup
4. Core
5. 7-Zip
6. GIMP
7. IrfanView
8. ColorPic
9. Audacity
10. Skype

Open Office is an office suite paralleling Microsoft Office, but offering  mathematics, drawing, and data base programs besides.  Open Office is cross-platform, meaning that it comes in ready-to-install downloads for several operating systems:  Windows, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX.  Mac users running X-Windows (installed from a Mac system disk) can also install Open Office. Linux users will find Open Office in most Linux distributions.  Open Office reads several file formats produced by Microsoft Office–Word, Excel, and Power Point–and saves to these formats too, so it provides an absolutely free way to exchange files with Microsoft Office users.  Google Apps, which operate by a Web connection, offer a similar array of free programs, but if you have a slow internet connection you may prefer Open Office, which can be used offline.

Notepad ++ is a feature-rich substitute for Notepad, the simple text editor installed on all Windows computers.  For typing notes or first-drafts quickly a nimble program like Notepadd++ is handier than launching a full-featured word processor.  Notepad++ is just as quick as Notepad, but will provide you many more useful features, such as a host of search functions.  Among the free Notepad++ plugins I particularly like Webedit, which lets you apply HTML code to highlighted portions of text, like the much coveted Macintosh text editor, Bbedit.

Speaking of editing HTML, if you want a free what-you-see-is-what-you-get HTML editor, Coffee Cup is hard to beat.  When Coffee Cup launches new users are presented with tips and a welcome screen that make learning your way around a lot easier.  The user interface is well designed to make the coding and deployment of web pages very easy.  Coffee Cup is not just a page editor but also a web site maintenance tool.  It has a built-in FTP (file transfer protocol) program for uploading files, and bookmarking for managing several sites at a time.

Even if you use a web page editor with built-in FTP it’s a good idea to have a stand alone FTP application to back up your whole web site, or upgrade lots of files when a new version of your content management system comes out, such as Drupal or WordPress.  If you run Windows, try the free FTP program called Core.  You can configure several sites and bookmark them with stored passwords so that connecting to any is a snap.  Core runs regular FTP or safe FTP (SFTP), which is preferred for security.  If you want to save time editing files on your server, Core allows you to edit them in place, so you don’t have to download them first, edit them, and then upload them again. 

Another great free application for handling transmitted files is 7-Zip. It will extract the files of 24 different compression formats, and archive files using five formats:  7-Zip, Zip (the standard Windows archiving format), Gzip, Bzip2, and Tar. Windows users may wonder why they would ever need to do anything other than zip or unzip folders.  Well, the more you develop an appetite for open source software the more you will encounter downloads from geeks who don’t rely solely on the Windows operating system. Such folk tend to use formats other than Zip to package their offerings. Get 7-Zip so you can unwrap your presents!

So far I’ve covered text editors and file transmission and archiving apps.  Next, let’s take a look at some graphics apps.

I’m a fan of Adobe’s Photoshop, the high-end editing standard for serious photographers.  However, if you don’t have several hundred dollars to lay out, try GIMP (the Gnu Image Manipulation Program) instead.  It will do many of the things Photoshop can but won’t cost you a penny.  GIMP was first released to the public in 1996, so it has gone through nearly a decade and a half of refining by avid open source coders.  There are tons of GIMP tutorials on the internet.  Like PS it’s a complicated application, but there are lots of experienced users out there who have written help files for newbies.  Although GIMP was coded first for GNU operating systems, by now it is cross-platform.  Windows users go here for downloads and instructions for installing GIMP on Windows .

The more photos you take, the more you will need good tools for sorting and cataloguing them, so that you can organize and retrieve them readily.  I can’t say enough good things about IrfanView, a snappy viewing app that does so many other useful things!  To learn more about this very popular application, see my CyberKen posts on how to use IrfanView for sorting and tagging your photos, and how to use Irfanview with Flickr.com and Bulkr to catalogue your photo collection.

Another very useful graphics app is ColorPic, which gives you the hexadecimal code of the color over which your cursor is hovering.  Say you want to design a web page that repeats a color from another page.  How to do that?  Well, you could work with both pages side by side and try matching the colors by eye.  Or, with ColorPic you could grab the hexadecimal code of the color you want to replicate, and then plug that code into the page you’re building to get an exact match. Now which method would you choose?

When you begin to make videos you’ll probably not bother much with the sound track.  You’ll just use the sounds that come with your video clips, and perhaps add a music track underneath.  But to gain more control over your video sound, or to edit tracks for podcasts, try Audacity.  It offers unlimited tracks, and many special effects. In one of my early sound experiments I pieced together recorded bird calls and water gurgling to simulate a walk through a local wooded park.  I achieved this aural illusion with Audacity.  Quite satisfactory!

My final app of my favorite ten, but by no means my least favorite one, is Skype, an audio and video conferencing tool that lets me visit with far flung family for as long as I want, for free!  In 1970 when I called my wife in the states by a satellite connection from Vietnam I thought that was a miracle!  Today I VIDEO chat with one son in London and another in L.A. at no cost whatsoever, and think nothing of it.  Well, not really.  I still think it’s a miracle, and an economic as well as technological one.  These days I’m using Skype for small business meetings online.  The audio connections are almost always reliable, and the video ones are getting better and better.  Skype has inexpensive features called Skype-out, by which you can call land lines and cell phones, and Skype-in, which permits anyone to call you while you’re at your computer, or leave a voice mail if you’re not.  That message triggers an email notice which lets you know you have a message waiting.  Skype-in is a very cheap business phone solution, cheaper than any other I know of.

So, those are my ten favorite free apps.  There are several others I like, but telling about them will have to wait for another post.  Please leave a comment about free apps that you recommend.

• quick to launch and quick to display photos
• reads Raw files
• edits IPTC information
• offers basic photo editing tools, plus special effects and borders
• creates .ico (favicon) files
• handles batch operations
• exports photos by ftp and email

This post explains step-by-step how I use Irfanview in my photo processing.  If you would like to follow along, download Irfanview and make sure to install the plugin package, because you will need that for IPTC editing.  Although IrfanView performs many photo editing functions, you may want to use another photo editor instead.  To set up that external editor to work in conjunction with IrfanView, in the IrfanView "Options" menu, select "Miscellaneous" and then under the "Set external editors" section, put the path to your chosen graphic editing application, (for example, Photoshop) in the #1 window, by navigating to that application with the "browser" button.

Briefly, these are the steps in my photo processing procedure, using IrfanView:

1. Download pictures from my camera to a folder on my computer, then, disconnect the camera.
2. With Irfanview, view each picture and delete the ones I don’t want to keep.
3. Edit the keepers, either with IrfanView or an external editor.
4. Write IPTC information to the photos using IrfanView.
5. Export the photos for safe keeping to an external hard disk or a web server.

Now that you’ve had a preview of the major steps, here are the details:

1.  Download pictures from your camera to a folder on your computer, then, disconnect the camera:

IrfanView works on the photos in a particular folder, which you designate.  Make sure that you do not choose the folder on the camera, because when you delete photos IrfanView would in that case delete your original photos on the camera. Instead, set up a working folder on your computer. Here’s how I do that:  Create a new folder to receive the photos from your camera.  Name it and place it wherever you choose.  In the Pictures library is a good place.  Then, click on “Computer” in the Start menu, and in the window that opens find the folder of your camera.  It will probably bear a short name for your camera.  Double click on that folder icon, and then double click on the DCIM folder (stands for “Digital Camera Images”).  There may be one more folder below that to open.  Finally, you will see the icons for all the pictures on the camera.  Hold down the control key and press the "A" key, which selects all those photos.  Drag and drop the whole lot into the new folder you created.  Now you have a full working folder for your photo processing.  Disconnect your camera to safeguard your original photos.

2.  With IrfanView, view each picture and delete the ones you don’t want to keep.

Open Irfanview.  Click on the icon of the yellow folder in the top left corner of IrfanView’s window.  This opens a file browser.  Navigate in that browser until you reach the working folder you created.  Click on that folder to highlight it and then click on the "open" button.

Now you will be looking at thumbnail images of all the photos in the folder.  Double click on the first icon (top, left in the window). You are now looking at the full view of the first picture in the folder.  If you choose to keep this photo, edit it (e.g., crop, sharpen, color or exposure correct it, etc.) using either IrfanView’s editing commands under the "Image" menu, or by opening the photo in the external editor you designated in the options>miscellaneous>set external editor step.  You can most easily open that external editor by holding down the shift key and pressing the "E" key.

When you have finished editing your keeper photo, save it (in its current place, not another folder) and then proceed to viewing the next photo in the working folder by pressing the right arrow on your keyboard or by clicking on the right arrow at the top of the Irfanview window.

If you do not want to keep a photo you are viewing, press the delete key on your keyboard, or click on the "x" at the top of the IrfanView window.  Note:  When you delete a photo it will not disappear in the full view unless you have tweaked a setting in the options menu. Here’s the tweak:  Under “Options” select Properties/Settings and then File Handling.  In the File Handling window check the little box beside the words “Jump to the next file after deleting/moving”.  Then click the “OK” button to save that setting.

When you have finished viewing the last photo in the folder and try to view the next one, IrfanView notifies you that you have reached the end of the folder and asks whether you want to work in another folder.  Choose instead "use current folder".  This will return you to the view of the first photo in your working folder.

3.  Write IPTC information to your keeper photos, using IrfanView.

At this point, you are looking at the full-window view of the first photo in your working folder.  Now, press the "T" key.  This brings up a new window showing thumbnails of all the photos in the folder.

You are now ready to write IPTC information to a batch of photos in your working folder. Entering IPTC information is tedious, but very worthwhile.  It will help press agencies find your photos, and it will enter valuable tags into the meta-data of your photo files, so that they will retain that information.  This insures that the tags will be visible for searches on your local computer and on whatever hosting server is equipped with search capabilities.

To save time in IPTC editing, write to a whole batch of photos at once.  Here’s how to do that:

When you are looking at the thumbnails of your photos, select a continuous series of them by clicking on the first thumbnail in the series, holding down the Shift key, and then clicking on the last thumbnail in the series.  Or, to select a discontinuous batch, hold down the Control key and then click on the thumbnails you want included in the batch.

Now that you have selected the thumbnails for a batch operation, right click on any thumbnail in the batch and then select "JPG lossless operations" and then "Set IPTC data to selected files".  This opens the IPTC editor.  You may want to fill in copyright information to protect the photographer’s rights.  If you fill in the caption window and upload the photo later to a photo sharing site, like Flickr, that caption will show as a title for the photo.  Fill in the headline window if you want to suggest to a press agency a title for an article that would accompany the photo.

To tag the photo click on the "Tags" tab in the IPTC editor.  Enter a tag and then press the "Enter" button.  Enter another tag on that new line, then press the "Enter" button.  Keep entering new tags, each on its own line.  Do not include multiple words within quotes.  Do not separate tags by commas or semicolons.  The Enter button is the way IrfanView separates tags.  Any words entered on a given line will be recognized as belonging together.

Continue to enter IPTC information using the tabs in the editor.  Of these remaining tabs, for your purposes you may need to use only the "Origin" tab. You will probably want to indicate where the photo was taken.  If your camera reports GPS, you might want to enter the GPS coordinates in the "sublocation" window under the "Origin" tab.

When you have finished entering all the IPTC info you desire, click on the "Write" button.  This will save your IPTC entries to all the files which were included in your batch.

Next you may wish to write IPTC information to a particular photo instead of a batch.  For instance, maybe may you want to enter a tag for a person who appears in one photo, but no others.  To write IPTC information to a particular photo, open that photo in the full view mode and under the "Image" menu select "Information" and then click on the "IPTC info" button.  This opens the IPTC editor to operate on just that one photo.  When you have finished your IPTC entries, click on the "Write" button.  This writes to just that particular photo.

4.  Export the photos for safe keeping to an external hard disk or a web server.

Now that you have perfected your keeper shots and tagged them with IPTC information they are ready for storage.  I upload mine to Flickr, where I can continue to catalogue them by using Flickr’s many collection and set organization tools.  When you upload photos already tagged with IPTC information to Flickr, Flickr retains that information.  An IPTC headline becomes a Flickr photo title.  An IPTC caption becomes a Flickr photo description.  IPTC tags become Flickr tags.  Very handy!

If you want to FTP your photos to a web server, in the thumbnails view select the photos you wish to send, right click on any thumbnail in the batch, select "Transfer selected files by FTP" and then fill in the FTP information to complete the connection.  You can email one photo or a batch by again selecting the batch in thumbnails view and then right clicking by any photo in the batch and selecting "send selected files by email."  If you use a web-based email service, like Gmail, this command will not work without some tinkering.  It requires a designated email application on your computer.

In closing, a note to Photoshop users:  You may wonder why I didn’t write about how to edit IPTC information using Photoshop, or Photoshop’s sub-program, Bridge.  I didn’t because I tend to report on free programs, and Photoshop is costly!  Also, I find that for viewing and sorting photos IrfanView is faster than Photoshop.  I love Photoshop for photo adjustments, but IrfanView has become my favorite program for viewing, sorting, and tagging.

And, a final note to IrfanView newbies:  Do learn the keyboard commands.  They make a fast application even faster to use!

Before I review O’Keefe’s book, however, let me explain what he means by "online forums." My introduction to online discussion was through the multi-denominational Christian online community, Ecunet. In the late 80s I connected by a very slow modem and dial-up connection to that quickly growing community of Christians who had already organized themselves into hundreds of discussion groups. This was before the advent of the World Wide Web, before sharing pictures and videos and podcasts. It was even before email was widely used. Participating in Ecunet went like this: One dialed in and downloaded all the comments in groups to which one had subscribed. One then disconnected and replied offline to a recent post or started a new thread for discussion. One then reconnected to synch one’s offline contributions to the server’s data. The slow pace of this protocol made for more thoughtful posts than one finds in many internet conversations these days.

Short and casual messages certainly do have their place, as is evidenced by the popularity of Twitter and Facebook. However, for people seeking a deeper and more meaningful conversation, a well managed and moderated forum is likely to be more satisfying. Although telecommunication has beome more techologically glitzy in recent years, there is still a demand for thoughtful composition.

That’s where online forums come in, or as O’Keefe calls them, online communities. He is writing about the offspring of the early bulletin boards, such as Ecunet. There are other forms of online textual conversation, such as UseNet groups, chat rooms, and listservs. How do these differ from forums? Usenet groups are generally not moderated, which can can make for wild and unruly, sometimes even cruel conversation. Chat rooms are for real-time text talk. The logical train of chat room chatter is sometimes hard to follow because of the varying keyboard skills of the participants. Listservs, or email discussion groups, bear most resemblance to forums. They are usually moderated, and the posts can be archived, as in forums. But, an active listserv can clog one’s email inbox, which forums do not do. One has to go to a forums web site to participate in the discussion.

As I see it here are the advantages of forums for online textual conversation:

• Forum administration software is more intricately configurable than other online discussion tools. This gives the managers and moderators of forums the ability to monitor and enforce the guidelines of the discussions.
• Given these more intricate managing tools, forums provide a better means for reaching out to the public and attracting newcomers. Listservs have many of the characteristics of forums, but listservs often consist of people who already know each other. Forums, on the other hand, are designed deliberately to invite strangers into the conversation.
• Because forums grew out of early online bulletin boards which were moderated, forums these days continue to attract users who expect a moderated discussion. Provided the moderators have been well trained, this makes for conversation that stays on topic and remains respectful.
• Forum management software provides an easy means to begin a new topic of discussion when the train of thought in a given conversation seems to demand it. If a listserv discussion reaches this point, a completely new listserv is required, and there is no way to link the posts of the new listserv to the prior one. With a forum, however, the branches in conversation are readily apparent in the interface, and users can explore the history of conversation at any point by clicking on the appropriate branch. Forum management software thus lends itself to a community whose conversations are evolving, allowing the community to delve into new topics while still preserving every word of their prior conversations.
• Forums do not clog your inbox.

O.K. now that you have an idea of what forums are, let me recommend to you Patrick O’Keepe’s book on how to organize and manage them. This book is a must read for anyone who is considering launching an online forums web site. The author covers the following topics:

• Laying the groundwork, by deciding what your forums will cover, whom they will serve, and how they will be financed. (Yes, even with free software, there are still costs to maintaining an online community.)
• Choosing software, registering a domain, acquiring a look to brand your community.
• Developing guidelines for user behavior in your community.
• How to promote your online community so that it grows in membership.
• How to manage your staff (consisting mostly of the moderators of various forum topics).
• Banning misbehaving users and dealing with occasional chaos.
• How to create a good climate for discussion.
• Tips for keeping the discussions interesting. How to make money with your online community.

You will not find in O’Keefe’s book a step-by-step manual for configuring forum software, but you will find cogently expressed advice from a seasoned forums manager about how to weather the storms of managing public discussions. Having read O’Keefe’s book, I have decided to put my toe in the water only, by running some private discussions first, so that I can get used to the software (I intend to use phpBB, a free, open source bulletin board management software.) Then, after I feel comfortable with managing the permissions I’ll be ready to manage public forums. Being able to reach out to strangers appeals to me. That’s a primary benefit of the internet, after all. But, doing so in a way that protects participants in the community from abuse is also of great concern to me. Much of O’Keefe’s book deals with that challenge. I highly recommend it to you.

Here are step-by-step instructions for setting all this up:

1.  If you haven’t already done so, register with Google.com and open your free Gmail account.  When you open your Gmail account you will be looking at your Gmail inbox.  Bookmark this page in your browser because you will need to return to it later in these instructions.

2.  Go to the administrative control page for one of your existing email accounts.  If you get your internet connection through Verizon or Comcast, you or a family member are likely the administrator for that account, so you will already have the login information.  Login, and then go to the email settings, and in those settings look for the link that permits you to edit the "forward to" setting.  Enter your Gmail address in the "forward to" window.  Then, save that setting.

In the case of some email addresses, you may not have administrator access to your email settings.  For instance, if you have a university email address, or a business email address, the administrator of your email settings is likely to be a university or business colleague.  Find out who this is, and ask him/her to enter your Gmail address into the forward to window of the email settings and then save that setting.

3.  When steps 1 and 2 are accomplished you should start noticing email from your other addresses showing up in your Gmail inbox.  So, now you can read all your email in one place, but what about sending from Gmail so that you can choose your sending-from address?  Follow the remaining steps to achieve this.

4.  Go back to your Gmail inbox, the page you bookmarked in step 1. 
5.  Click on the "settings" link in the top right corner.
6.  Click on the "send mail from another address" button (second section down from the top).  You are about to set up a sending-from address in your Gmail controls, so that you can compose a message in Gmail but have it appear to the recipient as if it were sent from another of your email addresses (besides your Gmail one).
7.  In the window that appears, type your name as you want it to appear in messages from that other address, and the email address you are now configuring.
8.  Click on the "Send through Gmail" button, and then, the "next step" button.
9.  Click on the "Send verification" button.  When you do this you will receive, almost immediately, an email message in your Gmail inbox that will contain a link to verify and configure this setting.  Click on that link in the email message. 
10.  In your Gmail inbox window, click on the "Compose mail" button (top left).  This will bring up a compose message window.  At the top of that window you will see a "From" window, with a little black triangle to the right.  Your Gmail address will appear by default in this window, but if you click on the little black triangle you can access other email addresses which you have set up, following steps 4-9 of these instructions.  In the drop-down menu click the address you want to send from and compose your message.  When you have finished composing your message and click on the send button your email will go out with the sending address you chose.

Voila, you have configured Gmail to be your one-stop reading and sending-from site.

What’s cataloguing?  Organizing and labeling photos for safe keeping and easy retrieval.  Let’s say  you have a couple thousand photos and you have a vague recollection of one that you took a few years ago which showed a certain person or scene.  Now you want to lay hands on it.  But how to find it in that huge collection?  Well, if you didn’t label, or as the accepted lingo goes, tag that photo with some key words, your search will be difficult.  However, if you took the trouble to tag the photo, or at least put it in a folder with other photos of like kind, then your search will be much easier.  Cataloguing software does the tagging and grouping. There are some terrific cataloguing programs on the market, perhaps the best known, Adobe’s Lightroom.  But, as you may have already discovered, these programs cost a lot, often a couple hundred dollars or more.

Here’s a much cheaper way to get the job done:  Get a $25/yr. account at Flickr.com, download and install the free photo viewer, IrfanView, and finally, download and install the free Flickr backup program, Bulkr.  Here’s how these three tools can be used together to create backup for your entire photo collection and a speedy retrieval system for particular photos:

1. Tag each of your photos with IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council)information, using IrfanView, an open source program written by the brilliant and generous young Austrian, Irfan Skiljan, pictured at the right.
2. Upload your photos to Flickr.com.
3. Back up your Flickr.com collection by running Bulkr, which downloads your Flickr pictures to your local computer (or better for protection against a disk crash, an external hard disk attached to your computer).

That’s all there is to it!  Why did I recommend these particular tools?

• IrfanView is free, very speedy, easy to use, opens even RAW photos, reads and writes to numerous graphic formats, and most importantly for the purpose of cataloguing, reads and writes IPTC information.
• Flickr is a huge photographers’ social network with numerous organizing and sharing tools.  An annual membership entitles you to unlimited uploads, and a file size limit of 10 MB–very generous indeed! Because Flickr is one of the older photo social networks there are many free third party applications and plugins to use in conjunction with it;  to whit:
• Bulkr, a fast, free synchronization program to clone your Flickr photo stream.  Flickr has many security measures in place to protect your treasure of photos "in the cloud."  However, should the Flickr server fail and erase your treasure, it’s nice to have a second copy on your own local disk.

You will find that when you enter IPTC information into photos and upload them to Flickr the tags are retained as Flickr tags and the captions are retained as Flickr image titles.  Therefore, labeling and grouping tasks are largely accomplished as soon as you upload.  You can, of course, add whatever other tags you may wish at the Flickr interface.  But remember that the only information which sticks with photos is the IPTC data. If you tag photos other than by the IPTC method and then you move your photos off the server where you tagged them, the information will almost certainly be lost.  That’s good reason to get in the habit of entering IPTC data routinely as you process your images.

Finally, you will want to know just how to use IrfanView for editing  IPTC data.  Here are the specifics:

1. Make sure you have installed the plugin package for IrfanView.
2. Open a .jpeg image with IrfanView.
3. Under the Image menu, click on the IPTC info button.
4. Enter information in whatever fields you wish, but be sure to fill in the caption and keywords windows.
5. When you have finished entering information, click on the "Write" button.  This records the information in the metadata level of the file.
   Upload your image.

Now, you may be thinking:  Yikes, do I have to go through this process for every single photo I upload?  No!  You can write IPTC information for a whole batch of .jpeg files at once.  Here’s how:

1. Press the "t" key when you are in a folder of .jpeg files.  This will bring up thumbnail images of all the .jpegs in that folder. 
2. Highlight all the thumbnails of the images you want to edit for IPTC info.
3. Then, right click on one of the highlighted thumbnails, and then in the drop-down menu which appears select "JPG lossless operations", and finally, "Set IPTC data to selected files."  This brings up the same set of tabs that you viewed before. But this time when you click on the Write button you will write the information to every one of the highlighted images.  If later you want to add more tags to a single photo you can do that by going to the Image>information menu as previously explained.

Movie Maker is part of Microsoft’s free suite of programs called Essentials.  When you download the Essentials suite you can choose which programs you want to install.  Check Movie Maker to install it. 

After installing Movie Maker, download all the clips and pictures from your camera and place them in one folder.  This will be your Movie Maker project folder.  Do not move this folder to another location on your computer once it has been stocked with resources, because Movie Maker makes a map to where those resources are located, and if you move the folder Movie Maker won’t know where to find them.

Next, in Movie Maker’s home window, arrange the clips and still images in an order that best tells your story.  Video clips often have speech.  You may want to incorporate that speech in your story line, as I used the students’ self-introductions in my movie.  Your still images, of course, will not have a narration track yet.  Don’t worry about that yet.  Concentrate on the arrangement of visuals.  After you have arranged the clips and images in an order that suits your story, trim the undesirable portions from each clip and set the number of seconds you want each still image to play, imagining the words that you will speak to accompany each image.  Next, save your project and play it back.  Make sure that visually it tells the story that you want to tell, and also, that the tempo of the still images fits the narration that you have in mind.

Next, set up a program to record your narration.  For this step you will need a microphone of some kind, and a recording program that produces mp3 files.  A digital field recorder is very handy, but not required.  Test your setup to make sure that your microphone’s volume is set high enough to record clearly.  Play back what you have recorded to confirm that you have a good volume. 

Now, here comes the crucial step:  Get ready to start your recording with a click of your mouse or a push of a button.  Set the cursor of your movie project at the very beginning of Movie Maker’s time line, and click it to play the movie.  As the movie plays, speak into the microphone the words which you to want say pertaining to each image. When the movie stops, stop recording.  Save your recording as an mp3 file.  You may need to trim off empty space at the beginning and/or end of the recording if you did not start or stop the recording precisely.  You can do this with Audacity, a free sound editor.  When you have completed this step you will have input for the audio track that will accompany the still image portion of your movie.

Next you will plug this input into the movie.  Here’s how:   Open the Movie Maker home window.  Click at the point in your story line where your first still image appears (the one that begins the series of stills which you have narrated).  Next, click on the "add music" icon at the top left of the Movie Maker home window, and select "add music at the current point."  This will plug in your narration at precisely the right point to coordinate with the slides portion of your movie. Note:  Movie Maker doesn’t care that you are adding words instead of music.  The "add music" button is for adding sound of any kind.  

Now go to the top and far left portion of the Movie Maker home window and in the pull down menu there select "save project."  Play your project back to make sure you have achieved the desired result.  If so, select "publish movie". 

As a photographer I like using stills in my movies to tell a story.  To clue the viewer in on who is telling my slides story I have found it’s artful to start my movie with video clips (motion pictures) so that the viewer connects a voice with a face.  That way, when I cut away to the stills portion of my movie, the viewer remembers the voice and knows who is telling the story. Ending a movie with more video, as I did in the movie of this post, is a pleasing symmetrical way to structure the work, but not absolutely necessary.

Teleconferencing is an obvious remedy, but what kind of teleconferencing?  Our presbytery stretches over Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  Not all residents in that region have access to broadband, so certain high tech solutions are ruled out from the outset.  And then, there is the average user’s skill level to consider, which is not very high.  Many of our members are seniors, whose familiarity with computers lags behind that of younger people.  We didn’t want a solution that would require installing new software, or fiddling with hardware settings either.  We wanted a solution that would be within the reach of our average user, who may already have taken part in a telephone conference call, and who has a rudimentary competency viewing Web pages with a browser.

We settled on conducting Web conferences by using Google Docs so that the participants can view static but editable visuals in the form of Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, published to Web pages.  And, instead of paying for a telephone company to set up our audio conferences, we decided to use one of the many low cost internet conferencing services, FreeConference.com, where you set up the meeting yourself.

Why FreeConference.com?  Well, in part because they are used by even large companies to save money, and we figured the big players must know a good deal when they see one.  And also because FreeConference.com offers a FaceBook plug-in that makes it really easy to arrange a conference call.  Many of our members are already on FaceBook, so that was a resource that didn’t require more learning.

FreeConference.com conferences are not totally free, of course.  The “free” applies just to the lack of an administrative charge.  Each caller pays his or her long distance phone rates for the connection, which can be made by land line, cell phone, or a VOIP device, in which latter case the connection may indeed be free.  Although smaller groups in our presbytery (with ten or so members) have used Skype (a VOIP service) for audio conferencing quite satisfactorily, we decided not to prescribe Skype as a solution for the whole presbytery because:

• Using Skype still requires learning some skills which our average user might not have the patience or courage to acquire.
• Some of our members have PC’s or connections not up to handling even audio connections on Skype let alone video ones.

Therefore, we settled for a combination of an old, familiar technology, the telephone, paired with a modern but not-too-demanding one, the internet, for viewing and editing static pages, which even dial-up users can manage.

And, for the member who has no computer, or who is computer-phobic, he or she can still participate in the telephone conference, though the Web conferencing feature of editing conference documents in real time will not be available, because he or she must rely on paper visuals received beforehand via the mail.

All in all this combination of Google Docs and FreeConference.com seems a good practical solution to a not-just-technical challenge.  I’ll let you know after some field testing how it’s working out for us.

Here are five steps for setting up your first Web Conference using this combo:

1.  Have everyone who will meet register with Google.com.  You will use a free feature of Google membership, Google Docs, to share visuals for the meeting, such as Word documents and spreadsheets.  If you do not have a computer, that’s O.K. The convener can send you paper documents for the meeting by mail.  You won’t be able to edit these visuals as the meeting progresses, but at least you will have something in front of you as you follow along.

2.  Have the convener open a a free account at http://www.freeconference.com and follow the instructions there for inviting attenders to call a designated telephone number at an agreed-upon time, and then enter the conference by touch-tone dialing a given code, which the convener will convey ahead of time by email or telephone. A nice feature of FreeConference.com is that it offers a FaceBook plug-in, which makes inviting members to a meeting very easy.  However, one doesn’t need to belong to Facebook to participate in a FreeConference.com conference.  Also, please note:  Attenders can use any manner of telephone connection:  land line, cell phone, or an internet phone connection such as Skype.  There are no administrative charges for FreeConference.com conference calls.  Connection charges are paid by each attender, at whatever long distance rates he/she customarily pays. Using a landline–these days perhaps the most expensive long distance connection–my customary expense is still only $6.00 for a one hour meeting.

3.  The convener will prepare ahead of time whatever visuals will be needed for the meeting.  He/she will place these documents in his/her Google Docs library, and under the “share” link, will then publish each one to the Web.

4.  In his/her Google Docs section, accessible from a top link in on the Gmail Inbox page, the convener will give permission ahead of time for each attender to edit the documents to be shared.  Permissions are set in Google Docs by clicking the “Share” button at the top right corner, then selecting “Sharing permissions”.

5.  The convener will make a list of all the urls (Web addresses) of these documents, and will send out to all attenders an agenda in which links to these urls appear.  During the meeting attenders will be able to see any document by clicking on its link in that email note.  Having been given permission to edit, attenders will be able to make changes to any of the meeting documents. All can see these changes immediately by clicking on the refresh button of their Web browsers.  (Note:  The convener should courteously “control traffic” so that only one attender edits at a time.  The Web software will get confused if two attenders try to edit simultaneously.)

Web-Empower Your Church shines in two respects:

• It explains in plain English the technological tools and techniques which your organization will need to master in order to use the Internet to its greatest advantage.
• It wisely observes that the chief challenges to designing and maintaining an excellent web site are not technological ones, but rather, organizational.  In other words, the hardest task for your organization will be organizing and training the people who will not only edit your website, but most importantly, provide continuing fresh content.  Stephenson’s book offers many tips about how to recruit and train Web teams for these tasks.

Web-Empower Your Church comes with a CD containing a free, open source website design and maintenance software package, Typo3.  Typo3 is one choice among numerous CMS (content management system) tools, each of which have advantages and disadvantages.  In terms of the learning required to use the software capably, Typo3 ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack.  Developed in Denmark, it enjoys a large user base in Europe, mostly for commercial sites.  Its adoption by churches has expanded that user base considerably.  A large user base is an important factor when selecting a free CMS, because you want a product that will continue to be perfected; and also, the more users there are, the more readily you will find help online.

This author highly recommends Web-Empower Your Church as an Internet primer.  It will stimulate your organization’s imagination and bolster its confidence to use the Web in ways it most likely had never before considered.

Out of the corner of my eye (the one aware of action outside the finder as I peer through my rangefinder camera’s viewing window) I see my grandson about to leap across the gap.  I have already figured I’ll need a 1/1000 second shutter speed to capture the leap with clarity.  I’ve set my camera for the right aperture at that speed.  I start pressing the shutter button as I sense he is going through with it.  Got him!  Right in mid air.   Not so much because I had extraordinary reaction time, but because I planned the whole thing as I saw the event unfolding.

Another example:  In the woods I see a leaning tree, a sinuous path, an inviting composition. All it lacks is a walker, a rivet for the eye.  I focus on the point in the sunshine where I want him to pass, and I wait patiently for a walker to make his way to me through the woods and down the path ahead.  Eventually he arrives, and when he steps into the right spot I gently depress the shutter.

Third example, one that took more than a year of anticipating:  I see how nicely the classical church spire compliments the modern sky scraper.  But my vision for the composition requires a dramatic sky, and just the right light.  I wait for those conditions to arrive, but I have many months to wait.  Then, on a windy Spring morning the sky and the light arrive and I am ready.  Clever to have captured just the right moment?  No– imaginative, and patient.

In doing some Web research today I stumbled upon a new information storing program called Evernote, which enables you to quickly store text highlights, PDF files, picture files, and whole web pages, and sync these stored bits of information in your own account at the Evernote server, which can be accessed on the Internet from any computer. 

To make all this work you download an Evernote program for your computer from their website.  If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer you can install an Evernote add-on which enables you to select portions of a web page, or entire pages.  Don’t know how Evernote does this, but you can even select and store text bits that are parts of images.  My techie son notes, however, “What I find wacky about Evernote is that you can take pictures of (some) handwriting, and search to locate the words written on that page, but there’s no way to retrieve the text from the note once you’ve found it.  Not nearly as useful as it should be.”

Well, there probably are some improvements to be made, but still, it’s really handy to have a means of storing a broad array of information quickly, and then be able to retrieve the bit you stored a month or two ago by means of a search string (or at least, in most cases).
 
Check out www.evernote.com.