#58 Being green

Last month I blogged on the library ning about a list of green resources that I'd come across on the virtual hosting blog.

As I worked my way thru the (mainly American focused) list I came across one little gem of a program that I blogged about here.

One resource I really, really, did like - I've downloaded it and use it at home all the time - is greenprint.

When you click on print a document you get the normal print screen but with greenprint as the printer.

It then displays the document in a print preview format with what it thinks is unnecessary pages highlighted in red (you know when you're not paying attention and you print something and the last page is just an ad?)

If you want the page printed you just 'unhighlight' it and the document prints in the usual way. You can also remove logos, banner ads etc before printing.

If you don't need a hard copy of a document you can save it as a pdf.

There is a free version of greenprint or a pay version. I use the free version at home and find it quite useful.
It also keeps track of the money you've saved (in ink, paper, energy, terms) by using greenprint to stop printing the extra pages/logos.

If you're the type of person who always looks at print preview before printing then you may not need this but for the rest of us it is useful.

#57. Feeding my addiction - Tastespotting.

Sandy via Jamie warns us not to visit Tastespotting if we are hungry - so true.

Much as recipe sites/blogs/whatever are not my cup of tea (or should that be homemade biscuit), how can you not like a site where the first picture is of homemade marshmallows with 100s & 1000s on top?

I added the widget fairly easily to my blog, the hardest part was finding the widget to add.

I used my standard cookery search terms - corned silverside and chocolate mousse (separately, not together) and found several photographic recipes for each. (and as a result I am now seriously hungry).

I much preferred Tastespotting to I'm cooked (Thing 50) as I like to look at the pretty piccies of the food rather than the video. In fact I've already looked up several recipes that I plan to cook in the future.

I like that the site's not just about the recipes, there are blogs from people, some about food, some about recipes.

#56. Smilebox

I'd downloaded Smilebox a while ago, played around with it a little, and then went back to Picnik.

Whilst I quite liked Smilebox I didn't want to shell out US$5 per month for the added features. (the main added feature I wanted to use was to add my own itunes music to my photos)

It has a lot of useful feaures, especially in the 'paid' version but I think the main thing against using it in a work situation (apart from the $) is that you need to download it.

We are not really able to download stuff onto our computers at work so this limits Smilebox's usability and usefulness.

At home I'm happy with Animoto, picnik, etc for all my photo fancifying needs although some of the design templates in smilebox are really cute...

#55. Slideshare

I first encountered slideshare at the Beyond the Hype conference where one of the presenters mentioned that her presentation was freely available on slideshare.

I checked it out (both the presentation, and the site) and discovered a wealth of relevant (to me) presentations that I could view and/or download.

There are a lot of web 2.0, and library, presentations available there which means that you can almost see it as a sort of defacto way of tailoring a conference (or should that be unconference) to suit your own personal needs or interests.

I found it a useful creative commons site for storing and sharing online presentations.