First is lynda.com. This website has got to be the best for online training. If there is software that you use for creative productions then there is probably a set of video tutorials on the site. The host are experts on their particular software. Some have better delivery than others, but I have always learned a lot from each of them. Sometimes the lessons can be even too in depth. If you are looking for a quick five minute tutorial then this is probably not the place. If you are looking for hours of hands on training then you have found the perfect match. This is a pay service, so you will have to sign up for use. There are different levels for different amounts of money, I wind up paying $25 a month for unlimited access to the online videos.

Next is going to the company websites. Adobe has a great tutorial site with lots of information about their products. Apple also has some good information on their site for Final Cut Studio. Both of these are free resources, but they do not go very deep into their products. If you are looking for official training, both Apple and Adobe have certified training available for a cost. These are done at authorized training centers and you will get a certificate at the end saying that you know your stuff.

Other resources are community websites. Creative Cow has a lot of tutorials that go into detail about how to do a specific effect. They are usually pretty informative if you already know the basics of the application. Ken Stone also has a lot of information about final cut pro and other related material on his site.

Total Training is a website that sells DVDs and has some online training for Adobe and Microsoft products. I used their videos back in the day to learn After Effects. Very good tutorials with a lot of useful information. You will also find good book out there on specific products. Focal Press provides a lot of information in books about film/video making, photography, audio and animation. Their books are used by many people as the go to resource for learning a new skill. They include sample files with their books and also access to their online extras with each book. There are also some free “tips and tools” that you might want to take advantage of.

I also found that I learned a lot when I went to the Chicago Final Cut Pro User Group. If you are lucky, there will be a group near you.

Post your resources if you have other good links.

First, let’s talk about wordpress itself.  WordPress.org is an open source blogging platform that is used by many individuals as well as organizations.  Here are some notable users. It is also the software that I use to power this website, and my personal blog. You can download the software for free and use it on your own servers (or rented space with a hosting company), or you can go to wordpress.com and they will host your blog for free. I prefer the flexibility that I get by hosting my own blogs, but some prefer the ease of use (and cost) of the pre-hosted version.

Once you have wordpress set up, you will want to look for a good theme. Themes are web templates that provide the design of your site. There are thousands of pre-made themes that can be downloaded for free on the wordpress site. I have used many themes for different sites, and usually find something close to what I like. I can then tweak it to get it perfect. All of the software released for wordpress comes under a license that allows you to modify any of the code. This makes it fun if you like getting into the design code. If you just want something simple, you can usually find a pre-made theme that you will make you happy.

After you have the theme picked out, you can then add plugins. There are plugins for almost anything. Some effect the whole blog, some just do stuff beneath the surface, and some just add useful widget to the sidebars of the site. Here is a list of some of the plugins that I am using.

Askimet is the anti-spam plugin that comes with wordpress. I strongly suggest that you activate this as soon as you can. If your blog gets any popularity you will get a ton of spam comments. The next utility plugin that I use is All in One SEO Pack. This plugin get rid of all the redundancy that search engines see in your site, and also lets you easily add keywords to let the search engines know what you are blogging about. Some people try to game the system to get their pages ranked higher in profitable categories. I try to make my keywords descriptive of what I do and hopefully by writing good content people will start using the information.

Next plugin that I use is cforms. If you click on my contact page up above you will see what you can do with this contact form plugin. For a long time I used Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP (also called gbcf) for contacts (for those of you familiar with my unregimented blog you will notice that the plugin programmer also designed the theme that I use). So even though I was more familiar with the other contact form, I thought that I would try the cforms plugin this time. Cforms is more complex, so I wouldn’t recommend it to some one new to setting up a wordpress blog. If you need the more advanced features maybe you can find a friend to set it up for you. Once it is set up you won’t have to mess with it. People will then be able to contact you directly from your site. If you want to contact me, feel free to give it a try and say, “Hi.”

Over on the side of my blog you can see the result of some of my other plugins. One is the wp-postviews plugin. (Well actually it is a couple of plugin; one for set up and one for posting as a widget). This allows you to see what post are getting the most views. I am getting away from posting in categories. Sometimes it is difficult to get a post to fit into a simple category, and just trying to think of all the possible future categories just gives me headaches. So, instead I am focusing on tags. The tag cloud is a widget that comes in the base package of wordpress. With the Search Box, Tag Cloud, and the Most Viewed sections, hopefully you can find anything on the site.

The last plugin is just a fun one. I use Last.fm RPS to list the last ten songs that I have listened to on last.fm. There are a ton of last.fm plugins, but this one seemed pretty simple to use and had good results. I am also thinking about adding a twitter widget, but I am not sure that I want to get hooked on twittering. The whole concept of micro-blogging seems like a lot of work.

One plugin that I am not currently using, but I have used in the past is Podpress. This plugin allows easy integration with podcast (and video podcast). I would recommend it to any one wanting to set up a podcast.

This brings us to today’s first gadget is Evernote. This application allows you to capture and organize any piece of digital information. If you have a website that you like you can do a screen capture, copy text, or get the plugin for firefox and just clip a portion (or all) of a web page. You can also put in photos, notes, and other documents. One of the great features is that it reads the text that is in photos, (including handwriting) and makes it searchable. You can get information into the system using a desktop client, a web interface, smart phone interfaces, or emailing notes. One other nice feature is that all the information gets synced to your computer and also online. The basic version is free, but to get more space you need to pay.

Here is a quick video tour of the application:

Another interesting app that I have been using for awhile is Dropbox. This allows you to easily back up documents. Just drop it in your folder and it gets backed up to the net. It also allows you to set up shared folders with other users of the software. When any user changes a file, it is updated on everyone’s computer. Again, this is a free app, but for more space you have to pay.

Here is a video tour of Dropbox:

Additional Information: Dropbox Wikipedia Page, Evernote Wikipedia Page

So after looking around at a lot of different options, I found that the best choice was Sound Slides.  This was a program that was created for journalist, by a journalist.  It is a very simple user interface, but it allows for high quality results.  You import jpegs to create photo slideshows and audio if you want to create audio slideshows.  If you are creating a non-audio slideshow you can choose the order of the photos, the transition type, and time, and change the color of the player to match your website.  You can also edit captions that can be desplayed with each photo.  With the Plus edition you are able to edit the pictures to your imported audio file.

There were a couple of features that I would have liked to have in the program.  For one, basic audio editing would be a great time saver.  Right now you have to edit in another program and import the audio file into Sound Slides.  The ability to write text slides would also be nice.  They have a caption feature and you can key people but there isn’t a place where you can lay out text anywhere on the screen.  The best solution is to create a slide in Photoshop with any text that you want.  Let me know in the comments if you know of any solution out there that has all of these features.

I have found quite a few newspapers using the same software on their online sites (or at least I think it is).  Check out some great audio slideshows at the Chicago Tribune site, the Lexington Herald Leader Photographers site, or search through the Sound Slides showcase forum.

Additional Information: Eamon Hickey has a good writeup of the application on Rob Galbraith’s Digital Photography insights website.  Berkley’s Knight Digital media center also has a good tutorial on using the program.

You can purchase the software, (or download a trial version), find the manuals, and forums at the Sound Slides site.