Confessions of a Tech-Savvy Woman...
I'm Paige from the
Creative Paige...I'm excited to be here at Someday Crafts!
Let's see...I'm a graphic designer/mommy by day and a blogger/crafty gal by night. My husband, my 2 boys and I moved to Puebla, Mexico 8 months ago and are enjoying the adventures of living in another country. However, this presents many challenges with being crafty...there is no Hobby Lobby! or Joanns! or even a Michaels...I know, it's tragic. So, I have to find ways to make things from the limited stores available. However, I did bring a supply of mod podge with me from the States
(a girl cannot craft without it!). I hope that you take some time to jump over to my
site!So, I have a confession: I love technology. Like I said before, I'm a graphic designer, so I spend hours each day working on my computer for my job, but I still love it. I love reading new things on blogs, I love finding interesting resources and emailing them to people who I know would like them.
I am a self-proclaimed google expert...not an expert at anything really...just an expert at finding out how to do anything online. From google I've learned how to make my own laundry soap, make homemade marshmallows, sew superhero capes, decide if my baby has a dangerously high temperature, look up Spanish words that are stumping me and so so much more. If you could only see the number of times a day that I google something...it would be ridiculous...and some of my searches would probably be quite humorous. However, in all of that searching and surfing the web, I have found a few resources that I believe are so helpful in my day-to-day life. I thought I'd share them with you and in turn, I expect you to share your favs with me as well!
1.
Feedly - this is a magazine-style blog reader...it can feed straight from your Google reader, however, I think it makes everything look so much better and more organized. You can also save certain articles, copy parts of them, and much more. I use this every single day to catch up on my blogs. Unfortunately, I never catch up on them...I follow too many.
2.
Google Translate - now I know that this one may not apply to everyone, but living outside the U.S. - I use it EVERYDAY! When my son's school sends home paperwork -into Google Translate it goes. When I'm reading the back of a cake mix box, into Google Translate it goes. It's a great tool and relatively accurate.
3. Supercook.com - I love to cook, but I run out of ideas very quickly. I also don't like having to go to the store everyday to find a specific ingredient, so I really like Supercook. You can type in the ingredients that you have and it will search the internet for recipes using those ingredients. It's really helpful if you have a jar of something in your fridge that you need to use up before it goes bad.
4.
AbstractFonts.com - If you love fonts, this is a great place for tons of free fonts...I go there all the time to find exactly the font I'm looking for - from handwriting fonts, to retro fonts, to scary (Halloween) fonts. It's my fav.
5.
Clker.com - free vector clipart - some of it's lame, but some of it is great. You can find almost anything clipart-wise and then download it into whatever format you need.
6.
ColourLovers.com - need a color palette for a project? This is the place - you can find color palette inspriation for decorating your home, designing a website, branding your logo, designing a printable...just about anything. You can also sort them by the most popular and see what colors are trendy. They've also got a great selection of patterns.
7.
Hipmunk.com - a great site for finding airline tickets...the main difference is a visual chart of available flights. You can find the flight with the shortest layovers or the shortest flight times very easily. It even lets you sort by the flight with the least "agony"...an agony-less flight sounds like heaven when you have little kids!
8. Wordle - a silly little site that let's you make those fun word clouds...type in the words you want...pick your colors and you've got a cute printable for your home.
9. Kidzui - a kid friendly website browser - your kids can play games, watch clean YouTube videos, look at pictures, etc, without you having to worry about them stubbling across inappropriate content. Let your kids explore the internet without being worried and without having to watch their every move. The best thing...it's free.
10. Flickr - I know everyone knows about uploading pictures to flickr to share, but if you pay the $25/year for the Flickr Pro account, you get unlimited photo storage, unlimited video storage (for 90 or less videos). We use it as a backup for all of our pictures. We had friends a few years ago whose computer crashed and they lost the photos of their baby's birth...they were unable to be recovered. Since then, we have gone through major precautions not to let that happen to us. We back up our photos on our external hard drive and then upload all of them to our Flickr Pro account...just in case. It also clears up room on our computer and we can share our photo albums with family, so they can always see up-to-date pictures of the kiddos.
And bonus number 11 -Amazon Universal Wishlist Browser button - this little button you install on your browser toolbar lets you add any item (that's for sale) to your amazon wishlist. That way you can start compiling your Christmas wishlist all year long! On a site that has something you love? Just click the little button and add it to your wish list. You can also have multiple lists (for your husband, kids, etc) and add items to those lists as well. All your wish lists in one handy, dandy place.
I hope you've enjoyed these online resources for making your life easier...now, hit me with your favs...anything and everything. I'd love to add some new bookmarks to my browser!
Did you find these helpful? Here's a sample of other goodies you'll find over at the Creative Paige:
P.S. These companies/websites have no idea who I am. I just like them so much, I'm willing to give them free advertising. Aren't I nice?
I wish I was a techy and good at technology! This was a great list and I learned a lot from this. I never knew about some of these things. Looks like The Creative Paige is a good place for me to read!!! Visit there and learn more today.
The best thing about them all though, is that you can easily import all the blogs you follow with Google Reader, so you don't lose any of your information! Isn't that great? Plus, these other sites make it really easy to find other content and websites that you might like. Most of them also have apps for your smartphones to make reading on the go even easier! 
