So.  You have a piano sitting in your dining room that never gets played.  You have a bed that’s tucked away in storage.  You have a car that you need to sell.  You wish desperately that you could easily sell these items without paying someone to display your ad somewhere, but you don’t know what to do!

Paging Mr. Craig on isle 4, Mr. Craig on isle 4, please

Craig’s list, that is.  Craig is a man from San Francisco who decided to make a very simple and free website, called craigslist.org, to allow people in his same town to easily buy and sell just about anything, back in 1995.  Initially, the service was only available for San Francisco (the Bay Area, specifically); however, it has grown to almost every major city in the U.S. nowadays.  The beauty of the service is that it is localized, i.e. the ads you see will be posted by people within a 50 mile radius (give or take) of you, so you can go look at the item before buying.  No more sending money on the internet and then wondering whether your item will actually show up!  Conversely, if you’re selling something, its much nicer to deal with local buyers, rather than to have to worry about shipping something.

Right about now, you’re probably thinking that you don’t know anything about computers, and aren’t comfortable with selling things on the internet, even if it is craigslist.  Wrong!  A few weeks ago, I showed my slightly computer-challenged mother (no offense Mom!) how to post an ad on craigslist.  She was selling a canoe.  Within only 5 hours, the thing had sold!  Oh man, was she hooked!  Since that time, my mom has sold or helped friends sell nearly a dozen things through craigslist!

Good for her, but I’m not your mom, genius.  How are you going to teach me?

I thought you’d never ask.  For your viewing pleasure, I have created a video which goes through all of the steps required to post something on craigslist.  This is just the first in a series of videos I plan on creating about craigslist.. Video #1 is all you really need to post something on craigslist, while the future videos will be tutorials on how to make your ads look nicer, and have more and bigger pictures on them.  

Hope you enjoy! Please leave comments if you think this video rocks, or if you think it sucks, and you want me to do it differently somehow.

I’ve just recently become infatuated with Flickr, in combination with my iPhone. Specifically, there is a third party app called iFlickr that makes uploading pictures from your iPhone a snap (pun intended). For people with a non-jailbroken iPhone, sending a picture to Flickr involves taking a picture, and then emailing it to your Flickr email address. With iFlickr, however, you have a customized Camera application, where upon taking a photo you get the option to “Send to Flickr”. Once you tap this button, within a few moments your picture will be displayed on your Flickr site.

By your powers combined..

Now, combine this coolness with the awesomeness that is WordPress, and a neat little plugin for it made by tantannoodles, and you get something that makes posting pictures on ones blog so streamlined that you may need some aviators goggles. Observe:

And that’s it!  All you have to do is click on one of your pictures, and it becomes one with your masterful writing.  As you can see, this plugin makes the addition of photos to your blog posts a piece of cake. I’m enthralled by it.

I had to write this for a computer science ethics class. I didn’t really put much time into it, and perhaps at some point I’ll revise it.. but upon rereading it I thought it was pretty good. Here it is for your enjoyment.