Adding images to your blog posts or to your website is a really effective way to dress things up and add to your message, and WordPress makes it silly-simple to do. But if you’re getting your images from your digital camera or a stock photo site, those images can be way too big to upload the way they are. They need resized, very likely.

I use PhotoShop to do this (and much more) to images for my site and my client work. But, what if you don’t want to buy and learn PhotoShop?

Last summer I told you about PhotoShop Express. It’s still available and will do some pretty cool things for your images.

Recently, though, I came across another online image editing tool that might even be a little easier to use called Picnik.

This picture of my daughter and her favorite horse, Stormin’, I quickly and easily resized, cropped, framed, labeled and saved to my computer with Picnik in less than 2 minutes.

   

I must warn you, though…these are just a few of the cool things you can do to your photos. Look what I made from one of my favorite pictures of my younger son and my daughter.

  

Watch you don’t lose hours playing with Picnik!

What’s really cool is you don’t even have to register a free account to use Picnik. Just go there, upload a .jpg file, do to it what you want, save it back to your hard drive and you’re outta there!

This blog post round-up once again brings a little something for everyone. As always, read what you like, leave the rest.

12 Blog Tune-Up & Spring Cleaning Tips

by Thomas McMahon at BloggerDesign.com.
This is a great list of housekeeping activities for your blog. I would add three more:

13. Review Your Categories: Are they still relevant to the direction and purpose of your site? Do you have too many? Do you need more? Is your content spread fairly evenly across them? If not, adjust.
14. Review Your Tags: Take a look at your tag cloud…does it reflect what your site/blog is about? Do you see any topics that are surprisingly more heavily weighted than others? Login to the dashboard and clean out any tags that have 0 posts assigned to them.
15. Update Old, Outdated Posts: Cruise through your archives and update any posts that you’ve learned more about, changed your mind about or just don’t apply the same way anymore.

Ad Swaps: A Smart and Easy Way to Get Free Traffic

by Maki at DoshDosh.com
You’re always on the lookout for effective ways to generate traffic to your site without spending a boatload of money, right? Well, ad swaps, while not “hip” compared to all the “cool” social media stuff available now, are still effective. Check out this article and see if you can’t find a few ways to generate some free traffic to your site.

The Cost of Freedom as We Know It

by Charlie Gilkey at ProductiveFlourishing.com
A thought-provoking post for this holiday weekend.