Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just drop a PDF in a folder and it would automatically show up on your Kindle? Or if imported photos automatically scaled themselves down to a smaller size? Or if your PDF documents automatically signed themselves? These are just a couple of examples of what Wappwolf can do along with your Dropbox or Google Drive account. Here's how to make the magic happen.

How Wappwolf Works

Wappwolf works by connecting to your Dropbox or Google Drive account and watching folders of your choice for types of files that you specify. When it sees anything that matches the criteria you laid out, it then performs an action of your choice. For example, if a folder called "New Photos" that contains all the new photos imported into your Dropbox/Google Drive has new JPEG files added to it, Wappwolf can notice this and then scale them down, add text, and do a bunch of other things automatically. It'll then create a processed folder containing the new images, place it in your Dropbox/Google Drive, and contain all the processed JPEG images you want without any effort on your part. There are plenty of other things you can do with JPEGs and other types of files, which is what we'll be looking at in this post. First we'll get everything set up and create a sample action, then look at a few cool actions you might want to try out for yourself.

Creating Your First Action

Step One: Sign Up

Before we get started, you'll need to sign up for an account—which is pretty easy to do. You just visit wappwolf.com and sign in with your Dropbox or Google Drive account. If you're hesitant about allowing full access, you can grant Wappwolf single-folder permissions to keep it from seeing everything in your account. In the event you have any trouble signing up, just follow these instructions for Dropbox or Google Drive. Once you've got that out of the way, Wappwolf will create a sample automation for you that downsizes images and adds some text to them. Since we're going to be looking at a bunch of other options and creating automations ourselves, you can choose to delete this and then move on to the next step.

Step Two: Choose a Folder

When you have no active Wappwolf actions, signing in will take you directly to the Choose a Folder step. If you already have an action (which, presumably, you do not since you're new to this) you'll just need to click the "Create a new automation" button. This will present you with a list of all the folders in your Dropbox/Google Drive. You can select one, or click on its name to go inside of it and select one of its folders instead. Once you've selected the folder you want, click the radio button next to its name and click the "Next" button at the bottom of the page.

Step Three: Selection an Action (or Two)

After you've chosen a folder, Wappwolf will present you with a list of actions that are sorted by file type. Before you can choose an action you'll need to decide what type of file you're going to work with. Feel free to pick whatever you'd like, but if you'd like to follow along for practice let's set up a Document-based action. Let's convert any document dropped into this folder to a PDF. You can do this by clicking the radio button next to the "Convert it to PDF" option. When you do, a big list will appear of supported file formats so you know what you can and can't use. Most standard file formats from Word to Rich Text to HTML will work fine, but you won't be able to use documents created in less-widely used apps like Apple's Pages, for example. Make sure you take note of the supported formats before you start saving unsupported documents in this folder. They'll just be ignored. If this all looks good, go ahead and click the "Add Action" button underneath the supported file formats list.

If you're done, you can click the "finished?" button at the top of the screen or you can add another action. Now that this file is a PDF, perhaps you want to delete the original. You can add this option from the Advanced section at the bottom of the actions list. In the Any file section, you can choose several other useful options like encryption, uploading to another file sharing service like Box or Skydrive, adding the PDF to a Basecamp project, and much more. Feel free the play with any additional actions you want, but we're going to keep this first one pretty simple and just stick with the convert to PDF action.[associate

Step Four: Add a Document to Your Folder

Now that you've finished adding your action(s), Wappwolf will display the active action on your main account page. To test it out, go into the Dropbox/Google Drive folder you set up in the previous steps and add a supported file. That file will first need to sync up with Dropbox/Google Drive. Once it does, Wappwolf will see it within the next minute and start turning it into a PDF. You'll see a processed folder appear, and your original file will be moved into it. This might scare you at first because it seems like your original file was deleted, but it just moved. After the move takes place a PDF file will show up in the primary folder containing the contents of the original text file. This whole process won't happen instantly, but generally you can expect results to begin to appear after a few seconds.

My Five Favorite Wappwolf Actions

It's pretty easy to explore the many actions Wappwolf has available, but there are a couple you should definitely know about because they're especially useful. Here are my five favorites.

Convert an Audio File to a New Format

By far, my favorite automation on Wappwolf is audio conversion. While it isn't exactly difficult to convert an audio file every time you need to, it takes time to figure out the settings (or remove the old copy if you're converting within a music player like iTunes). It's much easier to just drop a file in a folder and let Wappwolf do the work for you. What's really great is that you can use any of the following formats: MP3, AIFF, FLAC, M4A, OGG, WAV, or WMA. You can let Wappwolf pick the settings for you, or you can click on an "Advanced Settings" link to set the bit rate, frequency, number of channels, and other settings. This action is really useful if you need to automatically convert a lossless file to one you can easily share online or batch convert a bunch of lossless audio files you have lying around to a lossy format for your MP3 player. Perhaps you just need to use this just one time to convert a ton of audio files to another format and you don't want to deal with it manually. With the audio conversion action, you can make this all happen automatically while you're away from the computer.

Send Files to Your Kindle

Although it's not hard to send files to your Kindle via email, and have Amazon automatically perform the conversion for you, Wappwolf makes it as simple as just dropping a file in a folder and waiting for it to show up on your device. All you have to do is enter the address you want to send the document from, the Kindle email address that will receive the file, if you want to send it over Wi-Fi only or pay the $0.15 to send it via 3G, and whether or not you want the file converted to Kindle format before it gets sent. You can send any format supported by Kindle, but if you want to send a format that Kindle doesn't support but Wappwolf does, you can use the Convert to PDF action (which we detailed earlier in this post) to ensure it will be in the proper format every time.

Upload Your Photos Everywhere

Chances are you don't use every photo sharing site on the web, but you do use more than one. For example, I post all my photos on Flickr but I like them to go to Facebook as well. With Wappwolf, you can create an automation with multiple actions that takes your photos and uploads them to services like Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. You can even have Wappwolf downscale the images before posting and add text or a watermark. However you go about it, you can save yourself the time of uploading to multiple services by just configuring a folder to do it all for you.

Automatically Sign PDF Documents

Although it is perhaps the coolest of the actions—as you can actually just dump a PDF file in a folder and a signed copy will be returned to you in a few seconds—it's a tedious process to set up and you have to use another third-party service called Xyzmo. Getting started requires filling out a form and providing quite a bit of information to Xyzmo, so you may not want to set this up. Once you get through the long-ish setup process, however, you can have your documents signed for you. You also should note that this is an electronic signature and not a pasted handwritten signature, so that might be a deterrent as well. If you're cool with the drawbacks, however, this is definitely an action worth looking at.

Zip a File and FTP or Email It

Sometimes you need to deliver files to the same location or person on a regular basis, and that involves zipping them up and uploading them or sending them in an email. With these actions, you can automate the whole process by just dumping those files in a folder and letting Wappwolf deliver them to a destination of your choice. Assuming you want to zip the files first, just add a zip file action, and then choose the destination you want—whether it's and FTP server, someone's email address, or one of the other many destinations Wappwolf offers. Wappwolf will take care of it for you and you won't have to do anything at all. This can save a bunch of time at work or even when you need to email photos to your parents on a regular basis.

If you get started with Wappwolf and set up any cool actions, be sure to share them in the comments!

Becoming a good photographer requires several things, but one of the hardest to learn is lighting. Virtual Lighting Studio is a free web app that lets you light a (pretty awkward) subject with up to six lights so you can see how each setup affects the image. Because lighting is one of those things that you learn best by practice, this is possibly the easiest way to understand what different setups can do for your image.

Virtual Lighting Studio not only offers placement, but types of light and effective brightness controls as well. Learning through practice in the real world would be costly—whether you rented a lighting kit, purchased one, or took a class—and you wouldn't have as many options. While you'll obviously need some actual experience to light well, as a virtual studio won't prepare you for the conditions you'll encounter in the real world, it's a great way to test setups and save the ones you like for when you're lighting an actual set. Even if you have no aspirations to work in photography or video professionally, playing around with Virtual Lighting Studio is a great way to know how light affects your subject. That's useful even for beginner photographers, who want to use natural light to their advantage.

Virtual Lighting Studio | via Strobist via DIY Photography

When you're busy, it's easy to forget about your basic needs. You might find yourself skipping a meal, neglecting exercise, or spending too little time socializing. To keep yourself on task, here's a checklist to keep you from neglecting the things you need to do every day.

Last week we put together a daily personal inventory form to help you track potential problems in your everyday life so that you can correct them. Part of the problem, however, is remembering to take care of many of your basic needs. As a supplement, I've put together a checklist for keeping track of those basics. You can download it as a Word DOC and RTF file or just follow these instructions to add it to your Google Docs account:

1. Visit the checklist Google Doc page.
2. From the File menu (in Google Docs), choose "Make a copy."
3. Name that copy and save it to your Google Docs account.

That's all you have to do. The checklist will remind you to eat and drink regularly, get in your daily physical activity, and set aside some time for social activities and relaxation. You'll also be able to add any additional items that are specific to you. It seems silly to think that we'd forget these things, but it happens often when life gets filled with too many things. If you're neglecting the basics, keep this checklist handy every day and get in the habit of ticking those boxes. Even a tiny little reward like that can make it easier to remember the little things you need every day.

When you share a name with a drug dealer, have an embarrassing photo showing up on Google, or just don't have the most ideal search results when somebody looks up your name, it can be hard to get a job. We've discussed how you can better-manage your online reputation, but BrandYourself is a web app that'll help you through the process so you don't have to spend hours doing it all by yourself.

Once you sign up, you have to tell BrandYourself what you think of your current search results. It'll pull up them up for you and you can mark them as positive, negative, or about someone who isn't you. When you're done, you'll get a search result grade and tips on how to improve your results. Next you'll create a profile that'll be optimized to sit at the top of your search results. (You can check out mine if you want to see what it can look like.) Finally, you can submit positive links about yourself to help push them to the top of your results. You get three links for free. The premium service costs $10/month or $80/year (with other price points in between) and will allow you to submit an unlimited number of links. The service will also provide you with alerts about good and bad things happening with your search results so you can act accordingly. It's a really nice way to stay on top of the way search engines see you.

BrandYourself