Public Service Announcement

We interrupt this blog for the following Public Service Announcement....

I know that some of the people who are moving their journals over here from AOL may not be the most tech savvy group of people.... and some, like me, may just be having a hardware problem. I have a tip coming up.

One of my problems with AOL pulling the plug on Journals and Hometown at just this minute was this; having returned from my trip/adventure the first thing I did was put my laptop into the shop to have the DVD drive fixed. The drive had been acting up for a while, but I had nursed it thru going on this trip because it was going to be the only entertainment I had. Read that as I took a bunch of DVDs with me to watch cause I had NO television, no radio, no internet. Sigh!

Normally being without my laptop for a short period isn't too bad. I can use G's laptop to check e-mail and blogs, and I just put off everything else till I have my baby back. G has the bare essentials on this machine. It is old. It only has 128mb of Ram and a 20 gig harddrive and USB 1.0. He only uses it for surfing the web and e-mail. I do NOT have all of my usual resources. I needed a solution of where to download my FTP stuff. Even plugging my external harddrive into this machine is an interesting proposition. I needed some other way to take care of Hometown....

My solution?? Photobucket! They offer a free and a paid account. The free account is fine for what I'm going to explain. I had decided to get a photobucket account anyway to upload my animated content to due to the problem that Flickr doesn't support animations. After signing up for the account I was thrilled to discover that you can move pictures using the picture/graphics urls twenty at a time.

So, here's what you do if you want to move your FTP Hometown things without downloading and re-uploading them and using only a web browser:

1. Open up Hometown in one tab and Photobucket in another. I reccommend using Firefox. Sign into both AOL and Photobucket. Do not use the AOL client software... you need to be on the internet and in a browser for this to work. If you don't have Firefox, IE 7 or above should work.
2. About halfway down the Hometown page you should see AOL Hometown: File Manager. Click on that and you will be taken to the file manager. From here you should see your files that you have stored on AOL FTP.
   
3. Right click on the file that you wish to move from Hometown to Photobucket and choose Copy Link Location from the drop down box
   
4. Now move to the photobucket tab and choose the Web URL option. It will give you 3 spots to paste your url link into, but if you look farther down you will see where it says add more. Click on add more and it increases to 20 spaces.
5. Click on the space and using ctrl-v (or right click and use paste), this will put a copy of the link to your picture/graphic from Hometown into the space
6. Repeat steps 2 - 4 till you have the pictures/graphics you want or you have filled all 20 spaces
7. Click the Upload button in Photobucket (Located under the url spaces)
8. Photobucket will now upload a copy of the photos/graphics.
9. Repeat till you have moved all of the files you want to Photobucket.
   

Not an elegent solution, I admit. But a workable one if you don't understand how to use FTP programs, or don't have access to anything but a web browser!! I only had around 250 files (less than 10mb) in Hometown, so this was a viable solution for me.

Any questions... feel free to ask and I'll try to help.