I haven’t written much on this site because I’ve been concentrating mostly on the site I created for Nanci’s Naughties, my Second Life store. If you follow me on Twitter you know there has been some good news lately that I need to post here.
Something else you may know from Twitter is that I have some websites that I hit every day for a Photo of the Day rotation, and I wanted to share them with everyone here so you can have a place to find my list if you find you want to join me in checking out some pretty pictures every day.
I originally found these sites thanks to the Photo of the Day widget created for KDE 4 on Linux. The widget doesn’t work anymore since I upgraded my laptop to KDE 5 on SolydK Linux but I have a page of links I created for my start page so I can continue checking them out every day.
The first site is the Astronomy Photo of the Day. If you love looking up at the stars you need to visit this site often, and they even make it easy for folks who follow them on Twitter.
Next comes Steve’s Digicams with their Photo of the Day contest. Every day you get a picture from around the world. I use a slideshow of photos I find online as my desktop wallpaper (I generally have my laptop busy too often to set up a screensaver) and there are a lot of photos from Steve’s contest in the mix. I could also include them in a screensaver but my laptop is in use so often that I don’t use a screensaver.
Another great compilation comes from National Geographic, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. NatGeo is known for their gorgeous photography, and their Your Shot program is the source for another folder of amazing photos in my wallpaper rotation. They also have the pictures in their NatGeo Photography Twitter stream, giving you another reason to follow them.
A site that used to be in the app is Wikimedia Commons, but a change to their site broke their part of the KDE app a couple of years ago. They make it easy to check a month worth of pictures, and one of these days I need to get in the habit of checking their site often again.
A non-photo site to hit daily
There’s another site I hit every day, but not to see pretty pictures. FreeKibble.com was created by a then 11-yeard old Mimi Ausland as a way to provide food to animals in shelters. Simply answering fun, one-question quizzes about dogs and cats provides ten pieces of kibble to our furry friends, and there’s even a way to provide litter for the kitties. My bookmark starts with the kitty quiz, and after feeding the felines I provide them with some litter I give the doggos some food, too. Plus you get to learn a little something about our furry friends. It doesn’t cost me a dime, just a little time, and they regularly have double days where you can double the amount of food you provide without doing anything extra.
Mimi recently launched a new site, Free The Ocean, to help clear our oceans of plastic. Every day answering the quiz helps remove one piece of plastic from the ocean. Yeah, it’s not much, but as I write this, people on the site have helped remove over 77,000 pieces of plastic from our oceans. And I’ve learned a little more about the planet I live on, which is always a good thing.
Do you have a Photo of the Day site that you check often? Let me know in the comments and help us all find more beauty to add to our lives.