When I’m not blogging here (which is, like, all the time), I’m totally blogging elsewhere! If you’re curious what I’ve been doing since I joined SmugMug, check out my new blog post over on the SmugMug Sorcery blog, in which I describe how we made SmugMug Search faster.

Seriously, check it out. There are pretty charts.

Next week I start my new job at SmugMug!

This is old news if you follow me on Twitter. I plead laziness: I’ve spent much of the past two weeks sitting on the couch watching Magnum, P.I. on Netflix and generally avoiding any device with a physical keyboard.

During this time of reflection and relaxation, I’ve learned two things:

1. Magnum, P.I. is awesome.
2. iPads are awesome.

But seriously. SmugMug! I’m excited. This company is special in a way that’s hard to put into words.

On the day I visited, Beth the SmugChef surprised me with seven different kinds of pie. She had even scoured Felicity’s blog to find the recipe for my favorite, maple custard. When she set two plates full of pie in front of me at lunch, I knew I couldn’t possibly work anywhere else.

This feels right. I can’t wait to get started!

A few weeks ago I stumbled across SmugMug, an excellent photo sharing site that I had inexplicably never noticed before. I was impressed by its look and feel and intrigued by some of its features (especially the Google Maps-powered geocoding stuff), so I uploaded a few of my photos and started playing around with it. I’m very pleased.

Most of my photos are currently on Flickr. I like Flickr a lot, but SmugMug takes a slightly different approach that I like even better in some ways. Flickr has its strengths; the endless stream of photos is especially conducive to freeform, random photography like photoblogs. SmugMug is more structured, which works well for more organized, professional photo galleries.

Since I liked so many things about both SmugMug and Flickr, I needed to find a way to use both of them without spending all my time uploading, tagging, and writing captions twice for all my photos. Enter Picasa.

Flickr and SmugMug both support IPTC tags and EXIF captions embedded in photos. Picasa conveniently supports those features as well. What’s more, the latest beta version of Picasa integrates with Google Earth, so I can easily add geotags to my photos that SmugMug will recognize. The only thing I have to do twice is the actual upload process, and that’s easy.

I love it when good software makes my life easier.