Free Holiday Gift Ideas

These are just a few low to no cost online holiday gift ideas to add a little extra spice to your holiday season.

Online Photo Album - Share your good times with people far from home with an online photo gallery. There are many options for online photo collection Photobucket, Flickr, Snapfish and Kodak just to name a few. Many of them allow you to order prints and have them sent directly to your home. Gallery and Coppermine are nice advanced php options if you have webspace. Remember to customize your settings from public, private and select people to view albums. Make sure to research what your online photo album offers before you sign up.

Online Video Collection - From keeping in touch with online video messages to creating a family visual scrapbook videos say it loud.

Homepage - Show someone just how much you know them by making there online experience easier with a customized homepage. Many have widgets you can add and organize into tabs. Fill it with their favorite news sites, comics, movie times and more. Some fine selections for custom homepages are: Igoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Genealogy - Do some research into the branches of the family tree and compile them online. This one may take longer then we have left of the holiday season but you can keep it in mind for next year.

Fun Holidays Ideas:

* Express your deep and unspoken feelings in an online video. Have your loved one watch it as their gift.

*If you’re a wordsmith write a poem and host it online, or create some digital stationary to print it out on.

For the not-so technically inclined on your list you might want to help them set up email accounts along with writing down there passwords and guiding them through it. Consider setting up POP access or combining them with your customized homepage. Many customized homepage's can display email from any source but its easier to use igoogle with gmail or yahoo mail with my yahoo. You can always promise to write them once a week if it helps them use it more. Another idea for the technically declined is to set up a free security system. Free anti-spy ware, anti-virus, firewall, blockers the works. Who knows with proper care you may save there computer some day.

Don’t forget to customize your themes and images to match what your going for. Infranview is a decent free image editing program to get the job done. Also come up with a good name to describe your online photo album or video site. If you decide to put together your own website to display your creation and require a website authoring system check out Nvu. Even if your running out of time many of these options can be started and part of the gift will be to fill in your online photo or video collection. If you have a holiday season idea feel free to share in a comment or on the PCWorld forums.

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Comments

How nice are these gifts ideas!!! I am soon gonna try to research for the genealogy, but before the online photo albums seems a perfect gift for my mom's birthday, I am using Joomeo as a photo sharing service, which for now I am really satisfied with, I hope she will like it !!! The little bonus for using Joomeo is that I can stock all my precious photos... If you have any fun ideas for birthdays, please share it again ...

Eliee

July 25, 2008

12:49 AM PT