Technobabble baby
Thanks to several web-based applications, we were able to quickly announce Luka’s birth to the world in a lot of really effective ways. Here’s a quick guide to the fantastic services we used to share our excitement:
1. As I’m sure you learned in our previous post, picking a name we both liked was a daunting task. But we found the perfect name with some help from Nymbler. Type in up to six baby names you like, and Nymbler will suggest dozens of similar-sounding suggestions. You can save suggested names to a favorites list and read about the origin and popularity of each one. There are tons of websites that suggest potential baby names but we liked Nymbler the best. To know how common our chosen name has been through history, we went over to NameVoyager, which charts the rises and falls of the top 1,000 names since the late 1800s.
2. Starting at the hospital we will be using Trixie Tracker which is a web and mobile tool to help us uncover and understand patterns Luka’s sleep and daily schedules. Trixie Tracker lets us create charts for Sleep schedules, Diaper changes, Bottle and breastfeeding, Solids, Pumping, Milk inventory, Medicine doses. This info will be especially useful at the doctors office when they ask how often Luka is feeding, etc. There is also a Yahoo Widget for the service and even better it has an iPhone interface for entering data and viewing stats on the go.
3. One of the most time-consuming tasks right after Luka was born was trying to get in touch with all of our many friends and family to tell them the good news. Phonevite made this process a breeze by letting us record a message by phone right there in the delivery room. With our preset lists of people to call, including phone numbers and email addresses, Phonevite called and emailed them with our message. The other excellent feature was during the call, everyone’s phones showed the call as coming from us, rather than an unknown number from some company. Phonevite played the message immediately, and then played a brief identification tag at the end saying it was sent via Phonevite. We set up several lists before we even went to the hospital with one for our immediate family, extended family, friends, and our work colleagues. We were able to instantly reach 74 people within minutes of our sons birth with a single personalized call. Phonevite’s website also verified which calls were successful and which didn’t go through for any reason, in case we needed to follow up once we returned home. Phonevite’s service has a lot of unique uses, but we saw the appeal immediately for how quick and easy it made informing everyone of Luka’s arrival.
4. Since I’ve had so much fun using status updates (aka micro blogging), it seemed natural to use the same method to record Nadine’s progress during labor and delivery. Ping.fm, offers the ability to update many websites simultaneously. Ping.fm kept our friends on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Brightkite, and Identi.ca all in the loop on Nadine’s progress, all the way through the delivery and beyond.
5. With the iPhone’s built-in camera, we were able to immediately take some great photos of Mom, Dad, and baby Luka. In order to get those photos to where friends and family could see them right away, we used the AirMe iPhone app to automatically upload them to our Flickr account where the world could see. It took only seconds from the time we took the photos until they were up and available for everyone to view on FriendFeed, Flickr, and of course this site.
