How to Blog Better with Flickr

Pictures are worth a thousand words, or so the story goes. When writing blog posts or any other kind of content on the Internet images are a big key to making the content more understandable and more interesting. A great way to help manage the images that you use for your site is to make use of a photo-sharing website like Google’s Picasa or Yahoo’s Flickr.

I’m partial to Flickr myself. One of its advantages is the large community around it that helps to support each others photographic endeavours. Another is the more recently added Piknic photo-editing service which allows you to make changes and adjustments to your photos directly on the website.

I recently put together this quick “how-to” for a friend of mine and decided that I might as well share it with the world. Without further ado, here is a step-by-step how-to on adding Flickr images to your WordPress blog.

Open the page of the image you want in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmsquared/2195515600/
Click on “All Sizes”
For most blogs, the “Medium” sized image is usually sufficient. Its largest side will be 500px with the other scaled to match
Right-click the link marked “Download this image” link and “Copy Link Location” (Firefox) or “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer)
On your blog, click the “Add Image” button in the editor
Paste in the Image URL from #4 (WP will pick up dimensions automatically)
Done!

To add links back to the image in Flickr…

Go back to the Flickr page, right-click the “Back to the Flickr photo page” link in the top-left and select “Copy Link Location”
In WordPress click on the image that’s been added to your post, and then click the “Add Link” button in the editor.
Paste the URL for the Flickr photo page
Done!

WordPress 2.5: The rubber hits the road

WordPress 2.5 is out, warts and all, for public consumption today. Many users are opting to wait for a burn-in period to take place before taking the plunge. Several major updates from WordPress have had a point-release take place within days, usually to fix a security flaw.

I have installed it on the sandbox where I’m playing around with the Options theme and won’t be applying the upgrade here until I’m ready to move everything over, including the theme.

The biggest complaint from most is the redesign of the admin pages. People don’t like change. There is added functionality and a brand new layout to the admin screens. After having played with it for only a couple of days, I find myself fumbling around a bit still… but overall the new look isn’t too bad.

Many of the links I used most often are now displayed in the main admin toolbar (blue links) while the less often used links are in the grey bar at the top of the page. These are the high-level nav buttons like the dashboard. I think this design will indeed prove effective for people who spend quite a bit of time in the admin console, but will be more difficult for casual users to adopt.

I’ll be posting updates to both the Random Image Selector plugin and the Admin Links Widget in the near future to ensure compliance with the WP 2.5 code.

Jott Launches Local Canadian Numbers

Messaging and “GTD-ish” service Jott has just launched new local numbers in many major cities in Canada. The service has gone from one local number in Toronto, to twenty nation-wide.

Here is an excerpt from the email sent to Canadian Jott users today:

In an effort to protect your privacy, most Canadian mobile providers have blocked caller ID information from being passed to toll free numbers. This leaves the alternative of using local access numbers across the country, so that everyone can send Jott messages without having to pay long distance fees.

Here are the new Canadian local numbers

CITY	NUMBER
AURORA	+12898020110
CALGARY	+14037751288
EDMONTON	+17806287799
HALIFAX	+19024828120
HAMILTON	+19054819060
KITCHENER	+15199572711
LONDON	+15194898968
MARKHAM	+12898000110
MONTREAL	+15146670329
OTTAWA	+16136861502
QUEBEC CITY	+14189072209
SAINT JOHNS	+17097570047
SHERBROOKE	+18193401636
TORONTO	+16477245365
TORONTO	+14168001067
VANCOUVER	+17787868229
VANCOUVER	+16044841347
VICTORIA	+12509847093
WINDSOR	+15198000031
WINNIPEG	+12042728154

I’ve been using Jott off and on for the past couple of months, and with the addition of local Canadian numbers, I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my GTD arsenal.

Scope Creep – A Real World Example

Here’s a real-life example of how scope creep can absolutely kill a project you’re working on. I tend to find that this particular phenomenon tends to take hold of my projects on a regular basis, and I’ve been actively trying to combat it for quite a while now.

The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action.

First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you ~~just have to~~ could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem!

Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:

Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
Step Two: Provide OpenID credentials
Step Three: Start using TwitterFeed
DONE!

Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.

Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
Step Two: Discover that TwitterFeed uses OpenID
Step Three: Read the OpenID tutorial and discover that you can host your own OpenID server
Step Four: Download the OpenID code
Step Five: Read the roll-your-own-OpenID tutorial and discover that you should use OpenSSL
Step Six: Do trial and error until you find a way to actually get the OpenSSL working
Step Seven: After 2 hours of searching, submit a support ticket and give up on the SSL for now
Step Eight: Go get something to drink. Something strong
Step Nine: Configure phpmyid
Step Ten: Add code to your site.
Step Eleven: Realize that it doesn’t work and use a regular OpenID account until you get more time…
DONE!

I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:

Figure out what you need to get done
Get it done
Make notes of the other options along the way
DONE!

Twitter Rediscovery

I’ve had a Twitter account for about a year now. Until this past week, I think I’d only posted to it about a half-dozen times. But recently, I’ve started to see some value in Twitter. For some of the bloggers that I follow, something that I’ve noticed on occasion is the delay inherent in RSS. Being able to see immediately when a post is made lets me be the first commenter, or gets me some information just a bit earlier.

I was able to post something to my Twitter account this week to give me some ideas for an issue I was having in my life. By allowing a few more people to give me some feedback, I was able to get an answer and set up a post about it.

My Twitter client of choice (at the moment) is Twhirl, which I covered for this week’s Global Geek Podcast.

So over the next while, I’ll be giving Twitter a good run and trying to see who I can follow, and what I can learn. Nuggets. It’s all about nuggets… er tweets.

Reminder: Take-Down your MySpace Account Tomorrow!

Just a reminder that tomorrow is the official “Delete your MySpace Account Day”. If you have a MySpace account, and you don’t use it, cut down your Bacn and join in the movement.

I’ve been thinking about deleting my Myspace account almost since the day I got it but always opted out of doing so because of the few friends I have who don’t have Facebook accounts. But by remaining on Myspace, I realize, I’m becoming an enabler. I’m giving those friends no reason to switch over from Myspace by giving them access to my Myspace profile.

Originally posted by Simon Owens.

Visit the originating website, or join the Facebook group.

Flickr Fight Follow-up: The proof

After the post I did a couple of days back about FlickrFight using images and not attributing them to the photographers who took and own the images, I thought it might help to actually point to some of the things that FlickrFight is doing.

First off, they’re not copying the images, they are getting them from the Flickr API. As a result they have access to all the information required to properly attribute the photos, and I sorted that out after five minutes of looking through the Flickr API documentation.

Here are two Creative Commons licensed images that came up in my search for Sunrise vs. Sunset:

Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr

Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr

Get it together, FlickrFight. Attribute the photos! Everything you need to know is RIGHT HERE.

January 30th: International Delete Your MySpace Account Day

I’ve just been directed to a post over on Simon Owens’ site Bloggasm that January 30th is to be International “Delete Your MySpace Account Day“.

As a MySpace member who only ever logs in to check on someone else’s profile about once a year, it just isn’t worth getting all the Bacn from MySpace. I completely understand where Simon’s coming from on this and have decided to join him in supporting this initiative.

So if you have a MySpace account and you don’t use it anymore, join in on International Delete Your MySpace Account Day.

If you’re a Facebook member, you may want to take a moment and join the associated group as well. Thanks to Tom for setting that up!

Flickr Fight Doesn’t Attribute Photos

Pouring through my ever overflowing RSS reader tonight I came across a post on AppScout by Alan Henry about Flickr Fight. This is a site that allows you to search for two terms, and then determines how popular the term is based on the number of hits returned in a Flickr search (Google Fight knockoff??). Along with the search result is a grid of photos for each of the terms. Compare Coke vs. Pepsi, Angelina & Jennifer or whatever else you like… or better yet, don’t.

The one major thing missing from Flickr Fight is it’s lack of attribution for any of the photos it displays. It simply links to the images stored on the Flickr server and doesn’t bother to provide a link to the photo’s page in flickr, or credit the photographer/owner of the image in any way, shape or form.

This is the kind of IP violations that make posting legitimate content online a risky venture. If people don’t consider copyright violations of online material legitimate, then how will these forms of content distribution ever be considered good, legitimate viable sources??

Shame on Flickr Fight, and shame on AppScout for not picking up on this glaring omission.

Sun Acquires MySQL

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced yesterday that they have acquired the Open-Source database platform MySQL. This is a huge purchase and one of the largest acquisitions of an Open Source entity that we’ve ever seen.

The goal, says Schwartz, is to put a Fortune 500 vendor behind the innovative technology powering many next generation web-based services. To accomplish that goal Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” (and MAMP, WAMP, and of course Sun’s own SAMP…).

Support of open source projects is nothing new for Sun. They have been a positive force behind several other projects in the past including Java, ZFS, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. This bodes very well for the future of MySQL and companies offering other higher-priced options for production databases will be watching very closely to see what edge this provides in the Enterprise space.

With the acquisition Sun picks up “clients” who may not be using Solaris, or even Java in their implementation but are major players in the Web 2.0 market. These include Google, Facebook, Nokia and WordPress. Kudos to Sun for putting some more muscle behind the Open Source movement, and here’s hoping some more major corporations will now be willing to take a “leap of faith” and make more use of a proven and effective open-source technology.

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Tag Archives: Internet