crazybobbles

Flickr integration, thanks to the lovely Flickr Photo Album Plugin

Thought I’d update you on some new features here and there on the blog, nothing worth talking about but you know, if I keep talking about gigs you’d think I’m not actually a geek! There’s still lots of backend stuff that I occasionally do out of curiosity and for coding pleasures (mmm code). Today I’ve been doing a bit of plugin shopping and downloaded/installed two useful plugins, a flickr photo album plugin and a google site map plugin. The latter is mainly used for informing google and other search engines of newly updated posts and whatnot, I’m not really seeing any immediate benefit from it but I hear it’s useful *shrugs*, I kinda got bored reading it’s use on wikipedia (and I find it weird how my readers are actually reading this for me if they dare click on the wikipedia article).

The former (I always love saying “latter“, but never really keen on using the word “former“, it’s just weird) is a pretty useful tool in shoving photos into my blog. Typically I use flock to drag my flickr photos onto my blog but lately I’ve found it a bit tiddly to use. It’s still pretty slick but when I’m on computers that don’t have flock it’s a pain in the rectal region. I thought having all this built in would benefit so much more, so I opted to install this friendly and pretty awesome plugin. The plugin allows me to insert photos from my flickr photostream, all nicely linked up and ready to go. Not only that, it has more flexibility in terms of what size you want to insert it, the alignment of it and even captions. There’s loads more features but I won’t get into detail.

So what does all this mean to you? Absolutely nothing, well, not nothing. That is a lie I do apologise, whilst I’m still mastering it the thing you’ll notice most is the use of small thumbnails for photos. I really like using them now to really bung a lot of photos in a post with minimal effort (back then I had to copy the image location, paste that, and then put the link over it). I’m still in experimental phase so don’t expect that much difference, just be happy about the fancy search bar!. My next plan is probably to work on multiple stylesheets and having a different site design for the “photography” and “muse” sections. I was thinking of a nice black site for the photography one but we’ll see. It’s an idea for now but it might come true if I find the time and patience.

Oh and here’s an example of those thumbnail thingys I’m talking about. Using my pinching album as an example.