Red Winter Berries
One of my goals (notice, I didn’t say resolutions) for 2010 is to integrate Meander Passage more with Flickr. I want to do this is to perhaps gain/share some traffic between my Flickr Photostream and this Meandering Passage blog. I’ve had an account with Flickr for some time but have never maintained or updated it like I should — hummm, seems to be the same issue I’ve got with my gallery. Perhaps there’s a common/shared root cause here, ME! ;-)
So my approach this year is if there are things I’m not maintaining or doing in timely manner, I need to address the problem from two different approaches or countermeasures. First, simplify the process making it easier or nearly automatic, and second, apply more personal discipline. I’d like to do as much of the first as possible because history has taught me that over time the second countermeasure definitely tends to slip some.
Uploading the post images first to Flickr and then linking to them is easy (as with this image) but I like the Lightbox2 viewer I’ve been using prior to this. I’m not sure there is a way to do both within the Flickr Terms of Service, but that’s what I’m investigating now.
As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, I may also switch from Ecto3 to MarsEdit 2 as my Mac client blog editing application — new year, new things to learn. :-)
I know what you mean–I’ve been meaning to organize my Flickr sets for months and never seem to get around to it. I do find that Flickr has a large audience of viewers that do not inhabit the blogosphere; I get views and comments on my photos there all the time, even though I’m posting them there primarily as an outsourced method of image hosting for the blog, and almost all my descriptions there are empty.
I’ve not taken advantage of Flickr. I’d like to use Flickr to get some additional feedback on my photos and hopefully develop some cross-traffice between this blog and my Flickr account. Plus if I can post the photos once to Flickr and then use them else where things will perhaps stay updated a bit more.
Yeah, that would be good, to be able to use lightbox2 with flickr-stored images in the blog posts.
Hopefully there will be some type of solution…I’ll update if there is. :-)
These berries leap right off the page! Very nice shot.
Thanks, Don!
@Earl @Ove Email me guys I figured out how to use Lightbox with flickr.
Earl I use flickr for a lot of my photos and for the forums, although they can get tiresome at times. There are a few fairly interesting communities there that are worth the time, it would be nice to see more of your work and that is a good place to do that.
Ray, thanks for the email exchange. I look forward to further discussions on this later.
Interesting to see that you go this route: For a long time I used flickr as my basic display/storage unit and had my blog on blogger, using flickr medium size images in the blog.
I changed this setup, because I felt that the image size was too small for a good impact on the blog. Furtheron blogger was not flexible enough for me and last but not least I wanted to avoid feeding google with more personal data of myself and my readers – that’s the reason why I don’t use analytics any more, too.
Oh yes, Eric is right: flickr can provide some interesting feedback. It’s a pity that the design of flickr is, well, not that attractive.
It’s a mixed bag of pros and cons. I’d also like the posted photo size to be a little larger then the Flickr medium (500px) size images but I hope to find a way to use Lightbox2 to display a larger image. The tricky part in this is to still comply with the Flickr user agreement. Ray K. is looking at this issue also.
I agree with you the Flickr design is not so attractive but I’d like to tap into the user and user groups for discussion and feedback…perhaps also to generate some cross-traffic between the blog and Flickr.
I’m watchful but neutral on Google and the traffic/user data provided by Analytics. For the moment it’s useful for me and I’m not aware of any harm. That may change and if so I would stop using Analytics.
Re. flickr and lightbox: I have to admit that I happily ignored the flickr user agreement about directly linking the image to flickr, but instead put a link to the flickr page prominently at the bottom, trying to keep the *sense* of the agreement.
There was not too much exchange of visitors between flickr and my blog, barely noticable in the direction flickr -> blog. So that made decoupling the two quite easy.
Google analytics made watching those things relatively easy, and I still miss the well thought out analytical capabilities of this tool. However, the more I used it and learned about it’s power, the more I felt uneasy. The problem in my eyes is the cookie that google sets and reads with every visit on a analytics-enabled website. This means that not only our visits on this website are tracked (returning visitor and so on), but that google has complete knowledge of all the (analytics using) websites we visit. And through being an analytics customer they even have all the personal data to be connected with our breadcrumb trail through the virtual world.
This is my personal reason to dispense with this service, and this is also the reason why I delete almost all my cookies when turning off my browser.
Privacy: I sometimes think we’re all being tracked but then that’s perhaps being paranoid. ;-) Rumor has it our (U.S.) government security agencies have the capability to keyword search and track most if not all the traffic send across the Internet in the name of fighting terrorist. I’m sure other nations do as well. Any sense of privacy may be an illusion these days. :-(