Raving Amicks

Sale #2 happened this morning. Rock lobster! Of all the things to buy, people actually want neck warmers!

Wait! How’s this photo not in your Flickr account but still on your website? Well, I did it the “right” way (no, I’m not looking at you, Mason). Of course, it is my photo, which just happens to be uploaded to my Flickr account. Flickr is an amazing source for photos, and I highly recommend using it when you want to post a photo on the family website of something you haven’t actually taken a photo of.

In other words, I’m assuming Mason’s photo was of some Hawaiian something or another that he found by searching for “Hawaii something or another” at images.google.com. This is how most people hotlink, by searching images.google. And yet, by linking to that person’s image and posting it on your site (as Tyler already explained), you’re adding to the monthly bandwidth total that someone is paying for. Now, this gets really annoying when you have a highly trafficked site and that extra bandwidth is the difference between your normal monthly bill and being charged extra for exceeding your monthly bandwidth allotment. And then, there’s always the ethical intellectual property argument that revolves around posting someone’s image without giving them credit. But that’s a whole ‘nother sack of potatoes.

So, this is where Flickr comes in. Flickr still has a lot of growth ahead of it, but it’s two years old and has a very strong community base. This means, there’s two years worth of photos uploaded by thousands and thousands of people. Flickr’s primary community is also bloggers. Bloggers jumped on the Flickr bandwagon before it was even a wagon, and bloggers are the meat and bones to the Flickr community. Because of this, Flickr has developed so that it’s easy to post anyone else’s photos to your blog without breaching into the ethical problems detailed in the above paragraph.

So, here’s how to post photos from anyone’s Flickr account onto this website:

1. Go to Flickr.
   • You’ll need to log in by clicking the “sign in” link at the top right.
   • Then select “Sign into Flickr using your Yahoo ID”
   • Log in as ravingamicks, using the secret password (ask Tyler or me what the password is over the phone if you don’t know).
2. Search for a photo by looking at the very bottom of the page and clicking “Photo Search” (in the giant gray box).
   • I typed in “lobster” and found 11,507 photos.
3. Click on the photo you like. After making my choice and clicking, this is the page I saw.
4. Just above the photo and below the photo title (“Hummer – Lobster” for this example), there is a little button that reads: “Blog this”. Click the button.
5. When you click “Blog this”, a box will pop down and ask you to select a “blog” (Flickr would consider each family member’s account a different blog, even though all accounts are connected to one website).
   • Currently, there is only one “blog” set up through the ravingamicks account– “Mindalee!” I set it so I have to add my personal password each time, which means none of you can post a picture as me (unless you know my password). This is good for preventing accidental postings under someone else’s name.
   • We can easily set up a “blog” for each member of the family so that you can post pictures under your name and onto this site. You’ll probably want to have me help you, though.
6. Select the “blog” name that belongs to you in the drop down box (in this case, “Mindalee!”). Flickr will then take you to a page that shows the picture you’re about to post to this site and two text fields where you can enter the post title and text of your post.
7. Write your post, give it a title, and click “post entry”.
8. Sit back, relax, enjoy the fruits of your labor with a clean conscience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Blog Mechanics, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.