We’re working on a new site at work, and it utilizes WordPress in a big way. (yay!)  Worlds are colliding… Just in time for WordCamp. However, there is also a community photo component that the client would really like to do with Flickr, largely due to “all the content which already exists” for their set of keywords. So we’ve been fooling with Flickr, and exploring the API, and trying to get approved for a commercial use, etc.

I do not like Flickr, and my lead developer agrees. The interface is not intuitive. Oh, it’s easy to upload photos and all, but if you want to do something other than basic upload, keyword and view – it could be a LOT easier to find the options, and figure out how to structure things properly. Number one rule of interface design – if a person has to do a bunch of Google-drive blog reading to figure out how to configure your service – your interface needs some clarity. Personally, I prefer Google photos, but I don’t do a lot of online photo hosting and sharing. This may be because I don’t have many friends, or the sort of friends that I would share pictures with, but mainly because I’ve just always used markalope.com to host any images I wanted to share, and leveraged any of the many free gallery generators to create my photo viewers. And another thing, the purchase (of Flickr) by Yahoo kind of scares me when it comes to utilizing Flickr as part of a site – there’s too much than can change in their TOS post-purchase. Still, the client want the “cachet” (which they persist in spelling “cache”) of the Flickr logo, and of course all the content they are convinced is already there.

So I guess maybe “cache” is the proper word after all….

Several days ago there was a sort of blow-up on several of the Wordpress community sites, and related blogs dealing with “sponsored themes”. AS you probably know, Wordpress’ display layer is referred to as a “theme” and as with anything else, there are thousands of themes available for download all over the Web.

Turns out may of these themes, even though advertised as “free” are in fact “sponsored” by the inclusion of several links in the template. These links could go to any sort of site, and obviously, a lot of them are sponsored by the types of sites that most folks wouldn’t want links to on their blog. The argument that “people can just remove the links” is being made by many of the posters – although certainly not by the designers of these themes in question.

I first read about this here, on Lorelle on Wordpress.

Even Matt Mullenweg weighed in on this issue, here.  And on his own blog, here.

Anybody who’s done any sort of searching for these things will easily spot that this blog’s current theme is a lightly tweaked version of someone’s “free” theme. In fact, it until recently featured sponsored links in the template, which I have removed by editing several files in the theme. So that leaves me here…

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See the problem with this whole blog thing is that I cannot be satisfied with templates. Oh, I’m ahppy to use them, and I really don’t customize them too much – it’s just the little things really. All these little things make it hard for me to start this new blog since I keep running into thing I need to tweak, but haven’t gotten around to changing yet.

Examples?

• I need to make the header clickable to return home – but oh yeah, this template has those cool tabs.
• I need to write the about page
• I need to upload my gotta-have extensions to this wordpress install and activate those few I use. Do I really care about stats for this blog? Of course I do. Which means I need to get serious about fleshing out the META tags, etc.
• No Google ads on this site. This one is just for talking.
• I need to change the index page at Markalope.com to be a real index page or have it default to this blog. That’s kind of a tweaky thing that’s more of a pain than it should be, And I could have avoided it by just installing WP to the right freakin directory in the first place.
• I need to decide what my mission is with this thing and generate some content.

Aren’t new blogs a fun read? What a waste of bandwidth, posting all this shizz when it all should have been nailed before the thing went live.

This is the first post on this new blog. I’m using this as an outlet for topics, discussion and interaction with a larger community of blogger than I have been interacting with up to now. I’ve been online journaling (on Livejournal) since 2001, and active on the Internet and various BBSes since the mid-80’s. Two years ago, I launched a “real” blog focused on my neighborhood called The Multnomah Villager. I am one of those hyper-local bloggers that are often dismissed by “the in crowd” as one of the 100-hits-a-day bloggers. Personally, I’m OK with my level of traffic (which is more like 200 hits per day, thanks) and my place within the tangle of online resources. I originally launched the Villager blog on Blogger, but soon outgrew the current functionality (it’s better now) and after a few months of reading and waffling, moved the blog onto Wordpress. The transition to Wordpress has forced me to update my knowledge of markup language, and introduced me to working in CSS. I am not a programmer, but I enjoy tweaking.

I’d like to become more knowledgeable about the Wordpress platform, as I’m now using it with a couple of work projects, in my daily life as Director of Operations for the Portland, OR studio of Compass Rose Media, a Santa Cruz based interactive/video firm. I’d like to become more active, or at least nominally active, in the larger community of bloggers and web producers/creators. To that end, I decided to head down to San Francsisco later this month for WordCamp. I might as well throw myself headfirst into a group of 250 power users. I’m introverted like that.

That’s my intro.