SLL 2.0--Week 3, Thing 5--Flickr browsing

I almost titled this post "Flickr surfing"... but then you would have thought I was referring to the process of browsing through Flickr photos, wouldn't you? See how you are? ;) It's pervasive, now a part of the language of our Net culture. *Sigh*

Since the next Thing (#5) involves using Flickr, and I wanted to replace the stock image that runs along the top of this Blogger template with a photo of someone surfing anyway, I searched Flickr until I found a decent photo of someone surfing, then edited my blog's template to add it. I was pleased to be able to find a photo of someone surfing my home break, Swami's (at least according to its Flickr tag--and it does look like a Swami's wave). I did have to fire up Photoshop Elements and crop it vertically so it would be more of a band across the top rather than this huge photo you'd have to scroll down past just to get to the rest of the blog. Thank you, "Rick C San Diego" (evidently Rich Clark per his Flickr URL ) for posting this photo--and tagging it with "Swamis" so I could find it--on Flickr! (No, that's not me in the photo... no one's taking pictures of me when I surf.)

I guess what I've done satisfies Thing #5 Discovery Exercise a., but I may do Exercise b. if I have time. I think I have some photos of my library on my hard drive here at home somewhere...

Yup. OK, created a Flickr account (yet another account at another Web site! another login to record! Aaaugh!) and posted the photo. It's of a class last Spring working on a research project in the Reference room, using reference books (what a concept!). Virtually all have their heads down and it's a pretty blurry photo, so I'm sure none are individually-identifiable so I don't have to have parent-signed consent forms from any of them. Now to see if I can post it as part of this blog entry.

Rats! Didn't work. And now when I'm trying to edit this post to do it again, the Add Image icon in the Edit Posts toolbar doesn't bring up the Add Image window as it did before. Hmm... maybe my computer's tired? Back to the drawing board. For now, I guess ll just have to insert it as a URL here. That at least works.

Hmm... Tried again, and something very strange is going on. There's a very faint, almost completely "blank" space at the top of this post... looks like a faint "frame" of some kind. There were actually two of them, but I was able to delete one of them and leave only the one. Since I specified the photo be to the right, with the text wrapping on its left, the first line of text in this blog is "wrapping" around this faint frame... right where the photo should appear. and when you (I) click on that frame, it does switch the browser window to the Flickr-hosted photo of the library! I'm stumped for now.