SLL 2.0--Week 3, Thing 6--Flickr "Services"

Truly, the assortment of mashup "services"/"tools" available which interact with Flickr is astonishing... and I only took time to look at a few of them. I played with the "Flickr Color Picker" for about two minutes, and looked at some "trips" on the "Travel Planner" for about fifteen, read about Mappr, played with "retrievr" once... all interesting, but not that compelling or useful to me.

Then I went to "BigHugeLabs -- Home of fd's Flickr Toys" and discovered delivr (""Delivr might just be the biggest e card site on the internet with over 3,000,000 images to choose from to create a free ecard.") Now that I'll use personally! Immediately sent a couple to my wife, including a beautiful New Years e-card which will be great to send to friends & family if/when I ever get around to writing my (supposedly) annual personal newsletter.

But the idea of making an ersatz magazine cover especially appealed to me (thank you Helen Blowers/CSLA SLL 2.0 Team for suggesting it!)... and it's something I can share with LJHS faculty in an email, suggesting they consider having students create their own "magazine covers" for individual/small-group "magazines" of student writing (research projects or otherwise). So I used fd's Flicker Tool "Magazine Cover" to come up with the one you see up top--I'm actually rather proud of it. For about 15 seconds I considered paying $4.00 to have it printed as a poster and mailed to me so I could hang it in the library, but it's probably a little too sarcastic for that and I didn't want to spend more time and energy (and the $4.00--probably before postage) creating and tracking yet another login for another Web site. If you want to see it larger (or download the largest image file of it from Flickr so you can use it yourself--feel free), click here.

After creating it I was able to save it to my hard drive, then I added it to my Flickr collection. Rather than try to include it with this post the way I did the photo in the previous post (creating the blog post from within Flickr), this time I'm going to add it to this post from Blogger, uploading the photo file from my hard drive. I'm hoping this works better than adding a Web-hosted photo from within Blogger did.

Hooray... it worked! ...Well, sort of. The text trying to wrap on the left of the image doesn't do it right--leaves a big gap underneath the first few words, but oh well. Next time I want to include a "large" image with a post, maybe I'll try the "None" alignment option and see what happens.

SLL 2.0--Week 3, Thing 5 (more)

Students using reference BOOKS!
Originally uploaded by Browsing Isn't Surfing

Since adding a Flickr photo using Blogger's tool didn't work right, I'm now trying it from Flickr by using Flickr's "Add to blog" tool. "becca" Commented on my blog that she wasn't able to get a photo to display in Blogger using Blogger's tool, either, and suggested I try this.

I didn't try just uploading the photo file from my hard drive (in Blogger), because the whole point of this little exercise seems to be to do it using these this more-"Web 2.0" directly-from-Flickr-toBlogger tool (becca had this take on it, too).

About to click "Post Entry" in Flickr. If this works, you'll know it because this post--plus the photo in all its glory--will be in my blog! (Wonder if the caption--in addition to the title--will also show up?)

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.