Daily Archives: December 10, 2006

Why Is This Man Smiling?

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NPR : Rumsfeld Makes Farewell Visit to Troops in Iraq

 

Rumsfeld in Iraq

 

This photo from NPR, via Getty Images, tells an untold story. Donald Rumsfeld, grinning widely, gets a last photo op with "the troops" that he was so instrumental in placing in harm's way.

The female Marine at lower right seems to be smiling politely. Maybe she's thinking "My mom/husband/kids will see me" and is happy at the prospect. The other Marines in the photo all look stonily and grimly at some other focal point. The one guy standing on the right looks directly  into the camera. I can't tell if his expression is "Hey, there's a camera down there too… oops," or "Can you getta loadda dis shit?"  

Why is Rumsfeld smiling? Is he determined to put on a happy face after finally getting an offer to resign accepted by Bush? Is he attempting to show that everything in Iraq is much, much better than the Iraq Study Group painted it to be this week? A bit of "too little, too late" flesh-pressing with the grunts? Or all three?  

Wessex Archaeology And Flickr

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Wessex Archaeology And Flickr: How We Use Web 2.0 – 24 Hour Museum – official guide to UK museums, galleries, exhibitions and heritage

 

Roman Bowl

 

 

Wessex Archaeology is one of the largest commercial archaeological practices in the UK, employing over 160 people. We are a registered charity with educational objectives and play a vital role in helping people learn about their past.

In September 2005, we decided the Wessex Archaeology gallery (on the web) was looking a little long in the tooth. It was using a proprietary ASP gallery script and the process of uploading new photos was a pain. We had to manually create thumbnails, medium and large size versions of each photo, and follow a rigid structure. There was no chance for people to interact with the photos themselves, and the script itself was not particularly reliable.

This realisation triggered a review of our website strategy, stimulating an investigation into new 'web 2.0' approaches, such as social media, blogging, RSS and podcasting.

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One of the major factors that makes Flickr a good service to use, is that they provide an API. They encourage people to build applications that use the photos that they host. This enabled us to build our photos back into our website with our own look and feel, and thus have our gallery accessible from two locations.

Using the FAlbum plugin for WordPress, the engine which powers our blogs, integration of our Flickr account into our own site was very simple. A simple install and quick edit to the templates, and it looked like the rest if our website. A quick edit to the main site navigation, and it was live, and updating itself from Flickr whenever we added a new photo or even changed a description. Since Flickr handles image resizing for you, there's even less work to do.

This is cool! As it happens, I've also implemented a Flickr/Wordpress plugin to pull my own (or anyone's) images into my blog. The gallery page is also part of the same plugin. So I was able to pull in the image above directly from Flickr, using the WordPress edit interface that's been updated with the Flickr FAlbum plugin.

Via Archeology in Europe