One of my photos on Schmap! Yay me!

One of my Flickr photos got selected for the current Schmap online guide – they use photos to illustrate points of interest in their web-based city travel guides. It just goes to show you that it’s a good idea to tag your photos effectively on Flickr, as this is the second time something like this has happened.

The other one requires me to fill out some kind of form, need to get on that this weekend. I might actually get a small fee for use of another of my photos.

The No Name Saloon, Park City

Salt Lake City – Theme Bars

The decor is as interesting as the club’s name. Baby buggies, motorcycles, and antler lamps hang from beamed ceilings above an eclectic mix of collectibles and a western copper bar.

[tags]Flickr, NoNameSaloon[/tags]

Random Thumbnail Stories

IMG_4221

I'll try something from time to time here – when one of the random thumbnails catches my eye, I'll tell the story behind it.

This was taken on a May trip to Washington State a few years back. David and I flew out for Folk Life and then took off on a big loop around the Olympic Peninsula, the National Park, and down and around the long way, ending up at Mt. Rainier National Park. It was a lot of fun, but the next time we do that, we'll retrace steps rather than circumnavigating the peninsula, it was a very long drive.

This was taken along the coastal unit, where we could have spent a lot more time. On a future trip, we'll arrange our days differently. 

IMG_4221 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

[tags]Flickr, random[/tags] 

Purty Gurl

AlexaSnow.jpg

This is just a test post with perks: I get to see if Image Manager by Per Søderlind solves my little problem with IE not being able to show the WordPress image uploader. And it does, so nana-nana-booboo, Mr. Gates. My readers (all seven of you!) get to see my great-niece, Alexa. All snowy and cute. And perky.

And it works! The crowd goes wild.

Extended geeky navel-gazing follows…

I had been somewhat puzzled by the fact that at home, I could upload images via either the WordPress built-in uploader, or via ecto, but I could not upload images while at work. I thought it was something to do with a firewall or other security feature at the office, but no, it's something gone horribly wrong with the way a particular plugin I use called WYSI-Wordpress  interacts with IE and vice versa. Also, there are other problems for users who don't have this plugin, because the image uploader works differently in IE than it does in Firefox, requiring a rather hairy-eyeballed hack. The solutions to both of these problems are often found in support threads that include comments like "Well, your users should be using Firefox" or "IE6 is horrible, don't use it. Why update for something that may be fixed in IE7?"

IE7? Isn't that like the Second Coming?

Apparently, the good people who update WordPress, more or less as a labor of love, are so lacking in love for the product of the otherwise hugely philanthropic Bill Gates that they never bothered to test the latest version (2.x) with IE. And neither did the good people who make the otherwise excellent, excellent plugins.

Oops. That wasn't very nice.  But it's all fine now, because there's always another plugin you can throw at a problem.

Station: Falling the First Time

Flickr

This is an example of the kinds of things we're going to be moving from Holy Moly to St Nicholas. It's one of the Stations of the Cross that was made by one of our parishioners, and I think it represents Jesus falling the first time on the long walk to Calvary.

If you look closely, you can see two honkin' big wood screws going right up His robe. Also, it's really battered and like all the rest, really dusty and cobwebby. The ladies from the Altar Guild no longer dust these, because they regularly got pulled from the wall and broken because their dusters, or the silk scarves used to cover them in Holy Week would catch on them.

It's about the size of a large framed picture, and the open frame is made from very rustic, splintery wood. I'm not sure what the figures are modeled from, but I suspect all Stations were made from discarded or recycled building materials from when the church was built, or perhaps the parishioner was in construction.

It's definitely not my favorite. I purposely took the photo under moody, low-light conditions because flash just throws all the unfortunate detail into stark relief. It's not bad-looking now, and has a definite feeling of the agony it's meant to convey, but it's pretty primitive when seen close up under strong light.

I guess you'd call these an example of outsider art.

Via: Flickr Title: Station: Falling the First Time By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 13 Dec '06, 9.59pm CST PST

Another Point of View

Holy Innocents, Pentecost Sunday

Holy Innocents, Pentecost  Sunday

Just another test of ecto, so I used a picture from the Holy Moly site. This time, I actually completed the steps, instead of being stumped by Flickr’s “Oops” page. The trick is to disregard the error page, and to continue with the steps in authorizing ecto by clicking the “Finished” button. Duh, but also, not that intuitive. The answer from ecto was of the “you stupid n00b” variety, but hey, if I land on a page that says “Oops,” I expect that the process has failed, not that I should continue with the next step anyway.
In any case, this seems to be working. Still having a problem with ecto seeing drafts after I changed the blog profile to use the Movable Type API, which supposedly sends drafts info back to ecto.
[tags]Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, ecto[/tags]

Photographic Procrastination

Maroon Bells 10-11-2006 12-39-01 PM 3072x2048

Taken at Maroon Bells, near Aspen, Colorado.

You know, I really need to upload the rest of my photos from the October road trip. At the moment, though, I’m just testing a new beta version of ecto, 2.2.0 beta 3, and it has a very, very cool Flickr plug-in that pulls photos in very nicely, and then it applies all my fussy drop shadow doodaddery.

This process would be speeded up greatly (like, Warp 10, Mr. Worf greatly) if I could log in automatically to Flickr.

However, I couldn’t log in to my own personal photos to pull them, although I can pull “everyone’s” without special permission (it’s called an API key, but I can’t figure out where to put it). I got around that by using the unique tag I assigned to my “best in show” photosets when I set up a similar plug-in in WordPress. Just so you know, that tag is “blogula.”

I’d rather use ecto because of all the pre-sets; for technical reasons it’s not as easy to use some of my image shadow stuff with their post editing window. Just now I logged a question about how to go about authenticating ecto for Flickr.

Everyone stop scratching your heads, please. Except my husband David, and Dave of DDtB, who also uses ecto.

If I weren’t already a registered user of ecto, you could call this post “demo-bloggery.”

[tags]ecto, WordPress, Flickr, Maroon Bells, Nature, Photography[/tags]

Ahh…

Picture of David

David, on Day One of our last trip to Maui.

Really, this is more of a test post, I’m checking out ecto, and the iTunes plugin associated with it. I’ve managed to get it working and it appears to be mostly harmless. There’s a support forum,

Time for the acid test. I may be cracking open a beer in a second, but will there be much joy? or no joy?

Ledward Kaapana:Whee Ha Swing:Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters[2:37]

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Announcing: Yahickr!

Flickr and Yahoo, those two cahootsers, are integrating even more by making it possible to sign in to Flickr using a Yahoo ID. This is supposed to make it easier to use and easier to invite people, and they’ve made the sign-up process even easier.

So hey Timmy! Why don’t you sign up for Flickr and start putting some family photos up? How about everybody else in our far-flung family?

I’ve been having a lot of fun with it lately and still have plenty of photos that I want to highlight there. I’m starting to join more group pools and have a few contacts. It’s fun, and could be a lot more fun.

My stuff is at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ginnyred57/

via FlickrBlog