I’m back this week from several weeks of traveling. When I sat down to the computer this morning I found that the header for this blog that I made using a Flickr badge wasn’t displaying. It seems to never fail that something unexpected happens when I sit down to work. I think this is one reason why some people don’t like computers. Problem solving is part of the process when doing things with networked technology. Visiting the Flickr site wasn’t much help because what I got there by way of explanation was a message:

Flickr is having a massage.
We’re getting excited!! More to come!
Please visit the Flickr Blog
 if you’d like to look at some photos.

I can only guess they took the site offline for a while. But of course, I visited the blog and didn’t get an explanation there. I haven’t paid much attention to the Flickr blog - too much stuff to pay attention to - but I think that I might because it seems to be the place to get clued in to new technologies. I found some old posts about Flickr and Feedburner, and another about a Mac OS X photo uploader.

    Multi-tasking to an extreme right now,
  • I’m uploading pictures to the photo gallery (my own) I set up yesterday using Singapore;
  • Writing this blog post using Ecto;
  • And I’m researching using a plugin that will help me start to take advantage of Feedburner, since I found out that it is integrated with Flickr.

All of these technologies are intended to make online publication easier, but I wonder. It takes a fair amount of determination - and time - to research and implement all of this stuff. Not for the faint of heart, I think.

So, after checking back, Flickr’s massage appears to be over. I have my Flickr badge back again. All is well, apparently, and now I have some new things to learn about. For one thing, the Singapore gallery displays the Flickr photos if I want it to, but I know it is going to be inconvenient, pasting URL’s into another application when people can simply visit the Flickr site. Especially cool is the RSS feed for the photostream. I like the Singapore gallery’s simplicity. It works well. But it doesn’t work any better than Flickr. And of course, there is no sharing on a standalone application. Notably lacking from the personal gallery software is RSS functionality. What it does offer, though, is control over the server where the photos are kept. Little glitches with Flickr, like this morning’s, won’t happen with a stand-alone application. The Mac OS X uploader utilty for Flickr is working like a charm. All things being equal, I think I’m going to make extensive use of Flickr and probably abandon the standalone gallery, since Flickr seems to be breaking a lot of ground. My pictures aren’t so special that I need to worry about what happens to them. They’re just there to help tell my stories. I never did figure out how to integrate that gallery software into the blog.

Summer in Alaska is a busy time. Fish to catch, endless daylight, blueberries to gather, gardening, places to go, home maintenance projects, and pure recreation activities all compete for time. Summer in the far North is glorious, and I always hate to see it end. I’m working overtime trying to have as much fun and get as many chores done as I can in the weeks that are left. After 25 years here, there are still many things I can explore and discover, and marvel about. Seems like pictures enhance the stories.