Y’know, it’s really hard to get anything useful done when I run across all these nifty new toys to play with.
First up was Flickr, an online photo sharing website. I’d actually poked around with Flickr a few months ago, and it didn’t impress me enough to come back. They’ve made a lot of upgrades to the service over time, though, and something finally prompted me to take a second look tonight. I must admit, I’m fairly impressed — impressed enough that I’ll probably finally take down my all too neglected photoblog, and stick with Flickr for a pesudo-photoblog. To that end, there’s a new item in the sidebar, just underneath the linklog, that will automatically update whenever I post a new image to my Flickr page.
One of the new features that sold me on Flickr is their RSS keyword integration. Each photo that is uploaded to Flickr can be assigned an arbitrary number of keywords, or ‘tags’ in Flickr-speak (for instance, the only photo I have up at the moment has the keywords ‘seattle’, ‘bumbershoot’, ‘fountain’, ‘kids’, and ‘children’). You can search for tags on the Flickr site, and then subscribe to an RSS feed for that search. I’ve set up four subscriptions in my newsreader (bumbershoot, seattle, anchorage, and alaska), so anytime anyone uploads a photo to flickr with one of those tags, I’ll see it pop up in my newsreader. Quite nifty.
There’s also a ‘blog this’ functionality that is supposed to allow you to instantly post any photo you find on Flickr to your weblog (which is where the previous entry came from). I’m not sure how often I’ll use this, for a few reasons. The first is simply that when I tried the test post, Flickr returned an error telling me that the post failed, though it later showed up on my weblog — not sure whether this was a Flickr issue or a TypePad issue, though. Secondly, Flickr-generated posts come through with no categories set, and me being obsessive about metadata, I’m not terribly thrilled with that. Lastly, there’s the simple aspect of appropriating other people’s photographs without permission (is permission for a picture’s distribution an implicit — or even explicit — part of the Flickr community or license agreement?), which I’m not sure what I think about just yet.
The other new toy for the night is the public release of the ecto 2 public beta. I’ve been using ecto as my weblogging client for a while now, and ecto 2 is a major upgrade to the application. Most of what I’m seeing I really like, though I did immediately switch off the ‘WYSIAWYG’ rich text editing in favor of the “old-skool” HTML editing, and I miss the popup window that used to appear when using command-U to insert a URL held in the clipboard (in ecto 1, you could copy a URL, select the text you wanted to make a link, and hitting command-U would bring up a window with the URL in the top field [which was also a drop-down menu containing recently added links], the selected text in the middle field, and an empty field for the title attribute; ecto 2 simply adds the link code around the selected text, with the boilerplate “TITLE” text in the title attribute; clicking the ‘create a link’ button brings up the old dialog box, so why doesn’t hitting command-U do the same?).
The downside to all this is that I got so caught up in exploring the new toys that it’s now far too late to get any laundry done tonight (which was the original plan), so I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning instead, as tomorrow night is packing night. Yeah, I’m so prepared for this vacation…
“Redemption Song” by Bakra Batá from the album Music for Bad Guys (1994, 5:29).