Thing 4

Whew!

Thing 4 finished -- sort of...

I ran into all sorts of roadblocks here. To begin with, while I grew up taking photos (literally--my first camera was a cereal-box-premium point-and-shoot that used 620 film and let its 6-year-old owner take pictures "just like daddy"), I have not yet entered the digital age. Without a store of images from which to draw, I could read all about Flickr ... and not gain the hands-on experience of uploading, creating sets, tagging, and all the concomitant activities.

I considered asking family, but then reconsidered. Pictures of the granddaughter? Too public. Pictures of the house remodelling project. Nope -- needed to leave that out of my life for at least a few hours each day.

Then I stumbled onto a website that had all the photos I wanted and rekindled fond memories of my childhood. My father's annual effort to escape New York City's rampant ragweed late August and early September drew us into Nova Scotia. A 500-mile drive, a bout of seasickness on the seemingly interminable ferry crossing between Bar Harbor and Yarmouth, a bounce along Provincial Route 8, then unpaved, and we arrived at our cabin for a magical month at the lake, at Arthur Merry's "MerryMaKedge" -- land that has since been incorporated into a Canadian National Park, Kejimkujik. The park has a Friends group, and the Friends have an annual photo contest.

I created a Flickr account and tried my hand at adding some of their wonderful photos it, keeping the images private until I asked for permission to use them publicly. I added notes with credits for the images, played with the editing features on Flickr, created a few sets for practice, and having done that, emailed the site webmaster, explaining this project and my desire to use the photos.

My next hurdle was creating a slideshow to use on my blog. Yes, there's a page element on Blogger that is supposed to let you add a slideshow; I tried that, and it worked -- but my original set included two images that weren't part of the Friends of Keji site, and I didn't have permission for those. I tried to delete the images from the set, but the slideshow still showed the images even after I had removed them from the set, and even from Flickr. Then, somewhere in the trial and error process, the slideshow element decided --independently and unexplainably-- to show about half of the images in my set, and omit the rest.

Frustrated, I went in search of another way to embed a Flickr slideshow into a Blogger blog. Google yielded a number of possibilities, and I worked my way down the list.

At http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2005/09/flash-slideshow.html I found a template that asked for a Flickr user ID or set ID and given that, purported to generate the HTML code that, if pasted into the blog, would create the slideshow. Even after I discovered where to find my Flickr ID, the code I generated was not accepted by Blogger, which kept finding HTML errors that I don't have the slightest idea how to repair.

I tried using the set ID # (which was my preference anyway--I didn't want to use all of the images I'd put on Flickr, just a set of them, as this seemed like the most probable of future scenarios). The set ID# didn't bring up any images at all.

Another template called pictobrowser at http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2007/05/pictobrowser-embed-flickr-slideshow.html wanted my Flickr user name (more user friendly, anyway), but the code it generated still didn't work.

Finally, I tried a widget I found at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/flickr-slideshow-pricew. Lo and behold: slideshow -- that didn't fit into my sidebar. In order to resize the widget, I needed to sign up for a free widgetbox account. After that, it was trial and error to get the correct size in pixels. The slideshow displays only 14 of the 28 images in my set. I still can't get the display to show my credit captions correctly (the reduced size of my widget seems to be the culprit, and I still don't know how to limit my slideshow to a particular set on Flickr, but at this point, I'm going to move on.

Any suggestions, friends? I don't think I've got the tools to answer patron questions on this one.