Ever wonder how we manage to have a beautiful image illustrate every one of our posts on this site? Well, the secret is an incredibly handy WordPress plugin called Photo Dropper. It lets you easily search for, and insert into your posts, Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr.
Using the plugin is simple. When you want to insert a photo, you click the Photo Dropper button that is added to the “Upload/Insert” menu at the top of the new entry page in WordPress.
This brings up a search dialog where you can enter in keywords for to search for photos. Type some in and you’ll get back lots of interesting photos and graphics from which to choose. Click on one and it will automatically be inserted into your post.
The beauty of this plugin isn’t just that it makes it easy to find photos, but that it also makes it easy to respect copyright. In the plugin’s preferences you can choose the type of license to which you want search results limited–commercial or noncommercial. That way you know you’ll be using photos legally and ethically. Photo Dropper also takes out all the pain of giving credit to the image’s author because it automatically inserts the correct attribution and link back to Flickr. And as a bonus: Flickr hosts the image, reducing the stress on your server.
Here’s a bonus tip for those of using the Thesis WordPress theme: follow these instructions to edit your custom.css file so that when you use Photo Dropper, the images are nicely formatted and aligned left or right as you see fit.
As I explained in my last post, Tumblr is a light-weight hosted blogging platform that can be more than enough for many web projects. One thing that users accustomed to more full-featured content management systems miss when they use Tumblr is the ability to create static pages–for example, for an About page or a FAQs page. Luckily, there’s an easy way around that.
The trick I’ve used is to create subdomains for each static page. My personal blog is at jerrybrito.org, but my about page is at about.jerrybrito.org. That “about” subdomain is not hosted by Tumblr; it’s hosted on my own server. I simply took the HTML for my Tumblr template and replaced the dynamic content (the code that calls for the blog posts) with the static text of my about page. Voila, a static page for Tumblr.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a hack. If you need more than one or two static pages for your project, you’re probably better off choosing another CMS. A more likely scenario that would call for Tumblr, though, is if you have a website composed mostly of static pages or pages generated by some application that does not include blogging capability and you want to add a simple blog for your site. In that case, you can do the reverse of what I just described an put your Tumblr blog on a subdomain.
For example, I run a site called OpenRegs.com, which is an easier-to-use alternative to the federal government’s official regulatory portal, Regulations.gov. All of the pages on the openregs.com domain are generated by a custom-built application hosted on my own server. When I needed a blog to add the latest news and announcements about the site, I created a new subdomain at blog.openregs.com. That’s where the Tumblr blog resides and all the pages of that subdomain are hosted by Tumblr. The subdomain’s look is the same as the main site because I took the main template and simply added Tumblr code to pull in the dynamic blog content.
When choosing a blogging platform, don’t overlook Tumblr, the barebones hosted service cum social network. The key feature of Tumblr is how easy it is to post a nugget of information you found on the web. Whether it’s a picture, a video, a link, or a quote, all you have to do is click on a bookmarklet on your browser bar, add some optional comments, and it’s published to your site. Reblogging posts by others using Tumblr is encouraged and easy to do with one click.
This simplicity is why I use it for my personal site. You might not have time to compose long blog posts, but you can certainly click a button to share the cool things you find online. You can also post by emailing pictures, video, and text to a secret email assigned to you. This means mobile posting from your phone. If you like, Tumblr will also tweet out for you each time you post.
When I developed a new version of Paperclippy, a shopping blog for professional women, I chose Tumblr because it would make it so easy to maintain. Kathleen, who edits the site, surfs for cool stuff to post. When she finds something, she hits the bookmarklet and it brings up an editing panel where she can write her post. These then go into a queue so that she can amass dozens of posts if she wanted to, and then Tumblr will post them however you specify (we have it set to publisher three posts a day between 8 and 11 a.m.). At the same time it publishes, Tumblr tweets the posts and adds it to the Paperclippy page on Facebook. Finally, other Tumblr users who follow the site see it in their “dashboard” and can reblog the content.
Tumblr is easy to set up, offers a good deal of customization, and is incredibly easy to use, especially for web novices. Check it out if you don’t need all the overhead of a self-hosted CMS like Wordpress or Drupal.
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