Kaotic, Kreation, Design

Perhaps you noticed in the top right of the page I’ve added my flickr photos. This is auto-updating, as soon as I upload new images to flickr they appear here on my site as well. And its super easy.

First head over to http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne, We are going to use the HTML Badge for this. On the next step we have a few options about the type of content you’d like to display. You can choose to display all of your public photos and video or perhaps just your content with a specific tag associated with it. You can even limit it to only display content within a specific flickr set. You even have the option to display all public content from everyones uploads, and yes you can specify specific tags for this as well.

To get the layout I use, select not to display your portrait, leave the number of images to display at 3 (4 isn’t an option we will override this in the next step anyway). Choose to display your most recent images, (or you can opt to display random images) Select Square for the size and for orientation select None (Because you want to style it yourself).

Go ahead and skip the Colors step because we are going to style this ourselves with a bit of CSS. Don’t worry what it looks like at this step, in fact we only care about one thing on the next step, the bit of code I highlighted in the image. However we need to change this code just a bit to load 4 images instead of 3 and to make the code Valid. First lets replace all the & with & and then we need to adjust count=3 to count=4 your end code will look somewhat like this (This will pull MY 4 images not yours be sure to get the code from the flickr page to pull your images).

Now that we have the little bit of code we need, lets get it ready to place in the WordPress sidebar. WordPress Widgets are also known as “sidebar accessories” which are WordPress Plugins or add-ons to your WordPress blog sidebar. Developed by Automattic for WordPress and WordPress.com blogs, WordPress Widgets allow the easy addition of design elements, gadgets, content, images, and more to your WordPress sidebar to personalize your blog without knowing HTML, PHP, or any code. Many WordPress Plugins now come with a Widget version to allow easy addition to the sidebar. One Widget type is Text which allows us to input our own HTML or Plane text, We are going to use this Widget type.

Now that we have the Basic code put together, we need to style it, so we need to add some CSS to the WordPress CSS file, Don’t worry its not as hard as you think, WordPress has a built in editor for doing this. (The following Instruction’s assume your running the latest and greatest Version of WordPress, If your not UPGRADE! if you don’t know how, Use the Contact link at the top of the page or leave a comment to get ahold of me, I offer WordPress Upgrades as a service, contact me for more details)

Select Appearance from the Left Sidebar, then select Editor, okay we are going to edit the Style-Sheet at the bottom. Once the editor is up scroll all the way to the bottom and Paste the following code in.

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: Broswer, CSS, Design, Flickr, Howto, Software, Web Design, wordpress

Flock is a Broswer desiged with Social interaction in mind, with the ability to plug right into most social sites like facebook and twitter. Run your own Wordpress install? It can plug into that as well, even has a built in blog eitor. If it wasnt for me writing my blog from so many locations I’d use it. but for now I stick to the built in Wordpress editor.

Flock has been unappy with support from Mozilla, even going as far as to say they are feeling like the “red headed step child of the Mozilla development community.” I for one am torn on this subject, while I love Google Chrome I love the addon’s for Firefox, and most of them work with Flock as well, but then again. If they were to add plug in support for Chrome I’m sure I’d move to Chrome for good. Even though for now I only run it on my work computer as every personal machine of mine Runes OS X or Linux.

Granted Google is working on a OS X version of the Chrome browser, but on that platform I’m going to be pretty torn between it or Safari 4.

In the end I tend to trust the developers judgment and I’m fairly cretin they would not put the time into a product they were not sure the everyday user will love.

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: Broswer, Chrome, Flock, google, Mozilla

I started my twitter account about a year ago, my first tweet a simple “Working” was made from well, work. Back then nobody else really understood what twitter was, and saw the quick 140 character updates as pointless and a waste of time. But I kept with it, there was a time I went a few months with out posting an update to my twitter account but. Then I got back into it and now I post multiple times a day.

I think the most common thing I actually use twitter for is searching, yes thats right. I search for new things on twitter before I search on Google. because while searching Google may return several pages written on whatever I’m seeking information on Twitter yields millions of individuals that have personal experience with what I’m seeking information on.

Living in San Diego I’ll be attending Comic Con in a few months, and while searching for #commiccon may not yield much information on the subject. Try it again during the convention and I guarantee you’ll see thousands upon thousands of tweets on the subject.

Twitter is turning more into a way for people to gather useful information on the internet, Twitter is turning into a search engine.

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: Search Engine, Twitter, web 2.0, webapp