What’s In A Blog?

Flickr is a great, free way to have your pictures on your blog w/o using your own space. If you don’t already have a Flickr account, it’s easy to set up. You can now even give your Flickr photostream a unique name. That makes it easier to link to your Flickr Photos. For example, I named mine “surelybwh”. If you look in the sidebar, just under blogroll is a set of links labeled “Demos”. You’ll see a link called “My Flickr”. (All I did was add a new category under blogroll and named it Demos.) It links to this page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/surelybwh/

Go ahead, try it out. But be sure to come back!

Back already? Good. Now here’s some more you can do with your Flickr - the part that makes it FUN!

If you have a group of photos in Flickr that are from your trip to Cancun, you can tag them all with the same tag. Then you can link to the whole set in your blog. For example, I have tagged all my jewelry photos with the word “jewerly”. So if I want to link to them, I would use their tag:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/surelybwh/tags/jewelry/

My Jewelry

How did I make that a link? I selected the text ‘My Jewelry’ with my cursor. Above the text area for your post in WordPress, one of your options is to link. It will say “link” or it could have a picture of chain links. With your text still selected, click the link option. You should see a box appear asking for the link. Then I just typed in the link information as defined above. Oh, and I could have put the link in the middle of a sentence where I want you to admire my jewelry photos in Flickr.

Want to get fancier? You could put in a link to a slideshow by adding ’show/’ to the end of the link, like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/surelybwh/tags/jewelry/show/

That way I can link to a Flickr slideshow of my jewelry, too!

What if you want to show an image from Flickr within your post? That’s pretty simple. First, click the image in Flickr. Above the image you should see a row of options - Add Note, Send To Group, etc. Click on the All Sizes option. You should now see “Available Sizes” across the top. Click on the one you want to display. For my example I chose Medium. Now if you scroll down, below your image you should see Options for linking the image to another web site.

Option 1 - Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage. To use this option, select and copy the html code in the box into your clipboard (Menu option Edit->Copy or Ctrl-c or Cmd-c). The code I selected looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/surelybwh/1154071995/” title=”QuiteTall by surelybwh, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1069/1154071995_bd8950574c.jpg” width=”500″ height=”333″ alt=”QuiteTall” /></a>

Now for the tricky part. Be sure to do this exactly or it won’t work and you’ll just wind up with code in your post like that above! In WordPress, you must be in Code mode for the post you are writing, rather than Visual. So, select the Code tab for you post, position the cursor where you want your photo and then paste the clipboard contents (Menu option Edit->Paste or Ctrl-v or Cmd-v). And, Voila! If you did it right, once you save and preview, you should see your image in your post. Like this:

Notice that the code from Flickr automatically creates a link to Flickr - try clicking on the picture above.

Option 2: Grab the photo’s URL

This option in Flickr lets you just show the link, perhaps with some text. In Flickr, copy the code in the box under option 2. Now, in your post, type some text that you want to link to the picture. In the example below, I typed “Picture of Grayson”. Now, with your cursor, select the text you just typed, all of it. Above your post, one of your options is to link. It will say “link” or it could have a picture of chain links. With your text still selected, click the link option. You should see a box appear asking for the link. Paste the link you got from Flickr and click OK. You should see something link the following in your post. When you click the link, it should take you to your picture.

Picture of Grayson

Grayson is, for obvious reasons, known as the Long, Tall Texan. You can see more of him in Flickr under my Grayson tag!

You can also create a Flickr badge, like the one in my sidebar, for your blog at this link: Flickr Badge. If you have no clue what to do with it once you’ve created it, you may want to ask someone to help with that.

Well, I hope this has been helpful to you. If so, use the email link to pass it on! If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them!

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