About a month ago, I was tasked to create a blog for our office. Although we have an official website, the instruction did not involve the use of that website. I would have loved to, at least, create a subdomain from it for the blog project.
The only option is to use free blogs and among several possible platforms, I choose wordpress.com. The thing though is that the blog would require me to use a lot of pictures. And I’m sure that these free blogs have limits as to how much space you can use in their servers. These days, it wouldn’t be a lot as they are scrimping for space, what with millions of people creating new websites everyday.
With that problem in mind, I recalled having seen quite a few photo blogs before and I wonder if they store their own photos or host them some other place. Although most of these photoblogs I know are self hosted (meaning, not hosted in free blog sites), I think that they cannot just upload all they want in the servers they use. Paid hosts, I recall, also have limits when it comes to storage space even if they say ‘unlimited’ in their ads.
One photoblog I frequent is that of an Australian dude called Sire. He owns a couple of [wpPopWizard item_id=kswppw_in1ine clickthru=http://photos2blog.com/ newwindow=yes inltext=”<p>Photos 2 Blog by Sire</p>” ]photoblogs[/wpPopWizard] and I remember him in one of his past posts thanking flickr for something. I realized it was about the hosting of photos that he displays in his photo blogs.
Long story short, I decided to use flickr likewise to host the images I’m going to use for the blog I made for the office. And like Sire, I thank flickr for this feature. Flickr does implement some limit to the number of pictures you can upload per day or per month, but the picture volume for the blog I’m working on is comfortably way below the limits.
Once you have a flickr account and have uploaded your pics, it’s as easy as clicking the ‘share’ button above the picture you want to display in your blog.
Then, choosing ‘HTML’ (see #1 in pic), then choosing the size you prefer in the dropdown list (#2), then clicking on the code box (#3), the mere act of which automatically selects the whole code, then pressing ctrl-c to copy it.
The code looks like this:
[note]
< a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/blahblah/1111840101/” title=”picture’s title” >< img src=”http://farm7.staticflickr.com /6769/6328840101_02ae24dd4f.jpg” width=”456″ height=”500″ alt=”text here text here”>< /a >
[/note]
Now you’ve got the code to paste on your post on your blog. You now have a picture without loading your server with image files.
I don’t know what processing happens down at the flickr servers but I noticed that the flickr pictures displayed are a lot crispier and sharper with a lot smaller file sizes than the pictures I upload directly to the free blog servers. And inspite of photoshop’s ‘Save for web’ feature, I still can’t duplicate the small size flickr outputs at such good quality.
Of course, there’s the issue about what happens to your blog should, God forbid, flickr folds. But that’s for another story, I suppose.
