The Akashic Field Chronicle

There’s a video about WordCamp Philippines in YouTube (made by Buddy Garcenia), and my friend and I make a brief appearance (very brief) at about 2:05. Right behind the girl who was shouting: “Wordcaaaaaaaamp”.

Very busy right now with grad school work and I think the following PhD Comics strip sums it all up:

PhD Comics

Now, I really should get back to work.

I had a little slack time (i.e. I was feeling lazy) and decided to hack me up one of those photo galleries that seem to be standard issue nowadays on most blogs. I’m not much of a photography expert. In fact, all I have is a point-and-shoot camera which isn’t even mine.

Still, I thought it would be great to have a photo gallery that’s integrated into my blog. That way, I could refer to pictures from my posts and also use a particular post to let people know if I’ve uploaded a new album. Kinda like how multiply.com does it, but with so much more control and right here on my blog.

Some guidelines

Here are a few issues I considered when building the gallery for my blog.

• I don’t really have a lot of webspace to host full albums in my own server. Good thing there are loads of services on the web that will do exactly that for you. A lot of people like Flickr, so I chose that and went ahead and created an account.
• I needed to find a plugin for werdpress that will do all the work for me. I’m not much of a web programmer so building one from scratch was definitely out of the question. Besides, with this great Flickr Plugin for WordPress, designing my own gallery was plain dumb.
• I wanted something that would allow me to create a blog post whenever a new album is uploaded to my account.
• It also has to be aesthetically pleasing and should look at home with my current theme.

My First Album

Here’s my very first album for my gallery. These pictures are from the recently held WordCamp Philippines 2008.

WordCamp Philippines 2008

Just go to the Gallery page (menu bar on top) to view my filckr sets (i.e. albums). Or click the picture above to go directly to that album.

Some Issues

The plugin worked great for my needs but of course there are some minor kinks that needed (or still needs) a little tweaking to be workable.

• Your Flickr API key (needed for the installation) won’t work until about 5 mins. after you create it. I was so excited to make it work that I thought something was wrong when Flickr was complaining that my key was invalid. Apparently, you just had to wait a bit.
• The look and feel of the default template was just not working for my theme. The album view was a bit cluttered for my tastes, showing all the pictures as thumbnails. I just wanted a single photo as cover for the album. A few changes in some php and css files ironed it out really well.
• I still think the look is a bit too bare but my web styling know-how is not enough to improve it significantly. So for now, I’ll just have to be satisfied with it.
• When clicking on the cover picture (at the Gallery page), you are directed to the specific page for that picture. It would have been better if it directed you to the album page, since that’s the use of a cover page.
• Uploading big pictures is too slow using my connection (and a bit costly in terms of my free flickr.com bandwidth limit). So I downloaded the jUploadr program (available sourceforge.net) which automatically resizes as well as uploads your pictures to flickr.

Head on over to my gallery section and test drive it. Don’t forget to comment on this post if you encounter any bugs or if you have any suggestions on how I can improve it’s look/usability.

Edit:

Possible show-stopper (thanks scion) – Flickr non-pro only allows 3 photosets, after that, you have to pay 25$ for 1 year. Unfortunately, the plugin I use tracks these photosets to group pictures into albums. Darn. So I guess, I’ll have to be content with a max of 3 albums for now.

Plan of action:

• Just use photosets for the 3 most recent albums
• Tag older albums so that they are still grouped somehow
• Figure out a better way!!! (if you know a solution, please comment. Note that I don’t want to host my own pics due to limited space and I don’t want to manually link every single picture)
• Get lots of MONEY from a kind soul and upgrade to Flickr pro (haha. I seriously doubt this one)

Edit: Edit:

Flickr now allows more than 3 photosets so this isn’t an issue anymore.

Just got home from WordCamp Philippines 2008, held at the College of St. Benilde earlier today. This whole day event was so much fun! Aside from that, it’s sort of a little historical too, being the very first WordCamp in South East Asia. For those not familliar with it, WordCamps are basically venues where WordPress users and developers hailing from a somewhat relatively small geographical region (say a country like the Philippines) can gather and talk about this outstanding piece of software.

The Event

Besides being fun, the whole thing was a really great learning experience. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress platform was there for a short talk about the state of WordPress and some Q&A towards the end. He had a really really light character and seemed to be a very approachable guy. I really should go to more of these kinds of gatherings. It’s definitely a great way of enriching and cultivating my inner geek. Ooops, maybe I should edit that out, because I don’t think I have an “inner” geek. I’m probably geek inside-out. Haha. So much to learn today and I’m really glad that Wilson told me to register for WordCamp in the first place. Funny thing though, Wil doesn’t even have his own blog (yet).

Stuff I Learned

It won’t be like me at all if I didn’t take the opportunity to share with you folks some of the things I learned (and as I said, there’s a lot). There so much stuff that I can’t even figure out how to put it all in this post. So, to save up on time, I’ll just pile them up in a bulleted list:

• Indonesians Rock – apparently, the second most used language in WordPress, after English, is Indonesian. Cool.
• WordPress is so much more - I already knew that, but seeing companies using WordPress for corporate sites is simply amazing. You can’t even tell that some of the websites are made with wordpress. Like this one.
• Tons of SEO plugins - a really hot topic in today’s WordCamp was Search Engine Optimization. Just do a google search on WordPress Plugins for SEO to streamline your blog for search engines.
• WordPress is actually very profitable – a lot of people think that there’s no money in Open Source. I guess this just proves how wrong they are. Just the licensing of Akismet alone is already a lot of money.
• Some folks really take blogging seriously – I wasn’t really familiar with the concept of Pro-Blogging, but it seems, some folks earn decent (or maybe indecent) amounts of money off of their blogs. Wow. I’d be satisfied if I could just earn enough to pay for my webhost and domain.
• Custom Fields for CMS – using WordPress to manage web content becomes really easy by using custom fields in your post. You could attach additional content to a post such as a logo, an audio file, an excerpt to sort of customize the way each post will be presented. This is especially useful if you want to use WordPress to build a website other than a blog.
• A whole lot more - which I’ll just share when I get to apply them.

Photos

Here are some pics from the event:

Matt, Wilson and Me

Matt, Wilson and Me Again

My Sister with Free Chowking Food

Freebies Galore

For absolutely 0 pesos, I got the folloing:

• A cool mug from NuffNang.com
• A small cloth bag with the WordCamp Philippines Logo
• Chowking Lunch
• Two wordpress stickers (round and square) which I now proudly sport on my laptop
• Free blog advertising (care of wilson)

For a little bit more, I got:

• A really really cool shirt which I showed in this post. According to Matt, it’s one of the best designs he has seen so far from any WordCamp.

I can’t wait for the next one!