New photoblog

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I've been irritated for a while by the setup I had for my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It looked nice enough, but I had to upload my photos manually, title them, describe them and set the location and so on. That was annoying when I was also uploading to Flickr, and thus duplicating effort, so I started to post fewer photos to my photoblog. I could have just swtiched to Flickr and directed people over there, but it feels a bit impersonal. Flickr is great for the social aspects, but it doesn't feel like my space. I also upload more stuff to Flickr than I want to display as my photographic portfolio.

I considered a variety of different approaches, which varied in complexity and functionality, before stumbling on Flogr. It's a fairly simple but rich PHP photoblog, which pulls your Flickr photos into a gallery that you can style to your liking. By default, it gets all of your photostream, but you can also restrict it to certain tags or photosets. I've set it up to pull in photos with the tag 'photoblog' which makes it easy for me to be selective. Optionally, you can cache the photos and information in a MySQL database, speeding up display somewhat. If you click the 'Details and Comments' link, you can see — well — details and comments, and you can click the comment link to go to Flickr to leave a comment. There's also a nice Lightbox view for the recent photos, allowing you to navigate between them, or view them full size by clicking the title at the bottom left.

I like it a lot, so I've set it up here. I didn't want to break any existing links, so I've left a link to the archived Wings Open Wide on the new page. I might do a bit more restyling of the page, but I'm pretty happy with it as it is. One thing I haven't quite sorted out yet is the display of thumbnails on this blog. I've used the Flickr badge, so it shows the right images, but links directly to Flickr rather than Wings Open Wide. That's not a big issue, but I might see if I can fix it at some point.