Creating a photoblog

December 13, 2008 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

Spurred on by the concern that the quantity of photos I’m posting on Flickr is swamping some good pictures, and the acquisition of a new domain name (paulsphotos.org), I decided to create a photoblog.

I had a couple of basic requirements: it should link to my Flickr photos (so I don’t have to re-post them to the blog), and it should be based on WordPress (because I’ve used it a lot) or something equally simple to configure.

My first thought was to look at some photoblogs that I like and see how they work; I started with the Daily Dose Of Imagery, Rannie’s blog and photosapience … and ended up no closer to an answer.

I searched for a simple How To recipe using Google but nothing seemed to be very helpful (maybe I was tired and missed an obvious post), so did the obvious thing: I posted a request for help on Twitter and LiveJournal … and sure enough, I now have a photolog

So here are the steps to how I set up my photoblog:

I’m assuming you have a domain name pointing at some vacant web space – if people need help with this step, I’ll make a separate post because it’s not always simple.
My web hosting service (HostPapa.ca) uses cPanel and Fantastico, so installing WordPress is as simple as answering a few questions. (I used to host my own websites so I’ve installed WordPress from scratch; it’s not much harder, just more time consuming.)
In WordPress, set up a user – I like to keep my admin users separate from regular users, whether that’s for WP, the operating system or anything else.
Go to WP’s Writing Settings and enable XML-RPC; without this you won’t be able to post from Flickr.
Hop over to Flickr and in Your Account – Extending Flickr set up your blog; it gives you a hint at the URL for your API Endpoint, which should be OK if you’ve done a standard WP install. The username and password are for the WP user you created a couple of steps ago. For the post’s layout, I chose “500px, on its own line”.
I found a photo and did a test post: above the photo is a “Blog This” button that drops down a list of your blogs, and then you’re taken to a page that lets you add more text which will become the rest of your photoblog’s post.
Back to WordPress to admire my first photoblog picture!
I found a site called Photoblog themes for WordPress which had some themes I liked, so I downloaded Polaroid, unzipped it and then uploaded it to the WP contents/themes folder;
Before I activated the new theme, I noted on their site that it needs the Custom Query String Plugin so I installed it.
(I haven’t yet worked out if I can follow the theme’s instruction to “Post your image in the POST field and your thumbnail in the EXCERPT field” – Flickr just lets me post a single image, so I suspect I’ll need to find a workaround for the Archives page.)
Don’t forget to activate the theme by selecting it in WP’s Design tab
I then installed and configured a few of my favourited plugins:
Lastly I created an empty Archive page and filled in a little blurb on the About page.