Paul Henman at henman.ca

I’ve just upgraded to TweetDeck v0.24.2b* and it now has the option to post to Facebook as well as (or instead of) Twitter, which means I no longer need to have my tweets auto-echo as my Facebook status. Read more »

I’ve dropped the “life stream” focused Agregado theme in favour of MistyLook, mainly because I’m refocusing my blog away from simply aggregating my other feeds. (The “life stream” is still there but it’s been relegated to the sidebar.)

The new banner picture is taken from a photo I took of a Lamborghini at the 2009 Toronto International Auto Show; you can find all my photos from the show in my flickr album.

I’m pretty happy with the new look but I’ve got a couple of other plugins that I’m testing out; let me know (leave a comment on this post) if you spot any issues. Thanks.

I’ve installed a new plugin in my blog: LiveJournal Crossposter. It should automatically re-post this to my LiveJournal account but I’ve configured it so that all comments must be on the original blog post. I’ve also configured it Read more »

I’ve turned off the Daily Digest in Twitter Tools, so you won’t see a “Twitter Updates for (date)” post each day. The individual “tweets” will still appear in the “Find me Elsewhere” section, but the daily digest is drowning my real posts … as few and far between as they are.

I still use Twitter more than anything else, but it’s time I got back into blogging; I do occasionally post to my LiveJournal so instead I’ll post those here and have it replicate on LJ.

Don’t forget there’s also my photoblog @ http://paulsphotos.org/ – it’s a “best of” taken from my Flickr photos.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.)
3. 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.
4. Go to WP’s Writing Settings and enable XML-RPC; without this you won’t be able to post from Flickr.
5. 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”.
6. 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.
7. Back to WordPress to admire my first photoblog picture!
8. 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;
9. Before I activated the new theme, I noted on their site that it needs the Custom Query String Plugin so I installed it.
10. (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.)
11. Don’t forget to activate the theme by selecting it in WP’s Design tab
12. I then installed and configured a few of my favourited plugins:
    • Maintenance Mode
    • WordPress Database Backup
    • WP Contact Form III
13. Lastly I created an empty Archive page and filled in a little blurb on the About page.

It looks like a lot of steps but it didn’t take very long at all! You can see the results @ http://paulsphotos.org/