Paul Henman at henman.ca

I put together a web page a while ago that summarises where to find Kerri and me (it’s at henman.org) but I have a presence on a lot of sites, so I’m creating a new page (at paulhenman.me) which lists a lot more of the places where I hang out.

That’s all

I have removed the contact form because I’m being flooded with spam. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and even my email addresses at http://www.paulhenman.me/

I’ve fixed a problem with this blog’s config in FeedBurner, so now you should be able to follow my posts using your favourite RSS reader. To subscribe (i.e. follow me; it’s free, despite the word suggesting otherwise), click on the RSS Feed at the top right of this page, or point your RSS reader at http://henman.ca/blog/feed/

Not that you should see any difference, but FeedBurner is now migrated to Google.

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/

LiveJournal is down as the data centre moves to its new home, which was planned and announced a few days ago.

However, Twitter is down too (for database maintenance) but there’s no mention of it on their status page.

All I need now is for my email to hit a problem and I’ll be completely cut off from the outside world!

Oh, I forgot about Facebook – I guess that shows how often I use it!