Isaac's cool blogInspired a bit by Svein’s comment, I added a feature to search Flickr for Creative Commons and public domain photos. It’s probably still a little rough, but seems to work pretty well so far. Since most licenses require attribution, I’ve turned on the caption by default – and it now includes a link to the photo’s owner.
Download flickpress 0.7: flickpress_0.7.zip
Also, flickpress is now at the WordPress Plugins ranch, so you should be alerted to upgrades now.
I got brave last weekend and rode the bike down to Hains Point. It turned out to be a traffic nightmare and the bike and I got pretty hot, but I did manage to find a parking spot along the Potomac side of Potomac Park, where there were plenty of blossoms and not very many people.
Yesterday the Tidal Basin was way too crowded so today I decided to make a Metro-and-foot trip down, knowing rain and Monday would thin the crowds a bit. The rain and wind weren’t fun, but the Tidal Basin was very quiet and the blanket of petals all over everything was well worth getting a little wet.
As part of my photo archiving process I like to first change the image file names from their original nonsense names to something based on the date and time. This way, if I upload a low-res image someplace, such as Flickr, I can easily use its original filename to locate the high-res version in the archives. This also means all of my images have unique filenames.
To batch rename files, I used to use a script called “irename” that I got from varp.net a long time ago. Unfortunately, it would fail to rename images that were taken too close together. Looking at the code, it didn’t include a way to automatically give unique names to images taken really close together. So, I looked at the code to see if I could fix it. It turned out the script was parsing the EXIF info in image files itself – which I guessed an external program could do more reliably. There’s a Perl library and command-line tool called exiftool that does a great job of parsing EXIF info. It even does exactly the sort of image file renaming I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to have to type all this every time:
exiftool -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%e "-filename
When you find yourself typing stuff like this at the command line repeatedly, you should put it in a bash script with a name you’ll remember, place that in your “bin” folder, and make it executable. I called my script “camcon” because I didn’t have anything on my system with that name and it sounded easy to remember. Download camcon: camcon.zip
It’s springtime in DC, which means cherry blossoms and tourists. After the inauguration, the cherry blossom crowds seem pretty tame – no need for the national guard to do crowd control at least. However, trying to take photos around the tidal basin you’re either standing in someone’s way or further trampling the already dead grass. So, I like to head over to East Potomac Park, towards Hains Point, instead. Also, the blossoms around the tidal basin and Hains Point are all the same delicate pinkish-white, so if you like some variety in your blossoms, you’ve gotta go elsewhere. I found the bright pink blossoms at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton.
Update: Added a couple more from Brookside Gardens. This Flickr set contains a few more photos.
If you run a group blog, your group members are going to forget to title their posts now and then. It’s mostly just an annoyance – posts without titles look funny – but some plugins get broken because they expect posts to have titles. So, I was using Luke’s Default Post Title plugin, which works well but just sets a default, such as “Untitled Post.” The code I borrowed from the Prologue theme for the quick post feature in OrgPress has a nice auto-title feature that takes the first 25 characters of post text and uses that for the title. It results in some silly titles, but at least they’re more informative than “Untitled Post.” I smooshed the two together into Titlematic, a plugin that sets the title for an untitled post to the first 25 characters of the post’s content and reverts to the “Untitled Post” thing if there isn’t any post content, such as when a post is just an image. Right now you’ve gotta edit the code to change the number of characters to use, so for the next version I’ll probably add some settings.
Download Titlematic 0.1: titlematic.0.1.zip