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Blogging with Flickr

Blogging with Flickr by Nico.....
I've been blogging, on and off, since I discovered Halcyon's amusing creations in mid-1999.

For a lot of that time I have been frustrated by the fact that however often I redesign my site I'm never completely happy with the way it looks. I spend my time designing and redesigning rather than producing good content to go in it.

So how could I blog without worrying about how it looked but keep my posts archived, tagged and searchable?

Well to cut a long story short I'm going to try blogging with Flickr for a while.

As a blogging app Flickr has a lot going for it:

- My "blog roll" is easy to maintain via my contacts and I can see when someone posts something new via the Your Contact' section of my home page.
- My feeds are managed for me.
- Tags enable me to ensure that my posts are easily found and help to create a folksonomy of my posts and others'.
- I can decide who sees my posts by assigning privacy levels to them
- I can annotate images which go with my posts using notes etc.
- My hosting is done for me!

One of the obvious points I should make is that all my posts will need to have some sort of image with them. I will have to be a creative with my screenshots of other sites to make it work, but as you can see from the post before this in my photostream (concerning Andy's post about Opera) it's not difficult to keep it relevant.

I'm not sure if it will work and I would love to hear from anyone with ideas about where it will break down and why it hasn't been done by lots of people before.

If you do look at my blog from time to time (stop laughing at the back!) then you need to look here from now on. 

Comments

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gilest  Pro User  says:

Nico, you pipped me to the post on this one. Very recently I had the same thought and very nearly tried it out, because, like you, I see a lot of positives.

The only thing that held me back was the nagging thought that I'd be tied to Flickr in the long run, and given my habit of switching from one CMS to another at the drop of a RSS feed, that didn't appeal. There'd be no way of exporting all your stuff, for example.

I also didn't like the rigidity of the Flickr page format. One pic at the top, with text underneath. That suits a lot of posts very well, but every now and then you might want a post which includes a sequence of images in a certain order, with text between them. Sure, you can implement this in other ways (using sets, adding to groups, annotations on pictures etc) but you're still tied to the way Flickr works. There's little room for flexibility.

None of which is intended as a criticism of Flickr, which does its job very well. These are just the thoughts that went through my head when I considered using Flickr as a weblog. I think the idea will suit a lot of people, and probably works better as a simple beginners weblog than blog*spot or some of the other freebie weblogging services.
Posted 51 months ago. ( permalink )

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roz the brownie says:

ah, so THIS is what the IT staff do in the evenings. wild ... :P
Posted 51 months ago. ( permalink )

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Nico....  Pro User  says:

Thanks Roz. Nice dress.

I know what you mean Giles. Your post about the Cotton Wool echo is a classic example but I can exmbed images in my description I suppose which would pretty much allow for most things.

I guess what I crave is something which I can use rather than constantly tinker with!
Posted 51 months ago. ( permalink )

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Elvira Black says:

Love the graphic...I've blogged it at

elvirablack.blogspot.com

Best,
Elvira Black
Posted 49 months ago. ( permalink )

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