Wed 19 Nov 2008
Thanks to EphBlog readers’ generosity, I have a Flickr Pro account. One of the purposes of this gift was to make my pictures easier for EphBlog readers to browse and enjoy. I recently realized that I had not made all of my EphBlog photos into a “set.” (A set makes it easy to look at a group of photos without having to do a lot of back-and-forth clicking, as is necessary with simply tagging them.) I have now done so: EphBlog photo set. It should include all the pictures I posted on EphBlog over the years. A few are missing, but not many (I am adding them as I find missing ones). So if you’d like to reminisce back and take a look at those pictures, there they all are. Browse, and enjoy.
By the way: In my opinion, the best way to ensure that the Flickr sidebar contains a good sampling of Williams photos would be to require that the pictures are from six different Flickr accounts. Then you won’t get five blurry running pictures, five underexposed dance pictures, or (gasp!) five fall foliage pictures.
November 19th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Thanks for doing this.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Here’s a slideshow (also added to “Of interest” sidebar for posterity). When we get the new theme (with wider sidebars) finally launched, I’m thinking we might replace the current sidebar widget with a similar (smaller) slideshow that plays off the “williamscollege” tag.
November 19th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Thanks, Ronit and Diana. I remember the photo ID contest with (nostalgic) fondness.
I like the idea of a slideshow. I would hope that it could include a wide variety from the thousands of tagged “williamscollege” photographs, and be added to regularly. A more limited slideshow would get dull for regular visitors.
Do you remember the photos that used to show up on WSO? (Maybe they still do, but I can’t see them from away.) I was led from there into a lot of wonderful memorializing of, amongst other things, semesters away as well as lots of campus shots. Is something like that possible here?
I wish we could figure out how to solve the problems with the flickr feed. If we set it on “most recent” we repeatedly get clumps from the same event, which gets tiresome. If we set it on “most interesting” (apparently, generally meaning “most viewed”), we keep seeing a very limited number of photographs over and over, and don’t see many additional ones often — or ever — once they have been in the pool for a short time (i.e., we see them a few times but only when they are first posted — the selection from “most interesting” seems to have a “most recent” subcomponent to it, which is why we keep seeing the dance pictures recently, I think).
I don’t know very much about other blogs or sites that have photos, but I’m hoping someone has a lot of experience with this and can suggest a good solution.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
The photo ID feature was wonderful! Too bad no one took over from Diana.
As far as the sidebar photos, perhaps the code could be changed to the Flash Flickr badge instead of the static html version. The Flash version constantly changes the photos so you’re guaranteed to see a variety. I’ll try to post the code in the next comment.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
uh okay, I guess it won’t let me do that :)
November 20th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Laura - your code didn’t post, but a Google search turned up the code. I’ll see if we can get it to work.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Ok, this morning when I visited EphBlog, all 10 pictures were from my flickr account. I refreshed a few times, and they were all from my account every time. This evening, they are all from acordova’s flickr account. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? I understand that with randomness comes examples that don’t “seem random,” but I was able to replicate the situation repeatedly. Can we please find a way to require that they come from different accounts, or at least that they come not all from one account?
November 24th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Diana - I’m “working” on it. But it doesn’t seem possible to do true randomness using Flickr’s API (they only offer two algorithms - most interesting and most recent - for sorting the photos).
What I’ve done is I’ve required the photos to come from the Williams College “pool”, which obviously has a high concentration of photos from you and Alan. This isn’t perfect, but at least it provides a change from the older method, and turns up some interesting photos.
If someone wants to write us a little script that grabs the URLs for all of the pictures found when searching flickr for a certain tag, assigns each picture URL to an array, then randomly selects a dozen pictures from the array, and maybe wraps this into a Wordpress plug-in that can run server-side about once a day, that would be awesome, kthx. The script could also have the feature where it grabs only one picture per user, but I don’t think that would be really necessary if we had true random picture-selection.
Basically, what we’re looking for is something that hasn’t been written yet.
November 24th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Ronit -
I think the “williamscollege” pool is much larger than the “Williams College” pool. I could live with all ten pictures coming from the same person’s cache at one time (and even for many times) if I kept seeing new pictures. My problem is that the same smaller subset keeps recycling. Since you reset it, it is a different group (thank goodness) but the problem persists. It wouldn’t be optimal but it would be okay if we cycled through all of Diana’s and then all of Laura’s and then all of stenz’s and so forth all the way through the big pool before we came back to Diana’s (and, Diana, I’ve especially enjoyed seeing the boat). What’s happening now is that I keep seeing some of Diana’s (e.g., the lovely tulips) over and over and the program doesn’t seem to be moving on further into the barrel.
November 24th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Larry: Flickr strips out spaces and capitalization, so if you tag a picture with “Williams College,” flickr sees it as “williamscollege.” For an example, see this photo (I tagged it with “Williams College,” but if you click on that tag on the right sidebar, you will go to all the pictures tagged with any variation of “Williams College,” “williams college,” or “williamscollege.”)
Strangely enough, the boat doesn’t seem to appear as often as the tulips for me. I wish it did! I’m glad you enjoy pictures of it; thanks for telling me.