I won't have time to update this blog until at least June 2010, so for now I'm calling it a day. I've de-personalised this blog (for personal reasons ) and I've archived all my original posts. It might seem strange to some that I've taken them down but I want to re-launch version 2 of this blog sometime in the future with a blank canvas.

Many thanks to everyone who's visited, commented on or contacted me through this site over the last 5 months (May to Septemer 2009).

I have a new project in mind and hopefully I'll be back to give it a mention here sometime next year.

Bye for now....

Eventually got round to downloading and installing the Google Chrome browser today. I'm working on my blog theme and wanted to have a look at it in Chrome to make sure everything was ok. Lucky I did as there was a few problems with the php, that I had to iron out. I normally just check in Firefox, IE and Netscape but Chrome is becomming more and more popular in the browser market and cannot be ignored. I have used Browser Shots to see how a website looks in multiple browsers before, but it nice/essential to just do a quick check with your own eyes when your editing your site layout (at least with the most popular browsers).

photo credit: Randy Zhang

First impressions are that it's almost too clean! That should be a good thing but it just seems a bit bare. I have to say though that I'd probably get used to that if I'm only surfing for fun. One thing I really like is, when you load the browser, screenshots of your most visited sites are displayed. Another is the integated search in the address bar. My default homepage when I use Firefox is normally set to Google.ie so it's great how you dont have to tab to another window and open up google. I know Firefox does this too (as do most browsers) but it just seems better within chrome due to the fact that it's a Google product, it feels more natural to search from the address bar. I also like how you can easily pop open new tabs at the top and each one opens up with your most visited page displayed.

That's just my initial thoughts on it. I haven't used it for more than an hour and I wondering will I start using it more often or stick with Firefox. Time will tell...

I like reading blogs, and one thing I do like when reading/looking at a post is the use of a image/photo that is relevant to the post to capture my attention and break up the article into manageable sections. Using images/photos adds life, colour and content to your site. For me, the largest source of free usable photos and images has to be flickr. One issue with Flickr, is not to infringe the copyright of someone's image and to credit the owner if you wish to use an image. To manually add credits to a photo by copy/pasting links etc. would take all day so I needed to find a way to automate this and speed things up!

For something like this, there's no point trying to reinvent the wheel so I looked at other blogs to see what they used and also did the old trusted google search for "add flickr images to your blog". As a result, I came up with a ready made plugin from photodropper.com. Here's how Photo Dropper works:

It searches for Creative Commons licensed photos - images that are licensed for shared use - and lets you drop them into your posts - right from your dashboard with just 1 click.

That'll do nicely! It's only takes two minutes to set up and is easy to configure. There's a built in search functionality that let's you search for images right from your WordPress dashboard. To center align the images I configured Photo Dropper to wrap my images inside a paragraph and set up the text align as centered, like so:

One thing I did notice is that the keyword search did not match a direct search from the flickr site itself. I posted my first image from flickr yesterday. When I selected the image yesterday I searched for "Twitter" on the flickr main page and that's what I came up with. However, when I searched for "Twitter" from the Photo Dropper keyword search tool I could not find the same image when I went to update the credits. To combat this I went back to flickr and did then search again. I then pulled out some of the tags under the image I choose and searched for the tags in the Photo Dropper keyword searched tool and got a match. This is no biggie and I'm sure there's plenty of images to be found directly from the Photo Dropper search engine but if I can't find anything suitable I know i may be able to use this method again!

Hopefully the inclusion of Photo Shopper can play a small part in adding some of the following attributes to my blog and between this blog and it's readers

photo credit: Mexicanwave