In this course we will be talking a lot about systems and what they mean. For example, on this day I took some time to work on some photos. Now that I can again work in the Photoshop landscape, the image editor I’m most comfortable with, I can get back to the business of working on my photography skills (which, truthfully, need lots of work).
In any event, as John Timmons was working on a shoot for the Tunxis New Media Mashup for the summer, I went off and took some pictures of the Library and 600 building. I hooked my camera into the computer and drew the photos in via iPhoto, populating a folder. Easy enough.
That was yesterday. This morning, I opened up some of the photos in the image editor, spruced them up some, then saved them as small jpegs. I saved them at 500px wide and let the height of the images go where ever they wanted to. Since I like to store images on my weblog, I trimmed photos to the pixel size above because that size fits pretty well inside my posting area. Now I wanted to post them up. This can be a problem. How to get them onto the weblog from my computer?
Well, how about Flickr, a public showcase software tool for storing photos, so lots of people can just check them out. Well, but what if want them in Flickr and on the Weblog at the same time, such that if someone clicks on a photo in the weblog, they’ll be taken to my other photos? I want the photos in three places, therefore: on my HD, on the weblog, and in Flickr.
There are too tools that are making this easy to do: Marsedit, a weblog editor, and Flickr Uploadr, a tool that makes it easy to upload photographs into Flickr.
With Flickr Uploadr, I drag a photo from a folder into Flickr Uploadr, a nice window opens for image dragging and asks for some information, and that’s about it. The pics go into Flickr and now anyone can see them. Ah, but then the fun begins. Turns out that Marsedit can hook right into Flickr. If I want to place a Flickr photo into a weblog post, I click on the Marsedit Media button, a window opens with my Flickr photos, and I simple go through few steps and, boom, I have a weblog post with a photo inside it, and have ready access to Flickr’s ability to promote sharing.
Narrative: take a photo, fix it up, save it, upload it to Flickr, draw from Flickr and insert into weblog.
This post is about how systems talk nicely to each other. If we’re dealing with data, we should be able to work smoothly with because of its “nature.”
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