Thing 16 - flickr

Flickr. I like it, but am slightly wary about the potential it opens up for bunging sometimes extremely tenuously linked photos into blog posts, presentations, poster etc., just for the sake of it.

Tenuous, by Road Fun, on flickr

See what I mean?! Sometimes words are enough! And even when an image is appropriate, flickr won't always be able to provideexactly what you had in mind, but it's tempting to find something sort of ok and go with that (equally, a search can bring up brilliant and inspirational results that you could never have anticipated!). Once or twice I've searched flickr, eventually found a photo that more or less illustrated what I wanted, and only at the last minute changed my mind and realised that taking my own photo would give me exactly what I wanted, rather than something that was just about ok! I don't want to be lazy and settle for just about ok, and I don't want to get hooked on taking the easy route - benefiting from someone else's creativity instead of using my own. On the other hand, coming back down to planet earth, I realise that there isn't always time to get out your easel and whip up a masterpiece, or even reach for the digital camera, and flickr is a great resource for these occasions. And if your use for the image is illustrative rather than artistic, why spend time taking a photo of something when it's already been done and you could save yourself the effort?

Reinventing the wheel, by Romain Vignes, on flickr

Flickr is good. I see it mostly as something I may use in the future for personal photos. I think for a work presentation or poster I would prefer to use something bespoke. But it's great to know flickr is there if I need it. And as for creative commons - what a great idea!

You may view what follows as a selection of totally unnecessary and completely irrelevant images, but you would be wrong. This post is about flickr; these photos are from flickr. It's perfectly reasonable...

Firstly, something ballet related, just for me...

Ballet shoes, by Jeff Medaugh

Next, a cute animal picture, a must for any blog post surely?...

Link in Profile, by Tobyotter

Finally, a source of inspiration...

Batgirl was a Librarian, by Super Furry Librarian, on flickr

Thing 2 - Blogging (the technical side)

Here I'm going to talk a little about my experience of setting up the blog. The technical stuff. In my next post I'll talk about the psychological/emotional (yes really!) stuff - which for me is a much bigger deal! I thought I'd break it into two posts so that anyone reading who doesn't want to be privy to my blog neuroses can avoid them by just reading this first post...

I have to admit I'm finding Blogger quite fiddly to work with. It was really easy to sign up, name, and choose a basic template, a definite point in Blogger's favour, but once I began to want to fine-tune things (font sizes, font colours, etc.) I started to feel a bit dazed and confused! I am at best a third-rate techie, and have to keep asking a longsuffering colleague for help (which he willingly gives). When I'm in the advanced tab of the template designer I'm not always sure which option corresponds to which element of the blog design. I'm sure once I've spent a bit more time fiddling around I'll get the hang of it, and in fact the kind of changes I want to make are probably barely perceptible to anyone else, just personal whims regarding the size of this text with relation to that, or the amount of space between things (if you read my first post, you'll know that space, be it white or, in the case of my blog, a pale custardy colour, is important to me!). I'm sure there are very good reasons for Blogger to work the way it does, so I don't really mean to suggest that my niggles should be catered for, but it's just a bit frustrating to have an idea in your head of how you want something to be, and for it not to be immediately obvious how to achieve this.

One final thing - I wanted to use one of my own photos for the background, but it has to be under "300K", and seeing as all my photos come from a fairly decent digital camera, the file sizes are much larger. Can anyone help me with this? Is there a simple but effective way for me to reduce the file size of my photos?