Saturday afternoon I went to one of New York City’s billions of Starbucks for the New York City WordPress November Meetup. Even though only a few people attended it was very interesting to meet fellow WordPress users and enthusiasts. WordPress was applauded for its ease of use, the fact that its free and that it has a huge developer community.

Easy to use

One person who attended the meeting had not even begun using WordPress yet and mainly came to the meeting to find out if WordPress is the right tool for his purpose. Other people set up some blogs for friends who had no computer knowledge at all. Because the WordPress interface is so easy, all these blogs are now actively used by people who hardly had any computer skills.

It’s free

The fact that it’s free is a big motivation for using the software. Nearly all WordPress plugins and themes are free too so you can customize your blog to your wishes.

The huge (developer) community

We often referred to all the wonderful people who make plugins and themes, write excellent articles on blogging and WordPress and answer questions on the forums. The fact that there is such a innovative community behind WordPress was a big choice in choosing WordPress.

Lorelle was mentioned a few times by other people as a major resource for excellent articles on blogging and WordPress:

What interested me most was that it is hard to talk about WordPress only. We talked a lot about WordPress plugins, themes, WordPress MU and shared some tips but we often went “offtopic” as well. We talked about content management systems in general, Joomla, photo editting software, hosting and various other programs and services.

WordPress and blog software are tightly knit into a web of services and software. You cannot talk about starting to blog with WordPress without talking about hosting and databases. It is hard to talk about WordPress and uploading pictures without talking about photo editing software or services such as Flickr. When we exchanged contact details I was really happy with my new MOO business cards, it makes it fun to exchange business cards!

The only negatives of the meeting were the fact that Starbucks has no free wifi and that it took forever to get a skim milk latte with sugar-free hazelnut syrup.

I also wrote a piece on this meetup and The Value of Meeting Your Fellow Bloggers – Offline! for the Blog Herald.

In my previous post I explained why I said goodbye to Zenphoto and Gallery and started explaining why I said hello to Flickr. Flickr offers a free account that has a (bandwidth) uploading limit of 100 Mb a month and a Pro account for 24.95 USD that offers unlimited uploading. I started out with a free account and uploaded some pictures. One of the blogging options from Flickr is the “Blog This” button that sends a picture to your blog once you have configured your blog settings:

Step 1: define your blog software

Step 2: define your API Endpoint (this is the location of your xmlrpc.php file on your server) and supply your WordPress username and password.

Step 3: verify and confirm your details

As you can see Flickr uses the MetaWeblog API service to communicate with your WordPress.

MetaWeblog API (MWA) is a standard client-server application programming interface for weblog (blog) publishing. It is built on XML-RPC.¹

Flickr uses the MetaWeblog API to communicate WordPress using the XML-RPC protocol. The XML-RPC protocol is a very important protocol in blog software as it is also the basis for RSS, ping, trackback and Weblog Clients for offline blogging.

Before we are ready to use the Blog This button we need to define the layout of the image being posted on our blog:

Step 1: choose your template.

Step 2: Preview, use it or customize it.

Step 3: customize the layout. You can adjust the borders here or the text alignment and you can add additional metadata, see step 4.

Step 4: determine which metadata you would like to add or remove.

There are a few interesting things to note here:

• You cannot post images that are larger than 500 pixels wide. The average (medium) display size of a Flickr photo is 500 x 375 px which is very likely linked to the fact that designers are still optimizing webpages for 800 x 600 px displays. According to recent statistics 14% of the computers are still set to a 800 x 600 display². So if you use a 500 pixels width picture you still have 300 pixels left for navigation elements or other elements.
• A lot of blogs themes that have a fixed width layout also stick to the maximum of 800 x 600 (which is actually less because the browser sidebars take up space to). The traditional blog sidebar is around 150-180 pixels and if you add margins to leave some whitespace between your content you are left with an average blog picture that is also around 500 pixels.
• Customizing your layout is seen as something geeky and we are warned, as if we are about to do something dangerous: “Watch out! You have to be pretty geeky to add this stuff!”

Send a test post to your blog or just test the Blog This button and it should work great! We are now ready to display all the Flickr photos on our blog and our recent Flickr additions in the sidebar. Continue reading for my Flickr adventures and how to turn your WordPress blog into a Flickr photoblog.

1. MetaWeblog – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 27 April 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaWeblog>. [↩]
2. Browser Statistics. 27 April 2007 <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>. [↩]

I am working on a schematic overview of the various layers of WordPress. My main focus is the hierarchy of the various layers, how they communicate and how they fit into the whole picture of the internet. Here are the first draft I made in February and my current drafts from April. I am constantly working on it, making adjustments and improvements so comments are very welcome.

Last updated: April 4th