Friday 29 March 2013

Doing Things Differently...

...Maybe.

So here's the thing: when I started this blog, I was using Photobucket to host my images, and grabbing sets of thumbnail links from its built-in option to do so. Things became even easier when I started using Flock as a browser because, for a while, it featured its own blog editor and Photobucket uploader which, to a certain extent, bypassed The Bucket's automatic downsizing of images. Then Photobucket (and Blogspot) made changes that meant I couldn't log in, upload or post from Flock anymore. Flock fixed things, then they got changed all over again. Flock upgraded, losing most of its cool features and becoming just another browser. Flock got cancelled, but Photobucket still did what I wanted/needed by way of keeping track of my images and linking them - thumbnail-style - into this blog.

Over the last year or so, Photobucket have been making colossal changes to their user interface... and now it just doesn't seem to do what I want it to do. It claims to allow sorting of images alphanumerically by filename but, in practice, since it's messed about with loads of the filenames of my images over the years, the very clearly defined alphanumeric order of my digital camera shots (DSC00001-99999, then reset to 1) has become muddied to the point where, for example, my TF Prime gallery runs partly in reverse order, partly in the right order, and partly all-over-the-damned-place. The best option I have is (reverse) date order, but that mucks up the supplementary images I sometimes take later on.

Plus, while they have graciously reinstated the easy-access thumbnail link HTML, it seems one may only copy that information from one image at a time. Most of these posts have far too many images to make that worthwhile.

While the old-style interface was still available, I batched up a load of links for TF Prime stuff, and I've drafted all the necessary links from my old Photobucket account, so it's only the few thousand images in the new account - set up specifically for this blog - that I need to worry about.

And considering how difficult it is to motivate myself to write a post for this blog, let alone sort out the images to go with it, that just doesn't work for me.

So... the TF Prime Ultra Magnus post features embedded images, uploaded direct to Blogger. What I'd really like to do is feature one of those embedded gallery wotsits, whereby the screen darkens and a larger version of the image is displayed over the top, with thumbnails below, but doing it this way worked out reasonably well for the time being.

Don't expect a sudden glut of posts, least of all about TF Prime... just know that I haven't forgotten this blog.

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