markpetrowsky.com

I wish I ran across this project before I headed into vote this morning so I could have participated. The New York times with the AIGA is asking the voters of the United States to snap and upload picts of their voting places. This is a great way for the regular Joe American to document there voting environments and give us online users a way to sneak a peak into the worlds of other voters around the country. It’s kind of interesting seeing schools, public buildings and even firehouses turned into makeshift voting places.

The ChicagoTribune has a nice set of 30 vintage winter photos to get you in that holiday spirit. In particular I especially like photo number 16 (shown above) of the motorists snowed in on Lake Shore Drive up near Foster Avenue. That reminds I need go toss a bunch of random junk in the street to reserve that parking spot i just shoveled out!

I was looking for a way to display a small sampling of recent photos on the site. Ideally I wanted a solution that tied in with Flickr so I could manage my photos from one location. While researching I ran across a WordPress plugin called FAlbum from the people at RandomByte.org.

The plug-in, as I was thrilled to find, pulls your photos from flickr and displays photos, albums, and tag sets right in your WordPress blog. Considering I was looking for a solution much simpler I was pleasantly surprised at how robust FAlbum was! The setup was pretty painless. I’m still in the midst of tweaking some of the presentation but so far everything seems pretty customizable. The only small snafu I ran into was a few database errors on initial setup. I’m running WordPress 2.3.1 and after installing the plugin (version 0.7) I kept getting a caching error that read “WordPress database error: falbum_cache’ doesn’t exist] DELETE from wpfalbum_cache…

I read on the RandomByte wiki that if you manually create the falbum_cache table it would take care of the database errors issue and sure enough it did. It looks like they just released a 0.7.1 update to FAlbum. Taking a quick glance it looks like they might have fixed the database cache issue.