Update 2/16/11: This only works on personal profiles. It does not work on fan pages. The photos can not be set in a particular order on fan pages.

On the new Facebook profiles there is a row of photos below your name, which are photos that you have been tagged in. People have been doing some cool things with those photos so I decided to figure out how that was one. Below are some examples of creative photo use and instructions on how to set it up.

Of course, all of your hard work can be ruined by being tagged in a new photo.

The hardest part is getting the images to display in the correct order. I uploaded and tagged my letters a couple of times before I got it right. Also, while FBOOK isn’t the most creative use, it makes me laugh ;-) I also considered using the word NINJA but that has been played out.;-) I could also use my name with an image on either side.

Instructions

1. Create your images or crop current ones. The should be 96x67px in order to fit in the space provided.
2. Upload the images. It may be possible to upload them all at once if you are careful about the order but I found it was easier to do it one by one. So, upload the first image and then tag it with your own name.
3. Within the album, you can tag it by clicking on it and a drop down box will appear. Your name should be the first one in the list.
   
4. Again, do this one by one. Perhaps the upload order doesn’t matter but the tagging order definitely will make a difference.
5. If you want to spell a word, upload and tag the images in reverse order. So, for FBOOK I uploaded and tagged in this order K-O-O-B-F. If you want the images to be in a specific order, do the same thing and upload and tag them in reverse order.
6. And that’s about it – you will have your custom images or word on your Facebook profile page.

Keep in Mind

If anyone tags you in an image, that image will show up in these photos and mess up your hard work. You can change your privacy settings so that images you are tagged in only show up to you but this causes a couple of problems.

1. You will still see the tagged image in your row of photos.
2. If you set tagged photos to only visible to you, then you can’t set up the custom layout that I’ve described in this article. You would be the only one that sees it.

Facebook has made a mistake in not allowing us to turn off tagging by others completely. I would prefer to be able to tag photos of myself and not let anyone else tag photos of me.

Also, if you have any “friends” that are practical jokers, they can tag a bunch of photos of you and do something like this.

Here are instructions for removing and hiding tagged photos of you.

More Examples

The photos on the new Facebook profile can be used creatively but can also be abused by your “friends”.

Do you have any examples of creative uses of the these photos?

photo credit: Rob Larsen

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Customize Facebook Photos on the New Facebook Profile

Almost a year ago I wrote about how a simple gallery could be added to a post or page using the WordPress Gallery Shortcode. At the time I found out about it because include and exclude were going to be added to later releases. It is now part of the shortcode.

Last week I used the gallery shortcode for the Halloweeen themes post but I didn’t want to use all of the images in the gallery – the photo of the cupcakes is in the gallery associated with that post but I wanted to exclude it because it isn’t an image of a theme.

Using include or exclude looks like the following

[gallery exclude=”21,32,43″]

You can not use include and exclude in the same shortcode – it has to be one of the other. The numbers being exclude are the attachment ID’s for each image that you don’t want to display. When I looked in the gallery, however, for that post I didn’t see any attachment ID’s.

It turns out that you have to get the attachment ID from the media library.

1. Go to Media > Library
2. Click on the title of the image that you want to exclude.
3. The attachment ID will be in the URL in your browser’s address bar. For example, the image include in this post has the URL
   http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/wp-admin/media.php?attachment_id=9633&action=edit The attachment id is 9633.

I typically add images through upload/insert when writing a post and not through the media library. It would be helpful if the attachment id was included in both locations. At any rate, this feature makes the simple image gallery included with WordPress a lot more useful.

photo credit: Schristia

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Include and Exclude Images with the WordPress Gallery Shortcode

This week I have going google free, above the fold, freelancing, WordPress, some skateboarders in Uganda, and more.

• How I Became (Mostly) Google-free in About a Day – Thoughts on how many google services we use and alternatives (such as Zoho instead of google docs). I thought this was interesting because I frequently think that I am overly reliant on the services of a single company.
• Debunking the Myth of the Page Fold in Web Design – This article is from last Fall but I got was getting annoyed about the phrase “above the fold” and decided to search for articles that supported my point of view. Short story – people know how to scroll and will look below the fold for extra content if they are interested or intrigued by the site.
• 15 Reasons Why I Utterly Refuse to Give Up on Freelancing – This article states the most of the reasons that I really enjoy freelancing.
• How to Be a Morning Person – I already am a morning person but I know for some people it’s really difficult. Maybe this article will help.
• Four Ways To Add Photos To A WordPress Post – John Haydon has a great tutorial about adding images to WordPress posts.
• Weird Photoshop Mistakes – Some of these images are funny and some are really creepy.
• Re-Thinking Workaholism – Being a workaholic seems to be worn as a badge of honor these days. I suppose it’s ok if you really love what you do for work but there needs to be balance and working non-stop isn’t a healthy way to live. When I was younger, being a workaholic wasn’t really considered something to be proud of.
• 10 Steps To Create The Ultimate Facebook Fan Page for Your Brand – Some great advice about getting started with a Facebook fan page.
• Some skaters in Uganda build their own skate park.
  

  Kitintale from Yann Gross on Vimeo.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social-Lists 3/28/10

I really like Flickr for photo sharing and to find photos with Creative Commons licenses to use in my blog posts.

There are also a lot of fun Flickr groups on pretty much any topic that you can think of.

So, since so many of us use Flickr I decided to list some of the best Flickr plugins for WordPress.

1. MudSlideShow – This plugin will create a photo gallery in a post, page or Widget. It can be used with Flickr and Picasa photos. The gallery is not automatically updated when new photos are added to Flickr or Picasa so the gallery will need to be updated manually.
2. Flickr Digest – This plugin will create a post with all of your photos uploaded to Flickr in a specified time period.
3. suiFlickr – Easily add your flickr photos to blog posts.
4. Flickr Photos – This plugin makes it easy to display your photos on your site. It also allows you to display and group or public photos.
5. Flickr Mini Gallery – Embed a gallery from any Flickr account or group.
6. FlickrAPI – Easily display Flickr photos by set, user, favorite, group and public streams.
7. Live Flickr Comment Importer – This plugin will import comments on a Flickr photo to the WordPress post of your choice.
8. Fidgetr – This is a widget that will display the latest photos from your Flickr photostream.
9. flickr-slideshow-wrapper – Another plugin to add a slideshow to your blog from one of your Flickr sets.
10. flickpress – Adds a button to the post editor to make it easier to locate Flickr photos for your blog posts.
11. FancyFlickr – Another plugin that will display your photos in a styled array.
12. Flickrpress – This plugin contains a widget and shortcode function to display photos in the sidebar and within posts.
13. Tylr Slidr – This plugin adds a button to the toolbar in the visual editor to make it easier to add a flickr photo to your blog post.
14. Flickr Gallery – A plugin that will facilitate using a shortcode to add flickr photos to your WordPress photos.

photo credit: www.patriciawillocq.com

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

14 Flickr Plugins for WordPress

If you’ve ever wanted to add additional information about the images in your NextGEN Gallery, you can do so with the NextGen Custom Fields Plugin.

This plugin will add additional fields that you define to each image in the gallery.

The downside of this plugin, is that you have to be comfortable editing the template files. To actually display the data in your new custom field, you need to edit one or two of the templates that are included with the NextGEN Gallery plugin.

And the plugin takes a little bit of extra work to install and activate – it’s not quite as easy as most plugins. But if you want to add additional information in your image gallery, it is worth the extra work.

Note: You must already have NextGEN Gallery installed and Galleries within NextGEN.

Installation

1. Upload the plugin to your plugins directory and activate.
2. Put the following URL in the address bar in your web browser. http://www.example.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=nextgen-gallery-custom-fields/ngg-custom-fields.php&mode=upgrade Make sure you change www.example.com to your own domain name. This seems to be a 2nd level of activation for the plugin.
3. You will now have a NGG Custom Fields menu in the left navigation in the WordPress Admin.
   
4. Click on Setup Fields
5. You can choose to create a custom field for individual images or for an entire gallery. I am going to continue with creating them for images.
   
6. Give the custom field a name, tell which galleries it should be associated with, select the type of field and then click on the Create Field button.
   
7. Now that you have created a new custom field, you will want to add data to it. Go to Gallery > Manage Gallery and select a Gallery that you associated a custom field with.
8. In the Gallery you will see a new blank field, which is the field that you just created. In mine I have a new field called Link and it is a URL on my site that I want to be associated with the image.
   
9. Fill in the data that you want associated with the image.

Ok, great. Now what?

You’ve created a new custom field for your Next Gen images and filled the field in with data. But now what do you do? How do you get this field to show up?

Well, you have to edit one or two of the NextGen plugin files: nextgen-gallery/view/gallery.php and nextgen-gallery/view/gallery-caption.php The first one must be edited but if you are using captions with the images, the second one must be edited as well.

1. For images, add the following code to the template file(s) mentioned above:
   

   <?php echo $image->ngg_custom_fields["Your Field Name Here"]; ?>
   

2. “Your Field Name Here” is what you named the custom field. For example, I named mine Link.
3. For Galleries, add the following code to the template file(s) mentioned above:
   

   <?php echo nggcf_get_gallery_field($gallery->ID, "My Gallery Field
   Name Here"); ?>
   

4. “My Gallery Field Name Here” is what you named the custom field for the gallery.

Now you can’t add the code to just any old spot within the template. I used mine to link each image and image description on my portfolio page to a specific WordPress page on my site.

In my next article, I will show where I placed the code and how this NextGen Custom Fields can be used to link to specific posts or pages on your own site or other locations on the Internet.

photo credit: bengarland

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

NextGEN Custom Fields Plugin: Add More Information about an Image in the NextGEN Gallery

I’ve got WordPress, twitter, humor, John Travolta, and some videos.

• 10 New WordPress Plugins You Might Want to Test – A list of 10 new WordPress plugins that look very promising. Some of the plugins included are WP Content Slideshow, Sidebar Generator, and Custom Login Page.
• John Travolta’s Best Movies – Rotten Tomatoes lists, what they believe to be John Travolta’s best films. I agree with Pulp Fiction being #1 but there is no way that Face Off should be #2 or that Grease should be #9. Of course, I’m biased because Grease is one of my all time favorite movies. And I didn’t even know he was in Carrie.
• Where Did That Crummy Paddle Go? – A very funny article about a first experience with a new breadmaker by my friend Davina.
• What Stormtroopers Do On Their Day Off – A visual representation of how Stormtroopers relax.
• 
  The Top 20 Real Food Advocates to Follow on Twitter – 20 Twitter users who want to change the way we grow, purchase and eat food, according to Care2
• O rent-a-tree, O rent-a-tree – In Los Angeles you can rent a live tree for the holidays. I think that’s a great idea and wish they had something like that where I live. Of course, I would probably lose my deposit because the cats would destroy it.
• The kid has been into old musicals recently. Last weekend we watched The Band Wagon, which we both thought was boring, but we liked this scene.
  
• A kitten trying to wake up – too cute.
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Lists 12/13/09

When I was researching the upcoming features for WordPress 2.9, I came across the following: “Add support for ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ to (Gallery Shortcode)”

I didn’t know what the gallery shortcode was all about so I looked into it and was pleasently surprised to discover a built-in WordPress feature that allows you to display a simple image gallery on a post or page.

The gallery shortcode will display all of the images that you have uploaded to that post or page as thumbnails. Here’s how you do that.

1. Upload an image using the upload/insert button for the post or page where you want the images to display.
2. Save the upload but don’t insert it into your post or page.
3. Do this for each image that you want to display.
4. Add
   

   [gallery]
   

   into your post or page where you want the gallery to be displayed.

The gallery will look like the following:

These are all photos of my favorite soccer goalie, Iker Casillas, who plays for Real Madrid. He has nothing to do with this post but I needed images for this article and he is one of my top ten celebrity crushes. ;-)

The gallery shortcode has a number of options that can be added to it. Some of them are:

• columns – You can specify the number of columns for the image display
  

  [gallery columns="3"]
  

• id – This will display images attached to a specific post. For example, the gallery above displays the images for this post but by using the post id number I could display the images from a different post in this one.
  

  [gallery id="292"]
  

• size – will set the size of the images. The default is thumbnail but you can also use the medium and large images.
  

  [gallery size="medium"]
  

Obviously, this is not as full features as a gallery plugin like NextGen Gallery but for a quick and easy gallery on a post or page this shortcode works great.

I just can’t believe that I was completely clueless about it until recently.

If you want to read more about the gallery shortcode, there is information in the codex.

photo credit: voteprime

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress Gallery Shortcode: Add a Simple Image Gallery to a Post or Page

This week I have freelancing, WordPress, Monkey Island and more videos.

• The Best Books for Freelancers – If you are interested in freelancing, here’s a list of the best printed resources.
• Beautiful Post Thumbnails – A list of tutorials for creating the best images for your blog articles.
• Billing Boss: A Free Online Invoicing Tool to Send Invoices Quickly and Easily – Smashing Apps reviews a free online invoicing tool.
• Does Your Business Have the Flu – Symptoms, causes and remedies for a sick freelancing business.
• A video I took of the 2nd episode of the Tales of Money Island. I can play this over and over and laugh every time.
  
• Why pole dancing isn’t for everyone
  
• And the pole dancing video reminded me of Tobias Funke as Mrs. Featherbottom on Arrested Development
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social-Lists 10/11/09

Last winter I wrote about photoblogging plugins for WordPress. Recently I’ve been using NextGen Gallery with clients and have become a lot more familiar with the plugin.

My friend Manshu also brought it to my attention that the screenshots on my portfolio were outdated. For example, we had installed Thesis on his site but my screenshot still showed his old theme. I decided to redesign the layout of the portfolio using NextGen Gallery. This gave the portfolio a new look and gave me more experience with the plugin.

Steps to a New Portfolio

1. Install Next Gen Gallery and activate it.
2. Please note that NextGen Gallery only works with WordPress 2.7 +
3. Visited the sites that I worked on and took screenshots. (I use the print screen button on my keyboard and do basic edits with Irfanview – nothing fancy here.
4. Gallery will be added as it’s own menu item in the WordPress navigation menu.
5. Click on Gallery > Add Gallery / Images. Before you can add images, you need to to create a gallery and give it a name.
6. You are then ready to upload your images. Add Gallery / Images gives you 4 tabs; Add New Gallery, Upload a Zip File, Import Image Folder, and Upload Images. I usually use Upload Images – what’s cool is that you can select multiple ones from you computer at one time. You will be select the gallery that the images will be uploaded to.
7. The plugin does it’s thing, uploads the images and creates thumbnails of them. If you are uploading a bunch at once the processing can take some time but it isn’t too long.
8. If you haven’t already created a new page for your photos, gallery, portfolio make one now. You can put some text on if you want or you can leave it blank. We will be adding a simple piece of code to the page.
9. Each gallery will have an id number. You will want this for the code that you will using for your gallery page.
10. If you are using the visual editor, you can click on the button “Add New NextGen Gallery”.

    
    And then select the Gallery and click on Insert. The code will be added to your page. Save, Publish and you’ve got your new image gallery.

    

11. If you are using the html editor, you can insert the following code on the page and you’re done.
    

    nggallery id=x
    surround this in brackets []
    x=the id number for the gallery
    

12. I recommend changing the pop-up lightbox setting to Thickbox under Options >Effects. Maybe it’s just my preference but I think this one looks the best.

This is just a teeny amount of what you can do with NextGen Gallery. You can create slideshows, adjust the image and thumbnail sizes, create and display multiple galleries, create albums, use single images from your galleries in blog posts, and much more.

My new portfolio page still links through to the old one through the link of the site name under each image. I’m not going to keep it this way but still wanted information about what I did on each site and the testimonial. I just haven’t decided yet how I want to manage this page – I might want a separate one for each site …

Do you think this plugin would be useful for your site? Do you think it’s a good way to manage a portfolio? If not, how would you do it differently?

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

NextGen Gallery Plugin for a WordPress Portfolio

Last week I mentioned that I was having problems with comment moderation since upgrading to WordPress 2.7. Well, I was also having trouble with the flash uploader. I would get an error and have to use the browser uploader. Not a big deal but it annoyed me and slowed me done because I could only upload one image at a time.

So, I also decided to tackle this when I did my WordPress spring cleaning and I found a solution that worked for me.

When I would try to use the flash uploader for images I would get an error that said HTTP Error in bright red and nothing would happen.

When I started doing some research on the WordPress forums I discovered that there were many causes of this problem and just as many possible solutions. My heart sank a little because I wanted one simple answer and didn’t want to try a lot of different solutions. I am, however, only going to discuss the solution that worked for me.

The error is often caused by mod_security, which is a security module installed by the web host. This can be corrected by modifying the .htaccess file and there are two ways to deal with this.

1. Install the Image Upload HTTP Error Fix plugin. The plugin adds the necessary lines to the .htaccess file. I have not tried this plugin so can’t vouch for it but people seem to be using is successfully.
2. Edit your .htaccess file. This file is at the root level of your WordPress installation. Download it via ftp, make a copy, and then add the following lines to it.
   

   #BEGIN Image Upload HTTP Error Fix
   <IfModule mod_security.c>
   <Files async-upload.php>
   SecFilterEngine Off
   SecFilterScanPOST Off
   </Files>
   </IfModule>
   #END Image Upload HTTP Error Fix

   Then upload the edited .htaccess back to the root level of your WordPress installation.

I used the second solution because I am familiar with editing the .htaccess file and didn’t want to install another plugin just to do this for me. If you are having a similar problem with the flash uploader this solution may correct it. This thread in the WordPress forums discusses other possible solutions if this one doesn’t work for you.

photo credit: Ray Radlein

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress Flash Uploader Fix for the HTTP Error