Alex LuftA piece of the web dedicated to me… by me!

This falls into the category that everybody tries to avoid on a daily basis (the category of officially sucking): I’m getting a gallery of pictures up on TechNest Report: some awesome pictures of me replacing the hard drive on my aging iBook G4 and having to remove almost 40 screws.  I am looking for a WordPress picture gallery plugin that integrates with Flickr.  You know, one that pulls said pictures from Flickr and displays them using a nice AJAX interface such as Lightbox.  I thought I have found a perfect one: Flickr album by Joe Tan.  But it’s nigh impossible to configure Lightbox with it, even thought the developer states it’s possible.  So my quest for the perfect WordPress Flickr gallery continued and I really have found the perfect one: Slickr gallery.  This one has perfect integration with Lightbox and the entire plugin is super easy to set up thanks to the developer providing all the necessary files on his site.

And this is where it begins: Slickr gallery conflicts with another plugin I have, ShareThis, which adds bookmarking and sharing options to the bottom of posts.  Basically, it’s either one or the other, since Slickr gallery doesn’t load pictures when ShareThis is enabled.  So now I am exploring all options: revisiting Flickr Gallery and looking at a ShareThis competitor - AddThis.  The problem with AddThis is that, out of the box, the button doesn’t align properly with my theme and doesn’t provide easy customization of the plugin with PHP - all things ShareThis does.

If you have any suggestions, please do let me know in the comments pppplease.

P.S. The reasons why I insist on using Flickr for my pictures are quad-fold:

• I don’t want to wake up one day and see that something “inadvertent” happened at my web host and half of my picture albums have been deleted whereas the other half were cut off 3/4 of the way.  Being one of (if not the) most popular photo-sharing service on the web, Flickr can provide me with the peace of mind that my uploaded photos and sets are backed up across multiple Flickr server farms.  I’m sure that many webhosts have this down as well (I use GoDaddy), but then there is the fact that my pictures are available to view from within Flickr by others (friends, family, Flickr users) and they will stay there no matter what happens to my beloved tech site.
• Tags.  Period.  (no other WordPress gallery service offers this)
• For $24.95 a year, the Flickr Pro account has unlimited photo storage and unlimited photo bandwidth.  Compare that to $150 a year that SmugMug charges.
• The Flickr online service is simply awesome.

If you’d like to see Slickr gallery (and Lightbox effect) in action, I have it displaying my Flickr sets here as of this writing (7/3/2008 19:38 EST).  I don’t know how long it will be up, however.  I will post an update on this blog as soon as I find something better.

Visit my Flickr page here.