OK, so for those of you who have blogs/photos/content of any sort for us to import into our sexy new blog, this is the thread where you sign up.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY 'IMPORT '?Through the wonders of the various Web SYNDICATION technologies (e.g. RSS, Atom, plain XML etc.) we have the ability to pull in a lot of content from other peoples' websites automatically so that a new post appears on the Filmwasters blog everytime those sites are updated. For example, I have a photo blog at
http://edandjacqui.my-expressions.com/ and I have set up a connection between it and the Filmwasters blog. Whenever I post something new to my site, the same content (in slightly different format) appears on the Filmwasters blog. Cool! I get my photo shown in two places and the Filmwatsers blog gets some fresh content without any of us hard-working FW admins having to lift a finger
If you want to know more go to
this page for an amazingly accessible (and short) video explaining in
plain English how Web syndication works. Just substitute the Filmwasters blog for an RSS reader (in their example Google Reader) and all will be clear. I hope.
CURRENT FEEDSWe already have the following feeds active on Filmwasters (with varying degrees of success), but we'd like a lot more:
- Skorj's Flickr site
- Filmwasters.com group on Flickr
- Susan Burnstine's blog
- Flak Photo blog
- Al Cooper's Flickr photos tagged filmwasters
- Marketing Photos with Mary Virginia Swanson blog
- Ed Wenn's Flickr photos tagged filmwasters[/
- Eddie Mallin's blog
- Jim Green's blog
- Ed Wenn's blog
- 5B4.com blog
We
need your content to keep the blog dynamic, interesting and entertaining. I assume a load of you have photo blogs (or blogs about photography), Flickr sites etc. and those are the things I'd really like to focus on initially. Don't be shy. If you're a regular forum contributor then your photographic output is good enough for us and we'd love to see it on the Filmwasters blog. Just be mindful of the fact that this is a
film-based photo site, so if you post a lot of digital stuff on your blog/Flickr then it doesn't really make sense for us to have those photos appearing here at Filmwasters. If you're not sure, just try it anyway and if we decide that any content is inappropriate for whatever reason we'll just remove the feed; no harm done.
Reply to this topic with the URLs of your site and I'll work out how to best import your content. It'll probably take me a day or two to set it all up, but I'll be monitoring this thread and will be notified of any updates, so don't worry about slipping through the cracks. All links posted here will be checked and added if they look appropriate.
In addition to your own stuff, we'd be happy to also consider importing content from photo-related news sites and anything else similar...can't think what just now, but there's bound to be stuff out there and if you know where it is....point me at it.
IMPORTS FROM FLICKRIn theory every page on Flickr has the ability be a feed (check out the little RSS logo bottom left on every Flickr page). This means that we should be able to tag photos in our Flickr streams with a word like "filmwasters" and then syndicate that search result back to Filmwasters so that photos tagged appropriately will appear on the Filmwasters blog...
if I've lost you at this point don't worry, it's almost certainly a result of my poor explanation and the fact that I hate typing rather than you being a bit dim. That's how it
should work at least. In reality something breaks most of the time which means that we're having patchy success rates at best importing tagged photos from Flickr. So far the only Flickr feed that works consistently well is a feed from a person's main photo page (i.e. your whole stream). While this works fine for
Skorj, or
Becky P who currently only post a small number of carefuly chosen photos to their Flickr sites, it is no use to say, myself and
Damion who post a lot of non-art (e.g. family/friends) and/or digital content to Flickr. The plan was for people like us to use the tagging process described above and add content to the Filmwasters blog direct to their Flickr sites that way, but so far the photos usually don't make it over.
For that reason, I'd recommend steering clear of Flickr for the time-being unless you're like
Skorj, or
Becky P and restrict your Flickr content to photos that would be appropriate to the Filmwasters blog. In which case post the URL of your Flickr stream below.
In an attempt to get round the random Flickr feeds issue I set up a
Filmwasters.com group on Flickr - which you're all welcome to join BTW (go find it on Flickr and send me a request to be added). The plan was to get you to add the photos that you wanted to the group and we'd then import them to the Blog, but so far it's gone the way of the tagged photos and not worked at all well. Grrr!