Blogging Flickr photos (part 4)

The other day I got a comment on the third installment of this series asking how to wrap text around photos inserted in the manner I describe there.

It's a very good question. If you use either Flickr or Blogger's automatic tools, they do the wrapping for you. But if you insert images the way I recommend, in order to link to your Flickr site from your blog, then you'll have to wrap text around them (or center them) on your own.

Fortunately, it's not difficult. Start with part 3 of my tutorial on Blogging Flickr images manually.

In this example, we'll use a photo that is narrower than it is tall. We choose the Medium size on Flickr (289 x 500 pixels) and copy the automatically generated code for the image from box number 1.



Next, paste the code into your blog post:



Adjust the width (and remove the height) if necessary, as described in part 3. In this example, so we can really see the text wrap, I've reduced the width to 200 pixels and removed the height.

Next, after the width, add the following:

style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0"

Don't forget the quotation marks at the beginning and at the end!

It should look like this:



Now when you view the photo, the text that follows the image, and indeed anything else that follows the image, will wrap around to the right. Don't put anything but a space between the chunk of code and the following paragraph so that your text is aligned to the top of the image.

You can have the text wrap to the left of the image by using float:right. Remember the image floats to the side you tell it and the text goes around the other side.

You can adjust the space around the image by adjusting the values next to margin. The numbers refer to the number of pixels of space to the top, right, bottom, and left, in that order. (Start at the top and go clockwise.) So, if you float your image to the right (and the text goes to the left, you should use something like: margin: 0 0 10px 10px. Be sure to always specify px unless the number is 0.

These bits of code are CSS and are explained in detail in my book, HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Visual QuickStart Guide, Sixth Edition, published by Peachpit Press.

P.S. That's my llama! Her name is Rosie.

P.P.S. You can find the first three parts of this series on Blogging Flickr photos here, here, and here.

How to add comments to a blog post

My mom asked me the other day how to add comments to this blog. I realized it wasn't as straightforward as it should be to add comments to Blogger posts. So, I thought I'd give a quick tutorial here.

The most confusing thing is that on the main page of a blog, where several blog posts are listed at once, it's not at all obvious where to go to post a comment. In fact, it's downright hidden. But it's there if you know where to find it: It's the place that says the number of comments. Here's what it looks like on my blog:



And here's what it looks like on fivethirtyeight, another Blogger-based blog:



So, to add a comment, you click on the place where it says "0 comments" or "248 comments" or however many. And then you'll see something like this:



If you just see a long list of comments, but no place to add yours, like on fivethirtyeight's site, then scroll on way down to the bottom until you see where it says "Post a comment":



When you click "Post a comment" you get the box (like the one shown above on mine) where you can actually add the comment--though it's down at the bottom of the page.



Once you get here, you can add your comments in the box at the top (under Leave a comment). You can even add a bit of formatting... add <b> before and </b> after text you want bold, the same thing with the letter "i" if you want italics, and if you want to add a link, add <a href="the page's url here">the clickable text here</a> Be careful with all that punctuation, it's all required. (To get the URL of the page, just go there and copy the address from the bar at the top of your browser window.)

Some blogs require that you sign in, some don't. Some require you to have a Blogger account, some don't. It's all up to the person who creates the blog. (On this blog, you can post comments anonymously, though I moderate them all before making them public.)

One more thing, if you're viewing a blog post's individual page... perhaps you clicked there from the navigation bar on the right, or you followed a link from another site, you'll see the Post a comment link at the bottom of the post automatically.

Further, like fivethirtyeight, some people have set up their blogs so that when you click the "n comments" link, you go to the post's individual page, not the Leave a comment page. In that case, just scroll down to the bottom of the list of comments and find the Post a comment link. That'll always bring you to the "Leave a comment" box.

The American Dream

I was greeted this morning with an email from friends in Barcelona congratulating us on our new president. I felt so happy, so proud that we did it. Throughout the day I got several more congratulations from Catalonia and England. I realized how much the rest of the world has been on tenterhooks, right along with us.

Later I was listening to NPR and they were talking about Obama's upcoming agenda including universal healthcare and energy independence and I just had to smile. Imagine fighting for universal healthcare and energy independence! There was an interview of folks in a restaurant in Chicago where a man said this was the most important event since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Everyone was happy.

I am happy. As I wrote my Catalan friends, this is the America that inspires me. The America where you can follow your dreams. Where you can do crazy things like have a cow and pigs, carve gourds, and write computer books.

And even though I don't fully believe in the American Dream, sometimes it works anyways and makes people believe they can follow their dreams. Which is almost as good, because believing is half the battle. If you try, you're that much closer to making them come true.

Mostly though, I am so happy for my children, who were able to witness our country, our whole country, voting for the candidate who inspired them instead of making them afraid.

Plucking Chickens

We finally slaughtered all of our meat birds about a week and a half ago. It's not a fun job, but when it's done and you have 30 delicious organic chickens in the freezer, it feels worth it.

Folks often ask how we do it, so I'll share the process here.

We start by getting all the material ready. DH sharpens the knives and hangs three ropes from a rafter behind the manure barn.

My station is at the edge of the compost pile. I set up an eight-foot folding table with the plucker on top. And then on the ground I have a portable burner where I bring a large lobster pot full of water up to about 150°F. I have a digital thermometer that I keep in the water. The temperature should remain as constant as possible. Throughout the day I continually turn the burner on and off to maintain the right temp.

We also have a large bucket of ice water for cooling down the chickens, once plucked.

Once we're all set up, the process goes like this: DH gets a chicken from the coop. He hangs it upside down by its feet (using a slip knot so he can do it with one hand). He then slits the throat to bleed the chicken without cutting off its head. The chicken loses conscience almost immediately.

While that chicken is dying, he goes to get another.

When the chicken is dead, he brings it to me. I dip it into the scalding water for about 30 seconds (longer if the water has cooled off, shorter if it is too hot). As a test, I pull off a bunch of feathers from the legs. If they come off easily, it's ready. If bits of the feathers stay in, I dip the whole chicken back in for 10-15 more seconds.

Then I hold the chicken up to the plucker (that weird contraption in the photo above) and gently let the plucker rub against the chicken. The feathers come flying off, towards the compost pile. (If the skin comes off, it means the water is too hot, or I've left it in too long. If the feathers don't come off, the reverse is true.) I try to take advantage of the momentum of the plucker to hold the chicken at all the proper angles for the feather to come off all over. It takes about a minute or so to do the whole chicken.

Then I hose it off and put it in the bucket of ice water. Later DH will retrieve the chicken, bring it inside and cut it into pieces. He has a new way of taking out the intestines and what not which seems great... Instead of cutting around the anus and sticking his hand in and pulling (which is the way we learned), he cuts off the legs and wings, and then cuts around the back and breasts. He can then open the chicken laterally and pull out all the innards much more easily. He then cuts the livers free of the gall bladder (without cutting it or letting it spill its bitter contents on the meat).

We use freezer bags to collect a meal's worth of legs, or breasts, or whatever, and a sharpie pen to label them. We leave the meat in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours before freezing. I think this makes it taste better and have a better texture.

Last time, we tried giving Laika the heads, but she wouldn't eat them. This time, we separated the necks from the surrounding skin (and head) and gave them to her that way. She loved them. She also eats the feet and the wingtips.

And that's it, over and over for about 4 hours.

It's really no fun but we generally only do it once a year and then we have this amazingly tasty free-range, organic chicken! Yum!

iPhoto Book Themes

If you're a Mac user and an iPhoto fan, you've probably thought about printing out some of your photos in a book. I highly recommend it. Ever since my friend, Nancy Bea, lost 19,000 pictures when her computer got accidently bumped to the floor, I've been more and more convinced that the only good backup is a printout.

I always find it hard to choose an iPhoto theme... partly because Apple only shows you a very small portion of what the interior pages of any given theme might look like. Some themes let you have a lot of text, some don't let you have any, some let you have one or two photos per page, some let you have many more, even up to 32.

But how to tell which iPhoto theme is the one you want?

Use my handy iPhoto theme wiki! I give a detailed description of each theme, including use of text, and number of photos. Then I actually show you what each page of each theme can look like, depending on the orientation of the photos you choose.



Hopefully, you'll find that it's a helpful tool for making your iPhoto books. Hey, the holidays are coming.

You'll also note that this site was created with PmWiki... although it's not currently open to the public for editing, it certainly could be. I used the wiki software to make it easy to create a lot of connected pages without having to write all the code by hand.