Revamped photos page

Well, after much thought and experimentation, I’ve decided to take a different approach to my photos page. For the past few months I’ve been using flickrRSS (which I’ve written about before) to serve up the last 10 pictures uploaded to my Flickr account (it builds the image list from the RSS feed linked to my account).

Though this plugin is great for what it was designed for, I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t what I wanted, mostly because of the fact that I didn’t necessarily want all of the pictures I uploaded to Flickr to be on the photo page I keep here — I wanted on this page only those pictures I thought were my best work (users could then click through to my Flickr account and look at everything else).

While searching for plugins to accomplish this I came across FAlbum, which pretty much did what I wanted, namely, dynamically create thumbnails of a single Flickr album (in my case, my Best album). The problem though, is that it did a lot more — the idea of the plugin is to integrate a list of your Flickr albums (and their respective pictures) into your WordPress theme. I didn’t want any of that and ended up turning ~1500 lines of code into ~300, dropping all of the superfluous (in my case) stuff along the way. I had to change a few things, including the way the function was called and the URIs generated for the thumbnails (I wanted the thumbnails to link to their respective Flickr pages, not to single-image pages within my site).

When I can find the time, I’ll likely package these modifications and additions into a WordPress plugin and release it here; something tells me that this is going to be very popular.