In another quick and simple process, I personalized my About page a little with a bit of flickr html/java that they supply. Of course I’ve worked directly with their API, but in this case that’d be using a sledgehammer, since the good folks at flickr also provide a nice little javascript snippet to randomly select a couple of pictures/thumbnails to drop right in. I went to flickr’s badge generation page (logged in as moi, of course) to get started.

First I chose HTML. This is because I have serious issues with flash, although I admit the boxy thing it comes up with is pretty cool. On the next page, I was asked to choose which pictures to display. I chose to display any of my public photos although it’s possible to choose one or more tags or a particular set from which to select pictures for display. That could be useful for something fairly strong-themed: animal pictures for an animal focused blog, for example. Since I don’t have sexy computer photo shoots, I didn’t use either of those options. In the third step, flickr asked me questions about the layout: usage of buddy icon, number of photos, the size of the photos, and vertical or horizontal (or other, using personal style options) orientations. Finally flickr allowed me to specify colours and background for the snippet and gave me the code, which I dropped into my About page.

From there I made two modifications. The first was to add display:inline; and float:right; attributes to the table wrapper around the pictures so that it would display as I wished on the page. But I also cut out the <style> included with the snippet and put it in my css style file. That last is optional, and possibly not what someone else would want to do because changing the theme could lose the styling in that page. (Of course, I have my own workaround this situation, since I use a common.css that’s independent of theme styling which I accomplish via a private plugin that I should clean up and make available one of these days.)