The pictures you are about to see are the result my fascination with people watching. Street photography? Social documentary? Snapshots? Who knows…Moments in time captured by a mere…passer-by !
Tony Edenden Passer-By | Black and White Street Photography
The Photoblog Randomizer 1.o is finally here! After several weeks of hair pulling and paper throwing, I have created a new and exciting way of viewing our photography blogs; my best solution to date.
When I initially started this blog, my first idea was to create a photography blog list; which basically features blog links in a table format. This is okay if you are interested in just looking to see if you or your buddy made the list, however, it does lack the graphic impact I was looking for.
Next up, the SnapShots alternative. SnapShots is a great plug-in which allows the viewer to see a ‘snapshot’ of the website while mousing over the link….interesting, but many viewers wrote to complain that it was a bit distracting. I like this application and having ruled out using it in a different capacity later on.
Tonight, I put the final touches on the Photoblog Randomizer 1.o and would like to explain how this innovation works. As the name implies, the Photoblog Randomizer 1.o is a simple solution to randomly display my list of favorite photoblogs. When the “ILovePhotoblogs Randomizer” button, located near the top of the page is pressed, a javascript randomly selects and displays a photoblog from my current list. Press the button again and another photoblog is presented, and on and on and on. I was looking for a solution to dynamically display this content without having the viewer leave my site…the truth is out. My solution…. to display a webpage within a webpage, by combining a random webpage javascript generator within an iframe for content display. Since I could not get WordPress to play nicely with my added HTML code for the Photoblog Randomizer 1.o, I decided to create a page in plain ‘ol HTML.
After I got completed the scripting, and verified that it functioned with a variety of browsers, i.e., Safari, IE7, Firefox, and Flock, I only needed to add a static link in a WordPress header.
Hope you find this tool enjoyable to use. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it.
After a call to the kind folks at SnapShots, I was able to adjust the website preview option to show more pictures. Now when you mouseover the links from the list on the main page, you no longer just see text, but get the actual screen shot of the home page. This is how I intended the feature to work, but obviously had it set up incorrectly.
I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.
Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.
Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.
Give me a shout out if you feel this works better for you!