The Old Weblog

I setup my photolog in WordPress 1.01 last month with guidance from Eric Billingsley, who has a wonderful photolog called Frozen Images. In the spirit of passing on the information, here’s a short howto that someone might find useful.

I started out with an install of WordPress in my target ‘plog’ directory. Once I had the installation going, I set the following settings in the post options.

posts_per_page is set to 1
what_to_show is set to posts paged
archive_mode is monthly
with the date_format set to l, F d, Y

Now comes the part where I had to think of a way to upload the images. There are photo upload hacks in WordPress that you could use. However I currently upload the photos onto my target directory using FTP.

I then modified the ‘img’ Quicktag by changing the following lines of code around line 350 or so in the quicktags.js file in the wp-admin folder.

function edInsertImage(myField) {
var myValue = prompt(’Enter the name of the file in Photolog’, ”);
if (myValue) {
myValue = ‘<img class=”img-format” width=”680px” src=”/foo/’
+ myValue
+ ‘” alt=”‘ + prompt(’Enter alternate text for the image’, ”)
+ ‘” />’;
edInsertContent(myField, myValue);

Replace /foo/ with the name of your folder you upload the images to.
Replace “680px” with the file size of the image you upload.

So now, inorder to post a photo in the photolog, these are steps you’d follow:

• First take an awesome looking image!
• Resize the image in GIMP
• Upload the image to the target directory: ‘foo’
• Fire up the WP post page, and hit the ‘img’ Quicktag
• Enter the name of the file that you uploaded
• Enter any alternate text for the image
• Hit Publish

There you go, you just setup a Photolog in WordPress that will match any other!

Disclaimer: This is a very custom solution and I don’t take any responsibility if your WordPress installation breaks if you use this method.