The Solar CITIES Side Show Slide Show: Putting flickr on your blog...

We just added a widget to our blog, which you can see if you look to the sidebar: it's blogspot's new "slide show" feature. So now you can take a photographic tour of the Solar CITIES project without having to scroll through all our posts. Everything is geocoded too, through Flickr, so you can view each photograph in context, taking a virtual Solar CITIES tour!

Good times!

Questions from students:

Q: Hey that's nifty-tricks-up-yer-sleeves-coolo, moyne droog, but whaff I wanna do the same thingamadjigy on moynown blog?

A: No problemo! Because it took some web searching to figure out how to do it, and, as students on a deadline (and a mission!) , we know that the opportunity costs of every hour spent researching something other than things related to your dissertation topic are exorbitant (especially when you are unemployed, are trying to finish your Ph.D. (or climb some other step up your personal "license to live" ladder), and, as we are , expecting the stork to arrive in less than a month!), I want to save you the time I lost, so I can at least feel I'm "passing the torch" and helping increase the marginal revenue product per capita. Er... yeah.

So, to engage in some "information cost reduction" here is a quick summary of the procedure, in case you want to share a slide show on your blog:

1) From your Flickr home page: Click on " Organize" and create a "Set" of the photographs you want to put into your slideshow.

2) When you have added all the pictures to the set you are going to use, click on "Your Photostream" in the top right, and when that page loads, click on the icon of the set that appears on the right side of the page.

3) Scroll to the bottom of the page where it says (in our case) " Feed – Subscribe to the set "Cairo Solar CITIES project"

4) Right click on the little orange RSS feed icon (or the word "Feed") and choose "copy link address" to put it in your memory buffer.

5) Paste the link address somewhere (notepad would be fine). In my case it looks like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/
photoset.gne?set=72157605037415475&nsid=26520258@N07&lang=en-us

Looks confusing, but let's examine it more closely. Do you see that within that mess of letters and numbers it says "id"? That is your user id! Here, I'll highlight it so you can see it better:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/
photoset.gne?set=72157605037415475&nsid=26520258@N07&lang=en-us

Notice the part I've highlighted in red after the &nsid= which I've put in green? The green part says "&nsid=". It is telling you that what follows is your user ID. Look at the red part I've highlighted,. That is the USER ID for my flickr feed.Yours will have different numbers, but the same format. So you are going to copy that part into your memory buffer:

So...

6) Select the numbers after the = and before the @, along with the @and the Letter and the two numbers after it. In my case it is "26520258@N07"

Now you are ready to paste this into your blogspot widget.

7) In your blogspot settings: Go to Layout.

In layout click on "Add Page Element"

8) When the window opens (see the picture above) , select "Flickr" as your source, and under options select "User". For user name, paste in the Id I showed you above.

Save changes and voila, you are done!

Note that in our Solar CITIES side show slide show we have geocoded each picture so that you can go into a googleearth type map to see where the picture was taken. That should help you get a feel for the Solar CITIES Cairo project and help you plan a Solar CITIES tour, if you want to visit our green collar jobs team. (Flickr uses Yahoo's map, which is older, and shows Al Azhar Park BEFORE it was finished; see above!)

We hope this new slideshow feature will enable all of you fellow bloggers to join us in getting all of your Solar CITIES images out there, showing just how many citizens and cities are going solar, proving that green cities are the future of urbanization, and that we aren't condemned to living on a "planet of slums".

vs.

The choice is ours...