Back in August I wrote a short piece on how you could use a free Wordpress blog and a free Flickr account to create a quick portfolio site. There were a few supporters, and a few detractors, and a few people gave it a go.

Shepiro went through a few designs before ending up with this: http://osart3d.wordpress.com/

I hadn’t thought of using pages, but Owen did, and it’s all the better for it. The front page simply links to the category pages, making it much more like a traditional website. It works. It looks great.

It seems that every week there are dozens of new portfolio sites popping up - sometimes they look good, and sometimes they look bad. Storage space is often hard to find, some free hosts make it almost impossible to directly link to your images, and some people are still manually editing and upload HTML.

Why not use the easy route? Blog it. These days image sharing sites and blogging sites are closely linked, so we can use them to store and display all the content.

I’m going to show you how to quickly create a portfolio site that will look good, be simple to update, and display your art easily. It will use default settings for most things, but I’ll point you in the right direction for customisation. I said quickly, and I mean it - with a high speed internet connection you should have everything running in about 15 minutes.

The Blog

Firstly, we need a blog to hold all the content. There are dozens to choose from, but you’ll want one that lets you integrate other sites into it using an API. I’ll use Wordpress for this example, but you could equally use LiveJournal, Blogger, Moveable Type, Typepad or whatever.

So I went to http://www.wordpress.com and signed up for a blog. This took about 30 seconds - they emailed my password to me, and http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/ was up and running. Using Wordpress is a breeze - just click ‘Add new post’ and type away.

So, in 2 minutes I had a site with my own content on it - but it used the default Wordpress template so it looked like every other Wordpress site out there. My rsart.co.uk site is a Wordpress based site, but I used my own hosting and installed their blogging software myself. I really went to work on rsart, editing the stylesheet and layout templates to get something that worked for me, and you can do this on a Wordpress.com hosted account just as easily - but you have to pay for the privilege (about $15). But since this article is all about speed, for now we are simply going to pick a template design.

If you go to the Presentation tab on the Wordpress dashboard you can edit the CSS, or you can simply pick from one of the 40 or so themes that are just sitting there (with nice big preview images). I went for Benevolence - it was the first one on the list that I liked.

The images

Now we need an image host - and we might as well use Flickr as it has excellent ties with Wordpress. I already have a Flickr account, so I’ll not set up a new one, but I assure that it is simplicity itself. When you sign up you get a coded id, like n001828-a, but you can change this to something much easier to remember. I choose rickstirling for mine, and you can view my images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickstirling/

Once you account is setup you can upload you images. Flickr has a web based uploader, but you can also upload by email or by using a variety of applications - you can also send photos directly from your camera phone. I have a plugin for iPhoto that lets me upload directly to Flickr. Since I have a lot of images online, I’ll not upload a new one and instead I’ll use an existing image for my blog.

We need to configure Flickr to know where our blog is - fortunately this is easy. By going to http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne you can add a blog to your Flickr profile. Choose the blog type (in this case it’s Wordpress), Then you fill in the API address - Flickr tells you what it is, in my case it will be http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php and then I give my blog login details. Press next and Flickr will try to verify this - 15 seconds later I’m good to go.

The setup is complete for the blog and image hosting.

Blogging the images

Now the final stage - getting an image onto your blog. This is the easiest part - simply upload your images to Flickr, navigate to the image that you want, and click the ‘Blog This’ button. This brings up a text editor, where you can give the image a different title and write a blog post about it. Press Post, and a few seconds later it’s done! Flickr has posted a blog post onto your site with the image.

You can see the images I posted from Flickr on my test Wordpress.com site http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/

Taking it further

This short article was just a quick run through, showing you how to build an image blog in minutes. Of course you’ll want to take this further, so I’ll leave you with some links.

• The latest version of Wordpress.com allows you embed video from Google Video and You Tube - perfect for showing off your animation.
• Flickr has a section dedicated to getting the most out out Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne
• Flickr also provide several methods of uploading you images - http://www.flickr.com/tools/
• Wordpress can be installed on your own site, give you much greater flexibility - http://wordpress.org/
• Wordpress blogs can be edited off line using several blog editors - Ecto and Windows Live Writer are just 2

Other Portfolio Thoughts

• Go read Jon Jones article, Your Portfolio Repels Jobs

Technorati Tags: Art, blog tool, ecto, flickr, photograph, portfolio, Web Development, windows live writer, wordpress

I love the Google Calendar - I’ve given up on iCal and switched to it for all my task management. This is mainly due to it’s ability to add calendar entries based on recognising English - like “Dinner at Suruchi 7pm Next Friday”. others are not so Keen, and Paul Scoble has written a post on what he finds wrong with it - much better than just saying that it’s rubbish.

Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading my ranting and expect more than just “I hate it.”

It makes interesting reading, and I have to agree with some of his points. It is an online calendar, so if you don’t have access to the net, you don’t have access to the calendar. For me this isn’t a big issue, but I can see how it could be for some people, thoguh I can set up iCal to also update itself from gCal.

Technorati Tags: Blogger, google calendar