Confession time – I am not a neat person. This is born out by the deplorable state of both my home and work offices. For some reason, entropy intensifies around any space I occupy.
While my real world may be cluttered, I like for my cyber worlds to be nice and neat. That means having things fit within the frameworks that I establish. For the websites that I design, I like to have all of the pages and data fit within a unified theme. Nothing screams amateur more than having different backgrounds or layouts for different pages.
With that in mind, I’ve got some problems with RandomConnections, specifically with some of the workarounds I have to use to view external data within my WordPress templates. First, there is the problem with Flickr. The Flickr Badge on the right side looks good, and integrates nicely with the site. However, it is random, and shows only ten images at a time. It can’t really be considered a link to my photography. I can, and do link directly to my Flickr site. But by following that link, one loses the easy connections with the rest of my site. I would prefer to be able to display my photos on my own site, with my own menus, etc.
I’ve been using FAlbum by Random Byte, but it mysteriously stopped working a couple of months ago. I finally got around to downloading and installing an update, and it seems to do fine now. However, for whatever reason, it doesn’t like this WordPress theme. The backgrounds break down and all you see is a gray-green background behind the photos. Even though it works, it just doesn’t look right.
I’ve also installed several widgets from WidgetBox. Again, these seem to work OK, but it’s obvious that they are not really part of the site.
So, here’s my wishlist….
- Complete Flickr integration on a page, including options for Sets or Collections, comments, and image sizes with links to the actual Flickr photo pages.
- An RSS aggregator that can be integrated into a WP page. It should be able to support multiple feeds and be easily customized.
- Better support of embedding Google Maps into WP pages. I’d love to create my own apps for geotagged images, etc., etc.
Right. So there are only three things on my list right now. I can do any one of these things right now through a variety of methods, but not within the confines of my current WordPress theme. I’d love to be able to create new mash-ups with Yahoo Pipes, pull the data in through RSS, then display either map or text information on the site. Oh wel. I’m sure that one of these days this will happen.