Alright, Alright, Come On Then

[Neil Struthers]

I think it's time we woke Ficktion from its long winter slumber. Is there any good reason not to? Are we all too busy at the minute? I know I didn't post anything for the last few pictures, but that was a lack of decent ideas on my part, not because I wasn't paying attention. Now it's May and I am primed and ready, fingers poised, eyes wide and staring, sweating pure writerplasm. It's a seasonal thing,

What if we were all involved in submitting links? I mean, we each have a Ning page here. Or we could use a common forum post. What if we picked out, say, four or five decent links per week, and used that as a kind of image pool? It would ease the burden for our man Donal, and our individual aesthetic senses might pick out some interesting stuff for the others. It would also open up an extra dimension of inspiration--a story could be inspired by a juxtaposition of multiple images from that week, by the strange links they form in your head. I promise mine will not be all heaps of discarded circuit boards and bundles of cable and pictures of offal.

[Neil Struthers]

JuxtaposFicktion!

...maybe not.

[Donal Murphy]

Thank you for the wake up call Neil. I feared this beast may have slept too long. My own filthy urges have lain dormant these long months as life deposited a landslide of cares upon me. It's time to kick that Black Dog up the arse and shove him along, the bastard.

I'm game for giving it another shot here, I'll admit I was getting a bit burnt out on selecting the images.

Let me fiddle with the settings and open the site up a bit. I think I can allow users to upload images to the frontpage. I shall begin breaking the site now...

[Donal Murphy]

Ok, I have enabled photo galleries and added them to the top of the frontpage. The frontpage feature plays a flash slideshow of all the uploaded photos in all user galleries.

So if everyone who wants to participate uploads a photo or a number of photos each week and then we can view the slideshow of images created and fire ahead with the fiction piece. Periodically we can reset or remove the older images and keep feeding the slurping photobeast with new pics.

[Neil Struthers]

I take it that the would be CC-only photos. For non-CC stuff, we could just provide the link beneath some placeholder image. What do you think yourself?

I must play with it a bit now to see what can be done.

[Donal Murphy]

Yeah, strictly speaking that could be problematic.

Before I was using a widget that basically hotlinked or pulled the image in from Flickr and then I would provide the appropriate link backs and attribution. I felt fine about doing that with Flickr, but it's not always possible when you use a found image blog or similar. You can't hotlink the image and sometimes there is no attribution available.

I feel that displaying placeholder images with links kind of defeats the purpose or at least puts barriers in the way of using the site. Also I don't think the slideshow feature is advanced enough to do that. You can add links into the photo description. I did this with the porcelain guns pic, but it's not user friendly.

I'll play around with creating a notes or text field that everyone can add to on the frontpage. Somewhere you can add links and attribution. I don't want to overcomplicate the process though.

[Donal Murphy]

Neil I added you as an administrator so you can take a look under the hood. Feel free to have a bash around.

[Neil Struthers]

I'll certainly have a gander. The ideal would be some kind of mixed photostream that could accept both uploaded images and links. I seem to remember The Engine's Ning site having a decent photo widget, but it might have been the one we're currently using. Not sure if it accepted links or just gathered up member's photos.

[Donal Murphy]

Was that the Club of Mars site?

[Neil Struthers]

Just http://engine.ning.com/

I was under the impression that it had become defunct with the death of The Engine. Anyway, the photo widget looks like the one we're using.

I've noticed that it's possible to add comments on the weekly photo albums. That would be a fair enough place to drop a handful of links for that week. It's still not terribly user-friendly though.

[TadMack]

Hiya,
I subscribe to two photo blogs, both of them featuring photographs from the 1800's to present (Library of Congress Flickr and Shropy Photoblog) so I can jump in with random photographic weirdness myself, but I'm not really a good judge of what pictures make the best story subjects. Maybe we can have a set of loose ideas on what works for a picture? What strikes me as interesting rarely strikes anyone else the same way, but I definitely want to help keep this going and am willing to do a bit of work.

[Neil Struthers]

With regards to image choice--

I've found the best pictures (or the ones I found most useful, anyway) were the pictures that managed to declare a theme and a subject in a straightforward manner but were--at the same time--wide open to interpretation.

The wrong kind of picture for me is one that is either i) trying to tell a story or ii) too abstract. At either end of the scale I draw a blank. If the picture has a story already, then nothing of my own has a chance to bubble to the surface--I give up. If it's too abstract, then my head goes into random story mode, and anything I write will either end up in my "canned" directory or on the blog, as it will have nothing to do with the original picture.

I suppose I need something that provokes thought, but at the same time does not try to lead my thinking down any one path.

[Donal Murphy]

I'll give some thought to all this over the weekend and try and formulate some loose guidelines or summat. Bit flat out with work at the moment, but I'm determined to get back to this.