After spending several hours yesterday getting the posts to look and function the way I wanted, you can imagine (and probably understand) my delight and horror at discovering the following two articles on embedding a Flickr slide show in blog posts.
- http://paulstamatiou.com/2005/11/19/how-to-quickie-embedded-flickr-slideshows/
- http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/10/23/how-to-embed-a-flickr-slideshow-in-your-blog/
Unfortunately, I experienced some strange problems which ultimately caused me to abandon all hope. Maybe you had the same experience.
Watch the WYSIWYG. When I pasted the correct code in my Word Press WYSIWYG editor, I ended up with a terrible non-functioning mess, even in the page preview. Once I pulled up the HTML view and pasted the code there, the slide show functioned properly in the page preview window below. At least for a few minutes.
Multiple Saves Later. After a couple of times of hitting the “Save and Continue Editing” button, strange things began to happen. Everything, including the text that I had typed in to include in the post with the embedded Flickr slideshow, disappeared in the WYSIWYG editing window. The page preview window also broke and everything headed straight south. I hit “Publish” just to see what the result would be and it was nothing. Literally nothing showed up in the body of the post. Nothing.
For Good Measure. I guessed that the problem must have resulted from the two causes I described above, so I started a new post and went straight to the HTML view where I pasted the correct code. I didn’t pass “Go” or collect $200, I just hit “Publish.”
Voila. It worked. Sort of. The Flickr slide show appeared as I expected in the post at the top of my blog, but none of the other four posts (that should have been there) showed up. None of my sidebar widgets made an appearance either. Phooey!
Call it a night. There’s only so much time in the day, so I gave up. I kind of like the way that Light Box handles the photos anyway, so I’ll think about customizing the plug-in to give me the Flickr-designed 75×75 pixel thumbnails and automatically handle the coding in the background to link to the image (instead of the page) and give me the full-size version in the Light Box slide show.
No good deed goes unpunished . . . AND it can’t be too easy.