Blog on Photoblogs

Just wanted to follow-up my earlier post on using social networking to promote your photoblog with a little more information. I’ve mentioned before that I have been using pixelpost for ages on my photoblog and when I decided to create a link between it (my photoblog) and my Facebook page I decided it would be a good opportunity to create my first pixelpost plugin at the same time.

For those of you who haven’t read the first post, or simply don’t remember (it’s ok!), here’s a quick overview of what I am trying to accomplish. A while back I created a Facebook page which promotes my photography, and I offer discounted prints and exclusive Facebook only images to my fans. I decided that I wanted to link my fan page to my photoblog and display a graphic promoting my “photo club” on specific images published on my photoblog.

Here’s how I did it,

Step 1. Identify those images on my blog which were being offered up to my Facebook fans. I did this by simply tagging those images with “club_images”.

Step 2. I created a super simple Pixelpost add-on which did a MySQL query and selected only those images which had the tag specified above. In my add-on I created a custom tag <IMAGE_CLUB>.

Step 3. I updated my image_template.html file and added the newly created <IMAGE_CLUB> tag.

Viola! Instant connection. I doubled my Facebook fans in a matter of days, and I have so little traffic to my photoblog I was amazed at the results!

Now I wanted to create a more dynamic Pixelpost add-on, which I figured out tonight and am posting here..

Couple of quick things,

1. Currently, you cannot set the full path to the image, so make sure whatever image you want to use as your attention grabber exists in the /images file of your blog.
2. I didn’t add an option to specify your image tag, so you need to use club_images for the time being. I will change this very shortly.
3. There’s no ALT tag associated with the new graphic, will fix that shortly.

Remember, BACK UP your photoblog (including your DB!) before adding any new addons. Please, please make sure you do this, and also make sure that your backup is good. I would hate to hear from someone that my first pixelpost addon messed up their photoblog! Having said that, I don’t support this software, so you’re using it at your own risk.

So, if after that little reality check you’re still interested in giving it a try (which I hope you are), please feel free to download Club Image V1.0! Just upload the file to the addons directory of your pixelpost installation and enable the plugin, and make your configuration changes, that’s it.

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