Headed to San Mateo for Make: Magazine’s “Maker Faire” (could strangle them for plopping an “e” on the end of the name) – a confab for hackers and geeks who like to… make stuff. Busting with energy and ideas. Robots of all stripes (of course), flame throwers, Segway hacks, cardboard fabs, neon tube bending, wooden bikes, drive actuator music box, earth-magnet LED tossing, live-circuit graffiti, BBQ grill pool heater, steam-bots, mechanical theremin, painting bots, The Woz playing Segway polo, collaborative sound jams… an incredible day, and Miles didn’t want to leave.
Since my fave image publishing app Image Rodeo seems to have ceased development, decided to try a couple of experiments.
First whack at using Apple’s iWeb to extract sets directly to a non-.Mac gallery. Overall, pretty cool for 1.0, but iWeb doesn’t preserve iPhoto comments as captions (how lame is that?) and forces you to use the big popup slideshow viewer rather than putting each image onto its own page. It also does some URLs-with-spaces stuff that I hated, and had to modify after the fact. Limiting overall, but the built-in template collection is slick.
Next tried Frasier Spiers’ excellent Flickr Export plugin to poot directly from iPhoto to Flickr. Correctly extracts caption data, and gives you all that rich, chocolatey tagging goodness, but without the fancy templates, of course. I’m OK with that. Flickr’s got it all figured out, and as long as there’s a strong bridge from local metadata to remote, I’m buzzing.
Been buzzing with “make” energy all day.
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