How I Made My Flickr Badge

I recently got a comment asking me how I made my badge on the sidebar of my blog. Instead of responding directly to the e-mail, I figured that I might as well just write it up for future reference.

Step 1: Get your badge made

The first thing you’ll need to do, is head over to Flickr’s Make a Badge page. At the time of this writing, there are five steps that you need to do. Here is what I did on each step:

Step 1
Pick the HTML badge.

Step 2
I chose all of my public photos, but choose whatever fits your fancy.

Step 3
I chose to not display my buddy icon or my user name. I also selected to pick 5 photos (we’ll change this later) that were random and were of the square size. I also selected that I would style this badge myself later.

Step 4
I un-checked the boxes for no background and no border.

Step 5
We’re done… almost. Copy the badge code into your favorite text editor.

Step 2: Edit Output

OK, now we need to play with the code Flickr gave us and we’ll be on our merry way.

The first thing we’ll do is change the number of pictures to be displayed from 5 to 8. To do this look for:
?count=5
and change that to
?count=8
This will be within the script tags (since we’re changing the Javascript). Now, we’ll have 8 pictures displaying in our badge. Of course, you can really pick any number you want to… up to a limit.

Now, Flickr also includes a link back to Flickr.com at the top of the badge. I didn’t really want that, so I deleted it from the produced code. If you’re familiar with HTML, this is an easy find. Basically, you want to remove the a tags and everything inside of it.

Step 3: Personalize

Next, you’ll want to style it. The badge comes with some default styles that you can play with, but if you like the look that I have, I’ve provided the CSS and HTML I used here for your reference.

A Series of Tubes: Remix

Last month, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) gave a rather stunning speech on the issue of net neutrality, in which he made such clueless statements as: “I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday,” and “[T]he internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

Now, the good folks at Boldheaded have turned his “skillful fusion of political doublespeak and perplexing ignorance on how the Internet works” into the DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix: “A Series of Tubes.

You can listen to it on AlterNet. It’s pretty funny and sad at the same time. Tubes? *sigh*

Degrees of Separation on the Internets

So, I’m reading my blogs on NewsGator Online, when I get to an entry by Robert Scoble titled “Flickr Analysis Tool Released“, which leads me to Thomas Hawk’s blog entry about the tool. This then leads me to the actual tool, which is really neat. I enter in my user name and this search result comes up. Way at the bottom there are various links to see who might have linked to some of my pictures, I click on all of them that point to Technorati, and I am looking at the one for “Ryan Prins”, when I see that the top link has my name in an online survey. Curious, I click the link and find out it is the MySpace page of my first girlfriend, Kelly.

Phew, so, yea… how random was that.

Back from Bandon Dunes

After a weekend of golfing at Bandon Dunes it is back to the reality of work for me. But, the trip will be one this is not soon forgotten.

The drive down to Bandon Dunes is not for the weak. It took me 7.5 hours to get down there and that included only two stops along the way. One to eat, and one to use the restroom. But, really the drive went by really fast (relatively speaking). I was listening to the radio until south of Tacoma then I had come Nolo.com podcasts to listen to (like 25) and that took the rest of the journey down to my destination. So really, it wasn’t that bad of a drive. It’s really like 3 roads the entire way, so it’s kinda tough to let lost.

I could write about each day and hole, but that would be long and boring for most of you. But, I’ll just say this… the course are unreal. They are not terribly challenging, given the right conditions, but it is the conditions that make these courses what they are. The first two courses we played, Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes are pretty close to the Pacific Ocean and the wind was probably one of the biggest challenges on these courses. But, I’d also have to say that the fairways and greens are some of the fastest and bumpiest I’ve ever seen, let alone played on.

The greens were really fast and it was like trying to land a golf ball on a piece of plywood. It was just crazy firm. When you got to putting, it was like you didn’t need much force at all to completely putt your ball twenty yards off of the green. That became frustrating quickly, but you adjusted to it over time.

The last day we played Pacific Trails. This course was off of the ocean coast and was a little bit more wooded than the other links style courses we had played on the days before. It was also equally fun, but just as challenging as the other two we had previously played.

All in all, it was a great way to spend a weekend. If I had to do it over again, I’d wear sunscreen the first day (and every day) so that I didn’t get burned to crisp like I did this time. But, really, it was a good weekend of golf, now it’s time to heal my burn and to take a break from golf for a little bit and let my body heal from the punishment the sun put to it over the past weekend.

Flickr Photoset: Bandon Dunes Golf Weekend

Avanade Wins “Best Companies to Work For” Honor

The results are out from the Washington CEO Magazine’s survey for the best companies to work for in Washington and Avanade ranked #4 in the large companies category. The initial list of companies started out at 105 then was widdled down to the top 60. So, this is a pretty neat thing for the top companies on the list. If you’re curious about the rest of the list it can be seen in this PDF.

As a side note, aQuantive beat out Avanade for the 3rd place spot… only b/c of Jamie ;)