As a couple that work with developing technology on a daily basis, we become easily frustrated when tools do not enable us to achieve the goals we desire. We are loud-mouthed enough that we are willing to write a blog post about such annoyance, and lazy enough that we are unwilling to preform the workaround that is suggested to solve it.

… which introduces me to my latest annoyance: the WordPress flickr-widget.
It’s the thing at the bottom of this page that let’s you view the latest images we have uploaded to our flickr-account, a great widget that let’s our friends and family, back home in the cold, enjoy the warm images of us in the South Pacific.

Let me try to explain this mind-boggling problem without loosing my reader on the way:

These widgets may either be positioned on the left column of the page, or at the bottom of the page. Because anything positioned in the left column will push the Comment-field further down, we try to mix between the two options to find the perfect balance between functionality and aesthetics. On pages with little content (basically any page other than the front page) you can easily fill up the left column, with the effect that our less technically savvy family will never scroll to the bottom and find the field to add their comments(!).

No problem you think: Let’s move some widgets to the bottom of the page. So we did.

To our amasement, rather than using the great amount of free space available at bottom of our page, WordPress continued to display the images in the same vertical column style! Rather than solving our initial problem we had now created a page with 10 thumb-sized images, stacked on top of each other at the bottom of the page, and thus created even more ugly empty page space!

After several minutes of verbal abuse against the computer screen I made the decision that this is unacceptable. I decided that it was worth $15 from Erica’s PayPal account to pay for a CSS upgrade from WordPress so that I could hammer the flickr widget into place. After several more minutes, Erica agreed that is was worth $15 from her PayPal account to stop me nagging

The result: You may now view images of us in a horizontal layout. If I had not made this post about it you would not have know about my frustration, and you still would not care For people that work with web programming please view the generated HTML code for the flickr widget for a good laugh (cry?).

Other news

By popular request we have added a Guest book and Your recommendation feature to our blog that I hope you will use. Do leave a comment: we love to hear from you!