Being Mark Cohen

Flickr has a really handy feature, which is relatively obscurely linked to.

If you are a flickr user you can set up the ability to email photos and post them directly to Flickr. That’s not bad, but most people know about that already. But what’s way more cool is that you can also set up an email address that posts directly to your blog. Now that’s cool, but what’s even cooler than that is this: If you go in to this link you can configure the template that is used to post to your blog. You can choose custom layout options, apply your own css, and you can choose from a whole heap of Flickr placeholder tags to insert things like the photo’s title, publisher’s name, links and so on. And for the icing on the top, you can do similar stuff with video if you’re that way inclined.

As an example I’ve used css to put the film background behind the image in the previous post, and this was published by email from my iphone

The Cohens are out for a midday ride in Brighton Le Sands.

It’s a spectacular day out in South Sydney today. Heaps of people are out and they’re all friendly and relaxed, and fully in holiday mode. It’s warm and there’s a slight breeze and today reminds us how good Sydney can be to live in…
Blogged from my mobile

One of my three main projects for the EOY break was to create a custom blog theme from the ground up.  I realise it’s largely a waste of effort because most people who look at my blog are either transient readers or else they’d be using an rss reader.  The point was to learn how it was done rather than to create a massively impressive skin that would attract a wide audience of graphic designers

I’ve been really enjoying the grunge designs I’ve seen around lately and so this tutorial on psdtuts.com was a great guide (it’s almost exactly what I produced, I largely followed the tut step by step)

Props to Jenn B (Scully7491) for creating the most amazing set of grunge brushes for photoshop on the entire planet, and putting them up for free download.  Also check out the collection of free Grunge fonts at Outlaw Design Blog here.

I snuck a few of my photos in to the design – in the header on the right is the underside if the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  The top left is an old family heirloom map of Africa, which sadly got a bit smashed up when we moved to Oz in 2001.  The “polaroid” of me is clipped from a photo in a set I took at the ACP studio about a year ago.

The end-product was a wordpress theme so heavily customized and graphic rich it’s only good for one-time use really (part of the lesson I suppose) but I had heaps of fun in producing it.  The finishing touches now are really all mopping up the css and fixing up some minor style issues.  The most irritating part of this whole process was testing repeatedly in three browsers.  I have a new-found sympathy for web designers

Let me know what you think