Flickr Blog This to Draft

Plugin: Flickr Draft Post
Purpose: Instead of publishing, Flickr’s “Blog This” function will make a draft post to your blog.
Author: Donncha O Caoimh
Version: 0.1
Download: flickr-draft-post.txt
Install: Copy into your WordPress plugins directory, change extension to .php and activate on the Plugins page.

Flickr is very useful as a hosting platform for your blog’s images, and even provides some useful tools to making blogging your photos easier. Unfortunately the resulting blog post doesn’t always look right and requires editing afterwards.

During the summer of 2006 I attended a blogger dinner at which Shel Israel was present. Across a crowded dinner table he asked me why WordPress published his Flickr photos when he used the “Blog This” feature on Flickr. At the time my mind was on the delicious food in front of me and taken by surprise I couldn’t come up with a good answer. In hindsight, I should have said, “Because that’s the way Flickr did it”. You “Blog This” and it publishes. WordPress is only doing what the client wants. Thankfully, it’s possible for WordPress to fix the problem with this plugin.

I use Flickr’s “upload by email and blog this” feature. I simply compose my post in Thunderbird (select all and copy), attach the image and click Send. Then starts the hurried scramble to edit the text on Flickr which now has extra line breaks, broken urls and sometimes missing text. That’s why I copied the email, so I could paste it into Flickr. Once that’s done, I jump to this blog’s backend, edit the already published post, select the text of the post and correct it once again, scroll down and change the post status to ‘draft’. Now I have some time to think.

Why is it bad that Flickr published your post?

• Oh no! People are looking at my blog! I need to fix everything pronto, asap, straight away! The stress!
• In the past I found that Technorati didn’t immediately pick up on the categories I added to an already published post. I had to republish it.
• Now that Google is pinged when you publish, your malformed post may show up on Google Reader. This is also true of Bloglines or any other aggregator. I know it happens with planet sites that track this blog.
• There’s something missing. You get a chance to add UTW tags.