I initially sat down to write briefly of how I was having an enjoyable morning getting organized and working sporadically on the many things I want to do today: potting plants I bought on Amazon, processing photos from the past several months, and perhaps blogging. This all seems rather trivial considering today we bombed a hospital, yesterday we lost a ship and 33 people to Hurricane Joaquin, Thursday we had a mass shooting, and Wednesday fricken Congress almost shut down the government, again… but you have to make the best of things.

Anyway, I got the idea to take a photo of myself doing work at my desk so I could later reminisce. That wasn’t too difficult, though it did require my “Hobby Creek Helping Hands Third Hand Kit Soldering Tool” to hold my GoPro HERO4 balanced on top of the closet door.

My bedroom, a work in progress

But then when it came time to post the photo, I remembered the plugin I wrote to help me integrate Picasa Web Albums with Movable Type is dead. Specifically, it no longer can authenticate because Google killed AuthSub earlier this year, and I’d need to migrate to OAuth 2.0.

I briefly looked into what would be involved, but decided not to deal with it now. I’d have to force users of the plugin to register their “apps” individually with Google, write code to manage those keys and secrets, and the whole thing would be much less user friendly. The plugin for WordPress I based mine on also has the same problem, and while it’s not maintained, a user avatarone1 managed to patch it. I could get mine working again, but I’m really not satisfied with my photo posting process even with the plugin. I’m currently mulling over the idea of writing a Firefox or Chrome extension that would handle the photo selection interface I currently do with the Movable Type plugin, and that can generate HTML that I would just copy and paste into the blog entry. That would have the added benefit of not being restricted to use in Movable Type.

So for now, I manually built the URL to the image embedded above. Fine for a one off, but certainly not how I want to handle all the travel blogs I still need to write. I’ll need to figure this out soon.