Today is May 1, Labor Day in Europe, and thus a holiday. I used it to see if I could get my WordPress MU installation running and actually create blogs which did not work earlier during the week. I had run into trouble when I used sub-domains, but the sub-directories work fine.

The reason behind the upgrade to WP MU was that I wanted to create a second blog on my server to showcase my daily photograph. Of course, I could always link to my flickr photo set, but I prefered to use a blog. Well, that was not a novel in itself, as others had already done so before me, e.g. D’Arcy Norman and also Alan Levine as I realized very recently. From them I got the idea to use the Monotone theme, which displays the photos with an individual background that matches the dominant color in the photographs. Way cool.

After having solved my blog creation problem and having moved my regular blog (this one here) over to my MU installation, I started to tackle my photo blog. As Alan Levine describes nicely in his post “(Almost) Effortless Photo Blog”, I wanted to connect my blog with flickr as well to be able to post immediately to my photo blog from there. I had no such luck until I found out that I had to activate the XML-RPC publishing protocol in my blog settings under “Writing”. Once the checkmark was placed, I could link my blog to my flickr account.

Now I had the monumental task to add all pictures to the blog. That took about four hours for 119 photos (I had missed to take a photo one day) because my internet connection was uncooperative today and everything was rather slow. However, now that I am done, I really like the result, and I also found the “Page Links To” plugin to allow a tab in the blog menu to open my photo blog immediately.

Update: I changed the archive page to display 31 photos instead of only 24. That is particularly nice when the archive of an entire month is displayed.

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