Wednesday 8 February 2017

LightWidget

[EDIT 10/02: Explanatory footnote added belatedly to the bottom of  this post]

Over the years I have, at various points and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, played with Instagram. The flirtations always ended up brief and transitory; typically I'd be drawn in by the camera app itself and the filters and effects that come with it, and then discouraged because it inevitably felt like too much of a closed environment to have much lasting interest for me.

I take photos, but don't pretend to be a photographer. If there is any art in me, I'm a writer and a musician. I rarely see much artistic merit in my photos in and of themselves, but that doesn't reduce their value to me. Instead, I take them to document a moment or, more often, to share that moment with friends.

Facebook and this "blog" (hate the term, but sometimes can't avoid it without risking pretension) always proved much more open and flexible environments to share through.

However, through happy accident (actually, a whim and a Google search) I've discovered I can link my Instagram feed to this site, using a third-party site called LightWidget to generate the necessary code to do so. There are other companies that do the same, but of my brief search of the free code generators, LightWidget seemed to have the lightest, least obtrusive touch so I've gone with them.

I don't know if the Instagram feed over to screen right will ultimately prove too intrusive or visually heavy for this site, I've always preferred a slightly lighter, more minimalist presentation, but we shall leave the feed up in the sidebar for now and see how it goes.

On the subject of Instagram, below is a short video clip I took sometime last year with the Instagram app. I'd completely forgotten about it until I stumbled back across it whilst sorting out the widget and it made me chuckle, so I thought I'd share.

A video posted by Bill G (@tatali0n) on

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ADDENDUM 10/02: A friend queried the whole "Instagram feed" thing with me yesterday evening which brought home a point that should've been obvious to me but I'd overlooked, and should've mentioned - the feed (which is a stream of thumb-nail photos) only populates on the conventional website view of this site and not on the mobile view.

So you'll only see the feed if you're reading this on a computer rather than your phone - I've not yet worked out how to add it to the mobile view, or whether I even should, given the relative limits and restrictions of screen space, bandwidth, etc you naturally get when viewing on a phone.

Sorry for any confusion I might have caused!
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