It’s too cold to take pictures where I am (blustery Washington DC) so I integrated the Flickr API into my site over the weekend, and used the new tools (and momentum that came with them) to plow through a whole list of things I had been pushing off.

The front page is now a fully functioning part of the blog, which is good because it provides about 80% of the updated content on the site. Also, all pages on the [Random Musings] blog now pull their wrapper images dynamically from my “favorites” photo set on Flickr, which means I can stop rotating them by hand.

Finally, the [Photography] section now has — GASP! — photographs, including a run down of my most recent photoblog posts, my most recent Flickr sets, and a few more images pulled from my “favorites” photo set on Flickr.

Oh, and I did a bunch of design work on the blog too. New headers, new formatting. Everything (should) look much cleaner now.

FWIW, I highly recommend the Flickr API, though integrating it into your site is probably not for the weak of heart. I did most of the work through phpFlickr, but even that needed a lot of customization to get it to do what I wanted.