2006 December 22 |

So, this is how you would post using Flickr. You’d say some text like you normally do. Blah, blah, blah, this picture is of us in the summertime when we were all tan and didn’t look like the living dead. Why didn’t I photoshop this? Maybe I’ll go back and retouch them. Blah blah blah. Here’s a picture of our family, you can see the rest of them at Flickr.

When you go to Flickr, please note the comments below the pictures and the notes within the picture (mouseover the picture to see where the notes are). These are all cool features, I think. Also, give it a shot for your next post. If you like it, let’s try it out. I think you guys will and I think you’ll enjoy the page loading much quicker.

I realize I’ll be seeing all of you tomorrow at the family Christmas party, but I wanted to publicly tell each of you how much I appreciate and value your friendship and love. Yeah, I know, I know. Mushy. But people always talk about what a husband and wife must do to keep the fire burning and one thing that never gets mentioned, at least very often, is extended family. I can honestly say that all of you feel like true family to me and I think that’s because we’re all friends. I’ve told Sandy on several occasions the friendship I feel toward you isn’t because of obligation. It’s real and I think we could all be friends if we weren’t connected via marriages. It’s something I treasure and hold dear. So, honestly, thanks.

Also, thanks for making this site so fantastic. I love the banter that goes on between us. So far we have 195 posts and, even better, 822 comments. Keep it up.

Lastly, one small item of business for 2007.

I know we’ve had some issues with photos loading and photo size and some confusion in that arena altogether. Another concern is oftentimes the homepage takes an extremely long time to load because of how many pictures are uploaded in a post. I don’t want to discourage people from posting pictures because that’s what this blog is for, however, here’s my idea:

Write a post and put one picture on the post to “tease” and then upload the rest to a Flickr account I created for the family. You can access Flickr by going to Flickr.com and signing in with the username fredoteabaggins and the password norman32. From there, it’s quite simiple. Just go to upload photos and then put the link in your post. I’ll do a sample post to illustrate what I mean. Some other cool things about Flickr are the ability to add notes inside the picture (I’ll illustrate) and the not-so-good thing is that if we want unlimited bandwith and uploads every month, it’s $24.95 per year. However, split between eight households that equates to 26 cents per month, which, I pray, everyone can manage.