With the help of Catherine O’Neill, Maritsa Asghari and my mom, we held a weekend website workshop for the young artists of Club Arthouse, a community program at local contemporary art space Arthouse. Each created their own flickr.com account for managing their portfolio photos and a WordPress-based website.

These portfolios relied on a system of loosely joined free services and software:

• Firefox web browser
• flickr
• WordPress
• My modified flickr to WordPress plugin
• Markdown Extra WordPress plugin
• My portfolio WordPress template

Open Source Portfolios

The system and setup is described step-by-step in my Open Source Portfolios presentation. We used flickr to organize all of their images because it handles uploads well, has interesting community-based emergent effects, and does automatic scaling. We used Wordpress as the content manager and site organizer because it allows posts and pages, integrates with flickr in a one-click way, has a people-friendly HTML code generation and can be easily templated. Wordpress works well because it gracefully handles the “craft” aspects of website design. Elements of this craft include people friendly URLs, integrated search, RSS feed generation, commenting options, plugins, and standards-support.

One good example, is that the structure of WordPress allowed each artist’s latest post to be syndicated on the Club Arthouse homepage. By focusing on free web browser-based services and software I hope to instill a decentralized and evolutionary design perspective on working with the living web. Make the tools simple and the content accessible so that new forms will develop.

tags: wordpress, opensource, portfolio, template, flickr

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Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 6:55 pm

topic: art, tech