First post of sorts – A sketchnote on Liberating Structures

I’m sort of starting from the ground up on this site. I have a new host ( yay hippies! ) and have an updated version of wordpress with no plugins. Taking a page from the @dlnorman playbook my intention is to be more self sufficient here, and rely less on third part services. My first challenge will be photos. For awhile now I’ve been using flickr as my defacto online image sharing service, (and I’m not giving it up just yet) but I want to begin building my own self hosted image collection here. This is an important collection to me that I want to not only share, but maintain and archive into the future, my collection of sketches, visualizations and art. Also, I bought a new scanner!

My first entry is a sketchnote I made last week at the ETUG spring workshop.  Nancy White was speaking on Liberating Structures, a “disruptive innovation” tool for organizations. I was struggling between participating in the activities (always encouraged at a Nancy White session) and working on this drawing, but most of my energy went here in the end.

I’ve added this image (which was scanned on the new scanner) using the default WordPress Media uploader, and was able to do several of them as a batch. I have noticed WP now has a “gallery” feature which I intend to check out, and also noticed you can do basic editing functions such as crop and rotate right in the dashboard now which I know will come in handy.

Here is the same image, this time photographed with my camera and hosted on flickr. The colours are way more vibrant, although probably not more accurate, but also here I know the image has been viewed over 50 times and favorited twice.

A few questions I’m considering

• Should I upload this to flickr as well?
• Are statistics about how this image has been used important to me?
• How do I create a gallery widget of image ‘categories’ from my own collection? 
• What plugins are needed to manage a self hosted image library?