This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Collaborative photo blogs, on the subject of Jokes, Canonical, and CES.

At CES 2012, Bill and I were chatting about Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things and decided* that it was the best thing on the whole entire internet. To that end, we came up with the idea of Canonical People Looking At Things. Canonical people look at things a lot.

So, it was my job to come up with a way of creating a collaborative photo blog. After tweeting to ask how, I got a bunch of suggestions, like Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, and so on. However, all of these things require me to do all the posts, or to set up each author. Wordpress.com may not (thanks to a suggestion by popey), but you can't theme a wordpress.com blog to look like a photo blog without paying money, as far as I can tell, and it'd still require people to go to the admin console and then me to approve each post, which is way way too much effort for a joke.

Then I remembered Blogger. (Remember blogger?)

Blogger lets you set up a blog and then create a Secret Email Address for it. Anyone with the Secret Email Address can post to the blog by emailing the email address. Yay!

So, I set one up. A bit of tweaking of the templates (to use Canonical aubergine) and the HTML (to remove post titles, post footers, enforce that the captions (all "looking at X") are in lower case, that sort of thing) and it's done.

canonicalpeoplelookingatthings.blogspot.com

I can't stop chuckling.

Stuart

That is great, but is there any way of setting up more than one topic? Or would you need to create a new blog identity per topic?

sil

One blog per topic, I think; I wasn't worried about that, since I only had one topic. I had yogile.com recommended as an alternative way of doing this, so you might want to check that out.

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.