Building Online Community -or- Never Miss a Pic

I'm big on building community, and our church website was built heavily with this in mind. Today I'd like to show you how to turn your digital photos into community building devices, and also how to keep track of other people's pictures.

You may have noticed a selection of pictures at the top of Breakwater's website that changes each time you load the page. These pictures make use of a feature offered by the free online photo sharing site Flickr.

Within Flickr you can create groups where multiple people can join and add pictures. Our website pulls it's pictures randomly from our Breakwater Pictures group. Any attender of the church is welcome to join and all you need is a free Flickr account to participate. Once you join the group you just need to open a picture you want to share and click the "Send to Group" link above it. Easy as pie!

But that's only part of the fun! One of the best features of Flickr is the ability for people to leave comments and notes on your photos, transforming an otherwise static web album into an interactive photo community. But this raises another problem; How do you make sure you're seeing people's comments with out constantly opening every picture in your portfolio?

At the bottom of every page in Flickr is a block of links that help you do this. The very first one in the top left is labeled "[Activity] On Your Photos". By default this shows you any comments people have made on any of your photos over the past 2 days, but you can change it to a week or a month or longer. Now if you have 300 photos and someone comments on the very oldest one you will see it here!

There are also links for "[Activity On] Comments You've Made" which shows you new comments on pictures that you've previously commented on (like replies to your comment and such), and also "[Activity On] Photos From Your Friends" which shows you the latest pictures posted by anyone you've designated as a contact. All of these help you keep up with your friends' photos and comments and help build community online.

But that's still three different links you have to click on to check everything, and you still have to open the Breakwater Pictures group to see if anyone new posted anything there. If you're like me you're far to lazy for all that work - isn't there a quicker way? Yes, and it makes it easy to keep track of other stuff on the web too...

It's called Google Reader and it's free from Google (you're need a free Google account to use it though). What Google Reader does it keep track of RSS feeds. How does this help you? Well, each of those Flickr links I talked about above has a feed associated with it. When you subscribe to those feeds in Google Reader it keeps track of all the new activity on all of the feeds for you, so you only have to check one place. It can also keep track of other feeds from your favorite blogs, news sources, and many other online media sources. And since it's all kept online it's the same no matter what computer you log in to.

To add one of your Flickr feeds, just go to flickr and get the page way you like it, for instance here is a link to show you any activity on your photos for the past month . Notice at the bottom of the page, above the block of links is a small, orange icon labeled "Feed". Click on it and it will open a page that just has a list of stuff. Depending on what browser you use it could also look like a big mess of code, but that's fine because all you want is the address up in the address bar of your browser. Copy that address and then log into Google Reader and click the "Add Subscriptions" link and paste the address in the text field that appears. Click "Add" and you've subscribed to that feed. You should now see activity on your photos inside Google Reader.

Repeat that step for each of the Flickr links any other feeds you want to keep track of. From now on all you have to do is log into Google Reader to see any new activity for anything you're subscribed to! Could it be easier?

Yes, actually. If you use Firefox as your web browser it takes the cutting and pasting out of the subscribing routine and instead provides you with links to add your feeds directly to Google Reader. But that would be a whole different tutorial...

I hope this tutorial will help you do more with your digital photos and I hope you experience great community and Breakwater Church. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

- Brian