We haven’t revisited our love for Adobe’s Lightroom for quite a while, but that doesn’t mean that love has diminished. Any photos we’ve taken for CDMo have likely passed through Lightroom’s gentle caress. Flickr, likewise, is indispensable. We use it for hosting larger images associated with CDM stories, and the Flickr pools for both CDMotion and -Music is a great way to keep up on what’s happening in the respective communities.

So a way to get your images from Lightroom to Flickr as quickly as possible is a Good Thing, right? Right! Jeffrey Freidl’s “Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr” works cross-platform, has all of the right settings available (including adding photos to Sets, or making a new Set), and integrates cleanly so all of your titles, tags and descriptions make it through intact.

And it’s super quick, so there’s one less barrier between the act of creation and the act of sharing it with the world.

Peter and I have been talking about implementing WYSIWYG editing for Wordpress comments for a while now. WP’s comments system is reasonably robust, but the HTML instructions seem to confuse some people:

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href=”" title=”"> <abbr title=”"> <acronym title=”"> <b> <blockquote cite=”"> <cite> <code> <del datetime=”"> <em> <i> <q cite=”"> <strike> <strong>

We quite often receive comments to out sites in which people - probably those unfamiliar with HTML - have taken these instructions to heart and created comments which look a little like this:

You can check it out <a href=”http://example.com” title=”here”>, more updates should be coming soon.

This can cause issues for the site as a whole: Wordpress doesn’t detect this error and close that anchor tag, so the rest of the comment becomes a link, which encompasses everything down the page until the next link in the code is closed. The same kind of thing happens when people put unclosed <strong> tags in their comments. We don’t have any closing </strong> tags in the page source after the comments, so when someone does this the rest of the site becomes emboldened until an administrator corrects the comment.

These kind of errors notwithstanding, WYSIWYG is perfect for comments. I don’t like WYSIWYG editors making decisions for me in my day-to-day coding life, as they rarely output exactly what I want them to, but writing comments is such a constrained activity; with a small number of tags available, the editor can’t really stuff things up too badly.

I’ve previously hacked a cut-down version of TinyMCE into our test bbPress installation. This was relatively simple, so I’d expected that it wouldn’t be hard to get it happening on the Wordpress comments form as well. I did a quick search first, though, to make sure I wouldn’t be duplicating someone else’s efforts. It turns out I would be, as there’s a Wordpress plugin called TinyMCEComments.