Flickr-ing to raise awareness and project capital

Eric Gunderson of Development Seed, our web designer, came up with this spot of genius. While I am slowly working backwards through our site to update all of the photographs, check out Matt Marek’s post on Project Medishare to see an example. The genius lies in the wonderful interoperability of the net.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am no tech-savvy web guru. Posting blogs and photos, while common now, are not as speedy as I have seen it done by others. Needless to say, when Eric sold me on redirecting our visitors from our photos to our Flickr account, I was at first lost in a haze of geek words but later overwhelmed by the excitement of its potential.

Now, rather than taking the time to resize and shape my digital photos manually, I post them for free to Flickr. They will automatically resize your photos to five preset dimensions and then give you the html code to insert them into any site. Now when people wish to view larger versions of the photos on Haiti Innovation’s website, they are taken to a gallery of all our Haiti photos on Flickr, in hopes that the other photos will draw their attention to our other blogs and projects.

For those unfamiliar with Flickr, their site has photo pools, much like Yahoo Groups, that members can subscribe too. Haiti Innovation is a member of the Developing World pool. As interested parties surf through our pool and our photos they are just one click away from our site. Each photo that is blog or project related has a link back to the original source on the Haiti Innovation site. What a wonderful way to learn more about Haiti.

Thanks Eric for the bit of free advice. I highly encourage those interested in web development to check out Development Seed.

Robert Miller
Haiti Innovation