I’ve been on and off the fence about writing this post for about a week now. I decided if I don’t write it this weekend, I might as well give up on it. So here goes.
In early April I was in a nasty car accident which left me with some injuries and temporarily immobilized for several weeks. My world was reduced to a limited part of my home that I could reach without having to use stairs – a few ground floor rooms, the front and back porch and the garage. I was only able to move around with a walker at first.
It would have been easy to just take my meds and settle in for a month of daytime TV, but I wasn’t too pleased with that prospect. Since discovering DS106 earlier this year I had started developing a habit of posting at least one picture a day to Flickr, as well as trying The Daily Create every day. In the past, after a surgery for instance, I spent most of my recovery time reading, but this time I wanted to keep making stuff (art, dammit). I have to credit (or blame) DS106 for instilling that attitude.
Actually, I had a project to do for #potcert11, another online course I was taking. I had the idea of making a video review of the class, and I was able to tap into some of the resources on #ds106 to learn a lot of tools and tips about working with video. In the end, I spent much more time than I should have, but came up with a video that I was pretty happy with considering I had never tried anything like it before. That kept me busy for the better part of a week or more.
I recalled a DS106 assignment I did earlier in the year, Mission:Defamiliarize.. (Here’s a link to the DS106 assignment page). I figured I could do something like that, so I started taking pictures around the house, looking for novel angles or effects to make the pictures more interesting. As I got a little more mobile, I was able to go out and take pictures of the neighborhood from my porches. Over the 5 weeks I was shut-in, I ended up taking over 800 photos, though a lot of them were not all that interesting.
I really like trying to post something to The Daily Create every day. So I tried to keep at that as well. Some of my efforts were pretty lame (pun intended) but I managed to come up with something. Sometimes I had to distort the assignment to fit my circumstances. For instance, one assignment was to photograph a bumper sticker. I didn’t have any chance of doing that, so I just made up my own bumper sticker and posted it. It was kind of dumb, but it gave me something to do.
With all this activity going on with Flickr, I started looking for some new ways to integrate my blog and my Flickr postings. There are a lot of tools and plugins to do that. However, I have also wanted to learn some WordPress programming, so I set out to learn how to create WP plugins and studied the Flickr API to create my own little plugin. I’m deploying it today on this blog. I put a selection of photos from my shut-in period into a Flickr Photoset. This page is generated by my plugin, and it pulls all the photos from that photoset into my blog. If I go make changes to the photoset on Flickr, the page will update itself with the changes. It’s kind of cool if I do say so myself. There’s no grand works of art there, but you might find some interesting shots if you care to take a look. I’ll probably have more to say about the plugin later, but it still needs a bit of polishing.
So what’s the point of all this. I’m not really sure, except that I wanted to share the story. I guess the message is that the DS106 spirit helped me find something useful to do with my brain while my bones and muscles were recovering.
Things are slowly coming back to normal, though I’m still limping around with a cane, and occasionally relying on meds for the lingering aches and pains. But I’m hoping that in another week or so, I’ll be fit enough for summer camp.
That’s my story. Any questions?
