The Planet Blog

Life is on demand these days. With RSS feeds, DVR, Domino’s Online Pizza Tracker, Hulu, Kindle 2, Netflix and the iPhone app store, you’re in complete control of your world … Why should The Planet’s blog be any different? Lucky for you, we came across a great WordPress Poll plugin this afternoon that puts that power in your hands.

Unlike that perfect black dress I bought on sale from Banana Republic last September, we aren’t going to let this plugin hang in our closet for six months with the tags attached … we’re putting it to work immediately. Take a couple seconds to vote on the content you most want to see from The Planet’s blog:

[poll id="2"]

If you think we missed anything, be sure to leave us a comment with your recommendation and we can update the poll to include it.

Now I wonder how I can follow suit and unveil that dress …

-Katie

Apparently, a few folks here at The Planet have a knack for photography. On Monday, we asked everyone to send in their favorite photos from our dragon boat race last weekend. We assumed a few people would pass along a few snapshots from the event and we could quickly and easily organize the pictures on one blog page …

However, the floodgates opened and immediately, we were up to our ears in JPEGs — over 300 of them. The “problem” we ran into was that all of the pictures were phenomenal. We wanted to include them all, but entering 300 lines of HTML didn’t seem like much fun — especially when the lines of code look like this:

<a href=”Dragon Boat Large Picture URL”><img class=”centered” src=”Dragon Boat Small Picture URL” alt=”Picture Title”/></a>

With the help of a useful Wordpress plugin, we linked the blog to a newly created Flickr account, and we’ve been playing with the newfound functionality ever since. You’ll notice the new photostream widget in our sidebar, and you can click on any of our photos to see other pictures from our Flickr pool in a gallery layout or in a slideshow.

If you’re a Flickr user, come join our group and contribute your favorite pictures: www.flickr.com/groups/theplanet! I’m still getting pictures from last weekend and sifting through them, so keep an eye on our photostream for updates: The Planet’s Flickr

Check out the Dragon Boat Race photo set: