After a few months my photoblog, Dreamz Photo, has finally been approved by VFXY syndication service. VFXY is one of the largest syndication services for photobloggers to share their work with other artists and photography lovers. They are manually approved by volunteers to ensure high quality of the thousands of photoblogs submitted.

This is a quick guide how to setup VFXY on a WordPress photoblog that is hosted on your own domain such as configure your htaccess file, VFXY and WordPress configurations.

Control your photos

Once your photoblog has been approved you should setup the htaccess file to prevent hotlinking of your photos. This is a good way to give you a better control where your photos will be published. It will also save you bandwidth which may result in saving you money if your photoblog is popular and bandwidth is limited.

For more information on how to use and write a htaccess file, see AskApache htaccess Tutorial.

You should add the following to your htaccess file. Keep in mind that mod_rewrite must be enabled on your server, however in most cases it’s enabled by default.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?feedburner\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feedproxy\.google\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://photos\.vfxy\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ - [NC,F]

Change the domain name to your own on this line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]

If you are using a feed redirection plugin like FeedBurner FeedSmith or FD Feedburner then you must have the following in your htaccess file. If not, you can comment them out or remove them:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?feedburner\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feedproxy\.google\.com/ [NC]

WordPress, FeedBurner and VFXY

First time users should import all their photos to VFXY by changing the number of syndication feeds in WordPress by going to Settings > Reading in the administration panel. Set the number of shown feeds equal or higher than the number of posts, e.g: if you have 50 posts, set it to 50 or 100.

Otherwise you should keep the syndication feed number to no more than 10 as this will save you bandwidth and a bunch of other things :)

If you are using the FeedBurner service and if you don’t want to wait the hour it takes for them to update your feed. Login to FeedBurner, go to Troubleshootize tab and click on Resync the feed.

Once this is done, login to VFXY and goto your Photoblog settings. Since we are using the FeedBurner redirection service you must set the address to your Photoblog RSS using the URL specified by FeedBurner. If you don’t do this VFXY will ignore your feed.

Add the following in the field for Photoblog RSS and change the your_feedburner_name to your own.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/your_feedburner_name

Now save the Photoblog settings and then reset your gallery. Resetting the gallery will take on average about 20 minutes and if everything is setup correctly your photos should be showing up in your VFXY photoblog gallery.

Once the gallery has been reset you should go back to the WordPress administration panel and set syndication feed value to 10.

The first beta of Wordpress 2.6 is out now. It comes with some new interesting features.

Post revision
This is a great feature for when you run a blog/magazine with multiple authors. I believe this will be one of the main features that will let smaller magazines/papers run a site with ease. It’s been one of the features I have missed. Read more about post revisioning.

Caching with Google Gears
Google Gears is a browser add-on that enables WordPress feel alike word processor application like Microsoft Office Word or Open Office. This is another feature that might have a big impact on the uses of WordPress and the type of users that find WordPress useful.

I’ve heard requests/wishes that there was more web applications that worked similar as a word processor. This might be what they have been looking for. Time will tell. Read more about Google Gears for Wordpress.

Theme previewing
This feature I have waited for since I first tried out WordPress and it’s finally here! Not much to say about it really, as long as it works :)

You can read the complete feature list here.

All these features sounds very good but only issue I really have with WordPress is the Media Library. WordPress completely suck at managing uploads; especially images, creating thumbnails, cropping and/or resizing images. Unfortunately there aren’t any good plugins for upload management either.

I want more control over how to handle stylesheet and html codes in posts, most of the classes and IDs are hardcoded. It’s a pain when you just want it to be used a little differently and you end up writing your own tags just to make a small change.

This is after all a beta but it do look promising :)