What an afternoon of random ideas. During a rather slow drive home from work, I started thinking about new site designs for Ka'anapali Dreamin' and came up with a few goodies. After some quick browsing for inspiration and a handful of pencil sketches, I arrived at something woth throwing together in Photoshop.

Getting ready to fire up the laptop, I soon became distracted by yet another idea while looking at one corner in my office at home. You see, I have been a fan of the Islands Gallery Day Calendar for a few years now, and whenever I come across a day that features Hawaii, I put it on my wall.

As you can imagine, one would gather quite a few of these over the course of 3 years (I'm counting 39 so far, with a few of them practically duplicates). And in all of that time, I had yet to think of using my own photos to create an online version. But for whatever reason, today I did.

This week's update is actually not an update to our website, but an update to your home page! What exactly does that mean?

Well, we've added a Maui Photo Day Calendar as a new Google Gadget that you can add and customize on your own iGoogle page. It will display a different Maui photo every day with a short description and the current month and day. It's a small little gadget, so it won't take up much space. Yet it's still large enough to share that warm, Aloha feeling.

Another great thing about this day calendar is that all our photos are hosted on Flickr. That means, if you see a photo you really like, you can click on it, view the photo page and read comments that others have posted. If you also have a Flickr account, you can leave your own comments, too.

I said it before, I love being a photographer and a web developer. Here's another reason why.

Making an Online Photo Calendar
What started as an idea in mid-November turned into a relatively easy to make Google Gadget to showcase some of my favorite Maui photos. And all it took was:

• a little preparation,
• some convention,
• and 2 Flickr API methods

Sparing all the minor details, here's the jist of what I did.

This will probably take more than one post to cover, but I thought I'd give it a little quick start. The final result: An automated way to feature new photo on a Facebook page or profile stream.

The Photos
There's going to be some prep work on all those photos you're going to need, but I'll save that for another time. I already amassed my 366 photos for a daily calendar project, so that part was already taken care of. Those photos are hosted on Flickr and tagged with an individual date code. For example, the image in this post here is tagged with 'c1117' for November 17th.

Now, you don't need to follow that tag approach, and you certainly don't need a full year's worth of photos to start with, but it's one less thing you need to worry about later.