Still articling

This morning there was a nice sunrise so I decided to go out and try and take some photos of it. Unfortunately I was too late and missed it. The annoying thing is that we only get nice sunrises on average about once every three weeks. So to get a nice sunrise photo you would need to go out before sunrise every day for three weeks, spending a couple of hours out in the cold, since there is no way you can know if the sunrise will be good until it happens.

It's a lot of work just for a few nice sunrise photos!

When I got back home I wrote up yesterday's blog post, then did some more work on my top 5 photography tips article PDF version. I changed some of the layout a bit more, then found that the links weren't working when exported to PDF.

I tried a different PDF and the links in that worked okay, so I thought you must need to do something special to hyperlinks in OpenOffice to get them to work as a hyperlink in a PDF. Googling I found this thread: Links not working in Adobe Reader in Exported PDF, which said the problem was caused by exporting as PDF/a. So I tried tagged PDF instead, and now the links worked.

When I'd got the PDF finished and uploaded I then tried slideshare, but found that the PDF was really in the wrong orientation (portrait) for slideshare. So I spent a lot of the afternoon and evening making a presentation version of the article in OpenOffice.org impress.

Unfortunately it wasn't just a case of copy and pasting as with the different page orientation everything needed rearranging and Impress would always mess up the formatting whenever pasting the text into it. It was particularly annoying with the flickr links where it would make the whole flickr credit text look like a hyperlink and you had to alter the style of the text in a very specific and cumbersome way to make the text look like normal text while keeping the actual hyperlinks looking like links.

I did some checking on the creative commons licensed flickr photos, and found that one of the requirements was that when using the photo you must specify that it is CC licensed. I didn't realise this previously.

The Firefox Greasemonkey script I'd been using to get the image / credit html for CC licensed flickr photos did originally produce the credit in the form of something like

<a href="link to photo on flickr">Creative Commons licensed photo</a> by <a href="link to user on flickr">username</a> on flickr

But I didn't think that was that great so I had changed it to

<a href="link to photo on flickr">Photo title</a> by <a href="link to user on flickr">username</a> on flickr

Now I realised why the script creator had written it to mention CC instead of the photo title. Anyway, all I did was to put a note on my website, the squidoo lens, the presentation, and the pdf that all the flickr photos used are CC licensed.

That way I keep using the photo titles, don't make the photo credits really long by mentioning on every photo credit that it's CC licensed, and also comply with the CC licensing rules.

I also read this blog post about CC licenses being revoked and the burden of proof being on you as a user to prove that you had a license to use the photo: Gaming the Creative Commons for Profit.

So although it is a pain, I took screenshots of every page for each flickr photo I was using, making sure that the little CC icons were on show. Of course, if someone did decide to falsely sue me they could claim that I doctored the images. But still, I think it is better than nothing.

And when there are probably people using the images with no attribution that they could go after, just the fact that I have a screenshot might be enough to put off any of these claims. I hope that in reality I never receive any such claim in the first place though.

In the evening I also watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and Bo. My favourite quote was Dammit, I'm a doctor not an escalator!