This is the first half of part 1 of the Uploading section of My WordPress Image Process.

First off, you need place to store your images. I tried the host your own website under the table style without paying the extra to my ISP and just updating the IP address when it changed every month or so. That was more hassle than it was worth. I’m a horrible IT manager. I’m now hosting a bunch of sites on a virtual server and have fantastic paid tech support (MillcreeekSys). This works out because I have a website that brings in come offsetting revenue, so I’m not going it the hole every month. The problem with image hosting there is that there is only 10 GB. With all that i have on my virtual server I had to remove all my originals and re-upload pre-scaled-down version to fit all my images. This way is not a long term solution. Then I heard about S3, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. There is a flat storage fee and a bandwidth use fee. So for every image you store you’re charged and for every image that is viewed, downloaded or uploaded, you get charged. Sounds expensive!!! Well actually is is amazingly cheap. If you bought a hard drive and kept you photos on it, you’d still end up on the loosing side. Redundancy, unlimited storage, and cheap rates make S3 a great service.

Enough with the hard sale. None of this is any good, unless you have a way to use it with WordPress. Luckily there is a plugin that meshes with the normal uploading that is native to WP. Tan Tan has given us the WordPress S3 plugin. With this plugin you can add images to S# and they will act exactly as they do if they were stored on your personal server or hosted elsewhere. If you need bulk upload. There are a few options but the one that I like the best is a Firefox plugin called S3Fox. Plug it in and bulk upload to S3.

There you have it step one. A place to put your pixels. Next up… Adding on to the basic upload of WordPress. Yes it even works with S3.

Advanced Tag Entry - Adds more advanced tag management to the post edit screen. By Jennifer Hodgdon, Poplar ProductivityWare.

Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put in your template. By Matt Mullenweg.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT - Adds a breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location. For details on how to use this plugin visit Breadcrumb Nav XT. By John Havlik/Michael Woehrer.

Category Cloud - Displays a category cloud, using bigger font and different colors for important categories. Based on Weighted Categories by Matt Kingston By Francesco Mapelli.

Code Markup - A filter that displays <code> blocks nicely while still allowing formatting. By Bennett McElwee.

Flexible upload - Resize picture at upload and make thumbnail creation configurable (like WP1.5), optionally include a watermark to your uploaded images. By Antoine Choppin.

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold.

Gravatar - This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. See the documentation for syntax and usage. By Tom Werner.

IImage Gallery - Simple but powerful plugin for creating image galleries. By Martin Chlupáč.

Recommended Tags - Creates a list of recommended and existing tags (JavaScript must be enabled). There are currently four different settings you can adjust in the file. By CyberNet.

Search Regex - Adds search & replace functionality across posts, pages, comments, and meta-data, with full regular expression support By John Godley.

WordPress search and replace - Lets you search and replace text in posts using Perl-compatible regular expressions — Usage instructions By Manuel Amador (Rudd-O).

WP-o-Matic - Enables administrators to create posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds. By Guillermo Rauch.

WPG2 - Embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into your Blog & Sidebar Content. Documentation, Support Forums, Change Logs By Ozgreg and WPG2 Team.

WP lightbox 2 - Lightbox JS v2 is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page written by Lokesh Dhakar. Add rel=”lightbox” attribute to any link tag to activate the lightbox. This plugin integrate its feature into your WordPress blog. By Safirul Alredha.

I believe that the correct animated gif for this post would be the yellow caution sign with the street worker digging. But who could pass up this one.

Come on, don’t these remind you of when the World Wide Web was young, still called the Information Super Highway, and piping hot out of the idea oven of Al Gore.

Anyway… I’m working towards completion of the new design. The fantastic Wordpress blogging (and much more) software release of 1.5 Strayhorn was the impetus, and the only thing holding me back is my inability to speak CSS. Please let me know what you think. In the mean time be patient. I’m getting there, just very slowly.

Now for the real icon!