At school, I’m the yearbook adviser. I realized this year that we have thousands and thousands of pictures – and most of them never see the light of day. Why not use them for something?

I wanted to make a website for the yearbook club and post some of these photos in galleries. It’s a great way to promote the yearbook and the kids like seeing themselves online. There were some legal issues that I’m working out with the administration, but there were also some technical issues.

Although I obviously can create and host my own website, I don’t have access to web space with php hosting for the yearbook club. I didn’t want to mix school stuff with my own stuff, so I didn’t want to host it here. The simplest solution for me (which I also use for class blogs) was a free blog hosted on Wordpress.com.

That is, until I realized that I couldn’t easily embed slideshows from other websites (i.e. Picasa). Doh! The embed and iframe tags that are usually used to include slide shows gets wiped out by Wordpress’ security.

I figured out a work around, though. http://www.slideshare.net/ allows you to create and host unlimited slideshows for free. They also offer an option to embed the slideshow into a Wordpress blog, and its compatible with a free Wordpress.com blog. This solved my technical problems and I don’t have to worry about storage space.

Shortly, I’m going to write up an article about this for Associated Content. I’ll link to it when it’s published. In the meantime, here’s a sample gallery. The pictures are just of my backyard. I’m still working on the legal issues, so I haven’t actually hosted any slideshows of students yet.