The Garrison Center: What's With The Pix?

I knew someone would ask sooner or later, but I thought it would be later. Someone (just one person) noticed that each posted op-ed at The Garrison Center now comes topped with a big photo and wondered why.

The explanation is simple: I want the Garrison Center's material to qualify for syndication via Flipboard, and one of the requirements for that is "at least one image per article, no less than 400px in width." There are other requirements that will take time to meet. A minimum of 30 articles, for example -- I'm not going to speed up op-ed production, I'm just going to make sure that as the new stuff churns out it's optimized so that when we hit 30 we're go for launch.

English: iPad picture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'd never really paid attention to Flipboard before. It started off as an iPad app and then (I think) made the jump to Android. Now it's available on the regular old web as well. I read an article the other day (I tried to find it again to link here but couldn't) about how much additional traffic Flipboard syndication drives to sites, especially from tablet and phone users. The answer is: A lot. And I want The Garrison Center's stuff to show up in that market. So ... pictures.

The fly in the ointment is that Garrison's op-eds are published under a public domain dedication, and finding public domain pictures for every article would likely be a real pain. So I added a disclaimer about photos to the public domain notice and started looking for relevant and/or attractive graphics at rgbstock, my favorite free stock photo site. I'll use other sources as well.

So now you know the rest of the story. If you wondered. But you probably didn't.