You will see from the previous post we spent a lovely morning at the Great Wall of China at Mùtiányù (???) which is 70kms outside of Beijing and relatively close compared to some of the other parts of the Wall. The traffic gods were being kind to us and it didn’t take as long to drive back in to the City, so we asked our driver to stop at Yonghegong (???) Lama Temple so we could thank the aforementionned Gods! Yonghegong is a fine example of a working Tibetan Buddhist Temple in Beijing and a monastery which dates back to the late 17th Century.
We managed a short visit before closing and managed to see most of the main temples and courtyards, bustling among the tour groups, few devotees and monks going about their daily chores. It was certainly much busier than the solitude at Mutianyu!
Here is a small gallery showing the photos I took with my Minolta camera. There are three galleries, all with the same photos as I am testing the various photo display galleries and slideshows available on WordPress linked to Flickr.
The first is called SimpleFlickr and uses SimpleViewer adjusted for WordPress by Josh Gerdes. It shows up fine in Mozilla and although this has worked in IE’s browser previously, it needs some adjusting to the code which I can’t find anymore and there is no longer any support.
The second slideshow is called flickrSLIDR and is easy to set up, but has very few extra options, hence the photo missing a border at the top and the black background. It is a solid product though.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Lastly, there is the Pictobrowser Photo Gallery, another Flash gallery but working better than SimpleFlickr. It also needs no plugin to work with WordPress. Quite nice looking and customisable. Those two points are pros and cons. If you have the settings in WordPress, you only need to set them once to propagate across your whole site, however you can’t change individual settings for one gallery. However, using this version, you have to change the settings for each Gallery (or paste and copy from code and change the set), so you may end up with a less fluid website, but can change the settings depending on the photo size and particular use each time..
So, which do you prefer? And I mean the various galleries, not the photos. Well them too!
Lot’s more photos to come on the next posts, or you can always look at my Flickr account – where you can leave individual comments too.
