More than a Pretty Picture

Pretty much every garden blog includes information about plants. They put in pretty pictures and leave the reader to fill in the rest. Pictures are great, but they don't really give your reader any details.

Now, RSS isn't a solution, though I do fall back on RSS quite a bit. What you need is a way to include the information without having to do it all yourself for each and every plant.

Enter our friend, iframes. I'm sure you've never heard of it. Well, I'm going to explain it to you without a lot of technobabble.

In short, iframe is a code that puts a page from another website on yours. When a visitor to your blog reads your post, their web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc) asks the other server for the page. When the visitor's web browser gets the file, it creates a small frame on your page with the other page inside it.

Landscapedia (http://www.landscapedia.info) makes it's database available to bloggers for their posts through a script you can include in your webpage. Now, yes, I'm partial to Landscapedia because I own it, but I honestly don't know of another place out there to get the information.

Include
To get started, all you need is the code to include and that handy "Edit HTML" tab at the top of your post editing window.

Now I surround mine with a span tag, which simple lets me add some formatting like flowing text around it. Here is the code for the box above:

<span style="float: right; padding-left: 5px;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" name="Plant" scrolling="no" src="http://www.landscapedia.info/feeds/feediPlant.php?plantID=30883" width="250"></iframe></span>

Format that Bad Boy
Now in the code you can see that it floats to the right, there is a small padding on the left side to prevent text from jumping up against it.  I'll explain some hmtl in a week or so.  Also, you see in the iframe tage where it says plantID=30883?  You can change the plant by changing that number.  Search for the plant you want, and grab that number from the URL bar of your browser.

Why Not Manually?
So the natural question is why not just manually create your own text block and link the pictures? More sites are disabling bloggers ability to "hotlink" or display pictures off the original website. This is for bandwidth, copyright and other concerns. Pictures that work today may not tomorrow leaving your blog looking empty and lonely.

Also, information on plants change all the time whether we like it or not. Dietes morea becomes Dietes iridioides. Community databases usually typically have a large group of people editing them, so the information is kept more current than if you tried to stay on top of it all yourself.

Road Test It
If you are on the fence, give it a shot and let your readers give you feedback. Post a pic, then post an inclusion. Ask them to tell you which they prefer for future blogs.