We’ll be getting to the clker.com plugin in a moment or two. You need to know

that clker.com is an outstanding image resource – wide in its breadth and variety, often deep (many resources on a given subject), and high-quality images. So – with the assistance of one of the AIGA international symbols for “wait,” we ask you to bear with us for a moment while we digress.

We’re very partial to Vladimir Prelovac‘s work generally, and have been installing and extolling his Insights plugin since we discovered it. ((Insights Plugin: finding images, citations, references while composing, July 12, 2009)).

Insights lets you find an image, definition, video, reference on your own site, book title, etc. – from within the editing window. So when we want to say – for instance – that “even the conservative Winston Churchill, at the end of WWII, realized that it was time for England to have single-payer – i.e. nationalized – health insurance” – we use the Insights dialog box – right underneath the editing window -

I’m going to search Wikipedia for “Winston Churchill” – and it yields the main Wikipedia (english) entry on Churchill, as well as nine other references. Searching “Images” for the same search terms – gave me the cute dog on the right from a Flickr pool, the    recognizable official portrait on the left (possibly by Yousuf Karsh, but I’m not sure) , and the statue reproduced below, these just part of a set of 32 images – at least some of them perfectly suited to my needs.

I also remember a book I read recently about the post-wartime British decision to, among other things, nationalize health care – but only the title – Austerity Britain.

Here’s a current limitation of the Insights plugin – it’s searching Google Books – and doesn’t get more recent stuff – like the  book I’m looking for,

What I did get was this:

Power, Competition, and the State: Britain in search of balance, 1940-61

Keith Middlemas, published 1986, 0 pages

The ruined abbeys of Great Britain

Ralph Adams Cram, published 1905, 315 pages

The Suttees’ Cry to Britain: Containing Extracts from Essays Published in India and Parliamentary Papers on the Burning of Hindoo Widows : Showing that the Rite is Not an Integral Part of the Religion of the Hindoos, But a Horrid Custom, Opposed to the Institutes of Menu, and a Violation of Every Principle of Justice and Humanity

James Peggs, published 1827, 82 pages

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland

Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, published 1863, 0 pages

England before the Norman conquest: being a history of the Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods down to the year A.D. 1066

Charles William Chadwick Oman, published 1910, 679 pages

A little book about Great Britain, by Azamat-Batuk

Nicolas Leon Thieblin, published 1870, 0 pages

A Shorter History of England and Greater Britain

Arthur Lyon Cross, published 1920, 942 pages

The Church history of Britain

Thomas Fuller, John Sherren Brewer, published 1845, 2 pages

Which is still a lot of help if I’m trying to give context and authority for my searches. And research leads for me if I’m going to stay with the topic. You can also search your own blog, news (via a variety of sources), and a variety of blogs (I’m not sure – but I think it might be Google’s blog search).

The clker.com plugin does the same thing by adding a button to the editing window – a dialog box opens, gives you three choices of size for each image – and automatically closing the window once you choose and insert the image. Searching “United Kingdom” got  us, among other things, this medium-sized flag image:

What we’d like to see is Vladimir’s search and insertion technology harnessed to clker.com – and perhaps let users customize their own from-within-the-editing window search preferences.

We’ll leave you with a tip of the hat to Vladimir, the the apparently anonymous creator(s) of Clker, and a couple of images we like just because we like them, from  Clker, and acquired and inserted via their super-cool WordPress plugin. The variety and of the images will keep me coming back to Clker – and if it’s added to the Insights Plugin that would be great. But – on balance – I think it might be easier to control images and layout by uploading them and using WordPress native image controls or, one of my favorites, the NextGen Gallery plugin. - by Alex Rabe – here’s the plugin page on Alex’s site.