Still Not Perfect

Good news for all the bloggers battling comment spam: Google has come up with a plan to reduce the effectiveness of the spam to raise spammer’s PageRank. I doubt that it will stop the spam from coming immediately. But hopefully after some time of not seeing their PageRank rising from all the spam links the spammers will get the point. Who knows how long it will take to get the message out to all the zombie machines they have doing the spamming for them though.

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

This plugin allows users of WordPress (and other clever people who can figure out how to make it work without WP) to display their Flickr photos on their own site. It is advised that users of previous versions of the plugin upgrade to this one. New features in this version:

• “Friendly” URI generation
• Link to Flickr slideshow of photosets
• Support for new Flickr image URLs
• Security conscious cache file names

Features that were already there include:

• Flickr photosets as “albums” - complete with descriptions and meta
• Support for Flickr “notes” feature - just this plugin uses all CSS and Javascript instead of Flash (the plugin’s output looks like this)
• EXIF data support to display camera settings the photo was snapped with — in addition to the description and meta info from Flickr
• Valid XHTML output
• Option to respect photos marked “private”
• Thumbnail size choices
• Pagination of albums and photos in albums

Get the latest version in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here.

Ryan has posted a guide for using this plugin with WP 1.5. Unfortunately I still haven’t gotten arround to making it easier to integrate with WP 1.5, but Ryan’s writeup sums it up pretty well.

If you are having issues with the new Flickr authentication API please consider the FAlbum project over at RandomByte. It is a branch of this project, and contains some neat features I simply haven’t had time to implement.

I know some people might be wondering where the interface for adding notes to photos is. For a while I worked at incorporating something like FotoBuzz or FotoNoter into the plugin, but in the end decided it was too hackish because both of those solutions are meant to actually store the notes in the JPEG. To store the notes in Flickr we just have to pass them to an API method. So, if anyone is a Flash guru (I’m not) with a little extra time maybe we could work together to create an interface that doesn’t feel so hackish, both from a usability standpoint and from an integration with this plugin standpoint. Read the rest of this entry »

Flickr has enhanced their already rich API even more by adding methods for creating, editing, and deleting “notes”. I’ve been waiting for this so that I can integrate notes features better into my Flickr Gallery WP plugin.

The preliminary plan is to try to use FotoBuzz as an optional interface for adding notes to your Flickr photos through my plugin. This will require a bit of work because I will have to re-write the open source back-end (released under the LGPL) of FotoBuzz to store notes on Flickr instead of embedding them in the image files. To do this I have to figure out how to talk to the front-end of FotoBuzz, which is just going to take some experimentation because the Flash (yuck) GUI part of FotoBuzz is closed source (but still free to distribute because it is released under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license) and undocumented.

Hopefully I will get some time in the next few days to work on this a little. I’m pretty excited about it.

Other features I’ll hopefully be adding to the plugin in the next few days:

• Ability to create human-readable (or at least more friendly) URIs with the help of mod_rewrite and .htaccess files
• Options to show the CC license photos are released under
• Options to choose which visibility level to display (public, friends, family)
• Probably a couple more bug fixes (as my rag-tag band of testers find bugs)

Read the rest of this entry »

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

Update (1/8/2005) - A new version is available here with some of the features requested in this post’s comments and also some bug fixes.

Flickr’s recent outage uncovered a bit of a security hole in my Flickr Gallery plugin. When Flickr goes down, or for some other reason your server can’t execute the API calls against their server, the remote fopen() calls were blowing up. The fopen() calls were throwing warnings (unless you have warnings turned off in PHP - which you should) that showed the entire URI of the API call it attempted to make, including the user’s email and password. Obviously this is undesirable. So, I’ve manually surpressed errors and warnings on any statement that could contain a password so we don’t get passwords spit out in the output stream anymore and caused it to fail back to the cache if that happens.

Also, Stewart (a Flickr developer) made a good point about EXIF data not needed to be refreshed in the cache because the EXIF data won’t be changing, so I’ve made that caching permanent. Stewart also had some concerns about how often we were refreshing the API call cache, so I’ve extended that from 10 mins to 1 hr by default. Unfortunately that’s not quite as drastic as Stewart would like us to be, but I think it is fair because the caching the plugin does is pretty efficient from their perspective (no matter how many users hit your gallery pages, the plugin will only hit the Flickr API once per hour for each API call).

So, this should probably just be a minor number release (security and bug fixes), but I’m making it a major number release because I’ve also added a few features like:

• Pagination of albums and photos in albums
• Slightly better navigation through gallery

Get the newest version in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here. Follow the installation instructions in the README.txt. Or follow the installation instructions here, except now the line you put in your gallery.php file is (to support paging):
<?php flickr_show_photos($_GET['album'], $_GET['photo'],
$_GET['page']); ?>

System Requirements:
PHP 4.1 or greater - with allow_url_fopen enabled (to make remote API/REST calls and download images)
Wordpress isn’t actually required because this doesn’t use any of WP’s plugin hooks

Of course this code comes with no guarantee. If you need support I’ll be glad to help (within reason) — just shoot me an email. If you want to suggest future features or just tell me that you are using my plugin I’d appreciate that feedback too.

Copyright (c) 2004
Released under the GPL license

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

Update (1/8/2005) - A new version is available here with some of the features requested in this post’s comments and also some bug fixes.

This is an update to my Flickr gallery plugin with a couple new features and some bug fixes. Some of the salient features include:

• Flickr photosets as “albums” - complete with descriptions and meta
• Support for Flickr “notes” feature - just this plugin uses all CSS and Javascript instead of Flash (the plugin’s output looks like this)
• EXIF data support to display camera settings the photo was snapped with — in addition to the description and meta info from Flickr
• Valid XHTML output
• * new * Option to respect photos marked “private”
• * new * Thumbnail size choices

You can download it in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here.

An example installation can be found here. Read on for installation instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

This project is now closed. Please use the much superior FAlbum if you want to integrate Wordpress and Flickr.

Update (1/8/2005) - A new version is available here with some of the features requested in this post’s comments and also some bug fixes.

I’ve been working on a Wordpress plugin that integrates some of Flickr’s great photo sharing services. This plugin allows you to display your Flickr photos and photosets on your site like a photo gallery using Flickr’s API. Some of the salient features include:

• Flickr photosets as “albums” - complete with descriptions and meta
• Support for Flickr “notes” feature - just this plugin uses all CSS and Javascript instead of Flash (the plugin’s output looks like this)
• EXIF data support to display camera settings the photo was snapped with — in addition to the description and meta info from Flickr
• Valid XHTML output

You can download it in .tar.gz format here or .zip format here.

An example installation can be found here. Read on for installation instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Wordpress plugin ideas I’ve been considering:

1. Server load indicator - Allow you to display a bar indicating how heavily loaded (load average, mem usage) your server is. This one is probably only easily done on a Linux server (/proc filesystem would be instrumental).
2. Visitor origins - Like this one just more customizable (can use a custom map image). The only problem with this idea is I have to get the geographic IP data from a source that probably will charge money. I’ve already investigated Maxmind’s GeoIP City and Geobytes GeoSelect.
3. Flickr photo gallery - I’ve already begun work on this one. I’m tying into Flickr’s API to get a list of a Flickr user’s photosets and photos. You can see my progress so far here. I still want to add human readable URL generation and Flickr comment integration before I feel it is ready for primetime.

Update (11/27/2004): After some thought I’ve come to the conclusion that the server load indicator really isn’t a WP plugin (it doesn’t interact with WP at all). Depending on how it was implemented the visitor origins one might not interact with WP either.

I’ve been trying Pictorialis II out as a photo gallery. You can see the results of my experiment here (example taken offline - it was getting spammed to death and I’m not using it anyway). For the most part I am pleased with it, but I’ve got a couple gripes: Read the rest of this entry »