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 »

Holidays can really be exhausting. Not so much because I didn’t get enough rest, but because there is so much I want to catch up on once I get back home. So even though I returned home well rested I managed to spend a couple of late nights wasting that rest away because of all the things I wanted to do. Anyway, I’m glad to be back home.

2005 promises to hold plenty of excitement for our family. Ian is due to be joining us out in the real world February 9 (but I’m pretty sure he’ll be here well before that). We are looking forward to that with much anticipation and an equal helping of “we don’t have a clue what we’re doing” fear.

We are starting to house hunt too, as our apartment will be kind of cramped for three of us. We are looking for something unique, but it seems to be hard to come by. The great majority of the housing in our area has gone up in just the last ten years. That means that most of the houses seem to come from a relatively small group of cookie cutter designs. We have found one neighborhood we really like (it’s unique and private) - but it seems everybody currently living there really likes it too and isn’t planning on moving out anytime soon. Maybe patience will pay off and something will open up in that neighborhood by July when our lease is up. In the meantime I’ll keep daydreaming about fixing a place up to be our very own.

Anyway, we wish everyone a great 2005.

I finally finished reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (except for one 50+ page monologue - just too much of one thing). I started reading it way back in August and got about half way through its 1100+ pages on a vacation trip. But once we got back home and life returned to normal (meaning too busy) my reading rate dropped off considerably.

Like many of my favorite books (George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) Atlas Shrugged carries a strong political message, or at least acts as a commentary on the state of politics, freedoms, and economics in our age. The book is really a vehicle for Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism (a philosophy that some say often influences the American Libertarian Party platform). That said, it is still quite a good story. However, if you are looking for a more concise presentation of Rand’s ideas, or maybe a piece of work that develops story and plot better, many people suggest The Fountainhead. 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 »

Living on Earth mentioned an Oregon DOT sponsored project to track the mileage that motorists drive on Oregon roads and use the data to institute a use-based road tax to replace the hefty state gasoline tax. Oregon, like all other states, charges a state tax on every gallon of gasoline sold on top of the $.18 federal tax per gallon. The states use this money to fund the maintenance of roads and bridges. Many states are noticing decreasing revenue with this model due to the increase in hybrid and fuel-efficient car sales.

Oregon DOT has been funding a project at Oregon State University (also mentioned in GPS World) as a potential solution to the decreasing revenue from gasoline taxes. The proposed program uses a combination of existing GPS and radio technology to tax the motorist for the miles driven every time they refill their fuel tank. This is how it works:

• The GPS receiver and the odometer are used together to determine how many miles were driven inside Oregon’s borders
• A radio transmitter transmits the mileage data to the gas pump when you fill up
• The mileage data is used to calculate your usage tax and you are charged the usage tax instead of the flat per gallon state tax

Read the rest of this entry »

FotoBuzz is a nifty Flash and PHP/Python widget for adding annotations to your photos. One of the few Flash things I have seen that could actually be useful (Flash is way overdone lately). Also, the user interface is a bit nicer than Flickr’s similar feature “notes”. Could be a nifty add-on to my Flickr Gallery WP plugin when the Flickr API starts to support adding notes. Cal Henderson of Flickr says the following regarding notes features being in the API:

oops - it’s not actually. API methods to deal with notes are half done. i need to port them across from the old API at some point soon. i definately plan to.

Interestingly, FotoBuzz stores the notes actually in the image file. Not exactly what I would want it to do for easy integration with Flickr, so I’d have to modify it a bit (the PHP/Python parts where the code would need to be changed are released under the LGPL — but the Flash part is under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license so I can’t [and don't want to] touch it). The changes shouldn’t be too hard to do, so I’m really just waiting on Flickr to allow posting notes through the API. It would be neat to have users be able to add notes to your photos through the Flickr Gallery plugin instead of having to follow the link to Flickr to do so (which nobody ever does).

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

As if the last couple of days wouldn’t have been crazy enough with the Thanksgiving holiday and family get togethers, we decided to throw a couple of hospital visits into the mix. Thanksgiving day we had a good time visiting with the family and eating lots of great food, but on the way home Alex told me she was feeling contractions (cue Ray getting really nervous). So she started timing the intervals - 5 mins between, then decreasing down to 3. So I finally convinced Alex to call the on-call nurse who tells her to take it easy and drink lots of water for an hour. We wait for the hour and things are actually getting worse. So the nurse tells us to come in to the hospital. 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.

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 »