Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 01 Sep 2006 05:32:29 GMT
A number of people have pointed out that Typo’s Flickr API key has expired. The situation is actually slightly more complex, but the fix is dead simple. See changeset 1256 for the fix. If this works for everyone, then I’ll roll 4.0.4 over the weekend.
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:28:45 GMT
I’ve been working on a cool new toy–a Ruby script that sucks up all of the images from a Flickr photo set and turns them into a random montage. The results are surprisingly pleasing, at least to me:
Once we’ve pushed the next Typo release out the door, I have a few ideas for cool and useful things to add to Typo, but you’ll have to wait to see what they are.
Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:01:05 GMT
Flickr has finally added photo printing. As of today, US Flickr members can get 4x6 prints for $0.15. They also sell other sizes (5x7, 8x10, wallet, 5x5, [458]xD, and 20x30), but the other prices aren’t quite as enticing.
By default, you’re the only one allowed to print your pictures; it’s a safe default for Flickr, but I don’t really care who prints my pictures any more then I care who looks at them. If I wanted them to be private, I wouldn’t have put them on Flickr. You can change the setting via your flickr preference page; I changed mine so any Flickr member can order prints.
Er, well, some Flickr members can order prints. For now, the printing service is US-only. Considering that Flickr was a Canadian company (until Yahoo snapped them up), I find the US-centric printing kind of funny. They claim that they’re working on adding more countries.
I’ll probably order a few prints to test it out, but I doubt I’ll use Flickr’s printing service much, for the same reason that I’ve never been willing to use any of the online photo-printing places: they don’t do color management, so there’s no guarantee that your prints will look anything like the images on your screen. Instead, I use the profiles from Dry Creek Photo, burn a CD, and take it to my local Costco. I’ve had very good luck this way–I’ve churned out batches of 300 images without any problems or rejects before. The only problem is that I need to burn a CD and then make a couple trips to Costco; one to drop off the CD and another to pick up the prints. Most of the time, I’d rather just click “print” and wait a few days for a package to show up in the mail. There are a number of professional photo finishers that will accept color-managed images via FTP, but none of them are even close to being price-competitive with Flickr or Costco, and for big batches of 4x6 or 5x7 prints, price matters.
Which brings me back around to Apple’s Aperture again. One of the minor features that they’re touting is color-managed printing from within Aperture. I’d love that. Unfortunately, I’m not about to run out and buy a PowerMac and Aperture just to make photo printing easier, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
On the other hand, while Flickr’s non-color-managed prints may not be quite what I’m looking for, they’ll almost certainly save me a lot of hassle–I get a lot of requests for prints from friends and family, and I hate doing one-off prints for people. Now I can just point them to Flickr and let them do it themselves.
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 23 Sep 2005 15:27:42 GMT
I just released Typo 2.5.6. This is a minor bug-fix release, but it’s an annoying bug. Flickr changed their RSS feeds slightly a couple weeks ago and this broke Typo’s Flickr sidebar. This release contains the 1-line fix required to make it work again.
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:20:00 GMT
Now that tags are working, I’ve started work on adding text-filter plugins for Typo. The current release (Typo 2.5.3) has support for 5 different combinations of Textile, Markdown, and SmartyPants hard-coded into it. The different combinations are actually repeated in 3 different places–the filtering code itself, the drop-down list for the built-in editor, and the Movable Type API code to list filter options.
That’s all gone now, replaced with a plugin system, similar to the sidebar plugins that made it into Typo 2.5. Individual filters get dropped into components/plugins/textfilters/ and the system picks up on them automatically. Then there’s an interface in the admin UI that lets you combine the filters into named filter sets, so you can combine Markdown and SmartyPants into “My Filters” (or “Markdown with SmartyPants”, which Ecto recognizes and performs some magic to get Markdown previews to work right). The UI isn’t really complete yet, but the entire back end is there, and I’ve added two new filters as a demonstration of what we can do. Here’s the current list:
<a href="amazon:097669400X" ...> into a link to Amazon’s page for ASIN 097669400X, optionally attaching your Amazon affiliate tag. This is mostly a demonstration of what you can do with filters, although I’ll be using it on my blog.<flickr img="31366117" ...> into a formated inline image, linked to Flickr’s full-sized image page, optionally with a caption attached. The full HTML produced is something like <div style=""><a><img/></a><p>Caption</p></div>, which saves a lot of typing.I’m currently working on a Sparklines plugin, using Glyph’s Ruby sparklines code. It’ll be similar to the <flickr> tag, except it’ll spit out an <img> tag that points to a built-in sparkline generator. Turning <sparkline ...> into an image tag is trivial; allowing a text filter to export an action to the world is a bit more work.
There are currently two things that bother me about this code that I’ll need to resolve before releasing it:
<flickr> and <sparkline> tags–should they look like plain XHTML, or is that a mistake? Should I turn them into pseudo-bbcode tags, like [flickr]? I’m currently leaning towards sticking a typo pseudo-namespace on the front of them, and turning them into <typo:flickr .../> and <typo:sparkline ...>. Any objections to that?If all goes well, I’ll post a public patch for comment early next week, and then kick off the Typo 4.0 process by committing this and the tag code later in the week.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 13 Jul 2005 06:02:32 GMT
I’ve been dribbling pictures from my laptop to my Flickr account for days now, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve made a dent in the backlog. I just posted pictures from Sophie’s first birthday. She’s almost 2½ now; the pictures have been sitting on my laptop unsorted for almost 18 months. Every time I burn through another batch of ancient pictures I feel even better about Flickr.
I’m making progress on my PictureSync problems. Apparently the reason that it wouldn’t save my Flickr password as a conflict with a version of PictureSync that I tried out last October. There was some weird remnant from the old PictureSync still sitting in my keychain that I couldn’t figure out how to delete, so I renamed my Flickr account in PictureSync from ‘Flickr’ to ‘Flickr (Scott)’, and now everything works. There are still a couple weird AppleScript bugs that pop up from time to time, but it’s usable now. I’ll probably send the shareware payment off tomorrow and hope that the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.
I’ve also been playing with 1001, an OS X interface to Flickr from the author of ecto, my favorite blog editor. I set it up on my wife’s Mac mini so she can see the pictures that I put on Flickr automatically. I also installed 1001’s Flickr screensaver on her Mac–it’s kind of cool to see pictures that I posted a half-hour ago show up on her screen all on their own. Once I have a few more pictures up, I’ll start pushing Flickr on random family members; it seems like the perfect way to share family pictures in our increasingly widely distributed family.
In fact, the whole social-networking aspect of Flickr has taken me by surprise. I’ve already had a couple old friends pop up out of the blue. There’s a lot more interconnection in Flickr contacts then I would have expected. It’s not six degrees of separation: it’s two or three degrees at most.
Weird example–1001’s home page has a few example pictures, and the last one looked kind of familiar to me. I haven’t seen the picture before, but the guy on the left looks a lot like Boris Mann; Boris and I have been swapping comments on each other’s blogs for quite a while now. A bit of searching and I found the original picture of Boris and Roland Tanglao. Even though I’ve never actually met Boris, I’ve met at least three or four of the people on his Flickr contacts list and I read the blogs of several others. I picked a few other people on his contact list and looked at their contact lists, and I kept finding more people I knew. I’m not sure if this is all that useful, but it’s certainly interesting, and it’s given me a chance to see a lot of fascinating pictures.
It makes me want to go out and shoot something interesting. Over the past year, probably 95% of my photography has been pictures of family and friends; they’re important to have, but they aren’t very exciting. Unfortunately, they’ve been all that I’ve had time to take recently. Now that I’ve started clearing up the old backlog, maybe I’ll have time to take more pictures for the fun of it, not just because we need pictures from some random family gathering.
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 11 Jul 2005 06:53:24 GMT
My poor laptop’s hard drive has been filling up with unprocessed photos again, so I took a couple hours this morning to organize things and offload them to my home fileserver. I’ve never been all that happy with my web-based photo gallery, but I haven’t been willing to spend the week or two that it’d take to write something better, and I haven’t found an open-source gallery program that works any better for me then what I have now.
Sophie looking cute
So, I decided to give Flickr another try. Part of this was motivated by the Typo’s Flickr sidebar plugin–it’s the closest thing I can get to photo gallery/blog integration, and that’s something that’s been on my to-do list for around two years.
Rusty and Colton at Whistler
Since I use iView Media Pro for organizing my photos, I wanted to find something that could automate the process of getting pictures from iView into Flickr. A bit of searching found PictureSync, which isn’t perfect, but it works well enough for now. I can select a block of pictures in iView and drag them to PictureSync’s icon, and it will convert them to sRGB, scale them down, extract metadata from iView to stuff into Flickr tags, and then upload the whole batch. Unfortunately, it seems to have keychain issues that force me to re-create my Flickr upload settings every time I run it, and it’s not all that great at extracting metadata from iView’s “people” field. Still, it’s easier to use PictureSync and Flickr then it was to copy files to my server and re-run my make-album script, and that’s good enough for me.
Extreme cyclist at Whistler
So, I paid Flickr $25 to upgrade my account to “pro” status, which ups my upload limit from 20 MB to 2 GB and started uploading blocks of pictures. It’s going kind of slowly (550 MHz G4s aren’t all that great at resizing multi-megabyte images), but there’s no way around that for now. Eventually, I’ll probably write a Ruby upload script to work around the problems with PictureSync, and then I’ll be able to do uploads from a faster Linux box, but I’m pretty happy with what I have for now. It’s good enough.
A Walrus at the Zoo
In celebration of getting out of the photo hosting business, here are a few random pictures. First, Sophie looking cute, then my brother and his youngest son, my family watching a walrus at the zoo, and a mountain biker in Whistler.
