I don’t often take the time to post something about a piece of code I figured out or things more technical, but I frequently rely on other’s blogs, websites, tutorials for random pieces of whatever puzzle I’m working on.
Anyway, the other week I was charged with putting up a slideshow using images from a specific flickr feed. The Google AJAX Feed API is perfect for this. No flash, no plugins.
The problem is in the gfslideshow.js file they provide you will only display square thumbnails of your photos, and if you scale them up, they become hopelessly pixelated. It took me a while, but the solution is simple. Open gfslideshow.js in a text editor and go down to line 48 then simply replace “thumbnail” with “content.” (or download this one) Also, be sure only to use the RSS2 feed from flickr as the Atom feed will not work with this.
That’s it! your slideshow should now show larger images.
HDR—in the hands of a seasoned professional HDR can be great for an image. Unfortunately there are around ten such people and none of them are on flickr. Please do not try.
“Best” Groups—usually invited by someone that’s embedded a stupid image of a ribbon or medal, these groups are a scourge and thinly veiled ego buoy. Often these groups have something to do with HDR (see above)
“365″ sets—Taking and posting a photo of yourself every day for a year sounds like a great idea…until you realize that it really isn’t. For most people this realization comes around day 13 when they run out of inspiration for new and exciting poses, environs, outfits etc. Most of these photo sets are then abandoned and never returned to. For those that stick with it: we know all we need to know about you from the simple fact you even started the set. And unless you have an extreme mental disorder, you probably don’t have more than a handful of ‘sides’ to your personality, certainly not 365, and most of those probably shouldn’t be shared anyway.
Inane commenting—Don’t get me wrong, commenting and adding notes to a photo in flickr is a great feature when not abused. Abuse is especially rampant on “the commons” images taken from archives. Please leave off-topic, non-constructive comments for myspace and irq.
Pretentious lingo—I can tell you’re from the US, so why do you spell “photo” as “foto.” Not basic. Also using the English spelling “colour” or “favourite” are unacceptable if you did not learn british english.
Shameless self-promotion—did you just post your own image in a comment for someone elses photo? Did you digg your latest upload? are you serious?!
August 30, 2008 – 2:06 pm
By joseph
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Also posted in travel
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A good friend of mine has a part in creating travelforchange.org which hooks hopeful Obama volunteers with people who donate their frequent flier miles to help them get where they need to be. I thought I’d put a link out there and a little plug. Apparently there is a surplus of sponsors and a shortage of volunteers. So, if you want to campaign for Obama and fly for free, this could be your ticket.
I’m not sure where to start on this one. First thing that jumped out at me was the mismatching (in color AND gradient) bookmark toolbar. It’s probably the same gradient as the bar above it, but it’s compressed into a third in the Y direction and is visually jarring. Then there are the out of date round corners around all the buttons and input boxes. I mean, that was the kind of thing that was cool when ‘skins’ were all the rage. Just take a look at windows media player, so many curves and bulges it doesn’t know where it’s going. The font is also very sloppy. It’s on the cusp of being too bold…or is it just fuzzy around the edges? I can’t tell. Either way it’s not too readable. But probably my biggest pet peeve of all time for any program anywhere, especially browsers, is wasted space. You can see in the screenshot that the fully expanded safari navigation, bookmark bar, and tabs take up less space than firefox in the default ‘small icon’ mode. Also, the aforementioned rounded buttons make for a lot of wasted space between them, and on top of that they’re not even necessarily evenly spaced. Included in this space waster category is the tab bar, why are there gaps between tabs?! Okay, so maybe if I have one or two open and there is extra space can there be gaps, but if I have more tabs than will fit in the bar shouldn’t the gaps go away? Nope. Apparently not.
Anyway, I can already hear you saying: “well the beauty about firefox is that you can make/install a custom ‘theme’ (read: skin), and make it look however you desire.” …True. But if that’s the case shouldn’t the default theme be so bare bones, tiny, but still functional? And besides, I’d just look for a theme that makes it look like safari anyway.
I think I’ll just stick to the real Safari for now.
The url to block the spaceball is here: http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif
Also, in all my flickr journies I’ve found that I really do not like HDR, digital B&W photos, and stupid “BESTEST FLICKR FOTOS EVAR!!1!!1ONE!” type groups. Please avoid them. For everyone’s sake
