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. (more…)

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.