FancyFlickr Dev Help
So, as many people know, I started development on a plugin called FancyFlickr a little over a year ago. Development went well at first at first, but it started to get slow and my lack of programming skills started to show. I originally got the idea for the plugin from a video Chris Coyier did on his CSS-Tricks blog. The main idea of the original is powered by a bunch of cool CSS3 and a bit of jQuery. This all works quite well, but when I started trying to add features it turned into a bit of a mess. The plugin currently functions and works in pretty much every environment that I’ve tried. There are some server requirements, like cURL, but if these are met it works fine.
I’ve known for a while that the plugin needs help. At first a few people wrote me asking for help sorting out problems that had to do with loading the images from Flickr. Recently, it really hit me when I noticed that Fred, from Fredstuff.com stopped using the plugin in favor of something that loads quicker.
The first thing that I want to do is make it more efficient, as it currently slows page loads significantly. I’ve also got some big dreams for the future of the plugin involving “WordPress gallery” style photo pages for individual photos and galleries. Basically, the WordPress gallery, but powered by Flickr.
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Published: August 6th, 2010 in Wordpress | Tags: development, fancyflickr, PHP
FancyFlickr Authentication
There have been a few people that have already let me know that FancyFlickr doesn’t work with hidden/private photos. Unfortunately the class that I’m using to power the plugin doesn’t have any way to authenticate. This isn’t a huge problem, as I’ve found other classes that do authenticate. The only problem is that the only one that I’ve found and like so far requires PHP5 and PEAR. Here I’d like to ask what the users of the plugin think. Should I continue on the current path — without authentication, or should I switch to a new class with these strict requirements. I’m have no idea how many shared hosting companies support PEAR, but it should be hard to find out if your hosting company does. I’d also like to hear from other developers to get their take on which route to take.
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Published: December 2nd, 2009 in Web | Tags: authentication, flickr, PHP, vote
Addicted to Flickr
When I started working on FancyFlickr recently, I needed a PHP class to handle the flickr API. I quickly found that I didn’t like many of the classes that I found, for various reasons. I got lucky when I found Addicted to Flickr. The only problem with this one, was that he wrote the class over four years ago and there was some stuff that was quite outdated. The original URLs that it created were broken, which was the biggest problem for me. I rewrote it a little bit, at least so that part works now. So I’m putting it back out there for people to download if they want.
If you run into any problems let me know. If you rewrite any other parts of it, or write a new version, let me know. I’d love to have it for the fancyflickr plugin and to be able to link to it here.
Note: This is not FancyFlickr.
Download
Published: November 21st, 2009 in Web | Tags: flickr, PHP
Setup a Mailing List
Apparently nobody needs to know how to setup a mailing list anymore. Try checking google, there’s not much to look through, unless you know what your looking for. A client wanted a mailing list, so this is what I found. The IMAP extension for PHP is what you need. Here is the basic script that I found to work:
<?php
$subscribers = “you@gmail.com, sub@scriber.com”;
//Open a POP3 Inbox
$stream = imap_open(“{localhost:110/pop3}INBOX”, “username”, “password”);
//Get the content of the first email
$content = imap_body($stream, 1);
//Send the mail to your subscribers
mail($subscribers, “Subject”, $content, “From: me@mysite.com”);
//Delete the Email so the script is ready for the next time
imap_delete($stream, 1);
?>
You have to setup an email account somewhere, preferably on your webserver, that would be the easiest place to get access, and send an email there. Run this script and it grabs the email and sends it to all of your subscribers and deletes the email so that it’s empty for the next time you send the script.
Now obviously you wouldn’t want to store the list of your subscribers in the script. I’ll end up storing them in a database and pulling all the email addresses out when I call the script.
Remember, this will only work if you have the IMAP extension installed on your server and you have to run this after you send the email so it might be a good idea to setup a cron job to run this at least a couple of times a day, depending on how important the emails are that you are sending out and how time sensitive they are. For a regular mailling list that is sent out weekly or maybe even less frequently than that a couple of times a day should be just fine. If you are going to use this as a listserv, you might want it to run more like once a minute.
Published: June 7th, 2008 in Web | Tags: imap, listserv, maillist, PHP
Family Tree
I’ve decided to try PHP. I’m creating an application to display genealogy information on your website. I’ve got the basic format down, finally, after buying “The PHP5 and MySQL Bible“. There is defiantly a lot of information in there. I should have this app done by tomorrow afternoon or Sunday, hopefully no later than that.
Update: I’ve decided that this might not be the first project that I want to take on… At first it seemed like a good idea, but as I’ve been sitting here reading my book, and thinking of different ways that I can use some of the code in here I’ve been wanting to start all different things and this Family Tree thing just doesn’t seem as interesting as it did yesterday. I think I’m going to start another project though.
Published: June 8th, 2007 in Asides | Tags: Coding, PHP