Sunday, September 21st, 2008
A quick post to say that the FlickrMapMonkey script (yes that’s what it’s called now) has been updated. Version 0.3 is now available over on the UserScripts page. According to the stats there it’s now been installed 310 times, which is pretty cool. Of course there’s no guarantee that all those people are still using it, but hey.
Upon it’s initial release, the script generated some healthy discussion over on the Flickr Hacks forum. This brought up a couple of issues, which I haven’t had the chance to investigate yet. The main one seems to be an internationalisation issue, which I guess would be tricky for me to test quickly so that’s kinda put me off trying.
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
After the success of getting Gig Taggr up and running, I thought I’d dust off another little tool I worked on ages ago. Tube Mappr was a very basic experiment for me to explore the Flickr and Google Maps APIs. It’s not ‘useful’ in the way that Gig Taggr is, nor is it anywhere near as complex, but it was fun at the time.
I came across map data for the London Underground over at Wikimedia Commons one day, and, coupled with the (then) recent full-scale rollout of geotagging support on Flickr, I had the idea for Tube Mappr. It’s a simple script that plots Tube stations on a map, and clicking on a station displays random Flickr photos tagged with the name of the station.
The curious thing which I’m now realising is that Tube Mappr makes absolutely no use of the Flickr geo stuff (neither data nor functionality), but i’m pretty sure it was part of the motive.
http://tubemappr.ebotunes.com
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
This is an app i’ve been wanting to build for a while now, but was held back for a couple of reasons. The usual lack of time, but also some shortcomings in the Last.FM API
The main purpose off the application is to allow people who use Last.FM and Flickr to easily tag their photos with the relevant machine tags. Almost ever since Last.FM started doing event listings (I think), they’ve offered a feature allowing users to feed their own gig photos onto the Event page.
More recently, Flickr decided to complement this feature by displaying a link to Last.FM on the photo page whenever a machine tag exists. This prompted one of the Flickr devs to blog about it which, in turn, prompted me to get my finger out and finish Gig Taggr! [UPDATE: also looks like one of the Last.FM devs mentioned it too!
The main thing that had been holding it back was the lack of an API method to get a user’s past events. This was easily solved by asking for it. Thanks again to vincro and joanofarctan!
As an added bonus, Gig Taggr also lets you geotag the photos while you’re at it, based on the venue location info given by Last.FM. Cashback!
http://gigtaggr.ebotunes.com
Photos tagged using Gig Taggr
http://www.last.fm
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Today I spent half an hour writing my first Greasemonkey script. It’s pretty simple, just displays a little Google Map on a Flickr photo page, with the location of the photo (if available!). I had a look around but couldn’t find an existing script that did this, which was quite surprising. It was made an awful lot easier by the new Google Maps Static API.
Download the ‘Google Map on Flickr photo page’ script here
If anyone can think of a snappier name let me know :)
Now that I think of it, possibly the reason it hasn’t been done before is that the Google Maps Javascript API made it too hard (or even impossible??). Who knows. Anyway, it’s my first attempt at a GM script so its VERY simple and VERY rough. Post any suggestions/ideas in the comments!
Iain
[UPDATE: Join the FlickrHacks discussion]
