I’ve had this idea for a Greasemonkey script for a while. It seemed to me like, using the extensive Flickr API, I should be able to write a script that shows me a thumbnail of an image that was linked to in Flickr. When someone says, "Check out thesephotosonFlickr," with text hyperlinks, I’d like to be able to see what those pictures are without going all the way to Flickr.
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The Groups feature on Flickr, along with photo tagging, is what makes Flickr so interesting and better than other photo sharing websites. The structure is wide open. Anyone can start a group, and anyone can add any photo to any group. And, importantly, the group administrator (the person that started the group and anyone the creator deems worthy of administrative rights) can remove any photo from the group. So what you get are groups about certain topics, e.g. flowers, clouds, reflections, west highland terriers, horses, rusty things, door knobs, etc. If you upload a photo to Flickr that fits into one of those groups, you can join that group and add your photo to it. The point being that other Flickr users that like photographs of said subjects can find lots of photos from many different uploaders about that topic.
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I always sort of knew it was only a matter of time, with me so humbly submitting photos of such outstanding quality to Flickr, before I would be offered money for some of my work. Well, it finally happened. I signed over some rights to Panraven, Inc. to use ten of my photos on their website. To me, "Panraven" sounds like a Pentagon operation that you’re not supposed to know about, but from what I can tell without signing up with them, they seem to provide a way for people to write up stories about their travels to various corners of the globe and provide a stock library of photos from common tourist destinations for people to include in their write-ups.
It all began back in September, when I received the following standardized Flickr message: (more…)
The other day, my wife and I went for a walk around town that put us out by the docks as the tide was coming in. I noticed a really strange streak of light blue water, and we stood there to ponder explanations. The first guess was some sort of warmer current, but it doesn’t make immediate sense to me that the reflective tone of the water would change that much with temperature. My second thought was that a fishing boat had gone by and left a contaminate on the surface. The third conclusion that we were happiest with at the time was that it was a matter of depth, that the water was deeper where the color appeared lighter. I took a photo of the phenomenon with my iPhone, geotagged it, and uploaded it to Flickr all before leaving the pier.
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I’ve been wanting to try my hand at writing a Greasemonkey script for a while. For those of you that don’t know, Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets you run any javascript that you want as if it were part of the web page you are viewing. The main point of this is to modify the document content somehow to make the page more to your liking (removing ads, adding useful buttons, etc.). The only site that I use very often that has a fairly wide selection of Greasemonkey scripts available for it is Flickr. So, without further ado, I present you with my script…
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Today is the second birthday of this blog. When I went back to look at my first post just now, I noticed the link to my previous blog. It was broken, of course, but I’ve repaired it temporarily for those that are curious. It was done in iBlog, which is disgusting next to WordPress. There was no database backend. The data about the posts and comments was all kept in a static javascript file! That’s about as nauseating as having poop in a jar.
I also notice from the One Year Ago widget that I announced my plan to migrate all my photos off my blog’s server and onto Flickr a year ago. Unbelievably, I completed this task just two weeks ago, when the final Cactus Cam images made it to Flickr. As my more loyal readers my recall, we already had cactus flowers in May last year. This year, Mr. Cactus isn’t producing any because he’s really cramped in his pot. We’ve been trying to find adequate gloves – and courage – to move him to a new vessel, but we have yet to do so. I have little doubt that, upon getting a bigger home, he will thrive like never before.
That’s all the internal blog news for now. Let’s make this third year the best yet!
I have not yet lost my newfound fascination for tilt shifting. I’ve been searching through my photos for more candidates as well as looking for Flickr photos with Creative Commons licenses (that means you’re legally allowed to modify and republish as long as you cite the original source) to play around with. Here are the results of my recent efforts.
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I know very little about editing photos in Photoshop, and am far from being an expert, but I enjoy playing with it and figuring out how to accomplish the alterations that I’m imagining. Earlier this week, I saw this friend’s awesome photo of a pea pod and thought it would be cool if the peas were all different colors. So I downloaded the photo and opened it in Photoshop.
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It’s time for another episode of Frame Breaking. Previously on Frame Breaking…
I looked through my entire library, and really didn’t find many photos with 3D frame bursting action. So I had to borrow a few from Jane, of pimento cheese fame. She has photos of all kinds of strange objects. Hopefully she won’t sue me for copyright infringement.
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One of the first thing most visitors to our humble home say is, "So you guys got something against lamp shades, or what?" Our house still has the original light bulbs hanging from wires popping out of holes in the ceiling that the original builder left. And all the previous owners have shared our apathy about remedying the situation.
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