The downfall of Flickr
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Software
Yes, that’s right…
Every night I creep down to my tool shed and find the hidden trap door, which leads to a dark and dreary room with nothing but a lone bookshelf that I feel my way towards. I depress the hidden button which slowly but surely starts the mechanics that proceed to revolve both me and the bookshelf, all the time creaking and complaining, as I emerge into a laboratory that one could only associate with a mad scientist.
Creative writing aside, and on to the topic at hand.
Flickr is an amazing web site; or service, or application, depending on what floats your Web 2.0 boat. If one is looking for a reliable, easy to use, method of sharing their pictures Flickr is definitely the first name that comes to mind. It is my own opinion of course, but I have spent an extensive amount of time looking at various sites and hosting solutions and while some are very good, very few - if any, can match Flickr in all areas. Not to mention the enormous Flickr community, that as of this writing is uploading approximately 5000 pictures a minute to the Flickr servers.
But after saying all that, I do have some personal gripes with the service, mainly when it comes to the browsing experience. In trying to make Flickr as easy to use as possible, it has been made into an experience that is extremely limiting to someone of my particular nature.
A couple of examples that come to mind are:
- Inability to fully customize the photostream layout
- Mass organization becomes harder as one adds more pictures to his account
- Tagging of pictures is extremely hard to do online when you have more than a few to deal with
- Hidden and/or poorly documented features, (eg. search via multiple tags, hidden layouts)
- Interface in general is hard to navigate for a new viewer
- No offline sorting/editing applications
- No advanced tag management services, (eg. syncing with local images, create albums that auto propagate with tags)
So I have come to the decision that instead of further aggravating myself while using Flickr, I shall instead rely on building my own CMS to host my family pictures. To achieve this end, I have chosen Drupal (at least to start with), as it has an excellent user community and has very active development under works. Drupal has also been an active participant in Google’s Summer of Code since its kick off in 2006, if they’re good enough for Google - they’re good enough for me :P
I can’t wait to implement OpenID into my Image Gallery!
Now in the past I’ve had some horrible experiences with Drupal, namely due to its development cycle. I installed the latest version of Drupal, but all the essential modules were for the previous version, which just caused huge amounts of frustration. And even last night, I made the same mistake of installing Drupal version 6.3, as that’s the latest version..but all the essential modules are still only on Drupal 5.x (Which ironically is the version that they didn’t work for me before).
So I started over and went with the stable release of the last major version, and things have been going extremely smoothly. I expect something to be in production in the next week or two.
Regarding the blog theme, I was in a little frustrated mood and so decided to change the colouring to vent my frustration.
Flickr Blog Layout
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Software
This is basically a memo post, just so two years down the road when Flickr decides to do an “update” I don’t have to figure out my custom layout again.
So in other words, just move along.
</p> <div class=”alignleft” style=”float: left; text-align: center; margin-right: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;” mce_style=”float: left; text-align: center; margin-right: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;”><a title=”{photo_title}” rel=”flickr-mgr” href=”{photo_url}” mce_href=”{photo_url}” target=”_blank”><img class=”flickr-medium” src=”{photo_src_t}” mce_src=”{photo_src_t}” alt=”{photo_title}” /></a><br /> <span style=”font-size: 0.8em; margin: 0px;” mce_style=”font-size: 0.8em; margin: 0px;”><br /> <a href=”{photo_url}” mce_href=”{photo_url}”>{uploader_name}</a><br /> </span></div> <p>{description}</p> <p>
re: Test Post from Flickr
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Software
Hey look, I just linked my Blog and Flickr…and also sent a test post to make sure everything works.
One little problem, the fact that Flickr was able to log in using the supplied credentials is good enough a “test” for me. When I clicked test post, I imaginged I would get a test of, you know AN IMAGE and how it looks.
Guess not eh.
Los Angeles Convention
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Events
Well I got back from LA on Sunday, and man what a trip!
View the Flickr Set for pictures of the trip.
The trip started out normally, drove to Hamilton and met everyone else, we all got into our mini van and off to Buffalo!
The flight was supposed to leave at 7:30 PM, but because of a huge ice storm, the flight was canceled. So in order for us to arrive in LA in time for the start of the Convention we had to drive down to Rochester and catch the 5:40 AM flight, because we had our own car it wasn’t too big of an issue to drive down, and we actually drove another stranded passenger, Gary Hohler, there as well. Gary introduced himself as “working for a small company called Adobe“, and so we hit it off pretty well.
After getting around 2 hours of sleep in an airport that was getting renovated Gary and us parted ways, we caught our flight to Chicago, and our connection to LA.
Upon arriving at LAX we had very limited time to pickup our rental car, check into the hotel, and have quick showers and change into something presentable. Which we managed to do in reasonable time, but unfortunately we forgot about the line to pick up our registration packages. Which was so long that it went all the way down the length of the centre, and around the side, we decided to go grab something to eat because it had been quite a few hours since our last real meal. By the time we came back the line had diminished a little and we got in relatively quickly.
We had quite a few entertaining drives, from finding Indian restaurants that only served Chinese food, to getting lost in downtown looking for a 7/11 that we had been to only the night before, and having people walk into an airport terminal carrying car tires.
Tags: convention, flickr, los angeles, photos, trips
Guinevere
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Asides
Well it’s certainly been a while since my last post, so I thought I would at least throw up some pictures of our (relatively) new cat, Guinevere.
Guinevere has been getting along quite well with our dog Merlin, although Merlin is still a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes down to a one on one confrontation…go figure.
On a side note, I finaly got off the fence and decided to go with Flickr over Google’s Picasa.
You can check my photos out at, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pchander.
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