The Hickensian

8.11.05 Flock & Hickr

8 comments
Tagged with: flock, hicksdesign, updates

There are two questions I get asked a lot at the moment, so I thought I’d answer them here, rather than in the FAQs.

Did you do the Flock logo?

No, that was Bryan Bell. I was fortunate to be involved in the early stages of creating the Flock browser theme, and some of that work is still in there, but since starting a large project in June, Bryan has been handling all that too. Its come a long way since then, I might ask Bart if if I can post some of the odd ideas we had at the start.

How did you do the Hickr bit on your site?

This question still bemuses me, as its nothing more than the basic HTML Flickr badge, with a bit of css, but it definitely ranks as the most asked question at the moment.

The javascript is wrapped in a div with the ID of Flickr. Just in case the javascript has recently changed (and adds unwanted ‘stuff’) here it is:

<div id="flickr">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code.gne?nsid=yourflickridhere&count=12&display=latest&name=0&size=square&raw=1"></script>
</div>

I manually altered the ‘count’ to get 12 images. Here’s the css I use on that:

/* Flickr */
#flickr img { width: 50px; height: 50px; }
#flickr a { padding: 3px; display: block; float: left;}
#flickr a:hover { background: #ddd; }

Comments | RSS

No.1

∞ Lowell Wood said 1584 days ago:

wow. very interesting about the hickr deal. i always thought that was a plugin. Anyways, thanks for the new post finnaly, and please dont ever leave me like that again.

No.2

∞ Chris Messina said 1584 days ago:

Hey Jon, I’ll ping Bart and see what he says. I still have your list around and want to see many of your ideas get into Flock â€” I guess it comes down to a matter of time â€” and eventually extensibility!

Indeed, we’re working on a number of things to make Flock an all-around better team player… I’m curious Jon, does TextPattern have an API for uploading images or favorites? If not, would you be interested in working on or helping push the development of one? I’d like to see Flock be able to play nicer with open source publishing tools. MIght this interest you?

No.3

∞ chris said 1584 days ago:

I believe that the Flickr questions relate to the fact the the simple, raw, unformatted badge (badge_code.gne) is no longer visibly available from the Flickr site.

Instead there is a new default badge (badge_code_v2.gne) which formats the images returned in a very different manner. From what I can gather, the new badge creates a layout with tables which not only fails XHTML 1.0 validation but also makes re-styling the badge a little more difficult. The earlier raw, html badge makes changing the style much easier.

From what I cam remember, the raw badge places everything within a .flickr class div, whilst each image within the badge is given it’s own unique class being .flickrimg1, .flickrimg2, .flickrimg3 etc.

While the old badge can’t be setup/configured from the Flickr site, using your tip posted above, anyone can setup their own ‘raw’ badge. Only downside is that the old badge can only display your photos – either in latest photos or random flavours; the new badge does tags, groups etc.

No.4

∞ Jordan said 1583 days ago:

There’s also a group of PHP scripts called Oberkampf which go in through the flickr api and allow you to pull out images within galleries, or by a search based on tag, date or anything. You will need a little bit of PHP know-how, and the examples at the scripts site or a bit plain, but you can check out an example of its implementation at my photo page .

No.5

∞ Bennet McLean said 1583 days ago:

chris, badge_code_v2.gne can still produce badges without tables.

In Step 3 of HTML badge creation(the layout page), simply set ‘Which orientation would you like?’ to ‘None’. That then formats the badge just like the old version, including the unique IDs and classes. Alternatively, to modify an existing badge, make sure the ‘layout’ variable is set to ‘x’ (instead of ‘v’, ‘h’ or the default).