2005-08-05-look-at-all-the-pretty-pictures.md (1946B)
1 +++ 2 title = "Look At All The Pretty Pictures!" 3 date = "2005-08-05T00:00:00Z" 4 slug = "look-at-all-the-pretty-pictures" 5 tags = ["Meta"] 6 +++ 7 8 So I moved my webpage and was all of a sudden faced with a deluge of emails 9 from people who I never even knew read the thing. Among those emails was a 10 request from my amigo Chaffee requesting more pictures. Seeing as I'd always 11 wanted to play with the [Flickr API][flickr_api], I requested an API Key and 12 started hacking away at some [PHP][php]. The end result is that on the left side 13 of this page, you now get to see whatever happens to be the latest picture I've 14 taken on my mobile phone. 15 16 The moment I take a picture with my cellphone, it gets emailed to the magical 17 servers at [Flickr][flickr] and tagged with a title, some keywords, and a 18 description. The next time someone loads this page, a small PHP script in the 19 innards of this site makes a [SOAP][soap] request to Flickr's servers and 20 retrieves an [XML][xml] response. This response is then parsed out and a URI to 21 the thumbnail image on Flickr's servers is generated which is then inserted 22 into this page. To improve performance a tiny bit, I avoid the overhead of the 23 SOAP call every time this page is loaded by caching the response for five 24 minutes and reading the cached XML if it's available. 25 26 For those of you who are into [RSS][rss], I've added a [Flickr 27 feed][flickr_feed] to my pictures in the HTML headers on this site. 28 29 My goal—and this is entirely for you, Chaffee—is to take at least one 30 picture a day, which is far more ambitious a schedule than my posting to this 31 page. We'll see how that works out. 32 33 [flickr]: https://flickr.com 34 [flickr_api]: https://flickr.com/services/ 35 [flickr_feed]: feed://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=37996625178@N01&format=atom_03 36 [php]: https://php.net 37 [rss]: https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html 38 [soap]: https://www.w3.org/TR/soap/ 39 [xml]: https://www.w3.org/XML/