• Techdirt: The Library Of Congress Goes 2.0: This marks the first time in about seven years that my tax dollars have been spent on something I actually think they should be: "The Library of Congress [..] has teamed up with Flickr to put public domain images online for everyone to see and comment on.
  » LOC flickr government yhoo

• Greasemonkey EASY authenticated Flickr API call: Documents F.API.callMethod(). Thanks be to Bob, this saved me about two days of de-obfuscating.
  » code flickr greasemonkey

Things I have done in the last week or so:

• Turned my MySpace page into a tumbleblog (cooler non-myspace version here) to try to funnel some of my friends who live on myspace out into the actual internet. This is all powered by standard PHP5 with lastRSS.
• PHP script to provide an RSS feed of your weekly last.fm charts. It just displays the most recent week’s charts, but that’s enough really. Useful for, say, including the charts in your tumbleblog. [source]
• Updated Flickr Photo Page Enhancer greasemonkey script. Changes to flickr site = changes to script.

I’ve also worked 43 hours as of Thursday, and also, excitingly, my car blew up. Which means lots of exciting meetings with loan officers at my bank as they try to find polite ways to say “have you actually seen your credit report, fool?” So I don’t know what else you might want from me, but you ain’t getting it. I’m going to bed now.

So I decided to take a photo of myself every day for a year. I was more inspired by the Noah K thing than by anything else. I’m mostly curious to see if you actually can see my S.A.D. in action (…the answer, so far,appears to be yes). Here’s the first month:

You’ll notice a drastic change somewhere in there — no, no the shaved head, silly! I got a new camera. I love it, but now I’m going to have to go pro again at Flickr, and that will pain me. Also aggravating: waiting on these guys to send me my new 2 gig memory card. Apparently, the “Express Shipping” I shelled out for means “within 8 business days.” Who knew? This is made more annoying by the fact that the camera came with only a 16 MB memory card. Out of the box, the SD600 can take 8 whole pictures at the default settings before the memory card is full. Crazy.

• Flickr Services: Serialized PHP Response Format: Spent today rewriting several of my flickr hacks to utilize this, and I think I’m in love.
  » api flickr php
• Top 10 Reasons Why Your 5 Tips About 7 Cutting-Edge Technologies will annoy me | A Whole Lotta Nothing: “Cool it with the lists. Feel free to use real paragraphs and explain stuff. I have time.” w3rd.
  » blogging culture funny mathowie

Damn, that’s pretty. Okay then:

• There was an issue with group pools and the Thumbnails enhancer (a <div> became a <p>). I fixed it.
• RIP: Flickr User Icon Enhancer ist kaput, as there is no more need for it. The user icons are perfect now. Completely and totally ideal. Bravo.
• As I always have to have my ‘Last 24 Hours’ fix, here’s a script to add a link to the last 24 hours of Interestingness to the new Explore button.

That’s really all the changes that needed to be made. This is going much more smoothly than I thought it would. And once again: damn, that’s pretty.

So I was bored at work tonight, despite my new cellphone and data plan combined with Bloglines mobile, so I decided to create a mobile version of Flickr Interestingness. Total amount of time it took me to write this: 20 minutes. I ♥ the Flickr API.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve quit posting my photos and favorites from Flickr (quick, think of an f-word…) to the front page. It just started to seem like filler, and I am very anti-that, being someone who reads or at least skims something like 150 newsfeeds daily. The links, however, still get posted, as I always thought that sort of content should live in the main column anyway.

But pushing my photos back to the sidebar does present me with a quandary, though, in that I really enjoyed showing off my Flickr favorites in that way. I’ve always taken a wee bit of pride in my curatorial capacity over that collection of photos, and I have a love for each and every one of them. So, I now offer an Atom feed for those who really want to have their feedreaders spammed with my favorite photos. Everybody’s happy!

For those of you keeping track at home, I now have feeds for entries, comments, links, photos, and favorites, as well as for every single post on the weblog (right now: 1,042). So that works out to about, say, a billion feeds out there in the world, some in multiple formats, as a result of my daily activities.

So much for being against filler.

Quickie Greasemonkey script: Flickr Tag Quick Edit. Next to the little [x] to remove a tag, you’ll now find a link directly to the page that allows you to edit all instances of that tag.

New Greasemonkey script: Flickr: Thumbnails Enhancer. It adds the number of comments and notes to each photo listed in the Photos from your Contacts page any list of thumbnails on Flickr. I know this is much less detail than is provided by the php version, but I find that the number of comments & notes is really the most useful information. Plus, I gave up trying to cram the description and all the tags into the design of the page. Suggestions welcome.

• Update 10:58am EDT: I can’t think of any reason this shouldn’t work on any page where you’re presented a list of thumbnails, including tag pages, photo pools, sets, favorites and archives by date (any others?). I’ve changed the name of the script to reflect this. Uninstall and then install it again, if you already have.
• Update 2:14 pm EDT: Now works in sets and favorites, as well. I think it now works anywhere in flickr where there are thumbnails. As an aside, I’m really glad that flickr uses semantic, standardized markup — it made this so easy to write! And yes, that is sarcasm! It was like chewing glass!

I’ve posted about Mozilla/Firefox Quick Searches before, but here’s a new one: Flickr Tag Search. Bookmark that, give it the keyword ‘ft’, and type ft tag1 tag2 etc into your location bar to do a tag search for photos on Flickr. Searching for more than one tag only works when Flickr’s search servers are running correctly, though, which as of this writing they are not.

In other news:

• The Disable Target/OnClick for Downloads Greasemonkey script has been updated. It uses regex now instead a huge nested for loop. Translation: it runs faster.
• The Bloglines Continuous Updates script is more or less perfect now, so I listed it on the directory. Thanks to all the early adopters for their feedback and suggestions.
• The Enhanced Contacts’ Photos widget now accepts either a username or NSID. It’s just easier.

I’ve updated the Flickr Photo Page Enhancer (see this post for more info) again. The previous version was a little hacky, in that it tried to extract a lot of information about a photo from the page you were on, and completely guessed at other information. Now the script does a simple call to the Flickr API to get all of that information. The user won’t notice much of a change, but the script works better and handles rare exceptions (like the photo has no medium size, the original wasn’t a jpeg) way better. Plus, I finally found a reason to play with GM_xmlhttpRequest and the Flickr API, both of which I’ve been meaning to look into. Gods, I’m such a geek.

I’ve created quite a few Greasemonkey scripts for Flickr, and many of them are documented poorly or not at all, so I decided to create a permanent home for these scripts. They’re sorted roughly in terms of usefulness:

• Flickr Photo Page Enhancer (screenshot): This script does a lot of things, and is the result of a lot of feedback and collaboration with the great Flickr Hacks community. The script adds direct links to all of an image’s sizes, as well as a “Quick Link” box to quickly copy and paste the HTML for a thumbnail link. It also automatically loads your most used tags whenever you click to add a tag to an image. 1-Dec-2005: Now compatable with GM 0.6.4 & FF 1.5.
• Flickr: Thumbnails Enhancer (screenshot): adds the number of comments and notes to each photo listed in any list of thumbnails on Flickr (i.e. group pools, photos from your contacts, favorites, etc.). 16-May-2006: Updated for compatibility with Flickr Gamma.
• Flickr User Icon Enhancer (screenshot): Flickr provides links to view a user’s photos and to add the user as a friend, wherever you see a user icon, throughout the site. This script enhances that a bit, adding links directly to a user’s profile, their favorite photos, and to send the user a FlickrMail. 16-May-2006: Made redundant by changes to the way user icons work in Flickr Gamma, script is no longer being updated.
• Flickr Login Enhancer (screenshot): After you edit this script to include all the various Flickr usernames in your household, the default login screen will be replaced with a drop-down box, reducing the number of times per day you have to type your email address.
• Flickr Rich Edit (screenshot) Add limited rich editing capabilities (italic, bold, blockquote, link) to any input in Flickr where you can use HTML (comments, groups, batch edit). Updated 29-Jun-05
• Flickr: Return-to-Page on Login: This script makes it so that clicking ‘Login’ on any Flickr page will return you to that page after you log in. This is the default behavior on some Flickr pages (like Groups), but not all. This script makes it site-wide.
• Flickr Tag Quick Edit: If you have editing privileges on an image, next to the little [x] to remove a tag you’ll now find a link directly to the page that allows you to edit all instances of that tag. Added 2005-Aug-08

Fickr Rich Edit [screenshot]: Add limited rich editing capabilities to Flickr, in comments and groups. Very limited, as flickr only allows certain HTML elements in these inputs. And I’m done with greasemonkeying for today.

The Google, Yahoo, and Flickr user persistance things have all been updated again. Now it’s possible to input another user ID without editing the script or turning off Greasemonkey. The example usage would be if you had a guest at your computer.

The next thing that’s going to be requested is to have the setup not involve editing the scripts directly, and it is possible, but… Well there is no ‘but’ really. I’m just lazy. But I’ll get around to it.