Photoblog Changes

I made some changes to the workflow for getting photos onto my photoblog. Previously I mentioned using a bit of Perl trickery to get photos posted to my photoblog in a semi automated manner.

I've now made this much better since I got my Flickr account. Since all my photos that I've edited will end up on Flickr it also means that all photos I post to the blog will be on Flickr.

I wrote something using the Flickr API in Perl to fetch a given image from flickr, get the meta data from it, get the thumbnails that Flickr makes - nice uniformly square ones - and combine all of this into a blog posting. The advantage here is that I can use the very good Flickr UI to edit descriptions and the like relying on the Perl code to just fetch those and publish it to the blog without needing me to duplicate any data entry.

There exists a Flickr::API module for Perl to make this easy but it uses XML::Parser::Lite::Tree to give the data back to the user and I find this quite complex so I am using XML::DOM to parse the XML that Flickr returns and while this is probably more code to write it is much more readable.

The end result is that I've changed the layout of posts to be more readable, the shooting data is in a table with some bold's etc and there is also now a links section that for the moment only points to the Flickr page of the posted photo. I'm also using the square thumbnails from Flickr which saves me time in making my own as well as making my blogs look better since thing's are always laid out the same with these.

I may post some code samples later, suffice so say the Flickr API is really amazing you can easily skin the whole site into your design.