Journal tags: webservices

I talked a while back about how I was attempting to add some extra context to my posts by pulling in corresponding tag results from Del.icio.us and Technorati, and then displaying them together through the magic of Ajax.

It struck me that there was another tag space that I had completely forgotten about: Flickr. Now at the end of any post that’s been tagged, you’ll find links entreating you to pull in any of my Flickr pics that have been likewise tagged.

This is all possible thanks to a single method of Flickr’s API. I’m reusing the same method to search for other pictures too…

A had a little epiphany in the pub the other night, chatting after the WSG meetup. I was talking about geotagging and I mentioned that it probably won’t be too long before just about every file will be geotagged in the same way that just about every file already has a time stamp. Then I realised, “hey, all my blog posts have time stamps and so do all my Flickr pics!”

So I added an extra link. You can search for any pictures of mine that were taken on the same day as a journal entry. I like the extra context that provides.

While I was testing this new functionality, I couldn’t figure out why some pictures weren’t being pulled in. Looking at the post from the Opera event written on Tuesday, I expected to be able to view the pictures I took on the same night. They weren’t showing up and I couldn’t understand why not. I assumed I was doing something wrong in the code. As it turned out, the problem was with my camera. I never reset the date and time when I came back from Australia, so all the pictures I’ve taken in the last couple of weeks have been off by a few hours.

Keep your camera’s clock updated, kids. It’s valuable metadata.

Hmmm… I guess I should take a picture today to illustrate the new functionality. In the meantime, check out this older post from BarCamp to see the Ajaxitagging in action.

If you’re using either the Flickr or Del.icio.us APIs, be aware that some changes have been to both recently.

Cal Henderson announced on the Flickr API mailing list that…

…the API endpoints have been changed from https://www.flickr.com/services/ to http://api.flickr.com/services/

The documentation will be updated by and by. If you’re making use of the Flickr API, now would be a good time to go in and rewrite those URLs. I’ve updated Adactio Elsewhere to use the new URLs. There are no plans to get rid of the old endpoints but all developers are encouraged to make the change.

Back in May, the Del.icio.us team announced that all API requests would need to go over SSL:

If the old URL was http://del.icio.us/api/posts/get, the new URL will be https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get

I missed the memo so, like Dom, I was caught out by the change. On Adactio Elsewhere, I switched over to using PHP’s curl functions to retrieve the XML files and that seems to do the trick nicely.

If you’re tinkering with either API, take note of these changes.

Amazon’s new S3 service looks very interesting indeed. At first glance, it just looks like a very cheap way of storing and retrieving files — which it is — but the really fascinating aspect is that there is no user interface. It is purely a web service. As Sam Newman says:

When you get down to it, Amazon S3 is simply a large, distributed hash map with an API. Unless people build applications on top of it, it’s useless.

The creators of S3 have gone out of their way to keep the architecture as simple as possible. This is a smart move. I’m a great believer in the power of stupid networks.

Leaving aside the underlying technology, S3 is good news in purely practical terms. If nothing else, this should start a price war for data storage. Yet another barrier to entry has been lowered for anyone looking to publish anything online. Odeo and YouTube are good for audio and video respectively, but the agnostic nature of S3 means that you can store and stream on your own terms.

Hardware has been getting cheaper and cheaper for some time. Now it looks like bandwidth is heading the same way (for some amusing anecdotes on bandwidth issues, be sure to listen to Bernie Burns’ keynote from SXSW).

I’m looking forward to playing around with S3. For a service with no face, it sure looks like it’s got legs.