def Arne.blog

I have somewhat neglected my English speaking audience, I must apologise. I’ve recently moved to Taiwan to study Mandarin, and my travellers journal will mostly be published on the Dutch side of this blog.

Before I left to Taiwan my grandmother gave me a beautiful little camera, and I’ve been taking pictures like a madman and posting them to my Flickr account. I would like to include these pictures into my blogposts, but I would like to use a specific HTML template, so I can easily style them with CSS, like so :

Giraf schenkt David en Arne thee

Because of this the Flickr generated code and most other solutions out there are no good. Instead I decided to code up my own solution, scratch the old itch so to say. In the meantime you guys can enjoy a little example of a Nitro app in action. It’s a wee little thingy, but it shows that with Nitro you don’t get much overhead in your code. If you make a small Rails application, the noise to signal ratio is huge with so much pregenerated stuff you’re not gonna need.

So the target is just a single page with my most recent pictures, and next to that a text area that contains copy-paste ready HTML in my desired format. I coded this up in a small hour, with most time spent reading the Flickr API docs. I tried the flickr gem, but it’s no longer maintained and I couldn’t get it to work quickly, so I started my own wrapper just for the API calls I need. (YAGNI, right.)

The “app” is called Flikker (which is a not-so-polite word in Dutch BTW, wonder how many search engine hits this will bring me). Download it here Flikker v0.0 as a tarball.

To run:

• in settings.rb fill in your Flickr API key and user name
• adapt ‘launch’ to point to your Nitro repository
• change conf/debug.rb if you want to use something other than mongrel
• ./launch
• visit localhost:9000 in your browser

Actually this is such an embarassingly small app I wasn’t going to put it out there, but it’ll be damn handy for me, so maybe somebody else has a use for it also.