Dave Kellam

Hmm, my script on the Conform Project site that integrates the Flickr group feed makes the site look ugly if Flickr is down for maintenance. Which means I’ll have to test the feed to see it’s live and do something if it’s not. Or cache the feed. I thought Magpie was caching the feed but I’m not really sure.

Do you belong to a special group at Flickr? Want to display that group’s photos on your website? Well now you can! For four easy payments of $4.44 you can own a GPL’d string of characters that plays nicely with PHP and integrates a feed of your group pool into your website.

First thing you need to do is grab MagpieRSS, you could probably do it with lastRSS too. Then you want to grab flickrgroup.php (a slightly modified version of this tag script). Change the grouptag and num_items variables to suit your needs. You’ll probably also want to hack up how the html is displayed too.

I used this to integrate the group pool into the Conform Project site. Although, I still have a bit of tweaking to do, because I don’t think the spacing will be right between the images (there’s only one in the pool right now).

Update: The script has been updated to support local caching of the images.

Treasure Box is an online game/piece of artwork. It’s also part logic puzzle game, but of the variety that are solvable by waving your mouse around (or trackpad for a frustrating experience).

Dreamhost says they keep regular backups of your files, but I always assumed that it meant there was some mythical backup temple that tech support could get at. Hidden away in their Knowledge Base is this little piece of information: there’s a .snapshot folder in your home directory. They don’t really advertise it.

Even if you think it’s not there (ls -a), it is. Go to that directory and you shall find hourly, daily and weekly snapshots of your files, for backupy goodness. I wish I had known this a few weeks ago.