Dave Kellam

Ever heard of Steel Battallion for Xbox? No? Probably has something to do with the $199 price-tag. Tavis found a copy of it for cheap at Toys R’ Us. The game has such a high cost because it comes with a massive 2-joystick, 40-button controller , complete with an eject button that has a flip-up lid. I will need to see it with my own eyes.

Just in-case you’re a WordPress user and have been living under a rock for the last few days and happen to be reading my site before any other, WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” has been released. I think it’s great, then again I’ve only been using the 1.5 nightlies and never used an earlier version.

In other WordPress news, I bring you plugins. Visit the hacks section at Asymptomatic and grab BAStats and ezStatic. The former gives you all sorts of nice statistical goodies about your weblog, the latter allows for easy inclusion of static pages. While you’re there, you should take a look at the wealth of plugins that he has available.

I did a remix of the last image in the first series for the flickr group.

If you want to remix this one, feel free to join the group and give it a shot.

Want to integrate a Flickr tag, user or group pool feed into your site? This PHP script will use MagpieRSS to grab the the RSS feed for the photo pool and pull the images out of it. Download flickrrss0.5.txt, edit the preferences and then change the extension to php. Also, make sure that you install Magpie (and tell the script where it’s installed).

Features

– Can show photos from group pool, user id or tag
– Choose number of photos to display
– The script should now cache the images locally (you can turn this off)
– There’s an option to use small or medium sized images.
– Links to /in/pool-$groupname/ now, allows easier access to group photos Flickr does this now but it uses the ugly group name.

To Do

– Delete old cached images
– Fix junk feed problem if Flickr goes down (images are cached, but Magpie fetches the junk script and can’t parse it)

Problems

I switched from small images to medium, but they’re still small.
You’ll need to remove all the old images from the cache manually, then you should be fine.

Version

0.5 – choose group, tag or user id, turn of image cache
0.4 – – fixed broken image link
0.3 – cache images locally, small/medium images
0.1 – initial release

Update: I’m focusing more on the WordPress plugin these days, here’s a similar script that may see more development.

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.