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.