Flickr is a great tool for sharing pictures over the internet, but their flash
based slideshow is not my favorite. It doesn't work over dialup, the thumbnails
are really tiny, and if you have a lot of images in a set they can overwhelm the
flash window...
- me
Flickr slideshow lite is a lightweight bookmark-able slideshow that allows
my grandmother to see pictures of her great grandkids over her dialup connection!
Give it a try, make a new slideshow!
Features!
- NEW! Flickr Photosets RSS Feed Feed courtesy of Mike Lepore!
- Works over dial up
- Slideshows can be bookmarked & emailed as links!
- Choose your own speed for variable speed slideshow
- Large clickable thumbnails jump to photos!
- Click on a photo to open its flickr photo page in a new window
- Useful context sensitive links: flickr's set page, set owners flickr page, other sets
- Photo captions displayed under the picture
How to Make a Slideshow
- Visit the new slideshow page
- Enter a flickr username example: russelldad
- Click the "Lookup User's Sets" button
- Wait for a list of available sets to be displayed
- Click on a set to see the slideshow
Example Slideshows
- Alex and the Coffee Maker Box by russelldad
- Balloon Stampede in Walla Walla, WA by walla2chick
- Twelve shots by *ivan*
Installing
This application is intended to be hosted. Since it's already hosted at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~prussell/sslite/index.html you can save yourself the headache of getting a cgi configured correctly by just using the hosted version. All the same, if you want to host it yourself, here is how to install it:- Download the latest zip of the source
- Unzip it into a web accessable directory on your web server
- Make sure all of the files are readable for all users ( the files in the js directory have a habit of becoming read only on unix servers)
- Run the following commands in the slideshow/proxy/ directory to make sure the cgi runs properly
- chmod 700 proxy.cgi
- dos2unix proxy.cgi
- Navigate to http://yourserver/slideshow/ and you will see the new slideshow page
- Start sharing slideshows!
What's My Motivation?
I did this project for my wife, my grandmother and as a final project for a class I'm taking. I was required to write a bunch of documents for this project that explain motivation and implementation in detail.- Project Proposal ( Jump to the Why section. It has the funny bits)
- Design document v1 [PDF]
- Design document v2 [PDF]
- Final Remarks
Credits
This was one of those standing on the shoulders of giants projects. Family and friends were a big help with the vision and testing. Also, I used a few very cool tools and pieces of code that should be acknowledged. So to everyone here, a big thanks!- My wife Christine – for explaining why flickr slideshows didn’t work and giving me the idea for this project.
- My Grandmother – for testing over dialup and helping me fix some of the really tough bugs!
- The Russellpour team – for testing, feature ideas and comic relief.
- Mike West - author of a really easy to use JavaScript AJAX library called Data Requestor. I’ve done AJAX by hand and its not pleasant. Mike’s library makes it a brease.
- The XML for <SCRIPT> team - The guys that put this together rock! It’s a JavaScript based XML parser that made it easy to dissect the XML returned from flickr’s API.
- Peter A. Bromberg, Ph.D. – for his code examples and article Parsing The Querystring with JavaScript.
- Flickr - for creating an amazing image sharing tool with a brilliantly crafted API and an only moderately functional slideshow utility. ;)
- flickr Leech – So this is a little weird... There are probably a lot of similarities between my slideshow and flickr Leech from a code perspective. I’m not positive because I wrote the prototype for this slideshow prior to learning about flickr Leech (via Digg). That said I’d be remiss if I didn’t give them credit for the title design. I really liked the way the flickr Leech title looked ("because paging sucks" and all that), so I changed my rather lame title & logo to look more like theirs.