Simply Random

I’ve just written a javascript code to extract my recent photos’ thumbnails from flickr. You can see the demo on the sidebar of this blog. Yeah finally I made it You’re welcome to download the code to use/modify. To get it working in your blog, change the url in Feed with with your flickr feed and create a new html/javascript widget with the code. That’s set!

Has it ever happened to you when you tried to save a flickr photo but you ended up saving another blank image file called “spaceball.gif” instead? I don’t exactly know what flickr is trying to do. Preventing people from downloading those photos? Maybe. What flickr does is it uses another transparent image to overlay the main image to block users from downloading the actual image. Is there a way to get around it? Yeah of course. It’s no wonder that if you can download youtube videos, you must be able to save protected flickr photos somehow. There are a few ways you can do this. One approach is to screenshot and then use image editing application to crop the part that you want but believe me it’s such a pain in the arse. Another one is to actually read the code and extract the real image url and the paste it to browser address bar but i’m sure you don’t wanna do this. Ok enough of all that hassle. I’ve written a few lines of javascript code that can be plugged into Greasemokey to display an actual link to the image. The code is written as follows:

Save that code as, for example, saveFlickrPhoto.user.js and install that file in greasemonkey. That’s it. Go to that flickr photo that you couldn’t download but this time it will show a link under the photo. That’s it. I’m sure you know how to do it from there.

Here I’ve just installed Lightbox in my blog. Got a tip from Gecko&Fly and also javascript libraries (javascript prototype framework and lightbox libraries) posted on his server that enables me to get Lightbox working here. And also thanks to Lokesh Dhakar (Lightbox developer) for making lightbox available for public use and Sam Stephenson (javascript prototype framework developer) for taking out the pain out of web developers’ ass. Click on the picture below to see how it looks like.

Click on the image

Recently, my main interest seems to shift from photography to blog modification. I’ve been hanging out with my roommate Waz and all we talked about is blog mod. I’ve modified my About feature (button) so when we click it, it displays About information in the same page without redirecting to a different page but since it’s not an obvious thing because I used the expand/collapse code with a few modification to enable the fading fx I didn’t have a post about it. With this post, I’m blogging about a new mod which I called “label chart”. It displays barchart for labels according to numbers of posts that have been tagged with. This idea is not my original idea though. I was amazed by this idea where they increase the font sizes of tags (called Label in blogger) depends on their popularities. First I saw this on Flickr I thought I was cool and thought I would make my own someday but then yesterday Waz introduced me to this post, it shows how to create that feature, which the author calls it Label Cloud. Just after that, I learned his code and without copied his code right away, I knew how to use <b:loop> tag in blogger markup language. Instead of making the same thing, I was looking for a different to represent the popularities of labels and then I thought of barchart and because it has been used for years for presentation of summary of numerical data thus most people are familiar with it. Finally, I made it with a few added lines of code. Even though I don’t use the same presentation as used in Label Cloud, I still admire the idea.

Below is the code. The added lines are highlighted with yellow color. Click it to enlarge.

As I’ve been asked by a few friends of mine about Expand/Collapse, I just wrote a small tutorial of it even though you can find the code in page source of my old blog template it’s not easy to follow because the code was lengthy and the function I wrote is not well structured I would say.

<html>
<head>
<script language=”javascript”>

// TODO: expand/collapse (show/hide) an element, specified by id,
// triggered by an element, specified by triggerID. triggerTxt is a text in trigger element.
function toggle(id, triggerId, triggerTxt){
e = document.getElementById(id);
trigger = document.getElementById(triggerId);

if (e.style.display == ‘block’ || e.style.display != ‘none’){
e.style.display = ‘none’
// instead of [+] you can also replace with an image as well
trigger.innerHTML = “[+] ” + triggerTxt;
}
else
{
e.style.display = ‘block’
// instead of [-] you can also replace with an image as well
trigger.innerHTML = “[-] ” + triggerTxt;
}
}

</script>

</head>
<body>

<h3 id=”trigger1″ onclick=”toggle(’list1′,’trigger1′,’click here’)”>click here</h3>

<ul>

<!– element (in div) to be expanded/collapsed –>
<div id=”list1″>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
</div>

<ul>

<!– call this function now to collapse list1 element when the page is loaded –>
<script>toggle(’list1′,’trigger1′,’click here’)</script>

</body>