Playpen #7 - Flickr API

With my new-found ability to consume RSS (and by inference, any XML), my next challenge was to combine that with Playpen # 2 - Lightbox JS and the Flickr API and see what fun I could have.

Firstly, I logged into Flickr and found a suitable photo set of mine to play with, taking note of the setID. Browsing the API documentation, I found the API Explorer page very useful. It gives you some handy values straight away, such as your userID, plus recent photoIDs, setIDs and contactIDs.

If you put the SetID in the form on the Explorer page, and call the method (I used an unsigned call, since I was only interested in displaying pictures, not writing details or uploading), the XML file for your photo set is returned, along with the all-important URL you can use to call the method from your web page.

Whilst I didn't actually need to save this generated XML file, I did find it useful to see exactly what was what in terms of the schema - sometimes seeing an actual value tells you an awful lot more than just seeing the name of an element or attribute.

I then used Dreamweaver8 to generate a new XSL fragment file, which calls the aforementioned URL as its source. This gives you a display of the XML schema in the bindings panel. You can then drag and drop elements and attributes (relatively) painlessly onto your XSL document:

The nuts and bolts of my stylesheet are as follows:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" encoding="utf-8"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<h3>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/{rsp/photoset/@owner}/sets/
{rsp/photoset/@id}">Pictures of d.construct2006 in Brighton</a>
by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/{rsp/photoset/@owner}"><xsl:value-of select='rsp/photoset/@ownername'/></a>
</h3>
<ul class="thumbnails">
<xsl:for-each select="rsp/photoset/photo">
<li><a href="http://static.flickr.com/{@server}/{@id}_{@secret}_o.jpg" title="{@title}" >
<img src="http://static.flickr.com/{@server}/{@id}_{@secret}_s.jpg" alt="{@title}" name="{@id}" width="75" height="75" id="{@id}" />
<br /><xsl:value-of select="@title"/></a></li>
</xsl:for-each>
</ul>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The Photo Source URLs page was extremely useful in telling me what paths I needed to construct for the image thumbnails and originals. Even so, I spent a frustrating half hour getting the syntax right. I learned the hard way that copy/paste in the code view doesn't always get you the right path - but if you drag an attribute from the bindings panel onto the design view of the file (not the code view), the path is sorted out for you!

Basically, I was mistakenly adding:

{rsp/photoset/photo/@attribute}

instead of just {@attribute}, in the loop, and nothing showed up. But the overall title bit worked fine - because this was outside the loop, and did require the rest of the path to parse correctly. Argh!

With a bit of CSS styling, the photoset is displayed nicely in Playpen #7. Clicking the title or thumbnail then brings up the LightboxJS function to display the original image from Flickr, with it's title and prev/next links to the other pictures in the set.

Playpen #2 - Lightbox JS

The d.Construct Backnewtwork has a neat feature which hooks into the Flickr API and pulls out all suitably-tagged images of the conference. Then when you click an image, it appears in a rather sexy overlay window.

I've been looking for some time, for an unobtrusive javascript method of displaying a photo + caption in a popup, as I have several sites which require this feature, without needing to go for the overhead of dynamic pages or a page per image. Trouble is, most of the methods I've found haven't been friendly if you turn off JavaScript!

The latest issue of .Net magazine (#154) also has a tutorial on Lightboxes (Javascript Image gallery widgets), so I thought I'd give Lightbox JS a try.

It works great straight out of the box, is dead easy to inplement, and will let you customise quite a few features. If users have Javascript disabled, they still get to see the content (the larger image when you click on the thumbnail, albeit in a boring vanilla window), so it's fine from an accessibility standpoint. And I'm pretty sure it's the very same method the backnetwork uses.

I knocked a quick gallery together, which you can see at the Playpen #2 page.