Mainfram Reality

Google has released Google AJAX Feed API.

With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs like the Google Maps API.

Google has organized a worldwide Google developer day to be held simultaneously around the world on May 31^st 2007.
The event will be held at various Google offices around the world, Mountain View, Sao Paulo, Madrid, London, Paris, Hamburg, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney.

The topics will range from using various Google APIs to development kits and Ajax development. Sounds very interesting.

When I was looking into upgrading the blogging software, I also thought about managing my photos in a better way. So I looked into installing WordPress gallery plugin(s), but I didn’t really like the once I came across. So I decided to use Flickr instead.

I had around 50 photos to upload and using a web form uploading would have been a tedious task. This is one of the reasons I didn’t like WordPress galleries. Well Flickr tools provide a great solution to the problem. Install a small application on your computer and uploading becomes very easy indeed. So after getting a free account, I uploaded my 50 photos.

Now I needed to organize the photos in some meaningful way. Most web based galleries are pretty straight forward in how the photos are organized (different galleries, different tags, etc…). Flickr is no exception in this regard, but the web interface is amazing. So after about 10 minutes I had my photos organized and tagged and ready for publishing.

The next thing I wanted to do was to somehow show photos on this blog straight from Flickr. Actually all I wanted was the latest photo in the sidebar. Well WordPress widget exists that does just that, actually there are quite a few around.
And that was it. I now had a great photo gallery, with all the bells and whistles that was integrated into my blog the way I wanted.

Now was the time to learn more about Flickr and what it can do. So I joined a group PIP Photographers in Perth and I posted some of my photos there (again using the same interface Flickr provides for organizing photos). Within fifteen minutes I got a message, someone has recognized a photo of my wife. Turns out one of the administrators on the group is a brother of one of my wifes close friends.

So now I am a fully fledged Flickr user. I would recommend it to everyone who is looking into sharing their photos with the rest of the world. Flickr has some great photos posted by some very talented users, which makes Flickr a great place to learn about photography and see what can be achieved with a nice camera and some creativity.

Another thing I would like to mention is that Flickr is the first web service where I am actually contemplating spending $30 and getting a Pro account for the year.

So give Flickr a go… and happy snapping…

Well after some time I have finally upgraded the blog. Actually I was forced to due to changes to my hosting arrangements.

I’ve upgraded from b2evolution to WordPress. I have also moved my photo gallery to flickr. There will be other changes coming shortly, like ability to receive blog updates via email, etc. I have also toned down the use of Google adsense on the blog.

Apologies for imported posts looking terrible, I need to spend some time and reformat some of them.

Thats it for now…

Yahoo Pipes! is an interactive way of building mashups by using data feeds like RSS wikipedia, Atom wikipedia and web API’s like google or yahoo maps.Yahoo Pipes is a revolution, the possible ways to manage and transform data are enormous. Yahoo Pipes! are targeted at top 1% of web 2.0 developers. The idea is to provide a free and powerful toolkit for developing web 2.0 applications that use data from multiple sources.Google Tech Talk on Yahoo Pipes! by Yahoo Pipes! team