October 18, 2008

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your personal collection of terry tate

October 18, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Since Terry Tate has this awesome video which is making the rounds:

I thought I would collect some of my favorites from the past:

a little warning about flickr feeds

October 18, 2008 in Flickr, RSS, whoisi | 2 comments

Last night I discovered the hard way that flickr uses slightly different GUIDs in its RSS and Atom feeds for the same entries.  The format looks something like this in the Atom feed:

tag:flickr.com,2005:/photo/12345678

And in the RSS2 feed:

tag:flickr.com,2004:/photo/12345678

Notice the difference?  The photo ID is the same, the tag (a year, probably?) is slightly different.

I converted everyone’s Flickr feeds on whoisi to use RSS2 instead of Atom because the RSS2 feeds contain the thumbnail as part of the <media:thumbnail> element instead of having to make a separate call to the Flickr API.  This makes things like preview and adding new sites super-fast and it will probably let me remove a thousand lines of python and JS from the whoisi source code.

But the side effect was that with new IDs every entry looked new.  And I suddenly had a few thousand new entries in my unseen page on whoisi.  I spent some time last night and this morning cleaning up the database to reflect the proper GUIDs in flickr feeds.