Flickr Widget Plugin for Your Wordpress Sidebar
Posted on January 27, 2007 in Blogging, Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman92 Comments »

This is plugin I wrote for the Widget Sidebar in Wordpress. It will display your flickr photos in your blog’s sidebar.
It’s basically a wrapper round the badge functionality that flickr provide and publish. I’ve ported this from the Joomla module I wrote ages ago, it took no time at all and it’s working fine (see over on the right - my sad photos) - let me know if you run into any problems using it.

Download
Download the plugin here - Flickr Widget Plugin v1.0

Update
Dec 2007 - I’m no longer supporting or updating this code. I no longer use flickr, I’m no longer working with Wordpress and I have far too many other demands on my time. However by all means feel free to download and use my widget but I will not be able to help with any problems or deal with any feature requests. Sorry! The code is there for you to tweak/change etc if you want to.

Requirements
Wordpress 2.x or higher - http://wordpress.org/ (it might work on older versions but I’ve not tested it)
Sidebar Widgets Plugin - http://automattic.com/code/widgets/
Please install this plugin and get it working before installing mine.

Installation
Download and extract the flickr-widget.php file into your wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory
Goto your wordpress admin pages and click on ‘Plugins’ activate the plugin called “Flickr Badge Widget”

Configuration
Goto your wordpress admin page and click on ‘Presentation’ then ‘Sidebar Widgets’
Drag the widget called “Flickr Badge” to your sidebar.
Click the square icon next to the widget to open the config screen.

The following options are available

Widget Title: The title that will appear in the sidebar, optional
Source: Where to pick the photos from; can be a specific user, a group pool or all of flickr (everyone). Most people will select the “User” option to show their own photos
Flickr ID: If showing photos from a user or group enter the ID here, Use http://idgettr.com/ to find your ID as it’s a bit hard to find by yourself.
Note. This is NOT your flickr username, entering your username will not work. The ID will look something like 65706086%40N00 but don’t use that ID as it’s mine!
Tag: Use this if the selected source is (Tag) to only show photos with this tag
Photo Count: Number of photos to show
Layout: Layout orientation of the photos
Which Photos: How to select the photos to display; either randomly or the newest photos
Photo Size: Size of the photos displayed in the sidebar
Alignment: Alignment of the section (div) containing the photos
Picasa Sidebar Widget
Posted on January 26, 2007 in Blogging, Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman15 Comments »

I’ve been trying get a decent sidebar widget to display my Picasa photos on my WordPress blog for some time now. I found this one over at Vague Dream. It was working fine until I stumbled upon a few bugs:

  • Photos with spaces in the name would not be displayed
  • Photos with dots in the name would cause the page to render the JPEG as the HTML source - i.e. gibberish.
  • Multiple feeds on Windows wouldn’t work

I’ve found the source of all these bugs and fixed them! You can see the output of this fixed plugin here on this very blog; over on the right in the section called Pictures. So here is an updated version of the plugin…
NOTE. This plugin is not all my work, it’s simply a bug fixed version of the one at Vague Dream they did all the hard work of creating and writing the plugin.

Freecom DVB-T (The T Stands for ‘Terrible’)
Posted on January 12, 2007 in Gadgets by Ben Coleman2 Comments »

The Freecom DVB-T is the worst gadget I’ve bought in a long time. It’s a USB Digital TV tuner, so you can watch Freeview etc. on your laptop. That sounds handy. No it’s arse. because it doesn’t work.

With the supplied aerial I get zero signal and a channel scan predictably resulted in no channels found. This surprised me as I live in an area with very good digital TV reception. I plugged it into the main rooftop aerial (not exactly “portable” but it was a test), re-scanned; this time it found some channels but couldn’t display any picture and all I got was some stuttering audio.
If this doesn’t work even through a rooftop aerial then what soddin’ good is it?? – None. Avoid this like the plague, this is toy product that basically doesn’t work, I’ve seen better engineering fall out of a Christmas cracker.