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.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for updating the Picasa Sidebar Widget. I hate to bother you with tech support, but I wonder if this is a simple fix for you…
How do you get your widget to display thumbnails? Mine (www.ernandjan.com) will only display the name of the album, even if the album has a cover picture assigned to it (in Picasa).
Thanks!
Thanks for the fixes Ben! I knew Google changed their RSS feed, but wasn’t sure how to fix the code.
Works great!
The plugin produced code across my index page, mostly diamonds and letters.
Did I miss a step?
I think I have the same problem as baltimoron, I get:
fopen(/home/astro8/public_html/taisteal/wp-content/plugins/widgets/picasacache/P1010088.JPG) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Not a directory in /home/astro8/public_html/taisteal/wp-content/plugins/PicasaWebMatrix/picasaweb-matrix.php on line 67
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid File-Handle resource in /home/astro8/public_html/taisteal/wp-content/plugins/PicasaWebMatrix/picasaweb-matrix.php on line 70
and then a lot of junk. permissions are set to 777. my guess is the the junk is the images?
To the guys with the garbage code being chucked across your page… Can you please send me the RSS feed URL you are using with the widget?
There were some bugs with “funny” characters in the picture filenames but I thought I fixed it, apparently not!
http://www.radicalcontrapositions.com/left_flank/feed/
http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/miguknamja4/albumid/5033101176510793425?category=photo&alt=RSS&hl=en_US
To the guys having problems - the plugin saves the images in a folder called “picasacache” on your webserver
* Please check this folder exists under the widgets folder e.g. wp-content/plugins/widgets/picasacache
* Please check this folder is writable by the webserver, either chown the folder to the user of the webserver or run “chmod 777 picasacache” to make it writable by everyone.
Hey man, I get an invalid argument at line 106. The plugin was working before, now it isn’t, just out of the blue.
hi. I have the same problem as Neil. I already set the cache directory to 777 though…
I am having problems implementing the Picasa plugin. Can you/anyone give me some steps to implementing it into my blog?
I have the same problem as the dude from comment 9
invalid argument at line 106
is there a way to fix this issue?
I think I found a solution for the people having issues with:
invalid argument at line 106 or line 111
Copy the RSS link from the bottom of one of your albums instead of from your Public Web Gallery.
The instructions say to do it from the Public Web Gallery… but it didn’t work for me until I tried it from an album.
Good luck!
wow, i’m going to try this too..
nice plugin, thanks
Absolutely Fantstic Article