This will probably take more than one post to cover, but I thought I’d give it a little quick start. The final result: An automated way to feature new photo on a Facebook page or profile stream.

The Photos

There’s going to be some prep work on all those photos you’re going to need, but I’ll save that for another time. I already amassed my 366 photos for a daily calendar project, so that part was already taken care of. Those photos are hosted on Flickr and tagged with an individual date code. For example, the image in this post here is tagged with ‘c1117’ for November 17th.

Now, you don’t need to follow that tag approach, and you certainly don’t need a full year’s worth of photos to start with, but it’s one less thing you need to worry about later.

The Feed

Next up, you need a feed to serve up those files photos at regular intervals – such as every 24 hours.  For me, that’s where the date coded tags on Flickr came into play.  Using the Flickr API, I easily created an RSS feed for a daily photo that you can actually subscribe to over at my Maui Photo Day Calendar website.  It’s just a PHP file that determines the current date, and pulls the latest week worth of photos by their tags.

Other than the photo selection and tagging, this feed page is really the only code that you’ll need to right. Pretty simple.

The Delivery

So, you have the photos and the feed, all you have to do is tell Facebook about it.  For that, you can use just about any of the RSS applications on Facebook. I am happy with the Networked Blogs application, which many of my friends also use for their blog-to-Facebook needs.

Just plug in your Feed URL from the step above, and the app will take care of the work for you.  Depending on the Facebook app you choose, your mileage will vary as to when throughout the day your photo will be posted. If you’re not happy with the results, go ahead and try another app.  For me, I wasn’t too particular, so I just stuck with Networked Blogs.

The Result

If you want to see the final result, head over to my Maui by Photo page on Facebook.  It’s that easy.

If you do happen to be technically inclined and familiar with the Flickr API, take a look at this post that has more details about the API methods I’m using for the calendar project. They’re pretty much the same ones used in the feed, too.

With stuff like this, the sky really is the limit. I happen to be using this same set of imagery for an iPhone mobile web app, a WordPress Plugin, and looking into a Android widget. More details on those projects in the months to come.

Have Fun

If you do happen to implement something like this – whether it’s Facebook or anywhere else – please let me know and I’d love to check it out. If you’ve done something similar with a different technique or have another idea, feel free to share that, too.  There is no right or wrong way to skin this cat, and the more ideas, the better.

Enjoy,
- Kris

What an afternoon of random ideas.  During a rather slow drive home from work, I started thinking about new site designs for Ka’anapali Dreamin’ and came up with a few goodies.  After some quick browsing for inspiration and a handful of pencil sketches, I arrived at something woth throwing together in Photoshop.

Getting ready to fire up the laptop, I soon became distracted by yet another idea while looking at one corner in my office at home.  You see, I have been a fan of the Islands Gallery Day Calendar for a few years now, and whenever I come across a day that features Hawaii, I put it on my wall.

As you can imagine, one would gather quite a few of these over the course of 3 years (I’m counting 39 so far, with a few of them practically duplicates).  And in all of that time, I had yet to think of using my own photos to create an online version.  But for whatever reason, today I did.

I’ll probably have a working prototype up by the end of the night, and then I’ll see if I’m still as excited tomorrow about having to go through all those photos.

With a lot of the time and effort I’ve been spending on my photography lately, I thought I’d clean up the Recent Photos view over at kris.nelson. I switched it from the small 75×75 square thumbnail view to a little bit more profound by comparison, as well as added a few details about each photo.

Behind the scenes, I did some housekeeping as well. Previously, the Flickr integration on this site was being handled through the phpFlickr package, as I’m using for Ka’anapali Dreamin’ (at least at the time this was written). Instead of using that entire PHP library just for this simple part of kris.nelson, I decided to switch over to the REST version and made a few corresponding changes on the scripting to display the results. It feels like it’s running just a little bit faster (without the PHP and MySQL overhead), but I haven’t actually don’t any formal testing with it.

Other Updates
In addition to just making this piece of the site look nicer, I also cleaned up a few bugs here and there, including a weird issue that I didn’t realize at first on the Twitter updates display. It turns out that the date format that is returned from the Twitter API (for example: Mon Nov 03 18:32:33 +0000 2008) is supported by and parses fine with Firefox, however IE treats it as NaN. I ended up just manually parsing out the fields and building the date parts manually. Oh well.