Last night I took a break from all the regularly scheduled programming to get back to updating one of my own websites for a change. This time, it was updates to the Maui Photo Day Calendar website.

Now, the website itself isn’t that large since it’s really just a homepage for all the different uses of my daily Maui photos (you can find a complete list here). But still, having it just be mostly static and not updated in over a year didn’t feel good enough. That, and I was looking for a better way to associate the site with the RSS feed associated with my photo a day on Facebook integration. So, I had a pair of birds in my sight and time for only one stone.

Front and Center

The first change I wanted to make as to add a larger version of the photo and calendar date directly on the home page, and do so front and center. For that, I leveraged almost all of the same code I put together for Daily Photo tab on the Maui by Photo page on Facebook. All that was really needed was a few style tweaks and integration into the rest of the site template.

As far as the existing homepage of the site, I moved that over to an About page, which is really what it was built to be anyway.

RSS Link Page

For the other bird in my metaphor, I wanted something to update the target URL for each item in the RSS feed for my daily Maui photos so it would point back to the site and not to the photo on Flickr as it was previously.  It turns out this was very easy to implement as well by just using a redirect script and .htaccess settings to read in the photo values from the page URL and bring up the content that way.

It’s better to just see what I mean.  Here’s the URL for today’s photo and the one for yesterday’s image. I’m sure you can see the pattern now.

This is also helpful because now I can loop in Google Analytics for any page views per photo – either from the RSS feed, the published posts on Facebook, or anytime I want to include a specific reference to a particular photo.  Kind of like I just did with those previous two links in this post.  Before, I was relying on the Views count on Flickr, but could only do that one photo at at time.

Future Updates

Having an individual URL and dynamic page content for each photo in the calendar also opens up a lot of doors that I didn’t have time for last night.  I could incorporate the Facebook Like button, add the Twitter and FB share button equivalents, bring in a Stumbleupon widget, you get the idea.

Since I’m following a tagging convention on Flickr for these photos, I can also leverage the Flickr API to pull in other details about the photo, including comments and views.  With the meta data associated with each photo – including geolocation, place names, and coast details – I could also bring in related photos and even references to other pages and posts on my different Maui sites or even my photography blog if that same image was featured there, too.

Basically, the sky is now the limit with this relatively minor change for custom page URLs per photo.  I could ask myself why I haven’t thought of it sooner, but I already know the answer.  Just not enough hours in the day.

On a whim, I decided to put up a mini-site to promote my Maui Photo Day Calendar Google Gadget. Nothing too special or elaborate, but I’m pretty happy with it for only about 6 hours worth of work. It’s good to have an actual url (http://www.mauiphotocal.com) to send people to when telling them about it, or have others link to on my behalf.

I’m looking for a few iGoogle users that are interested in helping me with beta testing my new, Maui Photo Calendar Gadget. This is the first Google Gadget that I’m looking to publish for public use, so I want to try and do as much due diligence in testing as I can. And alas, I can’t do it alone.

The good news is that it is a really simple gadget. All it really does is just determine the current date (one small gotcha in a minute), retrieves a daily photo and details from my Flickr account, and put it all together in a layout as you see here. Maybe it’s too simple and I’m only being paranoid about pushing that final “publish” button, but better safe than sorry I guess.

There is one custom setting, though, that might not seem necessary, but I wanted to point it out. There is a Timezone Offset setting that will trigger the gadget to know when “midnight” is and flip to the next day. I know I could use a little JavaScript to detect and retain the timezone information with a cookie, but I wanted to limit the moving parts involved, at least to start.

What To Do
If you would like to help, the first step is to accept my thanks. I appreciate it.

Next, you just need to add the gadget anywhere on your iGoogle homepage. Just copy this url to your clipboard and click on the Add Stuff link on the iGoogle tab you want to use. When you click Add Stuff, the following page will have an option in the bottom left of the page that says “Add feed or gadget”. That’s where the url from above goes, and you’re all set. You’ll get a message saying that the gadget wasn’t created by Google (obviously).

What Else
Just kick the tires and let me know what happens. Once you add it to your iGoogle homepage, it will show up anywhere you login. I have been trying it with a few different machines, displays, and browsers, so that’s really all you can do as well. I know you can use these gadgets in other locations, and while I haven’t gotten to trying that, feel free to do so if you’d like. It’s not required, though.

If you experience any issues, such as error messages, timeouts, size, cropping, alignment issues, etc., you can post them here as comments, use the contact form, or send me a note on Twitter. Also, if you like it, have suggestions, or anything else, all feedback is welcome.

Timeframe
I’m not looking for anything long term from a testing period, probably a week at most. I’m also using Google Analytics to track the usage of this gadget, so that will help me gauge how much traffic its seeing and where I want to go from there.

So, thanks again for reading and if you decide to give it a whirl (now or when it’s published), a big Mahalo.

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.