Kevin Blake's Blog

Seems everyone is talking about Twitter nowadays.  The Hudson River picture launched it into the media world as the best news source on the planet, and Obama‘s adoption of the tool has given America the same pleasure that Britain experienced when our Prime Minister, Stephen Fry starting getting ‘back in touch with the people’, in October 2008.

The Hudson River picture wouldn’t have been possible without the non-affiliated TwitPic – which never truly got the recognition it deserved.  Without it, the infamous picture would have only been a 140 character description, and nobody will have noticed or cared.  Still, that’s the nature of buzzwords I guess.  If they don’t cause a buzz, they’re just words.

Anyway, TwitPic is yet another disparate service like Flickr, Panoramio or Facebook that’s had me tempted away from uploading some of my photos to Gallery2 / Blakepics.  With Facebook, I’ve integrated my own application there; Panoramio and Flickr, stolen the best parts of each.

And now with a hack to the tagging module in Gallery 2 I can emulate all I want from TwitPic as well, and tuck another service onto the shelf at the back at the cupboard.  So as usual, I thought I’d share.

What it is…

• Tweet any photos on Gallery just by adding the tag ‘twitter’ to your photo.
• Automatically takes the photos title as your Tweet text.
• Processes all URLs through TinyURL, giving you a warm and fuzzy Tiny URL

What it isn’t…

• A seamless Gallery2 module.  There’s some hacking to do.
• Multi-user.  If you share your Gallery, there’s some more work to do.

If you make improvements in these areas or any others – please let me know

Requirements

• Gallery 2
• Tagging module
• Twitter account

Things you need to do

1. Download my Twitter Tags class
2. Unzip to the root of your Gallery installation
3. Edit /modules/tags/classes/TwitterTag.class with your twitter username/pass, and Gallery URL.
4. Edit /modules/tags/classes/TagsHelper.class
   1. Add this just above the line ‘class TagsHelper’
      GalleryCoreApi::requireOnce('modules/tags/classes/TwitterTag.class');
   2. Then just above
      return TagsHelper::assignTagById($itemId, $tagId);
      Add
      TwitterTag::Tweet($itemId, $tagId);
5. Tag any photos you want to appear on Twitter with ‘twitter’.

Last year, like the year before that, I made a resolution to caption 35% of the photos on Blakepics (up from 20%). There were 4,040 photos added over the past year, and approx. 25% of all photos are now captioned. So I didn’t reach my goal. 1,344 photos were captioned, and if it weren’t for all those new ones it’d be standing at 30%.

Fortunately, BBC News have now deemed New Years Resolutions to be bad for your health.  So like bread, second-hand smoke, guilt and vitamins, I’ve given them up.

But I thought to myself, “I’ve been captioning loads of photos every week”.  I did.  “I bet it’s the rest of those free-loaders not pulling their weight”.  So I’ve given the Caption Status page on Blakepics a much-needed overhaul.  If you’re logged in, you’ll now see how you’re doing with captioning your own photos – and even if you’re not, you can see a member list with how many photos everyone’s captioned, as well as click-through to a list of them all.

Turns out I was wrong.  A lot of those free-loaders are doing a better job than me.  In fact, whilst 25.01% of total photos are captioned – 25.04% of my own photos are captioned.  Since most of them on there are mine, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

So it seems as though I can’t prove everything with statistics.  Not if that something is how successful my 2008 Resolution has been.

Happy New Year Everyone!

The end of my Vietnam trip has come and gone, so here’s the inevitable photo story from my time away. The pictures come from all over Vietnam from Hanoi down to Ho Chi Minh (or Saigon, if you prefer). Facebook users will probably need to click through to the original article link to see the video.

The rest of the photos, including the ones in the video above are on Blakepics, where you can also find a full quality version of this video. The music for this one in case you’re interested, is “Easier to Lie” by Aqualung, inspired by a recent episode of Lead Balloon.

As you probably worked out from the last post, I’ve been on holiday again. So, as is tradition – here’s the usual photo story. The pictures come from various West Balkanite countries; Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia. Facebook users will probably need to click through to the original article link to see the video.

The rest of the photos, including the ones in the video above will be on Blakepics shortly (as soon as I’ve got my server running again). Likewise, a full quality version of the video will be here. The music, “Let me be myself” by 3 Doors Down.

Incidentally, more blog posts from the trip are also on the way. Some are drafts, some are notes, some probably don’t exist yet – but they’ll be spreading across the site like mould on bread very shortly.

There is no end to this phones capabilities, it seems – so this evening I’ve had my trusty Nokia N95 working as a wireless bluetooth webcam and sending real-time videos across MSN.

* You have invited Alison to start viewing webcam. Please wait for a response or Cancel (Alt+Q) the pending invitation.
Alison says (22:21):
you doing something kinky?

I’m not sure where I got this undeserved reputation from, personally. But anyway, if you’d like to try this yourself, it’s compatible with all kinds of Symbian S60 phones, so head over to motvik’s web site and download wwigo. It’s free, and it’s cool – what else could you ask for?