The Distress Signal

Rants from a corporate IT drone, wannabe web designer/developer, and sometime blogger.

Because the future is NEVER now.

Droppin' knowledge bombs since 1973.

Here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.. just ran out of bubblegum.

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Rants & Sundry Prattle

01/09tags wordpresstags work

Hi-Rez AP/AFP Photos

I’ve been messing around recently with an RSS feed from Scripting News that includes hi resolution images from the Associated Press as enclosures. These are some amazing images of current events from around the world and I have a script setup to automatically download them and replace old ones within a local folder that I point to for a photo screensaver.

It’s a fascinating way to visually see whats happening in the world as every hour new photos show up in the stream. That’s obviously what Dave Winer had in mind when he started offering the feeds earlier this year.

I wanted some way to achieve that same sort of “up to the minute visual sense of the news” on my blog so I wrote a quick WordPress plugin that parses the xml feed and presents the thumbnails in list items with links to the full resolution images. Mix in a javascript image viewer like Fancy Zoom and you have a nice little up to the minute web gallery of hi-res AP photos.

If your interested, feel free to download the plugin. Thanks to Dave Winer and the Scripting News for making it all possible.