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.
wordpressHi-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.
FFFFound WordPress Plugin
I’ve re-written my AP Photo plugin to pull in photos from the “everyone” feed on the image bookmarking site FFFFound!. It works essentially the same, just add some styling and perhaps a nice javascript image zoom for a neat little web gallery of interesting pics (see it in action in my sidebar). Thumbnails are added as list items which then link to the full rez photos.
