Brilliant Corners

Welcome to the next phase in the evolution of Fotolog.

Wow. Fotolog is back, and it’s actually running smoothly (finally!). I stopped posting to my own Fotolog just about a year ago because the site performance was just horrendous; the site crawled along, and it often took five attempts just to upload a single photo. At the same time, Flickr was really starting to add some great features and gather momentum, so I moved house. Now, it looks like Fotolog finally has the rapid growth handled (as well as adding a much nicer archive display). Sadly, I think Flickr still has the better system and community, but perhaps I can start putting photos at Fotolog from time to time.

I’ll be posting over at i like cameras for at least the next couple of weeks. ilikecameras is one of the sites in new 9rules/Paul Scrivens’ Fine Fools Community. Read more about ilikecameras and the other sites here and here.

Eliot of slower.net just released a neat dhtml widget to display a Flickr RSS feed. See it in action on the sidebar on his site.

oe magazine: Identifying falsified images can be straightforward if you know a few tricks (via kottke.org).

My friend Maya is about to embark on a six-month travel across Asia. Thankfully, she’ll be chronicling her journey on her weblog and on Flickr. Before she takes off on her trip and the updates start rolling in, you can marvel at her wonderfully-detailed notebook drawings and notes.

Have a great trip, Maya!

Here’s a great page to see some of the most commented and favorited photos on Flickr within the last 24 hours.

Things have been quiet here because I’ve been spending just about all my spare time on a Ruby on Rails photolog application. You can see the results of the first public version here: http://kindofblue.com/

I really don’t want this weblog to fill with entries only about Ruby on Rails, but I’ve got to tell you: it has really won me over. The more I learn, the more I’m surprised at how easy it makes putting up a complicated application together rather quickly. I hit quite a few roadblocks when working on the photolog, but more often than not, all it took was a quick pointer from Erik Benson and then I’d get it. Then even more things would make sense.

It takes a bit of trial and error to get the hang of Ruby and Rails, but once you do, you really won’t look at web development the same way again. Honest.

There are quite a few steps to get this working, but once you do it takes only a couple of clicks and to add geotags to a Flickr photo.

Here’s a screencap of the result on the Geobloggers site for the first photo I geotagged:

Pretty neat!

soyler/soler back in town?
Originally uploaded by billturner.

Here’s a flickr post, just to see how it works.

Cross your fingers.