Year: 2007

Recenlty I’ve noticed that many of my friends copy and re-post pictures from each other on Flickr. Usually, this happens after some drunk party with naked women event that a few of them attend together – everybody wants to have quick access to those images, made by one of them.

Guys, you really don’t have to download and re-upload those images to your account. There is a better way. You can just mark images of other Flickr users as “favourites”. In the menu above the picture, there is the “Add to Faves” button with a little grey star. If you click on it, the star will turn purple and the image will be added to your favourites. If you click on the purple star once again, it will go back to grey and the image will be removed from the favourites. That works exactly like the Google star, which you see in GMail, Google Reader, and other Google applications.

You can access your favourite images from the main menu. It’s under “You -> Your favourites”. The best part of it, is that you can see other people’s favourite images too. When looking at somebody else’s stream, there is a menu at the top, just under user’s name – Sets, Tags, Archives, Favourites, Profile.

You see, now all your favourite images are just one click away. Enjoy Flickr!

I’ve been ignoring WordPress udpates for far too long now. My blog was still running WordPress-2.0.5, when WordPress-2.1.2 is available for a few days now. Today, when I realized that Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin works only with modern version of WordPress, I said “enough is enough” and upgraded. I was surprised as to how well the upgrade went through. Nothing broke except for the display of links, which I used a custom SQL for, and which I was warned all about in the release notes. It took me about 40 seconds to fix it, and I even got read of the custom SQL thing, so it shouldn’t break in the future.

If you notice any misbehaviour around the site, please let me know.

P.S.: Now, as a bonus feature, whenever I post a new entry to this blog, you can be notified via my twitter stream.

Twitter has been the noise of the blogosphere for the last few weeks. Even though the project is much much older than that.

Executive summary: Twitter is a great mix of blogging, instant messaging, SMS communications, RSS feeds, social networking, and fun. It’s sounds complicated and foggy, but in fact is very straight-forward and simple. And addictive. And useful.

Do any of you guys use it already? I’ve only tried it out today. It’s instant love. Despite the fact that their servers are a bit slow today, and my IM integration hasn’t happened yet. SMS works just fine though.

Anyway, I’ll probably post a wider review in a couple of days. Until then, try it out yourself, and let me know what do you think. You can find me at http://twitter.com/mamchenkov .

Everybody and their brother were requesting nested albums from Flickr development team for as long as I’ve been using the service. Indeed, when switching from conventional photo gallery applications, it looked a bit surprising that one couldn’t create albums within albums (say album “Russia” within album “Travels”).

With time, I forgot about this feature and got used to one level sets (Flickr lingo for albums). There are so many other ways to search, organize and navigate photos – tags, intuitive search, RSS feeds, contacts, groups, etc – that nested albums weren’t anywhere critical.

Those people who just can’t live without nested albums, can relax now. The feature was added with the most recent update of Flickr and is available with Pro accounts now (Pro account will cost about $25 USD per year, but it’s worth every cent).

I went back and scrolled through the list of my sets, trying to locate those that would fit collections (new term for nested sets) easily. It turned out that I could only create three collections – Cyprus Rally, Limassol Grand Carnival and KSP (most of you won’t be interested in this one). There is also some potential for a split in my Trip to Russia set, but I can’t be bothered with that now.

Flickr collections can be nested themselves. The maximum depth is limited to 5 levels for now. That is you can include a set in the collection, in the collection, in the collection… isn’t that already more than enough? Probably. But that’s not the best part yet. The best part is that sets and collections can belong to as many other collections as you want. That’s similar how photos are organized into sets. Excellent!

This post in Flickr blog has all the details. Also, about that other feature – of a customized layout of the front page with your photos. Now you can choose to use larger image sizes and use latest collections instead of sets, or disable them altogether.