Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

Instagram Digest : round two

It’s been a couple of month since I mentioned Instagram Digest plugin for WordPress.  Unfortunately, making it work wasn’t as easy as it seemed at first.  The thing is that Instagram’s Developer corner shows you four pieces of information, once you register a new Instagram API application. These four pieces are: client ID, client secret token, website URL, and redirect URL.  Just populating them with sensible values doesn’t necessarily work.

The trick here is to get a little bit of understanding of how OAuth works.  When a new API application is created, there is an authentication stage, where you, as a logged in Instagram user need to confirm access of the newly created application to your data.  For that, a redirect URL must handle the request from the Instagram, and, in case of Instagram Digest plugin, you need to save the authentication token.

Too bad the documentation for the plugin is not too clear on that.  Luckily though, after playing around with an deleting and re-creating the application a few times I managed to make it work …

… just in time for the upgrade of the site to WordPress 3.5.  What’s so special about WordPress 3.5 then? Well, if you look closer at the announcement of this version, you’ll see that the media manager has been changed heavily.  It looks very nice now when you are adding the images the old way, but it also doesn’t work too well with the Instagram Digest plugin.  The gallery is created, but it seems to have all the wrong things in it.  Manually fixing it takes just a few clicks, but is annoying enough, since the whole point of this plugin is automation.

With that, you do have my first Instagram digest post, and a possibility of a bumpy ride for the next few days until I figure it all out.  If you have any ideas on how to fix it, please let me know.  Otherwise, please be patient.  Maybe spend more time with your family during the Christmas holidays instead of browsing through silly blogs like this one.

The tour of International Space Station

This is so cool!  We’ve all seen bits and pieces of space stuff in TV reports.  But this is something else – a complete and through tour of the whole thing.  Well, maybe not complete, as there might be a few places that a webcam is not allowed.  While watching this, I kept thinking of two things.

The first is that there is way more space up there on ISS than I ever thought there was.  There is a possibility that my perception was mostly shaped by videos from the Russian modules, which do seem to be a bit less spacious.

The second is that it’s amazing how the whole secrecy has changed with ISS.  The top of the top technologists and scientists from different countries work together, experiment together, and discover together.  Again, I’m pretty sure there are still plenty of secrets, but there has been a huge progress, I think.

And now that you are done with the video, just pause for the second and think of all the things, all the people, all the technology that had to come through for this even to happen.  Given that space stations don’t grow on trees naturally, but are a product of human genius, I can’t be anything but absolutely amazed by it.