Welcome to PhotoShakr (ReduxR)

Saturday, December 2 2006

A friend of mine, togehther with a bunch of other 2.0 geeks (or bored Flickr users if they prefer), has realeased a cool Flickr mash-up to embed and shake your own Flickr photos.

PhotoShakr lets you embed your Flickr photo in a neat and fun way. Among the features the chance to read photo notes and, if the photo has the EXIF data enabled, to check for the used camera together with a link to that camera on Amazon.

The man behind this nice idea is Leandro Agrò (LEEANDER.com). You can see PhotoShakr in action on this blog's middle-right column.

That said I have just a bit remark to do, and this has to do with the proposed code to emded the mash-up in your web page: it does not validate.

<embed style="width:190px; height:400px;" id="PhotoShakr-ID" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://photoshakr.com/something_goes_here/YOUR_FLICKR_SET_ID_GOES_HERE" flashvars="">

</embed>


This is quite an old issue that's doing with embedding a Flash movie in a (X)HTML page andd the use of the embed tag. I then changed a bit this, into a more W3C-friendly code.

<div>

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"           codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/ >>>
shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"
           width="190" height="400">

<param name="movie" value="http://photoshakr.com/something_goes_here/YOUR_FLICKR_SET_ID_GOES_HERE" id="PhotoShakr-ID" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />


<object data="http://photoshakr.com/something_goes_here/YOUR_FLICKR_SET_ID_GOES_HERE"
            width="190" height="400" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">

<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<param name="pluginurl" value="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>

</object>
</div>

The above code does validate and it renders just fine in Firefox, IE (6+) and Opera. You might want to change the mash-up dimensions, apart from the ones given by PhotoShakr; easy task, just change width and height values in the code (remember to change it in both occurences to keep the whole coherent both in IE and non-IE browsers.

PhotoShakr JS

Submitted by Folletto Malefico (not verified) on Saturday, December 2 2006.

I have to say that I'm positively surprised... nobody never was so interested in one of the softwares I did to suggest an improvement! :)

So, I just can say: thank you.

About the problem you've explained: PhotoShakr at first used a javascript to generate its code, using a merged SWFObject script to address compatibility problems (it's also used by Adobe/Macromedia).
The javascript is here:
http://photoshakr.com/vaskr/vaskr.js

We dropped this solution since WordPress simply kills the script tag from the posts. We've studied the source code of Google Video to address this problem: any tool that could use the Google Video code also can use our little software. It's one less problem for our users. Also, this isn't killed by the non-wysiwyg interface of WordPress.

I stopped developing the js above since we switched to the embed solution, but it should work.

Maybe... do you think that we should offer also the js code to address compatibility issues? :)

Thank you again. :)

PhotoShakr JS

Submitted by TBtE on Saturday, December 2 2006.

Well, thanks for your comment.

I knew the javascript thing suggested, and used, to feed different browsers with its own specific Flash embedding, I have to say I'm not a great fan of the js approach since it has its limitations, the first one's obviously being you shoud have javascript enabled.

Also, as you point out, it looks some CMS platform as Wordpress has some problem with this kind of approach. Considered the numbers of Wordpress users, and the fact that possibly others CMS are not supporting it, the js thing looks someway not so useful.

A list apart has a nice post on the topic of Flash/Video embedding: Bye Bye Embed, but in RL sometimes things are not as easy as they should be, and the provided solutions are not always working.

I posted on this topic here twice, Just a standard show and IFRAME scenarios (Standard Compliant IFRAMEs and the OBJECT thing).

In the end, sorry for being so pedantic, talking about PhotoShakr, if you are not so concerned to (X)HTML (Strict) compliance I guess the solution you provided is just fine and should be preferred to the js approach.

PhotoShakr alla fine va bene così, non penso sia il caso di arrovelarsi poi più di tanto per trovare il pelo nell'uovo così come ho fatto io. ;)

Thanks

Submitted by Folletto Malefico (not verified) on Saturday, December 2 2006.

There's absolutely no problem about this kind of comment, it's really interesting and if we came up with a different approach it's just thanks to criticism. :)

I'll try another solution, if viable, following some hints from your posts (I completely forgot that article from ALA even if I know about the object tag).

In the meantime, I'l try to be as Strict (XHTML) as I can (our pages are XHTML Strict)... but in a tool like this the user is more important than standards compliance... so... we had to find the best way even if it isn't perfect. :)

Thanks again :D