I’ve improved the load speed of the ObSrv home page. Sometimes it would take a long time to load.
I’ve also improved the speed of the image feeds. It still can be sluggish at times – that’s because it’s heavily used, but to counteract this, the Image Feed will ignore requests from the same computer if they come more frequently than about once every 3 or 4 seconds.
For most people this won’t be a problem, and the only time you really notice delays on the Image Feed is if you try and display it in your browser.
If site performance is still an issue for you, please let me know.
Why does ObSrv only ever return 21 images at one time?
I thought it was a bug in my code, but it’s not. ObSrv pulls images from Google Image Search, and Google only ever returns 21 images in one go.
But this is not a problem. The images are embedded into a MediaRSS feed. That feed is cached for a maximum of one hour. After this time if you request the same feed, ObSrv will search again, but it will add in up to 21 extra images that weren’t shown last time. So on subsequent calls you’ll get more than 21 images in the feed. In the unlikely event that it runs out of images, it starts searching from the beginning again.
So although there’s nothing I can do about the 21 images at a time issue, it’s not a major problem because you will get more images after the feed refreshes – but remember, to save server resources (and to stop Google from banning me) it waits an hour between doing searches on the same terms.
I took Steve and Harrison on a bike ride this morning, along the North Pine River, up to Lake Samsonvale, and then back along the North Pine Rover.
It was a hoot! A little bit slower than normal, because Harrison is only 9 and his bike is a bit worse for wear. But it was fun all the same.
And I got to try out a new program for my Nokia N95 mobile phone. Nokia Sports Tracker Uses the inbuilt GPS on the phone to record speed and height info. While you’re cycling, your N95 acts like a speedo, and odometer, showing you all the vital stats. But when you get home, you click the button, and upload the data to sports tracker.
The really cool thing is that if you take any photos with the phone on your journey, it will upload and geotag them.
So the map on the left here is where we went. You can drag and zoom it if you want more detail.
But the fun part is that the data is also uploaded to the Sportstracker community. Here’s a link to the data for our ride today. If you tick the “altitude” box, you can see every hill, and how fast we were going.
The thing I like most about this technology is that it adds to the fun of getting out and exercising. At times I’ve found it hard to overcome my inertia to regularly exercise. In regards to exercise, if it makes me think “Oh yeah! I want to do that again!” then I think it’s a great thing.
Oh – and you can use Sports Tracker for running, walking, skiing, rowing – whatever floats your boat.
P.S. I’ve ordered a mounting bracket to attach my phone to my handlebars. Till that arrives, I’m using some of Lilly’s hair ties
I prefer to use this facility to pull in Image feeds from Flickr.
The problem with the images in these feeds is that they’re either too large or too small.
The MediaRSS specification has a <media:thumbnail> tag which lets you have a thumbnail image in your feed. That’s great, but the image size of the thumbnail is 75×75 pixels, which is useless for a nice looking slideshow. It ends up looking terribly blurry with no detail.
The Google Ajax Feeds API tries to get around this by letting you specify a “thumbnailTag” in the slideshow options object. Basically, you set this to “content” to tell the API to look for the image in the “content” section of the feed, rather than the <media:thumnail> section. This is also great, but the problem is that Flickr uses the LARGE (or even worse, ORIGINAL) image size in this section. So you get nice large detailed images in the feed, but they’re so large that they take ages to load, and your slideshow sits there for ages saying “Loading….” while it grabs the huge images and chews up your audiences bandwidth.
So I wrote a simple PHP screen scraping utility which grabs the Flickr feed, and changes the ImageUrl…_L.jpg to ImageUrl….M.jpg – in other words, it modifies the feed to include the medium size image rather than the large size.
Medium sized images are fine for slideshows, and they load quite quickly.
Just save this in a file named FlickrRSS.php in the top folder of your wordpress directory. Then instead of using your flickr RSS feed, pass the feed as a query parameter to the PHP utility.
You’ll need to change the < and > tags in the file to < and >.
Lilly came in to my office the other day. “Dad I have to go out now. Can you get the TV to record my favourite show in an hour”.
“Hmmmm????”, I replied in typical pre-occuipied father mode.
But she had an intensity in her eye that made me realize I ignored this six year old at my peril, despite my displike of leaving my desk while in the middle of solving a problem.
Happily, I didn’t have to get up from my chair. I just logged in to IceTV, found the program she was interested in, and told my PVR to record it via the website. My PVR is a High-Definition Beyonwiz DP-S1. It’s wireless, but I’ve wired it in to the house LAN so we can watch movies from our D-Link DNS323 1TB NAS
We also have an older Topfield 5000 PVRT. It’s only standard definition, but the cool thing about it is that it has an open programming interfacem , so a lot of people have written their own software to get it to do cool things. One application I added to it was ToppyPC by John De Angelis. It has a program called “TWIN” which adds a web page to your Topfield PVR. So you can set timers, and record shows, like IceTV lets you do with the Beyonwiz. ToppyPC needs another utility to run – an FTP server (ftp4t by Aldarin) which runs on a PC which I connect to the Topfield via a USB cable.
All this technology is both good and bad. It’s convenient, but I don’t get the exercise I need going up and down stairs to program the PVR!
But at least I don’t have an angry six-year-old to contend with!
I haven’t seen an empty inbox for years, and I love it! When it’s full I feel like I have the cares of the world on my shoulders. But when it’s empty, it’s like I’m making progress. Even if it might be illusory, I like that feeling.
So I’m going to persist in my strategy which can be described simply as:
If it’s junk, get rid of it.
If it’s someone elses problem, forward it.
If it’s worth reading, read it now, then delete it.
If it needs more info, request more info and delete it.
If it needs acting on, then act on it now, then delete it.
It took me hours to find, but the easiest way I found to build a slideshow from a MediaRSS feed and add it to a WordPress blog was using the Google Ajax Feed API.
There are a few plug-ins that are supposed to work with WordPress, but I didn’t like them because they were really limited, or didn’t work on an IIS hosted blog. Good old Javascript, although it’s verbose, works fine.
That’s what I’ve used on this blog. Have a look at the slideshow on the lower right. It’s generated by the Google Ajax Feeds API.
If you don’t like getting your hands dirty with JavaScript, the best Flash based slideshow generator I know of is at VuVox.com. That’s what I use for some of the ObSrv examples of slideshows here.
The beauty of building a slideshow from an RSS Feed is that you don’t need to have the images on your own site, and the content updates continually as more items are added to the feed.
Of course, sometimes it’s hard to find a good feed. That’s where ObSrv.com comes in, because it can generate a feed from a google images search.
So when you use the Google Ajax Feed API and ObSrv.com you can make a slideshow of any topic you’d like. The one on this site is for “Information Technology”.
And just to make this post pretty, I thought I’d include a slideshow of the most recent ten pictures from the Creative Commons group on Flickr
