About Kay Kremerskothen

Kay is a Community Manager for Flickr and passionate about extraordinary photography. As an editor on Flickr Blog he loves to showcase the beauty and diversity of Flickr in his posts. When he's not blogging or making Flickr more awesome (in front of and behind the scenes), you can find him taking pictures with his beloved Nikon and iPhone, listening to Hans Zimmer's music or playing board games. | On Flickr you can find him at https://flic.kr/quicksilver

Web 2.0 Expo: You’re in Our Town Now

O’Reilly made the understandable, if unfortunate, mistake of scheduling a conference about 6 blocks from FlickrHQ. And we’ll be descending on next week’s Web 2.0 Expo in droves. Besides lurking around in the halls, a handful of us have successfully bluffed our way onto the schedule. Which means next week is your chance to come see the people who make Flickr talk about doing just that.

Thursday, 04/24/2008

A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World

Dan Catt will be holding forth on “A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World”, covering all things geo and nerdy, and bending very large geo datasets to your will. Thursday 1:30pm – 2:20pm, Room 2006

The Next Generation of Tagging

Don’t go anywhere, because right after the Reverend, Kakul Srivastava (Senior Director of Product Management), will be exploring the insights that arise at scale, and how to cope with them “The Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience” Thursday 2:40pm – 3:30pm, 04/24/2008, Room 2006.

Friday, 04/25/2008

The Power of Online Communities

On Friday we’ll be kicking it off with some head to head scheduling. Our Community Manager Heather Champ will be bringing a ridiculous amount of expertise to The Power of Online Communities: Lessons from the Best of the Consumer & Business Community Managers. Friday 2:40pm – 3:30pm, 04/25/2008, Room 2009.

Capacity Planning for Web Operations

While across the hall John Allspaw will be explaining the art of Capacity Planning for Web Operations. (less politely known as, “If on the off chance your website doesn’t suck, you’re probably still screwed, ain’t you?”) John is literally writing the book on this subject, as well has helping plan Velocity. Friday 2:40pm – 3:30pm, 04/25/2008, Room 2010.

Casual Privacy

And in the anchor slot (thanks guys!), Kellan Elliott-McCrea (that’s me), will be talking about Casual Privacy, on techniques and algorithms for making lightweight privacy easy, while actually enhancing the sharing that is the heart of Web 2.0. (you might have seen the 5 minutes version last year at Ignite) 3:50pm – 4:40pm Friday, 04/25/2008, Room 2006.

Friends of Flickr

Perennial FoF Tom Coates of Yahoo Brickhouse and Fireeagle, will be giving his Designing for a Web of Data talk, and joining Matt Jones of Dopplr for Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics. (Polite, Pertinent, Pretty, and British!)

And intriguingly, Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web. But hopefully not in a “ … of the Corn” kind of way.

See you next week!

Flickr Uploadr, start to finish now

Starting at Flickr a short nine months ago, I was given the state of the Flickr Uploadr and told to make it better. Better meant many things. It meant cross-platform so we could move forward with one codebase. It meant localized in all of Flickr’s languages without hackery. It meant new features that would make uploading easier and encourage people to add metadata to their photos. And while we didn’t explicitly talk about it at the time, better meant open source.

Settling on a platform

Straight C? No. Java Swing? Adobe AIR? XULRunner? So many choices, each with advantages and disadvantages. I ended up choosing to work with Mozilla’s XULRunner, which is what makes up the guts of Firefox and Thunderbird. The main advantages of XULRunner were the ability to link in outside code libraries (like GraphicsMagick) and the availability of real multithreading.

Learning the hard way

Since the project began I’ve jumped more than a few hurdles. I documented many of the more exciting problems on my blog (rcrowley.org) as I went. Crash course follows:

Cross-platform XPCOM (a howto)

Working from Mark Finkle’s crash course for Windows got me halfway and some other scattered resources helped to piece together the skeleton of an app that will run on both Windows and OS X. The code has evolved quite a bit since then but this process got me on my feet.

XUL overlays demystified

As apps grow you naturally need to break files up to save your sanity. I never found the crystal clear example of overlays that I wanted, so after I trial-and-errored my way out of the corner, I wrote out this common use case that Uploadr uses in several places.

Threading in Gecko 1.9

I’ve been developing against XULRunner 1.9 (and therefore Gecko 1.9) which are the underpinnings of Firefox 3. The thread primitives made available in 1.9 are much nicer than in Gecko 1.8. Uploadr uses a background thread for event queuing and this is a stripped down example of that same pattern.

MD5 in XULRunner (or Firefox extensions)

The Flickr API requires developers to sign calls with MD5. MD5 is built right into PHP but is conspicuously missing from JavaScript. There are JavaScript implementations out there but (just for kicks), here’s how to take advantage of Mozilla’s built-in hashing library.

Fun with Unicode!

Flickr has, from the very beginning, been an international place. Well before it was available in eight languages, it would accept user input in any language through the magic of UTF-8. Uploadr carries on this tradition but to bridge the gap between Windows’ UTF-16 Unicode support and GraphicsMagick’s non-Unicode-iness, some hacks had to be liberally applied. This code has changed a bit since, so check the latest out in Flickr Subversion.

Video interview with the Yahoo! Developer Network

Jeremy Zawodny from the Yahoo! Developer Network came up to San Francisco to chat about the new Flickr Uploadr a few months back. We talked about the development process, open source and where the future might lead.

The future is here now with an extension API ready for use in version 3.1. Check out the documentation and helloworld extension or check out the full source code and build tools.

Welcome to the Flickr DevBlog!

Congratulations, you’ve found Code.Flickr, our new developer community site, and our new DevBlog.

The DevBlog is being written by the Flickr developers for the larger Flickr development community. We’ll be covering changes to the API (look for a post covering video in the Flickr API soon), cool Flickr related projects we discover, writing tutorials on Flickr API methods, and most anything else which catches our whimsy. If you have something you like covered, you can let us know on [in this thread] in the Flickr API group.

Its also the place to keep up on Flickr;s open source projects like the new open source Uploadr 3.0.

A Quick Tour

Beyond the blog, we’ve also got forums, a ticket tracker and a public SVN repository.

And we’ve got rainbows! And gears!