A handful of generally experimental projects built for various reasons. Some are more functional than others.
I’m slowly moving the code and open sourcing the code for these over on github, links will be added when relevant.
The Photo1024 Blog
A traditional photo blog of Creative Commons photos, updated automatically on a daily basis.
The system is built using Flickr Pandas’ (yes really) getPhotos API method and a Google App Engine app that polls it once per minute. Each poll stores the information about all the Creative Commons Licences photos it finds for review.
The same App then uses xml-rpc to post selected photos to Blogger throughout the day. The photos are selected every few days by me reviewing the pool of photos, marking which ones are “keepers”.
Hipstamaticatron
A simple photo sampler for viewing photos taken with the Hipstamatic iPhone app, with extra filtering on film, lens and flash types. Also a test of small HTML5, CSS3 and jquery bits and bobs (transformations, custom fonts and so on).
The Long Good Read
A blog setup to highlight longer articles from the Guardian, designed specifically so that people can sync up various offline readers, iPad, Android, iPhone etc. and have something interesting to read when off-grid.
Much like the photo1024 blog the backend is powered by APIs. In this case the Guardian Zeitgeist is scanned for articles which are then checked for word length and “hotness”. Articles above a set word count are placed into a review queue where they are approved or rejected.
Approved articles are then queued up for automatic posting to the main blog, one at 4am so people can sync up and have something to read on the way to work. One at 4pm to give people something to read on the way back home.