Tag: crossroads Posts

A long time ago I wrote that I had started to try and turn the Crossroads Flickr plugin into a full-featured stock photography plugin. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on it in the last six months, but finally sat down last night to start to hack on it a bit more. I’m thankful to say that I’ve finally put most of the pieces together such that I now have a full featured stock photography section on my website powered almost exclusively by Flickr. If you’d like to browse around, I suggest you head over to Leslie Feist gallery and start there. There is still a ton of room to improve upon things, but most of the larger pieces are now in place. The prices are set based on available Flickr sizes, and are priced according to image megapixels. I need to go through my archives and re-upload […]

A few years ago I sat down to write my very first WordPress plugin, and ended up writing Crossroads. My goal at the time was to integrate Flickr comments into the normal comments on my blog, which was something I ultimately did. Unfortunately though, some of the limitations of the Flickr API made that feature fairly slow to use, and so it’s something I ditched on my own blog a long time ago. A few days ago I sat down and started working on version 2.0. It’s a 100% complete rewrite, which given the state of the old code is definitely something that’s going to improve it. I’m writing it with both Flickr and SmugMug in mind, so it will most definitely support both out of the box. I’m also ditching all the old prototype concepts and switching it entirely to jQuery. I’m still prototyping several concepts, and still don’t […]

About six months ago I released the Crossroads wordpress plugin. I haven’t really kept up to date with the usage statistics for it, but today I stumbled upon them. There are currently 370 authenticated users, generating around 20,000 API calls a day to Flickr. Not bad.

Last week, John got a hold of me on iChat and let me know about a WordPress plugin competition. Since I have written a few of them, I thought I might as well enter the Crossroads Flickr plugin into the competition. While the contest winners haven’t been announced yet, they have announced all the participants over at one of the sites. If you are a user of the plugin, head on over and give it an honest rating.

I’ve really been trying hard to get a new release of Crossroads out for quite some time, but with my job at work, it’s just so hard to find a few hours to spare these days. That being said, I’ve up-reved the plugin to version 2.0, and am making the changes I’ve done available as a download. This is an early alpha, and for sure it has a few bugs, so please don’t expect it to be perfect. Compared to version 1.0, here are some changes: Added support for GreyBox image gallery Added support for HighSlide JS image gallery Fixed a few changes with how the scripts were loaded to improve compatibility Added more adminstration options Removed Flickr comments from posts, as these were very slow — you can re-enable them via the admin panel if you want The original plugin page for Crossroads can be found here, and it […]

A few days ago, Flickr gave me the not-so-subtle warning that my account was about to expire. Since I’ve had a pro-Flickr account for a full year now, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the service so far. Flickr sort of came to the limelight about 18-24 months ago as one of the leading websites that had real Web 2.0 technology. If you haven’t been there you should definitely check it out. Most of the website utilizes Ajax and as you use it, sometimes it feels more like an application than a mere website, and that was really one of their original selling points. Most people would probably be surprised to learn that they were once a Vancouver company. I actually popped by their office before (located in a small Yaletown room, next to UBVideo) they were acquired by Yahoo. I’m honestly not too sure […]

Well, it’s only been a little over a week since I open sourced the plugin used on this website. So far, based on the flickr API key statistics, it looks like 25 people are using it, which is pretty cool. A couple of people have emailed me a few suggestions, so I’m gonna try to release a new version soon incorporating some of them. If you are using it, then drop me a line and let me know!

I finally cleaned up the main plugin for this website enough that I’m ready to release it to whoever wants to test it out. You can read about it and download it from the Crossroads Page. Basically all the flickr pieces on this website are handled by that plugin, so if you like what you see on this website, then feel free to test it on yours. I still have a ton of work to do on it, mainly in the speed optimization area, but I figured it’s good enough now for some people to test out. Enjoy.