Making FlickrRSS Work for Me
Filed Under: Javascript, Top Post
My goal with this new site is to not only to design a very clean, beautiful site, but to also showcase some of the nice effects that are possible with javascript libraries like jQuery (and teach myself how to effectively use them in the process). Last night, I worked for over 6 hours simply getting one small section of the front page to work the way that I want it to. My rule for myself was simple: I would accept no compromise from the design that I drew in Photoshop–unless IE 6 and its crappy rendering forced me to, which it did on the horizontal tab navigation. Bad browser! BAD! No biscuit.
So, if it’s still working, you should see a big image from flickr. You hover over that image, and you should see the image title and the description from flickr slide up onto the image, and if you mouse-off, the details will float back down.
The animation and hover effect is created with jQuery and a plugin for jQuery called hoverIntent. I had to add hoverIntent because I wanted a delay between mousing off the image and the slide-down. Doing this part, including writing the CSS and javascript, was actually only about an hour’s worth of coding at the most, and the only reason it took that long was because I screwed up including the script, and then I wanted that delay and had to go find out how to do that with hoverIntent.
Where things really got sticky was figuring out how to get the data from Flickr onto my page.
Here’s why: there are basically two plugins that you can use with WordPress to talk to Flickr. Unfortunately, neither one did exactly what I wanted. After playing with Falbum and FlickrRSS, I decided FlickrRSS was going to be the easiest for me to beat into submission. Important caveat: WordPress runs on PHP. I’ve worked with PHP off and on for the last 8 years, but I have never really learned it. I am NOT a programmer–I am a designer. A programmer probably could have written the code to do what I wanted to do here in about an hour. If a client had asked me to do this kind of modification, I would have contracted out the work to an expert. But I’m cheap and I took it as a learning opportunity, so I beat my head on it instead. So, moving on:
The first problem I had was that by default, FlickrRSS could display images, but had no options for displaying the title of the image and the description from flickr. My design plans called for this data. So first, I had to dig around in the Flickr API, look through the different feed types ,and look at the source code of my flickr RSS feed to see if it provided what I needed. It did, but unfortunately, the area of the feed that provided that also provided a damned “JeremyT has posted a photo:” and an img tag including the image before even running the description. This information needed to be stripped. It was pretty easy for me to figure out how to write the PHP to start displaying that information, and even style it. But I needed to figure out how to take that information and strip out the img tag and the “JeremyT has posted a photo:” string. This took me down the rabbit hole of PHP functions and operators and all a bunch of stuff that I understand at a basic level due to all the work I’ve put into Actionscript at the day job. Eventually, through Google-fu, I found str_replace, and that worked fine. There’s probably a better function, but I couldn’t find it. I also used striptags, and provided a list of tags that were okay. Paragraph, bold, italics, and so on.
I describe it, and it sounds so easy, but the constant tweaking, the uploading and testing, then testing again–that’s what too so long. And my solution involved hacking the code in such a way that my desired effect is going to happen for every image I try and display anywhere. I will take advantage of this and provide more popups, or I’ll use CSS to hide that information. I just need to modify some IDs into classes and it’ll be more flexible.
So, one technical hurdle overcome–three hundred to go! God help me, this program stuff is actually kind of fun. JQuery is especially cool.
Why Giant Mecha Robots Are Totally Awesome
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Top Post
Sci-fi rant: Why giant mecha robots are stupid | Geekend | TechRepublic.com
Jay Garmon has written a very well thought-out article on why giant mecha robots are stupid and will never work. I am afraid I must provide a counter to this article. Giant mecha robots are also totally awesome, and I think he’s wrong. Here’s why:
1. Collateral damage.
Okay, so yeah, it’s hard to make robots that can walk bipedally. They fall over a lot. That’s part of the charm! Who wants a giant robot that doesn’t smash everything in it’s path? Tanks can roll over cars and stuff, but can they shove other tanks so that they go flying through the air, crashing into skyscrapers and causing massive gasline explosions everywhere? No? Tanks are stupid.
2. Giant energy swords are awesome.
Robot hands exist on giant mecha so that they can wield giant energy swords. Do you think lightsabers are cool? Of course you do. A four story energy sword is like, 400 times more awesome than a lightsaber. That alone is enough reason for me to have giant mecha hands. However, there is one other thing that Jay Garmon has overlooked here. If giant mecha robots did not have all-purpose hands, they could not rescue kittens from trees. You are not going to build a special kitten-rescuing attachment for a mecha. That would just be silly.
3. Giant Mecha Robots make cool sounds.
If I could fill my iPod with just the sounds of giant mecha robots walking around and shooting up shit, that is all I would ever listen to. And millions of people just like me would do the same. The music industry would collapse. Thanks to giant mecha robots. Bonus!
4. Giant Mecha robots are our only defense against the Daikaiju threat.
What else are we going to build to protect us from giant monsters? As the recent Daikaiju documentary Cloverfield demonstrates, conventional military weaponry is not sufficient to defend our citizens against the menace of giant monsters that rise up from the sea. As to the cost? $725 million is a small price to pay to prevent some damage to New York City. I say some damage of course, because it is inevitable that in fending off the beast, the giant mecha robots will do considerable damage itself. But sometimes you have to burn the village to save it.
5. Giant Mecha battles will be cooler than any other sport ever made.
Giant mecha wars will be televised. All the violence of Ultimate Fighting combined with the metal-on-metal crunching of demolition derby. Sports bars will turn to the Giant Mecha Battles channel and throw away the remote. All other sports will fall before the juggernaut of Giant Mecha Robot Wars!
6. Giant Mecha Robots when damaged explode.
Some giant robots will undoubtedly be powered by nuclear reactors. I think you know what that means. Explosions are totally awesome. If you cannot agree to this, you should stop reading my blog.So there it is. Six very good reasons why, despite the cost and technical difficulties, we will build mecha robots. Because they’re totally awesome should be the only reason we make anything at all.
This post brought to you by the Infernocrusher Movement.
A CC-Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Top Post
A CC-Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”
I slept very badly last night, and had a migraine to end all migraines. I’m slowly recovering this morning. I recently woke up and, along with this lingering headache, I found I have an overwhelming desire to give something away.
I’ve posted a story online under a Creative Commons license. It’s about death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope. A lot of it really happened. Some of it did not. It’s so intensely personal that I can’t bear to receive another rejection calling it “slight” or anything else, so here it is, posted for anyone to read and call “slight” or anything else they want to call it. What is important to me is that maybe someone reads it who is going through something similar and feels a little less alone. Writing it sure helped me. But your milage may vary.
With that said, here’s the link to the story. Share it as you see fit.
Babe, I’m Going to Leave You
An Interview Regarding Dr. Roundbottom
Filed Under: My Writing, Photography, Top Post, Writing Process
K. Tempest Bradford has interviewed me for Fantasy magazine about my Dr. Roundbottom project. The interview is now live here.
K. Tempest Bradford: Did the initial inspiration for Dr. Roundbottom start with the photography or with the story?
Jeremiah Tolbert: The work started specifically in photography. I had an opportunity after a week of rain to go out and take some pictures of mushrooms. I started playing with some of the images in post, and ended up creating my most popular photograph, the eyeball mushroom. From there, I started writing flash fiction around the photography, and Dr. Roundbottom was born.
K. Tempest Bradford: Did the initial inspiration for Dr. Roundbottom start with the photography or with the story?
Jeremiah Tolbert: The work started specifically in photography. I had an opportunity after a week of rain to go out and take some pictures of mushrooms. I started playing with some of the images in post, and ended up creating my most popular photograph, the eyeball mushroom. From there, I started writing flash fiction around the photography, and Dr. Roundbottom was born.
Tempest: How does a typical Roundbottom image come about?
Jeremiah: I’m pretty strongly limited by my own surroundings and what I have the capacity to photograph myself. Some of them come from experiments in photographic techniques that I want to try out, and some of them come from specific images that I conceive and then try and photograph. Then some just come about as happy discoveries of odd things as I explore my surroundings with camera in hand.
For instance, there are not a lot of people in the Roundbottom photographs at this point because of my limited budget and access to period costumes. Luckily, I have leads on some costuming resources, so that will change with time as I do more storylines for the project. Also, my wife is hard at work sewing a more formal Roundbottom costume for myself, and a costume for a female character that’s part of the narrative.
