Flickr adds people-tagging, finally joins the bandwagon
A feature that many in the Flickr community have been requesting for years has finally been implemented.
What?! No @ sign in front of the names??
Flickr badges, awards, invites and other nasty stuff
If you use Flickr, you've probably encountered images, flashing GIFs and badges in people's comments:
Cheap. Nasty. Whatever you'd like to call it, they're an eye-sore. I delete them whenever I see them on my photos.
Then I ran into this:
I have to admit, that's the funniest Flickr group I've ever seen - with a badge to match.
You can view the group here: Giant T-Rex Group
Flickr comment generator
For anyone that's tired of coming up with comments, let the generator do the work for you:
If you would like me to add more comments to the database, comment here or contact me.
Flickr adds live-search to contact list
I remember asking them for this, and now they've implemented it. Definitely helps with finding contacts instead of having to browse through pages and pages of people.
Sweet!
Use Google Reader to find out rough estimate of RSS subscribers
RSS has been becoming an increasingly popular part of Web-based applications and services. For example, Flickr provides an RSS for your photo-stream and even a user's favourites.
Many webmasters will know just how useful FeedBurner can be to get an accurate picture of their subscribers. Using FeedBurner means that you'll have to display a specific-to-you FeedBurner address so that it can gather statistics (e.g. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RaminHossaini) You can't really use FeedBurner though for services like Flickr, because you have no real control of what the RSS-feed-address displayed to users on your Flickr page is (unless of course, you're advertising your RSS feed on a website of your own). The "hack" described below could help:
First, start out by subscribing to the RSS feed:
Next, click on the feed to view it then click on the "show details" link in the top-right corner:
You can then see how many people are using Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed:
This would obviously only be part of your subscriber-base. If you're happy with just approximating it, have a look at how much of a market share Google Reader has (I've looked at a couple of statistics and it seems to be roughly 60% at the moment) and use that to calculate the unknown number of subscribers.
Finding new photos on Flickr (almost effortlessly)
There are multiple ways of finding/exploring/discovering new great photos on Flickr - joining interesting groups, adding tons of contacts, or visiting Flickr-Explore.
I feel like Flickr-Explore has the same people in it all the time (with exceptions here-and-there). Basically, if you're a Flickr celebrity and have a couple thousand people following your photos, you stand a good chance of getting a photo of your "cute" cat or a "artistic" white-wall on Explore.
There are lots of little-known users that have great photos. One way I try to find these people is by looking at what people are "Fave"-ing. You can dig even deeper by picking a couple of those faves, then looking at their personal faves, and so-on.
While doing this the other day, I noticed that Flickr allows you to subscribe to someone's fave-feed. First browse to the user's favorites:
Then click on the feed link below the faves:
Next, subscribe to the feed in an RSS reader (like Google Reader, Netvibes or Outlook)
If you subscribe to a couple of these feeds, you'll have other people doing the hard-work of finding photos for you. This works especially well if you subscribe to people that are on Flickr all the time, but Fave photos relatively selectively.
Yes, it is a lazy approach - but it's just another way of making the most out of Flickr.
Automatically insert rubbish Flickr-comments with Flickr-comment-generator
I created an AJAX application that generates somewhat generic comments for Flickr. But I soon realised that people would not use it unless it was completely simple and automated.
That's where GreaseMonkey comes into action. I've created a GreaseMonkey script that automatically retrieves a random flickr-comment and places it into the comment text-field of a picture. You get to choose whether you would like to publish the comment or not.
If you notice any bugs in the script, or any improvements I can make to the script - please let know.
Go to Flickr-Comment generator
Or download the script directly