New rFlickr Ruby Gem

After I started to use the rFlickr gem it didn’t take me long to realize that development of the gem had all but halted, yes it worked, which was more than the original Flickr gem did, but it was still a little bit out of date and in the end, a little bit broken.

In one of my older posts I documented a fix for the gem and provided a download to unzip into your plugins folder, however, with the advent of the wonderful GitHub and it’s marvelous gem support I’ve decided to move the project onto GitHub.

I have preserved the original gem’s GPL license and copied the source code from it’s original repository on RubyForge to a new, public, GitHub repository. In the process of the move I have dropped old code from the project, updated the readme & license information and generally performed a little house-keeping.

You can find the project at: http://github.com/digitalpardoe/rflickr/. You can install the gem using one of the following methods. First involves adding GitHub as a gem source (always a good idea) and installing the gem:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ sudo gem install digitalpardoe-rflickr

The second method it to add the gem as a gem dependency to the environment.rb of your Rails project:

config.gem 'digitalpardoe-rflickr', :lib => 'flickr', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

And run a rake task to install the gem:

$ sudo rake gems:install

Whilst performing the code migration I also added the fix that was documented in my original post and implemented support for the (not so) new ‘farm’ based Flickr URLs for images (which should make things easier to implement).

The future plans for rFlickr include new tests, improved usage examples, updated readme / documentation and implementation of missing API methods, time permitting of course.

Until the readme is updated please refer to the original post for information on how to use rFlickr.

That’s all for now, enjoy the new gem and as they say, if you don’t like it, fork it.

Guess Who's Back

As you may have noticed, it’s been a long time since my last post. There isn’t really any good reason for this. Plenty has happened, I just haven’t got round to writing any of it down.

First off I’d like to mention the website, it went through a fairly radical redesign a few months ago and I mentioned nothing about it. For some reason it’s not in my nature to be happy with what I make hence the many faces and iterations of the website. This website, whilst being my home on the internet, is also the test bed for my RoR programming, you may get tired of hearing about it’s re-designs and re-codes but that’s part of the reason I created it. Anyway, another re-design is coming, this time it’s not visual but all back end, the main difference you will notice is that I am doing away with user accounts and having a more open comment system (I could be shooting myself in the foot with this decision, we’ll have to see how the spam bots take it). To the people that have commented on the blog already, your comments will be preserved and, when I roll out the changes, I intend to reply to all the comments I haven’t yet replied to.

The second thing I wanted to mention, again website related, is my hosting. A good proportion of my posts seem to be apologizing for the downtime of the website. I was actually getting pretty bored of this so decided to, quite literally, take matters into my own hands. The website is now hosted on a virtual private server set up and maintained by me. This again, may be a case where I’ve shot myself in the foot. For those of you interested, the VPS is provided by the wonderful folks at Bytemark Hosting.

Number three. Many of the posts of my website relate to the use of the ‘rflickr’ RubyGem. Development of this gem seems to have been at a stand still for a good while now, I’ve therefore taken the decision to clone it and try to continue development in my spare time. More on this in a later post.

Four. Any of you interested in my photography will have noticed a lack of it over the past few months, it’s not that I haven’t been taking any photographs, it’s just that I’ve not published any. To try and remedy this I uploaded a batch of photos today that have been sitting on my computer for a while. You can take a look at them on the photo page of the website or on my Flickr page.