Lirae.co.uk

I wanted to 'pull' my recent Flickr photos^{^} and display them on my site. All of the scripts I found were actually WordPress (or other blogging tools) plugins.

I sort of gave up on the idea until last night, when I joined Twitter^{^}; I wanted to display my twitters on my site. I found a JavaScript snippet that would do it for me but it kept killing Internet Explorer, so I kept looking around and found a script called TwitBlog^{^}.

TwitBlog requires Magpie RSS^{^} to be installed; the script is actually pulling your Twitters from the RSS feed and displaying it in HTML format and the RSS feed is parsed with Magpie RSS.

I then Googled 'flickr rss parser' and came across a script called GetFlickrPHP^{^}, which did the whole 'display in HTML format' thing for me.

To get it working, I had to find my Flickr ID^{^} and then modify the variables, near the top of the script. This is what my variables are set to (the Magpie RSS paths are wrong on purpose though ):

# set what type of tag you're pulling from flickr
# 0 = tag; 1 = user; 2 = group pool
$tagtype = 1;

# set the tag to pull from flickr (tag, user or group pool)
# example: "cats", "44124462494@N01", "circle"
$tag = "46498153@N00";

# set default value for number of pictures to show
# (flickr show maximum of 10 photos in feed)
$num_items = 9;

# set to true to use medium pics, otherwise it uses small
$mediumPics = false;

# set location of Magpie RSS files
# require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');
# require_once('magpierss/rss_utils.inc');
require_once('/home/user/public_html/magpierss_installed/rss_fetch.inc');
require_once('/home/user/public_html/magpierss_installed/rss_utils.inc');

# use image cache & set location
$useImageCache = false;
$cachePath="http://www.thebishop.net/news/cache/";
$fullPath="/home/tbishop61/www/news/cache/";

To install Magpie RSS: download the files, upload to your server and use your cPanel to extract the files, then point the variables in the scripts (that need Magpie RSS) to the paths where it's installed.

Easy! I just wish someone had done this before me and talked about it!