Yuan.CC Web Experiments

Ok, it's done. Now the main window will display popular tags with variant sizes and with all tags below.

Posted by CK at 03:57 PM | Permalink |

To get a better using experience, I moved the nagivating box of photostream from the photo window to left. So the div boxes of photo/description/navigation won't float around when clicking prev/next link.

Posted by CK at 01:53 AM | Permalink |

LfVr has been changed to use Google Maps API instead of maps hacking.

Posted by CK at 02:58 AM | Permalink |

I am inspired by the topic of Recent comments in photostream in Flickr Hack group. The smart GM user script takes flickr RSS feeds to get the recent comments on one's photos. Although flickr API doesn't have anything about comments, we can get it from RSS feeds.

So I add a feature to LfVr to get recent comments of a user. You can see a new box called "Comments" on the left side. But the feed gives only the latest 10 comments.

FYI, the feed URL is "http://www.flickr.com/recent_comments_feed.gne?id=your_nsid&format=rss_200"

Posted by CK at 08:29 PM | Permalink |

This idea has been in my mind for a while. Now LfVr has some traditional photostreams such as recent photos, favorites, contact's photos, everyone's photos, group pool photos, tag search photos, and photo sets.

I'll add some special photostreams. e.g. geotagged photos of a user, photos that other users were viewing...

Posted by CK at 03:02 AM | Permalink |

The reason I wrote LfVr is to browser and enjoy so many wonderful photos in the world "FAST". So the response time is my first priority. LfVr uses text ony, no image banners, logo, or image buttons.

When you are surfing these photos, LfVr won't retrieve unnecessary data from flickr server. If you don't mind not to see the photo details, you can close the "photo information" so LfVr will not call API to get photo info.

I encourage to install Greasemonkey user script, so you can jump to LfVr from flickr anytime.

Use photo sets as far as possible. Prevent to use tag search or click on tag directly. The response of Flickr tag search is very slow.

There are many ways to jump to other's photostream. You can find new users by search, favorites, contacts, or at least everyone's photo. All photostreams you visit will be cached by LfVr, but will be clean when you switch to a new user.

I hope LfVr can satisfy all of you.

Posted by CK at 12:43 AM | Permalink |

FlickrJS has released version 0.6, which support multiple calls simultaneously. Thus the web app can operate faster than before.

The release is mainly internal structure changes. No new feature is added, but some minor bugs were fixed. User won't see anything new but a better performance.

BTW, the GMap feature is broken now. Because Google uses a new gmap js library. I'll try to fixed it later.

Continue reading "LfVr: v1.6 is released" »

Posted by CK at 05:14 PM | Permalink |

With the cache mechanism built in the flickr API proxy, users can benefit from it when surfing photos in flickr. However, the default cache expiration is not suitable for each flickr API call.
For example,
-- "flickr.people.findByUsername" can lookup a user's nsid, but the nsid of a user will almost never be changed. So the result of this API should never be expired.
-- "flickr.photos.getRecent" is to get the recent photos of everyone, I set its expiration as 1 hour.
-- "flickr.people.getInfo" is to get info of a user, I give it a longer expiration, 5 days.

Continue reading "Inside the LfVr - cache improvement" »

Posted by CK at 01:46 AM | Permalink |

LfVr now supports the path in URL as parameters like flickr. For example, if the flickr URL is

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckyuan/

The corresponding URL to LfVr is

http://webdev.yuan.cc/lfvr/photos/ckyuan/

So you can have a permament URL of your own flickr photos at LfVr. Additionally, I wrote a Greasemonkey user script for Flickr to switch current flickr page to LfVr.

You can get the script here lfvr.user.js. After installation, you will see there is a link "Lite Viewer" appearing beside link "Invite" at the top of the flickr page.

Posted by CK at 10:18 PM | Permalink |

New feature added.

If the photo is geotagged, the LfVr can display Google Map according to the lat/lon information of the photo.

If you don't know anything about "geotagged", visit Geobloggers to see what it is.

Two screenshots are already posted to the group photo pool.

Posted by CK at 10:22 PM | Permalink |

I've added a Preferences page to save user's browsing preferences. Current options are:

1. Cache enable or not.
2. Startup page.
3. Default photo size for browsing.

See the group photo spool for a screenshot.

Continue reading "LfVr: Preferences added" »

Posted by CK at 02:39 PM | Permalink |

I am thinking how to integrate LfVr and Flickr official site. Currently each page of LfVr will generate a corresponding link to flickr.
I plan to write a Greasemonkey user script to switch between LfVr and flickr back and forth. But first of all, LfVr has to take outside parameters from URL.

Posted by CK at 08:34 PM | Permalink |

1. Link directly to a user's photos at the Lightweight Flickr Viewer by going to a url like flickr.yuan.cc/lfvr/chicagosage or flickr.yuan.cc/lfvr/user/chicagosage (ChicagoSage)
2. Display the photos in chronological order or reverse-chronological (GustavoG)
3. Background color preferences (Spigoo)
4. Browse with larger sizes (Spigoo)
5. Add a user preferences page. Current potential options are cache enable/disable, background color, loading everyone photos at starup, default borwse size of photos (me)
6. Album maker featuer. (for replacing old flickr album maker)

Posted by CK at 06:55 PM | Permalink |