Helpful Tree by Ali-Berko

I discovered something weird today. I’ve known for some time that you can get Flickr’s short link for an image if you view > source. It’s usually about 20-odd lines into the page.

I was making a comment on this picture by one of my contacts, Ali-Berko, and wanted to include reference to one of my own images in my comment. So I found my image, looked at the source and got the following:

<link id="shorturl" rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://flic.kr/p/64KX3U">

On the line above this, there was also the canonical link to my page:

<link id="canonicalurl" rel="canonical" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rugbymadgirl/3324308332/">

So far, so good. But then I wanted to post a message to Twitter referencing Ali’s image and went looking for the short url in her page sourcecode. Could I find it? Nope. Just, around line 21:

<link id="canonicalurl" rel="canonical" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/35082628@N06/5543790810/">

Rats, I thought, where’s it gone? I tried looking at other images from my contacts and people I didn’t know. None of the people I know as contacts showed the short url when I looked at the page source. But people I didn’t know had the link in the code. How weird.

It’s only whilst writing this blog post that I’ve actually figured out what was going on… It’s to do with Flickr’s new link appending to tell the page “where you’ve come from”. For instance, if I look at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35082628@N06/5543790810/in/pool-1606325@N22/ and view the source, I just get the long canonical link as before. BUT – backtracking and removing the “/in/pool/…” bit of the URL, http://www.flickr.com/photos/35082628@N06/5543790810/ and hey, presto! the short url is in the code:

<link id="shorturl" rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://flic.kr/p/9rTnSb">

Similar things were happening when I navigated to other shots which had “/in/contacts/” on the end.

Whilst this may be obvious with hindsight, it’s pretty confusing for the user. Flickr’s new page design (full of Ajaxy goodness, apparently), re-writes the URL on the fly (adding or removing the “/in/whatever/…” part depending on which of the “filmstrip” navigation aids you have opened on the RHS of the page. I’d never noticed this before. And that’s the ONLY part of the Photo Details page which appears to change.

So, it’s easy to get tripped up and wonder why the short URL is not visible in the HTML source. Now I know, I’ll be wise to it in future. But I wonder how many other folks are confused by it? (OK, it’s probably just me!).

I also hope to catch up with some posts from recent events – but I’ll probably cheat and make their dates nearer the events in question – so shoot me.

Add 04/07/2008: And then, the server fell over. Big time. All sorts of poop flew in all sorts of directions. So I’ve given up with my old host, and have moved to a new one. Just getting everything migrated over now. The old domain, carolinemockett.com is still in a bit of a mess during the transition – these are where things are going to live very soon:

My personal ramblings: cazmockett.com – Live Now (still a few tiny things to fix)
My webdesign blog: cazmockett.com/blog/ – Live Now
My general photographic site: cazphoto.co.uk – Live
My general photo blog: cazphoto.co.uk/blog/ – Live
My Photo a Day blog: cazphoto.co.uk/2008/ – Live
My Rugby blog: rugbypix.co.uk/blog/ – Live
My Rugby photos: rugbypix.com – Live

I think most things are fixed now, finally!

Lots of my mates are members, and when we’ve got together for socials, we share the pictures via Flickr afterwards. Many tag the images by subject, or use something like Upcoming‘s machine tags: upcoming:event=138806, which refer to the relevent event tag, and can be used by Upcoming’s API to display photos from that event (held on Flickr), in the event page on Upcoming. “Old hat”, some of you may say.

The other thing that regularly happens is that folks tag pictures with people’s names or nicknames. Thus, you can see all the photos of me on Flickr (which have been appropriately tagged), whether they be in my photostream or someone else’s. But here’s where we get the problems.

Some people have particular tags by which they would like to be known, as well as their normal names. Ben (74 results currently) is a case in point, who also goes by the nickname of Kapowaz (56 results, some of them the same). Mark Norman Francis (390 pics) (aka Norm! – 2,324, not all of them him) thinks he’s King Of The Britons (122). Adding all these tags by hand every time gets very tedious.

Now Flickr is very good at letting you organise your pictures, by set, date of upload, geographical position, etc. Their drag and drop interface is easy enough to get your head round with a bit of practice.

So I was thinking, why not let each Flickr user asign their own tags to describe themselves. Then give the Organiser Panel the facility to set which Flickr users appear in the photo, and that user’s tags then get applied automatically. As long as you know that a person in one of your pictures is a Flickr member, you ought to be able to drag their icon onto a picture to set up the tagging, even if they are not in your friends, family or contact lists (these could easily load by default in the appropriate new “choose Flickr member” panel):

[mockup of the "choose member in photo" facility, via the Organiser panel]

Or when you come cross an individual picture in your Flickrstream, you can currently add it to a group via one of the fuction buttons at the top. Similarly, you could have:

[mockup of the "add member in photo" facility, in the Flickrstream view]

I’m sure that would save some donkey work on everyone’s part, and would be quite interesting to follow the reference tag trails around Flickr until you get dizzy.

Comments anyone?

“For those of you going “huh?”, I have been blog tagged, a game started by Jeff Pulver which seems to be spreading quite quickly. The object of the game is to reveal 5 things about you, which most readers probably don’t know, then nominate 5 friends to do the same.”

So, here are my five “surprises”:

• I had my first photograph published when I was 8 years old.
  It was taken when I was seven, at Darnholm, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I used my father’s manual camera (he had set the exposure for me) and managed to pan the shot when the steam train came round a curve under the bridge. Dad regularly submits pictures for publication in preserved railway magazines, and so he sent it along with some of his, and it was published in Modern Railways. So I’m a bit of a closet steam-head as well as nethead.
• I mushed a team of six huskies for a week in the arctic circle.
  We toured northern Sweden and Norway. It was the best trip I’ve ever done, but totally knackering. We ate for England, but expended so much energy, I’d lost 4lbs by the time I came home. My experiences during that week have taught me that teamwork is invaluable, and that plastic is not as good as polystyrene for making loo seats for use in sub-zero temperatures!
• I started learning to play Bass Guitar in 2002.
  I’d wanted to play bass since I was a teenager. Then one day I woke up and thought, “why don’t I just go and buy one, rather than dithering all this time?” Not sure the neighbours were pleased. But my amp doesn’t go up to 11! I started out with a cheap 4-string model, but now have a custom 5-string Iceni Funkmeister, with a purple paint job. I guess I’m a late starter when it comes to rebellion and rock-goddess pretentions, ha ha.
• I’m a PAGB-accredited judge, and regularly visit photographic clubs in East Anglia and North London, to judge their competitions. For some reason, they like my opinions and keep inviting me back.
• Danny Grewcock (England and Bath Lock) once signed my rugby shirt. I was still wearing it at the time. ‘Nuff said.

And I’m going to tag these good folks to reveal themselves: Litlove, Andy Mitchell, Bobble, Prof. John Flood and his RATS, FakeBob.

I’m a web designer and developer with 10 years experience of coding sites – I started with Notepad back in ’96 and have progressed quite a lot since then! My current weapons of choice are:

• Dreamweaver8 – Macrodobe’s latest offering (I’ve been using DW since version 4) which has much better support for CSS layout, XHTML and .Net than its predecessors
• PhotoshopCS – essential for graphics preparation and photographic retouching
• Firefox 1.5 with various plugins, notably:

1. Web Developer Toolbar – turn off css or javascript at the flick of your mouse, outline block level elements, debug scripts, and heaps more.
2. Tidy HTML validator – great as it runs on your localhost and immediately validates any page directly in the browser. Especially useful if you are developing offline or for intranet apps when you can’t get the W3C validator to play ball – its the same validation engine
3. IE Tab – allows you to open tab in Firefox which uses the IE rendering engine – dead handy if you have a pathalogical fear of using Internet Explorer
4. Foxytunes – for keeping you supplied with music, this plugin gives you all the basic controls over your media player of choice in the status bar of the browser, and takes up much less task-bar real estate than the minimized Media Player

• XHTML – usually 1.0 transitional, but sometimes 1.0 strict. Essential if you want to improve your standards-compliance and accessibility for your content
• ASP.NET – I have developed a few sites driven by .net, and have found it to be resonably easy to get to grips with. Examples are:

1. www.cazphoto.co.uk – an online portfolio site for my general photography
2. www.rugbypix.com – specialising in my rugby photography
3. www.johnflood.co.uk – electronic publishing for John Flood, professor of Law & Sociology

• Access2000 – so far, the sites I have developed have not needed the extra scalability required by mySQL or SQL Server, but I do intend to build sites with mySQL in the future.

I’m also looking to develop my PHP skills in the near future.