The photographs.
For some time now I’ve been using Tumblr to power Hypsography, which is Hypsometry’s less serious counterpart. At first I used it as a tumblelog, focusing mainly on art and the environment. Among other things, the tumblelog featured my photography from flickr, pulled in automatically via Tumblr’s cleverness. When I stopped tumbling, the photos kept coming in.
Around that time, I was feeling frustrated about my photos on flickr. My style was becoming increasingly formal and each photograph was requiring more and more time before I felt like posting it. I had lost the ability to be spontaneous and lighthearted with my photos.
On the other hand, I had started snapping quick shots with my cameraphone, and emailing them directly to various friends, documenting little chunks of my life. Thus, the obvious solution: Create a new account on flickr for my mobile photos, and thereby allow myself renewed photographic spontaneity, free my friends from a deluge of time-wasting emails, and breathe a bit of life back into Hypsography.
The new account is at flickr.com/photos/hypsography.
Using Yahoo Pipes to bring together flickr and Tumblr.
In the meantime, Tumblr had been upgraded. The new version brought many cool new features, and improved the reliability of the sometimes funky feed importing, but I don’t really like how photo feeds are imported now. Among other problems, Tumblr resizes all imported photos to a certain fixed size, no matter whether the original photo was larger or smaller than that size. And Tumblr doesn’t link photos from imported flickr feeds to the original photo, which is annoying – Tumblr, in this case, is just serving as an alternate view of my flickr account – and violates the spirit of the flickr terms of service.
I created a Yahoo Pipe to rectify these problems and some of the hardcoded limitations of the flickr feed format. This Pipe fetches a flickr photo feed and cleans it up a bit. The feed it produces:
- Uses the medium size image, not the small;
- Has no hard coded
width and height attributes; - Leaves out the Chris Boone posted a photo note;
- Strips some of the unnecessary HTML;
- Adds the name of the image into the description, formatted to appear as a caption in Tumblr;
- Replaces the author name.
NB: This Pipe is very specifically designed to meet the needs described in this post. Please feel free to use it, or copy it, or just make fun of it, but don’t expect it to really do much for you, unless your needs happen to be scarily similar to mine.
Now I feed that Pipe, in its RSS-producing format, into Tumblr, and set it to parse the feed as Text without titles, and it produces nicely linked, properly-sized, appropriately captioned photos.
On the downside, the photos are no longer being imported into Tumblr, so I lose some of the fanciness that comes along with that. For instance, Hypsography’s archive view now only shows photo titles, without the actual images.
The evilness of Yahoo Pipes.
And it turns out that Yahoo Pipes does some rather nasty things to any feeds that it handles. Namely, all links have rel="nofollow" and target="_blank" added to them. Which verges on evil.
Strangely, I can only find one other person on the web who seems to have noticed this. And, best I can tell, Yahoo never bothers to mention it.
Yahoo Pipes does a lot of magic feed manipulation behind the scenes, actually. Far more, in fact, than they let on. I take advantage of this heavy-handedness in my Pipe, by replacing width and height with the nonsense attribute frogger, which Pipes then promptly removes. But there’s simply no way at all to remove the nofollow and new window additions – no matter what hoops I make the Pipe jump through, Pipes always adds them back in.
Why? This is lame, Yahoo.
Anyway, enjoy the photos.
