houbi.com / blog

New to this blog: a flash-based banner on top displaying photo’s from my flickr-photostream. It’s on the homepage and on the archive page for this post (so if you don’t see it right now head over there…

Was tempted into making this after reading on Mashable about a Belgian startup called Positiveluck, who just launched this service called Slideoo (or is it Slide∞ ?).

Writing a tutorial for this webservice would be quite simple:

1. Go to slideoo.com

2. enter a Flickr username (Preferably your own, if you don’t want to go into lengthy arguments with Flickr-users about whether or not an API can steal data)
3. choose between a photoset or the photostream (newest photos on top) of that user
4. Customize if you want small, thumbnail, medium or large images, and set options for width and the number of pictures to fetch)
5. Hit “Create your Slideoo”.

Slideoo then quickly compiles the images into a horizontally scrolling flash-movie. It also provides you with the embed code to integrate your slideshow into the platform of your choice (Typepad, Myspace, Facebook, Blogger … most popular social networks and major blog platforms are represented through the magic of the cool widget-distribution network Gigya.

Cool, ain’t it? It ain’t eyepopping as other flickr-mashups as e.g. Tiltviewer, but I bet that will make you grow tired of it less quickly.

There is still room for improvement in the service, certainly:
The top functionality wanted would be to have a “random” function, so that on each reload the displayed photos would be different.
Another one is to distribute the flash-file, as integrating the thing on your blog now risks slowing down your site in two ways: the flickr-api has got to respond (but that’s taken care of by internet-giant Yahoo), ànd slideoo has got to be able to handle the traffic.
And third: I’m sure some smart kid could write this in javascript + ajax instead of Flash, which could render it more accessible.