• Favikon
  Supersimple way to create a favicon for your site (the little icon that lands up in the address bar, bookmarks etc…).
• Flickr Hits Two Billion Photo Uploads
  That’s 2.000.000.000 photos! A lot of zeroes, indeed… Too bad the 2 billionth image wasn’t a totally inappropriate one … The photo in question was of a tree trunk. There are now “34,057 results for photos matching tree and trunk” on flickr.
• Ask500People – World Opinion While You Watch.
  Nice implementation of a world poll: if you have a question for the world, formulate it, watch it go up in the queue, and watch the votes come live in on a google map. Not very scientific, but could still be useful … My question: “Which site wins the Clickx-election to “site van het jaar”, and why should anyone care?” is in it. Not.

• Change the appearance of stacks on OS.X Leopard
  Kindly translated from a Japanese site. My Leopard-cd still hasn’t arrived, so can’t try it out yet…
• Read it Later – Firefox Extension BETA
  Still a bit rough around the edges, but this could be a very cool extension. For now I use “google notebook” for this kind of stuff…
• Why is Firefox slow? Memory fragmentation
• Disabling Deprecated HTML Using CSS
  This won’t get you clean (x)html, but it will puzzle unaware users of a clean CMS greatly: why the heck does my <font color=”red”> blinking marquee-tag doesn’t work anymore???
• bookr
  Ultrafast way to publish a bunch of photo’s into a flash booklet, to send off to friends, blog or into a distant future galaxy.

Besides being a great photo gallery site, Flickr offers also a lot of tools for photo management, storage, external use through the API …. Sometimes these two uses collide.

Case in point: the photostream. This is a blog-like representation of your photos, newest to oldest, and it is the default view on your photo collection for someone visiting your profile on Flickr. Now say you want to blog about a screenshot or post ten slightly different versions of a photo to discuss them on a photoforum. Then the photostream suddenly gets pretty uninteresting.

This had me puzzled for a while, wondering if a Flickr-Pro-account would be the right tool for me. Until I found out there IS a (non-obvious) way to get rid of a photo from your photostream. Sort of.

Go to “Organize“and then select your photo (or a batch of photos) from the bottom list. The obvious choice then would be to click “Edit Dates”. This however only acts on the “date taken” of the photo, leaving it on top of the photostream…
Instead choose “Edit Photos” and then “Title, Description and tags“. In the window that opens there is another “Dates” option, and this one gives you the possibility to change both the “date taken” and the “date uploaded”.

Choose a date in the past for “date uploaded” and voilà: the picture is out of the photostream, yet still available (e.g. for blogging it, posting it to a forum etc…). Unlike a “replace” of a photo, this operation doesn’t change the file location…

The “sort of” from the third paragraph is of course also true: the photo with the changed date is still in the photostream, just in a different place. Changing it a few seconds back allows you to change the order of the photostream, changing it to a date in the past moves it even further back. The possibility that a visitor looking at your photo collection gets puzzled by a photo you uploaded just for a photo correction, a blog post and so on, just has become much smaller.

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.