Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Pictures of You

After a day and a half of trying to get this program to work, I have finally accomplished what seemed the impossible. To begin with, I had to setup a Flickr account. After that, I had to suck down every detail on their website in order to come to the conculsion that "support" was only a tiny breeze of a word thrown out there to be lost among the clutter. What's the point of going to a Wiki if no information is on there? I know it's in Beta, but come on guys!

The steps to get this working:

  1. Set up Flickr account and add pictures

  2. Get a Flicker API code

  3. Download Flapi

  4. Use Flickr's RSS feed to figure out your USER ID and whatever SET ID you want to show up first

  5. Insert these into the config.xml file

  6. Now, if you are hosting this on your own server, then you're cool. Just add the HTML object code for the Flash file and you're up and running. However, if you are, like me, hosted on Blogger, the story is a little trickier. You need to edit the FLA source file Action script to use an absolute reference to your XML file.

  7. This is easy assuming you have Flash 8. I had MX 2004 and had to download the trial in order to fix this. If you want the MX 2004 version, I can send that on your way. You WILL need this action script to compile the movie.



Want to know why you have to use an absolute reference in the AS? Because a new security feature in Flash 7 disallows cross browser data access. There are other workarounds, but they are all under the assumption you have access to the necessary server (which we don't have under Blogspot).

Anyways, check out my initial offering.