cooliris (Piclens) Embeddable 3D Wall

jwalkeroh

cooliris (formerly Piclens) has a new option called the Embeddable 3D Wall. It requires a crossdomain.xml file in the root of the webserver. Is this something we can use, and if so how? It's explained on their site at http://developer.cooliris.com/

darryl

Neat. In theory you should be able to simply replace their feed with one of your feeds with one small change.

My Recent Galleries feed as copied from the link on my home page:

http://darryl.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nicknameRecentPhotos&Data=darryl&format=rss200

The change needed to get around the crossdomain.xml issue:

http://api.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nicknameRecentPhotos&Data=darryl&format=rss200

(I changed darryl to api)

Unfortunately, there appears to be some other incompatibility with SmugMug's RSS feeds and what the Extended Plug-In is expecting to see, as I'm getting a blank screen. :-{

Weirdly enough, the plug-in works with SmugMug's RSS feeds just fine. If you have it installed, you should see that photos in my Recent Photos hack get highlighted with the CoolIris buttons, and if you click on those or the toolbar button, my feed shows up nicely with the plug-in.

jwalkeroh

My guess is that they are not processing the feed correctly (yet) in the Embeddable 3D Wall application. You may recall from several months ago the Piclens plugin didn't work correctly then magically it did. Cooliris must have changed the plugin to process the SmugMug feeds in a SmugMug-specific fashion, and they started working. Recently they finally acknowledged and fixed (at least in development) the problem with Piclens Lite with my nagging encouragement (see this thread: http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=936346&postcount=2). It had to do with them using the image in the feed labelled as "default" (the thumbnail) instead of looking for better size images. I'll tinker with what you discovered / suggested and give them some feedback. I seem to have a developer's ear and they are responding.

What do you think of the concept of the Embeddable 3D Wall?

darryl

Hey JW, thanks for staying on their case. :-}

I dig the wall. Have you seen my SmugTight hack? http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=100780

It's funny, I've spent a fair amount of time hacking on various alternative photo viewers like this, (Airtight, Google Slide Show, etc.), but I honestly don't actually have much need for them.

I suppose if I was in the business of selling my photos, or really trying to show off my pictures to strangers, I suppose I might set up one of these widgets to display photos that I've tagged with the "slideshow" keyword, but I've never really felt like my photos were worth putting into a slide show.

I do like showing my Recent Galleries and Recent Photos. Wish those functions were built-in, instead of requiring hacks.

darryl

JW:

It's not CoolIris's fault, it's not SmugMug's. It's Adobe's. :-}

Flash requires that all offsite images used by a Flash application be hosted on a site that has a crossdomain.xml file that says that it's ok for you to use those images.

Clear as mud? Yeah. The bottom line: SmugMug's RSS feeds contain links to your images in the format of:

http://yoursite.smugmug.com/photos/blahblahblah.jpg

yoursite.smugmug.com does not have a crossdomain.xml file that gives CoolIris permission to display your photos in the embeddable wall.

BUT, api.smugmug.com does have this crossdomain.xml file.

So you'd need some kind of script that would translate a regular SmugMug RSS feed into something that CoolIris can use, right?

Oh, like this:

http://rudebadmood.com/clean/http://dgrin.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nicknameRecentPhotos%26Data=dgrin%26format=rss200%26imageCount=50%26Size=Medium

Example: http://www.rudebadmood.com/darryllatest/index2.html

So, what's happening is that I'm feeding the CoolIris Embeddable Wall the Recent Photos feed from http://dgrin.smugmug.com/ . But I'm passing it through my "clean" filter, http://rudebadmood.com/clean/, which basically changes all occurences of http://<WHATEVER>/photos and replaces it with http://api.smugmug.com/photos, thereby linking to a website with a crossdomain.xml file that will allow the Embeddable Wall to display the photos.

Because of some Flash variable wonkiness I have to change the & (ampersands) to the URL encoding for ampersands, %26. But once you've done that, voila, it works!

darryl

Feh - embedding works, but not on a SmugMug page because of the *&(&!*@#$ rewriting of special characters that SmugMug does to <html> that's in a Bio box or Gallery Description. Ok, time to [post=1038582]file a bug[/post] about that.