Twitterfeed posts Flickr photos to Twitter

While writing up my experience testing the FlickrToTwitter service, I noticed that Ouriel Ohayon, a French-Israel venture capitalist and blogger whom I follow on Twitter, had sent a photo-tweet using Twitterfeed.

And that got me thinking. Flickr, after all, automatically creates RSS feeds for each tag that you specify in your Flickr photostream. I realized then that it should be a simple matter to grab whatever RSS feed you want to share and send it to Twitter!

So I looked at the Flickr page for my photos that are tagged with "4twit," grabbed the Flickr RSS feed which is located at the bottom of that page, and fed it to my Twitterfeed account.

I set Twitterfeed to post titles only, and asked it to include a link to the original photo. Then I waited for the requisite 30 minutes to pass until Twitterfeed checks the newly added feed.

The result: SUCCESS!!

And by golly, that was so much easier than I expected, since this approach has far less moving parts, plus the Twitterfeed platform was designed to do exactly this. I feel like kicking myself for not thinking of it on my own.

Thanks for the idea, Ouriel!

Hardy Har Arrrrrr!

Got today's biggest laugh when I saw Flickr's new language selection: "Arrr!"

That's a really clever bit of marketing. Not only does it showcase Flickr's multi-language support while celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day... it also prompts people like me to talk about the site!


Click on the image for a larger view of Flickr's Arrr!

Hat tip to Picocool for pointing out that you switch languages in the footer of Flickr's page.

Gorgeous

Love the photos that Flickr has picked for their 3rd anniversary benefit auction from amongst all the folks who contributed their pictures.

I find these two photos particularly lovely (click any image to visit its original Flickr page).


by Zachstern. North Potomac, Maryland


by Sixsteps. High Park, Toronto

Kinda awakens what little wanderlust there is in my system. hehe.

Recent Sidebar Updates

Made a couple of updates to my blog's sidebar this week.

I updated the Twitter widget so it now displays the three most recent 'tweets' instead of just one. Also changed the display order somewhat by putting the time before the text. It was fairly easy to do, thanks to this great blogpost from Jon Aquino, which I found via Twitter's FAQs.

What I'd love to do eventually is to restyle the display to look like the Twitter widget in Brad Kellett's blog, Pantsland. He groups his entries by day and displays the actual time, rather than the relative time after each text blurb.

Also added a Google Reader widget to the sidebar, under 'Recent Reads'. This widget displays items that I've opted to 'share' while reading through my various RSS subscriptions using Google Reader.

It does not yet look quite as nice as I'd like... but I'm fairly confident I can prettify it once I've got some time on my hands, since it just takes a bit of CSS.

I can't help but feel happy when I look at the sidebar now, because these two recent changes really complement my existing Flickr widget, which displays my most recent public photos.

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Update - Feb 16:
Finally have my 'Recent Reads' widget styled, thanks to bits of CSS from the Google Reader Blog.

New Flickr Badge

It took a bit of experimentation, but I was finally able to update my Flickr badge today. I had gotten a bit tired of the old Flash-based badge, and wanted to do something a little more fun.

Thanks to a bit of web surfing, I found Veerle's wonderful blogpost that describes how she tweaked the generic Flickr html badge code so that it would display four Flickr images in a 2-by-2 grid.

I had wanted to display six images in a 2-by-3 grid, so her CSS/XHTML code was exactly what I needed.

Now that the badge is there and displayed in a fairly prominent spot on my sidebar, I guess I'll need to upload new photos more often.