A couple of years ago I set up a Flickr photo gallery on Sibylle’s studio site. I had seen nettuts tutorial on creating a slick Flickr gallery with SimplePie.
SimplePie is an RSS feed reader, and the tutorial showed how to incorporate it into your site, along with some JQuery JavaScript and the Thickbox style sheet, to create a photo gallery. Once I had the gallery working all Sibylle had to do was add or remove photos from a particular set on her Flickr account to alter the pictures on her website. It seemed like a good solution at the time but has proven to be cumbersome in actual use.
Today, quite by happenstance I observed Jon Hicks ask on Twitter about a “clean-looking non-Flash way of embedding a Flickr set into a blog post. Much to my delight he soon posted the best response.
Flickrshow produces a very elegant slide show using a Flickr set. There’s a single JavaScript file to link to (or download and refer to on your own host), and a few lines of script to embed in your site to produce the gallery. Compared the RSS-feed method I had used before Flickrshow is lightweight and dirt-simple to setup and use.
It only took me about 5 minutes to cobble together a new photo gallery page for Sibylle’s site use Flickrshow. Sibylle was delighted with the appearance and so this evening I made the switch. You can see it in action for yourself.
Even after all the years I’ve been online I am still astounded by how quickly and completely a single reference to something can change your life.