A couple of weeks ago, I opened up my latest Flickr project to the world. Quietly announced with just a single post to Twitter, my Flickr Badge Maker was made available. I planned to follow that announcement up with a blog post, but real life intervened and slowed things down a little. Still, here we are, at last. A couple of weeks later than I’d expected, but so it goes.
It all started when I wanted to display my latest Flickr photos across the top of this blog. There weren’t any ready made scripts out that that did what I wanted, so I knocked up one of my own. Over the following weeks, a couple of people asked me about doing something similar on their own sites, and so I decided to take my badge code and turn it into something a little more generic so that people could easily create their own Flickr badges.
There were a few things I wanted to achieve here:
- It should be completely straightforward for non-technical users to create a badge and embed it into their web site
- It should work ‘out of the box’ with no complicated set-up or styling needed
- It should be easy to re-style to fit pretty much any page design
So, the Badge Maker has a simple user-interface to allow you to create your badge:
Once you’ve authenticated on Flickr, you can then choose whether the badge will display photos from your photostream, from one of your sets, from one of your groups or from one of your galleries. All you do then, is set a couple of options such as the number of photos you want the badge to display, and which layout style you would like, and you’re done.
| My Photostream | My Hasselblad Set |
|---|---|
| The Utata Group | My Cats Gallery |
The pre-canned styles available are somewhat basic and limited – I’m a software writer, not a designer – but they should be good enough to get people started. And if you want more control, then you can write your own CSS to display the badge however you like – details on how to do this are in the FAQ.
In order to help maintain good performance and to play nice with the Flickr API, the badge contents are cached for a little while, so you won’t necessarily notice any changes to the contents immediately. The badges are currently cached for twenty minutes, although I might make that longer if it grows significantly in popularity.
If you want to have a play, you can find the Badge Maker here.