Lepolt.com » code http://www.lepolt.com/blog Random stuff from my head to your computer Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:13:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 My First Try at a WordPress Plugin http://www.lepolt.com/blog/2008/11/15/my-first-try-at-a-wordpress-plugin/ http://www.lepolt.com/blog/2008/11/15/my-first-try-at-a-wordpress-plugin/#comments Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:30:03 +0000 Jonathan http://www.lepolt.com/blog/?p=149 In a previous post I talked about how I could never seem to get my photo albums to fit into my webpage templates quite the way I wanted to…so I ended up writing my own PHP script that tapped into my Picasa Web Albums to do that for me.

Since then I decided to take it a step further and write a WordPress plugin that did exactly the same thing…only was much easier for novice users to integrate in their webpages.

The result, Get Picasa Albums. Available here:

So, if anyone out there is looking for some way to integrate their Picasa Web Albums into their WordPress site, this should help. Enjoy!

See the plugin used in action here

]]> http://www.lepolt.com/blog/2008/11/15/my-first-try-at-a-wordpress-plugin/feed/ 3 Integrating Picasa Web Albums Into my Site with PHP http://www.lepolt.com/blog/2008/10/28/integrating-picasa-web-albums-into-my-site-with-php/ http://www.lepolt.com/blog/2008/10/28/integrating-picasa-web-albums-into-my-site-with-php/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:37:33 +0000 Jonathan http://www.lepolt.com/blog/?p=140 I like to think that I take a moderate number of digital photos, and I’m always looking to store them on my computer. I use iPhoto for organization, which I believe is a great application. I’ve always liked to share my photos online with friends and family (and whatever other creeps find the links), but I never could find a solid display method that did what I wanted (thumbnail page, higher res images, etc.). I used Photoshop for a while, which offers some decent page templates and automated creation of thumbnails and high(er) resolution images, but I still had to manually add a link from my page to the album page. I used Dreamweaver for a while, which also offers some decent page templates, but again, I was still stuck manually adding a new link to the new album page. In addition, none of the templates ever matched the template I used for the rest of the site; ie, there was too much manual work required!

I tossed around the idea of writing my own PHP script to pull images from a directory, generate thumbnails, create pages, etc., but it always seemed like too much work and I never got around to doing it. Anything I found online never did “exactly” what I wanted it to do, so I was never happy with any 3rd party solutions.

A while ago I finally gave up with Photoshop and Dreamweaver and decided that I would let Google handle all of my photo albums online. Using Picasa Web Albums has worked out very well, but there was never any integration between Lepolt.com and my Picasa Web page. A couple weeks ago I found out that Google [more or less] provides an API to Picasa Web. This is nothing new, I just had never heard about it. It’s not a direct API, but basically works by reading the XML feed that Google uses to store information about the albums and photos within. After Googling around a little and messing with some code, I finally developed a version that I was happy with.

It can be seen in production here: (http://www.lepolt.com/pictures.php).

For those interested, I will post the final version of my code. Please note that this code carries no warranty.
http://www.lepolt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/getpicasapics.zip

Additional links:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-picasalbum/
http://code.google.com/apis/picasaweb/developers_guide_protocol.html

Update: See this link for an updated version of the code for use as a WordPress plugin

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