Recently, I came across discussions on Twitter, and a blog post about ‘hidden links’ in my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Quite frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by this, and I’d like to explain how the situation came to be, and what I plan to change in upcoming versions.
More About the ‘hidden’ links in WP-Cumulus

There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.
More My thoughts on Flash and the iPad

The one feature I’ve always wanted to add to WP-Cumulus is true unicode support. Flash player 9 made this impossible because it needed to have the font characters embedded into the movie, and unicode fonts are simply too big for that. But with Flash 10, Adobe has introduced new ways of handling text, and those now allow for non-embedded text to be animated quite smoothly. There’s also no longer any need to specify an exact font name, you can simply tell the player to get a sans-serif font. Flash player 10 is on over 93% of computers now, so it starts to make sense to use it to finally add this long-awaited feature to WP-Cumulus.
More Help me test WP-Cumulus unicode support

Twitter by it’s very nature is a very limited service. That’s what’s fun about it. Some people manage to be really clever and witty in 140 characters. But there’s only so much you can express in a tweet. The other main way to express your personality on Twitter is through your avatar image (or ‘profile picture’ as Twitter calls them).

Many of the people I follow have carefully designed avatars that they don’t change very often. But what if you could have your avatar be as current as your tweets. Showing you exactly the way you look today, doing what you’re doing right now? That’s where Snapatar comes in.
More Introducing Snapatar: Update your Twitter avatar from your webcam

I guess it was about time I updated my Tagnetic Poetry plugin. WP-Cumulus’ lesser known brother now has shortcode support, as well as several other improvements. It’s not as mature as Cumulus, but it’s definitely stable enough to deserve a 1.0 version number.

The Flash movie now has support for the ‘xmlpath’ flashvar that WP-Cumulus has supported for a while now. This affects you only if you’re attempting to use it outside of the context of WordPress, but is very handy if you do. Putting more than one instance of the plugin on a page should also no longer cause issues, and several other little issues were fixed.
More Tagnetic Poetry 1.0 adds shortcode support

A while ago I was asked to do a Flex version of WP-Cumulus. Because I don’t know the first thing about Flex, I failed miserably . But the fun thing about open source software is that anyone with the right skills can pick things up and create the version they need. Carlos Carvalha did just that and did a Flex version for use with Drupal. If Flex is your thing, you can download the files from Carlos’ page. Because this is a ‘modified version’ of my WordPress plugin, it is automatically licensed under GPL, and is thus free for you to use.

Carlos’ blog is pretty interesting btw. Definitely the first blog theme I’ve seen that’s built entirely in Flash.

Lots of people have contacted me, asking for a version of my Flickr widget that they could use on their website, without having to use Flickr (or Picasa). Doing such a version was easy enough, but I was hesitant to release it. The DIY version of WP-Cumulus has yielded more support requests than the actual WordPress plugin, and answering all the email has been taking a lot of my time.

One thing I could have done was to simply release the sources for the Flickr widget. But there’s a lot of Flickr/Picasa specific stuff in there that you would need to take out before being able to hook the movie up to another data source. So that would have made things harder for everyone.
More Introducing Photo widget, floating thumbnails for your website

Talk about picking a poor name for this project. I first considered giving it a catchy name, but decided to simply call it ‘Flickr widget’ becaused that best describes what it does. But then I found that Flickr itself has a Flash widget too. And now I’ve made it support Picasa feeds too, so the name doesn’t make any sense anymore.

The upside is of course that Picasa users can now use the widget to show off their favorite albums on their websites. It accepts the feeds from your ‘My Photos’ page and album pages. If you, like me, have only a couple of albums under ‘My Photos’, the feed from that page will only show the album covers, so it makes more sense to use an album feed (on the left is a trip to the zoo with my daughter in 2007). Like with Flickr, the total number of thumbs shown is limited to 20.

Fortunately, Google uses a very similar feed format to Flickr, so I was able to put support for both into one Flash movie. Please feel free to try it, and let me know if you run into anything.

Get the widget here

Flash sucks. There, I’ve said it. Or to be more precise, using Flash in a web page sucks. Just about everyone has the plugin, but actually embedding a movie into a web page isn’t quite as easy as it could be. There are a number of options, all of which have pros and cons. And in most cases you’ll need to pass parameters to your little RIA and/or have it communicate with the outside world too, adding to the complexity.

About 90% of the email I get about WP-Cumulus is from people where the movie isn’t displaying as it should. In most cases, this is caused by relatively minor markup errors in their blog. I find it hard to explain why Flash can sometimes break if you forget to close a single tag.
More About WP-Cumulus 1.20′s compatibility mode

If you like, you can now try the Flickr widget I blogged about a little while ago. This is the first time I’ve released something like this, but I’m pretty confident it’ll work. I’ve set up a page on this blog where you can enter your Flickr feed, along with some other details, and create your personalized version of the widget. It’s generates an HTML code snippet that you can copy-paste into your website. In fact I just used it to create the widget embedded on the left.

One thing I was concerned about was where I should put the Flash file. If this thing should become popular, it could cause lots of traffic. That’s why I chose to host it at Amazon’s S3 service. I’ll blog some more about this soon because it’s is an interesting service, but what it comes down to is that S3 is an extremely reliable way of hosting files. Even if there’s a little hick-up here at roytanck.com, the widget will still be served. That means no big empty hole in your blog, unless Flickr is down. Or S3. Both highly unlikely.

Click here to get your own Flickr widget

Let me know if you run into anything. I’m pretty sure the widget code will remain the same for the foreseeable future. All URLs are final, so if you successfully generate the widget, it will continue to function, even if I need to make little adjustments to the form or the Flash movie later on.