This blog isn’t about making money. I have no problogger ambitions, and I don’t really like ads on blogs. But what I do find interesting is how ad networks work, what their benefits are, and which work best for a blog like mine. That’s why I’ve added a few AdSense units, and signed up with BuySellAds. Adsense has paid for the hosting of the movie review blog I run with a bunch of other people since day one, but I never really experimented with placement and such because the layout on that site is far from optimized for ads.
More Experimenting with advertising

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.

I never thought this to be possible, but Dawid Fatyga just emailed me about his ‘Stratus‘ project. He’s recreated the 3D Flash movie from WP-Cumulus in Javascript. Sure, it’s no match for Flash’s ultra-smooth anti-aliased scaling (yet?), but that doesn’t really make it any less impressive.

Dawid stressed that it’s still very much a work in progress, and there’s still a lot that can be optimized. I had no success running it in Chrome, but it does work in Firefox. I’m sure that can be fixed. And with Chrome’s ultra-fast Javascript engine it will probaly fly.

Dawid is working towards a possible WordPress plugin implementation, which might mean some healthy competition for WP-Cumulus. I’d love to see if Javascript can beat Flash at its own game (being animation).

P.S. Dawid just emailed me that he’s only been working with Javascript for a few days. Go figure.

This distracted me from client work yesterday. I tried modifying WP-Cumulus to load thumbnail images from a Flickr RSS feed instead of passing it WordPress tags. The results surprised me, because I was expecting to see all sorts of depth sorting weirdness. However, because of the limited number of images and the way I distributed them over the sphere, you can hardly spot any quirks.
More WP-Cumulus for Flickr anyone?

I’ve been meaning to convert some of the output of my TIME/SPACE experiment on YouTube for a while now. Unfortunately the current incarnation of that project is a Flash movie, and Flash doesn’t let you simply save the images you generate. At least not very conveniently.

I’d been looking into complicated stuff like mmsave, when it dawned on me that there are plenty of tools out there that let you simply record whatever’s on your screen. I ended up using Windows Media Encoder to grab these and VirtualDub to crop and convert them. Took just a few minutes.
More TIME/SPACE experiment on YouTube

When visiting family last week, the conversation turned to Sudoku puzzles and how to solve them through software (I know, it’s sad ). My initial impression was that it shouldn’t be too hard to write a program that fills in the missing numbers but, as so often, I now stand corrected.
More Sudoku solver

Tagnetic Poetry is another experiment using Flash to display your blog’s tag cloud. It was Merel Zwart who came up with the brilliant idea to mimic magnetic poetry. Because it re-uses most of the code used in WP-Cumulus, the 0.8 version should already be pretty stable.

You can see it in action here.
More WordPress plugin: Tagnetic Poetry

Triggered by a comment on my recent Flash SEO post I decided to set up my own experiment to find out if, and to what extent search engines index Flash content.
More Flash search engine experiment