Author: admin

I know this isn’t new, but now that I have a Treo 680, I have been playing around with SplashBlog. SplashBlog is basically a photo sharing site (a la Flickr), but with the added twist that it supports PDA/smartphone synchronization. Here’s what Six Apart says:

SplashBlog lets you instantly publish photos from your smartphone to an online photo album (photoblog) to share with others. SplashBlog includes everything you need to share your photos, including software for your smartphone and a free online photoblog account at splashblog.com. Just install the FREE software on your smartphone, create your free splashblog.com account and start photoblogging!

At some level, this is the killer app for a smartphone. Wherever you are, whenever something cool happens, you can snap a picture and push it to the web in about 30 seconds. You don’t even have to describe the picture before posting it, because you can go back afterwards (either on the phone or via their web client) and fill in the details. Of course, it eats data charges faster than Lucky can eat his supper, but it’s still very cool.

Once I could upload pictures effortlessly, I wanted to make it equally easy to share them with my friends, so I started looking around for a way to display them at NfGCW. I figured I was on the right track when I found “district 30″‘s Photo Sidebar widget but, unfortunately, this doesn’t support SplashBlog out of the box. It was trivial to add the support, however, by including…

elseif (strpos($item["link"], "http://www.splashblog.com/") >= 0) {
	//SplashBlog
	$item_url = $item["description"];
	$start_pos = strpos($item_url , "<img src=")+10;
    	$end_pos = strpos($item_url , """, $start_pos);
	$item_url = substr($item_url, $start_pos, $end_pos-$start_pos);
}

… in the code that decides how to pull out the picture URL (i.e. $item_url) based on the different feed types. I also bashed the code to remove the randomization of the order that the pictures are returned. Given the way SplashBlog works, it seems like showing the most recent photos is more interesting.

All in all, a fun bit of hacking for a Saturday morning. If you haven’t noticed already, you can check the side bar of the main page to see my latest images. Apologies for the portrait shots being displayed sideways. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to fix them at SplashBlog, so I’ll just have to remember not to hold the Treo sideways when I take them.

Btw, if you do want to check out all the pictures on my SplashBlog site, you can go to:

McQ’s Treo Shots