I’ve been trying to get some work done on how my website does Posse, because I want to be able to pushto other sites as easily as possible. I’ve had it working well with Wikimedia Commons for ages, and find it much quicker than othet means to get my photos uploaded there. Now I’m trying to get it sorted for Flickr, and (probably easier) for Twitter.

The general process is to a) edit a post to satisfaction; b) open it in one of the Posse forms and change any metadata as appropriate (this doesn’t get saved locally); c) send the post to the remote site. This will upload the post and also create a local syndication record pointing to its remote URL.

So far so good, but it’s really a post-by-post operation — I wonder if its worth figuring out a bulk cross-posting system?

The other part of the Flickr Posse feature will be to do a bit more work on PhpFlickr hopefully including releasin a new major version (with all the deprecated code removed at last).

Europeana 2021 keynote by George Oates about Flickr’s history and design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsqUv3JU32g

50 billion images in 17 years.

I’ve been reading a bit today about the new Flickr Foundation, and it does seem interesting. Ultimately, I think I’m still happier hosting my own stuff and copying when appropriate to Wikimedia Commons or the Internet Archive. Sometimes also to Flickr, but not with a sense that the photos will be safe there permanently. Self hosting means not only that I have control and can modify the software as required, but also that I can archive in the ways I see fit (e.g. some stuff is optimised for printing to paper, annually).

If nobody is able to chat with Flickr members who show interest in Commons collections, you will see comments like “Great shot.” If staff are showing consistent, friendly interest in Flickr members contributing, you will see comments like “Yes, that record is for Mary’s in the city. Priest was a John Doody, about the same age as Richard, recorded in 1901 as a Professor of Classics at Kieran’s. In 1911, he is Priest and President of College. Wikipedia says he was President from 1903–11, so at the time of the wedding.”

— https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eHlYDCJS2F4KH-Eml8mW9aVqP5WVOaKN_-5XFW4-wc/edit

Posted my first thing ever to Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28901488

I’m still importing Flickr photos. Nearly done! It’s great watching the import coming in and seeing all the duplicates being found (and not imported twice). It’s one of the most annoying things about Flickr, that they let you upload the exact file twice and provide no API access to determine if something already exists. I’ve attempted to hack something together with checksum:sha1=blah machine tags, but the tag search system has some great annoyances (mostly lag, I think) that makes this less than great. It’ll be nice to not have to deal with any of that in the future.

I’m in the process of importing all my Flickr photos to this site. It’s a long-winded sort of thing, getting the import process correct, but I think it’s all working now. About three thousand done so far. It’s great to be weeding out the duplicates (and even matching them to their Flickr IDs). It’s also marshalling all the tags and album names here, and the next step with those will be to associate (the relevant ones) to Wikidata items and then display some sort of infobox-type thing on the tag pages here, as well as marking up their pages with something like <span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><meta itemprop="url" content="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q42 "><a href="/T323" rel="tag" itemprop="sameAs">Douglas Adams</a></span>.

There’s an indieweb meeup this morning, and I’d thought I’d go to it and maybe talk about the vagaries of syndication links in posts (because that’s been confusing me), but actually before that I wanted to finish importing my entire Flickr collection to this site — and that’s taking longer than I thought it would. I’ve built the same Flickr importer about three times now, for Piwigo, MediaWiki, and a generic backup tool, but this fourth time is different enough. I’ll get it done soon though, and so maybe I’ll go to the next meetup.

Of course, ideally, I’d be able to write about what I’m working on here, and for it to be syndicated into the other feeds etc. — but I’ve got more work to do here first, and so keep putting off the actual writing.

In fact, the old truth is rearing its head again: that it’s probably not a good idea to write one’s own blogging software! I’m ignoring that still though, and having fun.