Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 2 Saturday 2006-03-25
It’s all about including the Flickr Badge in an XHTML compliant way. As I have described in an earlier post, I thought I had succeeded. This proved very soon not to be true, and after a considerable amount of head scratching, I decided to craft my own badge.
If I could do that, I would gain two things. Firstly I would have full control of the behavior of the badge, such as the number and size of the images, the size of the grid and the timing of animations. Secondly, having direct access to the Flash Movie ( the “swiff” ) it would be much easier to look for embedding markup, that would validate as XHTML.
I have the Flash MX 2004 authoring tool or, if you are a programmer, the IDE on my computer, so making a Flash Movie from scratch is quite possible. I started to look for a suitable ActionScript Flickr library, to be able to communicate with the Flickr Service API. I found one at the Adobe/Macromedia web site, that looked promising, but I couldn’t find any documentation, so I dropped that. In my continued search, I found Kelvin Luck's flashr, version 0.4 Actionscript Flikr library, which contrary to Macromedia’s, is well documented. It is free for all to use, and comes with an introductory example, that runs right out of the box.
After some fiddling with the example, I realized that the example application only needed a few changes to look like the original Flickr Badge ( sans animation ). I decided to write a tutorial on “Building a Flickr Flash Display“. This is part 1, and further development will follow. Enjoy!
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Thursday 2006-04-13
Great job. I’ll love it when you get it working as it should from the beginning.
Thursday 2006-04-13
Martin, Thanks!
As you can see from the tutorial, it’s a multi step process. It’s possible that the original badge could be embedded in a way that validates, but it’s sure easier when you have access to the Flash Movie directly.
There is a later version in part three of my tutorial, that behaves essentially as the original Flickr Badge.