During my absence I got an email that the first version of my unobtrusive Flickr badge has stopped working. The reason was that Flickr changed the output of the API. I the old version the JSON object contained an HTML description that was run through htmlspecialchars() first. I always considered this a bit of a nuisance and wondered about the reason. Now the Flickr feed does not have the encoding any longer as you can see for example in the JSON output of my latest photos:

{

	
“title”: “Terminal 5 animated discs thingamabob *”,

“link”: “http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/3141566868/”,

“media”: {m“},

“date_taken”: “2008-12-27T08:10:35-08:00”,

“description”: “
codepo8 posted a video:
 
 
* technical term, really
“,

“published”: “2008-12-27T16:10:35Z”,

“author”: “nobody@flickr.com (codepo8)”,

“author_id”: “11414938@N00”,

“tags”: “london art heathrow awesome animation t5 ba britishairways terminal5”

},

Before the change this would have been:

{

	
“title”: “Terminal 5 animated discs thingamabob *”,

“link”: “http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/3141566868/”,

“media”: {m“},

“date_taken”: “2008-12-27T08:10:35-08:00”,

“description”: “
codepo8 posted a video:
 
 
* technical term, really
“,

“published”: “2008-12-27T16:10:35Z”,

“author”: “nobody@flickr.com (codepo8)”,

“author_id”: “11414938@N00”,

“tags”: “london art heathrow awesome animation t5 ba britishairways terminal5”

},

This broke my code as I was relying on regular expressions to get the photos. Taught me a lesson, and as we have a media property now there is no need for this any longer. The fix for the badge code was:

// buggy, bad

temp=obj.items[i].description.match(/src="([^&]*)"/)[1];”

// works :)

temp=obj.items[i].media.m;

Lesson learned: Don’t trust regular expressions and data scraping.

Thanks to Jennifer Forman Orth for flagging this up!

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Finally being home and online again (blackberry helps, but also hurts)
• Getting £750 payback from Scottish Power as I have used much less gas than they anticipated (well, I am hardly at home)
• Todd Kloots from Yahoo explaining in detail how to set up a screen reader testing environment
• Steve Souders explaing all about coupling asynchronous scripts
• John Resig asking developers to file browser bugs – as it is their responsibility
• Tech Crunch seriously considering a buggy Doogie Howser Twitter skin/app newsworthy – it means I don’t have to feel bad for not finding much.
• Scoring awesome tickets for Monkey – journey to the west this Sunday (while suffering terrible usability issues on the ticketmaster site, seriously, this is borderline unacceptable!)
• Furthermore I can has Cheezburger is pronouncing that we are all doomed:

Time to go to the gym to work on those lazy bones.

(Normally I tend not to write any personal posts here, but hey, why not?)
It is the end of the year and time for new year’s resolutions. Luckily I had a great year and did most of the things I planned to do (the classics like losing weight, cleaning up the flat, changing my work and so on) worked out swimmingly. I gave a lot of talks, trained a lot of people, re-invented my job and organized my own event. All in all I am very happy about all that.

So then, for the coming year I’ve just written an article for Digital Web that will be released in the new year that covers a lot of my thoughts on what I want to do. Generally I am seeing harsh times ahead – people are spooked out by the financial recession and the short time fixes (yes, layoffs). This means to me that I am planning to do a few things differently to give myself space to work with colleagues and contacts to get through this.

My laundry list for the year:

• be more moderate – I can get very cross about things that in the big picture are not of that much importance (this has improved constantly over the last few years though)
• concentrate my work on markets and environments I hadn’t covered much this year – specifically universities as environments and South East Asia as markets (I am already scheduled for 3 university hack days in the US and India and plan to find more Hong Kong/China/Signapore/Australia/Taiwan/Korea assignments)
• finish my work for the Opera Web Standard Curriculum (sorry Chris, I have delayed a lot)
• write (or at least start) another book – this time for O’Reilly
• look closer at my finances (I am terrible at that)
• turn my flat into more of a home than a place to change suitcases
• take Scripting Enabled more on the road. Somehow the “go forth and do it” doesn’t work that well…
• clean out icant.co.uk ;)

Let’s see how I will succeed.

I am currently in the German countryside to see my family and old school friends. My brother’s internet connection is actually trained weasels carrying the things I type on 5.1/4” floppy disk to the next internet hub and I need to write everything in their beautiful but hard language.

Therefore I am not answering emails, will only twitter from Blackberry and generally try out this offline “life” thing for a few days.

Merry Christmas ya’ll!

cheers
Chris

Things that made me happy this morning (evening, afternoon? what do I know, jetlagged and confused):

• The Videos of Paris Web talks are now available – most of them in French, but two in English. In any case awesome content, check them out! Amazing “bang for your buck” conference, that one.
• Opera’s “Mother” Henny Swan talks about the state of the accessible web 2008
• One of the cooler thinks Henny talks about is Project:Possibility, an Open Source initiative to build accessible software. Check out the awesome favicon on that one! 5.1/4” floppy with wheelchair FTW!
• While “us Brits” (well, I can play now, can’t I?) had a good insight into who represents us in parliament via they work for you for quite a while now, the New York Times hackers brought the same convenience to the unwashed masses via Represent. I love the clear look of it!
• I’ve been to my first Mozilla Labs Meetup and it was great – especially after the Manhattan mixed by Brendan Eich…
• To round things up, I am very happy that someone set a record for Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute so I don’t have to.