Barattalo

I’ve spent about 30 minutes to find a javascript embed to print out a custom thumbs list of flickr photos, but I didn’t find anything clean enaugh… and I’ve not enaugh time to spend to read the flickr’s API’s…
So, I’ve searched for the feed of the user, and I’ve found it at the bottom of flickr’s pages: I’ve decided to grab the feed and parse it to get my custom gallery.
If you’re looking for the flickr’s feed it’s here, at the bottom:

If you click on the feed link you will open the feed (this can be shown in different ways depending on your browser). If you look the URL of the feed you’ve clicked, you can see that it contains the “id” of the feed on flickr database, here is the id:

Take the id. And then use this php function to grab and create the thumbs list, this code will simply output anchors and images, so you have to use css to customize it as you want:

function attr($s,$attrname) { // return html attribute
	preg_match_all('#\s*('.$attrname.')\s*=\s*["|\']([^"\']*)["|\']\s*#i', $s, $x);
	if (count($x)>=3) return $x[2][0]; else return "";
}

// id = id of the feed
// n = number of thumbs
function parseFlickrFeed($id,$n) {
	$url = "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id={$id}&lang=it-it&format=rss_200";
	$s = file_get_contents($url);
	preg_match_all('#<item>(.*)</item>#Us', $s, $items);
	$out = "";
	for($i=0;$i<count($items[1]);$i++) {
		if($i>=$n) return $out;
		$item = $items[1][$i];
		preg_match_all('#<link>(.*)</link>#Us', $item, $temp);
		$link = $temp[1][0];
		preg_match_all('#<title>(.*)</title>#Us', $item, $temp);
		$title = $temp[1][0];
		preg_match_all('#<media:thumbnail([^>]*)>#Us', $item, $temp);
		$thumb = attr($temp[0][0],"url");
		$out.="<a href='$link' target='_blank' title=\"".str_replace('"','',$title)."\"><img src='$thumb'/></a>";
	}
	return $out;
}

// usage example:
echo parseFlickrFeed("16664181@N00",9);
// you have to use css to customize it

Like here:

This code will be addedd to the next version of Mini Bots Class.

Tags: flickr, grabbing, Mini Bots Class, Parsing, Php, preg_replace, programming, Spider, Thumbs, webbot