Flickr Hacks / Discuss

alto maltés    says:

This is a simple tool to facilitate browsing the Flickr API documentation.

Drag this Grazr widget’s link and drop it to the Bookmarks Toolbar (you are using Firefox, aren’t you?). Now right-click on the bookmark where you’ve just dropped it and in “Properties”, check the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” box*. You’re done.

Now, clicking on the bookmark in the toolbar will load the Flickr API’s outline in the sidebar (view a snapshot of the expanded outline). Navigate down the hierarchy to your desired Flickr API method/feed/whatever and clicking on it will load its corresponding documentation in the main window.

Note that the widget displays a live outline of the Flickr API i.e. when Flickr will add a new feed or a new API method, it will automatically be reflected in the outline in your sidebar.

If for some strange reason you’re using Internet Explorer, you may still use this widget and embed it in any HTML page you like, but I think you can’t load it in the sidebar.


Tech info

What you see in the Grazr widget is the rendering of a (static) OPML document that itself links to other OPML documents that are generated dynamically, as follows…

The “Methods” outline is an OPML document that is generated by transforming the response of flickr.reflection.getMethods via an XSL transform (currently using W3C’s Online XSLT 2.0 service).

Since the Flickr API currently doesn’t provide the list of available feeds programmatically, the “Feeds” outline is generated by a Dapper service that scrapes the list of available Flickr feeds from Flickr’s feeds page’s HTML and outputs it as an XML document, and then transforms that document via an XSL transform into an OPML document.

What is also interesting (i.e. hackable) is the Grazr widget’s URL itself

http://grazr.com/gzpanel.html↵
?linktarget=_main↵
&exp=methods↵
&view=o↵
&file=http://dev.dwardu.info/flickr/api-docs/