Bye Bye Image Gallery… Hello Flickr!
For a few years now, the buggiest piece of software on the Fractured Atlas website has unquestionably been the stuff we used to power our member image galleries. (I won’t even reveal the name of the software because it was such a disappointment and I don’t want to badmouth a free open source software project.)
Today, that system has been put to bed. It has been replaced with a far simpler mechanism for displaying your photos on the Fractured Atlas website: Flickr integration.
If you’re logged in, just go to your user profile and click on the “Photos” tab. Clicking the “Edit” button will bring up a simple form where you can enter your Flickr username. That will automatically set up a slide show from your Flickr photostream. Easy peasy!
You’re going to see more of this kind of thing over the next few months. One of the big advantages of the “social web” is that services like Flickr (or YouTube or blogs, etc.) allow for simple syndication. For an organization like Fractured Atlas, that means we no longer have to re-invent every wheel. For our users, it means you only have to maintain one image gallery instead of two. Win-win.
NOTE: if you had an image gallery and you’re wondering where it went, don’t worry. We’ve still got it; it’s just not online any more. If you’d like a copy of your photos just send us an email and we’ll send you a zip file.