Author Archive

Did we really never blog about Building Scalable Web Sites, the book written by Flickr's lead developer, Cal Henderson and published by O'Reilly last month? Really? Because if we didn't, that was dumb,

Folks, this book occupies 9.2 x 7.0 x 0.7 inches of space and weighs a conveneint 15.68 ounces. More importantly, it contains a four page analogy between data layers and the English dessert known as Trifle. No other technology book has ever come close to acheiving such an extended and informative dessert-based exigetical conceit.

In all seriousness, Cal is one of the best software developers in the world, bar none, and he's also great at explaining complex ideas in a clear way. If you're interested in this stuff, there is no better book on the market today. Get it.

Zicatela #2, by konaboy. The previous photo in his stream is equally awesome.

Found on the first page of Explore.

UPDATE: Site's online now and everything is heading back to normal.

Previously: A group of us are figuring out the best way to bring the site back online after an unexpected outage. Shouldn't be that long, but once we bring it back up, a small number of users will notice some inconsistencies (e.g.,photo activity appearing on their "recent activity" page, but no new comments visible on the photo - that kind of thing). All these things will be fixed, and there is no need to re-upload or re-edit anything.

This goes out to all the Flickr engineers and ops troubleshooting late on a Friday night:

Thanks guys :)

To do: see more photos from Flipped Out.

We've had a temporary storage failure affecting a sizable chunk of old Flickr photos and are moving about 20 terabytes of photos across a few thousand miles (between two of our data centers) to ensure consistency and smoothness. ALL PHOTOS AND DATA ARE SAFE AND NOTHING HAS BEEN LOST. The site will come back up as soon as possible.

In a few minutes we'll make a decision about whether to bring the site back online right away, or wait until all the photos are sure to show up. (If we bring it up right away, there will be lots of "This photo is currently unavailable" images, but everything will function properly.)

UPDATE [4:59pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: Weather report - everything is still cool. We're going to try to bring the site back online shortly (there will still be photos which appear as unavailable, and they will gradually fill in - no need to do anything on your part, dear user).

UPDATE 2 [5:52pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: We've had some issues bringing the site back online without this storage system but everything is still quite safe and we are working hard to get back as soon as humanly possible. One thousand apologies!

UPDATE 3 [7:58pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: The site's been back up for a while now, but I was on the freeway and couldn't post. All's well that ends well!

I was without a cameraphone for a little while, then got a Nokia N80 was too new to run ShoZu, the handy Symbian app which makes uploading much easier (and runs in the background, handles disconnects/partial uploads, can postpone uploading if you are roaming, lets you add tags and edit the titles and descriptions on your phone, and a bunch more). I ended up losing that N80 and then getting another one and by that time a new version of ShoZu was out and this one ran on the N80.

The new version has an additional feature** though - it grabs the latest comments on your photos whenever it connects to the server. It also keeps a list of recent comments and remembers which ones you've already read.

This has totally changed my mobile Flickr experience. Whenever I get one of those insane Silicon Valley four minute red lights or have a few moments to spare before a meeting starts, I can't help but check for new comments. And every time the star lights up, there's a little treat waiting. Very cool! I can't wait till I can respond and add comments to other people's photos as well!

ShoZu is free and is available to many phone model. Check it out:

** Turns out this feature isn't actually new. It's been around since earlier this year, but you had to manually enable it on ShoZu's site. Because not everyone has unlimited data plans, the ShoZu team was worried about causing their users unwanted charges for more data usage. Thoughtful blokes!

Longtime Flickr user striatic just pointed out an interview he did with another longtime Flickr user and hacker, Steeev, for Utata's (Flickr group) Ink section. Steeev makes Greasemonkey scripts[1]. Greasemonkey is an extension to the Firefox browser that lets you customize how various websites look and work (adding new features, moving links to places that make more sense to you ... things like that).

If you spend a lot of time on Flickr, use Firefox and you're comfortable poking around a little under the hood a little, you might want to install Greasemonkey and give a couple of Steeev scripts a try[2]. Two of them, the new Flickr Contacts Organiser and the popular Group Pool Admin: Warn + Delete are reported to be extremely useful (to people with many contacts and to administrators of popular groups, respectively). Definitely gives us nice motivation to improve Flickr!

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Notes:

[1] You can find lots of Greasemonkey scripts at userscripts.org. Note that Flickr is the second most "Greasemonky'd" site on the net -- I learned that from the interview.)

[2] Obligatory disclaimer: we offer no support for 3rd party extensions; do not warranty anything about them, including that they won't erase your harddrive and kill your pets; and have not audited any Flickr Greasemonkey scripts for security of privacy issues.