It’s been fun to see positive reaction to this little experiment, and with some time today, I have added some new features, moved it from my lab testing server to its own domain http://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/, and just now posted the source code http://code.google.com/p/pechaflickr/.
What is it? It’s just like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, two great tastes…. well it is a way of practicing improv skills by using the pecha kucha presenttion format, but rather than planning a presentation with your own slides, it draws random images from flickr from a tag you provide.
The idea was not mine; it was a few weeks before Northern Voice 2o11 when I was asked if my Five Card Flickr could do a kind of “powerpoint karaoke”
I actually made a version that used the same images that are in the Five Card Flickr site, but that was limited to the tags I use for that site… as it turned out, knowing how to do stuff via the flickr api (using phpflickr) made it easy to fetch the photos. To add some element if randomness,my code grabs data for the 300 most recent photos for a give tag, and then uses 20 of them chosen at random.
The presentation side was made super easy by jQuery Cycle slideshow code, a brilliant set of code on its own. My own bit was to have a set of 5 title slides (outside of the 20 chosen), randomly chosen, that provides enough time for the remaining images to preload from flickr.
A piece I added today was an option to choose some other number than 20 slides, just in case someone might want a shorter (or longer) slide show.
The impetus today, besides having some time not driving, was seeing Dave Cormier’s gauntlet toss down (via Google Plus, it is public, so I hope the link works for everyone)– Dave’s idea was to have his network suggest the tag to do, and then he free form did a made up talk using pechaflickr, sent out as live desktop video
To date… no one (ahem) has picked up the gauntlet.
Anyhow, the prompts from people out there were sufficient to get me to do some code dabble and documentation (the site now has a “stuff for geeks” page) (there seem to be some Firefox quirks that require a history cleansing).
What are doing reading this dull blog post? Go Play!
Awesome and challenging Dog. The seeming randomness of some people’s tagging certainly makes for challenging improv.
…Geoff