With no apologies to Casey…
One of my favorite home-spun projects that joys me to see in the world is people using my Flickr CC Attribution Helper, a tool I really built for me to make it easy to quickly form well-constructed and consistent attributions from open licensed flickr images.
It’s a simple browser bookmarklet tool that is able from a flickr photo page to request info via the flickr API (all through public javascript calls, do you need to know why flickr’s API is the bomb when other services repeatedly cripple their own API https://later.com/blog/instagram-api/).
I can often see it used in other people’s posts and projects because of the way their attributions are stated. And this is not 100% self-congratulating back-slapping, just seeing more attribution of open content is the real joy.
But one of the pain points has been that for a year or more I’ve had to tell people it won’t work in Firefox. Because they changed security levels on what the browser can do, any one like mine that opened a new browser window via javascript was walled off. Dead.
Until yesterday.
And the best part?
It was a student who figured this out.
Ken Bauer did flag me in a private channel that this was coming, and he was eager to see his student push the change to the GitHub repo.
There was proof!
And sure enough the commit came in this morning from José Carlos. It’s not even a code fix I have to do; installing the the Bookmarklets Context Menu Extension enables your bookmarklets to be run as “content-script” which I infer means it has fewer restrictions.
Regardless of how, this means that Firefox users can again use th Flickr CC Attribution Helper. What happens with this new Extension is that all your existing bookmarklet tools are now available via a contextual menu (right or control click in a flickr web page, then select your CC Helper tool).
And boom, here it is!
You can also get to the bookmarklet via the button for the Bookmarks Context Menu extension on the browser bar.
This is really good news. I do have longer term hopes of redesigning the tool as a proper Firefox Extension (and maybe for Chrome). But even bigger, I think the attribution tool can be expanded to work on other services such as WikiMedia Commons, Pixabay, maybe Unsplash. Technically, it should work on any site that has a public JavaScript API for getting info about the photo from the page that contains it.
And beyond that, I’d like the tool to be more flexible from the results window to offer different size, and/or attribution options.
This will take some time and effort to do (wedged between the “real” work); but if any group, organization, filthy rich person wants to sponsor the development, contact me and/or click the begging buttons below.
But thanks to José Carlos (and Ken for encouraging his CIS students to take on real projects) we have a short term fix for the Mighty Firefox Users to now strike out on doing one click flickr attributions.
Featured Image: Added the Firefox icon, an “F” and screenshots from the flickr cc attribution helper (those are mine, I give myself permission) to Casey at the Bat pg 21.jpg a WikiMedia Commons image by Ernest Lawrence Thayer shared into the public domain cause it’s pretty old and Sono Bono could only extend copyright so many decades back.
