Shashin 2.0.2 – Critical Upgrade

On March 21, 2008 by Mike With 14 Comments - WordPress

Murphy’s Law is being strictly enforced today: within 24 hours of my 2.0 release, Google coincidentally changed the Picasa RSS feed. The URL for the photos isn’t where it used to be in the feeder, with the result that, if you sync your albums in Shashin, your photos won’t show up anymore. I’ve found the new tag for the photo URLs in the Picasa feed and updated Shashin accordingly. So download Shashin 2.0.2 now. Note that your photo data is still safe in Shashin even if your photos stopped appearing after the Picasa RSS feed change. Syncing the albums with 2.0.2 should straighten everything out.

This is the one real problem with building an application that relies on Google’s RSS feeds – I have no control over when they might change the feeds, or what kind of changes they make.

There are also some other minor fixes. Here’s a list of the changes in 2.0.2:

  • Adjusted for new location of the content_url in the Picasa feed
  • If you select the option to display your photos at Picasa in a new browser window, it actually works now 😉 (the formatting of the anchor tag was incorrect).
  • Shashin now performs a preg_escape when detecting the URL for the page containing your salbumphotos tag. This fixes a warning that was being displayed for some URLs in PHP 5.
  • Shashin now correctly detects your WordPress installation directory if you’ve installed it in a subdirectory (except for paths in shashin/display/highslide.css which are hardcoded – you’ll need to edit those by hand).

14 Comments

  1. Conan March 21, 2008

    Ah, those carefree Google devs, ever hiding under the banner of “beta” so they can change what they like whenever they like. 😉

    If you’ll allow me I found one other issue that may bite when WordPress 2.5 is released. Shashin creates the table-names without a “wp_” prefix in a fresh install of 2.5 RC1. This throws an error when trying to add an album for the first time.

    This is of course not an issue with 2.3.3.

    Thanks a lot for the fast responses and updates!
    Cheers, Conan

  2. John March 21, 2008

    I’ve got everything working now. I’d not read the instructions properly so I didn’t realise I needed to make a page with salbumphotos and another with salbumthumbs

    Thanks

  3. Conan March 21, 2008

    Yes, everything works now.

    Thanks again, Conan

  4. Charity March 21, 2008

    I’m having difficulty adding a non-public album. (The URL is like http://picasaweb.google.com/username/albumname?authkey=xxxxxx-x-xx.) I can add it without the authkey and that works for displaying images or the widget album cover, but when clicking on the image or album should take you to the Picasa site, a 404 error is returned. This same thing happens if I try to go to the album site without the authkey portion (when I’m not signed into Google). Is there a setting I’m missing?

  5. Mike March 21, 2008

    Hi Charity – Shashin doesn’t support private albums yet. You’re the second person to request it, so I’ll try to move it up the wish list.

  6. Max March 22, 2008

    Dear Mike,

    I just updated Shashin 1.2.3 to 2.0.2 – it’s fantastic!
    Working with no problem! Beautiful results.

    Thank You for hard work.

  7. Dustin March 22, 2008

    I’m hoping this to be an error on my part, but if not, I’ve found a slight bug in the display of multiple albums. When I try to REMOVE one of the albums (say I had albums 1 and 2 set to display) by having 1|2 in the widget box, when I clear that entry out and save.. the widget saves the info, however the albums are still displayed. To my knowledge, I don’t have any caching enabled.

  8. Dustin March 22, 2008

    Okay… disregard that.. I wasn’t paying attention to my widget names and forgot about the single and multi separate widgets

  9. Charity March 24, 2008

    Thanks, Mike. I think I have enough of a workaround for now. I can make the album public to synch it, and then the latest pic widget works, even after I set the album back to unlisted. I use Highslide for the enlarged pics. As I’m just getting started with Picasa, that works well enough for now. Thanks for a great plugin!

  10. Christian March 25, 2008

    Hey Mike,

    is it possible to include videos that are hosted in my picasa album?

    Maybe in a next release ?

  11. Mike March 25, 2008

    Hi Christian – yes, you can include videos now. They work exactly the same as regular pictures, except that they can’t be displayed in Highslide. Shashin will link to them at Picasa. I looked into displaying them locally, but could not find an automated way to do it.

  12. Christian March 25, 2008

    Hey Mike, thanks for the fast answer,

    ok that sounds great, but in the praxis i cant see thumbnails of the movies and when im clickin on it, loading.. appears and nothing comes…

    you can look on it here: http://sleephead.de/wordpress/?page_id=19&album_id=5147175633727639361&title=Nature+One+2k7

    the pictures without thumbnails are the movies.

  13. Mike March 25, 2008

    Ok… I just synced one of my albums that contains videos, and my videos are broken now too. Google must have changed something in the RSS feed. I’ll have to find what they changed and then update Shashin. I’ll try to do it today.

    Mike T

  14. chris September 11, 2008

    please add support for private albums. I have a blog for my kids and I won’t want the pics public – I’d love to use your pluggin for them

    Thanks….

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