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).

Shashin 2.0 is now available. I jumped the version number to 2.0 because this release includes a couple major new features. One is that Shashin is now bundled with Highslide. It was a fun challenge getting WordPress to play nicely with Highslide for displaying any combination of photos in a post, and then any combination of posts on a page. The other major new feature is linking album thumbnails to a local display of the album’s photos, so you can show them on your site instead of having to go to Picasa.

There are minor new features too: a new tag that lets you display sets of album thumbnails alongside their titles and descriptions, an option to prefix album titles to photo captions, and if you choose not to use Highslide, you can open the links to Picasa in a new window if you want.

All the details, including instructions for using the new features, are on my Post to Post Links II error: No post found with slug "shashin-wordpress-plugin".

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please use the comments on this post.

In my announcement of Shashin 1.2 the other day, I said I didn’t have as much time for testing as I would have liked, for the sake of getting out a version that works with WordPress 2.3.3. Sure enough, there were several bugs in Shashin 1.2. Get the fixes in version 1.2.3 from wordpress.org.

It may fix the problem some people were reporting with adding and syncing albums (a problem I haven’t been able to reproduce, so I can’t say for sure). If you had this problem, please let me know if the new version fixes it for you.

I also took the opportunity to rewrite the algorithm for displaying random photos, and it works much more nicely now, so give it a try.

I believe I may have also found why some, but not all, Shashin users were having trouble with multibyte (e.g. Chinese) characters, so this upgrade may help with that as well.

If you have any questions or problems, please post a comment on this post.

Update: There were some bugs in this version, please see my post on version 1.2.3 for the latest update. Also go there for any comments or questions – I’ve turned off further comments on this post.

You can download the latest version of Shashin from wordpress.org. I had to rush this out the door, since Shashin 1.1 doesn’t work with WordPress 2.3.3. That means I didn’t do all the testing I usually do before a release. If you have any problems, please post a comment here (note I turned off comments on Post to Post Links II error: No post found with slug "shashin-wordpress-plugin", as the page was just getting way too long).

The two big new features happen to be the two most requested features: displaying groups of album thumbnails, and the ability to add or sync all your Picasa albums at once. For the album thumbnails, they are displayed in a table with a number of columns you can specify, you can choose to display either only certain albums, or all your albums with your choice of sorting preference, and you can choose whether to display the album titles and locations (if you specified a location in Picasa, Shashin will include a Google Maps link as well). Syncing all your albums at once will make using Shashin easier for those who maintain a lot of Picasa albums.

Another feature I added is smarter album syncing. Now if you move a photo from one album to another in Picasa, Shashin will preserve its original photo key when it syncs the albums. Before I made this change, the old photo key would be deleted and the picture would get a new photo key, thus breaking any Shashin tags that referred to the old key. That problem won’t happen anymore.

The biggest piece of work in this release wasn’t the new features though. It was writing a parser for the Picasa feed from scratch. I got tired of Shashin breaking every time WordPress changed its RSS tools (which seems to happen with almost every new version – that’s what broke Shashin 1.1 when WordPress 2.3.3 was released). Instead of using something big like Magpie, I instead wrote a very lean XML parser – not counting comments, the whole thing is less than 60 lines of code. It uses Snoopy to load the feed, since I can’t rely on PHP functions like fopen being configured across different servers for URL fetching (Snoopy comes with WordPress, so Shashin loads it from there). I would have loved to write the parser in PHP 5, which has a great new set of tools for XML, but a lot of sites out there are still on PHP 4 (including mine), so the parser is PHP 4 friendly.

I’ve noticed my old rss-functions-mod.php file being re-used by folks in other WordPress plugins. That code doesn’t work with the new version of WordPress (I didn’t bother to investigate why, since I was done working on the new parser anyway). If you’re someone who’s used that file in your plugin, you may want to switch to the parser that’s included with Shashin 1.2. But you’ll need to make some adjustments to your plugin, as the data that comes out of the new parser is in a different structure.

Stay tuned for version 1.3, probably in a few weeks. I’m planning to include Highslide integration! 🙂

WordPress 2.3.3 was released about a week ago. I haven’t upgraded yet, but I just heard from a Shashin user that Shashin isn’t working with the new version. It sounds like it actually breaks the whole site – that you’ll only get a blank page until you deactivate Shashin. I will install the new WordPress version today so I can start investigating what the problem is.

I actually have version 1.2 of Shashin almost ready. One major change is that I completely rewrote the parser for the Picasa RSS feed (so it’s no longer relying on my hacked version of the old WordPress rss-functions.php file). If I’m lucky, whatever the problem is with 1.1’s compatibility is already gone in my 1.2 code. But I’m not counting on it 😉 .

My Shashin plugin recently made the 20+ WordPress Plugins that Rock list by Jayson Akers. I have a slew of new features I want to add, but unfortunately I’m wrapped up in other projects right now (i.e. projects that can pay the bills). But an update will be coming – give me about another month.

My blog has been sadly quiet for the past month, but I’m now ready to resume my blogging duties. Today I’ve just a got a brief announcement though: Shashin 1.1 is now available for download at wordpress.org. I’ve added the most requested feature – widgets. Shashin now has a widget available for each of its main functions (displaying single photos, album thumbnails, random photos, newest photos, and tables of thumbnails). And for those not using widgets, I simplified the code needed for adding Shashin to your sidebar manually.

I don’t use widgets myself – since my sidebar is just a thin sliver of nav elements across the top – but it was fun learning how they work. The widget admin forms are great because I can include things like a drop down menu listing the possible image sizes, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the FAQ. The one thing that struck me as weird while studying other widgets is that all the other widget authors seem to have something against including a submit button in their widget admin forms. That’s just bizarre and not user friendly at all – they’re just counting on you hitting “enter” after filling out the last field in form. It’s probably because the couple of tutorials that are out there have just a single text input field (where a submit button is arguably less important), so everyone just blindly followed them, even when making a longer form. I’m happy to say that my forms include nice, friendly submit buttons 🙂

Shashin 1.0 is now available. New features include an options menu (so you don’t have to touch the code to change settings), improved random image and thumbnail display features, the ability to show the latest uploads to your albums, and UTF-8 support. Thanks to everyone who helped with the beta testing (the beta version was downloaded exactly 100 times).

Shashin is available at the WordPress plugin repository now, so you can get it there as well. The plugin repository requires a readme.txt file with an FAQ section. To avoid maintaining two sets of documentation, I rewrote my Shashin page to also follow the FAQ format.

If you’re crazy for code, you can read the PHPDoc documentation.

My Picasa plugin for WordPress is now available. I’ve been working on it for months now and I’m pleased to have it in good enough shape for others to try out. Please keep in mind I’m the only one who’s used it so far, so if you encounter any problems, please let me know, and I’ll fix it. You can get it at my Shashin page, where you’ll also find detailed instructions.

I had intended to make it available exclusively at the WordPress.org plugins site, as that’s where it would reach the widest audience. But I filled in their “add a plugin” form almost a week ago and haven’t heard anything back yet, so at least for now I’m making it available here.

The new design I'm working on for toppa.com

View at Picasa

 

I’ve been busy working on a new design for toppa.com – this is a screenshot of it. My site is cluttered with a ton of links that really are more distraction than anything else. My design is inspired by the simple and clean open source “Cash” design. As you can see, I want to go even simpler (the CSS for Cash is also needlessly complicated, so I simplified that too). I’ve been using a lot more photographs in my posts over the past year, so I want to maximize the available width for pictures, but still be friendly to low-res monitors. Put all that together, and it means the sidebar has to go.

One part I still have to work on is rollover menus for the top navigation. The header area can be overlaid with a tag cloud, blogroll, etc. if someone wants to look at them. Otherwise, they’re neatly hidden away. After that I need to convert it into a WordPress theme, but I think that part will be easy.

Let me know what you think. If there’s any interest I’ll be happy to make a downloadable version – just leave me a comment.