Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.

This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:

I forgot to post this about 1 or so weeks ago when I finsihed up the script. So here’s how the output looks on my flickr views program:

Now my next step is to put it on the web. However, the Python API I’m using doesn’t do web-based program authentication. It also doesn’t handle multiple user authentication, which I’d eventually like to do. Right now I’m thinking of porting it to Perl or PHP. I’ll keep you posted.

So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation.  This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies.  For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year.  Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.

Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it.  At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme.  Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme.  Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.

In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator.  You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit.  Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix.  Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts.  It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place.  The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.

Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web.  In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr.  Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day.  In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages.  Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable.  But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.

Last time I checked on that picture it had 25 Views. As of this writing it has 230 Views. That’s not a very high number of views, but for the amount of time it’s been up (about 5 months), the subject matter (a plain view of The White House), and lack of groups (when I wrote this it was in just three groups - although I’ll be adding it into more now) it IS indeed a high number of views. Which just goes to show that you don’t need pictures of naked women to get views on Flickr (as some have argued).

So I’m using Flock daily now for my web browsing to see how I like it. Since I don’t usually go to Facebook on my own, it’s nice to see the notifications within Flock. Thus, I’ve been more responsive to my Facebook private messages, a good thing since my second-cousin recently caught up with me on Facebook. So I’m liking the Facebook integration even more than I thought I would since I’m not a Facebook-heavy person.

Some of the usual as well as some interesting ones which have crept into here: