A couple times a year, someone asks how I created the Flickr "badge" that appears on the right side of my blog front page. It's not using JavaScript (what overkill that'd be) or anything fancy. It's simply an include file built up by a Perl script from a cron job every 20 minutes.
Basically it uses the Flickr API to fetch a list of my most recent photos, grabs the thumbnails, caches them on disk, and then re-writes the include file.
It's pretty simple, really. Here is the code: flickr_badge.pl.
It's a highly modified and pruned version of someone else's script that I ran across years ago. I have since lost the attribution, so ping me if you know where it came from and I'll gladly give credit.
This code is free for the taking, as in Public Domain. Use it for whatever you want. Feel free to give me credit or not. It's really not rocket surgery.
Posted by jzawodn at December 04, 2007 11:43 AM
Just curious as to why you feel JS would be overkill. I realize that it potentially cuts some audience, but I guess I didn't mind it much because it pushed some of the load onto the client, and I didn't have to set up a cron job or anything. :D
Because nothing about it is interactive. Why should I slow down the page load and force the browser to do more work than it needs to?
