I need to update my blog. There are more new AP photos and Dave got a positive review from Lance Knoble. “No Bull” Knoble… he likes it.

But what they always rave about are the photos. AP photos in near realtime… for free.

Knoble wants every school to shows those images. I would expect many schools would like all the images. The world AP covers is not always that pleasing… it’s based upon a lot of conflict and political disorder.

A feed of just great photography would be much less interesting for most. We typically get some nice photos already with a screensaver.

I must say, the UI for OPML Editor is not particularly intuitive. I suspect there is a simple way to inspect the database and the scripts, but in my short time using the program it was certainly not obvious. Fortunately after opening and closing the program a few times I inadvertently caused errors (like a table somehow disappearing) that brought up windows to inspect the OPML of one of the running scripts and the database. I don’t have the program on my computer anymore, but one of the more confusing things is the way ‘app’ script functions are mixed into the menus with scripting environment actions.

Probably the most likely scenario, in my mind, is that he figured out he could break iPhoto with a slightly tweaked feed… but then when he got caught he silently changed it. I also say this because of the bizarre change from /ap/ to /ap2/.

There’s nothing I can find about the feed change in the changelog for FlickrFan itself, although it’s clear that Dave is trying to hide the feed.

I didn’t mean to suggest that Dave at any point hand-coded his RSS feed, but I do agree that the way I described my scenario, in which the feed is created by “textediting programmatically” (i.e. removing old items from the bottom, adding new at the top) doesn’t seem likely. Evidently the feed is generated by OPML Editor, and it would be simplest for the feed generating script to draw from its database the most recent n items and build a new file each time.

Keeping in mind that the RSS feed is generated this way, and given that the top (most recent) entries of the RSS file are correct, I would modify my original scenario: Some time after our discussion on Wednesday, Dave makes a wholesale change to his database, a find & replace operation, changing all AP photo URIs from “http:///…” to “htp://…”. This would explain why older items which earlier on Wednesday had the triple-slash now have “htp”. Then he corrected his script that processes the images he downloads from AP, so that URI for each new item he puts into his database has the proper double slash.

Incidentally, since my curiosity has been raised, I downloaded FlickrFan and did a few tests. OPML Editor is quite generous when interpreting URIs. In my own feed, a URI like “crap:////” was treated just like “http://”. In fact, “ftp://” was also treated as an HTTP URI. It’s not just the interpretation of feeds, either. Submit a messed up URI to the FlickrFan ‘app’ when adding your own feed to the list and it works fine there, too. It would appear this is a ‘feature’ of OPML Editor, not just the FlickrFan script. (Dave would say it’s Postel’s law in action, right? Be liberal in what you accept? Geez, I need to just stop reading him!)

He uses that feed to upload photos to his S3 service.

Then he creates an RSS feed with enclosures to his cache of AP photos.

His RSS feed has the triple /// issue making it non-standard.

His cache of AP photos are accessible at static.flickrfan.org which is a domain/server that points to amazon’s S3 service.

He can legally download the photos, I assume. It’s the passing out of the photos to FlickrFan users (and anyone that can interpret his RSS feed and download the photos) that is suspect.

I love the images. I’d like to have them keep coming but it probably won’t last to scale beyond a few hundred users of the service. Too bad.

Most of Dave’s new product dreams are intended to route around content controls and ownership.

He’d love to be a source for photos, audio (music and podcasts) and video but the realities of those media types are that the really good stuff is commercial. The non-commercial stuff tends to be worth something to some people. It’s the long tail effect that makes open source software and open media so damn tricky.

That said, if he’s hand-entering the URLs into a database, this problem would be replicated. Although if it were me, I wouldn’t store the “http://” in the database. It’s just wasted space.