The redesigned Plazes.com went live today

(Link changed to point to the Internet Archive snapshot now that Plazes.com is offline).

So far these are the only things that work, all of the homebrew “saran wrap over a dish of sugar water” having failed. Catherine got them at True Value Hardware in the basement of the Confederation Court Mall. They haven’t eliminated the problem entirely, but they seem to be helping.

I’ve spent this morning refining some code that enables using Share on Ovi programatically from PHP. So far here’s what I have:

• class.ovi.php is a PHP class that supports upload of JPEG images to Share on Ovi.
• UploadToOvi.php is a command line uploading tool.
• Creating a Share on Ovi Droplet provides instructions for turning UploadToOvi.php into a Mac OS X “droplet” to allow for easy drag-and-drop Share on Ovi uploading.
• flickr2ovi.php is a PHP script that enables migrating a user’s public Flickr photos to Share on Ovi, complete with title, description, tags and the original image.

I’ve have been remiss in not pointing out the virtues of Ampersand, the new café cum t-shirt shack on Water Street in Charlottetown. There were some fumbles as they found their way — my first visit I asked for sugar and was handed a big bag and a spoon — but the young rockers behind the counter are all learning the ways of the big machine, and they’re starting to produce some very nice coffee. Like a cappuccino made for me this afternoon by Megan Stewart.

By far the nicest place to enjoy your coffee at Ampersand is in the back garden: you’ll have to be content with tree stumps to sit on, but it’s a very pleasant space. You could also hold a small theatrical event in the cavernous and as-yet ill-defined upper level if so-moved.

The Ampersand vibe is far too cool and young for me to completely grasp, but it’s a welcoming vibe nonetheless, and if you’re looking for a place to escape from the everyday, hiding out down on Water Street is a pretty good destination.

(This page originally included a photo from Share on OVI, but after OVI went offline, the photo went missing).

I’ve been a Flickr user for a long, long time. In the olden days I was averse to the notion of outsourcing my image storage to a third party, but a walk in the Copenhagen woods with Ben, one of the people of Ludicorp, Flickr’s birthparent, convinced me that it was worth exploring the social aspects of Flickr.

What I discovered is that there’s more to putting photos online than just looking for a cheap place to store bits: being able to share photos with my friends and family, have them leave comments, mark photos as favourites, and to do the same with their photos has become an integral part of how I use Flickr. To the point when I encounter photos that aren’t stored in Flickr they are, in a sense, dead to me.

Recently, though, I got skittish: when faced with the notion that, if Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, my photos would be part of an evil empire, I started to think about alternatives. My experimenting with Share on Ovi, Nokia’s social photo alternative to Flickr, only reinforced my misgivings (I like Ovi, especially the one-click upload from my phone, but it suffers from the same “walled garden” qualities that Flickr does).

Which got me thinking: is it necessary to store and manage the actual bits of my photos in the same place as my photos exist as social objects? While it’s obviously in corporate best interests to have the two wedded — there’s nothing like photo-lock-in to build “customer loyality” — it’s not necessarily in my best interests, no matter how enlightened the outsourcer or rich their community.

I blurted out some gibberish yesterday at Gong Bao Thursday about the possibility of piggybacking a system on DNS, or something DNS-like to do this. Nathan countered with the notion that shareable ATOM or RSS feeds could achieve the same thing. I’m still not really clear what I’m looking for, or what I’m thinking of, but it seems to boil down to having a decentralized system where a photo with any URL could become a social object with all the richness that Flickr and Ovi afford, but without the downsides of having to rely on a single vendor’s walled community as the environment. The Internet itself, after all, is a social network, isn’t it?

I welcome thoughts anyone might have on this.

I’ve been experimenting with Share on Ovi this week (seems only proper now that we’re all part of the same family now). Turns out to be a very nicely put-together web app in the Flickr genre, but with much better mobile integration, at least on Nokia devices.

Programatically uploading media to Share on Ovi can be done using the Atom Publishing Protocol: the basic idea is that you do an HTTP POST of binary image data, get back a response that contains an endpoint for doing an HTTP PUT with the image meta-data.

While I’m an old hand at using PHP and cURL together, this was the first time I’d needed to do an HTTP POST that wasn’t a standard key-value pairs, but rather simply a binary file. Turns out this is pretty easy, once you figure it out; the keys are:

Once I got this together, and figured out the secret WSSE voodoo required to authenticate, everything fell into place: here’s the first image I uploaded with my cool new PHP class.

I’ve run hot and cold on Just Us Girls over the years, but I gotta say that the last three or four times I’ve been there it’s been a very positive experience: excellent, friendly (dare I say “sassy”) service with tasty food. Catherine and Oliver and I were there last night to avoid cooking in the punishing heat: Catherine and I both had the cold watermelon soup, which was an excellent balm for the heat; Oliver had a plate of fresh vegetables with dip (which was nice to see on the kids’ menu, as an alternative to the “deep fried X” that one usually sees). Very good hygge.

When I saw the title of The 5 Best, Surefire Ways to Break into Yankee by Yankee editor Mel Allen I thought I was going to be getting tips on which mat the key to the front door is hidden under.