has_many :thoughts

I love incremental improvement.

New in Attributr—you can now choose the background style for your attribution overlay. The original black/white on transparent is still there but I’ve added white on black and black on white options for photos where that is more appropriate.

There are several more ideas I want to flesh out such as:

• Returning other sizes besides the default Flickr Medium.
• Being able to position the attribution in someplace other than the bottom right.
• Choosing different font styles. For some reason, the Coolvetica font I’m using looks a lot jankier when rendered on the servers than when it’s rendered from my local copy running on OS X.
• Providing a list of more comprehensive attribution of all the photos you request so that a “credits” page can be pasted into your presentation, website, blog, whatever.

While playing with Sinatra a bunch as part of the prep for my Philly on Rails talk, I came up with a few ideas for microapps that I thought would be perfect for Sinatra.

The first of these I call Attributr. It’s a very simple app that accepts the URL of a Flickr photo and returns that photo with proper attribution overlayed in the lower right corner. I often use photos from Flickr that are Creative Commons licensed. And I’ve often thought it would be handy to get the image with attribution right from Flickr so it’s ready to just drag into my presentation or whatever.

I used GraphicsMagick to add the text. In the past, I’ve used ImageMagick for such things, but I heard GM was easier to get installed. Indeed, it was pretty simple. On Ubuntu, it’s as easy as apt-get.

This is running on our newest production server under Passenger. I couldn’t believe how easy Rack and Passenger together make deploying tiny apps like this a breeze.

I’d love some feedback on Attributr if you ever have occasion to use it.