Django powered flickr photo voting site | Hacker News Reader

Django powered flickr photo voting site

flickrup.com

11 pointsmonological21 comments

two things: 1) the about page throws an Unhandled exception error, and 2) by not linking back to the original photo page on flickr (from the individual image page), you are breaking flickr's TOS.

Other than that, looks pretty cool.

By the way, this site used to be written in php (Code Igniter), but I just rewrote it in Python (Django), which took about 2 weeks. I also automatically pull top photos from Flickr's interestingness api, so there's always fresh content on the site.

Please offer any feedback you might have.

what prompted the rewrite?

Maintainability and Python's more powerful, i.e., I'm more dangerous with it, than php.

One question about your implementation. Last time I checked Django their file upload mechanism wasn't pretty, I'm not sure if you're dealing with file uploads, but did it cause any pains? Please enlighten me.

it's actually not that bad ... especially if you use ModelForms ... you just need to tell the FileField where to upload.

There is no file uploading as of now. I simply have a script that pulls 500 new photos from Flickr every morning and then another script that adds 20 more photos to the frontpage every 30 mins.

FWIW, if you're searching for a better interface, django-filebrowser uses Uploadify which works quite well.

Thanks for letting me know and I think by Uploadify you meant the Jquery plugin, right?

Yup, that's the one.

It's alright. You can also set up your own file upload handling or even setup a middleware that will push the file in chunks, and allow you to have things like an upload progress meter.

The design is clean, I like the concept. I didn't see attribution for each photo, did I miss it? I wouldn't feel comfortable visiting the site everyday if you don't give credit to the photographer.

I just noticed the attribution is missing on the photo page, but present on the homepage. If you were only going to do one, it seems the one that would benefit the photographer them most is on the photo page - because likely that will be the one that is indexed and possibly found on your site later - thus the link would help them.

Thanks for input, I will add that to the todo list. thanks!

Also I believe that clicking on the photos has to take you to flickr.com, according to the TOS. At least that's what I remember. Clicking on the photo (from the detail view) seems to go to the same page.

Great job. It would be a lot more addictive if it was in a hot-or-not format -- random sequence of pictures and you get to vote on each one. Each vote shows you the next one.

I am actually going to really consider implementing this. I think you are right. Before I had the option of allowing users to submit photos, but no one really submitted anything so the site kind of died. I realized I need fresh content to make the site addictive, but your idea will take it a step further.

Some of the photo titles come out wonky due to character encoding issues.

If I click Vote, but am not logged in, why not redirect me to a login page?

The photo sizes are really small. Why not make them bigger? After all, the whole point of the site is to see and vote on them.

Actually there are tons of voting groups of Flickr, I was really hoping that app was a way to do that better, but everything is lumped together, so it doesn't.

Could you describe some ways that would make it better?

Well, to me, you are trying to solve the wrong problem. Everyone is voting for what they like which all goes into one big pool. I think you should let people create groups with their own rules.

Flickr already has a very active scene where people create groups that are voted on in various ways, but it's very ad-hoc. Here are a few examples of the types of groups:

Post pictures with at least 50 favs http://www.flickr.com/groups/greatpix50/

Pictures with a least 4000 views http://www.flickr.com/groups/views4000/

Post a picture of a tree, comment on one http://www.flickr.com/groups/the_tree/

Post one, award two http://www.flickr.com/groups/history-mystery/

Top 20 Travel Pics http://www.flickr.com/groups/top20travelpix/

I would suggest looking at what these people are doing and seeing if you can make a better system for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com