Blog Archive
Hacking Humzoo.
Disclaimer: I didn't really hack Humzoo. I may have broken a few trade agreements and will be next on the RIAA's 'to sue:' list, but no harm was done.
Dave & Denny - Even though I believe you're pretty cool guys, if this has crossed any Humzoo guidelines - Let me know, I'll take everything down.
One feature I hope D & D are working on is a slide show. For the majority of my photos I use Flickr which comes with a nice slide show feature. Click the icon and sit back and watch the photos fly by on the screen.
The last few days I've been working on a side project that uses a Javascript framework called Jquery. There are a few frameworks out there (sciptalicious,mootools), but I've become really fond of Jquery. One thing Jquery does well is animation with HTML objects ex: hiding and showing images.
Well, Jquery happens to have a plugin called Jquery Cycle that does a whole bunch of transitions to create slide shows. With a little creativity I was able to get a hold of the images stored in Humzoo and put together a slide show using Jquery.
Here are some examples:
http://gotshoo.com/humzoo/index.php?id=gotshoo&gallery=...
Very cool!
Hacker! Your account has been permanently disabled. Thanks for using Humzoo, see ya later.
Kidding of course. That's an interesting slideshow, and that's cool that you were able to make it work with our images. We don't discourage that kind of thing at all.
I will say that I'm not that fond of JavaScript things like that where the images move around and shuffle and what not. If I was to design a slideshow, I would probably just have the images fade in and out, or crossfade. I'd put a control bar with some buttons to start over, skip ahead and pause the show. I made one of these for the district, although it is very basic and the code is not by any means perfect.
There's another aspect to the whole slideshow approach that I'm not fond of, which is that it takes you away from the captions and comments and just shows you the pictures. I think one of the strongest features of Humzoo is the community and the interaction that happens in the comments section.
That said, I would not rule out a slideshow feature by any means. I'm just not sure what it would look like if I was to design one today. I've seen some cool stuff done with Jquery though. The first place I heard about it was on your site, 'cause I was checking out your code looking how you did something (can't remember what now). And there it was, and I ended up tracing back all the included files and spending a lot of time reading through them in detail. Exciting!
I agree with Dave. I think slideshows are stupid.
Except my fishing slideshow.
I'm all for slideshows, but A) like Dave, I like the captions, and B) I want to control the time between photos...sometimes, it's just tooooo sloooowwww. Well, except for Betsy's fishing slideshow.
I have seen some well done slide shows on the Internets. Some of them even display captions and comments. You could do this fairly easily with AJAX. Or it could be a completely separate page for convenience without captions/comments. But until we get around to adding one Shoo can just link them all for us. Thanks Shoo!
Stoopid? Eh, I think slide shows are better used when you want to watch a whole gallery and not have to click next, next, next... ect. I can add some controls to the slide show. I did this example last night on a whim to see if I could get it to work.
Now the captions and comments would be a challenge. If you guys created an RSS feed, then I could do something.
Check out this Flickr slide show: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gotshoo/show/
Again...I say cool!
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I like to ponder photos. I don't think I can remember the last time I actually just sat back and "watched" a slideshow. I'm a definite next button clicker, I'm starting support group. NBCAs
Justin, I will join too. I like clicking buttons, as long as the button DOES something when I click it.