Flickr and Blogger Can Drive You Nuts

When Flickr decided to go with Iframe to for the sharing code used to embed their photos (see the post immediately below), I didn't like some of the side effects.  But it was actually a better methodology, and by using Flickr Sets, which I always do, the whole photostream wasn't exposed in every embed.

One other side effect that I had experienced was that when I embedded into a blogger post, I had no photo show up in my "Compose" view of the post.  There was just white space, indistinguishable from the background.  This was pretty poor from a composition standpoint, but I just wrote it off to the war between parents Google and Yahoo not wanting to place nice together.  The same thing shows up in Blogger's Preview.

Today, I added a couple of pictures to an old post on my travel blog - and what's this? The new pictures showed up in Compose, but not the old ones!

More wasted time playing with code to find out WTF!

Here is what happens when I used the link code for a photo two days ago and what happens when I linked to the same picture today:



  *******************************************************************
Now I know that the above two images look identical to you once they are published.  So here is what they look like to me while in Compose mode or on Preview.  (I screen-captured it for you and will publish it as a localy sourced Blogger image.)

 ************************************************************************




That;s right - no image on the two day old stuff, nice image today.  Did Flickr fix a bug?  What' changed, by the way?

Well, here is the old link code generated by Flickr and the new.

 <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="272" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjsawyer/13060029443/in/set-72157642150476853/player/" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe>

And, here is the new:

<iframe src="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tjsawyer/13060029443/in/set-72157642150476853/player/" width="500" height="272" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>

A little changing of the order of things but the real change is from "http" to "https"

Why?  Well, Flickr fessed up to changing some SSL things here.

Sometime in the last few months, we went and updated our API SSL endpoints. Shame on us for not making a bigger deal about it!

But without much explanation.  And why does Blogger show one of the images in Compose and Preview but not the other while showing both when Published?  Beats me.  But I'll accept the improvement in functionality without argument.  But it would be nice if these behemoths software concerns just shared with us poor customers what they are doing once in a while.  I know that not all of their customers are nerds like I am - but a lot of normal folks ask us what's going on from time to time.