Photolesce

Photolesce is a little application that aggregates together RSS feeds of images and lets you browse them in a simple way.

The app is currently in its very early stages and is not ready for public use yet.

It filters Flickr photos by a fixed amount of favorites to make sure most of the photos are of decent quality. Otherwise, the timeline winds up being inundated with too many mediocre photos amongst the good ones. Currently, this threshold is 5. In order to keep the app simple, this is not currently a user-configurable setting.

Getting started

Photolesce should work like any normal Rails 3 app. Here are the configuration steps you'll want to take:

• Generate a secret token using the built-in rake task: rake generate_secret_token
• Fill in the values in config/initializers/secret_info.rb. See config/initializers/secret_info.rb.template for an example of how to fill it in. You'll need to supply an admin password . If you want to work with Flickr feeds, you'll need a Flickr account so you can apply for a Flickr API key. To work with Tumblr content, sign up for a Flickr account and get a Tumblr API key by "registering a new application" and then pasting the "OAuth consumer key" in for the TUMBLR_KEY variable.
• Photolesce currently uses MySQL, so make a MySQL database named 'photolesce' and then fill out config/database.yml.template as you did with the secret_info file above.
• Fill in your Google analytics tracking ID in /config/initializers/photolesce_settings.rb and optionally change the thresholds for Flickr and Tumblr. If you don't want to use Google analytics, blank it out.
• After you've deployed and configured it, head to the admin interface at /feeds to start adding content to aggregate.
• You'll then want to put the rake tasks that fetch content on a cron job; make a cron job that runs rake fetch_all RAILS_ENV=production. Because this makes many API calls to Flickr, you'll only want to run it a few times a day. See the text block below for a sample crontab file that separates the 'cheap' tasks from the ones that make lots of Flickr API calls.
• You'll want to customize the about page (app/views/entry/about.html.erb) and application layout (app/views/layouts/application.html.erb) to be specific to your site, as the ones in version control contain descriptions and names specific to photolesce.com.

Sample crontab configuration

*/20 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/warren/code/photolesce && RAILS_ENV=production rake update_feeds && RAILS_ENV=production rake update_tags'
0 */2 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/warren/code/photolesce && RAILS_ENV=production rake fetch_flickr_favorites'

Replace /home/warren/code/photolesce with whatever directory your copy of the app is on your server.