John’s Background Switcher has long supported photo sites like Flickr, smugmug, Phanfare and Picasa Web Albums and even Facebook a couple of versions ago - but they were never enough. I’d regularly have people on my forum or emailing me directly asking to support myriad other photo sites and I’d dutifully add them onto my to-do list. More often than not the sites wouldn’t have any sort of developer API I could use to extract photos and my frustration would grow.

All that changed with the wonder of Media RSS. This is a common feed format that, without getting boring and technical, means that if added support to JBS for it, I’d suddenly be able to support a whole host of photo sites without any more work. And with version 3.6 that’s exactly what I’ve done.

Take DeviantArt for example. If you browse through the site you’ll notice that on pretty much every page - be it a category page or a person’s photo page, there’s a link near the bottom that looks like the icon to the right (albeit somewhat smaller). That’s the feed link. Click on it and you’ll see what the feed version of that page looks like - in most browsers it’s not very interesting. But if you copy that address and paste it into the ‘Add Feed’ dialog in JBS then you’ll be able to see those photos on your desktop.

Or take a site like LOLCats (which I love). My good lady thinks I’m insane but it always makes me laugh. Anyway, there’s a big orange feed icon right at the top of the page. Copy that URL into JBS and your desktop can look like this!

You can use as many feeds as you like at the same time and JBS will choose photos from all of them. So you’ll be able to mix your Zooomr photos with LOLCats, attractive women on DeviantArt, photobucket photos, featured photos from Webshots (for some reason only the featured feeds are Media RSS, user feeds aren’t) and so on. Just look out for the orange feed icon!

JBS 3.6 has been tested with a host of sites but if you find one that you think should work but doesn’t, then let me know and I’ll try to support it in the next version. Bear in mind that not all sites provide enough information in their feeds for JBS to use properly (FriendFeed being one that springs to mind - come on guys, put the photo page URLs in your media:group’s!) but hopefully in time I’ll be able to support them too.

I’ve also added a bunch of highly requested features such as ‘Shuffle mode’ for folders, a ‘Never Show Again’ option so that if a picture comes up that you don’t like it’ll never appear again, a workaround for problems in Windows where your monitors get displayed the wrong way round, some useful defaults for first-time users, options to explicitly set your own snapshot scrapbook background and a host of bug fixes. You can read the full release notes here.

Anyway, you can download the latest version at the John’s Background Switcher page. It’s free, it’s fun and, eh, did I say it was free?!

Back in February I mentioned that I was joining a start-up founded by some ex-colleagues of mine. I was hoping that we’d build a product and spend a few years building up a business that would mean an escape from the evils of the corporate world. To have a direct say in the direction a product takes and potentially a better share of the success of the company. Instead only 8 months after I joined we’ve been bought out by a large American company called RiskMetrics.

I’ve not had a lot of happy times working for American companies before. One closed our office down thinking they could kill our product off (and ironically it’s the now only product that they are able to sell) after a prolonged period of “us against them”. They were a large, slow-moving company with more Vice Presidents than I’ve had hot dinners, everything that’s wrong with corporate America. The second company did pretty much the same thing and made the working environment so miserable that I left after a year and a half. So it was with some feeling of dread that the directors told us that they were thinking of selling out to a big American company.

However following a 2 day trip to New York to meet some of their senior people I was really impressed. This wasn’t the sort of company that had 20 layers of management (and no obsession with Vice President of this and that). Every person we met was not only very intelligent and insightful, but genuinely interested in and passionate about what they do. We had a meal out with them on the first night where we were just ourselves and so were they (although to be fair I’m just myself all the time) - and we had a great time. But the thing that really impressed me was how the people were the next day - the “corporate types” I’ve worked with before would be friendly outside of work but put their business faces on the next day as if the previous night had never happened. This was not the case with these guys. From the 2 short days we had it was clear that these were the sort of people I’d relish the chance to work with and could learn a great deal from.

I do have mixed feelings about joining a new, 1000 employee company. As a regular employee I don’t make any money from the buyout and my long-term hopes for the company will not come to be. But I will get the chance to work with some incredible people on a platform the scale of which I’ve never encountered before. A big reason I joined the start-up was to work in a small company away from a large organisation and that’s exactly what I’m going back to - time will tell what working for this company will be like although all signs so far are good. The work I’ve spent the past few months doing has been pretty frustrating and “bitty” while we were chasing business in the short term (which I guess is unavoidable in a start-up) so having the backup of a larger company will mean we can be more organised and structured and I can get more of a chance to do what I do best.

Ultimately from what I’ve seen so far this may turn out to be a great opportunity that otherwise I’d never have had the chance to take. And so the John Conners career roller-coaster ride continues with more unexpected twists and turns!

I’ve certainly learned a few lessons in this short journey working for a start-up that would make me a lot more wary about doing it in the future. But then again, to coin one of my favourite non-Steven Seagal phrases: nothing ventured, nothing gained!

One of the cool things recently introduced in WordPress (version 2.5 if memory serves me correctly) is built-in photo galleries. I’d wanted to host my own photo galleries locally for ages instead of relying on a 3rd party like Flickr and once again WordPress came up with the goods in the nick of time (I was getting close to rolling my own which wouldn’t have been ideal).

You may have noticed that when I upload a photo album here on John’s Adventures you don’t see all the photos on the home or archive page, you see a single photo from the album, a description and a link to view the full album. Pretty much like this:

While WordPress doesn’t currently support this functionality out of the box, it’s actually pretty straightforward to implement in your own theme by following these steps…

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