How to make RedBubble slideshows!

Mark Mansour 34 posts

Widgets, Syndication, RSS, Atom

These are some of the names used for a technology that lets you to put images from RedBubble on your site. Oh yes – your own bubble. So if you have a blog, a MySpace page or any other web site you can now show RedBubble images on it. What makes this really cool is that when a new image is added to RedBubble it automatically appears in your widget.

I wants me some of thats magicks

You need to have at least a passing understanding of HTML to get this done

So how do you do it? We’re trying out a widget on RedBubble for displaying a slideshow of images. Now this is only one of a whole bunch of widgets you could possibly use (more on the technicalities later) but I’ll use this one as an example.

Let’s say I want to have my work turn up in my blog – I can do this

I think this slideshow looks best at 150×150 pixels or smaller. At the moment we are only making small images available through this method. If you need bigger images, let us know and we’ll see how the response is.

Stalk Keep up with other people

You don’t just have to follow your works, you can follow what other people are doing. Let’s say I want I want to see what webgrrl’s images, I would just replace the username mark with webgrrl and presto!

The World Wide Web of Widgets or WWWW

There are a bunch of other things you can do with the syndicated feeds. Webgrrl has done a heap of work on identifying other widgets that you should look at . There are more widgets that you can poke a stick at so get out there and check em out!

So nerd boy, how does this stuff work?

Syndication, in the form of RSS or Atom, allow the content from a site to be used on other sites. At RedBubble we decided to go with the Atom format for syndication because it is technically superior to RSS (and its the ants pants). The best way to find out about Atom, and content syndication in general, is to head over to the Wikipedia pages

We are producing Atom feeds of

All user’s portfolios – you can subscribe to http://www.redbubble.com/people/USERNAME/works/visual.atom, where you replace USERNAME with the user name…
All user’s journal entries (basically, their blog) – http://www.redbubble.com/people/USERNAME/works/journals.atom

There will be more feeds coming soon!

Show me your widgets!

Here are some widgets to check out

Webgrrl’s website – you can see an example of the widget on her site under the “Just Released & For Sale!” heading on the right side of her screen.
My Blog – you can see another example of the slideshow on the right hand side.
MySpace example – can you tell I don’t use MySpace :)

So please followup with examples of how YOU have used the widget on your site and what new and groovy widgets you’ve found.

Widgets, like everything at RedBubble was a big effort from everyone in the RedBubble team! Go team!

Thanks to Webgrrl for help with this post.

over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	Widgets, Syndication, RSS, Atom These are some of the names used for a technology that lets you to put images from RedBubble on your site. Oh yes – your own bubble. So if you have a blog, a MySpace page or any other web site you can now show RedBubble images on it. What makes this really cool is that when a new image is added to RedBubble it automatically appears in your widget. I wants me some of thats magicks You need to have at least a passing understanding of HTML to get this done So how do you do it? We’re trying out a widget on RedBubble for displaying a slideshow of images. Now this is only one of a whole bunch of widgets you could possibly use (more on the technicalities later) but I’ll use this one as an example. Let’s say I want to have my work turn up in my blog – I can do this <embed src="http://www.redbubble.com/swf/slideshow.swf" width="150" height="150" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="file=http://www.redbubble.com/people/mark/works/visual.atom&linktarget=_current&height=150&width=150&transition=bubbles" /> I think this slideshow looks best at 150×150 pixels or smaller. At the moment we are only making small images available through this method. If you need bigger images, let us know and we’ll see how the response is. ~~Stalk~~ Keep up with other people You don’t just have to follow your works, you can follow what other people are doing. Let’s say I want I want to see what webgrrl’s images, I would just replace the username mark with webgrrl and presto! The World Wide Web of Widgets or WWWW There are a bunch of other things you can do with the syndicated feeds. Webgrrl has done a heap of work on identifying other widgets that you should look at . There are more widgets that you can poke a stick at so get out there and check em out! So nerd boy, how does this stuff work? Syndication, in the form of RSS or Atom, allow the content from a site to be used on other sites. At RedBubble we decided to go with the Atom format for syndication because it is technically superior to RSS (and its the ants pants). The best way to find out about Atom, and content syndication in general, is to head over to the Wikipedia pages We are producing Atom feeds of All user’s portfolios – you can subscribe to http://www.redbubble.com/people/USERNAME/works/visual.atom, where you replace USERNAME with the user name… All user’s journal entries (basically, their blog) – http://www.redbubble.com/people/USERNAME/works/journals.atom There will be more feeds coming soon! Show me your widgets! Here are some widgets to check out Webgrrl’s website – you can see an example of the widget on her site under the “Just Released & For Sale!” heading on the right side of her screen. My Blog – you can see another example of the slideshow on the right hand side. MySpace example – can you tell I don’t use MySpace :) So please followup with examples of how YOU have used the widget on your site and what new and groovy widgets you’ve found. Widgets, like everything at RedBubble was a big effort from everyone in the RedBubble team! Go team! Thanks to Webgrrl for help with this post.
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	Has anyone tried this? Does the article make sense? Or does this just look naff? I’d really like to get some feedback on this stuff.
over 2 years ago JasonSmithPhotogs 29 posts	Great stuff mark! Thanks :)
over 2 years ago David Burren 58 posts	It’s interesting, but not as useful as it could be for me. This is mainly because the Atom feeds currently just return the 15 most recent items, which do not include the “older” works which may be more interesting. Dynamic feed generation where the URL can specify one or more tags could liven things up of course…
over 2 years ago kathleen 728 posts	-
over 2 years ago Jon Dawes 29 posts	Stumbled into this post, and 5 mins later it works Admittedly I’m good with HTML, but I literally copied and pasted your code into an HTML document, changed the username from mark to dawesy in the last line, and stuck it on the web. Presto. Nice feature, and a good way for people with their own sites to advertise. I do agree though that it would really benefit from the ability to select images by tag or similar, particularly those with wall art and t-shirts who want to keep them separate. Cheers.
over 2 years ago David Sundstrom 87 posts	Looks great, I will have to give it a try once I get home tonight. Thanks Mark!
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	Jon: great to hear – I’m glad it wasn’t too bad Kathleen – can you tell me this weeks Tattslotto numbers. I could really use some tips :) David: I don’t quite understand what you are after. Are you saying that it would be more useful if you could specify your own images in the slideshow rather than just the last 15? DStorm: Looking forward to the update
over 2 years ago webgrrl 193 posts	I Love it! it sits perfectly above my other RB feed widget … Yes would be nice if we could specify what tag feeds we use.. Mark..that would mean making the RSS more specific with tags yes? Ive seen this done on other sites.. where you can only just get feed off one particular category… (im not clever of the innerworks of RSS) but Thank YOU~!!
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	Doh! I forgot a really important parameter in the slideshow… If you add &linktarget=_current then the slideshow is clickable and takes you back to RedBubble. I’ve updated the original post to reflect this.
over 2 years ago David Burren 58 posts	Mark, the feeds at the moment only include the 15 most-recent items from one’s portfolio. I’m not sure if the feed files are being generated and cached only when items are added to the portfolio, or what. But if you could specify the feed URL along the lines of http://www.redbubble.com/people/USERNAME/works/visual.atom?tag=MYTAG and have the feed include the items from your portfolio that match MYTAG, that would allow us to set up specific widgets for parts of our portfolio.
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	David, the ability to filter/generate a feed by a tag is something we definitely want to do but it will depend on demand. At the moment the ability to slice and dice your content is limited (almost non existent really). My guess is that at some stage ( no promises :) we will have the ability to put images into groups and you’ll be able to get feeds of those groups. We’ve had quite a few discussion here as to how that would look – i.e. would we create a folder like metaphor such as flickr, MS Windows and MacOSX or do you go down the path of tags where you can then nominate a more permanent folder based on a tag. It is still a bit of a guess work on which way to go. Internally our focus is on scaling the application so that we have many more wonderful artists and works on the site and we only have a small team so getting time for any feature is difficult. Make some noise if you think anything is needed and if you can rally support you are much more likely to influence the shape of RB. Keep the questions coming :)
over 2 years ago Justin French 348 posts	Hooray! Have just pasted that stuff into my own site with great success!
over 2 years ago Sandra Chung 122 posts	I tried it, did all the proper editing, but got this message: Invalid video URL. Edit It seems to depend what site I try to put the flash script. I tried to put in on my weblog, and that is where I got the error message. I did manage to plunk in on MySpace. Such is life. :)
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	Hmmm, if you want to post more details we can try to work out what is going on.
over 2 years ago Helen McLean 95 posts	Oh my god, You’re the Mark from State of Flux??!!! We emailed each other ages ago when I uploaded some images on that website! I thought the site was gone (wasn’t there last time I looked a couple of months ago?) OK – just checked the website again and it is NOT what it used to be… I’m confused – what happened to the stencil art website????
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	Ahhh, state of flux – I spent a lot of time writing that… My life has moved on and I just didn’t have the time to keep it running in the way I wanted to, so I thought it was better to take it down. Now I can put my effort into RedBubble instead!
over 2 years ago Fitzroyalty 1 post	I’ve made a start using the html code to display in my wordpress blog, and removed the transition effect – a little too ADHD for my liking – see Fitzroyalty
over 2 years ago Melinda Kerr 738 posts	Thanks Mark I’ve done it & it looks great. Just wondering-is it possible to make the slideshow bigger than 150×150? I tried changing the html to 250×250 but juts got the 150×150 images in a bigger black box?
over 2 years ago webgrrl 193 posts	im Lovin how it looks.. also have added it in various sections in one of my site PSYDJS
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	@Fitzroyalty, @webgrrl – I love the way you guys have used the slideshow widget. Very schmick! @Melinda: At the moment we are only sending out smallish images. We’ve spoken about adding another feed for larger images if there is demand. So… who wants a feed with larger images? And how large do you want them? Is the size of an image on our ‘works’ screen (i.e. http://www.redbubble.com/works/show/32483) too big? What about these image sizes http://www.redbubble.com/search/find/water?display_mode=list I’m all ears (not literally of course)...
over 2 years ago Natalie Manuel 467 posts	I think the image size on the “works” screen is best. It means we could use it as basically our initial page on a website. I’m really really wanting large images pleeeease :)
over 2 years ago Anne van Alkemade 2011 posts	I’m glad my suggestion has got people buzzing – but my original idea was for a casual browser to click on a button and whallah – a slideshow of redbubble images – someone sitting at their desk at lunchtime who doesn’t have a website, or html knowledge would not be able to use widgets etc. So, maybe a slideshow tab in the gallery???? A randomiser so ANYONE’S art etc. Is that possible Redbubble?
over 2 years ago Mark Mansour 34 posts	@Anne: I think you are asking for something quite different from what this thread is talking about. This thread was primarily started to show people how to embed a slideshow widget in their own site and how we can make it better. If I understand you correctly (which I may not!) it sounds like you would like another option in the gallery page that shows a random slideshow of images. Is that correct?
over 2 years ago Melinda Kerr 738 posts	Hi Mark, thanks for taking the time to answer so helpfully. Yep, I’m with Natalie, the “works” screen is great!

How to make RedBubble slideshows! - Updated