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• PAX Hack
  by Dave Pearson

  RedBubble’s newly-announced PAX...

  RedBubble’s newly-announced PAX is pretty cool. Well, no, that’s not true, it’s very cool. But it’s got a problem. The problem is that, with over 16,000 works in the mosaic, you’ve got a hell of a time seeing if any of your works are in there. Now, sure, you could sit down and just wander around it, keeping an eye out for your own stuff and being amazed at some of the works that are in there, but that could take forever. Besides, you can never be sure that you’ve found all of them (or be sure that you’ve confirmed that you’ve got none in there). And then I noticed that the full list of all the works in the mosaic was available “under the hood” (anyone with a reasonable knowledge of web development should be able to find that file). The file itself is just some Javascript code. So, I got to thinking, here’s a file that contains a list of image IDs of every work in the mosaic. I’ve got a list of all my works on RedBubble thanks to a tool I wrote a while back. If I just extract the two ID lists, take the intersection of those two lists, I’ll have a list of all of my works in PAX. So, a quick bit of ruby hacking later and I had findPAXworks up and running. And a few seconds later I had a full list of all of my works that appear in there. Well, I say “all”, there’s only the two, and it’s the two that I expected: / Chaos / Quite a Contrast Now I can go and enjoy wandering around the mosaic without being preoccupied with looking for my own works. ;)

• Hack: RedBubble art list exporter for Microsoft Windows
  by Dave Pearson

  Ever since I wrote getrbart I’ve been toyi…

  Ever since I wrote getrbart I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a variation on that theme that might be useful to people who aren’t in the habit of getting “down and dirty” on their Windows machines, people who prefer not to install software they don’t know about and who don’t fancy running command line scripts. Last week I finally cracked and started work on something: This is a very early release of the software, it doesn’t do a whole lot of stuff. Things it does do: Lets you download a list of all your public art on RedBubble. Lets you save the list and load it again later. Lets you download it again (dur!) Lets you export the list as a comma-separated values file. Lets you export the list as a tab-separated values file. Lets you export the list as a MediaRSS file. Lets you export the list as a set of HTML files, which might be useful for including in your own website (if you have one). Please note that this is a very early release of the tool. I’m making it available to people who are feeling adventurous (or foolish, depending on how you want to look at it) and who won’t mind reporting problems or giving suggestions. I can’t promise that it’ll do everything you want, but I can promise that it’ll be free to download, free to use and will always be free to use. If you fancy having a play head over here and have a read and, if you like what you see, download, install and have a play. PS: Yes, I know the application icon sucks in a big way. I’m a developer, not a designer. :P Version Details: v1.6.0.0 — Released 2008-09-21 / v1.5.0.0 — Released 2008-05-21 / v1.4.0.0 — Released 2008-05-16 / v1.3.0.0 — Released 2008-05-16 / v1.2.0.0 — Released 2008-05-15 / v1.1.0.0 — Released 2008-05-14

• Hack: "Friends of RedBubble" quick link for mybubble
  by Dave Pearson

  Inspired by this thread...

  Inspired by this thread I’ve knocked up a quick Greasemonkey hack that adds a Friends of RedBubble forum link the the quick links bar in mybubble. This, of course, is only useful to people who use Firefox, have Greasemonkey installed, and who are a member of the FoRB group. If that’s you and this sounds useful then pop over here to get a copy.

• Hack: Simple BubbleMail Preview
  by Dave Pearson

  Inspired by this thread (although it is a subject that…

  Inspired by this thread (although it is a subject that has come up many times before) on the RedBubble forums I’ve created a Greasemonkey script to implement a very simple BubbleMail preview facility. It works by adding a preview button to your screen when you compose a new BubbleMail: When you press the button a preview of your BubbleMail will appear below the button: It’s not perfect. It has some issues. But it’s a start. See over here for more details about the script and to get a copy.

• What's your RedBubble Year?
  by Dave Pearson

  Note that I’ve also posted about this on the forums A little earlier today I noticed t…

  Note that I’ve also posted about this on the forums A little earlier today I noticed that the total number of pages of art on RedBubble was about to hit the 6,000 mark. And then I got to thinking that most people probably look at the first 10 or so pages and perhaps the last couple of pages (just to see what’s right at the “bottom” at any given moment). And then I got to thinking some more: somewhere around the middle there’s probably lots of stuff that most people don’t notice. So, how about picking a random page and bookmarking it (the content will change over time anyway). So how to pick one at “random”? Pick a year, perhaps? So, long story short, the pick a year and find art tool page thing Yeah, I know, it’s stupid… So, what’s your RedBubble year? Did you find anything fun? Edit: As of December 2007 this no longer works due to the fact that the “most popular ever” view is now restricted to just 30 pages. :-(

• If you have a web site read this!
  by mikoto

  Hello fellow Bubblers. I hope your Christmas and new y…

  Hello fellow Bubblers. I hope your Christmas and new years were enjoyed. Just writing to warn all of you out there with a web site for your creative endeavors to beware. My website mikoto.com.au got hacked into and I have spent the last 3 days rebuilding it from scratch. The cyber nerds got into my site with apparent ease using a brute force attack and then diverted all the traffic to some other destination. I have learn’t that you need to make your passwords over 20 letters, numbers and symbols or it can easily get picked by the ‘bots’. It was a timely hack though that I used to revamp my website with some fun new images and functionality. To read the long version of this story goto mikoto.com.au

• Edit a work from the public view
  by Dave Pearson

  Last week PigleT and me were chatting about how annoying it is that you can’t edit a work on Red…

  Last week PigleT and me were chatting about how annoying it is that you can’t edit a work on RedBubble from the public view of the work. Diving into your art or clothing list to find the work, or hacking on its URL, can be a real pain. I then got to thinking that a Greasemonkey script could be the way to go, although this would have the downside that it would only work with Firefox (not that I see that as a downside). PigleT then had the cracking idea of using a bookmarklet. Smart idea because it would work with most browsers. And then we did the usual thing and let the good idea stay just like that: a good idea. And then I saw this thread and that got us going again. I tried one way (and failed) and PigleT tried another and it worked, but only for art. I then hacked it a little and made it work with art, clothing, journals and writing. The end result can be found over here. And it works. And works well. And solves a really annoying problem. There’s a couple of issues, not least of which is the fact that any number of strange things could happen if you used the bookmarklet while viewing something other than a public view of one of your works. Think of this as a feature rather than a bug. Edit: If you’re a Firefox user, and you have Greasemonkey installed (or are happy to), then this approach might be more to your taste.

• Hack: Better text formatting hints
  by Dave Pearson

  Time for another Greasemonkey hack. This one replaces the existing text formatting hint you get when making comments (the text that po…

  Time for another Greasemonkey hack. This one replaces the existing text formatting hint you get when making comments (the text that pops out when you click on the “Show text formatting help:” link below the comment box). Instead of the rather small bit of help you get webgrrl’s rather handy text formatting cheat sheet. See over here for more details.

• Using an exported art list
  by Dave Pearson

  Yesterday I finally got around to using my little tool for exporting my RedBubble art list...

  Yesterday I finally got around to using my little tool for exporting my RedBubble art list to build a quick and dirty site that acts as a simple “front door” into my works here. Given that I’ve had the domain davep.co.uk hanging around not doing anything useful for a while I’ve placed it over there. At the moment it’s a quick and dirty hack, more of a proof of concept than anything else, I’ll probably expand it into something more at some point in the future. But, for now, here’s the first version of Photography by Dave Pearson.

• Hack: RedBubble Art Manager for Windows v1.2.0.0 Released
  by Dave Pearson

  I’ve just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application...

  I’ve just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application (this is v1.2.0.0). You can get it from here. The main change in this release is to enhance the “promote a work” dialog as per Julie Langford’s suggestion. Whereas before it simply let you promote with a simple image it now lets you promote with a simple image or one of the various product previews: Another change is that I’ve added a command that takes you directly to a work’s edit page on RedBubble, something I thought of after reading a comment made by Shelley Heath. Edit to add: I’ve just noticed a small bug. If you try and generate a promotion code for a mounted print with no border the resulting code doesn’t work. This is now fixed and will be available in the next release.

• Hack: Script to export an art list
  by Dave Pearson

  _Warning: This is a solution looking for a problem. It’s also aimed at people who have the ability to execute ruby...

  Warning: This is a solution looking for a problem. It’s also aimed at people who have the ability to execute ruby scripts. Edit: I’ve now used this tool to knock up a quick and dirty website as a simple test of the idea. I’ve seen a few people ask for this, and I’ve been after a way to do this myself: a facility on RedBubble that lets you export a full list of your works (or, at the very least, your art) so that you can do something else with it elsewhere. Today I got to thinking that it should be possible to scrape the data from my public art page. A bit of hacking with ruby later (using its “net/http” and “rexml/document” modules) and I had something that produced a very simple tab-delimited text file containing the work ID and the work title (given these two items it’s pretty easy to infer everything else). Like I say: this is a bit of a solution looking for a problem right now, but a quick test with Google Docs shows that the file imports nicely as a spreadsheet: I’m also thinking that such data could be handy as the starting point for writing a tool that generates some sort of front-end (on one of my own sites) into my works on RedBubble. If you think this sounds interesting, and if you’re able to run ruby scripts, pop over here and grab a copy.

• Hack: RedBubble Art Manager for Windows v1.6.0.0 Released
  by Dave Pearson

  I’ve just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application...

  I’ve just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application (this is v1.6.0.0). You can get it from here. This release adds a new export option. You can now export your art list as a MediaRSS file. This is useful if you want to add CoolIris support to one of your own websites. For details on how to add support to your website see the CoolIris developer guide.

• CoolIris with www.davep.org
  by Dave Pearson

  Having previously added CoolIris support to my RedBubble wrapper site...

  Having previously added CoolIris support to my RedBubble wrapper site I decided to go ahead and add it to my main photography site. Because of the way things work over there it took a little more effort but, now, I’ve got it working: For those interested in the technical details: I obviously didn’t want to create one honking great RSS feed of every photograph on my site, that’d be far too much data moving around all in one go. Thankfully the advanced developer documentation (note: no direct link to the documentation in question — fancy JS tricks are fun for some things but for documentation? Meh!) points out that a feed file can have next and previous links so I could create a feed for each individual album and they could all point to the previous or next albums. The nice thing about this is when you’re viewing an album and you hit the CoolIris button in your toolbar you’re taken to the part of the wall that’s displaying those images. Then, as you move about, the wall grows in the direction you’re moving in, following those previous and next links. I’m now toying with the idea of adding a MediaRSS feed generator tool to RBArtMan. Extra (X)HTML hacking would be needed to make it all work on people’s own sites but it would mean that most of the grunt work would be done for them. I’m not making any promises, it’s all down to available time.

• Hack: Random page of UK group art
  by Dave Pearson

  The UK group has quite a lot of art in it now (204 pages as of the time of writing) and it has…

  The UK group has quite a lot of art in it now (204 pages as of the time of writing) and it has been suggested that having so much art could work against a lot of the stuff that’s in there (a suggestion that makes sense to me). So, I got to thinking: it could be amusing to have a little tool that directs you to a random page. One line of PHP code later: The UK Group Art Random Page Selection Thingy Clicking on that link will take you to a random page. Note, however, that there’s a small problem with the above in that I need to hand-edit the max number of pages as the number of works increase. Still, for a quick one-line hack, it’s not so bad. I think.

• Messing with CoolIris
  by Dave Pearson

  I’ve been meaning to have a play with CoolIris (previously known as PicLens) for a while now and “this thread”...

  I’ve been meaning to have a play with CoolIris (previously known as PicLens) for a while now and this thread over in the forums prompted me to have a look (mostly because there was a link to the developer information — how could I resist?). I had a quick read of the information and managed to quickly add the required feed to my Photography by Dave Pearson site (the one I created a short while back as a way of using my art list exporting tool). I installed the extension into my copy of Firefox and right away I had a funky 3D wall of my photography here in RedBubble. Nice. I then did a little more reading and had a quick play with the “Lite” version of CoolIris. This is more or less a in-browser slideshow tool. That took a little more work (it didn’t want to auto-discover the feed so I had to tell it where to look using the feedUrl option) but, soon enough, I had that working too. So far I’ve tested it in Safari and Opera (on Windows) and it seems to work fine. To see it in action, in a browser that doesn’t have the CoolIris software installed, just click on the “Slideshow” option in the menu of my site. While there’s no (obvious) way of making this work on RedBubble itself it might be worth looking into if you’ve got a site of your own and you’re able to create the required feed and add the right header to your (X)HTML. It’s yet another way of letting people discover and view your works.

• Hack: Move user actions further up a user's profile page
  by Dave Pearson

  This thread over in the forums raises an interesti…

  This thread over in the forums raises an interesting point: wouldn’t it be nice if the user actions for a user’s profile (the actions for adding them to your watchlist or to send them a BubbleMail) were in pretty much the same place all the time. Currently, because they come below the user-supplied part of the profile, and because some user-supplied text can be very long, you’ve got to go hunting down the page to find them. If they always came before the user-supplied text you’d always know where to look. Inspired by this issue I’ve written a Greasemonkey script to solve the problem. So, if you use Firefox, and if you’ve got Greasemonkey installed, have a look over here.

• I've been Hacked
  by Tammy Soulliere

  Like my life wasn’t fucked up as it is.. No wonder I couldn’t render and my CPU whirled like no tmw.. Please excuse my absence I am so so…

  Like my life wasn’t fucked up as it is.. No wonder I couldn’t render and my CPU whirled like no tmw.. Please excuse my absence I am so sorry … Life is just so incredibly short think people could find better things to do than mess other peoples lives up more than they already are… Love peace and chicken grease Tammy P.S Thought ya all might like to know I am feeling very depressed

• How people find my photography
  by Dave Pearson

  Following on from my clickable search term interconnectedness graph thingy-...

  Following on from my clickable search term interconnectedness graph thingy, and prompted by a conversation with my friendly Scottish Landscape Photographer after he added a similar feature to his website, this morning I got to thinking about adding a simple list of the most popular recent search phrases that resulted in people landing on one of my photographs on my main website. A little bit of php hacking later (using the output of a ruby tool I wrote that simply extracts search phrases from apache log files) and I had a table of the 40 most popular recent search hits on the photography section of my site. It’s interesting to see how some are very specific (the old “big fish in a small pond” thing going on there, obviously) while one or two are rather general (photographs coming in at #2 was a surprise, for example).

• Hack: "Add to Google Reader" button for all forum threads
  by Dave Pearson

  Yet another Greasemonkey hack for RedBubble. This one adds a Add to Google...

  Yet another Greasemonkey hack for RedBubble. This one adds a Add to Google button to all forum threads. This makes it easier to keep on top of threads you’re active in (if you’re a Google Reader user, obviously). If this sounds handy, and you use Firefox, and you’ve got Greasemonkey installed, pop over here and give the script a go.

• Hack: Random profile page link generator
  by Dave Pearson

  Inspired by yesterday’s little hack I got t…

  Inspired by yesterday’s little hack I got to thinking that it might be fun to have some way of pointing people at random aspects of your profile (random page of art, random page of clothing, random page of favourites, random page of people on your watchlist being the obvious ones). To make it work, to make it so it approaches being easy to use by most people, it needed some sort of link generator. Some hacking about with PHP later and here it is: The RedBubble random pages from your profile link generator thingy I’ve tried as best as I can to document how it works and how you can use it over on the page so I won’t write any more about that here. However, if you’re stuck, or find it confusing, or just need a hand with something, feel free to ask here. To give you an idea of what it ends up doing: View a random page of my art

• Hack: RedBubble Art Manager for Windows v1.5.0.0 Released
  by Dave Pearson

  I’ve just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application...

  I’ve just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application (this is v1.5.0.0). You can get it from here. There are no new features in this release, all it does it tidy up a couple of loose ends and adds a little more error checking in places.

• Iron Hack
  by Dave Pearson

  Now that there’s a mosaic for clothing I had to do for that mosaic what I did for PAX...

  Now that there’s a mosaic for clothing I had to do for that mosaic what I did for PAX. Turns out I’ve got one t-shirt in there (and, again, it’s the one I expected): / Tendrils This did involve extending (the now incorrectly named) getrbart so that it can optionally export a list of clothing. I’ll be releasing a new version of that a little later on (it’s now released). It’s also reminded me that I really should rework RBArtMan so that it too isn’t just about art but lets you work with clothing too. When I find some time I’ll have to see about sorting that out. I think it’s also about time that I added a clothing page to my RedBubble wrapper site.

• recently my websites and my identity was hacked
  by Gabriel Popa

  I was a victim of internet atack , my identity and credit card info was stolen. Everything starting after I published my website www.crea…

  I was a victim of internet atack , my identity and credit card info was stolen. Everything starting after I published my website www.creativezone.ro and www.transylvanikon.com . There was a link for PayPal payments and an E-Bay link to my e-bay gallery wich was empty . I just designed the website to have this feature , a direct link to my e-bay account. This was my critical point cuz from here somebody was able to see my real name and sent me a phishing e-mail to answer to an “unpayed” item disspute. I was so naive and I believed that is better to see whats the problem and why is related to me, what are his concernings,cuz I didn’t even started to sell on e-bay anything yet. But in the e-bay message my name was clearly nominated. The answering e-bay form was very tricky , they asked me to confirm again my identity with my card info . And I was so naive to fill all the info and send. In that moment I realised maybe is a fake message and site. But was too late. Anyway, be aware, do not put e-bay links on your website could be dangerous.

• Geeking Out With Exif
  by Dave Pearson

  Back in May last year I knocked up some code to generate some (po…

  Back in May last year I knocked up some code to generate some (pointless) stats taken from the Exif data of my photographs. The other day I found the Google charts API and got to thinking that it might be (pointless) fun to knock something up that used it to generate some charts from the stats. A little bit of PHP hacking later and I’ve now got a page of totally pointless charts to go along with the totally pointless stats. Things like this: No, I’m not sure that it tells me anything useful either. But, but, but…. It’s fun to hack.