DRR Feed Read
Digital Railroad (DRR) is a great service, the Tasmania Adventure Team is excited to be using it, and we're very grateful for the sponsorship!
Digital Railroad lets the team upload images to a central spot where they can be organized, presented and rights can be sold for usage. In addition to lots of things DRR has going for it, the customizable XML feeds that archive owners can create in Digital Railroad are really powerful! These feeds can be "subscribed to" so that when new images come up, people can be notified. The feeds also have a limited way that they can be presented on other websites - say that you wanted to show the latest images from the Tasmania Team on your website, you could do this with a little code snippit from DRR
But the ways that the images can be presented directly from the feeds from DRR is rather limited. DRR Feed Read is a script I wrote in Perl to read a feed from Digital Railroad every so often, and put information about any new images into a database. Once the information is in a database, pages I wrote in PHP can present the images from Digital Railroad any way and any where one wants!
As an example of what we can do with DRR Feed Read, the two boxes here are iframes that can be pasted into websites where one wants to. One shows a randomized list of thumbnails from the 50 most recently published images from the team in Tasmania, the other a random image from 3 "highlighted" images that we'll choose each day. I wrote all this code to accomplish a couple of things:
1) Allow the Tasmania Adventure Team to use DRR 100% for our online Digital Asset Management. Rather than having to do extra work posting images to other websites, etc, we can just put the images in DRR and know that they are going to other websites
2)Attract people to our DRR archive to see all of the images that are there.
Hopefully, this will help us accomplish all of that!
The whole goal here is to present the wonderful photography of the Tasmania Adventure Team on DRR and other websites, attract people to our team's DRR archive so that they can see even more photos, and make the whole thing efficient and automatic enough that we can focus on shooting not mucking around computers!
Enjoy :) - and feel free to contact me with questions.