pureVirtual Services

Why post pictures of myself when I can post pictures of my son?  He's much more adorable, trust me.  Since I'm lazy I don't want to upload the same files to my blog that have already been organized and published to his photo stream in Picasa.  The work has already been done, so I should be able to to query the Picasa stream and with some simple jQuery code, the magic can all happen in the client-side browser.

We can use the getJSON jquery method for retrieving a lot of google data across many google products.  Picasa (Google's answer to Flickr or other photo stream sites) exposes its own flavor of the familiar gData interface.  By building a URI that corresponds to a particular photo album, it's easy to display the thumbnails from a few recent pictures in the album.

 

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/lkostoulakos/albumid/52601673040050129/?kind=photo&access=public&alt=json&callback=?

 

Note that the format we're requesting the data in is json and we need to include the callback=? option in order to avoid getting cross-site scripting errors.  Calling the getJSON method with your URL and a callback function is all that remains.  There are three thumbnail sizes available in the media$group object, in this example I'm using the "medium" sized image.

$j = jQuery.noConflict();                
$j(document).ready(function(){            
$j.getJSON([YOUR URL HERE],
    function(data){
        var thumbCount = 3;
        var smallThumb = 0;
        var mediumThumb = 1;
        var largeThumb = 2;
        var picsCount = data.feed.entry.length - 1;                  
        for (var i = picsCount; i > picsCount - thumbCount; i--) {                    
            var pic = data.feed.entry[i];                    
            $j("").attr("src", pic.media$group.media$thumbnail[mediumThumb].url).
                      attr("alt", pic.summary.$t).appendTo("#pics");                    
        }
    });   
});

Full source code can be found here. Enjoy!

Because the database mail service is disabled after 10 minutes by default in SQL Server 2005, you may want to run this script to check if the service is enabled, and if not, start it.

IF NOT EXISTS 
(
 SELECT 1 FROM msdb.sys.service_queues
 WHERE name = N'ExternalMailQueue' AND is_receive_enabled = 1
)
-- Enable the database mail service
EXEC msdb.dbo.sysmail_start_sp