Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Posting to Facebook
Now you want to be able to post your creations to Facebook, and it is not as easy as you
might think. his part has perhaps taken up more hours to get right than anything else in
this topic. Facebook does allow picture posting to happen remotely, but you have to register
with them as a developer and you have to have a server that will run your app. Although this
is ine for purveyors of mobile apps and the like, it has a few downsides for the individual.
You end up needing to pay for the app hosting and creating a unique name for yourself. Also,
the fact that you need to create the app in another language is ofputting for beginners. It
also would not be good for Facebook to have all of you readers create your own apps just for
your own personal use. All in all this is much more complicated than it should be.
Using Flickr
Whereas Facebook is diicult to post to, Flickr makes it some what easier to upload pictures
and, as an added bonus, you can link your Flickr account to Facebook - so two for the price
of one. However, it is not all plain sailing, and it is not as simple as it could be. One way to
post a picture is to e-mail your pictures to Flickr, to a unique address you can ind on your
Settings page. his is easy to automate, but unfortunately pictures posted like this never
seem to be transferred onto your Facebook timeline. his problem stumped not only the
online forum of experts but also Flickr's help desk. It turns out that this is actually a bug in
the Flickr web code which might be ixed by the time you read this, but I can't rely on that
when writing a book - it has to work now.
Pictures posted from a browser however are linked to Facebook, so what is required is to have
some way of doing that automatically from the Pi. he answer I came up with was to use the
source/checkout
,
which is actually a subversion repository for the code.
Subversion
is a
revision control software system that is used in professional circles; it keeps track of develop-
ers working on a small subset of iles for a large project. It maintains a backup system so that
any earlier version of code can be reverted to at any time. his is very handy because a com-
mon occurrence, when many developers are working on a large program, is that someone will
make a change that will break the code in an area he or she is not working on, and therefore
will not see. Subversion allows the developers to rapidly backtrack and revert to a previously
working project. To get at the source code for the
folders2flickr
package, all you need to
do is to use the desktop to go to the directory that you are working with for this chapter; I
suggest you name it
sketch
as it will eventually contain the code to drive the roto-sketch
hardware. hen from the Tools menu select the Open Current Directory in Terminal option.
his will cause a Terminal window to appear. Type this into it:
svn checkout http://folders2flickr.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
folders2flickr-read-only
