Flickr Hacks

by Paul Bausch and Jim Bumgardner

Published 1 January 2006
Over two million registered Flickr users and counting have discovered the ease and fun of organizing their photo libraries, showing off their favorite pictures to the world, and securely sharing their private pictures with friends, family, or ad hoc groups. But, Flickr's own plethora of intuitive menus, options, and features just scratches the surface. "Flickr Hacks" goes beyond the basics of storing, sorting, and sharing your photos to the much bigger playground of what's possible. Whether you're a beginner looking to manage your metadata and play with tags, or a programmer in need of a detailed reference of Flickr API methods, you'll find what you're looking for here. In addition to getting under the hood of some of the most popular third-party Flickr toys already in the wild, you'll learn how to: post photos to your blog directly from your cameraphone; mash up your own photos or others' public pictures into custom mosaics, collages, sliding puzzles, slideshows, or ransom notes; back up your Flickr library to your desktop, and save the comments too; and set random desktop backgrounds and build your own Flickr screensaver.
You'll also learn how to: geotag your photos and map your contacts; download a list of photos and make a contact sheet; make your own Flickr-style tag cloud to visualize the frequency of common tags; build a color picker with a dynamic color wheel of Flickr photos; feed photos to your Web site and subscribe to custom Flickr feeds using RSS; and talk to the Flickr API using your Web browser, Perl, or PHP; authenticate yourself and other users; and build custom API applications.

Google Hacks

by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, and Tara Calishain

Published 28 February 2003
The Internet puts a wealth of information at your fingertips, and all you have to know is how to find it. Google is a search engine that indexes more than 2.4 billion Web pages, in more than 30 languages, conducting more than 150 million searches a day. The more you know about Google, the better you are at pulling data off the Web. You've got a cadre of techniques up your sleeve - tricks you've learned from practice, from exchanging ideas with others, and from plain old trial and error - but you're always looking for better ways to search. It's the "hacker" in you: not the troublemaking kind, but the kind who really drives innovation by trying new ways to get things done. If this is you, then you'll find new inspiration (and valuable tools, too) in Google Hacks from O'Reilly's new Hacks Series. This is a collection of industrial-strength, real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. The book offers a variety of interesting ways for power users to mine the enormous amount of information that Google has access to, and helps you have fun while doing it.
You'll learn clever and powerful methods for using the advanced search interface and the new Google API, including how to build and modify scripts that can become custom business applications based on Google. Google Hacks contains 100 tips, tricks and scripts that you can use to become instantly more effective in your research. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for the right answers. Written by experts for intelligent, advanced users, O'Reilly's new Hacks Series have begun to reclaim the term "hacking" for the good guys. In recent years the term "hacker" has come to be associated with those nefarious black hats who break into other people's computers to snoop, steal information, or disrupt Internet traffic. But the term originally had a much more benign meaning, and you'll still hear it used this way whenever developers get together. Our new Hacks Series is written in the spirit of true hackers - the people who drive innovation.

Yahoo! Hacks

by Paul Bausch

Published 1 January 2005
Yahoo! took the world by storm in the 1990s as a one-of-a-kind, searchable list of interesting web sites. But ten years later, it has expanded into a department store overflowing with useful and innovative tools and services-from email, blogging, social networking, and instant messaging, to news, financial markets, shopping, movie and TV listings, and much more. Today's Yahoo! keeps you connected with every aspect of your life and every corner of the Web. "Yahoo! Hacks" shows you how to use, expand, personalize, and tweak Yahoo! in ways you never dreamed possible. You'll learn how to: fine-tune search queries with keyword shortcuts and advanced syntax; manage and customize Yahoo! Mail, using it as your universal email client to access all your other accounts; explore your social networks with Yahoo! 360, blogging your life, keeping up with friends, and making new contacts; store, sort, blog, feed, track, and otherwise share photos with Flickr and RSS; make My Yahoo! your Yahoo!, and personalize Yahoo!'s many properties; roll your own Yahoo! applications with Yahoo! new Web Services API and Perl, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or the programming language of your choice; visualize search results and topics, mash up images from around the Web, and remix other web content; and, list (or hide) your site with Yahoo!
, and integrate Yahoo! Groups, Messenger, contextual search (Y!Q), or other Yahoo! features. Whether you want to become a power searcher, news monger, super shopper, or innovative web developer, "Yahoo! Hacks" provides the tools to take you further than you ever thought possible.