Popular posts and *less* broken Flickr images

Another few spare hours, and a few more improvements to HalfEagle!

First, this image to the right here has been annoying me for sometime. Why? Because to speed up the site, HalfEagle has to do some caching of Flickr images. Unfortunately, that means that if someone deletes, changes the privacy, renames, or heck, even rotates their image on Flickr then the next time HalfEagle tries to display it, the visitor gets to see that ugly honkin’ image.

Ideally, Flickr would actually send a 404 not found error — at least that way HalfEagle could use some javascript trickery to make those broken images disappear. As it stands, I couldn’t figure out how to get javascript to detect a 302 redirect in an <img> src attribute. (Never mind the technical details, it’s only my way of sharing the pain of the hour spent looking for an easy fix.)

There is a fix in place but it’s not 100% effective. Basically the server goes and checks a random sampling of Flickr images every so often and deletes them if they are no longer available. This means less “this photo is currently unavailable” images but they will still occasionally appear.

Second, I’d really like to find a way to recognize the best Scouting blog posts being generated out there. I had a few ideas but they’d require a lot of traffic to HalfEagle to work. Until that time comes, I’ve started to gather data from PostRank™ and added a new page to HalfEagle that shows popular Scouting blog posts.

There’s more information on that page about how it all works and a link to PostRank’s methodology. It even shows the top 3 all-time most popular posts for each of the blogs on HalfEagle. So, if you enjoyed Lone Star Scouter’s stocking stuffers, you might be interested to see that blog’s three most popular posts.

(If you’re looking to increase engagement with your blog posts, the first thing I’ve noticed is that blogs with images seem to do a bit better.)

Finally, a made a few tweaks to the styling of the page. No more border between items, instead there’s a subtle shading of every other item. This allowed me to fit the items a bit closer together without too much visual distraction. This means more posts “above the fold” which will, hopefully, expose people to more Scouting posts. 🙂

Update: I’ve also added a new scroller to the Flickr image block. Let me know what you think!

Update: The Custom Google Search Engine has been updated to add all the sites included in HalfEagle. You can also refine your search by “Cub Scouts,” “Boy Scouts,” or “Venturers.” Let me know what you think!

Update: HalfEagle is now sporting a mini YouTube video bar (if you have javascript enabled) that cycles through recent videos from 17 different Scouting YouTube channels. Think your YouTube channel should be there? Let me know! 🙂

Update (last one today!): HalfEagle now offers browse-able archives going back to June 2007. Flickr images only go back to February 2008. 🙁 However, it’s pretty neat to get to see more of the images and to see what kind of pictures are posted month to month. All in all, it’s been a pretty big day for HalfEagle!

Of course, with this many changes, it’s bound to have messed up something somewhere! If you notice any issues or would just like to share your opinion of the changes, please drop me a line by commenting below. Thanks and happy holidays! 😀