Trying Tumblr

My friendly Scottish Landscape photographer mentioned to me the other day that he'd been having a play with Tumblr. As normally happens when one of us tries something out, the other has to go have a play too. So, in no time, I created my own Tumblr account.

I've decided to use it as somewhere to "showcase" some of my photographs. Think of it as a mini-blog of personal favourites.

The nice thing about messing with this is that it gave me another reason to make use of the ruby library I wrote a while back for querying my published photographs. Tumblr has a simple API for writing entries so it made sense to write a little command line tool that would post a photograph to the blog. All the command does is it takes the filename of a photograph on the command line, finds it amongst the collection of published photographs, and then publishes an entry for it using nothing more than this code:

Net::HTTP.post_form( URI.parse( BASE_URL ),
                     {
                       "email"             => EMAIL,
                       "password"          => PASSWORD,
                       "type"              => "photo",
                       "source"            => image.jpeg_url,
                       "caption"           => caption( image ),
                       "click-through-url" => image.url,
                       "tags"              => image.tags.join( ',' ),
                       "generator"         => "org.davep.tumblphoto"
                     } )

Nice! :-)