I’ve recently begun the process of moving my photos from Flickr to SmugMug — their professionalism, features, and storage/bandwidth capacity has really won me over. Their photo printing comparison is a great example of something a company can do to generate goodwill, even though it may not turn directly into dollars… I really appreciated their comparison when I was looking for a printing service last year, so when I wanted to find a new photo hosting service SmugMug was the first company that jumped to mind.
It turns out that not only do they have a great interface, but they also have a fantastic API as well! Their RSS feeds, in particular, are highly configurable and well-designed. Since I plan on using their API in the future, I thought I’d dip my toe in the water and leverage my SharePoint knowledge to make something that combined the two.
The result is SmugViewer — a web part for SharePoint that displays a slideshow of a user’s most recent photos.
Installation instructions are included… it sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. You’ll drop the .dll in the GAC, edit web.config, then upload a file to the Web Part Gallery. Then you’re good to go!
Download SmugViewer for Windows SharePoint Services v3 here. I look forward to your comments and suggestions!
Update: for best results, set the web part’s height to be fixed at 305px and the width fixed at 405px. I’ll update the readme file shortly.
3 Comments
I love Smugmug! I haven’t tried installing the viewer yet, but saying that it’s not complicated, but then telling me to drop the .dll in the GAC (which conjured visions of some sort of recipe), etc, etc… sounded more complicated than you were telling me, only because of my being rather illiterate to the terms used. Mostly I just thought “drop the .dll in the GAC” was good for a laugh.
It’s only ‘not complicated’ if you’ve got a SharePoint server set up. :-)
Received an IE error:
Unable to add selected web parts(s).
SmugViewer: Cannot import this web part.
Evidently, this is a regular occurrence with web parts. Not too surprising to find that SmugViewer is not immune. Looks like a very nice freebie. Would love to figure out why. I’ve spent a little time looking at lists. Seems like most things MS nowadays, very complicated to figure why the error is occurring. Let me know if you have any insight. Peace.