In the past I mentioned an application that I was building using Rails and the Flickr API. After building it, it turned out to be way too resource intensive for me to host with Dreamhost. Since then, I rewrote the application in PHP and it is a bit faster. It’s still a bit of a CPU hog , and Dreamhost probably isn’t too happy about that, but I wanted to put it up anyway.
The application is video.conductr. It searches Flickr for images with your search terms in their tags, text descriptions, etc. and pulls the images together into a Flash video. The videos can be viewed on site, embedded on other pages, or even downloaded as MP4. No account registration is required, however, it will help you keep track of your movies, registered users’ movies have priority in the queue, and you will get a friendly email notice when your movies have been produced. To keep down on resource use, I am currently producing about 3-6 movies per hour maximum. If the site gets heavy usage, I will put it on a better machine and this limitation will be gone.
“Urban” was a recommended tag today when I visited the Flickr homepage. Here is the video and embedded below.
TODO:- Fix movie introduction text
- Fix view counter
- Add commenting system
