Tag Archives: Instagram

Instagram complications⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Replied to Re: Meet The “Teacher Instagrammers” Who Moonlight As Influencers To Make Ends Meet by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
Isn’t it sad when the only way for teachers to make a fair wage is by selling themselves and their work on Instagram.

The linked post: Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet and the thread on @audreywatters’s tweet are fascinating.

 

I think of instagram as a nice silo for sharing and liking photos in a casual way (I like being liked too). It went bad when it removed the ‘time’ from the timeline. (I don’t like its lack of interoperability much either).

I don’t think I follow any influencers so this is a world outside my ken.

The idea of using instagram as a way of showing a shiny classroom has some of the same problems at tweeting to my mind. Not that my blogging is a great example of sharing classroom practise.

I am not sure about the Teachers Pay Teachers, concept. I feel a slight distaste, but am not sure why.

I like Instagram but..⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve seen this linked a few times recently, finally clicked.

– […] we may keep, use and share your personal information with companies connected with Instagram. This information includes your name, email address, school, where you live, pictures, phone number, your likes and dislikes, where you go, who your friends are, how often you use Instagram, and any other personal information we find such as your birthday or who you are chatting with, including in private messages (DMs).

from: A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of service for kids. Now you can understand all of the private data you and your teen are giving up to social media — Quartz

I’ll be sharing this with my pupils soon.

    Instagram GO⤴

    from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

    IMG_5868

    Dean Groom on Poekemon Go:

    Teachers should care about Pokémon Go! – after from the initial network effects (craze) as it is a good way for kids to develop socially. It isn’t designed for education and certainly presents the all too common accessibility issues of commercial games – but THIS game leads you to start thinking about why games, play and learning are important – and how they can be connected with helping children deal with saturated media cultures – Great!

    from: Should teachers care about Pokémon Go? | Playable

    There is a lot more to think about in that post.

    As usual with games, my mind wander and my eyes glaze, I’ve never caught the game bug (although I am interested when I read something like the above).

    My first though was it is a wee bit like golf, a good walk spoiled. I am now wondering if some of my own behaviour fits the pattern.

    fr_593_size640

    1. I wander about outside, searching, looking at the map on my phone
    2. I capture images
    3. Share and store online, socially, flickr, instagram.

    Featured image my own, IMG_5868 | John Johnston | Flickr CC-BY, sort of hunting idea. The kind of Pokemon I look for.

    If Not This Then Something Else⤴

    from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

    I’ve got a few IFTTT recipes on the go. IFTT is a useful service from linking up and pushing information around online services.

    In the last week or so I’ve seen a couple of posts about the service, received an email and had an interesting incident so though it worth a post.

    First I read this:

    Kin Lane mentioned that IFTTT, a service entirely built on APIs, doesn’t have an API. That bothered Kin and the more I thought about it it bothered me. So I figured I’d start disentangling myself from IFTTT.

    from: Shifting out of IFTTT – Bionic Teaching

    I then had the problem illustrated by the screenshot at the side of the post. I have a recipe that posts my instagram photos to a blog. The blog then tweets them out and another recipe posts the images on to Flickr. This seemed to go a bit off the wall posted multiple times for a couple of photos and therefore my twitter timeline was filled with repeats.

    I would rather this did not happen.

    Next this:

    Imagine if your sewer pipe started demanding that you make major changes in your diet.

    Now imagine that it got a lawyer and started asking you to sign things.

    from: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT (Pinboard Blog).

    Pinboard is one of my favourite online services. I got an email from IFTTT saying that they would no longer be supporting pinboard unless pinboard made changes to their service.

    All this got me thinking that there might be a way to do this without IFTTT. Most of my recipes are for pinboard, but I though to start with something that might be simpler.

    Photo Flow

    A while back I blogged Make you own SPLOT about a flow powered by IFTTT from instagram to blog to flickr. I like the system, but wonderd if I could DIY without IFTTT.

    A while back I’d made a page to grab my instagram photos so I thought I could reuse that to create an RSS feed and then pull that into the photo blog using the FeedWordPress plugin. It was not too hard.

    The feed is produced with php file and basically is this( I’ve taken out some caching code):

    echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <channel>  <title>Insta john</title>  <description>some instagrams</description>  <link>https://www.instagram.com/troutcolor/</link> <atom:link href="http://johnjohnston.info/oddsandends/instarss/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />';    
$url="https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/7835090/media/recent/?client_id_=CLIENT-ID-HERE&count=2"
$json =file_get_contents($url);
$jsonA=json_decode($json, TRUE);
foreach ($jsonA['data'] as $post) {
 echo '<item>';
    echo '<title>'.($post['caption']['text']).'</title>';
    echo'<description><![CDATA[ <img src="'.($post['images']['standard_resolution']['url']).'"> from <a href="'.$post['link'].'">instagram</a> ]]> </description>';
    echo '<link>'.$post['link'].'</link> <guid>'.$post['link'].'</guid>  </item>';
}
echo ' </channel> </rss>';

    I’d guess this is not the prettiest piece of code but it produces a short (2 items) RSS feed that FeedWordPress can use.

    I’ve also installed the FeedWordPress Advanced FiltersPlugin after reading about it here: Field Botany WordPress Site Breakdown – Bionic Teaching. This allows me to copy the image onto the WordPress site as opposed to keeping it in instagram. It also lets me add it as the featured image which works well with the theme on that blog. Until I am sure it is all working I am posting the photos as pending review, but if it all looks good after a few more pictures I’ll flick the switch and let it run.

    There may be trouble ahead

    I had just grabbed the code from my old page, including the info needed to connect to instagram’s api which I had set up before. So I checked out the Instagram API page where I read:

    Any app created before Nov 17, 2015 will continue to function until June 2016. After June 2016, the app will automatically be moved to Sandbox Mode if it wasn’t approved through the review process.

    from: Instagram Developer Documentation

    Which sort of sounds like the API will be for more professional sorts than myself. I guess I’ll find out in June.

    The other news was that IFTTT has backtracked allowing users to continue to use pinboard recipes without asking pinboard change its system. Hello Pinboard Customers, From Linden Tibbets, the CEO of IFTTT a blog post by Kin Lane, has the details. The post also repeats the waring that IFTTT, by not having an API itself IFTTT might not be something to depend on.

    All of this change reminds me of how shaky a foundation we are building our online worlds on. This makes IndieWeb idea even more attractive.

    Make you own SPLOT⤴

    from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

    Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 09.38.01

    Like anyone with any sense I read Alan Levine’s blog religiously. It has given me more ideas to think about and play around with than any other site on the Internet.

    The other day I read Share Images By Email to SPLOT Collector (this post is now well down the post list as Alan blogs like a manic).

    I was very interested in this, as I’d loved posterous until it was abandoned. One of the main things I liked about posterous was the posting by email facility. This allowed me to publish photos from my phone even with a terrible connection. I first noticed this on holiday in Galloway when I didn’t see a signal all week. I did keep my posterous updated with photos because the mail app on my phone magically seemed to be able to find a signal when I was asleep and send the photos over. I’d got it in the back of my mind to replicate this behavior with WordPress sometime, Alan’s post gave me the details of how to and the impetus to do it.

    I’ve already got a reclaimhosting account for quickly setting up things to play with. It took me a quick 5 minutes to install wordPress, set the theme to the one Alan recommended (Fukasawa by Anders Norén), add the Jetpac plugin to handle mail, another plugin (Auto Thumbnailer) to automatically use images as featured images and add a css tweak. All following Alan’s instructions.

    This had me covered for the main features of posterous, post via email and handling images in a pretty way.
    As I wanted to post multiple images I also turned on the ‘Tiled Galleries’ and Image Galley Carousel provided by Jetpac and tweaked the CSS
    a bit more for that. Another couple of minutes.

    The system seems to be working just the way I wanted and yesterday I added a couple more features. Posterous had an interesting feature that allowed you to automatically forward whatever you posted to other services. I had a quick search for a WordPress plugin to do this but ended up at ifttt.com. There I found: Post WordPress Featured Image to Flickr. This just deals with the first image, but a quick test proves it works. I’ll probably explore posting all the images later.

    While I was on ifttt I also notice Instagram photo to WordPress blog so have thrown this into my mix. I can now post to Instagram, have that picture added to the blog and also sent on its way to flickr.

    Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 10.22.52

    Apart for the sheer fun of doing this, it also fit in quite well with the POSSIE, own your own space agenda.

    Alan’s SPLOT | Smallest Possible Learning Open Tools project is fascinating.

    Smallest/Simplest * Possible/Portable * Open/Online * Learning/Living * Tool/Technology

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