Using existing chumby widgets

=Flickr=

The flickr widget shows a photo stream from Flickr. You need to enter a 'flickr ID' Forum member ghohpe had this suggestion:

To get the Flickr widget to show your pictures you need to enter the numeric ID from your Flickr RSS feed. Go to "Your pictures" and find the number embedded in the link to the RSS feed (the button at the bottom of the page). The link looks something like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=41715395@N00&format=rss_200

The ID you want for this feed would be 41715395@N00

(ghohpe got it to work, but I have not been able to...yet!)

(04-17-07 (ECC) - Thanks!! I had been stuck. It worked great 1st try. Just make sure that you capture the 3 characters after the @ sign)

Flickr RSS feeds of Group Pools
The default RSS link for feeds of group pools is in RSS 2.0 format. This doesn't work with the Flickr widget's RSS input -- the discussion in the group appears to interfere with the widget's expected input. If you want a feed of the group's pool photos, you must use atom format feeds, like this "Best of U.S. National Parks" feed: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=1257878@N22&format=atom

Simply change the  to read   in the URL. For more on Flickr feed types, see Flickr Services.

=Google Calendar=

Overview
This widget will display events in your Google Calendar (http://calendar.google.com). Instructions for getting the URL for your private calendar feed can be found on Google's site here. Note that there is no way to include multiple calendars in a single feed (this includes multiple calendars within the same account)

Currently, the Google Calendar widget does not seem to handle recurring events (see below for one possible workaround).

Also, the widget displays the events in the order that they are received from Google. This has several consequences:

1) Events are not displayed in chronological order (see below for a partial workaround)  2) Given that the Chumby cycles between widgets every 30 seconds, not all events may be displayed before the Chumby moves to the next widget.

Workarounds
There are several parameters that can be passed to Google to better control the data returned for your calendar. For a complete spec of the Google Calendar Data API go here.

Controling Date Ranges

You can append the query string parameters "start-min" and "start-max" to your URL in order to control the date ranges passed from Google:

http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/pd9v27vu2a1ddo2c1qiuan4gueuc2utr@import.calendar.google.com/public /basic&start-min=2006-12-01T00:00:00&start-max=2006-12-31T23:59:59

The URL above would display US Holidays for the full month of December 2006.

Of course, in practice, you would need to have some sort of proxy to pass relevant current parameters (or constantly update your configuration). A few lines of PHP and a web server does the job nicely.

Ordering '' You can have Google order the events by the start time by passing the parameter "orderby=starttime". ''Oddly, this seems to return the events in descending order, starting with the event furthest in the future and working backwards. The workaround is in the 'sortorder' parameter. For a future events feed, sorted in chronological order from earliest to latest, add the following to the end of your feed url string: ?futureevents=true&orderby=starttime&sortorder=a&singleevents=true .''

Recurring Events

A partial workaround to the recurring events is to pass the parameter "singleevents=true". This forces the expansion of recurring events in the returned feed. However, it is not comprehensive and without some date range restrictions (see above) is virtually useless as it will project the recurring events well into the future and return those that are furthest out (scheduled meetings in 2029 anyone?).

Google Apps Calendar

Google Apps calendars provide SSL feed URLs which the widget does not support. Change https:// to http:// in the URL.