I’ve had two great ‘off the record’ conversations today that will have a great impact on the FrameAlbum project.  I’m not yet at liberty to discuss the details but suffice it to say that the result of these conversations will be greatly enhanced support for some frames.

Now, if I can only get my A/C unit to work harder and get the temp in my office below 85F… ;-(

I released a bunch more FrameAlbum invites this morning.  The invitations for all beta registrations placed before 4-July have been sent out.

If you signed up for the beta before 4-July and have not yet received your invite email please contact me.

In other news…

I will be activating the PicasaWeb channel type today or tomorrow.  This will allow you to include photos from PicasaWeb users’ Public folders in your frame.

I may take a break from photo sharing services and have a go at weather next. 😉

UPDATE: A few of the last batch of invite messages went out missing a key bit of info.  If your link takes you to the main page rather than the registration page you are affected by this bug.  I’m working on a fix now.  Sorry about the confusion.

I fixed a bug this morning that caused some of the custom Feed URLs to return an incorrect feed; sorry about that.

Those of you that are using the custom Feed URLs should notice a correct set of images appearing on your frame shortly.

Thanks for your patience.

Someone asked this in a comment and I thought it worthy of a full post.  This applies to any frame that does not support a ‘Custom Photo RSS’ feed.

Unfortunately, both of these solutions require a bit of geekery.  I’ve, so far, been unsuccessful in my attempts to get (whats left of) the FrameChannel folks to redirect the domain to FrameAlbum.  The domain is registered through 2013 so any hopes of grabbing it after it expires are on-hold for now.  A few friendly suggestions to FrameChannel support from disappointed consumers may help them decide. 😉

There are two ways in which you can use your Toshiba frames with FrameAlbum:

– If you run a DNS server (some home routers have this feature) you can configure it to redirect the framechannel.com domain to framealbum.com. I use an open source firewall/router (m0n0wall) that allows me to override specific DNS requests and replace them with my own responses.  Specifically, you want to redirect rss.framechannel.com to rss.framealbum.com and images.framechannel.com to images.framealbum.com.  Owners of D-Link frames will also have to redirect dlink.framechannel.com to, you guessed it, dlink.framealbum.com.

– You can configure your frames to use the FrameAlbum DNS server which will redirect the requests automatically. I have built a public DNS server that contains the correct configuration to redirect all communications from your frame to the FrameAlbum service.  To specify a DNS server usually requires that you configure your frame to have a static IP address.

The more astute of you will ask ‘Hey, why don’t I just point my home router at FrameAlbum’s DNS server and be done with it?’  Well, because it isn’t a general purpose DNS server (it won’t resolve domains that are not required by frames).  And, it would be just plain rude. 😉

I haven’t yet published the details of the FrameAlbum DNS server but if you are interested in giving it a try I’ll happily share the necessary info.  Ping me via any of the methods listed on the Contact Me(e Mee) page and I’ll fill you in.

– The channel details page now includes sample images from the feed. The most recent 16 images from the channel will be displayed on the channel details page.  The channels are currently updated only once per hour so it may take up-to 60 minutes after adding a channel before any sample images are displayed.

– Fixes to the layout issues have been pushed to the live site. This should take care of the ‘borked’ channel detail layout as well as improve the ‘correctness’ of other pages.

– Added the ability to delete channels and frames. You will find this option on the ‘Edit Details’ page for each.  This is irreversible so make sure you reeeeeallly wanna before you do it.  (You could always just add the frame/channel back if you want.)

– DNS tweaks performed. I twiddled some of the knobs on the custom DNS server.  I am now running my Kodak frame in full FrameChannel compatibility mode.  As far as my frame is concerned it is happily talking to ‘framechannel’.  Yippie!

– Registration invite Email changes. As I had feared most folks do not accept mail sent directly from Amazon EC2 instances.  As a result several of the first round of invites bounced back undelivered.  I’ve change the email routing so it now goes through an ‘established’ email server; no more bouncies.  I’ve resent those invites that initially bounced.

That’s it for now — I’m going to release another batch of invites in a few minutes…  Keep your eyes on your email!

As always, questions/comments/bug reports are eagerly invited.

In no particular order…

• The layout channel detail page is borked when viewed with Firefox; it is fine in Chrome and IE.
• There is currently no way to completely delete a channel.  It is possible to remove a channel from a frame but nothing that allows removing it from the system entirely.
• There seems to be some confusion on how to get a channel onto a frame.  Clearly some UI and workflow work needs to be done in this area.

More later — thanks for testing and reporting!