Like most people with a digital camera, I tend to be a heavy Flickr user. Not only does Flickr make it easy to share my ever-growing photo collection with colleagues and family, but its drag-and-drop photo organizer and geo-tagging features make it easy to quickly categorize and find pictures from, say, my 2003 holiday in Goa.

The really good stuff, though, is hidden behind the scenes. Like many Web 2.0 applications, Flickr exposes its data to the public via a REST API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This REST API allows access to a number of important functions, including photo searching, tagging and uploading; photoset retrieval; contact retrieval; and panda recommendations. It’s also pretty easy to integrate this REST API into a PHP application – and this article will show you how!

With most of the Flickr services available they are wrappers for the Flickr API. Therefore I thought I should make a more logical implementation, more O/R like. It’s available now under the new BSD license and works like a charm

Last week I attended the Web Builder 2.0 Conference in snazzy Las Vegas, Nevada. This year, the name of the game was ajax, Ajax, and AJAX Our beloved PHP had a decent representation throughout the various sessions, but no more than during my own "PHP Powers Mashups" talk. At the conference I bumped into PHP security guru and buddy Chris Shiflett, and met some new folks like Cal Henderson from Flickr and Ask Bjørn Hansen. Normally, you’ll find me working the Zend booth at this kind of conference, but this time I was free to attend sessions. I decided to post my notes on the most interesting things I saw at the conference, presented to you here list style.

p. Here is more catch-up from announcements preceding this past weekend’s “Hack Day” at Yahoo. Flickr now supports JSON or serialized PHP responses. This one is a short one but interesting to anyone doing PHP Mashups.