Putting Flickr on Rails

You know that really cool screencast at the Ruby on Rails website where Rails is used to create a Flickr interface in 5 minutes? Well, I followed the screencast and built my own copy and then I enhanced it with some additional JavaScript (Lightbox style preview of the images and a blind-up on subsequent searches). Note that in the course of making my changes I found out the proper ordering of the JavaScript callbacks (see this) – even though you would think that :before would be called prior to a :complete, it doesn’t always happen that way (so sometimes the new results are blinded-up and not shown).

I’ve been meaning to upload this for awhile, but just haven’t gotten around to it. So today I updated it to work with Rails 1.1.1 (though didn’t switch the Ajax-y goodness over to RJS). Hopefully other folks can benefit from the code. To run it all you have to do is first install the flickr ruby gem, like so:

sudo gem install flickr

and unzip and run this Rails app. Enjoy!