Racing Minis at Zandvoort
Photo: Copyright © 2019 Eelke Blok

WordPress Quick Flickr Widget with cURL

Of course, you put a site live, and you run into trouble. Turns out the widget I chose for displaying my Flickr photostream uses the file_get_contents() PHP function to fetch the contents of the Flickr feed. Whether this is at all possible is governed by the PHP setting allow_url_fopen, and my hosting provider has it turned off. This is not at all uncommon, because when a script is not coded carefully, it would be possible to load a remote file into a script that was only ever intended to load local files. Scary.

Embedded YouTube HQ? Beware of older Flash versions

YouTube has recently enabled High Quality/High Definition videos in the embedded player. That is, when there is a high quality version of a video available, you get the chance of switching to it, although by default, movies will still play in the default quality. All over the net, you can find instructions on how you can force the embedded player to show the HD movie by default. What most (if any) of these pages do not tell you, is that this will not work with versions of Flash below 9.0r115.