Your call is very important to us…

I’ve been a busy little code monkey…

I’ve installed a ‘trouble ticket’ system to manage support issues for FrameAlbum.  Some (Ok, most) of you who have emailed me in the past (at framealbum@gmail.com) may have received a reply stating that a ‘…human will reply shortly.’.  I’m in the process of sorting through those, and replying to folks to whom I’ve been woefully remiss.

I’ve also installed a ‘bug tracker’.  I’ll use this to record bugs that are discovered by you, intrepid users, and to manage the ‘feature roadmap’ for future versions of FrameAlbum.

Both of these items are ‘behind the curtain’ but are important for the maintenance of my sanity as well as the experience of folks using the service.

Source code ready for ‘early review’

Lastly, but of greater significance to many folks here, I’ve finally managed to cobble together a GIT repository of the FrameAlbum source code.  I’m using the new bitbucket.org service from Atlassian (makers of Jira, Confluence and many other tools for developers).  I’m going to open this up only to a few people at first so that I can insure that I’ve left nothing ‘secret’ in the GIT version of the code.  If you are interested in having a look at the sausage machine that is FrameAlbum, hop on over to bitbucket.org and register yerself.  Ping me when you’re registered.

Ciao for now!

The FrameAlbum DNS server is…

The most difficult issue with creating a FrameChannel replacement service is how to get all those frames that are ‘hard wired’ to the FrameChannel service over to access FrameAlbum instead.  It is practically impossible to change the internal programming of photo frames to use a different service.  The manufactures refuse to update the software and there is no way for the consumer to do it on their own.  The easiest method is to utilize the ‘custom Photo RSS’ feed feature built into many frames (Kodak) but not all frames have this feature.

For those frames without a ‘custom Photo RSS’ feed feature (I’m talking about you Toshiba) the only option is to fool the frame into thinking it is talking to FrameChannel when, in fact, it is talking to FrameAlbum.  There are various methods of accomplishing this but the most straightforward is to utilize a modified DNS server.

A DNS server is akin to the contact list on your smartphone; when you type in ‘Dave Smith’ it ‘translates’ that to Dave’s phone number (1-234-567-7890).  A DNS server does a similar thing on the Internet.  When you type ‘www.streamingmeemee.com’ into your browser a DNS server translates that into a specific network address that your computer contacts to retrieve the webpage.  Your photo frame uses the same mechanism to determine which server to contact when it is trying to retrieve your photos.

I have put together a specially modified DNS server that when asked for ‘framechannel.com’ returns the server information for FrameAlbum.  When your frame is configured to use the FrameAlbum DNS server, rather than the server provided by your ISP, it will think it is talking to FrameChannel when in fact it is talking to FrameAlbum’s servers.  The somewhat tricky bit can be configuring your frame to use the FrameAlbum DNS server.  I’ll warn you now that it involves a bit of geekery.

All frames that I have seen require you to choose a ‘static IP network configuration’ to set a specific DNS server.  The method varies widely between frames so I will not go into detail on how to access or set this option.  If this is all gibberish to you I strongly urge you to reach out to your friendly neighborhood tech-head and ask them to give you a hand.

Here is the key bit of information you’ll need:

FrameAlbum DNS server IP address: 64.2.142.181
FrameAlbum DNS server hostname: dns.framealbum.com

If your frame requires two DNS server values simply use the same address for both entries.

Once you have set your frame to use the FrameAlbum DNS server you should receive an image on your frame providing you with an activation code that you can use to link your frame to your FrameAlbum account.  Simply log into the FrameAlbum website and choose the ‘activate a frame’ link.

Please post any questions in the comments section below.

Thanks for your patience!

FrameAlbum status — Channels not updating?

Well the ‘snowtober’ Nor’easter threw a wrench into the works here are FrameAlbum-central.   Power (and heat and water) are back on for the moment.

The core FrameAlbum service was unaffected by the wide-spread power outages here in the Northeast but I did fail to notice that things had gone a bit pear-shaped with the channel updaters.  Both the Flickr and Picasa feed updaters had marked a very large percentage of the feeds as ‘user unknown’ and discontinued updating them.

I’ve reset all those and the feed updaters are running now.

Sorry about that folks — you should start seeing the new pics on your frames within the hour.