oh bum

Well actually, it's a horse. Quiet day today of jobs about the house (building some play equipment for +2/3 and +3/3, working on the London guitar and some coding*). +2/3 was off to riding too, hence the horsey blip.

It appears as though the mystery of blipcentral is solved, which is what the title refers to. If this is true not impossible to believe and would explain the behaviour. What it does mean, however, is that the lights may only be on for a little while longer. 

* After some musings overnight I hobbled together a python script to allow you to download all of your data. I think it should work for anyone.

To get the code, look here. There are some instructions there that should get you started. If you use the script and it works for you please do not spam the servers; the API is rate limited for a reason.

If this doesn't work for you then let me know and I'll try and fix it (or if you can fix it then send me a pull request and I'll roll in any fixes). 

The script is running for me just now and seems to be happily chuntering away. The script doesn't do anything fancy and I didn't figure out how to get the full res images yet. And I've just remembered that I didn't download the thumbnail (which I should really do). The idea is that by leaving the content in a structured format you can potentially easily re-use it in the future.

Anyway, if you check out my profile you'll now find my e-mail address and facebook details. Please do stay in touch and let's hope that somehow the wheels (and lights) stay on! 

I'm going to keep on posting until the lights go off, so no freaking out on me now... 

update

The script seems to be working for people on Windows and OS X; if you need some help setting this up I would recommend joining/looking at the facebook group "blipfoto friends".

Next: in general when you develop something like this the people who run the web site want to know who is accessing the data and why. It lets them manage their resources better and e.g. cut off badly behaved apps. To do this they use an access URL and token specific to the app. If you look in the script you can see this at the top.

You now need to get your own application details; this is quite simple to do.

1. go here
2. click "Apps"
3. click "Create a new app"
4. fill in name, select type = distributed application, redirect URI (this can be anything e.g. myapp://blipfoto) and check the box agreeing to the rules
5. submit 

Follow the README.md! Feel free to modify if you have any corrections, etc., and welcome to the world of open source development!


This is the most important part: sticking by the rules is important; under no circumstances do I want to jeopardise being able to use blipfoto hence the update to the code.