I whipped up a little smart block today. It's just one of the badges from the Flickr site. I took the code they provided, simplified it a bit and inserted a SmartTag to control the user ID and voila, it's a cool little reusable library element.

To use it:
1) Click on the picture to the right to download it.
2) Safari usually decompresses these sorts of things, but if your browser doesn't, then double click the zip file to decompress it. It should then be called, "flickrbadge.block"
3) Drag the file from the Finder to the middle of a Blocks layout.
4) Open your Blocks library.
5) Drag the library element to a blocks layout.
6) Open the Smart Info window and customize the Flicker ID

To find your Flickr ID, open up your Flickr photo stream and click on the RSS feed (it's the blue rectangle in the address bar of Safari).
Your Flickr ID is in there. Here's what Nik Fletchers RSS feed url looks like:
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=80573242@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom
The ID is the part in there that's after "id=" and before the next "&". That's what you'll want to put into the Smart Info window.
Just so were clear, here's one more example (this is my stream):
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=41787274@N00&;lang=en-us&format=atom

Tags: smartblock, flickr, flash

If you've been hungry for more info on Blocks 3.0 you may have noticed a few links in the sidebar while visiting the Blocks page. One of the pages has the details on Smart Blocks. Down at the bottom of the page there's even a Blocks Library block to download. It's a very simple flash embedding block, but it does show a couple of cool things: it builds a GUI for an HTML block, it alters the HTML with properties from the block itself, and it uses the GUI to replace the asset file name.

As simple as it is, however, Smart Blocks are still pretty foreign. So I decided to produce a little screencast showing at least how to USE a smart block. How to CREATE a smart block is for some upcoming screencast. But this screencast will get us halfway there.

Check it out and let us know what you think: Watch it!

NB: This library block does embed flash on a Blocks page, but this isn't really the recommended way to go about it. Building a xHTML/CSS strict version is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)

Tags: screencast, smart blocks, flash, Blocks