decoding flickr picture urls
October 21st, 2006A couple of blogs that I read are run by people who use a pseudonym. I can certainly understand why they’d want to remain anonymous, the internets being a dangerous place and so on. I do the same obviously (no, my parents didn’t actually name me “drac” although that would have been cool too). I can see a difference in my approach and theirs, if only because I use a pseudonym to prevent embarassing Google powered collisions between my real life and the blogger world. My real name is out there for anyone who knows where to look. However, these people actually go to extreme lengths to edit references to their names (in comments) and take seemingly elaborate precautions to prevent accidental disclosures of their identity.
Unfortunately, they also embed photos from Flickr in their blog. As a thought exercise, I wanted to see if this practice was a good idea or not, in light of their need for anonymity. So, I wanted to see if I could go from a static.flickr.com URL (which is commonly used to link photos uploaded to Flickr) to a Flickr user account. Stalker wannabes, please start your engines.
