Pikchur.Dev.Blog

Tweetbot 1.2 + Pikchur = <3

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:42:00 -0400

You can now use Pikchur on Tweetbot 1.2!

If you already use them, simply go to your “Account Settings” > Select Photo & Video Upload and choose Pikchur.

If not you can download them here!

As always, feel to reach out to info@pickhur.com if ya have any questions or feedback!

~Pikchur Team

Developer | Add Pikchur To Your App!

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:45:00 -0400

So you want to add Pikchur to your next App? Great!

Our API mimics the ones you already integrated in the past, and all you need to do is

Change API End point to http://api.pikchur.com/simple/upload
Add Parameter api_key, to gain access, can be found here http://pikchur.com/api
Optional: Add Parameter source
Optional: Add parameter return_format values json or xml (xml is default)

Also, when you have your app, we can add you to our supported apps page! :)

You have two API options.

1) Upload, this is your standard method for Twitter clients, you upload to us we post to users synced accounts -except- there one used to authenticate with (in this case twitter, because you already post to it.).
2) Upload & Post, this method is used to post to all accounts synced to the user, including there twitter account.

Documentation

upload

This is used if the application wants to post the status message it sent for the authenticated service. For example if you use this with an authentication for “Twitter” we will not post a note to Twitter but the photo will still propagate out to the users remaining synced services (facebook, flickr, etc).

Endpoint XML: http://api.pikchur.com/simple/upload

Required Parameters:

media
- Binary image/video data
  - The image/video data to be posted.

username
- Text Value
  - This is the username for the synced service (default is Twitter).

password
- Text Value
  - This is the password for the synced service (default is Twitter).

Username/Password OR if using Twitter’s echo oAuth system please include the following headers

X_VERIFY_CREDENTIALS_AUTHORIZATION
- HEADER, Should contain the following

oauth_consumer_key=”YOUR KEY HERE”,

oauth_signature_method=”HMAC-SHA1”,

oauth_token=”YOUR TOKEN HERE”,

oauth_timestamp=”TIMESTAMP”,

oauth_nonce=”OAUTH NONCE”,

oauth_version=”1.0”,

oauth_signature=”SIGNATURE”

EXAMPLE curl -v -H ‘X-Verify-Credentials-Authorization:oauth_version=”1.0”, oauth_nonce=”a436ee1ee9437e98ffafa04f39af2a69”, oauth_timestamp=”1274233993”, oauth_consumer_key=”BdkEXpkerXPqJMaiYMN3Q”, oauth_token=”16056271-aVl42OcvOA81cjdBpFy2yaLzmjLiNwSSByMXvh…”, oauth_signature_method=”HMAC-SHA1”, oauth_signature=”LiG5LqZO1Zprc6fJmVci%2FmXIwuk%3D”’ -F ‘api_key=O1kXlYN1SYQG82ZXtvZC0g’ -F ‘media=@/var/test.jpg’ -F ‘message=Hello World!’ http://api.pikchur.com/simple/upload

api_key
- Text Value
  - A Pikchur API developer key, which is used to prevent abuse. It can easily be obtained here: http://pikchur.com/api#key

Optional Parameters:

message
- Media Caption

service
- Text Value
  - If the service requested for authentication is not Twitter, it can be specified by sending it along with the request. i.e: identi.ca,plurk, etc

X_AUTH_SERVICE_PROVIDER
- HEADER
  - The service to auth with (default is https://api.twitter.com/1/account/verify_credentials.json).
source
- Text Value
  - Request a source id from api[at]Pikchur.com and all photos sent in will say “Via yourApp” and link to your website.

private
- Text Value
  - Overrides users media privacy settings for this one upload. Options “YES” for enable privacy “NO” to make media public.

Sample response

abc

http://pk.gd/abc

uploadAndPost

Used to authenticate and post a photo to the user’s Pikchur account, along with a status update to Twitter and any other supported service users have synched.

(If the service requested for authentication is not Twitter, it can be specified by sending it along with the request, such as identi.ca, plurk, etc.)

Please make sure all data sent is formatted as multipart/form-data.

Endpoint XML: http://api.pikchur.com/simple/uploadAndPost

Required Parameters:

username
- Text Value
  - This is the username for the synced service (default is Twitter).

password
- Text Value
  - This is the password for the synced service (default is Twitter).

media
- Binary image/video data
  - The image/video data to be posted.

api_key
- Text Value
  - A Pikchur API developer key, which is used to prevent abuse. It can easily be obtained here: http://pikchur.com/api#key

Optional Parameters:

message
- Media Caption / message to post to Twitter or any other service. The URL to the image will be appended to the message

service
- Text Value
  - If the service requested for authentication is not Twitter, it can be specified by sending it along with the request. i.e: identi.ca,plurk, etc

source
- Text Value
  - Request a source id from api[at]Pikchur.com and all photos sent in will say “Via yourApp” and link to your website.

private
- Text Value
  - Overrides users media privacy settings for this one upload. Options “YES” for enable privacy “NO” to make media public.

Sample response

abc

http://pk.gd/abc

Developer | Converting Pikchur URL's to media!

Thu, 12 May 2011 09:19:00 -0400

So, you want to convert our URL’s to usable source urls of the media?

We gotcha..

Converting URLs

Photo URLS
http://pk.gd/

http://pikchur.com/

- Thumb (48X48) http://img.pikchur.com/pic__t.jpg

- Small (170XScale) http://img.pikchur.com/pic__s.jpg

- Medium (320XScale) http://img.pikchur.com/pic__m.jpg

- Large (600XScale) http://img.pikchur.com/pic__l.jpg

- Original http://img.pikchur.com/pic__o.jpg (PRO Only)

For example : http://pk.gd/l00 Converts to http://img.pikchur.com/pic_l00_l.jpg

Video URLS
http://mp.gd/

http://pikchur.com/v/

- Thumb Image (48X48) http://vid.pikchur.com/vid__t.jpg

- Small Image (170XScale) http:// vid .pikchur.com/ vid __s.jpg

- Medium Image (320XScale) http:// vid .pikchur.com/ vid __m.jpg

- Large Image (600XScale) http:// vid .pikchur.com/ vid __l.jpg

- MP4 http://vid.pikchur.com/pic_.mp4

For example : http://mp.gd/aoi Converts to http://vid.pikchur.com/vid_aoi.mp4 (Thumbnail @ http://vid.pikchur.com/vid_aoi_t.jpg)

As always feel free to drop us a line if you need help @ Support@Pikchur.com

Editing your Photo /w Picnik

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:18:00 -0400

We recently received a few request with people asking us how it is you go about editing your photos contrast, red eye, rotate or even crop on Pikchur.com

So we decided to write this short 3 step post on how to get started.

Step 1: Login, Go to your photo and click “Edit Photo”

Step 2: Go to the bottom and Click “Edit With Picnik”

Step 3 Begin to edit!

And thats it!

Hope that helps, as always thanks for choosing Pikchur :)

Pikchur Supports Twitter's Echo OAuth

Wed, 26 May 2010 10:47:00 -0400

Sorry for the late post, we sent out word that we support the new echo Auth functionality twitter released but forgot to write a blog post about it.

For documentation on how to integrate the new support please review our API Docs @ : http://bit.ly/dbWGQe

Feel free to reach us any time @ API@Pikchur.com for support/feedback.

~The Pikchur Crew

Pikchur on Twitter for the iPhone

Wed, 26 May 2010 09:21:00 -0400

Hey guys,

As you know Twitter for the iPhone is out, and allows for “custom” photo posting. To Add Pikchur support to your Account simple follow the steps below.

First Click More

Next Click Settings

Now Click Account & Settings

Select Services

Next Click Image Service

Then Select Custom

And Finally enter this URL

(Custom Photo URL http://api.pikchur.com/twitter)

And thats it, you now have the ability to post directly to Pikchur via Twitter for the iPhone.

As always feel free to reach us anytime, we love to hear from you.

~The Pikchur Crew

Posting From Twitterrific on the iPad To Pikchur

Wed, 19 May 2010 12:17:00 -0400

Hey, you can now post images & videos to Pikchur from Twitterrific, how sweet is that!? Here is how you do it:

1) Launch the application and tap on the Compose button in the upper-right corner of the screen.

2) In the window that appears, tap on the camera icon and select “Change Upload Service”.

3) At the bottom of the list that’s displayed, you’ll see “Other…”. Tap that and you see a text field where you can specify the “Media Service URL Endpoint”.

4) Enter “http://api.pikchur.com/twitterrific” and then tap outside the popover window to dismiss it. Done!

That’s it you’re set to use Pikchur in Twitterrific for photos & videos :)

What’s nice is that this media end point supports twitters new echo oAuth functionality so no need to update your settings with the Restful API is shut down.

Hope you guys like it :)

-Pikchur

Thanks to @Davidedichillo suggesting we add the end point, and helping us write the how to get Pikchur on the iPad instructions.

API now supports triggers

Wed, 19 May 2010 10:32:00 -0400

Great news, triggers now work within our API as well as our mms/email posting methods. Which means any application that supports Pikchur will now be able to have a basic trigger system which will override your posting settings on the go! We have plans to include some pretty slick custom triggers really soon, but for now refer to this list of service triggers.

To override any of the services you are posting to simply include the trigger in the subject of your post in the following format :

To turn posting OFF for a service: -triggername-
To turn posting ON for a service: +triggername+

Twitter( tw )

FourSquare( 4sq )

Flickr( fk )

Tumblr( tr )

Jaiku( jk )

Facebook( fb )

FriendFeed( ff )

Plurk( pl)

Identi.ca( id )

Koornk( ko )

Totspot( ts )

Brightkite( bk )

For example if your account settings are :

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr > Enabled
Brightkite,Identi.ca,Plurk > Disabled

Lets say you want to not send to twitter but you do want to send to Plurk.

All you would have to do is in your subject/message is add the following triggers -tw- +pl+

When we recive your request we will override your account settings to match your trigger request and filter out the triggers from your message for that one upload.

We are working on some pretty neat things to be released really soon, so keep an eye out!

~The Pikchur Crew

Pikchur Teams up with @France2TV

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 14:24:43 -0400

Pikchur Teams up with @France2TV to launch a contest for a chance to win 2 tickets to the Coupe d’Europe de Rugby 2010.

Homepage: http://france2.pikchur.com/

Timeline: http://france2.pikchur.com/timeline

Media Landing Page: http://france2.pikchur.com/OsK

“Envoyez une photo typée Rugby à rugby@pocarles.com et vous la retrouverez ici http://bit.ly/9YAfuM Les 2 plus RT avant lundi gagnent ! :-)” - @France2TV

In order to win you must have the most Retweets, we look forward to seeing what Piks come in and good luck!

~The Pikchur Crew

Showing Some FourSquare Love.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:37:00 -0500

We here @ Pikchur have been working really hard on a few things lately. The first is our joint venture with 39llc to develop a Foursquare application that allows you to check-in with multimedia.

It’s called SquarePik.

The application allows people to check-in with a photo or video. In addition, the app will show users all photos and videos dropped at a particular venue. Along with some of the expected features such as, the ability to add locations, search for locations, and view your friend’s last checkins, we hope to provide a supplementary application to the already popular Foursquare iPhone app.

The app is built on top of our new “GeoSocial” API (more on that later) and is available in the iTunes store for just $1.99

Now, our new Geo-Social API is aimed at providing developers of geo social apps such as Foursquare the ability to quickly integrate the following features:

- Multimedia check-ins (Photos & Videos)

- Pull feed of Media Dropped @ a venue

- Pull feed of Thumbnails for a list of venues.

- Allow for multimedia tips (coming soon)

Documentation for our API can be found here : http://groups.google.com/group/pikchur-api/web/geosocial-api-documentation

We also added the following to Pikchur.com:

- Landing pages with Foursquare venue badges: http://pikchur.com/Muq

- Geo social venue specific timelines: http://pikchur.com/timeline/foursquare*368848

- Nifty venue RSS feeds: http://pikchur.com/rss/geosocial/foursquare/368848

Well that’s it for now, stay tuned as we improve SquarePik and our Geo social API.

As always, feel free to reach us with your comments, concerns and feed back @ info at pikchur dot com

Thanks,

The Pikchur Crew.

Holiday Cheer Contest

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:14:00 -0500

Wether you guys have been naughty or nice this year, doesn’t really matter to us! As thanks for all the support you have given us, we decided to throw a short but sweet holiday contest.

Head over to the contest page, check out the prizes, and start sending in those holiday photos for your chance to win.

To enter this holiday cheer contest all you have to do is send in a photo or video that is holiday related to your Pikchur account with the hashtag #holidays09

We will select a winner based on a few attributes

1. Number of Re-tweets

2. Number of “UNIQUE” views (not view counter on landing page)

3. How creative the photo or video is.

4. Your entry must be dated after our contest has started (Don’t tag one of your popular photos or videos :-])

Happy holidays :-)

Pikchur

Sorry for the down time

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:42:29 -0500

Sorry for the down time, will be right back!

~The Pikchur Team

Posting from Tweetie to Pikchur

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:51:49 -0400

Hey, you can now post images to Pikchur from Tweetie, how sweet is that!? Here is how you do it:

1. Open Tweetie and go to settings, should be under account.

2. Click on Image service and then go down and click on custom.

3. Enter http://api.pikchur.com/tweetie as the posting url.

That’s it you’re set to use Pikchur in Tweetie for photos :-) If they add a custom url for video posting then you will also be able to post videos to Pikchur via Tweetie.

Happy Friday

-Pikchur

Picnik Anyone?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:44:00 -0400

Good evening ladies and gentelman, on this edition of what’s new on Pikchur, we bring you Picnik editing and Retweeting of photos and videos!

We don’t know about you but we have grown to love Picnik’s service, it really makes editing photos a snap. Well, we are proud to announce that we now support full photo editing via picnik. All you have to do is edit any of your images and a nice little “Edit With Picnik” section will appear on the bottom right of the page. Click on it, and edit away! Once you are done, our busy rendering bots will grab your edits and spit out your image to reflect the changes you’ve made.

While doing this update we also decided to jump on the tweetmeme bandwagon and add a Retweet button to all image and video landing pages (Just like the one on the top right of this post). So if you see a nifty image of a kick ass Leprechaun, or a crafty video of a nifty pigeon exercising, you can quickly and easily surface it to your Twitter stream.

Below is a short screen cast of the photo editing features in action. Enjoy

-Pikchur

Motion Pikchur!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:46:00 -0400

Hey guys,

As you may or may not know, we moved our servers to a new home today! This means we are going to be a lot more responsive and overall better!

As for the more interesting stuff, we pushed a slew of sweet new updates for you guys. By far the biggest item on the list .. drumb roll… Motion Pikchures! You can now use your mobile device or our website to upload videos! Yeah, you heard us, we now support video in addition to photos! So give it a try, you don’t even to change anything, just send in videos as if you were sending in photos.

As for the complete change log, here it is:

-Video support

-Find friends on facebook and twitter that are also on pikchur

-Completely revamped profile pages.

Ex: http://pikchur.com/people/jewgonewild or http://pikchur.com/people/Orical

-API upgrades and fixes

-API modified to support videos

-API feed functions revamped

Happy Piking!

Some Nokia Love

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:24:00 -0400

Hey again! Another day, another update..This time we are showing Nokia some love and welcoming them to our family of supported services. If you haven’t noticed Nokia Ovi Share is pretty nifty and has very cool media management, so we decided it would be a great addition.

If you don’t have an account you can sign up, it’s quick and easy, once you’re done, head over to Pikchur, log in and sync in your Ovi account!

Important: In order for us to post photos to your Ovi Share page you must add an album called “Pikchur” to your Ovi account. (Excuse my quick ‘photoshopping’)

These are just minor updates for now, but stay tuned, we have a big one coming out reallllly soon.

Hope you guys enjoy!

The Pikchur Crew

Poster this!

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:49:00 -0400

Hey guys, hope everyone’s having a good Tuesday. We pushed a small update and added Posterous as a posting service. Now you can add your primary Posterous blog to Pikchur, snap away and your shots will cross post to your Posterous blog!

I leave you with a video of bunliu for inspiration. Happy Piking!

Twitter Issues

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:45:00 -0400

Updated: We are back up and running with Twitter posting, any photos sent in via MMS,mobile,web and 3rd party apps should now be posting to Twitter, happy days ;-)

Hey guys,

We are aware that none of you can log in to Pikchur via twitter basic authentication or OAUTH (Please note that Twitter OAUTH is completly down). It seems that the basic Twitter API is up and running, however our servers seem to have been mistakenly blacklisted from using it.

This is most likely do to the Twitter DDOS attack that occured yesterday. They are probably blacklisting a lot of people in order to get the situation under control.We have contacted Twitter and are waiting for a response back. Hopefullywe can get back up and running ASAP.

These issues also effect posting your photos via the web, MMS, and certain Twitter clients that use our API. Please be patient as we are trying our best to get Twitter authorization and posting back to normal.

Thanks,

The Pikchur Crew.

Speed anyone?

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:09:00 -0400

Hey guys!

Hope everyone is doing great! We wanted to let you know that we just enabled a Content Distribution Network (CDN), which will make everything on the site load a little faster, well a lot faster ;-)

The CDN has various access points, so no matter where you load up Pikchur from you’ll notice an instant boost in speed, and overall responsiveness. The following edge locations are enabled:

United States
•    Ashburn, VA
•    Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
•    Los Angeles, CA
•    Miami, FL
•    Newark, NJ
•    Palo Alto, CA
•    Seattle, WA
•    St. Louis, MO

Europe
•    Amsterdam
•    Dublin
•    Frankfurt
•    London

Asia
• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

This is one more step we are taking to ensure you enjoy your experience with us. Feel free to drop us a line with any questions/suggestions you have.

Happy Piking!

~The Pikchur Crew

Pikchur gets a facelift .. and a slight tummy tuck ;-)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:06:00 -0400

As you may or may not have noticed, last night we pushed a new version of Pikchur with an enchanced UI and revamped homepage. Of course this is just some of what we’ve been working on so here is the full feature list for anyone who cares to read on ;-)

Design/UI

Homepage (http://pikchur.com)

This page has been completely re-designed to give us a more simplistic to the point look. Our previous page had to much going on and we didn’t want to overwhelm newcomers ;-)

All pages (e.g http://pikchur.com/timeline)

A side menu can be found on all pages, this improves overall site navigation.

Dashboard (http://pikchur.com/dashboard)

We scrapped the tab based navigation and moved to a side menu. It’s a lot nicer and also allows you to find stuff you need quicker. We also consolidated the

We also removed the constant upload section that appeared on top of the dashboard pages and moved it to it’s own page. This allows us to display a lot more content on the page and push everything up a bit so you guys gain a lot more real estate.

Pikchur landing Page (e.g http://pikchur.com/CYG)

This page also has a side navigation menu and streamline views for sharing,feeds,and trackbacks. You will also notice two additional menu items if you are a Pikchur pro member. Statistics, and Original Size. More on these two later in the post.

Header and Footer

These are pretty minor and probably not worth noting, but the header on all pages changed as well as the footer. The header is significantly smaller than what we had before, and again allows for more info to be displayed on the page.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Functionality

Pro Accounts

We added the ability to purchase a Pikchur pro account. A full list of features can be found here: http://pikchur.com/upgrade

Twitter Oauth and Facebook Connect

This update was really overdue, but basically it makes connecting your Twitter and facebook accounts a breeze. For Twitter it also means a more secure experience, you never have to share your password with us ever again ;-)

Backend Tweaks

This might be boring stuff to you, but it gets us really excited anytime we optimize our image propogation, mail, MMS and backend processes. We won’t go in to to much detail here but lets just say our services are purring like a fine fed kitteh cat!

We hope you enjoy the cha cha changes and as always your feedback is welcomed!

~The Pikchur Crew

Pikchur.Dev.Blog

Tweetbot 1.2 + Pikchur = <3

Developer | Add Pikchur To Your App!

Documentation

upload

uploadAndPost

Developer | Converting Pikchur URL's to media!

Converting URLs

Photo URLS http://pk.gd/ http://pikchur.com/

Video URLS http://mp.gd/ http://pikchur.com/v/

Editing your Photo /w Picnik

Pikchur Supports Twitter's Echo OAuth

Pikchur on Twitter for the iPhone

Posting From Twitterrific on the iPad To Pikchur

API now supports triggers

Pikchur Teams up with @France2TV

Showing Some FourSquare Love.

Holiday Cheer Contest

Sorry for the down time

Posting from Tweetie to Pikchur

Picnik Anyone?

Motion Pikchur!

Some Nokia Love

Poster this!

Twitter Issues

Speed anyone?

Pikchur gets a facelift .. and a slight tummy tuck ;-)

Photo URLS
http://pk.gd/

http://pikchur.com/

Video URLS
http://mp.gd/

http://pikchur.com/v/