South Korea LEGO Store Added
With building with LEGO again, come web-site updates. Got an e-mail today about a new LEGO store opening up in Seoul, South Korea. It’s been added to the database. I’m hoping over the next few days to do some web-site maintenance. The first act was to update the server, which broke the web-site for about 10 mins or so, while I figured out why PHP wasn’t doing it’s job. Added the new store (I’ll be looking back at email and checking LEGO web-site to see what other stores have been added), and wasn’t till a few hours lated that I discovered that my code broke with upgrading to PHP 7+. *sigh* So that should be working again. Next, I’ll refresh the parts DB and pick up some of the programming projects I’ve left on the back-burner… Like a BrickBuildr API…
In other news, within the past few days, I decided not to renew my Flickr Pro account. Even though I was grandfathered into a lower Pro renewal price for the past 2 years. I don’t feel like under SmugMug’s new leadership, it’s worth the 100% increase or the $50/yearly cost… Maybe I’ll upgrade my free account to a Pro account with the next round of site improvements, but until then, I’m out.
With that said, I’m reconsidering some of the pages that I have built based on Flickr’s API. At one time, I wanted to integrate it into Google’s Photos and other photo web-hosting sites. But I may end up just dropping it completely… I’m also noticing many of the FOL sites are going stale, I should ping each web-site daily and if a site fails 7 days in a row, flag it to be deleted, or something.
Several years ago, one of the challenges I saw facing the FOL community was where to find photos of what people were building in LEGO. Most people had moved away from BrickShelf to Flickr… but Flickr isn’t just LEGO/MOC-centric. Tagging helped with that. But now the digital landscape is much different — I find LEGO news and MOCs on Facebook and Reddit. I still have a RSS reader (Newsblur), that I pay for since Google dropped support for it… but that’s slowly dying…
If you have any suggestions on web-sites to use to keep up with new MOCs, drop me a line or post it in the comments…
Anyway, look for more updates soon.