Hasin Hayder has posted part one of a series he's doing on making an application similar to the popular FriendFeed site in PHP.

Friendfeed is an excellent life streaming service aggregating all your feeds from different service providers, compile them together, build a social network among your known people and finally deliver all these feeds as a mashup. [...] In this blog post I will try to focus on how to develop such a service like Friendfeed using PHP and JS and how to scale such a huge load successfully.

This first part looks at the photo sharing handling of the application, including links to libraries already written in PHP to connect to them (like Flickr and Smugmug).

Evan Sims, a recent convert from Flickr to SmugMug, has whipped up a little something to help make getting to those SmugMug unfriendly URLs a little bit easier - SmugUrl:

one aspect I didn't like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can't fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL.

His example replaces this - http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu - with this - http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online...much more readable. He's even created a little bookmarklet you can drop into your bookmarks to make creating the URLs quick and easy. Check out for more.