my mom is like any other gushing grandmother who dotes on her first grandchild. as silly as it sounds, she brags to her friends about how well-behaved he is (she clearly doesn’t spend enough time with him to see his fussy side) and smart he is.
for her birthday, i wanted to get her something that she would really appreciate, but she is a woman of few wants. it’s not because she has everything that she ever wanted, it’s more that she just doesn’t want a whole lot of anything.
this year, i decided that i would get her a digital photo frame and load it up with pictures of kyden. at first glance it seemed like a good idea, but then my mind started to wander. wouldn’t it be cooler if the digital photo frame could be updated by me remotely so that i can load new photos into the frame? how would i do that?
being a software engineer is a blessing and a curse. it’s cool because i can write web pages. i can make them do things. that’s sort of neat. it’s a curse because along with that comes the power to make web pages that do things.
i considered briefly buying a netbook and writing an app that will pull images and rotate them so that my mom can see the latest photos at any time. i thought about what i would need to run it and it started to feel a little overwhelming.
then i came across the D-Link DSM-210 10″ Wireless Internet Photo Frame. it seemed to have everything that I wanted. a digital photo frame that i can remotely update through the internet. how perfect is that?
the digital frame has integration with facebook, picasa, flickr, etc. that’s nice and originally, i was just going to make a Picasa account for this, but then my mind started to wander again. what is christi and i both wanted to update the photo frame? does that mean that we would have to logout of our google account, log in to the picasa account, upload the photo, and then it would work? it seemed like there should be a better solution.
we already have an image gallery that we upload photos to. we should be able to upload photos to this image gallery and then have those images shared to the digital photo frame. this is where the DSM-210 really shines. it accepts custom image RSS feeds.
so i went about writing an RSS feed that will take all of christi’s photos and all of my photos of kyden and then share it to the frame. it took a little while to figure out the format of the RSS feed, but i think that i finally got it all figured out.
i’m pretty excited about the digital photo frame. wireless internet access, auto-updating, and pretty good quality screen. perfect for the non-techy grandma who just wants to see pictures of her grandson.