Howdy folks.
Sorry its been a while since I’ve been able to spend any time on the plugins I built for Plex. My day job is leaving very little time for ‘fun’ coding right now - plus with a busy summer of stag weekends, weddings, photography and motorsport etc I’ve had very little free time. Maybe if I converted my main media centre from an old Xbox to a Mac Mini and Plex I would have some more inspiration but I can’t afford that right now 
donations are always welcome though LOL.
So whats been happening ? Firstly a revised core Plugin framework for Plex itself has removed some of the nasty data encoding issues that resorted to plugin devs trying to manage this themselves. Fortunately the plugin framework is now utf-8 friendly by default which is great. It took a bit of tracking down but we got there.
The next thing I need to talk about is obviously the Flickr plugin itself. This has obviously not made it out to the App Store yet because it was - whilst working pretty damn good - still a work in progress. Recently this plugin has stopped workiing and I know people have been reporting issues with it so I decided I’d better take a peep inside and see whats going on.
The primary reason things have been breaking seems to be related to the flickr api call flickr.people.findByUsername
Previously I figured out that in order to interact with flickr I needed to supply this method the identifier that appears in my flickr photostream URL. My Photostream is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iandgratton/ - so - the user id part would be iandgratton. This is the value I’d previously enter into the Flickr plugin preferences and it would work perfectly. When I go into Plex now and watch the plugin’s log I see:
15:53:53.700984: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Loaded the default preferences file<br />
15:53:53.701225: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Loaded the user preferences file<br />
15:53:53.701281: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : Creating Flickr Client<br />
15:53:53.701389: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : Finding Flickr user 'iandgratton'<br />
15:53:54.477099: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : Flickr Error: Error: 1: User not found<br />
15:53:54.477292: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : userid is None<br />
15:53:54.477340: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : username is None<br />
15:53:54.477400: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Plug-in started<br />
15:53:54.477440: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Entering run loop<br />
15:53:54.477530: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Handling request : /:/prefixes<br />
15:53:54.477685: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Resource named 'icon-default.png' of type 'image/png' was made public.<br />
15:53:54.477872: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Response OK
Strangely this has always worked - but not now.
The next thing I did is use the [IdGettr](http://idgettr.com/) site to check if it could get my flickr NSID just from the Photostream URL - and it can. Feel free to give it a try and see for yourselves.
OK - so maybe nothing broken at the Flickr services level.
The next thing I tried is to call the service directly from within Flickr's API sample pages. The one for [flickr.people.findByUsername](http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.people.findByUsername) returns with:
<rsp stat="fail"><br />
<err code="1" msg="User not found"/><br />
</rsp>
which is pretty weird. So the [IdGettr](http://idgettr.com/) service (which *should* be using flickr.people.findByUsername also) seems to work - but the Flickr API testing page does not.
So - the next thing I did is start using my Flickr Screen Name instead of the one that appears in the URL. IdGetter cannot obviously use this but if I enter my Screen Name (it doesn't seem to care if character case doesn't match) in the flickr test page it returns with:
<rsp stat="ok"><br />
<user id="38822801@N04" nsid="38822801@N04"><br />
<username>Ian Gratton</username><br />
</user><br />
</rsp>
So - if I use 'Ian Gratton' it can correctly obtain my Flickr NSID which I can then use to make subsequent calls into the Flickr API. The next thing I did was configure 'ian gratton' as my Flickr Username in the plugin's preferences page and restarted Plex. When the plugin then re-loaded I saw this in the plugins log file:
16:11:36.971824: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Loaded the default preferences file<br />
16:11:36.972373: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Loaded the user preferences file<br />
16:11:36.972438: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : Creating Flickr Client<br />
16:11:36.972568: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : Finding Flickr user 'ian gratton'<br />
16:11:37.723425: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : Response Status: ok<br />
16:11:37.723534: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : User found<br />
16:11:37.723654: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : userid is 38822801@N04<br />
16:11:37.723756: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : username is Ian Gratton<br />
16:11:37.723852: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Plug-in started<br />
16:11:37.723894: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Entering run loop<br />
16:11:37.723992: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Handling request : /:/prefixes<br />
16:11:37.724154: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Resource named 'icon-default.png' of type 'image/png' was made public.<br />
16:11:37.724469: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Response OK
so - based upon the above it seems the flickr API service [flickr.people.findByUsername](http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.people.findByUsername) can no longer obtain the NSID from your photostream URL name - it has to be your **Flickr Screen Name**. I've posted on the Flickr API forums regarding this issue - you can track it [here](http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157622268766584/) if you wish.
So - you'd think that would be everything sorted right ? - unfortunately wrong.
The first time I attempt to do anything with the plugin now I see the following appearing in the plugin's log file when I attempt to nagivate into the plugins menu structure itself:
16:34:44.676431: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) Handling request : /photos/flickr<br />
16:34:44.677921: com.plexapp.plugins.flickr : (Framework) An exception happened:<br />
Traceback (most recent call last):<br />
File "/Users/idg/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins/Framework.bundle/Contents/Resources/Versions/1/Python/PMS/Plugin.py", line 459, in __run<br />
result = handler(**kwargs)<br />
File "/Users/idg/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-ins/Flickr.bundle/Contents/Code/__init__.py", line 122, in MainMenu<br />
dir.Append(Function(DirectoryItem(GetPhotoStream, title=L("PHOTOSTREAM_TITLE") % username, thumb=R(PLUGIN_ICON_DEFAULT), summary=L("PHOTOSTREAM_SUMMARY") % username), nsid=userid, nickname=username))<br />
TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting
this never used to happen. The message **TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting** is the bit that concerns me. The actual error appears to be occuring in the framework itself on line 459...the line of code in the plugin is obviously been shown to as this is the stack trace for the method call.
Anyone have any ideas why this could be happening ?
Hopefully this won't be too difficult to fix and we can get this ready for the App Store soon.
