In my spare time I’ve been working on a mash-up between LiveJournal interests and Flickr tags. Given a username my program pulls their list of interests from LJ and then asks Flickr for 5 images that use that interest as a tag.

The last piece fell into place this morning and I’ve been able create a few test pages on my local machine. It is very slow when I run it against a new user, which pulls the interest data from LJ. There’s obviously some bottleneck in how I add/update interests in the database.

I also need to create a scalable limit for the number of images returned. With the current default of 5 I get 715 images but someone like qt3_14159 only gets 5 images back. I’m thinking of something like 300 divided by the number of interests. Maybe less if Flickr starts complaining.

Anyway, here’s a sample pass on my interests. Should I keep going?