I started this part of the project going strong using a plugin/library that came highly recommended and after getting everything setup and configured, it keep failing on the last handshake. For the life of me figure out where I had an incorrect configuration. The Instagram community came through for me but this cost me about 8 hours of staring at my monitor not knowing what to do.

Now that I have climbed over that wall I have realized that  I can’t use this library and have started writing my own custom OAuth, which in the long run will make the project faster and smaller. Another set back.

Well I hope to have better news next time and even better news very soon.

We are working on a major update to gramsby.me that includes a new design and we are working on our first iPhone App. You are going to want to follow us for updates as the app nears release.

We are also going to work on publishing more news even if it is a few sentences a week.

L8

There is a nice new feature as well, you can now browse all of a Instagram users photos on our site as long as you are logged into Gramsby.me!

In other news we have started partnering with keepsy. Keepsy lets you create albums of your photos from a couple different social photo sites including Instagram. Follow the links to Keepsy to help support GramsBy.Me

We have a couple other partnerships and some exciting opportunities that we will be announcing in the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!

We are constantly growing over here, and pushing out new features and fixes. If you want us to add something we want to here from you! Send an email or shoot us a tweet, we cant wait to hear what you have to say.

As you might have noticed we updated the layout a bit last month and have done some code changes that we hope you guys will like.

Quick And Dirty rundown:

• New Layout
• New feature: Albums
• Various Bug Fixes and optimizations.

More in depth:

 We have optimized the layout a bit and improved load times. Personally I love the new colors and artwork. Josh did a GREAT job with that stuff and much props for it. I love everything from the new color scheme to the new buttons all over the place and really dig the front page!

We have added Albums! First way to organize your grams the way YOU want. There is a new button in the navigation bar to manage your Albums, and you can create albums on the fly directly from the ‘My Grams’ page as well. We are tossing around a couple other new feature ideas, like a widget for specific albums. What do you think?

You have a couple options if you want to make your photos private. You can either make selective photos private or make all your photos private globally, and selective photos public.

To make an individual photo private, log into gramsby.me and go to ‘MyGrams’. When you select the photo you want to make private you will see a link with it’s current status, click the ‘Public’ link which will change it’s status. Refresh the page to verify that the link has update to it’s new status ‘Private’.

To globally make all your photos private, go to your user settings. Select the checkbox ‘make all private’ and click ‘Save’.

Once you make a photo private if you want to make it public you will need to log into GramsBy.Me and navigate to the ‘MyGrams’ page. When you select the photo you want to make public you will see the status link is set to ‘Private’. Click that link and refresh the page to verify the status has been changed to ‘Public’

Version 0.4 is looking great. There was some minor fixes that we went through including: bugs squashed, layout issues we discovered (please keep reporting those if you find them!), along with some new features.

Now on to the juicy stuff, we put together a new feature for you guys with websites of your own. We have created a little web-code snippet that you can add to your website or blog that shows your gramsby.me photos directly on your web page. No hot linking necessary :)! Once it is setup it will show up as a little gallery wherever you want it. Check out a screenshot and the instructions below the fold! We are putting together a how-to video as well. For the adventurous head over to gramsby.me and check out the tools section under your account.

So this is what it looks like on Posterous.

Instructions:

• Login to gramsby.me
• Click on your username/profile picture in the top right to show the My Account links
• Click on Tools and you will see the code that you need.
• Highlight the code and copy it (ctrl+c or command+c)
• Login to your Blog or personal site (I will use WordPress for this example)
• Click on Appearance -> Widgets
• Add a new Text Widget
• Give your new Widget a title if you’d like
• Paste (ctrl+v or command+v) the code from gramsby.me in the body portion
• Save and you are done

Simple as that!

If you have any questions or problems with the widget let us know!

If you are unfamiliar with the project go ahead and check it out. In short, we are using Instagram’s API to create a web interface to see all your photos, share, comment, like, etc.

We are working on some new features for gramsby.me based on your requests and have a update schedualed for two weeks, knock on wood :), keep you eyes peeled. More on those later.

We also have a couple other projects in the works. First one out of the gate will be rainby.me which is a little app that we whipped up for the rainmaker.cc api challenge. That one will be up and running by the end of today, and the other is called forgespark which we will be working on after our gramsby.me update. More info on that later!

Again go and checkout gramsby.me, and follow us on twitter, like us on facebook and lets get some fun stuff rolling.