I am serving my website from mywebsite. I host images on flickr so all images are loaded in the user's browser via get requests to flickr. Many of my websites users access mywebsite from corporate networks, which block access to flickr. This means users get very annoying blank placeholders instead of the images. I get the same problem with the Facebook like button. This makes my site look very unattractive to such users.

Is there a way I can run a client side script which will check if flickr, facebook, etc. are accessible. If not I could change the href attribute of the image to load from an alternate source, or replace with a standard image explaining that their network is blocking access. I could also remove the Facebook like button.

I thought an XML http request would do the trick, but then I'd hit cross domain issues I think. I guess I could also set up a proxy to serve the images, but I don't want to do that; the idea of this is that flickr takes the bandwidth hit.

TLDR: How do I determine if flickr is accessible from a user's browser, using client side technology.

I am serving my website from mywebsite.com. I host images on flickr so all images are loaded in the user's browser via get requests to flickr. Many of my websites users access mywebsite.com from corporate networks, which block access to flickr.com. This means users get very annoying blank placeholders instead of the images. I get the same problem with the Facebook like button. This makes my site look very unattractive to such users.

Is there a way I can run a client side script which will check if flickr.com, facebook.com, etc. are accessible. If not I could change the href attribute of the image to load from an alternate source, or replace with a standard image explaining that their network is blocking access. I could also remove the Facebook like button.

I thought an XML http request would do the trick, but then I'd hit cross domain issues I think. I guess I could also set up a proxy to serve the images, but I don't want to do that; the idea of this is that flickr takes the bandwidth hit.

TLDR: How do I determine if flickr.com is accessible from a user's browser, using client side technology.

• javascript
• html
• scripting
• proxy

5 Answers 5

You could try this...

var image = new Image();

image.onerror = function() {

   var images = document
                 .getElementById('flicker-images')
                 .getElementsByTagName('img');

   for (var i = 0, imagesLength = images.length; i < imagesLength; i++) {
        images[i].src = 'images/flickr_is_blocked.gif';
   }

};

image.src = 'http://flickr.com/favicon.ico';

Hacky, but it seems to work. However it relies that the favicon.ico 404ing means the main site is.

jsFiddle.

Working example: http://jsfiddle.net/peeter/pW5wB/

JS:

$(document).ready(function() {

    var callbackOnSuccess = function(src) {
        alert("Successfully loaded " + src);
        return false;
    };
    var callbackOnFailure = function(src) {

        alert("Failed loading " + src);

        // Here you can do whatever you want with your flickr images. Lets change the src and alt tags
        $(".flickr").attr("src", "flickr_is_blocked.gif");
        $(".flickr").attr("alt", "Flicker is blocked");
        // Lets change the parents href to #
        $(".flickr").parent().removeAttr("href");
        return false;
    };

    checkAvailability("http://flickr.com/favicon.ico", callbackOnSuccess, callbackOnFailure);


});

function checkAvailability(src, callbackSuccess, callbackFailure) {
    $("<img/>").attr("src", src).load(function() {
        callbackSuccess(src);
    }).error(function() {
        callbackFailure(src);
    });
}

HTML:

<a href="http://flickr.com/favicon.ico">
    <img class="flickr" src="http://flickr.com/favicon.ico" alt="Flickr"/>
</a>

For facebook you can simply include the Facebook JS API and then test if one of the objects/functions it exports exists.

It would be better if you did not (ab-)use external hosts for your stuff. If you want a CDN, better use a real one...

Flickr and Facebook both have APIs that support JSONP, so cross-domain isn't an issue. i.e. Here's a request that just echoes some dummy data from flickr's API.

$.ajax({
  url: "http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/?jsoncallback=?",
  dataType: 'json',
  data: {method: "fickr.test.echo", format: "json", api_key: "02de950d65ec54a7a057af0e992de790"},
  success: callback
});

You can't reliably set error handlers on a jsonp reqest, so show a "loading" image until that success callback gets called. Set some timeout that will show an error message if the response doesn't come back fast enough.

This works, but timeout must be set!

$.ajax({
    url: "http://example.com/ping.html",
    type: 'GET',
    dataType: 'jsonp',
    jsonpCallback: 'jsonCallback',
    timeout: 1000,
    cache: false,
    success: function(response) {
        console.log("SERVER UP!");
    },
    error: function(e) {
        console.log("SERVER DOWN!");
    }
});

ping.html should return:

jsonCallback({response:'PONG'});