How to customise cool Picasa tools

I have a heap of picasa web albums which I like to have slideshows of on my personal blog, which is very nice, but, I want a bit more functionality from my slideshow applet, so here I go.

What I would like to do is have a small combo box that lists the various albums I have available and the user selects one of them. After that the slideshow kicks off with the selected album and everyone is happy.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Lets see.

Well I finally got around to doing this and here's what I came up with..

The slideshow is a flash swf file that sits in an <embed> tag. The tricky part of it is the feedurl parameter that tells picasa which feed to serve to the slideshow player. In my url it has a id for the album which is the only thing that changes between the albums, like this

host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fbrockwmills
%2Falbumid%2F5228351820043835105%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss

so I set up a select form with the various album Id's as the values and the name as the selection text, then wrote some javascript to remove the embed element and replace it with a new one, with the new id value from the drop down list.

Easy!

Is it sensible, that's my question.... Also is there a way to access the Picasa data (feed URL, Album names, etc) dynamically instead of hard coding them into the blog widget.