I’ve mentioned recently using the JW Flash Media Player and the associated Wordpress plugin to enable easy embedding of Flash videos in Wordpress.
Our corporate network is - ahem - somewhat antiquated, and I was having problems getting the JW Flash Media Player to work properly on our machines. Turns out that we’re on and older version of Flash (7, rather than 8 or 9) and this seemed to be the root of the problem.
After a bit of searching, I found the Mini Flash Video Player by RichNetApps. This is a really simple, slightly bare-bones video player which works nicely even with ancient Flash versions.
Just drop the player files into your web directory, and add the code to your HTML. Here’s mine as an example:
<div class="flvPlayer">
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="320" height="260" id="player" align="middle">
<param name="movie" value="/wp-content/miniflvplayer/player.swf?file=/uploaded/video.flv&aplay=false&autorew=false&title=Video+Title" />
<param name="menu" value="true" /><param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="/wp-content/miniflvplayer/player.swf?file=/uploaded/video.flv&aplay=false&autorew=false&title=Video+Title" menu="true" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="320" height="260" name="player" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
</div>
For small projects, there’s a lot to be said for self-hosting the video - aside from the Flash version quirks of our network, it’s not the headache I expected it to be.
If you do stuff with WordPress, then there are two plug-ins you should definitely include in your toolkit: Subscribe2 and Subscribe-to-comments. The bottom line is: despite the advantages, few people use RSS, and few people remember to revisit your site to monitor comment threads and new postings. Email is still king.
Subscribe2 is a pretty fully-featured email subscription tool. You drop a special comment into a post or paste the subscription form into a template and voila: your readers can sign up to receive notifications by email whenever you post something new.
Subscribe-to-comments (confusingly similarly-named) does a different job: it adds a checkbox to your comments form for commenters to receive an email notification when a new comment is added to the thread. Keeping track of the conversation in a comment thread is a bit hit-and-miss: with this plug-in, it’s easier for your readers to monitor and rejoin the thread if they want to.
I was looking for a nice way to embed videos for an internal Wordpress blog. So hosting videos on YouTube wasn’t an option.
The WP-FLV plug-in is a single file plug-in for Wordpress which lets you add a <flv> tag into your posts referencing the video you want to embed. This then calls the JW Flash Media Player and presents a nice embedded player.
Tip: Wordpress is pretty strict about stripping out what it sees as dodgy code from the WYSIWYG editor. So if you want to allow the page/post to remain editable but don’t want to have the suspicious-looking <flv> element stripped out, change the following line in wp-flv.php:
preg_match_all (‘!<flv([^>]*)[ ]*[/]*>!i’, $content, $matches);
to:
preg_match_all (‘!\[flv([^>]*)[ ]*[/]*\]!i’, $content, $matches);
and instead of:
<flv href=’link/to/vid.flv’ autostart=’true’ />
use the following snippet in your post:
[flv href=’link/to/vid.flv’ autostart=’true’ /]
I was looking for a site search tool to run on PHP and MySQL, and didn’t just want to use Google Custom Search.
Sphider is nice: crawls your site (clean, uncluttered admin interface is a bit like a Google Mini), and has a simple, customisable template for results, and works fast. It also has ‘Did you mean?’ suggestions to help correct typos in users’ queries.
You can set up a cron job to call the spider to recrawl your site nightly.
See it in action: http://www.thebigopportunity.org.uk/
It’s frustrating to find a site you really want to follow but which doesn’t publish its listing of news etc as an RSS feed. That’s a problem Dapper.net is really good at solving. Sign up online for free, give it one or more web page URLs, and identify which repeating bits of the page are the title, date, and description fields you want in your RSS. It’s all point and click stuff, and you can publish the resulting feed in all kinds of formats, and with a friendly URL.
So for example this:
http://www.civilservicenetwork.com/index.php?id=152
becomes:
http://www.dapper.net/services/whitehallwestminsterworld
SimplePie is a PHP class which makes it easy to grab and use the RSS feed from services like Delicious, Flickr or Twitter. So you could take the feed of results of pages mentioning your product of brand from Google Blogsearch, and make them appear on your blog sidebar.
Of course, there are other ways of doing this: for simple feeds, there may be widgets that do it more easily. And PHP5’s SimpleXML functions are pretty good. But SimplePie can handle a bigger range of feeds, more intelligently and enable you to do clever stuff like filtering without getting too bogged down in the XML itself.
See it in action (powering the search results from Hansard and Delicious links) at: http://interactive.dius.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/site/debate/
