I have mentioned the free open source flash video player FlowPlayer before in my post about adding cuepoints and create flash videos. It is a great free flash video player that you can modify yourself. After writing about adding metadata to your flash videos I decided to add support for calling javascript from FlowPlayer one cue events. The first step to modifying the FlowPlayer source is to be able to build FlowPlayer from source.

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I have brought the Ming Ruby library up to date with Ming 0.3, added patches submitted by users over the past year and included a ton of user supplied examples. I hope to find time soon to include the real examples on a page by themselves with the code needed to generate each. You can check it out on rubyforge: Ming Ruby 0.1.8

Now that you can create a streaming Flash video player with PHP or Ruby and you know add metadata for cuepoints to Flash videos you are ready for something else. The following code will show you how to create a video player with PHP that will watch for metadata events and display annotations contained inside the metadata either over the video itself or in a div on the same page as the movie.
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Adding cue-points allows you to spice up your flash videos created with FFMpeg. Adding metadata to a FLV will allow you to introduce cue-points that have their own metadata that can be display when the cue-point is reached or let you jump to that cue-point. In the following tutorial you will learn how to add metadata to your FLV files using flvtool2 and how it is useful for adding cue-points.
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Some time ago I was looking at how to re-size uploaded images in a way that looks good using PHP. I was impressed that when I uploaded a 4M picture to flickr it managed to re-size and compress it into a smaller version that looked correct. I knew they weren't just resizing it so I went on a quest to find out what it took to do the same thing with PHP. The following is step one in that process.

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Vitamin has a good article today on the importance of maintainable javascript. 95% of what the article covers is applicable to any code. The important parts of the article cover javascript specific things like: object literals, namespaces and where to go when you want to compress your javascript to save bandwidth/make it download faster. They recommend packer and JSMIN as two javascript compressors but I think JSMIN is probably a better bet mainly because you can run it from the command line and make it part of a build script.

I found a post about an alternative approach to tagging today and thought it would be interesting if someone made a wordpress plugin that would use this idea. It seems like it might be a nice alternative to the normal site map that most sites have when there is a lot of information to drill down into.

Ever wanted to capture the entire page you are viewing in firefox instead of just what is shown on your screen? Ever need to do that from a command line? Here are two extensions that let you do just that.

Page Saver

The first extension is called Page Saver and comes in two versions. The pro version you have to pay for but the free version does a good job all by itself. Here is an example of a fullpage screenshot:

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This is a great article about the yahoo ui tools. I mention it mainly because they have a nice scrolling widget a lot like what I put together as an example of the things you can do with script.aculo.us (see Smooth Scrolling Image List).

A link to the demo: Sliding demo

The entire article: 15 things you can do with yahoo ui

Tags: yahoo ui, script.aculo.us, javascript

I like seeing more and more uses of prototype. I'm not sure if the big guys will win out with their UI toolkits (Yahoo UI/GWT) or if it will always feel better to put things together by hand. Either way it is good to understand how this stuff works. This is an edit in place example that is similar to what you see on flickr.

I've seen something like this a number of times when I've visited sites. They want your feedback on something or other while you are browsing. It is a little floating plus feedback sign that hangs out in the lower right hand corner. Check it out.

Browsing digg I noticed an article on "unobtrusive sidenotes" and found that the idea is pretty cool: The announcement and code. They are done with javascript so you can turn them on and off on the fly.

Tags: javascript, ajax, sidenote, ajax feedback, prototype