Development Cycle

A new version of the S3 Video (0.97) WordPress plugin has been released to the plugin repository. This release is a combination of some new functionality along with a number of bug fixes.

Some of the bigger changes in this release are:

• Support for Amazon S3 prefixes. This feature allows faster traversal of buckets containing a large number of files. This functionality was contributed by Harmag, many thanks!
• The addition of some simple tool tip functionality to help less technical users understand some of the terms and functionality.
• An issue was resolved that was causing the auto-play functionality to no work when using the videoJS player.
• Fixed the broken video preview functionality in the admin back-end
• Also resolved and issues preventing multiple videos or play-lists to be embedded within the same pages or post.

The new stable version of S3 Video can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository page. If you are not as concerned with stability and would like to take advantage of new functionality as soon as it becomes available, the development branch is also available to clone on github.

Related Posts:

S3 Video 0.96 Released

The latest version of my popular S3 Video plugin has been released to the WordPress plugin repository.

After many requests the 0.96 release now allows a user to set a “still” image as a title or splash page for their video. A number of bug fixes have also been fixed in the latest release, the two major ones being:

• Prefill handling of the “videos per page” setting on the plugin settings page.
• Videos no longer float above text they are embedded below within a page or post.

The bundled copy of Flowplayer with the plugin has also been updated to version 3.2.15.

Plugin background:

The S3 Video for WordPress plugin allows a user to upload video files to their Amazon S3 account via WordPress and embed the videos using Flowplayer or VideoJS directly into pages and posts. For personal and commercial videos this provides lost cost, pay as you go model for video hosting.

More information on the plugin can be found at either the plugin’s github page or the WordPress plugin repository.

Ever been working on a project that was area specific and wanted nearby local images? I did recently, and knew after seeing images over layed onto Google maps that it must be possible. Looking around I found a few pieces of code that did what I wanted using the Panoramio API but they were all written in Javascript and I wanted to do some server side processing and caching before presenting them.

This prompted me to create a Panoramio wrapper class. Simply instantiate and provide your chosen location via its longitude and latitude and the class will return a PHP object containing images from the surrounding area. The project show up in github as being written in Javascript although this is wrong the main code is PHP, the inclusion of jQuery and a few other javascript libraries with the documentation seem to have thrown its language detection off.

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One thing that has caused me some grief since the release of WordPress 3.1 is the admin bar that appears up the top of the blog when you are logged in.

Call me a stick in the mud but I have never really used it since its introduction and on a few sites it has even gone as far as breaking the appearance of the template.

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Wireframing is an invaluable technique when starting the development of a new project, both to set functionality expectations with project stake holders and to give the build team a concrete idea of what it is exactly they have to build. There are plenty of web based and commercial packages available but I don’t really do enough wireframing to justify the cost of an ongoing subscription to a web based service and not many of the commercial packages cater to the Linux market. I have always loved Dia ( http://live.gnome.org/Dia ) for creating flow charts and work flow diagrams but never really found it suited to the creation of wireframes.

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The recent release of Firefox has been the new look, features and speed are simply amazing. One issue I am having trouble adjusting to though is the refresh button location. It used to live as a nice big icon next to the back / forward buttons but in the new release it is now positioned as a small icon to the right hand side of the location bar.

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The latest release of the popular browser Firefox is now here with Firefox 4.0 boasting speed improvements, location aware browsing, improved HTML 5 support plus much more. Getting Firefox 4 for your Ubuntu desktop is pretty simple using the mozilla team PPA.

To get started open a terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Potential Issue: depending on your network, corporate firewalls often block Port 11371, which is used to communicate with the key server causing timeouts. If this happens to you the key can be downloaded over port 80 using the command:

sudo gpg –keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 –recv-keys CE49EC21

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Close Firefox if its currently running and open again and enjoy your new look browsing experience.

The 2.9.0 version of WordPress has been released some of the main new features include:

• A “trash bin” feature, allow the restoration of deleted comments or posts.
• Built in image editor, forget Photoshop! You can now scale, flip, rotate images directly in WordPress.
• Easier embedding of video, just post the URL and WordPress will generate the embed code on its own.
• Multiple updating of plug-ins, forget the days of having to go through and update each plug-in one by one.

Plus much more the 2.9 release of WordPress incorporates over 500 tickets for bugs and enhancements.

So what are you waiting for download it now here!

Found this neat little easter egg in Firefox 3 today to activate simply type the line about:robots into the browsers navigation bar to recieve this screen:

A painfree tutorial on installing the XAMPP bundle to ease the development and testing of your web applications.