Version 0.96 of S3 Video for WordPress 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.

HTML5 Offline Storage

HTML5 introduces a pretty handy ability to cache remote resources locally for off-line use, meaning the resources are downloaded once. Then when the page is used again in the future the local (cached) copies of the file will be used instead of requesting the files from the server again.
Why would you want this? This functionality come is handy for developing sites that may need to be deployed in places with patchy Internet i.e remote satellite offices or most importantly HTML5 mobile applications.

How do I make this happen?

First up you need to make an .appcache file for your site telling the browser exactly what resources you would like to cache. In its simplest form a manifest file is just a standard text file with the .appcache extension. The first line of the manifest file contains the line “CACHE MANIFEST” and each new line afterward a filename and path for a resource to be cached is listed e.g

CACHE MANIFEST
/css/style.css
/js/scripts.js

(more…)

Easy PHP File Extensions With PathInfo

The other day I was building some file handling functionality into a project I was working on when i came to thinking about the best way to retrieve the extension of a filename with PHP.

The first approach that came to mind was using explode statement to split the string at the full stop giving the extension of the file in the last array element. The second was using substr and strrchr in combination similar to below:

(more…)