31 May 2007
Avatar World is Yahoo! messenger plug-in, that allows you to create customized visual chat-rooms and invite friends to join it. You can read more about it on Yahoo! Gallery.
This plug-in is not final release, it's just preview release and that's why it's very slow when you use it. It's a Adobe Flash Application at the core.
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BTW! I was about to work on Yahoo! Avatars project when I was working for Yahoo! Bangalore but I left Yahoo! before that.
31 May 2007
I wrote this php-proxy-script and have been using for different purpose (loading cross-domain data like text, xml, swf, image, etc. or for YouTube REST API in flash, flex applications).
People keep asking about proxy-scripts in forums to manage various things (cross-domain AJAX issues). Download the proxy.php.txt, and use to solve such problems. You can also fork it on Github, and improve it.
Usage:
http://yourserver.com/proxy.php?url=[&mimeType=]</pre>
Examples:
- To load XML/Text:
http://yourserver.com/proxy.php?url=http%3A//abdulqabiz.com/blog/index.xml
- To load a SWF (binary-data):
http://yourserver.com/proxy.php?url=http%3A//abdulqabiz.com/files/some.swf&mimeType=application/x-shockwave-flash
Technorati tags: proxy, php, crossdomain
30 May 2007
I noticed that YouTube has recently included a element in their RSS 2.0 feeds which contains "duration" attribute to hold duration (in seconds) of the video. As per RSS 2.0 spec, there is no duration attribute for , however, "length" is a required attribute, which is also missing.
No big deal, lots of feeds are broken on the planet and it is not a topic to be blogged like this. But my point is, we don't expect such things from Google/YouTube, they must be using some tool to validate their feeds as their QA process?
I use Feed Validator for feed (ATOM, RSS etc) validation. Thanks to Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby et-al for making it.
You can also see what feedvalidator reports about YouTube's feed.
BTW! I got happy for a moment when I saw duration in their feeds, I have to use YouTube API to get it.
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27 May 2007
I created a Mixercast using Alanis Morissette videos from different sources, check it out.
27 May 2007
Revision3, a great site for videos on various topics (Diggnation is one of those), offers different RSS 2.0 feed links for different video-formats? Is that good?
AFAIK, Media RSS specification allows you to group all (seen in above picture even Bittorrent feeds) that in one feed and RSS feed readers can show/download the content they are capable of playing/rendering?
Update: I have sent couple of emails to Revision3, requesting them to implement Media RSS for feeds. I have not heard from them, so I posted here on my blog :)
26 May 2007
Twitter has added support hCard, hAtom and XFN Microformats. I noticed about it via Chris Messina's post.
Microformats are cool, I am reading and quietly noticing thing about it on web/mailing-lists. I have slowly started adopting, wherever I can, f.ex. this blog would have some of them soon.
If you are interested about Microformats, check out these links:-
26 May 2007
Syndication feed formats (RSS/Atom) seems to have support for various kind of metadata (directly or through extensions/modules). However, not all publishers seems to be using it consistently. I also notice, presentation specific markup being mixed with metadata. Is it because feed-publishers assume client to be a web-browser?
For example:-
- Description text is in complex-html (presentation specific).
- Inserting advertisements in certain places
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With Rich Internet Application platforms (Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Apollo, Microsoft WPE/WPF etc), content can be presented into different metaphor provided it's easy to get the relevant data and related metadata from feeds. Above example poses a simple problem of extracting description (actual metadata), if it's semantic-html it's cool otherwise a problem for client to parse and extract data. Similarly, there could be more problems and inconsistencies in feed-publishing as of today.
Monetization and Advertisement through Syndication are not totally solved problems, most of the solutions available today only work in context of web-browser.
If feed reader(aggregator) is something else (f.ex: Adobe Flash/Apollo client or Microsoft WPF/WPE) than Web-Browser:-
- How to take care of branding?
- How to show advertisements?
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I am sure, these can be solved using syndication formats it's just we need to do it consistently. Also, while publishing feeds it's good idea to think of all kind of clients that would be consuming it.
Note: I am fairly new Syndication/Aggregation, whatever I talk here is based on my experiences and understanding in last a few years. Problems, I faced while writing aggregators, clients or feed-publishing-engines.
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25 May 2007
You must heard about new Facebook platform and API. How about Facebook Apollo client? Social networking on desktop, excited :-)
25 May 2007
I just got the link of Emmy's post about bi-directional text-support in next major Flash Player release, via Matt Chottin. Thanks Matt for posting, I would have not noticed it otherwise.
It means, more projects would adopt Adobe Flex/Flash in future. I remember, Infosys dropped on of the projects in 2005 because they needed bi-di text support for Arabic and other languages. This news would surely make loads of folks happy, I remember there is entire petition site asking for this feature.
Anyway, you can read the Flexcoders thread, where it was first disclosed.
Update (March 24, 2009): Adobe Flash Player 10 has been released and it has support for Bi-Directional text.
Technorati tags: bi-di text, bi-directional text, flashplayer