The TTYtter 2.0 beta with Streaming API support is now available for the incautious.

Blow yourself away here: ttytter 2.0.0beta

I may tweak this theme to my liking a bit more and then take my time developing something of my own. It’ll end up looking very similar knowing me!

Someone prod me if I’m still using it in a few months

get_iplayer

Firstly, the videos I needed to shorten were from the BBC.. There’s a command line tool called get_iplayer that enables me to grab live or recorded video from the BBC site. It’s way too complex to fully describe here but the command I used to grab my video clip was:

get_iplayer http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/default.stm --stop 1800 --get

That command retrieves the embedded live video on that particular BBC web page and saves the file as an *.avi. The --stop 1800 argument recorded 1800 seconds of video (60secs x 30mins = half an hour – I was having my tea!). Once I’d retrieved the video I had to find the start-time of my desired clip and then calculate its duration. I used ffmpeg to create a *.flv file from the original *.avi.

I found that the original downloaded file’s audio and video were out of sync, by approximately 1 second. More Googling and I found a way to encode the *.flv file and offset the audio/video. Here’s the command I used:

 ffmpeg -i downloaded.avi -vcodec copy -itsoffset 1 -i downloaded.avi -map 1:0 -map 0:1 -ss 848 -t 399 result.flv

That took the video from the downloaded file, offset by 1 second from the audio in the same file, starting at 848 seconds and lasting 399 seconds. Cool.

Copy of a Copy

Much in the way a photo-copied document starts to degrade after multiple recopying, the same goes for video. Downloading a video, shortening it and then uploading the result to YouTube produced acceptable but not very clear looking videos. I had to reduce the number of copies so the answer was to locally host the file. Well, hosting the file on Amazon S3 and making use of their content delivery network (CDN).

Google led me to the marvellous site by Mark Pilgrim, Dive into HTML 5. The video section of the site goes into great detail about how best to display video in modern browsers and a link through to another awesome page, Video for Everybody. That site outlines how to display video in older or incapable browsers; yes Internet Explorer, pay attention. The information described in those two sites is invaluable, however since I primarily use WordPress for blogs and sites, I decided to use a plugin to display either *.flv or *.m4v files.

Not as pure as Video for Everybody but nevertheless, everyone should be able to see the video.

Flowplayer

Flowplayer is a tool that allows you to display video on your site in a YouTube style enclosure, complete with controls. There are a number of WordPress Plugins that utilise Flowplayer but some of them collide with jQuery. One that doesn’t is FV WordPress Flowplayer, so that’s what I’m using here on my site.

The plugin uses short codes to embed your video files, like this:

It seems to work pretty well. You can see an embedded video here: Embedded video using flowplayer. If I wasn’t using WordPress or something similar I’d definitely use the Video for Everyone technique for video embedding.

I’ve put this entry on my blog so that I don’t forget how to do it next time. It’s fairly straightforward to do so if you ended up here from a search engine, I hope you find it useful.

Caramboo Videos

Nice!

Well. I’ve decided to stop using it and here’s why.

Too Many Blogs!

I keep realising (and then forgetting and then re-realising) that if I set-up too many personal sites or blogs, I spread myself out way too thinly. I’m not the most prolific of bloggers at the best of times and if I’ve got to race round updating multiple sites, I’m just not going to and indeed didn’t bother. My Sweetcron site somehow became my lazy-blog. I knew I could fire off a few tweets here and there and the blog gods would be happy because I was doing my bit. So then this site site right here becomes like a ghost town. I even started giving out my Sweetcron address as the URL of my web-site. I’m such a cheat.

What’s sort of swung it for me are a couple of reasons. The first is that the Sweetcron Author himself has stopped using his own software and cites the impersonality of lifestreaming as one of the reasons. He’s actually moved onto Posterous as his blogging platform and makes regular updates. The second reason is that there’s a now a Lifestream Plugin for WordPress. I’ve installed it and without doing any customisation it already looks pretty neat. You can see it on this page. I’ll probably try and get my own style going there when I can get round to it but like I say, it looks pretty much OK as it is.

So What Now?

So, now that the Sweetcron site has bit the dust I’ll have to write in here more. I’m still going to have more than one site running but this place here will be for personal stuff. A proper blog with the attraction of an added Lifestream. I’m going to build a second site for geeky/linuxy/webby stuff and that will be more the start of business enterprise. We’ll see what happens. I’m going to need to find another income stream anyway since The Form Analyst has now closed its doors and is becoming a free site. Which kinda sucks!

Onwards and upwards…

I found myself with the option of working out what had gone wrong (the server wouldn’t even boot properly) which I may have managed, or to bite the bullet and start again with a fresh install. I went for the latter because I really couldn’t be bothered with the former and it would enable me to build a few applications in a way I wished I’d done on the first install. Fortunately due to WP-DB-Backup and rdiff-backup I was able to rebuild and restore quite quickly. DefCon 1 at 8.30am, multi-user subscription website and server back up and running at 2.00pm. I even managed to get a temporary forum up and running so that the users had somewhere to hang out. That was on-line at 9.00am.

The new set-up has Nginx proxying to Apache. I’d wanted to do it for ages and so now Nginx serves up the static content, Apache looks after all the PHP and other swanky malarky. I also did a review of the plugins on the site and found that one was really slowing things down to a crawl. It was Social Access Control that seemed to be strangling the server. I swapped it out for Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin. Things are a lot swifter. Maybe I didn’t have Social Access set-up correctly, who knows, it’s toast now. Members takes a little bit more messing about with templates to get it running sweet, but I like the concept and it’s there to stay over at TFA.

I was thinking of writing a few posts on the way I’ve got Nginx and Apache working in tandem but all I did was Google their names with the word proxy thrown in for good measure and all the help you need is already out there.

Google is your friend.

• Somewhere to test stuff
• An Apache Web Server (I use Nginx on my own server)
• As many domains/sub-domains as I like
• 5OGB of backup space
• Lots of funky stuff, like subversion!

All for less than that ten dollars. Cool or what!

If you don’t know what subversion is:

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 1999 by CollabNet Inc. It is used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).

So my plan is use the following workflow:

• Create/Edit files on my Desktop machine
• Save/Open them on my local server via SSH
• Sync my local server files with my repository at Dreamhost
• Sync the live site on my remote server with my repository

I already backup any sites I have or am working on via rsync or rdiff-backup to my Dreamhost backup account. This new subversion set-up will be used for current development synchronisation with the bonus of historical svn backups.

It all sounds lovely and geeky to me which is great. Trust me it’s good.

I was thinking about carrying on with the theme but the experience has served its purpose and I’m ready to move onto something else. I’ll just leave the theme as it is and perhaps I’ll come back to it someday. So, the next plan is to develop a theme that doesn’t instantly look like Thematic (or thesis for that matter).

I’ll start tomorrow.

If you don’t know what Themetic is, it’s a framework upon which you pin a child theme. I haven’t touched one line of Thematic’s markup for this child theme (which is tentatively called Tamollie). The look of this site is created by my spaghetti CSS and a cobbled together functions.php file. Oh yeah with a few widgetty plugins and some Justin Tadlock stuff thrown in for good measure. Anyway this is what Ian says about his baby, Thematic:

Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.

Ian frequently posts links to new Thematic based themes on Twitter and I’d go and check them out. Some are really good and I’d think “I want one like that!“. Then I’d look at Thematic, suss out the learning curve (it’s actually not that bad) before retreating to Firefox and just bimble round t’interweb not achieving very much at all. So that’s why I decided to break the mindset and move to something else which ended up being Blueprint (BP) and Whiteboard (WB). Anyway, whilst fiddling about with BP and WB I started delving into the WordPress functions.php file to add in widget areas and what-not. That got me thinking about Thematic again because it makes use of the functions file like crazy. So as soon as I finished the last design I started mucking about with Thematic.

I decided that I’d try and create a look similar to Ian’s Themeshaper Site so that I could get used to working with Thematic and what you are looking at now is the result. At the time of writing the CSS really does look like a bowl of spaghetti but it works. I’ll tidy it up but the experience of the past few days has been me climbing that learning curve. I think I’m about a quarter of the way up it. It doesn’t look completely like Ian’s since I’m not worthy but you can see the influence .

So now that I’ve got somewhere to write again I’m going to move to stage two and attempt to mimic another site. I don’t know where yet but I’m working on it. The aim is to completely immerse myself in all things Thematic and eventually develop a child theme straight out of my own head. Well, that’s the plan anyway!