Gudlyf's World

HotShoe: Can the web use containers for Flash?

2010-05-20T20:43:14Z

I just wanted to get this idea put out there, in case someone’s trying to come up with a solution for Flash on non-Flash-enabled browsers.

I got to thinking: why can’t Flash objects (or just about any object for that matter) be held outside the web page and displayed within an interactive container? If there’s a way to create this container using JavaScript and HTML5, couldn’t something like this be a solution at least for a portion of some Flash content?

Here’s a brain dump of what I mean:

The question mark here is that bottom piece and how it connects into the Flash Container (I called it “HotShoe” — the piece that holds a flash on a camera. I am so clever.). In very basic terms, I’m thinking a sort of VNC-like interface that interacts with the Flash piece. You probably wouldn’t get a massive Flash game to work flawlessly in such a design, but movies and ads….

That’s all I got. Now go make it!

Two unrelated items: iPad and Facebook

2010-05-12T14:03:40Z

Ever since the iPad was rumored, I wanted the thing. Even before the specs were announced, I had a picture in my head of what the thing would be like: a big iPod Touch … and that’s what we got. I’d already decided that was just fine with me. The price, though, when compared to a full OS netbook was a little steep. So, I went with a netbook … and just sold it yesterday on eBay (for more than I paid for it, because I installed a legal copy of Windows 7 Ultimate on it, which I had a spare copy of).

Now I’ve decided it’s iPad time, though I was originally awaiting the iPad 3G. However, after a lot of thought on the matter, I’ve decided not to get the 3G. I have an iPhone, with a full data plan my employer foots the bill for. If I need 3G, I will have my iPhone (and will have the NEW iPhone when that comes out later this year). The new iPhone OS will have Bluetooth keyboard capability, so if I need to get some doc or post writing done, I can do it that way if I really need to. For everything else, I can wait to find a wifi hotspot somewhere.

Something else regarding 3G: it’s more AT&T than I’d rather have. I really, really love the idea of $15 whenever I happen to need it in a pinch, since the portable wifi hotspots do not currently offer a-la-carte pricing like that. However, I’m pretty convinced we will see a-la-carte pricing for these devices in the near future, and when that happens I’d be really sorry I spent the money on the 3G iPad.

I’m also going with the 16GB iPad over the higher capacities. My current iPhone is 16GB and it’s full of apps, many which I use sparingly and some which are only really good for carrying on a phone (Foursquare, for example). With all of that and music and photos, I’ve still got 5GB free. I won’t put music in the iPad. By the time I’d fill an iPad’s 16GB, I’d be ready for an upgrade to their newer version anyway.

So, with the lowest model iPad, I save hundreds of dollars I’m putting toward the new iPhone (which should only be a couple hundred for the upgrade, since I’m due for the discounted upgrade through AT&T).

Now, Facebook.

Seems a lot of people are dumping out of Facebook. Deb wisely never joined Facebook and is laughing at the news of people leaving the service. To be honest, I wouldn’t bat an eye at leaving Facebook if I didn’t use it to help promote CliqueClack. Many old friends I’d want to keep in touch with there barely update as it is. We have a fan page there for CliqueClack, and I need an account to maintain it, so dumping out of Facebook isn’t an option at the moment. That doesn’t mean I won’t update my status on Facebook, but I never really shared much personal stuff there as it is.

I never really understood why people felt so comfortable revealing personal information there so regularly. Telling everyone you’re going on vacation and the house is empty? Or you’re alone in the house all week? Or that you’re playing FarmVille or some other wacky game during working hours or right after you told someone on your friend list you were too busy to do something else for them, yet there you are, playing this game? Y’know, we can see you. Everyone can.

Why digital books and not the library?

2010-04-28T18:36:37Z

I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that, sooner than later, I will have myself an iPad. But, while I love the idea of reading books on the thing, my problem is this: I’m a cheap bastard, and I’d rather get my books from the library … y’know, for free.

This bums me out, because I’d really love to read books on a portable device like the iPad or the Kindle, rather than dealing with book lights and pesky pages. Somehow, though, I have an easier time swallowing the >$500 price tag of an iPad than paying for a book, one that I’ll read once and likely never read again, nor can I share the damn thing or donate it.

I can get any book I want from my local library and even have it sent from another library if they don’t have it in stock. Audiobooks are even better — I can get the CDs, digitize them into iTunes, and then listen on my iPod/iPhone, complete with bookmarking (I do delete them when I’m done because, as I said, I will probably never ever read/listen to these books again).

So why are people so quick to buy digital books? Is it because they have a lot of disposable income? Don’t have friends they’d like to share the book with later? Are neurotic and don’t like touching old books? Too lazy to walk/drive to the library? Or is the convenience of using an iPad or Kindle to read the book worth the inflated price of it alone?

Plus, using the library helps support it. “You mean I read books for free and it supports the library with no money out of me?” I know: crazy! But it’s true. Don’t you want to help support that worthy cause? Or are you all like “screw everyone — get a better job and buy your books!”

Please, convince me I need to read all future books on an iPad — I need another reason to justify it.

The draw of episode reviews

2010-04-20T14:06:39Z

When I started up CliqueClack TV, there were a few key elements I really wanted the site to have. Firstly, I didn’t want to regurgitate news items. “News regurgitation” means simply scouring website RSS feeds of places like CNN News, Yahoo! News, or any other number of TV-related websites and blogs, and then generating a post that repeats that news, though in one’s own words. It’s not very original and it’s a cheap way to get pageviews.

The other thing I didn’t want to do was repeat anything that was happening on TV Squad, the place I left. We initially started up CliqueClack TV to have a place for people to read episode reviews of shows that were no longer covered on TV Squad, so it wasn’t repeating anything being done over there.

I understand there are a lot of websites that simply can’t afford to not re-post news items, because it’s what the bulk of their readership expect. They’ve already dug that hole, so simply stopping that practice would only serve to hurt traffic, at least in the short-to-medium term. And hey, it’s an easy buck for the writers because they don’t need to come up with anything original — the material is right there, so put a personal wrapper around it and it’s $25 in the bank.

I have a confession to make: I never liked episode reviews. We are not experts in the field of television here. Fans of TV — and, in some cases, die-hard ones — yes. But experts tootled in the art of television and journalism? Not at most places, at least. So why are episode reviews so popular? Shouldn’t a post about something specific in the episode itself fare better?

There are often times I will watch an episode of a show I love and, dammit, I have nothing to say. But because readers expect to see a review for every episode of the show we’re covering, I’ve got to man up and figure out something to say. Is that a good thing? Isn’t it OK that an episode isn’t remarkable and we can just skip it without having to say it’s unremarkable?

I’m not sure how many CliqueClack readers read this site, because I don’t update it often as it is. But would it really be a bad thing if traditional episode reviews went away and were replaced by something discussing specific aspects of the show, if we really have something to say about it?

By the way, we will most likely never provide recaps of episodes, which are, by definition, a retelling of what happened on the show, not simply one’s own thoughts.

Custom short URLs and WordPress SEO stuff

2009-05-20T18:00:01Z

If you use Twitter, chances are you’ve seen or have submitted URLs using short URL services like tinyurl.com or bit.ly. Because of the limited number of characters allowed in Twitter tweets, you simply have to use them to get your point accross. The problem with using these public services is that, to most people they have no clue really where the link is going to take them. Because of this, some places have started using their own short URLs; when you see the custom short URL, you know where you’re headed.

So, I wanted to have our own short URL domain for CliqueClack. Domains are cheap, but only if you use one of the primary top-level domains (.com, .net, .us …). If you try to use domai.nr to find domains, it will even search country-specific domains, many of which can cost hundreds of dollars to register, if you’re allowed to at all! While I would have loved to have cla.ck for our short domain, apparently the Cook Islands are picky with what you do with their domains. So, we settled with clak.us — it’s cheap and it makes sense: Clack Us!

Now, how to translate these short URLs to the posts on our sites. We could spend $100/yr. using awe.sm to do the routing for us, but I thought we could do this on our own. And I was right.

We use WordPress over on CliqueClack, and with at least WP, each post has an ID #. You could access the posts with the ID number rather than the permalink/slug URL (http://www.cliqueclack.com/tv/?p=12345), for example. The post IDs can increase pretty quickly when you’re posting as often as we do and, on top of that, all of the revisions of each post. For example, on CCTV we’re somewhere around ID #21382, but we only have just short of 2000 posts!

So, we can’t realistically access the posts in our short URL domain using the ID # of the post. It could get pretty long, pretty quickly. We could try making random strings for each post and write a plugin that does all of that, puts new entries into the database, etc., but then we’d have to go back through all the old posts too. Plus, it should be easier than that when each post has a unique ID #.

What I decided to do was use the PHP functions hexdec() and dechex() to shorten the post ID to something quite a bit smaller. For example, even if I hit an eight-digit ID like 10000000, in hex that’s 989680 — so I dropped off two characters there. For something more realistic for us, like a six-digit ID, that brings you down to five characters. http://clak.us/89680. Perfectly acceptable.

However, we’re currently not using WPMU, so we’ve got two blogs that I’d like clak.us to direct to using IDs. But how to translate non-unique IDs to the appropriate blog? Sloppy but works: I tack on the first character of the blog: “t” for TV, “f” for Food. So, with above: http://clak.us/t89680. Still not bad, and we’re not even close to six-digit IDs yet anyway.

Here’s the simple redirect script I use:

<?php

$clakus_log = "/path/to/clakus.txt";

$path = $_GET['id'];

$blog = "none";

$pre = substr( $path, 0, 1 );
$num = substr( $path, 1 );

switch ($pre) {

 case "t":
 $blog = "tv";
 break;
 case "f":
 $blog = "food";
 break;

}

$hexdec = hexdec( $num );

if( $blog == "none" ) {
 $realpage = "http://www.cliqueclack.com/";
} else {
 $log = fopen( $clakus_log, 'a' );
 $rightnow = date("D M j G:i:s T Y");

 $text = $rightnow . " - " . $blog . " - " . $hexdec . " - ";
 $text .= $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] . "\n";
 fwrite( $log, $text );
 fclose( $log );
 $realpage = "http://www.cliqueclack.com/" . $blog . "/?p=" . $hexdec;
}

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header('Location: ' . $realpage);

?>

To get clak.us traffic to route through that script, I have a .htaccess for its landing directory:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} clak.us
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cliqueclack.com/clakus.php?id=$1 [R=301,L]

“clak.us.php” is the name of the page I gave you the code to above. Simple. Works. The only thing I’d like to work on soon is better logging of how the URLs are being used and who’s clicking on them. Right now the info goes to a simple text file I can check once in a while, which is fine for my needs for now.

One change I may make is directly accessing the database to pull the real permalink rather than access via the p=ID method, which would cut down on a redirect. Speaking of…

Lastly, I (so far) highly recommend getting the Permalink Redirect plugin for WordPress to help your SEO/Google juice. Otherwise, if you do what I did above, your redirects will show up as ’302′ redirects, which apparently Google doesn’t like and will consider your new tiny URLs to be duplicate content, should it crawl it when it’s linked from elsewhere.

UPDATE: Glad I thought of this sooner than later. You can actually make much smaller codes than using hexdec/dechex by instead using PHP’s base_convert() function. I just use a conversion of base10 (decimal, the post ID) to base36. Makes for even shorter codes! By the way, to get the codes to use for each post, just write a simple plugin to convert the ID of the post to base36 and place that URL in the post edit list (I placed mind right under the post status). If anyone needs it, I can publish how I did that.

Ode to the bog dog

2009-05-08T18:50:19Z

I’ll miss you buddy.

Support your library or the Amazon Kindle?

2009-03-04T14:30:17Z

I have my moments of being a gadget geek … oh hell, I’m always a gadget geek, though the current economy hits this brand of geek pretty hard. Recently Amazon put out its upgraded Kindle product, Kindle 2, which I’d been eying since it was hinted at a while back. The Kindle 2 is an eBook reader — essentially, you can read just about any book you want on it without killing trees. Also, in case you’ve never seen it before, the display is nothing like a laptop or PDA screen — it actually has a a matte finish and eerily looks like you’re reading a piece of paper on an electronic device.

I tend to get my reading material these days via the local library, which is a plus because a) it’s free and b) it’s not contributing to another dead tree (do I sound like a smelly hippy yet?) The Kindle books cost money, but once you read the book there, that’s it — you can’t really share it or donate it to a library. However, you are saving trees.

That’s what I’m wondering here: is it better to not contribute to more paper products by using eBooks, or buying paper books so you have something to share with others, including libraries? This is sort-of the same issue I have with downloadable movies to own. If I have it on my hard drive in a format that’s not legal to burn to a DVD, I can’t share it with others or sell it later if I’m strapped for cash. Now that I think about it, it could mean the end of book/DVD/CD collectibles as we know it.

When the Kindle can allow renting or borrowing books for a limited time from libraries, then I’ll look into it a lot more seriously. Until then, I just won’t read — it’s overrated anyway.

Gizmodo has more on the Amazon Kindle issue with intellectual property that’s an interesting read and food for thought, if you’re considering purchasing a Kindle.

The kitchen’s open at CliqueClack Food

2009-03-04T14:30:54Z

We’ve had CliqueClack TV running since sometime in September of 2008, going “officially” live on October 1. Since then things have been going great, but we wanted to open the doors a little wider for our writers, allowing them yet another space to express themselves. Everybody’s gotta eat, and we’ve got a lot of foodies on our hands, so a site based on food seemed the most logical next step. And, there you have it — CliqueClack Food is here.

We’d been working on CCFood for a couple of months now, and we thought Valentine’s Day (or at least the week before) was the best time to make people more aware of it. I think everyone will find something interesting, fun and delicious to read about there. Please spread the word, post comments and visit often! And if you’re interested in submitting a guest writer piece, please visit the About page to learn more.

I’m extremely proud of the team of writers behind these sites, most importantly my incredible wife Deb. Everyone puts an incredible amount of time, effort and creativity into CliqueClack, and it shows.

I’ve got grand plans for CliqueClack, though every single one of them requires something I have a short supply of lately: time. I have the technical know-how to do it all, but it’s a daunting task to do alone. Then again, I tend to over-exaggerate these things to myself and find that, hey, I do have the time to do and and — voila! — it’s done. Time — or lack thereof — will tell.

And that, grasshopper, is the key to it all

2009-02-10T17:20:49Z

Master: “Grasshopper, when is the best time to plant a tree?”
Grasshopper: “I don’t know master. When is it?”
Master: “20 years ago. That way you will enjoy the shade today.”
Grasshopper: “But I cannot travel in time, master.”
Master: “True. Therefore the next best answer is: Today.”

That’s Darth Patches to you!

2009-01-13T20:23:16Z

Star Wars Halloween sometime in the ’80s - originally uploaded by corelliancaptain.

[via Wil Wheaton]