Archive for June 2011

June 29, 2011, 2:02 pm

Progress on the new SFC continues. Added a new plugin to it this morning: Photos. It’s a simple little plugin, and not pretty yet, but it does work. 🙂

Here’s a couple of example screenshots:

Facebook Images

The selection screen (not pretty, but functional)

Example of the result

Example of the result


The plugin itself turns out actually to be quite simple. It turns out that adding to the media tabs is fairly straightforward with the existing WordPress functionality, and making links that insert things into the post code is not nearly as difficult as I thought it might be.

You can use the SFC beta version if you like. There’s a copy in the WordPress SVN directories. However, it’s buggy and unfinished and doesn’t have all the same functionality. But most of it works okay. Still needs polish before releasing it.

Note that all development on the old SFC 0.25 has ceased. I’m not making any further patches to it. If you want to upgrade now to the 0.999 beta version, feel free. Also, patches welcome.

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Category: Code  |  11 Comments

June 17, 2011, 10:59 am

So I got this video from a friend, and I wanted to post it on my site, but I wanted to do it without using any Flash, or any plugins, and I wanted it to work on the iPhone, and Chrome, and Firefox, and IE…

Step 1: Convert the file.

First I took the file and used Miro Video Converter to make two versions of the file. The first version I made was using the “Theora” format. This is an Ogg format, and you basically only need to make it for the video to show up in Firefox. Future versions of Firefox will support the WebM format instead (Chrome supports it now), so when Firefox 4 comes out, use that format.

Next, use Miro again and this time make a version using the iPhone preset. This basically creates an MP4 version of the file, but at the right resolution to have it show up on the iPhone. Annoyingly, the original file was from an iPhone, so it should have played, but it wouldn’t on mine. I suspect that the resolution difference between the iPhone 4 (used to make the video) and the iPhone 3GS (which I have) is the problem. Regardless, I just used the preset to downscale the video resolution.

Step 2: Adjust WordPress’ settings

WordPress didn’t like me uploading these files. Turned out that it was because I’m on multisite. In the Network Admin screen, find the Network Settings menu option, go to the bottom of the page, and add the mp4 and ogv extensions to the list of allowed files. Also add webm while you’re there, for the future.

Note: If you’re not on multisite but still have problems uploading the files, then add this line of code to your wp-config.php file, to turn on the unfiltered_upload capabilities for administrators:

define('ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS',true);

Step 3: Check .htaccess settings

One of the things WordPress relies on to know if it’s a video or not is the MIME Type. Some servers have these properly configured, some don’t. Doesn’t hurt to help the process along by explicitly defining some of them in the .htaccess file. For good measure, I added a bunch of common ones, just to be sure:

AddType text/xml .xml
AddType video/mp4 .mp4 .m4v
AddType video/mpeg .mpeg .mpg
AddType video/quicktime .mov
AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/webm .webm
AddType audio/mp4 .m4a .m4b .m4r
AddType audio/mpeg .mp3
AddType audio/playlist .m3u
AddType audio/x-scpls .pls
AddType audio/ogg .ogg
AddType audio/wav .wav

Step 4: Upload the videos

Easy one. Go into the Media->Library and upload your two videos. After doing that, get the URLs of both of them.

Step 5: Make the post

Make a new post and type in everything you want to type in. Then make sure you’re in the HTML editing mode, and add this code to the post:

<video width="640" height="360" controls>
  <source src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/video.mp4" type='video/mp4'></source>
  <source src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/video.ogv" type='video/ogg'></source>
</video>

There’s a few things there you’ll need to manually edit.

Obviously the URLs need to point to your files. Also, it’s important that the MP4 one is first, some older iPad software doesn’t like it otherwise.

The second one is the width and height. Now, like with posting images, these don’t have to exactly match the actual width and height of the video. The browser will use these sizes and scale the video accordingly. However, you’ll want to get the aspect ratio correct, so you don’t stretch or squish the video into the wrong sized box. And you can leave the height and width out entirely to not scale it, if you got your sizes correct in the video itself. But it’s a good idea to have them there regardless, to clue the browser into the size beforehand and speed up page rendering. Also note that the iPhone doesn’t care about those width and height tags, since it will just show the video full screen when you tap on it.

Sidenote: Do NOT switch into Visual mode. TinyMCE will muck up this code, badly, and try to add a SWF player to it and Flash and a bunch of other stuff. This is probably by design, but I wanted to do this without Flash at all and see how that worked. Turns out to work fine in the browsers I tested.

Finally, preview and publish as normal.

Wantlist

One thing I haven’t figured out is how to target the iPhone specifically with a separate file. With this setup, Chrome and IE are now showing the iPhone file, which is lower resolution than the OGV file (which is at original resolution). In this specific case, the video was poor and so it doesn’t make much difference, but I’d prefer to have a separate file specified that only iPhones used without having to resort to user agent targeting.

EDIT: Turns out you can do this with a media query on the source that targets the iPhone. So here’s my new code:

<video width="640" height="360" controls>
  <source src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/video.iphone.mp4" type='video/mp4' media='only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)'></source>
  <source src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/video.mp4" type='video/mp4'></source>
  <source src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/video.ogv" type='video/ogg'></source>
</video>

The media attribute lets you specify a CSS3 Media Query. The max-device-width of 480px = iPhone. So desktop browsers will use the video.mp4 while the iPhone uses the video.iphone.mp4. I’ve confirmed that this works properly with Chrome.

It’s interesting to see that browsers can do this reasonably well, even if you do have to make a few different versions of the video.

Shortcode Plugin

At the suggestion of ipstenu in the comments below, I made this into a shortcode plugin. You can download it here:
HTML5 Video Shortcode.

This plugin has the advantage of being ignored by TinyMCE. 🙂

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Category: Code  |  14 Comments

June 14, 2011, 4:46 pm

Was trying to upload some photos and noticed that the captions I had set on the photos in Picasa showed up as titles in WordPress instead of as captions. Examining the core code, I found that it’s a known issue, but that fixing it in the core isn’t so easy, since WordPress has to support a number of different image editing programs and such. Different programs use the EXIF fields in different ways.

But I mostly use Picasa for photo management, so I don’t care about those other programs. So I wrote a quick plugin to fix the problem with WordPress and Picasa photos. Basically it just rejiggers the attachment when it’s added (but not when it’s edited) and puts the caption in the right place.

<?php
/**
Plugin Name: Picasa Captioner
Description: Fix up WordPress to read Picasa Captions from EXIF info properly.
Author: Otto
Author URI: http://ottodestruct.com/
**/

add_filter( 'wp_read_image_metadata', 'picasa_adjust_caption' );
function picasa_adjust_caption($meta) {
	if (empty($meta['caption']) && !empty($meta['title'])) {
		$meta['caption'] = $meta['title'];
		$meta['title'] = '';
	}
	return $meta;
}

add_action( 'add_attachment', 'picasa_adjust_attachment' );
function picasa_adjust_attachment($id) {
	$attachment = & get_post( $id, ARRAY_A );
	if ( !empty( $attachment ) ) {
		$attachment['post_excerpt'] = $attachment['post_content'];
		$attachment['post_content'] = '';
		wp_update_post($attachment);
	}
}
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Category: Other, WordPress  |  9 Comments

June 1, 2011, 11:34 pm

While looking at my backlinks today, I noticed a site in French had linked to my post about making photo galleries. He mentioned that the Google Translate wasn’t great. I took a look, and while I don’t know how good the text translation was, I did notice that Google strangely tried to translate the code as well, thus screwing it all up.

A quick search revealed that all one had to do was to add the “notranslate” class to any wrapping object to prevent its contents from being translated.

Now, I use the Syntax Highligher Evolved plugin to display code on my site (although I use an older version because I like the look and functionality of it better than the latest version). So I edited the plugin and found where it inserts the PRE tag, and added the notranslate class to it. And voila, now my code doesn’t get translated anymore.

Just a helpful tip for anybody who posts code on their sites.

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Category: Code, Other  |  9 Comments

June 1, 2011, 2:23 pm

Google rolled out their +1 button today. So I added it here. You’ll find it below all the posts. Try it out.

Here’s the simple-stupid plugin I wrote to do it. While you can just edit your theme, I like making these sort of things into plugins. That way, I can turn them off at will, and I know exactly where to go to change them without having to dive into my theme code. Also, if I change themes, the code still works on the new theme.

<?php 
/* 
Plugin Name: Otto's Google +1 Button
Description: Add a +1 button after the content.
Author: Otto
Version: 999
*/

add_filter('the_content', 'google_plusone');

function google_plusone($content) {
	$content = $content.'<div class="plusone"><g:plusone size="tall" href="'.get_permalink().'"></g:plusone></div>';
	return $content;
}

add_action ('wp_enqueue_scripts','google_plusone_script');

function google_plusone_script() {
	wp_enqueue_script('google-plusone', 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', array(), null);
}

I wrapped the button in a div so that I could style it. In my particular case, I’m floating it right and giving it a margin, same as the Twitter and Facebook plugins. One day, I’ll make all these little Google plugins more generic and configurable, and roll them into a Simple Google Connect plugin. 🙂

One thing I don’t like is that the +1 button only works for people who are logged into a GMail account. Sorry Google Apps users, you’re out of luck. Complain to Google until they fix it.

If you want to add more parameters to the plugin and reconfigure it, you can find out about the available parameters here: http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/#configuration

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Category: Code, WordPress  |  44 Comments