Solving technology problems, one at a time
A very useful displays an RSS feed as a list of article excerpts within a webpage.
The screenshot below shows the way the original script displays the RSS feed. A list of article excerpts is displayed in the center column of a portal site..
The search for the perfect WYSIWYG text editor in Drupal goes on. The best I’ve seen yet is YUI Rich Text Editor, but it still has some serious browser incompatibilities and usability problems. One significant is that there is nothing stopping users from upload a huge image, and not resizing it down using the provided resizing tools.
Now that just most cameras produce images of enormous resolution, users in my Drupal sites’ users often upload gigantic photos, which remain splashed across the entire layout until I get around to fixing them. I finally got tired of correcting users’ posts for them and fixed the CSS so it will never happen again.
Continue readingIf you are looking through the code on your site and find a mysterious call to a javascript in the domain “cetrk.com,” you may wonder what it is and if it is a malicious script
Continue readingThe JW Player is a very popular open-source media player which not only supports many video, audio and image formats, but has many scriptable behaviors. Here we’ll make use of the JavaScript API to generate as many players as you want on a page. The generated players all have separate event listeners to keep them from interfering with each other. Events or actions executed in one player do not affect others.
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This is a new version of that was compatible with an earlier version of the JW Player. This one has been updated to work with JW Player 4.7.761 and later.
Ever since Firebug got a recent big upgrade, I’ve had problems with it stopping a page from loading whenever there is any javascript error. Since the web is riddled with javascript errors, this has meant
Continue readingI started hearing complaints that a particular learning module completed a few weeks ago was freezing up at random. It took a while to isolate the problem down to the use of JQuery UI tabs
Continue readingQualtrics is an online survey application with many capabilities that aren’t obvious at first glance. I’m currently using Qualtrics to create a feedback form that will be used in several hundred learning modules. This form needs to recognize from which learning module it’s being accessed, and it should determine the author of the module and email them a copy of the user’s feedback.
Qualtrics has a feature called “embedded data” which allows you to pass any arbitrary arguments in the link to the survey. We’ll use this to add metadata to the feedback.
There are three steps:
This is an example of how to create a javascript-based Playlist selector for a JW FLV player. The playlist selector menu has 3 sections that toggle open and closed when you click on them. This allows the user to switch playlists, choosing from various topics.
The source code has not been cleaned up, but you should be able to get an idea of how to set this up from it.
Continue readingThe Accordion is one of the handy interface widgets that can be generated using jQuery UI. There are several optional settings you can add into the function call, including animation, auto-height, etc. If you find it is not working on IE7try adding “animated:false” as one of the options.
If you are running a debugger on IE, and see the error “invalid option on line 486” this is definitely the problem.
NOTE: this has been revised to make it more flexible, and allow multiple streamers and multiple video types, using the same code.
This is a script that allows you to add as many JW FLV players to a page as you want, using a single block of code. The players all have separate event listeners to keep them from interfering with each other. Events or actions executed in one player do not affect others.
This particular demo also corrects for a problem we have noticed recently with Red5, where RTMP streams will hang with a “BUFFER.EMPTY” status code. I’ve set up meta-monitoring so that it catches “BUFFER.EMPTY” codes and starts the player up again a little bit previous to the break. It creates player names and function names dynamically, based on how many players you request. If this function seems to be giving you problems, if your videos start jumping back and restarting a lot, search for the following line and comment it out by adding “//” in front of it:
window["player_"+obj.id].sendEvent('SEEK', parseInt(window["positionarray_"+obj.id][3])+100);
We’ve also had problems with some videos that simply refuse to stream, although they will play using progressive download. You can use a mixture of streaming and non-streaming by altering the playlist for each video.
