We recently finished up on a couple of facebook apps at Brando. The first, an app for Lifestyle Sports, gave me a chance to look further into the Wowza server and live streaming. The cam seems to be broadcasting though and I’ve learned a few things about setup for this. I’m quite happy with the results. (more…)

Quick update on Bess, she has now entered the stage of life of motherhood. The pups are fine and healthy, 4 boys. There’s something really cute about being followed by the pitter patter of 16 little paws when you go out the door.

(more…)

I’ve done a lot of flash video players over the years. Too many.

Some had custom interfaces, some used the default flash video component. Others were completely custom, managing the stream events and displaying the video in the vanilla video component. Then Dave came to me with the OSMF Strobe Media Playback component.

We had tried the JW Player a couple of times before, but found the per domain price a little excessive outside of large clients.

But, the Strobe Media Playback component offers a versatile solution which is usable and good looking out of the box.

Nice one.

I recently wanted to insert a class for the case where a menu item has children in WordPress. There doesn’t appear to be any option to do this in wp_nav_menu function, so I started doing some research.

I found out from this article how to add a ‘last-menu-item’ css class.

This doesn’t quite work for what I wanted though, because the returned data object from WordPress doesn’t tell you if the current node has children.

So, I used a walker object instead (there’s a good article on their usage here) and then used the theory behind the first article to achieve my objective. Nice.

<?php
class TopnavWalker extends Walker_Nav_Menu
{
	function start_lvl(&$output, $depth) {
		$indent = str_repeat("\t", $depth);
		$intPos = strripos($output,'menu-item');
		$output = sprintf("%s has-children %s",
			substr($output,0,$intPos),
			substr($output,$intPos,strlen($output))
		);
		$output .= "\n$indent<ul class=\"sub-menu\">\n";
	}
}
?>

Ronan Murphy, Dave Clarke, David Byrne and I recently put a site live for Tour De Picnic. This is a charity cycle to the Electric Picnic festival in Stradbally in aid of Temple Street Hospital. Ronan was doing the cycle and we decided it would be nice to track him on his journey.

Thus was born a website that used an iphone, a handy iPhone app called SendLocation, a little lamp coding, google maps api and some html/css/javascript to update Ronans location throughout the trip. We also integrated a twitter feed that updated with tweets using the #tourdepicnic tag.

The results can be seen at http://www.ronanmurphy.ie/tourdepicnic/