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…)

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";
	}
}
?>

Recently started work on a new website. We’re using the Kentico CMS, and came across the following while building some search based functionality:
http://www.kentico.com/Docs/DevGuide/smart_search_overview.htm

The lads have integrated their system with a C# port of the lucene search engine library. From what I’ve seen so far, this gives developers really powerful search and sorting options. A summary of some these options can be found here http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_1_0/queryparsersyntax.html.

Like I say, I’ve only started on this, and will update this post when the project is finished.

Site implementation

I recently got set up on Twitter. I’ve been hearing about it and scuttling around it for a while now. I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve only been using this for a short while, so I may just not have found some stuff out. So far I’m digging it. The concept is very simple, sms for web. That’s it. Create a user and post a message in 140 characters. Everything about the service (API’s, indexing, twibes etc) is built around this. The website layout is simple and clear, the creators are obviously exponents of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy. There is the ability to customise the look of your homepage, follow people, find friends, edit your profile and search your tweets (the name given to your messages). This is one of the sites that is held up as a standard bearer for the Ruby on Rails people (alongside basecamp). Site uptime and capacity has been called into question. I’ve seen the “too many tweets” page now once to often in the two or three weeks I’ve been using it. (more…)