Programming & IT (Archive)

Page 1 of 1 (8 total articles)
  • December 10, 2008 in Programming & IT

    From iPod to Embed: Building an .M4V Video Player in Flash CS3

    During my first trip to the SXSW interactive conference in 2004 I remember attending a video blog panel put on by the guys (and gal) at RocketBoom.com. They were using QuickTime for video playback, and during the question and answer segment, I raised my hand and asked if they had considered using the "new" Flash video format. They had no idea what I was talking about. Of course, these days Flash video has taken over the world, and apparently RocketBoom.com even got on board with the revolution.The advent of the Flash video format was the last revolution in online video. But now we are faced with a new challenge: .flv files won't play on iPods or in iTunes. And with the popularity of video podcasting growing, it seems that the only solution is to create two versions of every video—one to embed and another to podcast. But that's not the case. In this article I'll show you how to build a simple Flash video player that streams .m4v video files.

  • October 15, 2008 in Programming & IT

    Saving a File Directly Into a MySQL Database

    In cases where file security isn't an issue, it's easy to save web form file uploads into a public directory on your server where they can be accessed by all. You can do this with just a few lines of PHP code, and it works great for public photo galleries, or avatar uploaders, etc. But what if you need to limit access to the files your users are uploading? Let's say, for example, you have a client that needs to be able to upload sensitive company files that can only be accessed by certain employees. This is where the MySQL longblob field comes in handy. In this tutorial, I'll show how to get a file from a web form into a MySQL database and out again.

  • June 30, 2008 in Programming & IT

    Beyond Redirect: Using ReWriteRule in .htaccess

    Mod_rewrite is an Apache module that can be accessed from .htaccess files to perform all kinds of complicated URL manipulation. A few months ago I posted an article called Beat Your Website into Submission with .htaccess explaining how to use several .htaccess features to do helpful tricks; but I didn't really touch on mod_rewrite or RewriteRule. Since then I was involved in a project that required extensive use of mod_rewrite and I've come to truly appreciate its power and usefulness. The main mod_rewrite function, RewriteRule, is powered by regular expressions. Regular expressions are used to search blocks of text for specific patterns. I barely have enough room in this article to scratch the surface of regular expressions; so if you need more detail in that area I recommend this website. For the purposes of this tutorial, though, I'll be sticking to commonly used URL rewriting tasks.

  • October 10, 2007 in Programming & IT

    More Mashup Tools Thanks to Yahoo!

    I've featured some cool mashup tools on Bits O' NewMedia in the past. Dapper.net is one of my favorite and the driving force behind my experimental site midessamashup.com. The number of free mashup tools continues to grow, though, and now Yahoo! is entering the ring with Pipes. I haven't used Pipes on a project yet but I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the features. In addition to the features Dapper.net offers, Pipes has an RSS feed combiner and a some geocoding stuff that looks really cool. Plus, you know that Yahoo! has the resources to maintain the Pipes service and continue to improve it. It will be interesting to see where it goes in the near future.

  • August 16, 2007 in Programming & IT

    A Little PHP For the Designer

    We work in a strange and unique industry where the right and left hemispheres of the brain must be engaged on a regular basis to complete the tasks we are given. If you have too much programmer in you, your designs will suffer and it you have too much designer in you, your functionality will suffer...

  • July 9, 2007 in Programming & IT

    jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library

    jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library -- Having a good ajax library to support your websites has become an important part of being in the web design business but libraries like the popular script.aculo.us require a lot of additional coding to produce something really useful. The jQuery library has a lot of the same cool animation functions but it also has a ton of prebuilt plugins that do the stuff you want. It could definitely be improved upon but in the future, it may be a one stop shop that will keep you from scouring the web for scripts.

  • May 30, 2007 in Programming & IT

    Embedding a Shopping Cart

    is the true web 2.0 version of a shopping cart. You build a store on Cartfly and then you can embed it into any web site and even share it so that others can embed your store into their web site. Here is one embedded into a MySpace Page My mind is already racing with possibilities. It will be interesting to watch this little company and see how it does.

  • May 24, 2007 in Programming & IT

    You Will Mash It Up Whether You Like It or Not!

    Smart web sites make their content available to the world in RSS feeds and XML. I think we�ve already proven that the more you share the better off you are. But what about web sites with great information that don�t want to share. Dapper.net says, �Too bad! You�ll mash it up whether you like it or not!� Seriously, though, dapper.net has created an incredible free tool for extracting information from web sites and turning it into data that can be republished. When you go to the site, make sure to take a look at some of the daps that have already been created. Here is a screenshot of me �dapping� Bits O� NewMedia. This service brings up some interesting questions about where web content is going. If anybody has and idea for a dap or finds a really cool dap that I should post about, let me know.

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