Been browsing my past entries in this blog, where I come across the post of my past project that I did in 2005 – Flash Video Player. I have that for quite a while, where I decided to have it on it’s own seperate page at http://video.mohdimran.com/.

After so long, I’m thinking of bringing it back to the main blog page, so behold, the come back of Mini Flash Video Player to main page.

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Got iPhone? Now you can view my blog with the usual iPhone Apps look.

All the blog entries appears exactly the same as what you will see on computer, minus the extra stuffs that you see on the sidebar. This will make the page is lighter and faster to load.

Choosing the categories, you will see the usual iPhone dial look for drop down list.

And here are the blog entries related to My Cats.

Don’t like this look? You can always switch back to regular view.

So you own self hosted Wordpress blog and would like to have this also? Head to the WPtouch plugin page. Installing it is as easy as uploading the plugin and activating it.

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With the blog social widgets gone previously, my blog kinda feel incomplete. Blog list widget is something that I use everyday to check the latest updates from my fellow friends, just from one place. But I suddenly think of an alternative for this. Instead of having this on my normal page for blog entries, let’s make a dedicate page for it. It won’t intefere with the loading time on my blog. You can find it here.

Nice. Google Friend Connect and Feed Feeding Blogroll is back. But one list thing that I’m still cracking my head on. The excerpt of the blog is only shown in the form of tooltip when I hover at the link for the latest entry. Why can’t it shows normally as text?

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It’s been 2 and 1/2 week already that my blog is running on Wordpress. It was a very hard decision, where I lost all friend connections that I had on previous Blogger blog.

How I’ve been enjoying using widget based template for my Blogger blog before,

and the good news is, Wordpress is also supporting widget driven template. I’m just so glad that the template that I’m using previously offers widget capable template.

I tried making my Wordpress blog to be having the same features that I had previously. The 2 features of blogger that I like is the Friend Connect widget that allow visitors to Follow our blog, and the Blog List widget that shows the latest updates from the blog that I follow. Google Friend Connect is available to be used on Wordpress, and I managed to find a similar plug in that does the same thing as Blogger’s Blog List widget, but the problem is, these 2 widgets really slow down my blog’s loading page tremendously. Sometimes the page just got stuck and I have to refresh the page several time before the whole page is display. And with a heavy heart, I have to make this difficult decision again to deactivate these two widgets.

Now my blog has no connection with the fellow readers. Sigh!!

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My blog is finally running on Wordpress, and this is the very first blog entry that I write from Wordpress. It feels a bit strange as I was custom to blogger already. But I guess I will get used to this in no time.

Some may have noticed that my blog is buggy these few days. Even at times I’m completely not being able to access my blog. The main culprit is the TTL setting for the CNAME record that I set for my blog address. In the old day (from Google’s guide on setting up CNAME record for custom domain), the TTL has to be set for 1 week.

And what does that mean? TTL (Time To Live) is the amount of time that any name server on the Internet is allowed to cache the data associated with my domain name. After the TTL expires, a name server discard cached data and contact the authoritative name server to retrieve the updated one. So, I have blog pointing to Google’s server previously, with TTL of 1 week. Last Friday, I change blog to point to my own hosting, but since TTL is 1 week, some name server is still pointing blog.mohdimran.com to Google’s server. But Google’s server doesn’t have information about my blog already, and it gives page not found error.

Anyway, I’m glad to see that the guide for this at Google’s website is using 1 hour for TTL now (reference: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=58317). I will need to change the TTL of other Google App’s CNAMES as well.

So if you suddenly can’t access my blog, just bare with it for the time being. It takes this coming Friday for the TTL that were set previously to expire.

Question. After all these years, why I suddenly decided to move away from Blogger to Wordpress? Hhmm. It’s complicated. LOL. Anyhow, welcome to my new blog (kinda of. LOL)

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Keeping my flash video organized is quite a lot of chore for me. From inserting an entry into the database, finding the album cover art and upload it to Flickr and lastly put the lyric of the song into my blog.

Putting the lyric into the blog itself is quite tedious, especially creating the top part of the entry where it shows the thumbnail of the album, artist, song title and album name. Furthermore, it is a repetitive task that I get sick of doing.

Actually, this is what I’m talking about

So, I fire up Visual C#, and start designing mini application that will automate this process. And walla, I have the code generator already. This should make the job of adding a new lyric to the blog really easy.

Anyway, all the values are pulled from the database. Meaning, I add the entry into the database. The new video will be available in my Flash Video Player, and the entry will also visible here for me to generate the HTML code. How I love automation, and how now I started to love Visual C#.

But would it be nice if the video is displayed here too. Lets extend this application a little. C# WebBrowser control. Lovely!!. Just what I need to display the video here.

Lovely. Now I have standalone player for all my flash videos. This may not concern others, but the thing that i want to tell is, how free I am today at office. LOL. Just for today though…

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Phew. It’s now only I got chance to write to my blog again. Well, I was on leave last Monday. Just feeling so tired from the fever that I had during the weekend.

Anyhow, kinda bored at home, and then I decided to look at the code that I have for Flash Video Player. Guess it’s best to enhance it a little. Here how it looks now.

Well, if you are a regular visitor to that flash video, you might notice a little change. Yeap. It’s that album cover thumbnail that I added. Thanks to Flickr for generating image of this size by default for all the images uploaded. I can us it here. It’s perfect, with the fix 75 by 75 pixel dimension.

On the other hand, back end engine, the flash video has already uses Run Active Content script. IE6 sucks. When you try to embed things in your HTML, there’s this Click to activate thingy.

So that Run Active Content settle this problem.

Do you know that my Flash Video Player has 77 videos to offer you at this time of writing? And I have so many more that I just don’t have time yet to encode them to FLV format.

I also quite happy with the speed of free 2GB storage and unlimited bandwidth that Filecities has to offer. Filecities? Google it yourself

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Oh no!! My webpage hosting nearly reached the maximum bandwidth for this month. I’ve been using 9.4GB of the allowed 10GB bandwidth already for this month.

It seems that more and more people coming to my blog for this month. But the trend looks rather fishy. It can’t be that the number of visitor grows exponentially out of the blue, especially during 18th – 21th December?

Looking at the log file, I spotted what’s wrong. Damn. Someone is stealing my M’re’s Flash Video section. Now I know how expensive the bandwidth is, and why webmasters don’t like people leeching images/files from their website. This is the result. All the bandwidth being sucked out.

I have to temporarily disable M’re’s Flash Video part so that my website can’t survive until next month when the bandwidth counter will be resetted. I can’t afford to have my website down, since all the images, CSS and tagboard used for this blog are coming from my website.

Going to find the remedies in the nearest time as hotlink protection will not work since M’re’s Flash Video is using <iframe> and the request to the video files seems coming from www.mohdimran.com and can’t be blocked.

Any suggestion?

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Below is the thing that kept me busy for the past 2 days. It’s my own music video viewer which I called M’re’s Flash Video Player.

I have featured 2 video clips on my blog in the past, and previously, once I replaced the old video with a new old, the old video is not accessible and viewable anymore. Somehow I want we able to choose the past video if I want to watch it.

And also, I just recently encounter that my hosting change its plan. Before, they offered 100MB web space with unlimited bandwidth. And now, I just found out that my package has been changed to 1GB web space with 10GB bandwidth monthly. Gosh. They never inform me about this. At least, just send a simple informing me about this.

But I’m glad! I got 1GB space now on my server. It simply means that I can upload more videos.

All the videos are in Flash Video format. I kinda like this format. The filesize is small and yet it doesn’t sacrifice the quality of the image (i.e no horror pixelation in the video image).

Here are tools used to prepare this, and some technical information about this

• Macromedia Flash 8 Video Encoder used to convert movie file to FLV format. All movie files are encoded to Flash 8 – Low Quality (150kbps) format
• Playlist stored in MySQL database
• Video files stored at my 1GB web hosting
• PHP programming language to program the page
• Macromedia Dreamweaver to put everything together

How to use?
Simple. Just choose the video that you want to play from the drop down list. The video will be played automatically after that. And also, it remembers the last video that you choose. Meaning when you come back the next time, that last video that you choose last time will be played.

Oh, btw, the M’re’s Flash Video section is visible only at the Main Page, and not at Archive Page or Item Page. Just to get rid of the annoyance, or else, the video will restart each and every time you click the Archive Page links or Item Page links. Click here to go to the main page.

Enjoy the list that I have now. It will certainly grow in the future.

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