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Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’

WordPress 2.8.1

July 10th, 2009

I’ve upgraded the site to WordPress µ 2.8.1, which contains a number of improvements on the previous 2.7.1 release.

Most of the dashboard pages now have Screen Options with additional options such as number of columns, and widgets now take advantage of object oriented programming — for the end user, widget management is once again drag-and-drop, and you can even deactivate widgets without deleting them.

As part of the upgrade, my Simpler CSS plugin has been enabled site-wide so that you can customize your theme with your own CSS. You’ll find it as “Custom CSS” under the Appearance menu.

Custom CSS

Custom CSS

Important: the old video embedding system has been deactivated for inefficiency, and replaced with a new site-wide installation of Viper’s Video Quicktags, which adds new, simpler-to-use buttons in the Add New Post text editor.

New buttons to embed YouTube, Vimeo and other videos

New buttons to embed YouTube, Vimeo and other videos

Hence, [swf URL width height] style tags are no longer supported, and [YouTube URL] embeds must be replaced with [youtube]YouTube URL[/youtube]. I’ve made an attempt to automatically correct these YouTube embeds in posts through the database.

Take advantage of the faster WordPress µ backend, the easier-to-use video embeds, and the ability to customize the design of your blog with custom CSS!

Try another video site

March 22nd, 2008

Tired of the restrictions on YouTube? Want to upload a video longer than 10 minutes or larger than 100 MB? Want better video quality for things like screencasts or game footage?

You might be one of those people that should use blip.tv. Amber MacArthur (a Canadian media personality) runs a video podcast called CommandN which is distributed using LibSyn and blip.tv. (Visit their blip.tv show page.)

I actually discovered blip.tv while listening to another podcast, net@night, featuring Leo Laporte and (you guessed it) Amber MacArthur. Leo Laporte himself has used it, but recently he is fooling around with Viddler, which lets you record yourself using a webcam.

Anyhow, if you use blip.tv, you can let others download the original video file (.avi, .mov, and so on) in the full, uncompressed form that you uploaded it, right from blip.tv without eating up your own site’s bandwidth. Additionally, your original video file could be huge (like 300 MB) and blip.tv still handles it well.

When blip.tv converts your file into the Adobe Flash video (.flv) format, it is still pretty good quality. That’s why I use it for my recent screen recordings. The quality is good enough that one can read the text on a screen recording.

If you have large multimedia files that you want to upload and share, maintaining a high quality, you’ve got to try blip.tv. YouTube simply can’t handle 1024×768 screen recordings, or HD video. (Well, they are going to support HD, but it’ll be a long time before you see truly high quality video.) Just a reminder: multimedia formats like .mp3, .mov, .avi, and so on cannot be uploaded to your storage space on PersonalLog. (This is for copyright, bandwidth, and content propriety concerns.)

We make it easy for you to use videos you’ve uploaded to blip.tv. Simply follow the instructions for blip.tv at http://www.daburna.de/dokuwiki/doku.php/instruction. NOTE: the video embedded by this method will not show your Show Player, which is a brandable, customizable interface.

Try it; visit blip.tv now.