Martin Tod

Ever since moving my video to stream from Amazon, I’d been getting a rather annoying error on the otherwise excellent Wordtube plugin with playlists: in essence it refused to play any of the streamed videos on the playlist with the error message ‘playlist could not be loaded due to crossdomain policy restrictions’.

After much playing around, I finally found the likely cause of the problem via this guide to XML playlists on the JW Player website.

In essence, Wordtube was sending the format it uses to store the location for streamed video direct to the JW Player – instead of the format JW Player needed.

The playlist file was including this:

when it needed to include this:

Fortunately, this was a fairly quick fix. The code for the playlist is in the Wordtube directory at myextractXML.php and you can borrow most of the code to make the necessary change from wordTubeClass::ReturnLocation() in /lib/wordtube.class.php.

I attach a modified version of myextractXML.php here here and you can see the functioning video playlist here.

I’ve been playing with the WordPress theme that this site uses for the last few weeks.

Changes have included:

• Reconfiguring it as a child theme to the standard TwentyTen theme that was introduced with WordPress 3.0.
• Making it entirely customisable from the WordPress admin pages (of which more later), including:
  • Full control of all text on the page
  • Drag and drop control of the images used in the rotating headers and boxes
  • Control of the Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube accounts to show on the front page
• Writing drag-and-drop widgets to show Flickr photographs, social networking icons and the sign-up box.

While I was at it, I moved my video hosting to Amazon’s S3 and Cloudfront services.

The latest change is to the Flickr widget at the bottom of this page. It now uses a slightly modified version of Leandro Vieira Pinho‘s jQuery lightbox plug-in so pop-up big versions of the images shown if you click on them.  (The modification is to enable a link through to each image’s Flickr page as required in their Community Guidelines and automatic resizing if the image is too big for the screen).

I’d previously used Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar to do the same thing on another site, but that’s based on script.aculo.us.  I’d moved everything else I was doing to jQuery, so didn’t think it made sense to go back to script.aculo.us just for this one thing.

I could also have used ThickBox, since that’s built into WordPress. But that’s no longer maintained, and I only spotted that WordPress supported it after building in jQuery lightbox!