TheWayOfCoding.com

While researching about displaying video in web pages I came upon a good [free] solution. It uses: Free and open source flash based video player called FlowPlayer. Their website: http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/ To encode the videos into the flv video format I used a free tool called Riva FLV Encoder. Their website: http://rivavx.de/?encoder Why a flash player as apposed to quicktime/windows media player/real player? A lot more people have Adobe Flash installed and it’s just a generally more foolproof method of serving videos on the web (aka. the extremely popular youtube.com is flash based). Here is an example of the html required: <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="videos/FlowPlayer.swf" width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="movie" value="videos/FlowPlayer.swf" /> <param name=...

I started using VB.NET to write that JSON/FTP/site editor program. I found a free ready made library to work with the JSON data. It’s from Newtonsoft Really easy to use. They don’t have much documentation, but just looking through the library with IntelliSense in the VB IDE is more than enough to understand how to use it. With around 6 lines of code I can flip data between CLR objects and JSON. Very nice! I used VB.NET 2003 version about a year ago for the final group project in the last computer class I had. It didn’t seem as easy to use as the 2005 express version I am using now. It’s probably because that was my first foray into using .NET… anyways. A a quick term list: CLR = common language runtime JSON = JavaScript object notation IDE = integrated development environment FTP = file transfer protocol VB = Visual Basic programming language (.NET version) IntelliSense = One of the ways Microsoft makes coding easier in the IDE.

The ajax/json site is fully functional now. I had a few problems though that I’ll discuss here. First off, the simple hosting that is provided my my isp isn’t working correctly, so I had to look for an alternative host to do testing on. I found 50webs.com which provides 60mb of free bannerless hosting. They even allow you to use domain names with their free service, which is great. I got that setup and now my sister’s site (while slow) is on there and directly uses the domain name. Today I showed the site to a friend, who in turn said that it didn’t work. He was using IE7. I use Firefox usually and had not gotten around to trying the completed site on different browsers… Anyways I figured out the problem and the site now works on Firefox2/Opera9/IE6/IE7. What caused IE6 and 7 to not display the site? It seems that IE requires a new AJAX object for every request. I had it setup initially to define one AJAX object when the page loaded and reuse it. I...

I guess you could call this part three of the “ajax, json, html, css, easy to update non-server-scripted website series!” This time I will get into my design plans for the client application. It has not been created yet, so there will be some guess work here. Writing this will also help me figure out what exactly I am trying to accomplish here. Now that the website is: A simple xhtml page that uses javascript to fetch json text files. That means all of the content is now separate from the main structure of the site. Next up is deciding on how to make the client application. I have decided to use Visual C# or VB.net 2005 Express Edition. It’s completely free, yeah I was surprised when I found that out… Anyways, A few weeks ago I created an application (which I will post about here in the future) with that development environment and enjoyed using it a lot. The program may have features like: add/update/delete the main page links add/update/delete content pages modify existing co...

As I mentioned in the previous post, I made a static website in html, css, javascript, and json. It works pretty good and that’s great. The problem is my sister is the one who should be adding/editing content because it is her site. So the question is, how can I make an easily update-able site that is on a server without any server-side coding functionality? I had figured out pretty much how I wanted it to work even before I finished coding the first version of the site. Sure, I could just write a client application that spits out html\css code and uploads it to the server, but no, that isn’t cool enough. I wanted to break up the site data and formatting. That way the client application would only need to create json files and upload them along with any new content. That means the json data needs to be removed from the html files and the html page now needs to allow fetching of the data whenever the person using the site needs it. What does this mean? It means that I now have a site th...

I created a static website recently for my sister. It is hosted on our ISP’s server, which means there is no way to do any server-side coding. The site is coding in html with a few pages using JavaScript and JSON (JavaScript object notation). Just what is JSON you ask? It is simply a way of structuring data like the more commonly known XML format, but it’s easier to use with JavaScript. Why not just code the site in straight html? Well, I wanted the website to be somewhat easily modifiable. Even if the JSON is embedded in the page, it still allows easier access to the content and also cuts down on the actual number of pages. For example, there is a page that displays a list of graphic designs she has made. The JSON text is processed when the page loads. When one of the graphic design links are clicked, a javascript function modifies the html on the page to display the new picture/title/description. An example of JSON and the eval() function: var pageInformation = '{"collection...

I want to write more about programming and software development, but I don’t want to put it in my main blog, so I made another blog. Alright, Mission Staaaaarrrrt!