Archive for May, 2006
For an initiative that aims to make it easy to share data and intellectual property, however, Creative Commons can appear, at first sight, to be very un-Web-2.0 [do not sue me O'Reilly]. A developer who happens to casually surf the CC website can easily leave thinking that the only way to integrate a CC license into her web application is to use an ugly HTML-based system that requires users to be redirected to the CC website. She may be left thinking, as I was: "Where is my open Creative Commons API?"
The good news is that it exists. The bad news is that information about it (and other APIs) is well hidden!
Here are three relevant links where you can learn about the Creative Commons REST API and other developer aids:
- Creative Commons Developer Aids and APIs
- Creative Commons Web Services (REST API)
- APIs for Creative Commons license metadata
And here are a few other links to important Creative Commons pages:
- Main Creative Commons page for developers.
- Using Creative Commons metadata.
- CC Tools: Tools to tag and verify Creative Commons-licensed works
The Creative Commons initiative is currently lacking two important things: The first is widespread support for embedding Creative Commons licenses in third-party applications and the second, and most important thing, is a solid search solution for Creative Commons content. There are several search solutions for CC content but none of them provide an easy means to narrow down a search by license. Hopefully, better visibility of the developer APIs will spur new developments in these areas.
I'd recommend that you refer to the SWFObject page as your own private Best Practices for Flash Player Detection article. Or, if you'd rather, there is an Adobe DevNet article on SWFObject with the same content that you can refer to.
The inaugural meeting is on June 6th, 2006 and Paul and I are going to be there.
For the second meeting, to be held on June 20th, I'm going to be presenting on Flex 2 and AS3. Details of that should be posted on the FlashCodersBrighton site shortly.
I just had a heck of a time embedding a SWF file (the YouTube video from the previous post) into my WordPress post. Even when using the plain HTML editor, WordPress apparently does funny things to my HTML. Grrr! Feels like I'm using FrontPage or something!
Anyway, so I figured out that the problem was because WordPress was trying to convert the quotation marks in my code to smart quotes. Lovely! This was, of course, messing up the JavaScript required for SWFObject. So I tried putting the contents of the script tags into HTML comments, thinking WordPress might ignore the comments. And it did. But it also munged my newlines, thereby actually commenting out my JavaScript code. Grrr x 2! Finally, I got it to work by using multiline comments.
Here's the resulting code that worked:
<div align="center" id="flashCaptPicard">
You need the Flash Player to view this video.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
/*<!--*/
var so = new SWFObject("http://www.youtube.com/v/2CTB6Lklpik", "flashCaptPicard", 425, 350, "7");
so.write("flashCaptPicard");
/*-->*/
</script>
Does anyone know what this is from?
Update: Apparently the original video was removed from YouTube but I found this alternative one. Also took the opportunity to experiment with the Videobox wordpress plugin. Very cool!
Update: Videobox, SWFObject and IE don't appear to play well together so Videobox is gone!
Let's start with this site. It would be interesting to compare it to other WordPress sites.

Here's OSFlash:
And the London MMUG (ooh, those tables are showing in the VBulletin engine):
And, finally, Ariaware:



Recent Comments