OMG! A video podcast!


HTB!* We’ve gone and made a silly video podcast that almost entirely fails to detail any of our adventures here in the UK! And posted it to YouTube! So you can watch! And listen!

Phew – I feel so much better now…

Ok, it’s short, silly, and largely pointless, but it’s us without all that annoying cost of flying over here to visit us. (You are, however, more than welcome to engage in the latter behavior as well.) I’ve never done this web video/YouTube thing before, and the amount of compression artifacts is kind of annoying.

We might try to do this every week or two if people care. Or we might not. It all depends :-).

We’re again super grateful to Jess, KK, and KK’s family for their help in getting us to the airport and across the pond. We had a very nice week in Preston (I know I needed the rest), and now we’re in Colchester looking for a place to live and a school for Sub-Evil Boy. We still don’t have stable internet, as the house we’re staying in at the moment doesn’t have any connection. I got a key to my office today, however, which is blessed with much happy internet, so we may spend part of the weekend in here cleaning out accumulated e-mail cruft, catching up with blogs, and the like.

Best to all!

*”Heavens to Betsies!”

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PictoBrowser and distributed embedding

PictoBrowser has a nearly nifty alternative Flash slideshow creature that lets you embed slideshows of things like Flickr sets in posts. The idea is cool (I’m suprised there aren’t more like it), although the particular slideshow doesn’t allow for any useful customization and is a bit awkward to navigate if you have a large set of images. The browser is fixed at 500 pixels wide, for example, that that’s just a hair wider than really sits gracefully in this blog layout. I can hack their code to make their Flash thing only 400 pixels wide, but that cuts off the rightmost 100 pixels of my pictures, which isn’t cool. So too big it will be, I guess.

Above is a slideshow of my 50 most “interesting” photos on Flickr, as determined by their mysterious algorithmic special sauce.

What’s potentially really cool about this, though, is their distribution mechanism. If you want to make a slide show of your own, you can just click the “INFO” link on the bottom right of the slide show, and right there you’ll be able to make and preview your own shows, and get the HTML necessary to embed them in your own stuff. You never need to visit their site or Flickr or anything else – it all happens right here.

One could argue that ease of embedding is an increasingly key feature of web toys. I’ll bet, for example, that it certainly hasn’t hurt YouTube that they make it so easy to embed videos in your own stuff instead of requiring people to come to their site. It’s mildly annoying that Flickr only provides you with embedding HTML for you own images, and not for other people’s, even when those people have made the images “bloggable” and/or provided CreativeCommons licenses for them.

Via a del.icio.us link from mitten.

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