Developers « Viddler Home Page

Watch for falling rocks!  We’re sort of live updating the Viddler’s Developer site.

We’ve got a new template designed by Viddler’s Lead Designer Andrew Smith which will facilitate our needs not only for the Developer site but also for a few other sub-level domains we’ll be launching in the next few weeks.  Andrew provided me with a style guide of sorts and so now I’m put to the task of getting both Wordpress and MediaWiki, the two applications we use to pull off this site, to bend to my will.

Everything should work ok, but will look a little wonky while I’m updating. If you have any concerns, let me know.

The response from the first version of the bookmarklet has been pretty strong. It has now been updated a little, based on the comments we’ve received, and hopefully you’ll find it even more useful.

Changes in beta 0.2

• Sharing via Twitter now works, even when logged out of Twitter.com.
• Window is now resizable.

To upgrade or install

To update your bookmarklet, just delete the old one, and use this new one: ViddlerPop!

As always, if you have any questions, just ask.

I like watching video in Viddler’s player.  All of my favorite podcasts are now using Viddler including WineLibrary TV, DiggNation, Two Guys on Beer, just to name a few.  But sometimes I don’t like keeping a browser tab open to watch these longer videos while I’m doing other things like surfing the Web, writing code, or replying to the endless amounts of email I seem to get.

This is where ViddlerPop!, a new bookmarklet we’re playing with, comes in and saves the day.  Now instead of keeping a browser tab open dedicated to a Viddler video, I can watch this video in its own window.

Here is a quick video demonstration of how this first version works.

Please leave us some feedback to let us know what you think of the bookmarklet, how you’d like it to improve, and if you find any bugs.  Thanks in advance!

Installation

To install ViddlerPop! just drag the ViddlerPop! link to your browser’s bookmarks bar - or, right-click and “Add to bookmarks”. I believe in Firefox it is right-click and “Bookmark this Link”.

Questions?  Fire away!

In an effort to make developing on Viddler’s platform as easy as possible, we’ve moved the lab from lab.viddler.com to developers.viddler.com.  Everything should be forwarded now and we’ll be now setting up shop here.  The wiki is still available, but we’re going to be adding a whole new interface to our Developers area over the next few weeks.

Please stay tuned!

In order to make it easier for developers to include Viddler avatars in their applications, we’re introducing a simple service called “vAvatar”. To include an avatar, just use an image tag like this:

<img src="http://lab.viddler.com/services/avatar/USERNAME" />

Just replace “USERNAME” with the username whose avatar you want to display. For example, here’s mine, using vAvatar:

Is there anything else you’d like vAvatar to do? Let us know in the comments.

Ilya Sabanin (friend: ilya) has released a Ruby wrapper for Viddler’s API. He’s done a great job integrating all the existing API methods, so if you’re a Ruby developer, you’ll definitely want to check this out. To start using Viddler.rb, just install the “viddler” gem:

$ gem install viddler

For more information, check out Viddler.rb’s documentation.

We’d like to begin by thanking everyone for their help with testing, and spreading the word about, the first beta of this plugin.  The amount of feedback we received this weekend, contributions to the code itself, and number of people advocating the testing of our plugin has proven very valuable.   Thank you.

I’m really excited to release Beta 2 of Version 1.1 of the plugin (direct download).  We’ve got some nice additions and improvements to the plugin, as well as some general fixes that I think will make this plugin much more stable.

The bigger changes

Beta 2 has some pretty big changes, most of which were spurred by some feedback we received from Matt Mullenweg.  Thanks to him for providing excellent feedback on the first beta of the plugin.

We’ve changed the short code that the plugin produces for both videos that appear in posts and videos that appear in comments.  Our old short code was viddler_video=key,width,height.  We’ve now changed it around a bit and it shall be displayed as viddler id-key h- w-.  In case you’re wondering, this is the same short code that Wordpress.com uses for embedding Viddler videos.  We figured that aligning the two would increase compatibility with our short code, as well as making the width and height dimensions much easier to understand.

All older short codes will still work including [viddler_video* and [viddler_comment* from version 1.1 beta 1, version 1.0, and all of the version 1.0 betas.  In other words, there is no reason to change your older posts unless you really want to.

Video thumbnails are fixed sizes since we started to see that some Wordpress themes were not controlling, or over controlling, the size of the video thumbnail that appears in a post and/or comment.  As such we began to see huge and/or tiny thumbnails.  Now we’ve added fixed sizes based on the width and height specified in the short code.

Bug fixes

You may view the readme.txt file for a detailed description of the exact bugs that were squashed with this release, but here are some of the more important ones.

Dashboard Wordpress news was displaying really oddly in Beta 1.  We found out that a portion of our admin stylesheet was adversely affecting that of the Wordpress news that displays on your dashboard.  This slipped by our nose’s, sorry.  Thanks to Alex Hillman for reporting the problem, and to Jason Waldrip for helping to figure it out the solution.

The included XML Parser had thrown a few PHP 5 errors.  Thanks to Lee Adkins for contributing some code patches, this has now been fixed in Beta 2.

There are many other improvements with this release, but you’ll have to review the readme for those.  We’re hoping to get a third beta release out by Thursday of this week, so if you have any feedback please leave it in the comments below.  We’d like to limit ourselves to four or five betas before we add this to the Wordpress plugin directory and officially announce it on Viddler’s blog.

Do you have Wordpress 2.5 or above installed on your Web site?  Interested in helping us beta test the latest version of our plugin?  First of all, thank you!

Downloading and installation

You can download the latest beta version, 1.1 beta 1, from the wiki page for this plugin.  For anyone not using Wordpress 2.5 or above, version 1.0 is still there for you to use.

Installing Version 1.1 Beta 1 is simple.  Just unzip the file and upload the entire viddlercomments directory to your /plugins/ folder within Wordpress.  Then, go to your plugins page and click Activate on our plugin.  If you are upgrading please be sure to delete the old directory and upload this new one.

What’s new in 1.1 Beta 1?

Here is a quick list of the changes between version 1.0 and version 1.1 of our Wordpress plugin.  We plan on keeping these features locked until 1.1 is completed, only fixing bugs between now and official release.

• Dashboard widget You can now watch, and help promote, our daily featured videos right from within the Wordpress administration dashboard.  There is a preference in the options panel to turn this off.
• Viddler videos in Add Media pop-up One of Wordpress 2.5’s flagship features is the new “Add media” pop-up window when writing posts and pages.  Now, you can add Viddler videos in several ways.
  • Featured videos Like on the dashboard widget, you are now able to embed featured videos quickly.
  • Your videos One quick search for your username, and you can page through every public video you have on Viddler and embed them in your posts.
  • Search! The search features lets you find, and embed, any video on Viddler by searching by tag and/or username.
  • Record Using your webcam, or any camera attached to your computer, you can use Viddler’s recorder to quickly record a brand-new video and embed it in your post, all without leaving your Wordpress admin.
• Fixed Wordpress 2.5 jQuery conflict Both our plugin and Wordpress use jQuery, the state-of-the-art Javascript framework, and version 1.0 of our plugin causes conflicts with Wordpress 2.5.  Now that is fixed!
• Several other bugs fixes and enhancements.

Video demonstration!

We wouldn’t be Viddler if we didn’t have a quick video demonstration of this version of our plugin.  Now, remember, this is still in Beta so some things may change between now and the official release.

This video was embedded using our latest beta version, nifty!

If you are interested in developing on top of Viddler’s platform, we’ve now tried to make it even easier to do so.  We’ve added a new page to The Viddler Lab called Getting Started: Becoming a Viddler developer. This page should make it quick and easy to find anything you need to start building your applications.

Until today, everyone that wanted an API key had to send me an email - and even that was difficult to figure out.  We’ve added a subpage to the Getting Started page that lets you fill out a form to request an API key.

We have a lot more in store for the Lab in the next few weeks including tutorials, updates to a few of our wrappers, a huge update to our Wordpress plugin, a few new Lab project announcements, and much more.  We hope you find it even easier, and more fun, to be a Viddler developer.

Tell your friends!

We’re just setting things up here, but in case you’ve happened on our new toy, we want you to know what it is about.

In short: The Viddler Lab Blog will be reporting on developments on the Viddler video platform and with our developer network.  We’ll be actively looking for creative 3rd party developers, platform partners, and beta testers.

If you’re interested in being a beta tester, comment with your Viddler username in the comments!