c. scott andreas

I’ve spent half of my last three Saturdays coding and experimenting with new languages, APIs, frameworks, and the like. This weekend brings you a functional three-click videoblogging app for WordPress, Moveable Type, Drupal, and more.

To recap, earlier hackathons brought:

• A stable version of Phoreo Elements (with documentation). Launching very soon.
• ESV for iPhone, Mac OS X Dashboard, and Adobe AIR (Mac + PC).

This week’s pièce de résistance:

Three-Click Videoblogging. It’s really that simple. Open the app, click Record and bark into your iSight for awhile, then hit Stop when you’re done. Preview it if you like. Bang out a Title and Body content, then hit Publish to WordPress.

How’s it work? The app records video from your webcam via Flex / Flash, sends it off to a Flash Media Server to be encoded as an FLV, then communicates with your WordPress blog via XML-RPC to create a new post and embed the video automagically.  This is (mostly) sample code from Adobe that wasn’t functional (i.e., the blogging component did not work properly).  That’s been fixed, and this (along with some other tools, like WordPress MU) could form the basis of a really cool app.

The result?

Ultra-easy, brainless, painless videoblogging in just 3 clicks. Screenshot:

(I look like a total tool in this photo. Sorry. It was an early test - I was surprised that it worked.)

What went into it? ::

• Adobe Flex ( + Flex Builder 3)
• Adobe AIR / a web browser
• Adobe Flash Media Server
• A little XML + RPC magic
• A Mac / PC with a camera

It’s not ready for primetime yet, but it does work. Handy! Thanks to Mike Potter of Adobe for this week’s Legos.

But…my development / testing environment was a nightmare. Imagine a PowerBook G4 running Flex Builder 3 in OS X and Flash Media Server in a Windows 2000 Virtual PC session communicating with each other via a VPN tunnel looping from England to southern Indiana and back. Uh, slow. Painfully slow. Thanks, University of Kent, for your awesome IT policies. Bleah.

So here’s the new deal: Buy me a new MacBook Pro and I’ll make you something cool. Maybe a nice shrimp fettucine alfredo with a bottle Savignon Blanc or something.

Might be on hiatus next weekend - I’m headed to Cut & Paste London. Curious about this app or heading to C&P, too? Hit me up at scott att phoreo dawt com.

Adam Walker Cleaveland (Pomomusings.com) wrote a simple WordPress plugin to display your Facebook status (or any of several other items) on your blog. It’s called StatusPress and is available here. There’s a tip jar, too - drop a buck thirty-five in if you dig it.

I’m a bit of a Facebook junkie, too - notice I’ve added it to the bottom of my header. However, I’ve also taken it a tiny bit further:

• The plugin now retrieves the date/time information from your Facebook status and shows how long it’s been since you’ve told the world what you’re up to.
• StatusPress’ tags are now classed as “statuspress” to allow easy styling via CSS.

Ideally, I’d like to turn it into a sidebar widget. That way, adding it to your site would be as simple as dragging and dropping it onto your sidebar in the Sidebar Widgets panel and setting the options - no editing your template or even seeing PHP code. It’d probably take about half an hour, but that’s a little more than I can handle right now.

If you like, you can download Adam’s plugin with my humble modifications here.

Enjoy!