Posts from — October 2007

Do you remember this movie!?  It scared the crap out of me as a kid.  I was searching for something scary to post, and I ran across this pic that I shot last year at Comic-Con. 

Funny, ’cause I actually own Clash of the Titans on DVD now.

Anyway, some people find it odd that I would even mention Halloween, given that I am a Christian.  They see Halloween as a Satanic holiday, and something that all believers should eschew as a natural extension of their faith.

I hear that argument, I do.  I just don’t buy it.

First off, I really could care less about Halloween – to be honest, so I’m not “celebrating” anything.  If nothing else, its an opportunity for my kid to dress up in costume and bum candy from people. Whatever.  The focus that we have is not satanic, its fun and candy, nothing more.

Many people who frown on a Christian letting their kid dress up as Strawberry Shortcake have no problem with something like Christmas – simply because that holiday is supposed to be about Christ.  Well, it started out as a pagan ritual just as Halloween did, yet we’ve made it something different.  Of course, there are also some Christians out there that don’t want to celebrate Christmas either, for the aforementioned reason.  And, that’s fine with me.  But, for those that are frowning, let me remind you of Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37.

Rampant wildfires, again. 

The best place I’ve found for information on WHERE the fires are is this Google Interactive Map from the LA Times.

Here’s a few pics from my town.  The smoke is starting to be come unbearable – hard to breathe and stinging the eyes.

I’m grateful for the safety of my family.

This is a great little utility for encoding and decoding URLs.  It quickly turns gobbledygook like:

http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fmilowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY"

into something more useable like:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/
user/milowerx/albumid/5123888780136287569?
kind=photo&alt=rss&authkey=5M3WrH3fEkY

AND, vice-versa for using URL’s programmatically.

Hey!  Wow, two posts in one day…  I guess I should buy a lottery ticket or something.

UPDATE!

There is now a “better” way to embed Picasa slideshows in your WordPress posts.

• A direct embed now works with WP (as of v2.6.2 AFIK). Check out this new post for some additional info.
• The easiest way, IMO, is to use my new plugin, Postcasa. All you have to do is put the Picasa RSS link between this simple shortcode, and the plugin does the rest.

Example:

[postcasa]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

easily becomes:

Original Post

My brother wanted to put a Picasa slide show in his blog.  He can’t help it – he’s a big Google Fanboy. 

Anyway, after searching around and trying at least 8 different plug-ins to try and get this to work I finally came upon the correct secret mixture to make it work.

Some of the plug-ins that didn’t work had these problems:

• Plug-in hasn’t been updated in several WP versions
• Plug-in didn’t work properly with the latest version of Flash
• RSS based plug-ins couldn’t actually download the feed because:
  • Security didn’t allow getting the feed and storing it locally
  • The feed had changed since the plug-in was released and it made the parser barf
• It required activating PHP code in each post, which is a security nightmare, IMHO

Well, for those of you who have been banging your head on your keyboard trying to get this working, here is the key:

1. Run over and download Kimili, a great embedded flash plug-in.  Kudos to Michael Bester for excellent piece of work.  There are others like it, but this one is full featured and seems more stable than others that I’ve tried.  Upload and activate the plug-in.

2. Use the new Picasa embedded slide-show tool to generate the embedding code – for example:

<embed> type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0×000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F
milowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3D
photo%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY" src="http://picasaweb.google.com
/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" mce_src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="267" width="400"> <embed>


3. Now for the “kinda” tricky part…  You need to translate that code into code for Kimili.  Fortunately, it really isn’t that hard.  Kimili uses the syntax:

[ kml_flashembed movie="filename.swf" height="250" width="400" / ]


and uses fvars to pass parameters to the embedded flash video.  The Picasa code uses the slideshow.swf file as the “movie” and everything that is in flashvars should be put into fvars.  Make sure that you leave out the type parameter but include the height, width and pluginspage.

4. The final translated code should look like this:

[ kml_flashembed movie="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" height="267" width="400" fvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0×000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F
milowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt
%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"/ ]

You can see the results of all this hard work here.