Red Writes Here

Embedit + Mephisto

Sunday, November 16th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Tags: Embedit, faster, gamvee, google maps, Mephisto

Another Change to Embedit

Saturday, November 1st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

So I wrote a post last night about how I was getting around the url breakage problem. Well thanks to James (author of Carbon Diet, Has My Gem Built Yet? and s.andwi.ch) I’ve got a better way but also the ‘proper’ way of fixing this url problem.

I’ve updated the wrapper to now use

require 'cgi'
 
CGI.escape(url)

So now wrappers must all escape the url they are submitting. 

The new wrapper looks like this

require 'open-uri'
require 'net/http'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'cgi'
$KCODE = "u"
 
class EmbeditRuby
 
  attr_reader :title, :format, :url, :html
 
  def initialize(url, size={})
    url = CGI.escape(url)
    data = REXML::Document.new(open("http://embedit.me/home/index.xml/?url=#{url}&height=#{size[:height]}&width=#{size[:width]}"))
    @title = REXML::XPath.first(data, "//title").text
    @format = REXML::XPath.first(data, "//format").text
    @html = REXML::XPath.first(data, "//html").text   # Service will provide a way to change size, this may be providing user with regex pattern to the sizes, so the wrapper can change it
    @url = REXML::XPath.first(data, "//url").text
    @valid = REXML::XPath.first(data, "//valid").text
  end
 
  def valid?
    @valid
  end
 
end

All fixed :)

Tags: cgi, Embedit

Green Thing V2

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Phew it’s been busy week, but Green Thing V2 has now been officially launched. It’s awesome so you should go check it out!

Tags: do the greenthing, Green Thing, v2

UserVoice

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

For a quick update on how Embedit did with GT ’soft’ launch; everything went perfectly smoothly apart from a little bit of downtime around midnight last night, but this was either due to Slice Host or something getting stuck in the pipes, but considering I changed nothing I’m guessing it was on their end.

From Tuesday this week Embedit has already embedded over 2000 entities (I guess I could call them that) and is currently on 2865 embeds. I’ll let you all know how it goes with the big launch next Monday :)

I’ve also create a User Voice account for Embedit so that you can all add and vote on services/features you would like to see in Embedit. Add any site you want that has an embed-able entity. I guess to say it on one sentence, I want Embedit to become a platform for embedded stuff ;) So more the better

Anyway, check out the User Voice Here

Meet Green Thing

Monday, October 13th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Tags: Green Thing

Embedit Becomes Older!

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Firstly a big shout-out goes to @bumi whose helped a ton with Embedit.

Embedit is now in version 0.1.1 (I made a silly mistake so had to update). We have a bunch of new services, the list of all these can be found over here. 

I have also released a gem for Embed.me which can be found over here. I am, however, having a really strange problem with ‘turning’ on the gem facilities on Github. When I tick the ruby gem box and reload the page, the box becomes un-ticked again. I get no error messages at all, and even when I tick the box it says my setting have been saved. So anyone with an idea of what might be happening please contact me. I have emailed Github but haven’t heard back yet. I want to get it out properly as quickly as possible, so you guys can start using the API :)

Tomorrow I shall be moving Green Thing over to using the embedit API. So will let you know how that goes.

I also wrote a quick benchmark test as I was asked about the performance of the gem over the web service. You would expect the web service to be slower, for obvious reasons, but each time it showed to be much quicker, sometimes close to half the time. If anyone would like to explain these happenings, please leave a comment :)

Panda and Some Embedit

Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

As some of you may or may-not know, we are currently rebuilding The Green Thing. I’ve posted before about how much embed-able data the new site uses, and from this Embedit was born. However, we also allow users to do a straight upload of their videos, audio or pictures.

About a month ago I attended my first LRUG and met a couple of guys from New Bamboo. Not only do they have a cool name but they also introduced us to their newly released

open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming

called Panda. Here’s an extract from the site as I’m sure it does a better job at describing what it does than myself:

Unlike other video platforms, Panda is not just a service for encoding your videos for the web; Panda handles the whole process. From the upload form to streaming, Panda takes control.

Panda run’s completely in the cloud computing environment provided by Amazon’s array of web services. The application runs on a customised EC2 instance with everything pre-installed, including FFmpeg and an plethora of codecs. SimpleDB is used to store all of data for video, encoding, accounts and encoding profiles. Uploaded and encoded video files are then stored on S3.

So basically it’s a really cool thing that handles all our media upload needs, in the background, uses Amazons web services and all on a single Merb instance. ‘Perfect!’ I though, so I went to get us a SimpleDB account, unfortunately, SimpleDB is currently a closed beta! So I forked over Panda and have started making it usable with MySQL. It’s going quite well. It’s my first time using Merb, after having several hiccups due to versions and what-not all seems to be going smoothly now, thankfully.

As for news with Embedit, it is now on v0.0.5, newest release included Nokia’s OVI video/audio/picture service, Spec tests and the ability to validate an url. Please visit the repo for more info.

When Panda is working smoothly with MySQL expect to see Embedit work rather nicely with Panda.

Tags: Embedit, LRUG, Panda, Projects, The Green Thing

TED Talk : Ken Robinson

Friday, August 15th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

A must watch

Open Source Cola

Friday, August 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Is My Tube Late?

Friday, August 8th, 2008 | Projects, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

After much inspiration from:

• Delighting With Data
• Low Flying Rocks
• CO2 Updates
• One Hundred Months

I’m please to announce Is My Tube Late?

In short…There are 12 tube lines, each now has its own Twitter account. I have also created an ‘all tubes’ account that keeps up to date with all the 12 lines.

The status of each line is checked every 5 minutes and if there is a change in status a message is sent to the respective Twitter account and of course, the all tubes accounts.

If you wish you receive these updates on your phone, all you have to do is:

1.  Sign up to Twitter.
2. Go to the Twitter device setting and set-up your mobile to receive update.
3. Go to a lines Twitter page
4. Click follow and then select ’status updates’ to on

Due to furniture maneuver (the server will have to be shut down) the service won’t be up 100% until 9th August, but then should be pretty reliable.

Here is the list of all the lines and their Twitter accounts

All Lines

Bakerloo

Central

Circle

District

East London

Hammersmith & City

Jubilee

Metropolitan

Northern

Piccadily

Victoria

Waterloo & City

If there are any problems feel free to contact me @ reddavis [at] gmail [.] com.

The code will be released on GitHub as soon I tidy it up a bit.

Enjoy!

Tags: ismytubelate, Projects