Dan Hounshell: Digging My Blog plus Cheese Salt

Be Here to Love Me - The story of a great singer/songwriter

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:56:49 UTC

Be Here to Love Me - the Townes Van Zandt Bio

This is a great documentary about the troubled life of Townes Van Zandt, one of the best American singer/songwriters that you've probably never heard of.

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Recent quotes that I have taken to heart

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:30:32 UTC

Following are some quotes that I have heard or read recently that have affected me and I thought were worth sharing:

What you have done is good. What really matters is what you will do next.

A person is defined by what happens in the moment between receiving input and acting on that input. This is based on Stephen R. Covey's quote "Between stimulus and response is our greatest power - the freedom to choose."

Despite conventional wisdom, you shouldn't focus on improving your weaknesses. Focus on improving your strengths instead.

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Chatroulette: chat via webcam with random (sometimes naked) strangers

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:50:52 UTC

Chatroulette: chat via webcam with random (sometimes naked) strangers
by Jay Hathaway (RSS feed) Feb 16th 2010 at 4:00PM
Chatroulette is the hot new site that throws you into a webcam chat with another randomly-selected user, until you hit "next" and move on to someone else. It's become all the rage in the past few weeks, especially with tech journalists, sociologists, teenagers and creepy naked dudes.
Chatroulette is not for the faint of heart. You might run into someone dancing, making balloon animals, touching themselves inappropriately, or researching an article about Chatroulette. It's sort of a scary experience, but it can also be fun, especially with the knowledge that you're only one button away from getting out of any creepy situation. When someone "nexts" you, though, it kind of makes you wonder what you did. Boring? Offensive? Ugly? In my case, probably all three.
I don't think Chatroulette is going to be a regular habit for me, but I can totally see the appeal. I was a teenager back in the days of AOL chatrooms, and this seems like a similar phenomenon with better technology. While it might not be everyone's cup of uncomfortable, sometimes-naked tea, I'm sure it'll serve as the setting for plenty of social experiments, interesting conversations, and awkward flasher moments in the future.

via downloadsquad.com

Not really my cup of tea but interesting nonetheless. @Jamed may have a new purpose in life, though - someone has to be the creepy naked dude. :)

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Resources for migrating to Graffiti CMS 1.3

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:44:00 UTC

Migrating a blog from one platform to another is like taking a trip to the hardware store. It’s easy enough if you go solo: just grab your keys, throw on a hat and you’re there and back in under an hour. But if you are bringing a lot of content with you it’s like taking the wife with you on your trip because she wants to stop at Target, then you have to take the kids, too. Bringing the kids means packing diaper bags, the stroller and snacks, and making sure you have a video in the car for the trip there and back. Before you leave you have to make sure everyone has gone to the bathroom. Before you get home you’ll probably have to stop at least once for someone to use the bathroom. You’ll have to stop and grab something to eat at Wendy’s because kids are always hungry. You’ll definitely go to more than “just” Target – probably IKEA and Sam’s or Costco, too. By the time you finally get home (many hours later) you’ll realize you never even made it to the hardware store and you can’t even remember why you needed to go there in the first place.

Following are the tools, articles, widgets, plugins, etc. that I have used over the last couple of weeks to move my site from Community Server 2007 to Graffiti 1.3. I don’t know that I could create the list in any kind of chronological or other order that would make sense. Nor do I think that I could narrate the experience and have it be anything less than “way too much to read”. So instead I’m just jotting down everything with some notes on how/why I used them.

You don’t necessarily need all this stuff to create a blog with Graffiti. My issue is that I carried a lot of baggage with me to the hardware store… I mean to the new site. My blog has been around since 2004 and I decided to move everything over rather than start fresh. Therefore I wanted to redirect all the old urls to the new ones so I didn’t lose any Google juice. Since I’m using the site primarily as a blog I added a lot of plugins and widgets that are useful for blogs. Everyone’s needs and experiences will be different but these tools can help.

The Graffiti CMS space on CodePlex for the Graffiti 1.3 source, discussions, etc. http://graffiticms.codeplex.com

The built-in Migrator tool to import your Community Server posts/comments to Graffiti. http://graffiticms.com/support/managing-content/migrating-posts-to-graffiti/

Rich Mercer’s redirector for redirecting Community Server style post/tag urls to Graffiti urls (like http://danhounshell.com/blogs/dan/2006/08/some-old-post.aspx to http://danhounshell.com/blog/some-old-post/). http://richmercer.com/graffiti-plugins/

James Avery’s Graffiti Redirector – good for creating redirects on the fly using regular expressions. This is useful for posts that are not named (that Rich’s plugin do not catch like http://danhounshell.com/blogs/dan/2006/08/345.aspx to http://danhounshell.com/blog/some-old-post/) and anything else that shows up in my logs as 404s. http://code.google.com/p/graffiti-redirect/, http://averyblog.com/net/announcing-graffiti-redirect-0-1/, http://averyblog.com/net/graffiti-redirect-0-2/

You could also use something like ISAPI ReWrite or build something custom in IIS7 for redirecting from old to new urls.

Graffiti Blog Extensions Plugin (used to be available in the Graffiti Marketplace, will soon be a “core” extension in Graffiti) used for pingbacks/trackbacks. http://code.google.com/p/graffitiblogext/, http://jeftek.com/210/using-the-graffiticms-blog-extensions-plug-in/

The Graffiti Xtras Package. http://graffitiextras.codeplex.com/

Scott Cate’s Graffiti 404 Manager – great for finding all those links that used to work that are now showing 404s. When something shows up here a lot you can add a redirect for it using James Avery’s Graffiti Redirector. http://scottcate.com/blog/graffiti-404-manager/

Add disqus support for comments. ScottW provided good instructions as well as details on how to have older posts keep displaying their built-in comments. http://simpable.com/code/disqus/

Adding support for tags RSS feeds. ScottW again: http://simpable.com/code/rss-feeds-for-graffiti-tags/ – but RSS feeds for tags are now baked into Graffiti 1.3 so no need to use Scott’s solution if you get the latest from CodePlex.

I based my site theme on the Seven-Five Wordpress theme. http://www.press75.com/v4/the-seven-five-wordpress-theme/

favicon.ico issues with Graffiti, discussed by Andrew Tobin. http://grrargh.com/blog/your-favicon-and-graffiti/

I added a bunch of social streaming type widgets to my new home page, you can find a list of articles explaining each one here: http://danhounshell.com/tags/jquery/

I hope the above list doesn’t scare you away from Graffiti. It really is simple to use and could be as simple to setup in some cases as getting the source from CodePlex, building it and running it. If you are planning on migrating your baggage from another platform(s) to Graffiti you’ll find them useful.

Posted to Blog and tagged as telligent , graffiti

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Add a Google Reader Shared Items widget to any site with jQuery

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:50:00 UTC

The final new widget for my home page to document is the “Latest Shared Feed Items” widget. This one displays the last 3 items that I’ve shared from Google Reader. I’m no longer displaying this widget but it was a custom designed plug-in (for the most part) so I wanted to share the code.

Like the previously discussed widgets this one uses no server-side code it is all JavaScript. I could not find a “stock” jQuery plugin that I liked for displaying Google Reader Shared Items so I took information learned from the article “Processing an RSS Feed with Javascript using Google Reader + JSON + jQuery” and combined it with a modified version of the YouTube plugin that I used previously to create a plugin that did what I needed.

var __mainDiv; var __preLoaderHTML; var __opts;
function __ReceiveData(data) {
     var cnt = 0;
     $.each(data.items, function(i, e) {
         if (cnt < __opts.numberToDisplay) {
             var out = '<li><h3><a href="' + e.alternate.href + '" target="_blank" title="' + 
                 e.title + '">' + e.title + '</a></h3><p>From: <a href="' + 
                 e.origin.htmlUrl + '">' + e.origin.title + '</a>';
             if (e.summary != null) { out = out + '<br />' + e.summary + ''; }
             out = out + '</p></li>';
             __mainDiv.append(out);
             cnt = cnt + 1;
         }
     });
    $(__preLoaderHTML).remove();
    __mainDiv.show();
}
(function($) {
    $.fn.googleReaderShared = function(options) {
        var readerDiv = $(this);
        $.fn.googleReaderShared.defaults = {
            userName: null,
            loadingText: "Loading...",
            numberToDisplay: 5
        }
        __opts = $.extend({}, $.fn.googleReaderShared.defaults, options);
        if (__opts.userName != null) {
            readerDiv.append("<ul id=\"reader_div\"></ul>");
            __mainDiv = $("#reader_div");
            __mainDiv.hide();
            __preLoaderHTML = $("<p class=\"loader\">" + __opts2.loadingText + "</p>");
            readerDiv.append(__preLoaderHTML);
            var urle = "http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/user/" + 
                __opts.userName + "/state/com.google/broadcast?callback=?";
            $.getJSON(urle, function(data) { __ReceiveData(data); });
        }
    };
})(jQuery);

I placed the above code in a file named jquery.googlereader.shared.js. To implement you just need to add a script reference to that file and the jQuery library, a container to hold the rendered HTML, a few lines of JavaScript to wire everything up, and finally some CSS tweaks to display as desired.

<script type=”text/javascript” 
    src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”jquery.googlereader.shared.js”></script>
<div id="googleshareditems" class="googleshareditems"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('#googleshareditems').googleReaderShared({ 
            userName: 'your google reader user id goes here', 
            numberToDisplay: 3            
        });
    });            
</script>

You now have a Google Reader Shared Items widget! I hope you find it useful.

Posted to Blog and tagged as telligent , jquery , google-reader

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Add a Last.fm widget to any web site with jQuery

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:21:00 UTC

This is my next to last blog post about the new widgets on my home page. The “Lastest Music” widget pulls data from my Last.fm account. Currently I’m displaying the 12 artists/albums that I’ve listened to the most on Last.fm over the last week. It shows the cover art for each album and links to the album’s page on Last.fm.

Like the Twitter widget, the Flickr widget and the YouTube widget, the Last.fm widget is all JQuery/JavaScript all the time. Unlike most of the others, in this case I used an unmodified “stock” plugin. The plugin I chose is Jeroen Smeet’s Last.fm plugin, which was designed for WordPress but works just fine on its own.

To implement the widget grab the last.fm.records.js script from the zip at the Wordpress Plugin Directory, add a script reference for it and jQuery on the page, add a container to hold the rendered HTML and add a few lines of JavaScript to wire it up.

<script type=”text/javascript” 
    src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”last.fm.records.js”></script>
<div id="lastfmrecords"></div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
$(document).ready( function() {
    var _config = {
    username: 'diggerdanh',         // last.fm username
    placeholder: 'lastfmrecords',   // id of the div in HTML to use for cd covers
    //defaultthumb: './lastfm_logo.jpg',  // image when no cd cover or artist image is found
    period: '7day',         // which period/type of data do you want to show? you can choose from
                            // recenttracks, 7day, 3month, 6month, 12month, overall, 
                            // topalbums and lovedtracks
    count: 12,              // number of images to show
    refresh: 5,             // when to get new data from last.fm (in minutes)
    offset: 5               // difference between your timezone and GMT.
    };
    lastFmRecords.init(_config);
});
</script>

That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t get much easier than that. Enjoy.

Posted to Blog and tagged as telligent , jquery , last-fm

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Graffiti CMS 1.3 - add a Widget anywhere in a view with new Widget macro

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:01:25 UTC

Graffiti comes with a plethora of built-in widgets and there have been plenty built by the community. Up until now they had to be displayed in a sidebar. There was no way to display a widget in your content, your header, your footer, etc. without some modifications, custom Chalk extensions or using á��hiddená�� sidebars.

Youá��ll notice that my site has no sidebars (a fact that is subtly called out in the image below :)), but if you believe my scribble youá��ll see that there are if fact three widgets in use on my home page right in the middle of all of the other content. How can that be? As of this evening Graffiti now supports displaying a widget anywhere in a view with the help of the new Widget macro.

You can see from the screenshot below that I have the three widgets setup and sitting in my á��queueá�� column. Notice that they are not in the Left Sidebar or Right Sidebar columns, so even if I did use a sidebar with this theme they would not be displayed in the sidebars. Even though they are just queued they are still available for display. There was just no way to display a widget that wasná��t in the left or right sidebar before now (without a custom Chalk extension). Since Iá��m not using sidebars in this theme I could put the widgets in the left or right columns, but for demonstration purposes for people who might already be using left and right sidebars I left them in the queue.

To display a widget in a view all you need to do is use the Widget macro and pass in the title of the widget to render along with some directions for additional markup. It will search for the widget by title (so based on the screenshot above I would use CheeseSalt, Del.icio.us, or ScottCate 404Widget for the title) and if the widget is found then it is rendered. The Widget macro has the signature Widget(string title, string beforeTitle, string afterTitle, string beforeContent, string afterContent) so you can set markup before/after the title and before/after the content. Below are a couple of quick code examples of my use of the Delicious widget and Scott Cateá��s 404 Widget on my home page.

<div id="delcontainer">
    $macros.Widget("Del.ico.us", "", "", "", "")             
</div>
 
#if ($macros.IsNotNull($user)) 
   #if($macros.CanViewControlPanel($user))
<div class="content-item">
    <div class="content-dets">
        <h3>Admin 404 Report</h3>
    </div>
    <div class="content-body">
        $macros.Widget("ScottCate 404Widget", "", "", "", "")
    </div>
</div>
   #end
#end

Other examples might include using a Syndication Feed Widget, Recent Posts or List of Links widget in your siteá��s footer, adding a Search Box to your 404 pageá��s custom view, or using a simple Empty Box widget above your content on your layout view for ad markup.

One additional note: we also added official support for RSS feeds for tags tonight. A lot of people have implemented their own solutions for RSS feeds for tags, probably based on ScottWá��s example, but now it is baked in.

In case you missed the announcement around the middle of December, Graffiti CMS is now open source. The Graffiti CMS project is hosted on CodePlex and as demonstrated by this post we are moving forward. Doná��t consider this an official announcement but our plan is to clean things up and release the first open source version, Graffiti CMS 1.3, soon. After that weá��ll start considering wholesale changes like replacing the data layer. The specifics are still up for debate so feedback is welcomed. This isná��t my á��call to armsá�� post (there will be one soon) but you know where to find us if you are interested.

Posted to Blog and tagged as telligent , graffiti

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Create an iPhone styled slide-out Social Locator

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:06:00 UTC

The post iPhone look-alike on your kitchen wall on Hackaday inspired me to create a slide-out Social Locator for my site. If the iPhone interface is intuitive and recognizable enough to be used for a kitchen computer then it is probably a good model for anything. The “social widgets” on my home page are cool (to me) but if all a visitor to my site wants to do is find the link to my Facebook page there is way too much stuff to wade through. I wanted a quick and easy way to provide links to my online locations without cluttering up the page. I decided to use the “slide out” model and I realized an iPhone style interface would be perfect for it. Below are some screenshots of the closed and open state, but you can see the widget in action on my home page (or any page on my site) by clicking the “Shortcut” tab on the left hand side of the page.

What is a Social Locator?

I don’t know – I just pulled the name out of thin air on the fly. It sounded like a good term for what I’m trying to do – provide a widget with links to my online places. Why the iPhone-like interface? Because most people get it. The little icons and text provide a hint and brief description of what the links are and you click on one to go to that place. I can’t think of an easier interface to use than that.

My 18-year old son, who is pretty tough to impress, said “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I don’t mind that for once he thinks that I have some amount of coolness. I don’t necessarily need to provide a tool for “everyone” who is looking for me online – my Mom, wife and kids know where to find me just fine. But I thought it was cool enough to share and someone might find it useful on their own site.

How it works

If you’ve read any of my last few posts you know where I’m going with this – jQuery! I went looking for a slide out plugin for jQuery and found the tabSlideOut jQuery plugin. It was everything that I needed and nothing more. Now that I had the base functionality I needed some iPhone styled icons. I was afraid I was going to spend a few hours in Photoshop but another search brought me to the iPhone-like icon maker. This is a very slick online tool and was perfect for the job at hand. The instructions say to provide a 512x512 image, but I found that even 16x16 favicon’s (converted to png with the help of the “hidden” Google favicon to PNG converter) were good enough for creating the 50ishx50ish sized icons that I needed.

I grabbed the jquery.tabSlideOut.v1.3.js script and added it to my site, created script references on the page to the jQuery library and the tabSlideOut script and then followed the rest of the instructions for implementing the tabSlideOut plugin. I added some CSS to make the output look iPhone-like and that was it. Below is the javascript to wire everything up, the HTML for the popout panel, and the CSS to make it look iPhone-like.

<script type="text/javascript" 
    src=”http://ajsax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=”jquery.tabSlideOut.v1.3.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
    $('.slide-out-div').tabSlideOut({
        tabHandle: '.handle',    //class of the element that will become your tab
        tabLocation: 'left',     //side of screen where tab lives, top, right, bottom, or left
        speed: 300,              //speed of animation
        action: 'click',         //options: 'click' or 'hover', action to trigger animation
        topPos: '40px',          //position from the top/ use if tabLocation is left or right
        leftPos: '20px',         //position from left/ use if tabLocation is bottom or top
        fixedPosition: true      //options: true makes it stick(fixed position) on scroll
    });
});
</script>
<div class="slide-out-div">
    <a class="handle" href="http://danhounshell.com" title="Click Me!">Shortcuts</a>
    <h3>Where is Dan?</h3><br />
    <div class="button">
        <a href="http://danhounshell.com/blog" title="My blog">
            <img src=danhounshell.png" alt='My Blog' width='57' height='57' />
        </a>
        <div>My Blog</div>
    </div>
    <div class="button">
        <a href="http://twitter.com/danhounshell" title="Twitter">
            <img src="twitter.png" alt='Twitter' width='57' height='57' />
        </a>
        <div>Twitter</div>
    </div>
    <!—More Links go here, left out for brevity -->
    <div class="button">
        <a href="http://whatiwantmost.com/diggerdanh/Wishlist.aspx" title="WhatIWantMost">
            <img src="wiwm.png" alt='My Wishlist on WhatIWantMost' width='57' height='57' />
        </a>
        <div>What I Want Most</div>
    </div>
    <div class="button">
        <a href="http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/" title="Graffiti CMS">
            <img src="graffiti.png" alt='Graffiti CMS on CodePlex' width='57' height='57' />
        </a>
        <div>Graffiti CMS</div>
    </div>
</div>

.slide-out-div {
    padding: 20px;
    width: 312px;
    background: #333;
    border: 5px ridge #ccc;
    color: #fff;
}  
.slide-out-div .button {
    float: left;
    width: 67px;  
    height: 77px;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-align: center;  
    margin: 5px;
}
.slide-out-div .button div {
    font-size: .9em;
}
a.handle {
    background-image: url("images/shortcuts_tab.gif");
    height: 122px;
    width: 40px;
}

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of my new “Social Locator”. If you’d like, use these instructions to create one for yourself. Give me a shout if you have any questions.

Posted to Blog and tagged as telligent , jquery , javascript , social

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Did you search for that error message on Google?

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 07:27:00 UTC

There is No Such Thing as a Stupid Question (Google-Fu)

Have you heard this statement before? I have; a lot. I’d like to amend it though by adding, “unless you haven’t at least run it through a search engine yet.” Constantly I find that people won’t even take the time to copy and paste an error message into a search engine before they post to a forum, send off an email or go bug another developer. Part of being more than a code monkey is doing a little thinking on your own. As a developer you need to hone your problem solving skills and become a better researcher. At least learn to ask the right questions. It’s one thing to go to another developer for help (which I encourage); it’s quite another to do so without even attempting to find the answer with a quick search.

via mvwood.com

The above is a snippet from the most recent blog post in my friend Mike Wood's "Be a Better Developer" series.

The first thing I do EVERY TIME that I run into an error message that isn't familiar, self descriptive, or obvious to me is paste it into Google and see what comes up. More times than not, one of the top few posts will provide a solution.

The software development community in general and .NET developers specifically do a good job of blogging error messages that they receive and roadblocks that they run into and the solutions for them. Three of the posts on my site that get the most traffic (though each of the three are at least 2 years old) are those exact types of posts.

Nothing pisses me off more than to have someone ask a question about an error message without searching for that error message on one of the major search engines first. It should be the first basic step of troubleshooting!

I work with a great group of developers so I don't see this behavior anymore. But I used to spend a great deal of time helping people out on Microsoft's ASP.NET forums (http://forums.asp.net). I cannot tell you the number of "stupid questions" that get posted that would not be if people would just search first. Sometimes I would get so frustrated that I would just ignore the question, thinking to myself "I can't help you if you won't help yourself".

I rarely visit the ASP.NET forums anymore, unless a search leads me there :), but if I were to participate more I would make sure I answered those questions with "Search on Google for that term, the answer will be #2" or something like similarly appropriate.

I ask that the next time you run into a situation like this that you do the same. Tell them to search first then come back to you if they can't find an answer. Or have the first question that you ask be "Did you search for that error message on Google?". Or you could go the smartass route and use "Let me Google that for you".

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Add a YouTube widget to any web site with jQuery

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:06:11 UTC

Another new addition to the home page of my blog is the á��Latest Videosá�� widget. It pulls in the 6 most recent videos that I have tagged as favorites on YouTube. It also has the option to pull in only videos that I have uploaded, but since I rarely upload videos I decided to spotlight any videos that I favorite for the time being.

Like the Twitter widget and the Flickr widget that I wrote about recently, the YouTube widget is also a JavaScript only widget. It uses jQuery to make an AJAX request to get a YouTube feed formatted as json and and a little bit more JavaScript to output the images, titles and author info to the page. The code that I used is based on the YouTube Channel Playlist plugin (demo) but I modified it quite a bit.

/**
 *  Plugin which renders the YouTube channel videos list to the page
 *  @author:  H. Yankov (hristo.yankov at gmail dot com)
 *  @version: 1.0.0 (Nov/27/2009)
 *    http://yankov.us
 *  
 *  Modified my Dan Hounshell (Jan/2010) to work for favorites or 
 *  uploads feeds and simplified output 
 */

 var __mainDiv;
 var __preLoaderHTML;
 var __opts;

 function __jQueryYouTubeChannelReceiveData(data) {

     var cnt = 0;

     $.each(data.feed.entry, function(i, e) {
         if (cnt < __opts.numberToDisplay) {
             var parts = e.id.$t.split('/');
             var videoId = parts[parts.length-1];
             var out = '<div class="video"><a href="' + 
                  e.link[0].href + '"><img src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/' + 
                  videoId + '/2.jpg"/></a><br /><a href="' + 
                  e.link[0].href + '">' + e.title.$t + '</a><p>';
             if (!__opts.hideAuthor) {
                 out = out + 'Author: ' + e.author[0].name.$t + '';
             }
             out = out + '</p></div>';
             __mainDiv.append(out);
             cnt = cnt + 1;
         }
     });
            
    // Open in new tab?
    if (__opts.linksInNewWindow) {
        $(__mainDiv).find("li > a").attr("target", "_blank");
    }
    
    // Remove the preloader and show the content
    $(__preLoaderHTML).remove();
    __mainDiv.show();
}
                
(function($) {
    $.fn.youTubeChannel = function(options) {
        var videoDiv = $(this);

        $.fn.youTubeChannel.defaults = {
            userName: null,
            channel: "favorites", //options are favorites or uploads
            loadingText: "Loading...",
            numberToDisplay: 3,
            linksInNewWindow: true,
            hideAuthor: false
        }

        __opts = $.extend({}, $.fn.youTubeChannel.defaults, options);

        return this.each(function() {
            if (__opts.userName != null) {
                videoDiv.append("<div id=\"channel_div\"></div>");
                __mainDiv = $("#channel_div");
                __mainDiv.hide();

                __preLoaderHTML = $("<p class=\"loader\">" + 
                    __opts.loadingText + "</p>");
                videoDiv.append(__preLoaderHTML);

                // TODO: Error handling!
                $.ajax({
                    url: "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/" + 
                        __opts.userName + "/" + __opts.channel + "?alt=json",
                    cache: true,
                    dataType: 'jsonp',                    
                    success: __jQueryYouTubeChannelReceiveData
                });
            }
        });
    };
})(jQuery);

To use the YouTube plugin you just need to add a script reference to the jQuery library and the jquery.youtube.channel.js file. Then add a container to hold the rendered HTML, a line of JavaScript to wire everything up, and some CSS to format the output.

<script type=á��text/javascriptá�� src=á��jquery.youtube.channel.jsá��></script>
<div id="youtubevideos"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">    
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('#youtubevideos').youTubeChannel({ 
            userName: 'diggerdanh', 
            channel: "favorites", 
            hideAuthor: false,
            numberToDisplay: 6,
            linksInNewWindow: true
            //other options
            //loadingText: "Loading...",                    
        });
    });            
</script>

A simple YouTube widget for everyone. Enjoy.

Posted to Blog and tagged as telligent , youtube , jquery

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hire social applications strategists

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:17:41 UTC

Social web applications are not made famous by spending millions of bucks on advertisement and other media. What makes an application famous is the viral strategies behind them. Check out these developers for wonderful social strategies implemented into the social applications which made them famous overnight without spending a single penny.