I wuv you.
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Some of you might have noticed that I was able to use a fallback in my previous posts that include a native video tag. I was going to do a post on how that works. It’s pretty simple.
But Chris Double beat me to the punch and has an excellent little tutorial about how he’s using the video tag with elegant fallbacks. (In his post you can use something other than the Java-based fallback. In my case I linked back to vimeo.)
Enjoy!
A lot of people read blogs on open source projects via their respective planets. For example, I’m on both planet.mozilla.org and planet.gnome.org. You can either read content directly using your browser or you can read the rss feed for the entire planet. In either case the planet software parses and re-exports the feeds in order to enforce some level of html correctness and remove html items that might be unsafe.
For a long time people have been embedding flash movies in their posts using both <object> and <embed> tags. However the planet software, rightfully so, strips those tags out as unsafe.
Native video support, however, is designed such that it’s safe to include video in html and more recent versions of feedparser support passing video elements through to the planet software. Here’s what one of my recent posts looks like on Mozilla’s planet site:
One problem is that the controls don’t show up. If you’re using <video> and you want the controls to show up you have to add a controls attribute to the video element, like so:
<video src="foo.ogv" controls="true"></video>feedparser was stripping out the controls attribute. (In Firefox if you right click on the video you can still play it manually.)
However, Sam Ruby was nice enough to fix that problem in feedparser. Admins for the various planets should probably update their feedparser versions to pick up this fix to get ready for the new video-enabled world.
Thanks, Sam!
Jane has put up a post announcing that the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide is up and running. This is a guide that’s useful for people who want to participate in Mozilla’s community marketing to help spread the love of Firefox and the open web.
But I also thought I would post about it as a good framework for other open source projects to build from. There’s a lot of hard-won experience wrapped up in these docs – please use them for your project!
On March 6th Tristan Nitot and Paul Rouget will be helping to host a MozCamp event in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Taken directly from his blog post:
So if you’re interested in coming out for it then sign up!
From this fun David Carson TED talk on design.
The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostered ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. — Unknown
Another great example of how technology often changes how we exchange information. Fun talk, worth watching.
David Carson was also interviewed in Helvetica. It’s a movie worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet.
Update on February 24th, 2009: Due to popular demand I’ve made a screencast of the two demos that I used in this presentation.
I’ve put up slides from my talk at SCALE 2009. Lots of people were interested in the slides. There’s the .pdf I’ve linked to above and the original .odp format. It covers most of the interesting new technical features that we’re going to include in Firefox 3.1.
Here are two relevant links from the talk:
Enjoy!
One huge step forward for the web as a whole would be to end support for IE6. It’s filled with bad quirks and is the primary source of Microsoft’s drag on the web. At Mozilla we generally encourage people to upgrade to Firefox, because it’s light years ahead of any version of IE, but we’d be happy for people to upgrade to IE7 or any other modern browser like Safari or Chrome.
It sounds like some people in Norway have started to band together and just choose not to support it. But one thing that would really help is to just pick a date and have it spread world wide.
My suggestion is for everyone to just say that Dec 31st, 2009 is the last day it should be supported – drop support from libraries, stop testing, etc. IE6 usage is already sliding quickly and it’s time to help it across the line. The web needs an upgrade.
Update: There’s a great set from Norway on flickr that Paul Kim pointed out.
I’m going to list five little writing resources that I’ve found to be useful over the last few months. Many of you have probably seen many of them, but I thought it would be useful to put them all in one place.
1. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Outstanding TEDtalk on John’s weblog. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the creative process, suffering and her thoughts on a better way of dealing with both the successes and failures in writing. It’s funny, honest and you can tell that this is something she’s lived through.
2. Joss Whedon’s Top 10 Writing Tips. Buffy, Firefly, all that joy. It’s a quick list and I find myself going back to it for ideas on how to make changes or make something more interesting and approachable. Worth bookmarking for sure.
3. Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction. Ever try and write something while you’re connected to the Internet? Yeah, it’s basically impossible. He doesn’t suggest that you give up connectivity but offers up a bunch of different ways to mitigate the pain and turn it into an advantage. (Not that I use this – I do my best thinking + writing when I’m trapped on an airplane. But still.)
4. Eric Idle, on John Cleese’s Writing Process. A quick two minutes on writing with John Cleese. Funny, and somewhat useful. Specificity vs. big picture. A fun video that puts great pictures in your head of what it might be like to work with John Cleese. Mostly here just to spice things up a bit.
5. A Transom Interview with Ira Glass. (Also, part 2 and part 3.) If you made it this far into this post you’re probably willing to invest some time into reading through this interview. Ira Glass is one of the main forces behind This American Life which includes some of the best story telling I’ve heard in my young life. And it’s the best of this small lot of resources. Ira talks about learning how to create radio shows, finding the heart of stories, learning from other people and also what not to do. These are long and include some great audio samples and is worth your time to go through it. Lots of good thought and inspiration here.
Enjoy!
interesting stuff