Having recently bought the excellent TomTom GPS Navigation Traffic for my phone, to replace my physical TomTom satnav, I found that it drained more battery than I could charge my phone up with in my car. And that’s not good, as it would mean I’d always run out of battery using it on long journey.
Blog
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Support Your Local Game Store
And, by this title, I mean the bricks-and-mortar Game stores in the UK.
I used to get all my games from Amazon. However, order a game for delivery on the day of release and you’re reliant on whatever time the postman turns up – worst still, if you use Amazon Prime, they use a courier. When I pre-ordered Call of Duty : Advanced Warfare (with, let’s not forget bonus features on the first day only) it was delivered, by courier, at 8:30pm. I’d been at home all day (not to do with the game, I should add).
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How to use Facebook to find your Friend’s Interests
With the option to “like” groups and organisations on Facebook, it’s now become easy to find out who your friends and family have liked.
With a general election looming, for instance, you may be interested in finding out their political allegiances. With this in mind, here are some quick links – click on any and it will list which of your Facebook friends have “liked” them.
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Embedding Videos in WordPress
It’s been a number of years since I created my YouTube Embed WordPress plugin. It’s been extremely popular and I’ve learnt a huge amount from it but now my attention is now turning to the future.
For a while I’ve been thinking about creating a new plugin that will embed YouTube videos. And Facebook videos. And Vimeo, Dailymotion and Hulu. And, indeed, any that you care to name. Basically, offering the best features of YouTube Embed but for all the video embeds you can think of. It would cast off some the features that are more for the minority of users and concentrate on what people want – lots of control with multiple profiles.
So, with further details below, I’d like to know what you think! Please leave any comments, suggestions, whatever in the comments and they’ll be greatly appreciated!
Development has started – follow the progress here!
Key Features
- Embed videos with a single shortcode, which can be modified by the user. This will allow it to work alongside existing plugins, including the built in WordPress oEmbed method.
- As with YouTube Embed you can set up default profiles – you can have one for all video embeds or separate ones for different embed types (e.g. one for YouTube, one for Facebook and one for anything else).
- Selectable code validity – depending on your theme you can set it to be valid HTML 5, XHTML, etc. Or just select a more flexible option that may not validate but gives maximum compatibility.
- The plugin will fit in with the default look and feel of WordPress, looking like something that came with it by default. No ads, no banners and no odd colours.
- Compatible with a number of existing plugins to add additional functionality – for example, Shortcake to add a visual replacement for the shortcode or Video SEO for WordPress SEO.
- Automatic generation of video metadata for SEO.
Why not oEmbed?
WordPress already uses oEmbed to display videos. Simply place the video URL on the page and it will show up. That’s great, but oEmbed can only pass on parameters specified in the URL – many video functions (particularly YouTube) can’t be controlled this way. Indeed, it would means that we couldn’t use profiles and each video would have to include its own specific parameters. So oEmbed is a nice, simple solution but not particularly flexible. By using a shortcode method we can pass on any required information and, of course, use profiles to control default behaviour.
Premium Options
As I said before, this plugin would jettison a lot of the minority features. But that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. My plan, long term, is to add a feature to be able to add premium add-ons. These would include lesser video sites as well as features. Prices would be low to make them more attractive.
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Ford SYNC Upgrades
The version of SYNC that comes with UK Focus models is quite an early release, modified for the UK market. A number of releases in the US have occurred since, including the ability to update the firmware yourself via USB. Sadly, we can’t do that and are reliant on it being done via dealers (not that there have been any releases).