Tripp Millican for President!
Okay, perhaps a bit over the top, but the man gets my vote for:
a) Having a name straight out of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’; and
b) Getting my blog and Click.tv to work together in peace and harmony
Let me explain…
For the last 48 hours I have been slaving to get a simple 7 minute video to show on my blog, using Click.Tv’s superb service. But alas, the gremlins have been against me.
First off, it took 80 minutes to encode a 7 minute wmv file to flv, using Macromedia’s ‘Flash 8 Video Encoder’ (I had to do this several times – urg!)
Then I couldn’t get the code for the Click.TV viewer into the blogpost without the whole post corrupting, throwing all sorts of ugliness into my posts and still not showing the video.
Tripp to the rescue!
Not only did he supply me with a plug-in (called ‘Role Manager’) that stops WordPress doing some of its ‘self-correcting html code’ behaviour, but Tripp also later remembered that I needed to make one more change.
Firstly, the plug-in:
I have a WordPress blog myself and have gone through this frustration with trying to display flash files.
The good news? It’s completely do-able.The not as good news? It requires a little bit of leg work.
The problem lies in the fact that WordPress does not allow for ‘unfiltered html’. This will impact trying to post anything that WordPress considers ‘dangerous’. Unfortunately, the code required to embed Flash files falls into this category — whether it is YouTube or click.tv.
To work around this, install the “Role Manager” plugin. Unzip it and ftp it to your plugins directory in WordPress. Log in to your Control Panel and select “Plug-ins” and enable the “Role Manager” plugin.
Then select the “Users” menu and the “Roles” submenu. This will bring up a whole big chart of things you can now manage. I am assuming you are listed as Administrator on your blog — in that case, find the checkbox under Administrator that says ‘Unfiltered HTML’ and click it so that you have a green checkbox beside it.
Then, on to the next stage…
The tinyMCE / Visual Rich editor for posts can create issues — like FrontPage and some other WYSIWYG editors, it thinks it knows better than you what you are trying to do. Adding the code for click inside this causes the editor to rearrange it and blender-ize it. Obviously not what we want to have happen. To turn off this editor, there is a checkbox under Users->Your Profile, bottom of the page (Use the visual rich editor when writing). This needs to be unchecked.
BINGO!!!
Now my blog and Click.TV work together!
Proof: here’s that infamous video, in all it’s glory! Now, it’s only viewable in Firefox, not IE7 (why???) but at least it is now viewable. Go get Firefox, everybody, it’s a better browser anyway!
MEGA THANKS, TRIPP!
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