Adding Flickr's Flash Photo Viewer to Your Blog
One of my original intents of registering the beckshome.com domain name was to publish photos of my new baby son or daughter. That was two years and two daughters ago and, until this weekend, photos were nowhere to be found on my blog. I host my blog on the Windows platform and had no desire/time to do any of the following: (a) buy a separate package for image management; (b) cobble together an ASP.NET solution to manage my photos; (c) switch blogging software to a tool like Community Server that has integrated photo management. Furthermore, I already manage my photos on Flickr and I’m more than happy with the service, user experience, and the cost-benefit. What I really needed was a way to integrate my existing Flickr photos into my current .NET-based blog (DasBlog). The pursuit of this goal is what this blog entry is all about.
IIS and Apache Side-by-Side
This weekend, I set out on the daunting task of trying to add an Apache Web server to my existing Windows 2003 production server installation. “Why would you go about doing such a crazy thing”, you might ask. The answer is that, in short, it’s the only way to host an HTTP-accessible instance of Subversion on a Windows box. I’m looking to consolidate all of my hosted software: .NET, Java, and infrastructure, onto a single platform. Since I use Subversion to enable my location independence with respect to computers I use, this application needed to be ported as well.
Software Engineering Processes and the BSCoE SEP
In addition to the technical assets that I’ve mentioned in previous blog postings, BSCoE also makes a set of software process assets available. These software process assets are arranged into disciplines and collected under the umbrella of BSCoE’s Software Engineering Process (SEP). Information about the BSCoE SEP is available online to the general public.
Video on the Web
I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with Web-based video for GeoGlue as of late. I knew very little about the medium out of the gate but with a bunch of reading and prototyping over the past couple of weeks, I’ve learned quite a bit. The first revelation to me was that the majority of professional-grade video sites such as YouTube and Google video encode their video as Flash. A bit of further research found claims of 98% pervasiveness of the Flash plugin, as opposed to much lower rates for Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media. Scott Persinger’s post on the video format wars proved to be quite interesting reading in this respect.