Steve Rogers

I was asked if ShoZu Desktop would run under Linux the other day ( Ubuntu 8.04 to be more exact). So I decided to try it, and after nearly wrecking my PC trying to dual boot install Ubuntu (not the installers fault but mine) I managed to get everything set up and working. The only issue that was apparent was a slight visual issue with a scrollbar appearing in the login panel but that has now been fixed.

What I did was:

Install Ubunta 8.04
Install Adobe Flash Player v10

I had a play around with Wordpress at the weekend and more specifically how to create a Wordpress widget. As with most things when I learn something new I find it much easier to tackle the learning curve with a real task that will have an end result, rather than just read set of instructions.

So I searched around and found a very simple article on widget creation here:
http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2008/02/15/how-to-create-a-wordpress-wid....

The next thing was to think of a real world project to use so I decided to generate a Widget that displays the latest ShoZu uploads using the ShoZu provided feed for a user.

I have set up my own Wordpress site here where I have now installed the widget and also set up a page with some install instructions and a download of the code.

Next step is to do the same thing for a Drupal Block.

THis is my test ShoZu cellblock embedded into a story on my drupal site.

I have been looking into how I can transcode my ShoZu video uploads so that they all get converted into 1 format ( flash video). But to do this I need to move my site to another server that supports the app I need to do the transcoding. This will be happening over the next couple of weeks after I have done some transcoding testing and sorted out a new theme for my site move.

I have now started to generate some content for the Share-It module book so those interested can see what has been going on and how I have approached the project so far.

So a little more progress, I now have ShoZu video uploads working to my blog. The first attempt can be seen here. I have used an embedded quicktime wrapper to enable the videos that are uploaded to play and it seems to work OK from my Nokia N73 (using 3gp files). I still need to do some tests using mp4, but need to be careful on the file size as I have set up a small upload limit on my site.

I have been testing a few updates to my Share-It plug-in, first to make sure that if I created another user account and blogged to that it still worked OK , which it does.
And secondly I have now added an Admin menu option to allow the definition of the width and height of the image that is added to the blog entry. The admin setting will only affect new uploads as it is used to resize the original upload when it is received, but this also seems to work OK.

Well, after a good (and eventful) holiday, I finally had a bit of spare time to work on my ShoZu Drupal plug-in. The result is a successful end 2 end test from a ShoZu enabled mobile device to my Drupal blog of an image taken on my N73, currently this includes Title and Description. When I get a bit more time I'd like to add taxonomy words( ShoZu tags) as well.

The first upload test can be found here, more to follow as I work on the plug-in.

So I have started looking into uploading blog content via XML-RPC. This is being done with a custom module with my own functions for authorisation and upload. The upload is currently a combination of blog.newPost and metaweblog.newMediaObject as I need to ensure an image is uploaded to every blog entry (see the test blog here).