1 Pixel Out

This is for users of my Audio Player plugin. I have uploaded some changes to the public repository on wp-plugins.org. You can download the latest version of the code here.

I need testers for a new feature I have implemented. Many people use the plugin to include several songs on one page and this can cause problems. The latest version will close any open instances of the player when opening a new one. I have tested this on Firefox 1.5 and IE6.0. Before I release the new version to the public I need to know whether this works in Safari. You can download and install the plugin yourself or you can simply try it on the plugin page. There are two instances of the player on the page so try opening one player after the other and check that the other closes accordingly.

I have just released an update for my Audio Player plugin (version 1.0.1). This update corrects a flaw with the font handling of the plugin. Fonts are no longer embedded which means that the text is no longer blurred and the file size is now only 5K!

I have also updated the documentation to include a note about the chipmunk effect and a link to the full source code. I want this project to remain “open” so that others can have a go at improving it.

I have also set up a bug tracker and will soon open it to the public. I’m hoping that most of the feature requests and bug reports will be handled by this system instead of clogging up the comments on the plugin page (now over 200 comments!).

Again, thanks go to all who left comments and especially Jörn and Christopher Kwok for helping to test the update.

Version 1.0 of my Audio Player is now available to download. Here’s a list of changes and improvements:

• Player now based on the emff player
• New slimmer design (suggested by Don Bledsoe)
• More colour options
• New slider function to move around the track
• Simple scrolling ID3 tag support for title and artist (thanks to Ari)
• Time display now includes hours for very long tracks
• Support for autostart and loop (suggested by gotjosh)
• Support for custom colours per player instance
• Fixed an issue with rss feeds. Post content in rss feeds now only shows a link to the file rather than the player (thanks to Blair Kitchen)
• Better handling of buffering and file not found errors

I want to thank all the people who commented on the plugin page. Knowing that a significant number of people out there are using my plugin gave me a real drive to improve it.

I decided to use the emff code base because I wasn’t happy with the way I had organised my code. The emff player has been around for a while and there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel. This also helped me to focus on the user interface. I really liked what Ari did with the beta version of the plugin. ID3 tag support was something I’d always wanted to implement but the old format of the player was too restrictive to display long song titles. So I increased the width of the player as well as making it slimmer. I also made the titles scroll horizontally as they do on most player displays (hardware- as well as software-based). The increased width also helped for the slider bar solution to move around the track.

A lot of people requested a way to embed the player in the sidebar. This has always been a tricky one for me. First of all, I don’t think there’s much point in embedding the player in the sidebar. Usually, a sidebar player is intended to offer a list of tracks to listen to and my plugin is a single track player. Secondly, with a width of 290 pixels, the player is now too big to fit in most sidebars.

Planned developments

Only one for now: I’d like to add a download link to the player to make it the perfect podcasting plugin.

This is still a bit of a mystery, but I’m hoping to get some enlightening comments (that would be cool).

Anyway, we ran into a bit of a performance problem the other day: Verity was apparently spending over 3 seconds to perform a simple search on a relatively small collection. After a lot of time spent placing CFTIMERs all over the place, we concluded that it really was Verity. The only difference with other Verity searches I had built in the past was that we were now using the new category feature that comes with CFMX 7. So we removed the category bit from the search and we went back to a comfortable 30 to 200 ms execution time on the CFSEARCH tag…

I will now repeat. With category search: 3 seconds. Without: less than half a second.

And we were only using 2 categories in the collection so I really don’t know why this happened. We couldn’t spend more time on this problem so we just removed the category system from the search.

Has anybody successfully implemented a Verity search with categories? If you have, I really would like to hear from you.

OK. So I haven’t posted since June… Well, I’m not a born blogger. So what? (Who am I talking to?)

Well, I say I haven’t posted since June, but I have added content to this site recently and it has been very well received indeed. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with ColdFusion or Mach-II. I now have a WordPress section on my code page with a couple of plugins. My Audio player plugin has been particularly successful with a record 54 comments posted so far!

I even have an excuse for not posting since June. Back in February this year (has it really been this long?), we started a complete rewrite of our main project here at Rocom NewMedia. We’re still not done but the whole thing is shaping up nicely. We’re using the Mach-II framework of course with a very nicely designed independent OO model. Hopefully, I should be able to showcase parts of it soon.