Stuff

[filkertom]

Okay, Tom Smith Online may not be going to WordPress. It's got a gazillion lovely features, but I'm having trouble getting it to do a few simple things, and I'm realizing that I nearly overcommitted myself to overhauling my site for the sake of those few simple things.

I want to have slightly more secure streaming audio, and an events calendar. Google Calendar likely will do the job, but I'm looking at a few other options. I appeal to the group mind: Any suggestions for either?

ETA: Spelled out the web site, rather than leave it as TSO and get a further barrage of Trans-Siberian Orchestra jokes. ;)

ETA: One problem certainly solved -- devospice is helping me set up the correct data base to use a modification of the player we use at The FuMP. Clever fellow, that Devo.

Comments

[sethb.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by "more secure streaming audio"? There are plenty of programs around to snarf audio streams, so unless you do a ridiculous amount of work (including inventing a new codec and releasing only object code to listen; even then, if it becomes popular, someone will break it) you aren't going to be able to stop people from grabbing whatever they want. (Worst case, they can always put microphones next to their speakers.)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm planning to stream a lot more audio. Like, most of my albums. (I'll probably use reduced-bitrate MP3s -- 64 Kbps actually sounds pretty decent on most systems without overwhelming anything.) Right now, I'm using a simple playlist-based technique which doesn't hide the location of the file. I have seen a couple of player programs (which cost money, not much but they're not free) that don't reveal the file's location. That would be really good.

As I've said before, I know that a determined hacker can rip me off. Not my customer. I'm actually trying to make the web site cooler; the intention is to reduce the number of lyrics to what's on the albums and what's available for free download (the remaining lyrics going into the revised Big Book, along with guitar chords 'n' stuff)... but to have a Play button for nearly every damn lyrics page. :)

[sethb.livejournal.com]

You obviously can't hide the location of the file from the player. If you just want to trivially hide it from the user looking at the browser, that's easy enough (e.g. frame it, someone would have to look at the source). If you want to prevent deep-linking, there are simple techniques (e.g. change the filename every day, and remove the 2-day-old one; or generate new names every time someone loads the lyrics page and limit the number of times a particular file can be played) that do a reasonably good job.

[budsharpe.livejournal.com]

Sounds a lot like the problem I'm having. I want streaming audio, but I don't want it to be painfully easy to just download the MP3. I'll be interested in what you come up with.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm actually e-mailing with devospice right now about modifying the player he wrote for The FuMP site. Hee.

[budsharpe.livejournal.com]

Me too! He's going to love us...

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Well there's always things like Joomla or Mambo but what it sounds like is you need a commercial setup of some sort.

Oh and if you're still interested in Wordpress but are having problems go and talk to Tinkergirl (http://shorterlink.org/3535) over at Brass Goggles. That site runs on Wordpress and she works with it directly so she might have some suggestions.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee. This time of year, I read TSO as being Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and went "what the heck is Tom talking about??" Shows you where my mind is.

As for the more secure streaming audio: I don't have any suggestions on what to use. But I do software testing for a living, so if you need someone to try out the new method, and see if they can get around it, just ask and I will be glad to help out.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Not that worried about people getting around it -- more of a casual-user thing. I'm looking right now at the Secure TSPlayer (http://www.tsplayer.com/bar-mp3-flash-player). Not free, but not expensive, and with features I can't find elsewhere (so far, at least).

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

Would it be possible to embed the streaming files in a Flash player? I think that's the solution Blizzard has used to prevent people from yanking the Warcraft background music that they play from their site.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

That's basically what I'm looking at. Actually, I should ask devospice what he's using for The FuMP (http://www.thefump.com)....

[budsharpe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we should bully Devo into writing secure Flash players for us!

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Trans Siberian Orchestra is going to Wordpress? :)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

*smak* -- and for wildcard9, too. You wise guys....

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

Hey now! I said that I mis-read TSO at first, but corrected myself. And my comment was more than just the joke. Honestly, some days it is not worth gnawing through the straps on the straightjacket.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Could be worse. Could be Tesoro Corp, Texas State Optical or The Sims Online.

Let me ask my tech heads what they think; my Justice League wiki just battened down the hatches.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

my Justice League wiki just battened down the hatches.

Ok, so normally wikis annoy me [coming from knowing just enough HTML to get by, my trying to use wikis is like trying to play baseball, complete with spikes, on a basketball court] so references to wikis tend to annoy me as well [though the unintentionally funniest thing I've seen this week was a Google ad for "At Last! A Wiki For Non-Techies!" -- as in, I thought that was the *WHOLE FREAKIN' POINT* of wikis?!).

But that's a great image. I'm currently picturing a whole storm of DC villains attacking a Justice League-emblazoned wiki sub... thanks for making my day. :)

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

This Justice League is a citizens' help group in Second Life, the villians are a specific gang of hackers and trolls whose fun we keep spoiling by enforcing the rules, but basically your mental picture is correct.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Oh? I thought you guys had disbanded. BTW: the griefers are often found near the borders of Luskwood, throwing particles as far inside as they can.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Oh hell no, who told you that? The furry territories are usually on our patrol routes, will start checking on Luskwood personally. Best offer I can make.

I'm having more comic book geek fun in SL than I would have in WoW... we all have a dream I guess. Best, "Kara T."

[budsharpe.livejournal.com]

I can try to help with your WordPress woes. I'm making WP dance a bit for the Possible Oscar site in development, and I think we have similar goals for our sites.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but, no. I finally got annoyed at the insistence of WP to make pages (which are supposed to be for static info) display the "time of posting" info. More to the point, it wasn't obvious how to have an unchanging page of links to unchanging pages, i.e., a list of song titles where each title is a link to the lyrics page. The appeal of changing the look-and-feel easily and of having an audio player widget isn't worth this when I can just tweak my template file and install a Flash player.

[budsharpe.livejournal.com]

I won't try to change your mind, but I will say that what you want to do is possible. However, it's probably not categorized as easy as it involves adding some custom PHP to the template files. I'm doing exactly what you are describing on my site, but I'm also building my own theme from the ground up.

I hope your new solution is more intuitive.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It's not even a matter of intuitive: Every once in awhile, I get it into my head that I'd like to do something really cool with the site, and I get in over my head. Given that the grand bulk of the site is either lyrics, MP3s, or promotional stuff, I have to remind myself to focus on those. And they don't change much at all, so I really don't need WP for them. The few dynamic items, e.g., calendar, can be handled as well without the WP baggage. And so my grandiose scheme doesn't take off, but the site does slowly improve.

[denali1.livejournal.com]

I've tried various open source systems and I don't like any of them currently.

* Joomla/Mambo has too many open source "political" problems right now, concerning their rather narrow interpretation of the GPL.
* Wordpress lacks a certain flexibility that I'm looking for.
* Drupal is nice, but their templates are just ugly. If you have someone who can make you a nice template, you may want to consider it.
* Slashcode isn't friendly.
* Metadot is less friendly than Slashcode (and boy, that takes some work).

Concerning streaming security, the Flash solution your looking at really is the best idea to date. MySpace, Blizzard and several others use that method and it's pretty hardware/OS neutral. RealPlayer is possibly the only other solution out there, but I know many people (myself included) hate the RM standard with a passion.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big fan of Real myself. I've got the first three iTom albums up on SNOCAP, which cuts-and-pastes easily, but I'm looking for a rather simpler player, not dependent on a server away from TSO.

[jss]

* Slashcode isn't friendly.

From when I last looked at it, Slashcode isn't just "not friendly," it's downright effing hostile and genocidal, making me in a bad mood look like Polyanna in rose-colored glasses.

[denali1.livejournal.com]

Believe me. If you felt that way about Slashcode, you would shoot yourself if you tried Metadot. Metadot has some REALLY interesting features, but it really is worse than Slashcode to set up.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm trying to set donnael.com up on Drupal at the moment. Incredibly flexible, but I'm just having a little trouble getting it to flex in the right direction. I did find a reasonably cool-looking template, though...

[denali1.livejournal.com]

I decided to give Drupal another shot and found that they added a new template with 5.x that I really liked! :) I also b0rked up the site at one point just to see how hardy it was and it passed. Drupal gets my official seal of approval.

[graysoul.livejournal.com]

calendarix? Costs $80 but does _everything_.
I have some trivially simple php calendar code here:
http://www.bobdbob.com/~graysoul/calendar/

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

Hey, keep the TSO! Getting Trans-Siberian Orchestra jokes is a good thing! Besides, if they (or Savatage, as they were previously known) decide to find out what all the fuss is about, hell, you might have some appropriate songs for them to cover.

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

Forgot to mention: I just discovered that my LWL logo (on louislamp.com) might get me in trouble. Googling LWL gets Ladies Who Launch.

Ooh, six word news story for that other post:
Ladies Who Launch Partners Into Space