Gradual Quietness

Google Reader is my favorite daily online RSS reader, and it’s getting better and better recently. Some of the new features just added include a nice search box (finally!) and some small improvements. But what I am not satisfied is its somewhat boring and long-time-no-change user interface.

There were some tweaks to Google Reader’s interface and I tried some but none of them satisfied me until recently I found this one: OS X Style Google Reader by Jon Hicks. As the name tells, it mimics the Mac OS X Mail.app look to Google Reader. I feel this one is better than Google Reader’s default appearance by removing some items and changing fonts and colors. In order to install this style, you need to install the Stylish extension for Firefox, then load the script into Stylish. After all the installations, reload Google Reader and you will see the difference! You can find more styles for Google Reader here.

UPDATE: Google Reader just graduated from Google Labs and now is official.

Normally I use one Google account, one Yahoo! account, one Flickr account, etc, for daily web activities. But sometimes I do need to login another account, for example, my AdSense account which is different from my primary Google account, or another Flickr account that’s reserved exclusively for my daughter, etc. Firefox remembers my password so I don’t need to login every time when I open the browser. But if I want to switch between different accounts, I have to logout then login again. That’s a simple task but sometimes it’s boring.

Here’s a little tip, which I realized when I use the IE Tab extension for Firefox, to solve this problem very well. The IE Tab extension essentially uses Internet Explorer (IE) to render a web page in a Firefox tab. So it mimics two browsers in one browser window. What I do is open an IE Tab and login another account and it does not influence my always-logged-in account at all. It’s that simple. Of course, you can open two or more browsers if you like, but this is a neater manner I believe.

Considering that this blog is the main function of this domain and WordPress can be easily customized to be a portal, I decided to change the blog address to http://gqshen.com permanently. It’s implemented by referring to this document.

The main drawback is the old permalinks from bookmarks or search engine cache, i.e. those led by http://gqshen.com/blog, will not work. Instead, visitors will get to the ugly 404 page, though I have put a note in it.

UPDATE: Just installed the Redirection plugin at Urban Giraffe and it solves the URL problem almost perfectly.

I created a video collection page for my daughter’s blog long time ago but turned out to update it very slowly. A very important reason is the procedure to put the video online is much more complicated and time consuming than photo processing. Another reason is that the page lacks of convenient back end administration tools and playing controls. So I have been looking for a nice method to put video clips on blog for long time. What I want from this method is there’s a playing console so audience can watch the video clips without leaving the page. Another requirement is it must support playlist so that I can easily add or remove clips. Finally I found wordTube, a very nice WordPress plugin to integrate flash video player in WordPress, for various playlists or for single clip. Because of it, I spent some time these days to convert some of the old video files and find some other useful tools for this total solution. Following is my simple yet efficient solution to process video and put them online in WordPress.

1. Capture
   I use a Panasonic PV-GS250 3CCD video camera for event video taping and a Fujifilm FinePix F30 for casual daily shooting. Both of them output good enough video quality for web presentation. The first step is to capture the video from the cameras to the computer. For F30, it’s just to download the AVI files to hard drive, and they have 640×480 resolution. For GS250, I use Ulead VideoStudio to capture from the tape and generally the file will be huge for a general length video clip, it also has 640×480 resolution. Now these downloaded or captured files are ready for editing.
2. Edit
   This is the most time consuming step. I use Ulead VideoStudio for this task because of its intuitive interface and simplicity. Basically I just add titles and some simple transit effects between clips so more advanced softwares are just over kill. Besides titles and transit effects, I also do some cut and trim. So far I still leave the audio alone because for candid shooting of kids, I prefer to keep ambient sound. But I think I will try audio editing later. After all the edit, I export it to a video file. Currently I use Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec V2 because after some comparisons, I found it gives decent quality and relative small file size. So what I get is an AVI file with he original video size, 640×480.
3. Convert
   In order to put the video online in a flash player, I need to convert the video files to flash video (FLV) format. There are many converting tool out of there, some are commercial and some are free. I tried some of them including Macromedia flash 8 Video Encoder, Riva FLV Encoder and SUPER. Finally I stay with Flash 8 Video Encoder because it gives high quality flash video with its On3 VP6 video codec. It has batch convert, it’s easy to use and it comes with Macromedia Flash 8. Riva FLV encoder is a freeware and very easy to use and the conversion is much faster than Flash 8 Video Encoder. But the quality is not so good as Flash 8 Video Encoder for similar or even greater data rate. I guess maybe that’s caused by its Sorenson Spark video codec though I am not clear about its technical details. The FLV Player comes with it is fine so I just keep it. I also tried SUPER, which is also free but I uninstalled it because it just doesn’t have any appealing advantages comparing with Flash 8 Video Encoder. In Flash 8 Video Encoder, I convert AVI files to 320×240 medium quality FLV files using On2 VP6 video codec, 96kbps stereo MPEG layer III (MP3) audio codec. The file size of the FLV file is only about 1/9 of the original AVI file. The FLV files can be played on local computer by an FLV player, or embedded into a flash player on the web.
4. Flash player integration
   I use wordTube, a plugin for WordPress, to manage all the video (and audio) files and integrate them with the blog. It supports playlists so I can generate various playlists from the media center. Also, it’s very easy to embed a single video file in a blog post or page. This is a very convenient feature for podcast while one still wants to keep an archive of the whole media library in different categories (playlists). The plugin uses the JW Media Player to play media files. Options are provided to customize the player in the back end, including appearance and controls. The media files can be on your server, or can also be on any other remote servers as long as it can be accessed.
   UPDATED 2008-04-17: The latest version of JW Media Player now supports YouTube, means that you can embed YouTube videos in your OWN player without downloading the FLV files. It’s convenient to generate a list of all your videos hosted on YouTube.

Essentially this is my workflow for video manipulation. I think it’s efficient while with good quality for personal video showcase, such as for a kid’s blog. Please let me know if you have any other better ideas on this topic.

If you have your blogs hosted at BSP’s such as Blogger and Wordpress.com, you are not able to install plugins so this method doesn’t apply to your case. An alternative is you can upload your video files to video hosting services such as YouTube or Google Video then embed the video in your posts or pages. Both YouTube and Google Video provide necessary code for this purpose. You can refer to the instruction here and here, respectively.

Other related resources

• Quick Media Converter
• 5 Essential Video Plugins for WordPress
• WordPress 插件——CoolPlayer
• Post Tools
• KeepVid
• Online FLV Converter
• WordPress plugin: Youtuber
• GooTube FLV Retriever

About one and half years ago, I listed some of my favorite freebies, including software and online services. As time goes on, more and more freeware and web applications come out every single day, I think I need to revise the list while add some new ones. I believe this list will keep growing in the future.

• Email
  Gmail, no-brainer. With this better Gmail Firefox extension, Gmail is THE BEST. For local email client, I highly recommend Thunderbird, which I use to backup my Gmail emails on my computer locally.
• Online RSS reader
  I migrated from Bloglines to Google Reader completely. Basically two features of Google Reader make me stick to it. The first one is its keyboard shortcut support. I am a vi(m) fan so these keyboard shortcuts are definitely my cup of tea. Another one is that Google Reader’s “mark as read” is post wise, but not feed wise like Bloglines does. This makes more sense to me because sometimes I don’t have time to read all the posts in a subscription and want to get back to read them next time. Those unread ones are still marked as new in Google Reader and that’s really useful.
• Social bookmarks
  Still del.icio.us. Actually, it’s the support of private bookmarks of del.icio.us and this del.icio.us bookmarks extension for Firefox(my favorite web brower BTW) convinced me that I can totally move to del.icio.us. And the extension even supports keywords in bookmarks just like in Firefox. The biggest benefit to use online bookmarks is my bookmarks are automatically synchronized between different computers.
• Image browser
  XnView. I have used BreezeBrowser for five years and it’s not bad. But its new versions are not free anymore, so I want to make a change. After comparing IrfanView and XnView, I decided to go for the latter one. The main reason for me to make the choice is interface and speed. I like the way XnView handles thumbnails and full image browsing. It has a three-panel layout for convenience of folder browse and image information, but most of the time I hide the other two panels and it’s very neat.
• Music organizer and player
  MediaMonkey. I am a long term XMMS and Winamp user, then foobar2000 because everybody is saying good words about it. Foobar2000 is good, it’s fast and powerful and with simple yet very configurable layout. But after I tried MediaMoney, I liked it at once. What I like it the most is its very powerful music organizing feature. When it’s combined with the playlist, I think that’s exactly I want from a music player: easy to organize and convenient to make a playlist.
• File manager
  FreeCommander. Before I chose FreeCommander, I tried UltraExplorer for couple months and Total Commander for several days. The first one is free and very unique for its breadcrumb feature and highly configurable interface. The latter one is not free, and very famous because it’s very powerful with the ability to use lots of plugins. After trying three of them, I decided on FreeCommander because it has almost all the features I want, and it has the interface I am comfortable with, and it’s FREE. Actually what I like it the most is that it has dual panels, tab supported, quick filter supported, and has a user configurable center column for access to frequently used operations and bookmarks. I am looking forward to FTP support in its succeeding versions but so far I am quite satisfied.