myGUIDE

I always wanted to create my own web-based video player to share vacation videos with relatives and friends back home. But I didn’t have an idea where to start. I initially considered Adobe Flash but it’s not free and I didn’t have a license for it. Of course it is easier to just store the video files in YouTube and it will be immediately accessible to everyone. But I don’t like splitting each video into 10-min segments, 10 minutes being the current maximum length of video clips allowed in YouTube. 

Then I came across Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-browser and cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich interactive applications on the web. I read about it several months ago. And the first thing that came to mind was whether it could be used to create a self-hosted video player for sharing videos on the Internet. Last weekend, I finally had the time to try it out. I visited Silverlight’s web site and looked for some introductory materials to work on. Fortunately, I found a tutorial on how to use Silverlight for video playback. I tried it and it worked!

So here is an outline of my first Silverlight video player application. This is based on the tutorial from Silverlight.net. The brief explanation is based on my understanding of the original tutorial.

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After months of inactivity, myGUIDE is now back with a new look and running on a different weblog platform. Yes, you read it right, I changed my blog platform from Serendipity to WordPress. This means that although I have migrated all my previous posts to WordPress, previous links will no longer work since Serendipity and WordPress have different link structure. Now if you’re looking for a particular post, you can still find it here. Just use the search box to locate it.

How did I do it? It was quite easy. Thanks to Windows Live Writer (WLW). But before taking this approach, be warned that this may not be appropriate for your case. This worked for me because myGUIDE is relatively new and has only a small number of blog entries and I’ve been using WLW to post entries to this blog. A Serendipity importer plugin is already available for WordPress. So maybe you’re better off using the plugin. But if you want an alternative approach, you can try this one.

The first thing to do is to create a weblog account in WLW to access your Serendipity-based blog, if you have not done it yet. Then setup another account in WLW to access your WordPress blog. After doing this, you’re ready to go. Simply read your blog entries, one at a time, from your old blog using WLW, then switch to your new blog, and click the Publish button to publish the entry you just retrieved. It is that easy! You can also use WLW to create the relevant categories in your new blog. You can even set the published date so that you can keep the original date of your posts.

But there are limitations to this approach. First, you will lose all your comments. WLW will not read the comments associated to each post.  Second, WLW sometimes will not download the images in the post. Instead it will just get the link of the image from your original blog and use this link in the new one. Thus if you’ll remove your old blog, the images will also disappear. Finally, if you have many entries, transferring all of them can take some time since you have to manually repeat the process of reading your previous posts from Serendipity then publishing it to WordPress. Luckily for me, I have only 15 entries so this was not an issue.

And that’s it!