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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I have a couple of websites running phpwebsite. In these websites, I used the Article Manager module to handle article submission. I came up with a guide to help users of these sites. I am reposting the article here, which initially appeared at the Philippines Today website. The article is as follows:

To submit an article in this website, you need to have a username. If you already have one, you can login using the Log In box, which can be found in the left column of this page. If you don’t have an account yet, you can get one by signing up here. You only need a valid email address where your login credentials will be emailed.

After logging in, click here or the Submit An Article link from the Main menu box. A page containing an empty article will be displayed. See images below. Enter the necessary information, such as the article’s title, summary, and content, and click the Save Article button at the bottom of the page to post your article. The home page will be automatically updated with the summary of your article posted at the top of the Recent Article… section. It is that easy!

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