Steve Heffernan’s Blog

UPDATE: This tutorial has been rolled into an open source html5 video player.

This is a tutorial on building an HTML5 video player in Javascript. It’s meant to give you a basic understanding of the different options you have with the new video tag in HTML5, and the javascript needed to create some of the typical video controls you’d find in other players. It’s library agnostic, meaning you don’t need a library like jQuery to create it, however once you understand how everything works it can definitely be simplified/improved on. I’m always open for feedback if you have suggestions.

View the final result.

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This is a list of online video transcoding providers in no particular order. More for my own reference.
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For a long time Zencoder has had the domain zencoder.tv. Since then we’ve purchased the dot com version from the original owner. The question now is whether to completely switch over to the dot com version, or just redirect dot com requests to dot tv.
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Last weekend a friend and I put a little more work into our snorkel website. We’ve still got a ways to go, but it’s looking a million times better than it did. Apparently it paid off because today I got an email that we made a sale! We sold a pink Kapitol Reef Snorkel interestingly enough. We only sell Kapitol Reef snorkels at this point, but pink is the last color I expected. Continue Reading »

Today is my sister’s birthday, and for her gift I’m moving her new baby’s website from Totsites to Tumblon, and getting her a year of the premium subscription. Both sites allow you to blog about your child, post photos, notify family members, etc., but Totsites has super cheesy templates while Tumblon is really clean. Not to mention it’s owned by a friend of mine from Zencoder, John Dahl.
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I wanted to add both Zencoder and Flix Cloud to a list of video editing software on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is pretty picky about external links. My links got erased after only a day.
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When eBay was first gaining popularity I bought a good amount of stuff there, but I never actually sold anything. I think it was the hassle of having to package something and send it off that kept me from trying.
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A friend and I are starting to look into buying a home. One of the latest Fortune editions has LA with the biggest price drop in 2009 at 25%, and they expect it will continue to drop another 5% in 2010. That plus some upcoming government incentives make it a good time to start looking for the perfect deal.

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After years of it saying “I’m not making any promises”, with some jacked-up accidental jQuery effect that made everything disappear, I have updated steveheffernan.com. It was more about the content than anything else, so I went with a 600px wide, 1 column layout, with nothing interesting design-wise except some highlight-styled links.

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Flying to TX tomorrow to see my new niece, and needed a place to park near Ontario Airport. I clicked the first search result, “Park ‘n Fly”, and it looked decent enough. I set up my reservation, put in my credit card info, and after hitting submit I realized I wasn’t on a secure page! I used to be really good about checking for that, but up to this point I’ve never seen a site that didn’t use a secure page on a form, especially when accepting credit cards, so I got lazy. Some web developer out there needs to be slapped. Here’s the unsecured site. Continue Reading »