Youtube, Vimeo Showing in HTML5

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Both YouTube and Vimeo recently gave an option to watch videos in HTML5. I switched right away knowing that every time I try to play an HD video on YouTube, my Macbook fan spins up because of the heat caused from flash processing. On the Dell Mini I just bought, I couldn’t even watch HD videos on youtube because HD video in flash was too much for the atom processor.

When I saw that YouTube and Vimeo were offering HTML5 instead of flash video, I immediately tested both of the above mentioned issues. The fan in the macbook stayed quiet and the Dell Mini didn’t have any problems when I watched HD content with HTML5 video instead of flash. This is an example of the power of HTML5 video and why Apple decided to skip flash on the iPad.

The other thing that I really like about this is the fact that it pushes the HTML5 spec forward that much more. Obviously Google is involved in developing HTML5, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this on YouTube. Vimeo, however, is not involved — at least that i know of — in developing the HTML5 specification and just wants clean, efficient code. HTML5 is a good way to do that.

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A Contact Page to Avoid Spam

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There are too many website owners displaying their email address in the “name [at] tld [dot] com” format, or something like that. Whatever happened to the good old mailto link with the email address being displayed how it’s supposed to? I’ll tell you what happened — spam happened.

Many site owners are afraid of displaying their email address, as it should be displayed, on their site. Since spammers can use scripts to scan websites, the same way google does, to look for email addresses. I’ve been seeing more and more contact forms and weirdly formatted addresses to combat the issue, but there’s a better way.

The robots.txt file in the root of your website is where you control what these bots can do and what they can’t. So if you’ve got your contact info on a certain page, then don’t allow bots to view that page. Bingo.

Now, the robots.txt file isn’t a standard and there’s nothing that guarantees that spam bots will follow the rules, but we can take this a step further.

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Blogroll Links Favicons

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Awhile back I wrote that I was having issues with Blogroll Links Favicons plugin for WordPress. I came up with some code that better displayed the favicons and fixed my issue. I wrote the author and he agreed that this code made more sense. I hadn’t thought about it, but recently I checked to see if the updated code had been put into the plugin and it hadn’t.

Just yesterday I emailed John about getting added as a contributor to the plugin, as he’s recently switched his personal site over to Posterous. He agreed to add me and I put my code in right away.

In the future I’m also going to be looking for ways of optimizing the plugin even more than it already is. I have quite a few links on any given page of my site that use this plugin, especially the about page. It’s getting to the point that having to retrieve all these thumbnails slows down my site, so I’m going to look into making this as fast as possible.

Let me know if you’ve got any questions or suggestions.

Problems Getting WordPress Emails

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Are you having problems getting email sent from you WordPress blog?

One of the features that I really like is being able to get emails when new comments are posted. I also use the Contact Form 7 plugin which needs to send mail.

The Problem

I recently switched web hosts to Webfaction. They’ve been great — what I think you should be able to expect out of shared hosting.  The only problem is that they don’t support PHP’s mail function. They claim it’s to reduce spam — mail() can be used to send email defining the from address as whatever you want without having to authenticate. It can be very convenient, but it’s really not the ideal way to send mail using PHP anyway. WordPress does it because it’s pretty rare to find a server that doesn’t support it and the alternatives are too commonly uninstalled.
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Google Apps

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A little over a year ago I did a post about forwarding your godaddy email to gmail. This worked great for me for about a year, but I recently discovered that you can setup Google Apps for free on your domain and this is much easier to manage. I’m not going to document the process here, since their documentation is pretty easy to follow. It’s pretty much just a bunch of MX records to setup in your DNS.

Once you’re all setup, managing the whole system is super easy. Every account can have gmail, google calendar, google docs and google sites. Once you’ve got the email account setup you can forward to another email address if you want, or just use the inbox that they give you.