Silverlight Video and Embedding

http://silverlight.live.com

Silverlight was used below to great effect to publish the same video as was earlier published via Soapbox and then also embedded to the blog.  To embed Silverlight I could not paste the embed code directly into the Edit pane but rather tried to paste it into the Source pane. Within Live Writer’s preview it looked like I had the result I was after but once published to WordPress.com it was gone.

Later I found a Silverlight Plug-in for Live Writer and was then able to successfully embed the video as show below.  The result is a much improved and beautiful rendering of the video and great streaming performance.

err I guess that didn’t work either – must be a WordPress.com thing

 

‘AddThis’ button for organic web content sharing

I discovered the above button and pop out social sharing menu at the bottom of every blog post of a colleague of mine has on Blogger and thought ‘what a great idea!’.  So I’ve now figured out how to add one manually to a post.  Its a trick of copying the HTML code into the Source view and then go back to the edit view to finish the blog writing.  Next step is to encourage the Live Writer developers to generate a plug-in to add this to every post auto-magically.  This is how I discovered its use and would very much like to imitate this smart idea.

Thanks goes to SBS guru Sean Daniel who I now aggregate on the right column.

Test Lab – Embedding Video Via ‘soapbox on MSN’

 

***
‘Embed code’ was taken from Soapbox and then pasted into Windows Live Writer.  The code was reworked as necessary automatically by the software and publishing obviously worked. Pasting embed code directly into the WordPress.com new post creator UI was unsuccessful.
***

FYI – just discovered really cool factoid about the content above

The video soundtrack is an early career heartfelt soulful lyrical piece composed and performed by recording artist Keri Noble. You may not believe it but I made the video with that song before doing any of this following background research.

When researching her present ‘goings on’ I found this ‘its a small world’ entry on Keri’s MySpace page blog alluding to the very song used in the above video creation. That same day, March 16′th, she was in Cincinnati performing at South Gate House and I had not idea and missed it – doh.

Just within past weeks, Kelly Clarkson’s newly released Billboard #1 album does in fact use Keri’s song – this song – on it! Keri’s finally getting some payback on her very soulful creativity – awesome!

Keri’s voice still gets my vote on its delicate probing, textured range, and soaring verve.

Outlook Express Compacting Annoyance Message

Condition:  After logon immediately following boot-up, a message prompt appears informing you to compact the Outlook Express message store and includes a button to trigger the routine.

Perhaps your users don’t use Outlook Express but in this case it won’t matter.  Lately I’ve experienced a large amount of occurrences of this annoyance on XP SP3 desktops.  For some unknown root cause there is an Outlook Express counter that is suddenly getting triggered upon reaching an open/close limit (100) although it isn’t being opened or closed ever.  There are various reported programs that due to indexing are believed to sufficient trip the counter.  Windows Desktop Search is one of these.  With this app’s ‘Options’, Outlook Express indexing can be manually unchecked; however, still messages continue to appear unabated.

Fortunately I discovered a solution that ends the madness.  The only caveat is that it will permanently disable the counter from ever working.  I’d rather recommend Windows Live Mail over Outlook Express anyway.

Simply altering the Windows Registry to set this counter to 0 will buy you a little time until it reaches 100 again (the limit).  Instead if you completely remove that subkey it stays gone and so do the messages.  Normal precautions and warnings to editing the registry apply.

Here’s where: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0 ->Compact Check Count

…and of course you can just remove Outlook Express altogether via Add/Remove -> Windows Components

****note:  to be clear as pointed out by Jim in the comments, if you do run Outlook Express again, then this key will get recreated.****

Community Clips – user created tutorial vid’s

The idea  behind this Microsoft innovation is that the ‘community’ uses the tool to capture and upload tutorials for sharing. Microsoft then also provides the server space to host these media clips as well as a web portal to find them.  While the pieces aren’t ground breaking, the idea of putting them all together is.  This could be an nifty online enhancement to getting and giving help.

http://communityclips.officelabs.com/Default.aspx

Recently a peer of mine, Allen Miller, was talking about another nifty screen capture tool – JISP – that he likes:

http://allenmillercomputerconsulting.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/jing-cool-screen-capturerecord/