Earlier today while fixing another problem here on the site, it was pointed out to me that the “Submit Comment” button was almost on top of the Seesmic raccoon logo for video comments:
This fix was relatively straightforward. I just headed into <WPMU>/wp-content/plugins/seesmic-wp-plugin and then found my way down to lines 179 and 180:
And yes, the irony of adding BR tags after today’s earlier exercise was not lost on me. In any event, the little racoon is now not practically on top of the Submit Comment button:
And yes, it’s a kludgy hack that will undoubtedly be blown away if I ever upgrade the Seesmic plugin… but hey, the beauty of it all was that I could tweak it to fit our site.
If you look down in the comments area of this – or any other blog post – you’ll now see a link that says you can add a video comment:
What’s going on? Well, I’ve added a new video plugin for Wordpress from the folks at Seesmic. Here’s brief video intro from me:
{seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/drqRzo4T9X_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Adding Seesmic’s WP plugin to our WPMU site ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/HPiBziWhfW”}}}
Adding the plugin to WordPress MU was very straightforward. I downloaded the code, unzipped it and copied the directory into the “plugins” directory (NOT mu-plugins). I then went into Site Administration -> Plugin Commander and clicked on the “Allow” link to allow individual blogs to have this capability. Next I went into the admin dashboard for this blog and enabled the plugin for this blog. Ta da… video comments and embeds into posts are now enabled.
Why didn’t I just enable it across all blogs? Well, I like the granularity of being able to enable or disable it on a per-blog basis. The reality is that I’ll probably enable it for all the blogs on this site that I primarily run. But we may have other blogs here that others run (as Chris does with the Voxeo Labs blog) where they don’t want to use video.
One note I should make. In the Seesmic plugin configuration (for each blog), I have opted to allow “anonymous” video comments, meaning that someone does not need to have a Seesmic account in order to leave a video comment. There’s a checkbox there that enables that kind of posting:
Now, the one down-side I’ve already discovered is that in order to use it to embed a video in a post like this, I have to use the WordPress web editor to write my post. However, I almost never use this web editor because I’ve gotten very addicted to doing all my blogging offline using MarsEdit. However, I think odds are that when I want to embed a video, I probably won’t want to write as much text, so I probably won’t need all the shortcuts that I’ve gotten used to in MarsEdit. (I may also be able to go into the web editor, record and embed the video, save it as a draft, and then pull it down into MarsEdit and do further editing there – I’ll have to try it.)
Outside of that, it seems like a cool way to add video into the blogging platform. Let me know what you think. Hey… if you have a webcam, you can leave me a video comment!
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