I wanted to give a list of all my presentations on SlideShare right here on the blog and started playing with the SlideShare API in earnest. As I failed in just including my results in the blog, I wrapped them in a WordPress plug-in in case you also feel like listing your SlideShare achievements.

You can see the plugin in action on the presentations page and here’s a screenshot:

Notice that I am offering a link to Easy SlideShare as an option so that blind users can only go to the transcript instead of having to try to understand the Flash embed. The API actually has a transcript element, but there is no content in there right now. Would be cool to see it enabled :)

Update: The Plugin now also allows you to copy and paste the “WordPress” code from SlideShare into any WordPress blog running this plug-in.

This screenshot shows what the inital state of a post (with some CSS) looks like:

When you click the “here and now” link you get the “normal” SlideShare experience:

The plug-in is open source, BSD licensed and if you want to use it you need to get a developer key from SlideShare

Once you have those, simply change the variables in the slidesharelist-config.php file accordingly. Say SlideShare gave you a key of “minor” and a secret of “I really like Weird Al Yankovic” then you’ll have to change:

$key = ‘YOUR KEY’;

$secret = ‘YOUR SECRET’;

$apiurl = ‘http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/’;

?>

to the following:

$key = ‘minor’;

$secret = ‘I really like Weird Al Yankovic’;

$apiurl = ‘http://www.slideshare.net/api/1/’;

?>

That’s all you need to do, simply FTP the whole folder over to your plugin directory of WordPress and activate the plugin inside WordPress.

All you need to display your list of presentations in a blog post or page is to add the following:

[*slideshare-username-amount]

For example the following would show my latest 5 slides:

[*slideshare-cheilmann-5]

The other option you have is to copy and paste a single presentation into the blog post. You can either use the following syntax:

[*slideshare-presentation:url]

An example would be my “Creating Happy Little Web Sites” presentation:

[*slideshare-presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/creating-happy-little-websites]

Alternatively you can use the copy and paste code slideshare offers you for blogs hosted on slideshare from the SlideShare presentation page itself. For example my presentation “Yahoo is Open for Developers” from the Ankara Open Source event:

[*slideshare id=477388&doc=opensourceankara-1213971414957829-9&w=425]

This is taken from:

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/yahoo-is-open-to-developers

New in 1.10:

As requested in the comments below, you can now also list slideshows for tags and groups. The syntax is the following:

[*slideshare-group:{group}:{amount}]

For example:

[*slideshare-group:yahoo-developer-network:3]

And if you want to see slides for a certain tag:

[*slideshare-tag:{tag}:{amount}]

For example:

[*slideshare-tag:ajax:3]

• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.10
• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.05
• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.00

Someone just came to our table at Mashed08 and asked if Yahoo! offers a currency conversion API. We don’t, but a few lines of PHP allows you to get the information from the Yahoo finance site:

function convert($from,$to){

$url= ‘http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=’.$from.’&to=’.$to.’&submit=Convert’;

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$feed = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

preg_match_all(“/tabledata1”>([^<]+)/”,$feed,$cells);

return $cells[1][1];

}

	
echo convert(‘USD’,’GBP’);

There’s a whole list of currency codes available on oanda.

A few more lines turns this into a JSON API:

header(‘Content-type:text/javascript’);

$from = $_GET[‘from’];

$to = $_GET[‘to’];

$callback = $_GET[‘callback’];

if(preg_match(“/[A-Z|a-z]{3}/”,$to) && preg_match(“/[A-Z|a-z]{3}/”,$from)){

$to = strToUpper($to);

$from = strToUpper($from);

$url= ‘http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?’ .

‘amt=1&from=’.$from.’&to=’.$to.’&submit=Convert’;

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$feed = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

preg_match_all(“/tabledata1”>([^<]+)/”,$feed,$cells);

if(is_numeric($cells[1][1])){

$out = ‘{“from”:”’.$from.’”,”to”:”’.$to.’”,”factor”:”’.$cells[1][1].’”}’;

} else {

$out = ‘{error not convert currencies, are you sure about the names?”}’;

}

	
} else {

$out = ‘{error Currency format, must be three letters”}’;

}
	
if(isset($callback)){

if(preg_match(“/[a-z|A-Z|_|-|$|0-9|.]/”,$callback)){

$out = $callback.’(‘.$out.’)’;

} else {

$out = ‘{error callback method name”}’;

}
	
}

echo $out;

You have several parameters:

• from (mandatory): three letter currency code (upper or lower case)
• to (mandatory): three letter currency code (upper or lower case)
• callback (optional): the name of the callback method that should be wrapped around the resulting object

If something goes wrong, the API will return an object with an error property, otherwise you’ll get an object with three properties:

• from: the original currency
• to: the target currency
• factor: the conversion factor

Say you store this as convert.php somewhere, then you could do the following:

This is a terrible dirty hack and if Yahoo finance ever changes their HTML (and they will), this will cease to work.

Warning: The YouTube API is flaky at the moment, so there might be some outages!

At this year’s Accessibility2.0 conference in London Antonia Hyde from United Response asked the audience for technological solutions to make the social web easier accessible for people with learning disabilities.

Her presentation Rich Media and web apps for people with learning disabilities is available on slideshare.

Whilst not being able to tackle all the issues mentioned (probably the biggest one being captioning) I took some time to play with the YouTube API to create a much easier interface to watch videos. The following screenshot shows the Easy YouTube Player in action:

Using the player

You can use the player in several ways, the easiest is to just copy and paste a youtube url in the url field. However, there is also a sort of REST interface that allows you to do more:

Shows the player without any movie loaded, empty search fields and playlists.

Pre-loads the video of this YouTube address and shows the preview image in the player.

Performs a search on YouTube for the term panda and shows links to the videos in the playlist on the right. You can use more than one search word by adding them with a “+”. For example:

One last option you have is to bookmark certain videos on del.icio.us and tag them for a user. In order to show these videos as a playlist you need to provide your user name and the tag separated by a dash. For example my user name on del.icio.us is “codepo8” and I bookmarked some videos with the tag “easyyoutubeplayer”. The following link will show them all in the playlist:

You can mix and match the different options. If you for example want to show a video and perform a search for other videos you can use:

Documentation

The full player documentation with instructions on how to host the player yourself is available in the docs folder Easy YouTube Player documentation.

Download

You can download the player with all the demo files here:

• Download Easy YouTube Player V2
• Download Easy YouTube Player V1.5
• Download Easy YouTube Player V1.0

Changes

12/06/08

• complete re-write of code
• new buttons – glass were too complex
• added video size control
• added search and playlist support
• added address field to send to friends
• player now template driven – no more changes in main code needed
• added documentation
• added RESTful interface

28/05/08

• moved buttons to the bottom of the player
• text is now below the buttons and has an invisible extra “use this button to ” text for screen readers
• pause button now toggles pause/play
• mute button now toggles mute/sound
• the URL of the buttons is not an anchor but a url now (that goes nowhere, but this is just to read out the right command)
• removed the “current highlight” state
• added a volume level indicator (as a visual bar and a hidden form field)

I am almost ready to release v2 of the easy youtube player but out of a sudden everything stopped working. I thought at first my own developer key got banned for incessant re-loading locally, but even Google’s own example is broken.

The solution to it seems to be to change the URL of the embed code:

// broken

swfobject.embedSWF(‘http://gdata.youtube.com/apiplayer?key= ... ‘)

// working

swfobject.embedSWF(‘http://gdata.youtube.com/apiplayer/cl.swf?key= ... ‘)

Thanks do d.kunchev who pointed this out on the mailing list

YouTube just released a new feature for video content generators: annotations. As you can see in this example video of someone jumping out of an aircraft the annotations show up whereever you want to put them on the screen and are time-based. You can even add links and hotspots to other videos and search results which means you can do interactive games using several videos.

Now this is all cute and nice, but what I’d want is API access to these annotations. This would allow us to provide not only captioning of the video for the hard of hearing but also information for blind visitors. I’ve written about this before, you can easily create an interface to have timed captioning on youtube but playing the captions back is trickier as you have no means of syncing the video (if the video buffers in between the captions and the video get out of sync).

Now, if YouTube came up with an API access to these captions that fires an event every time a new caption starts with the type of caption and its text value, it would be dead easy to update a hidden form field with that text (or an ARIA live region) to provide a poor man’s captioning and information for the hard of hearing.

YouTube could become both a larger consumer faced product by enabling more disabled visitors to gain access and a means of captioning video that is intuitive and easy to use.

I’d be happy to help out!

• check out youtube annotations