Things that made me happy this morning:

• Let’s all go Squirrel Fishing
• A Chiptune Christmas Album for free 8 bit Jesus
• Having inspired someone immensely to use Yahoo Pipes at GeekMeet in Sweden
• Seeing that annoying crowds in public transport can become beautiful, spooky clouds when shot with the right camera
• A full list of references and samples used in Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique – someone really researched there!
• Microsoft releasing a t-shirt series called softwear goes in the WTF category
• A very clean and well coded DHTML snowstorm by Scott Schiller – who says we cannot upgrade useless 1997 effects?
• Valleywag defining ‘Irony’ by wondering and complaining that all the news media is overly involved with the Yahoo layoffs. Wait, if we were to delete all blog posts mentioning Yahoo from your DB, what would be left?

The last few months Chris Mills from Opera was busy gathering a lot of great web development experts around him (with a lot of pimping by yours truly) to assemble probably the most thorough and up-to-date web standards curriculum on the web: The Opera Web Standard Curriculum

Several dozen articles, all licensed with Creative Commons will be available to cover the tasks of web development: from understanding the principles of the web up to Ajax interaction. During the whole course the main focus is on usability, accessibility and writing maintainable code. We deliberately left out browser hacks and backward facing solutions and build on the ideas of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JavaScript.

I wished this would’ve been out when I started, it’d have saved me a lot of time learning bad practices and un-learning them (which is always a painful process).

So, read it, use it and teach younglings the way of the standards Jedi: The Opera Web Standard Curriculum

As several people asked how I did the easier Flickr interface, I wrote up some step-by-step instructions, analyzing the issues and then taking the API to work around them.

Check out How to create an alternative Flickr interface – step by step.

This is one example where providing a good API can empower developers to remove barriers you might not be aware of for you. I hope to be able to show you more of those in the future.

The code examples are available and are licensed with BSD, so feel free to re-use them.

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)