YouEmbed has been rewritten in PHP. When I first decided to create YouEmbed, I was just looking for a small project to complete using Ruby on Rails as a way to learn Rails. However, maintaining the Rails framework has become too tedious, and PHP can complete the task in a much quicker manner. Sorry Rails. It was fun while it lasted.
I have recently decided to take an indefinite hiatus from the development of YouEmbed. I have moved on to other things, and with my co-op taking up the majority of my time I’ve realized that I can no longer continue to update YouEmbed at this time.
VBounce is an object-oriented data structure framework for Visual Basic 6.0 that I decided to create last November when I became incredibly frustrated at the VB “Collections” object. After postponing that project for nearly ten months due to technical issues that I was eventually able to resolve, I decided that I would revive the project, continue development, and finally publish it on the web.
The future of YouEmbed is ultimately in the hands of those who have used it. If you have found YouEmbed to be helpful, spread the word of its existance across the web. I’d like to thank jbomb for taking an interest in this project and enabling it to live on the web.
I spent some time today creating two new pages that have been added to YouEmbed: an About page and a Contact form. In doing so I had to redesign the footer, making it the primary navigation bar on the website. Both the About page and the Contact form contain ‘Home’ buttons to redirect the user to the object tag generator.
The majority of my time was spent creating the Contact form, which I based extensively on a well-written article explaining an implementation using PHP on the server-side and calling Ajax functions through jQuery on the client-side. You can read it (and should read it) here.
The About page simply describes YouEmbed’s purpose, it’s Privacy Policy, and the various technologies that were used in its development. Enjoy these new features, and take advantage of the new Contact form, as I am very interested in user feedback.
I am rather excited to announce that my first web development project debuted this morning. YouEmbed, a lightweight tool for assisting web designers with a very common validation issue, was born out of my disdain for the “embed” tag and my recent research into Ruby on Rails. YouEmbed serves one purpose: to generate a valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional object tag for a YouTube video link.
I originally conceptualized the functionality of YouEmbed when I was designing a website for a student project last spring. My project consisted of numerous embedded YouTube videos that I commented on briefly in a blog-like manner. One requirement for the project was that it had to be created using valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS. When I quickly discovered that the object/embed tags YouTube gives you for their videos do not actually validate, I searched endlessly for a method of adjusting the tag so that my page would validate. Eventually, after spending plenty of time searching the web and reading blogs, I discovered a format that used only the object tag, rendered perfectly in FireFox, Safari and IE, (Yeah, I was impressed too.) and validated. I committed the method to memory and used it extensively throughout my project. At one point during the course I created a brief tutorial detailing how to complete this task, and I emailed it to my entire class.
Fast-forward a few months to this June. I was desperately searching for a new project, specifically something that someone might actually be able to use. I was reading a lot about different development platforms and web technologies, (I even learned C# during my summer internship.) and at some point I got a hold of an excellent introductory guide to Ruby on Rails. After spending some time with Rails, I decided to write YouEmbed just to see if my algorithm could be implemented in Ruby. A few weeks later, YouEmbed was born.
I am concerned with the actual clientele that exists for this type of web application. The types of people who actually embed YouTube videos are generally bloggers who tend to disregard validation and web standards. Hopefully the convenience of YouEmbed will help to correct this, even if it’s only with embedded YouTube videos.
I plan to continue working on YouEmbed, granted it eventually receives a bit of traffic and positive feedback. I understand that the object tag generator is not perfect and could use some more error checking. Additionally, I’d eventually like to create an asynchronous process so that the generated tag could appear in the same page. For now I can take solace in the fact I’ve published my first web application, and as simple as it is, I know that it would’ve made my life much easier last spring.
