It’s been nearly three and a half years since I starting writing about nerdy things on this blog, and during that whole time the design has stayed mostly the same. Today I’m launching a new design, mostly because I’ve been procrastinating about upgrading the Wordpress version the blog runs on (it was still 1.2!). So since my old ‘theme’ wasn’t even compatible with the new version, I decided to update the look a bit. I started with a version of the theme ‘Hemingway’ (Or is it ‘Ninjamonkeys’? Whatever.) Anyway, here’s the new design, running on the shiny new version 2.5 of Wordpress. I hope you like it, and if there’s any bugs I’ll hopefully be able to work them out over the coming weeks.

I put this little demo together in preparation for the hack-a-thon this Thursday.

It uses the YouTube player Javascript API to synchronize a Google Maps widget with the video (based on the current time of the video). It was pretty easy to throw together, it took maybe 4 hours from start to finish, and I’ve never used the Google Maps Javascript API before.

Check it out.

Would you like to come to the Googleplex and learn about the new YouTube APIs directly from the engineers that built them?

Yes? Then head over to this signup page and let us know you’re coming. The event is on March 27th, 2008 and will be held at the Google Mountain View campus.

p.s. free punch and pie

After months of work, we are pleased to present SWFObject 2.0.

The project has moved over to the code.google.com website instead of my blog, so go over there and check out the docs and consider upgrading, as the new version is a lot more flexible than v1.5.

I’d like to give a huge thank you to all of the people who contributed and helped us test out the new release, those no longer with us, and of course to Bobby who is easily the biggest contributor to this new version (and has a new design up on his blog!) and has kept the project pushing forward at a good pace.

Moving foward, we’ll be continuing to work with Adobe to get the word out about SWFObject 2.

A list of conferences I’ll be giving talks at this year so far. If you’re in the area you should check them out:

1. FiTC: Toronto (April 19-22, Toronto, Canada) - Always a good time Flash conference up in The Canadia. I’ll be giving a talk about the new YouTube API features we announced today, specifically the Flash and Javascript player control APIs and about the new Chromeless player.
2. Google I/O (May 28-29, San Francisco, CA) - A conference all about Google apps and how to use them. I’ll be giving a talk on using the YouTube player APIs and Chromeless player.
3. Flashbelt (June 10-13, Minneapolis, MN) - One of my favorite Flash conferences is back this year with a ton of great speakers. I’ll be giving a presentation on lessons learned while rebuilding the YouTube video players from scratch.
4. Singularity (October 24-26th, Everywhere) - Singularity is a new ‘conference’ that takes place online - all sessions are broadcast over the internet, and there’s a TON of speakers for this thing. It will be very interesting to see how it turns out - I think it has the potential to change the way technology conferences happen online.

I think that’s about it for now. I’m interested in talking about the YouTube API stuff at more conferences. So if you are running a conference and would be interested in having me speak, please let me know.