Powered by YouTube event this Thursday, July 10th 2008

Are you interested in the various API services that YouTube offers? Are you going to be in the bay area this Thursday? Then why not stop by Powered by YouTube?

It’s taking place at the San Bruno YouTube office this Thursday, July 10th from 10:30am to 5:30pm.

Here’s the blurb about it:

Powered By YouTube is a developer gathering focused on bringing together developers to learn more about the YouTube APIs and Tools. Spend the day at YouTube’s headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. Meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Also: It’s free, and you get a free lunch.

Help encourage Mozilla to fix a Firefox bug

Firefox has an annoying bug you may have come across while working with Flash applications and websites: When you make a request for a file from a swf, Firefox doesn’t send a referer. I’ve set up a test page to show the problem.

If you visit this page in Firefox and click the “push me” button, you will see simply “Ref is:” but no other text. If you visit in with any other browser, you’ll see:
“Ref is: [http://dev.deconcept.com/referer_tester/]”.

The problem is that Firefox doesn’t properly append the referer header to requests made from swfs embedded on the page. Every other browser I’ve tested sends a referer.

How you can help:

Visit the bug page for this issue and “vote” for the bug. DO NOT ADD A COMMENT SAYING SOMETHING LIKE “Yes please fix this bug!”. This will only annoy the developers. Simply “voting” for the bug is enough. You vote for the bug by clicking the “vote” link on the top right side of the page, and putting a check in the box next to the bug and clicking the “Change my votes” on the subsequent page.

Speaking at Flash on the Beach

I’ve been invited back to speak at Flash on the Beach this year. I’ll be giving a talk about the YouTube player APIs and how you can use YouTube in your online projects.

Flash on the Beach is a fantastic conference in Brighton at the end of September, and it’s one of the best Flash and design conferences to check out.

Registration is now open, so if you’re looking for an excuse to head to the UK, this is it.

Also, next week is Google I/O (Flight of the Conchords are playing a show there!), which I believe still has a few tickets available, and just next month I’ll be heading off to Flashbelt in Minneapolis, so come say ‘Hi’ if you see me wandering around either of these events.

Redesigned

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.