a generous designer’s blog

We can now watch videos even in 1080p HD, but to link to a specific time in the Youtube video is not so evident.

There are a few, nearly similar ways to do it. The differences between them are only there for our ease. No matter which do you use, put it at the end of the youtube link (without quotes). Here are they:

• to begin the video playback at 14 seconds: “#t=14s”
• to begin the video playback at 1 minute and 10 seconds: “#t=1m10s”

Examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3iLFhYDCy0#at=2m20s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TN3VtWwks4&feature=player_embedded#t=45s

Hope it’s useful! If you know other Youtube deeplink feature, don’t hold it back!

Update: one of them doesn’t work any more. corrected.

Oh yes! I made it! After following twitter status on RSS every single day, and sending a couple of emails to the support (no response), and after a HALF YEAR of waiting they can restore my account! THANK YOU!

Even this message could not take my happiness away:

30 days? What the f*ck are you doing there? Never mind, just restore it.

Welcome back feed readers!

After a week ago, before Feedburner announced the moving to Google Accounts, my feed readers count has dropped to the half.

I was a bit upset, but who uses FeedBurner for a while, knows that this could happen sometimes. It only appears in the statistic, and it’s back in a few days, like nothing happened.

But this time these few a days was a bit longer, plus there was this “moving” thing which actually did not resolve the problem, so everybody worried about the lost (or burned ) readers and had another question in mind: was my RSS statistics really authentic? (or should we count the requests manually in a server log? )

For now, the readers are magically back again but with a gap in the statistics. Some folks reported that Google Reader stopped reporting the subscribers to FeedBurner while moving. (Can’t remember the link).

Here’s a shot of my small statistics. As you can see on 17. January I started to “lost” my readers, but on 23. January I’ve got it back. Happy me.

FeedBurner statistics while burning my readers

Just a quick note. Google Apps’ Gmail got a new theme. To be more specific, it’s the new default skin from the Gmail “Themes” feature, which is available  from a couple of months (don’t know exactly).

I’m looking forward to see more customisation options in the domain settings, not just the login box’s border and background color. I don’t think the Gmail themes will be available (concerning the “corporate image” vs “the people who send funny and up-to-date (not!) powerpoint attachments” situation in most of every office, it would be a mess), but I would like to create a colored theme for my business, and maybe with a custom background.

Updated my Wordpress to the latest 2.7 version. It was a few minutes, as always. The bigger issue was to change my permalink structure.

The old one looked like this:

agenerousdesigner.com/blog/blog-posts-title-20081231

It looks now a bit useless, but I had a whole concept when it was created. First of all, i didn’t like the over-segmented /year/month/day/post-title form. I thought that the title is the most important, and the date must be also represented but at the end. Of course in this case the date format was a wrong decision.

The new structure is a default Wordpress option and it fits now my requirements:

agenerousdesigner.com/blog/2008/12/31/blog-post-title

But there’s a big problem with the search engine and user friendly links: you cannot change the structure the way you want or when you want. That wasn’t a problem in the good old days when we used ?p=3621763. It was always the same, meaningless link.

Luckily there’s a useful wordpress plugin for this, so you don’t have to maintain the old redirects in the .htaccess file “manually” (redirecting the redirects… :-s ).

You can download the Permalink Redirect Wordpress plugin at Scott Yang’s Playground, the developer’s website. (I didn’t find it on Wordpress.org)

You have to type in the previous permalink structure for the plugin to work. Also you can list special urls that will be excluded from the redirection, or specify urls where the old or the new did not follow the structure and you want to pair them manually.

Now all your links are handled, and visitors can find you, even if they bookmarked or followed an outdated link.

My note: if you change your post’s title several times while writing, don’t forget to check your permalink! It seems that Wordpress does not follow the changes! Or at least when you edit it at least once.