The Kyle File

I just found out how extremely easy it is, and how nice it looks, to include an HTML5 player for the audio and video files I post to The Kyle File. I’ll be updating my music page and prior posts shortly, and all future audio or video posts will include an HTML5 player with a fallback to a standard download link. This means that if you have a browser that supports HTML5, you will see a nice-looking player where you will be able to play the file directly in your browser, or you can right-click or navigate to the player and use its context menu to save the file to your computer. The player will automatically determine the file format that is supported by your browser and allow you to play or download it. If you have a browser that doesn't support HTML5, you will notice that there will now be two download links for each file, one for the Ogg Vorbis file and another for the mp3 file, (audio), and WebM and mp4, (video). Otherwise, there will be no difference in how you interact with The Kyle File. You can open the file with the browser and let it choose the player or plugin for you, or you can save it from the right-click menu exactly as you did in the past. This will just add choice for everyone and better functionality on the most recent browsers.

On a side note, this seems to be very similar to the way Posterous is handling audio and likely video files on newer browsers now, and I did finally find what they did with my download links, but I couldn’t get my music files to play using the “play” button, there was no “play” selection in the right-click menu and sometimes the controls randomly disappeared. Also, I find that here on Tunblr, I setup the player myself because I’m storing my files in a Dropbox, so I can title the player panel myself and I have full control over how my players and download links are presented. Enjoy the new functionality, and leave any suggestions or comments in the section below.

So I went ahead and took the plunge and upgraded to GNOME3. My experience has actually not been that bad so far. I did have to upgrade to the latest git version of Orca, because the Mozilla products appear inaccessible to the version of Orca that ships with GNOME. I also have no desktop for some reason in the “fallback” mode, and I can add the main menu applet to my pannel, but I can’t make it completely replace the menu bar in the top left corner that activates when I press alt-f1. However, all these problems are pretty much just minor annoyances to me, since everything else seems to work at least as well as before the upgrade, and I didn’t really use the desktop launchers and icons that much anyway. The desktop will probably become more of a problem when I plug in my mp3 player, but since it shows up in /media, I shouldn’t have a problem with that either. I’m sure I’ll find more bugs, but I’m actually fairly happy with my upgrade decision overall.

This is an update from an earlier post. I decided to repost it in order to share my experience from the beginning. I hope it helps someone.

Here goes one more test of Twitterfeed. I may need to try to find a different syndication system, as Twitterfeed has a little trouble publishing to Twitter, but it’s not publishing to Identica at all.

Update: 2 hours later

This post still hasn’t shown up on Twitter or Identica. It should post every 30 minutes, so it looks like there are multiple problems at once. I guess I just set up my Twitterfeed account at the wrong time.

Update: 6 hours later

Hey, it finally published. But only Twitter got it. I seriously need an alternative that will take my feed and publish it to both Twitter and Identica in a timely manner. It’s fine if it takes up to an hour, but 6 hours is a bit long.

Update: 1 day later

I finally found it! Enter dlvr.it, almost exactly what I wanted. It posts to Twitter and Identica usually in 15 minutes or less, and it even gives me more options for posting to Facebook than the Tumblr app provides. This has the added benefit of giving me just enough time to edit a post or change a publication option before the post goes live. It also gives me the option to choose any link shortener I want as long as it has a link to access the API and returns a plain text URL. This is similar to what Twitterfeed does, and it turned out to be a rather important feature to me.

I only found a couple of disadvantages using dlvr.it, and they’re not really showstoppers here. First, dlvr.it will publish the title of a post or the body, truncated to fit microblogging networks, if a title is not present, along with my short link, to the microblogging sites I have added as destinations. It doesn’t, however, supmit the truncated body if a title is present. This really doesn’t bother me that much, because it still offers more options than the “autopost” feature on Posterous. The more pressing problem is the fact that adding a new “destination,” which is just another name for the social networks where a blog post is published, is a matter of trial and error for a visually impaired person such as myself, because there appear to be no labels on the checkboxes that pop up the account authentication and settings. This was nearly a big showstopper, but I was eventually able to setup the networks where I wanted my posts published, and after that, it was smooth sailing. I also reported this problem on their getsatisfaction page, and hopefully the problem can be resolved in the near future.

Overall, in spite of the couple of problems I found, I would highly recommend dlvr.it for anyone who wants to publish a blog with an RSS feed to their social networks, no matter where their blog is hosted. At this point, it is much more reliable and has at least as many features as the more popular competitors.

Update two days later

The problem with adding a new destination when using a screen reader was fixed within two days after I reported it. Dlvr.it officially rocks, and I’ll definitely continue recommending it for anyone who needs to publish their blog feed. It gets the Kyle seal of approval.

I just found dlvr.it, which looks like it will do everything Twitterfeed could do and more. I hope this works. If it does, my signal-to-noise ratio should greatly improve again.

Wow! So it took 6 hours for Twitterfeed to publish my blog posts, then they only appeared on Twitter. I’m now running Twitterfeed through Hellotxt in an attempt to get better results.

I intend to get this noise level down as well, and hopefully my blog posts will be more meaningful again soon.