So far I haven’t done much more than register a Twitter account (@greenwichtweets) and domain name (greenwichtweets.co.uk) and browse some of the API documentation. Updates on progress will be available on the Greenwich Tweets site (which at the moment is just redirecting to a page on this site!). I’m hoping to start work in earnest around July.
At the moment I’m looking at Python and Zope (possibly Plone) to manage the back-end stuff, although I’m hoping to keep it all reasonably lightweight.
The number of steps I’ve had to go through to get this working seems to get larger every time I do it. I’ve now got to stage where I’m not 100% sure if a step is needed or not, but what the hell I’m going to do it anyway. To be honest, I’d probably recite incantations backwards over a boiling cauldron if I thought that was going to help.
Here’s a summary of what I’ve had to do:
That’s it. Simple and pain-free it’s not. But it is a good advert for not leaving it so long between upgrading your Zope/Plone versions, or being a better programmer.
The lovely folks at SWFObject helped to identify why this was happening — nothing to do with SWFObject at all but the fact that Flash Player 10 implements some new security “features”. I managed to isolate it to the fact that Plone serves up ATFiles with the header, “Content-Disposition: attachment”. Flash Player 10 ignores files served up with this header, so you need to override this and set it to “Content-Disposition: inline;”.
I came up with this solution which may not be overly elegant but at least it works. I created a skin-level Python script that sets response headers before returning the file:
showflash.py
request = container.REQUEST
RESPONSE = request.RESPONSE
flashvid = request['flashvid']
cd = 'inline; filename=%s' %(context.id)
RESPONSE.setHeader('Content-Disposition', cd)
return context[flashvid]
Then, when I embed the video with SWFObject I call it thus,
<script type="text/javascript">
swfobject.embedSWF("&dtml-portal_url;/path/to/flash/showflash?flashvid=myflash.swf", "my-dom-id", "435", "290", "9.0.115");
</script>
This may be better handled by a product like Plone4Artists Video but it certainly works as a fix for us.