Imagine you create tonnes of great video content every day and publish it all through WordPress. Your viewer can watch your amazing shows everywhere…on iPhones, iPads, iMacs, but not their TVs. Wouldn’t it be great to have a branded Apple TV app so that all your viewers could watch your content in full screen glory? Well I’ve got just the WordPress plugin for you…
A straightforward WordPress plugin I created to allow content creators to use WordPress as a data source Apple TV apps. TeeVee for WP attaches video metadata to blog posts. The metadata is used to to generate TVML ((TVML is this cool little XML apple created for basic layout – check out Apple’s documentation for more information.)) which gets ingested by a custom/branded TvOS app.
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On the xCode end you simply create a new TvOS single-view application, with an AppDelegate that looks something like this:
Modify the `TVDomain` to point the domain where TeeVee for WP is install and the rest is show business.
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The project is up on github here: https://github.com/ohryan/teevee.
Contributions would be much appreciated.
If you have any questions or suggestions hit me up on twitter at @ohryan or email me ryan@ohryan.ca.
Bootstrap is great, almost perfect. One thing it’s missing is responsive text-align.
So I created a simple .less file that uses Bootstraps breakpoints and class naming format. It allows you use set specific text-align for specific breakpoints.
He found that of the 1% of users even engaging with the carousel in the first place, 84% clicked on the first item in the carousel and PRACTICALLY NO ONE (~4% each equally) clicked on the remaining items.
To put it another way, you gaining practically nothing by putting content in a slider.
This data mirrors my recollection of the tracking we ran on hiphopdx.com when we were working on a redesign circa 2010.
This is not new information, yet carousels are more popular than ever.
Update: Chris Noto asks a good question in the comments “why is hiphopdx.com still using a carousel.” While I can’t answer for certain, I tried.
TL;DR – the 0.04% of visitors who click through the last item in a carousel still generate real dollars in ad revenue.
Thanks to my RetroPosts plugin, this weekend I was reminded of a blog post I wrote in 2008 – Web Dev Challenge: 1996 Compatibility. In the post I outlined rules for developing for browsers from 1996: CSS1, Javascript 1, 640×480 screen resolution, etc. I think I assumed this would be a relatively simple challenge, but I didn’t ever follow through with the plan.
In the post I mention developing for Netscape version 2 in the post. I don’t recall actually attempting to run the browser at the time of writing, so last night I decided to track down a copy of Netscape 2 and poke around the web. Unfortunately Netscape Navigator 4.01 was the earliest version of Netscape I get my hands on. To my surprise it actually installed and ran in Windows 7! Talk about backwards compatibility.
This sums up my experience using Netscape.
Every single website I tried gave me dozens of javascript errors on load. It’s easy to forget how ubiquitous Javascript usage is. Even sites that don’t have any dynamic features, are likely calling jQuery, Google analytics or an ad platform. As far as I could tell, Netscape 4 does support Javascript 1 (and Internet Explorer’s ECMA script), but it would seem that modern javascript has evolved so much that these standards are irrelevant. I doubt any developer has considered Javascript backwards compatibility in the past decade, I wonder if it would even be possible.
Once the Javascript errors were dismissed, the sites themselves rendered fairly similarly to what you’d expect from a browser with CSS turned off. Wikipedia states that Netscape 4 added support for “CSS1 elements, minimal dynamic font support and the proprietary object element.” I had forgotten just how limiting this was.
A small gallery of modern sites viewed in Netscape 4.
ohryan.ca
reddit.com
More reddit
Google.com
A List Apart
I also took a look at the web in Internet Explorer 3. With full(?) CSS1 support, ActiveX and Java applets (not to mention Comic Chat) at the time Internet Explorer 3 was poised to upset Netscape’s market dominance. In my testing, the web looks much the same as it did in Netscape 4 with the exception of the javascript errors (which I suspect Internet Explorer was simply hiding).
Though the Google homepage is virtually perfect.
The first browsers with support for anything resembling modern front-end features were versions 6 of Netscape and Internet Explorer, released in 2001. That’s after the collapse of the dot-com bubble! Investors were spending billions of dollars on technology that couldn’t even render a png!
In conclusion, I think my original idea of developing a 1996 compatible site would be a lot more difficult than I had thought. But given that this era of browser technology represents such an important time in the Internet’s history, I think it would still be a worthwhile endeavour. Who’s up for it?
