Yay! I finally got video & audio working in the davidcool.com website interface! I had this terrible problem for months that I couldn’t solve. Then I revisited it today and boom, fixed it on the first try. 
When you would click on one of the thumbnails and load a movie, it would work fine. But when you clicked on another thumbnail, the audio from the first movie would continue and then you would get two audio tracks playing at the same time. Click a third and now you have three at once… Not very nice indeed. But I finally got this javascript function working with the DOM (Document Object Model) code, and now it all works fine. So I have three of my little short videos on the site now. You can watch them if you click on a thumbnail below:
I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a “multi” page view of sorts. It would be a gallery view in which you could have all the media formats on the same page. I guess it would make those entries similar to a myspace page or even this blog in some respects. I was thinking of having each page capable of having video, audio, images and text. It would be nice to be able to have galleries that could incorporate all different media forms on one page.
The down side is formatting. If I make it part of the content management system, you can have only one template of sorts… You could only have say one instance of video, or two images, and they always have to be in the same places. I’d have to figure out a layout in advance and then stick to it. This has it’s advantages. The back-end code is easy to manage, the galleries look consistent and everything is streamlined. The down side is that you don’t have any page layout control because everything is predetermined. This is the problem with most CMS’s (content management system). An alternative I thought about was having basically a blank text window, similar to a blog interface. Then you could just input whatever code you want and basically build the page look and feel, as well as content, however you wished. The downside to this approach of course is that now you have to remember all the code to imbed video objects, audio objects and all the CSS and other code bits to fiddle with your page. Maybe I could build little buttons into the back-end that would insert code snippets for things like video object embedding.
We’ll see how far any of this goes. I’ve been planning something like this for over a year now and haven’t pulled the rabbit out of the hat yet. It’s not that it’s that difficult, it comes down to how much time I want to spend in front of the screen. For now, just enjoy the videos. I’m going to post audio tracks from my college band very soon. Stay tuned. I just contacted Vytas our bassist from the band recently and he has some old recordings from college as well. Hopefully I can get that in electronic format and then I’ll put some of that up too.
