futtta's blog

I pushed out a major new version of WP DoNotTrack to the WordPress plugin repository and major in this case means:

• you can now choose between a blacklist and whitelist-approach (previous version did blacklisting only)
• define what exactly is in that black- or whitelist (previous version came with a hardcoded blacklist)
• option to block javascript-initiated tracking code from being added for all your visitors, or just those that explicitly opted out of tracking in their browser (supported in MS IE9 and Firefox 9, not supported in Google Chrome)
• and off course an option-page under wp-admin to change all these settings

Because of these new features (4 of them) and because I think the plugin is already at least 50% mature, I decided to bump the version from 0.1.0 to 0.5.0. Never been good at math anyway …

If you encounter any problems when installing or configuring this plugin, you might find valuable info in the FAQ. But here’s two tips anyway:

1. In general caching and js-aggregating plugins can interfere, so you might want to disable those while working on your WP DoNotTrack configuration and re-enable (with cleared caches) once you’re satisfied with the result.
2. If you’re running WP YouTube Lyte with the bonus “donottrack” feature activated, you’ll want to deactivate that before installing/ activating WP DoNotTrack. If you don’t do that, you’ll have to turn to the FAQ …

Don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment beneath this here little blogpost if you run into problems, if have a feature request or if you just want to chat a little. I just love receiving feedback!

After almost a year of tinkering with my Donottrack-plugin for WordPress, I’ve requested it to be hosted in the WordPress repositories and uploaded version 0.1.0. So if you’re using Donottrack on your blog, or if you activated this “bonus feature” of WP YouTube Lyte, I propose you give WP DoNotTrack a try and let me know what gives here in the comments or via the contact form?

From the readme:

WP DoNotTrack stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code to your blog to protect your visitor’s privacy. WP DoNotTrack uses (a slightly modified) version of jQuery AOP to catch and inspect elements that are about to be added to the DOM and renders these harmless if the black- or whitelist says so.

The current version is blacklist-based and stops tracking by media6degrees and quantserve. This can easily be changed in the javascript though. Future versions will include a WordPress admin-page to change these settings.

I uploaded a new version of WP YouTube Lyte to the WordPress SVN repository earlier today. The markdown parser seems to be in a bad mood today and the changes in the readme.txt (the changelog, first and foremost) aren’t visible, so here’s what’s new in this release:

• you can now change player size from the default one (as proposed by Edward Owen); httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY#stepSize=-2 or httpv://youtu.be/_SQkWbRublY#stepSize=+1 will change player size to one of the other available sizes in your choosen format (4:3 or 16:9)
• added a smaller 16:9 size and re-arranged player sizes on the options-screen
• Bugfix: changed lyte-div ID to force it to be xhtml-compliant (ID’s can’t start with a digit, hat tip: Ruben of ytuquelees.net
• Bugfix: added version in js-call to avoid caching issues (lyte-min.js?ver=0.8.1) as experienced by some users and reported by Ryan of givemeshred.com
• Upgrade to the “bonus feature” to fix things (consider this beta though)
• Languages: added Hebrew (by Sagive SEO) and Catalan (by Ruben of ytuquelees.net) translations and added completed Spanish version (thanks to Paulino Brener from Social Media Travelers)
• tested succesfully on WordPress 3.3 (beta 2)

The (slightly smaller) lyte-embedded YouTube video to go with this release: “She wants” by Metronomy (very Japan-esque by the way):

As always, your feedback is welcome in the comments or via the contact form!

Just a quick note confirming the release of WP YouTube Lyte 0.8.0. As previously described, the main new feature is support for embedding YouTube playlists in a high-performance and accessible kind of way that is typical of this plugin.

While testing the new feature on different platforms I noticed the playlist-player only comes in Flash, so it does not work on iPads or iPhones. Or “does not work on them yet”, as YouTube’s Jeff Posnick confirmed that support for HTML5 video in the embedded playlist player is on their todo-list.

The plugin is multi-lingual, with the following languages supported:

• English
• Dutch
• German
• Slovenian
• French (only the strings visible for visitors, not those in wp-admin)
• Spanish (only those strings visible for visitors for now)

Corrections, extra translations, bug reports and feature requests are all welcome feedback, either in the comments here or via the contact page.

I hope you enjoy the new version!

Work on the next version of WP YouTube Lyte is almost finished. The main new features you can expect in version 0.8.0 are:

• support for playlists
• support for HD video (if size of the embedded player is big enough)
• updated UI elements & player sizes to match new, dark YouTube player style
• removed support for legacy YouTube embed code

Embedding a playlist will be as simple as adding

httpv://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=<playlist_id>.

The result will look like this documentary about Arcade Fire (4 video’s in one playlist):

Now off to testing this blogpost with an embedded playlist in all browsers I can get my hands on. Your feedback (off course) is always welcome as well! If all goes as planned I’ll push 0.8.0 to the wordpress svn later this week.

Yesterday I pushed WP YouTube Lyte 0.7.3 out the gates. The main trigger for that new release was a bug report about the plugin not behaving as expected when using the youtu.be-links that you get when clicking the “share”-button on YouTube.  Being from that TLD mysself I could not but fix this; the new version recognizes and parses both httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=videoid and httpv://youtu.be/videoid links in posts, pages and widgets. Other features: Slovenian translation (thanks Mitja Mihelič @arnes.si) and a small change to the donottrack-inclusion to make it work over https (hat tip; Chris @ campino2k.de).

Speaking of donottrack: I’ve finally started rewriting that privacy-enhancing plugin. It might … No, it WILL take some time, but expect a whitelist-based approach where you’ll be able to get a report of all inclusions of external content (images, css, javascript, …) in your site and where you can just tick a checkbox per domain you want to allow. All other current and future domains that rogue plugins try to smuggle in after you configured, will be stopped. Next to document.write’s I hope to be able to catch innerHTML and DOM methods like insertBefore and appendChild. If you’re a javascript DOM magician, I could sure use your help on those!

Not sure where I’ll be going with WP YouTube Lyte, it feels pretty complete to me. Stuff that might be added at a later stage;

• update of the player GUI to match the style of the new darker YouTube embeds
• support for the embedded YouTube playlists player
• catching the end of video playing and killing it (well, removing it from the DOM, gently yet firmly)
• adding translations (you’re welcome to participate, if you’re not familiar with GetText I can put all strings up in a Google spreadsheet)

Do comment below or contact me if you have other feature requests though! And thanks for all the downloads (36.000 and counting)!!

And as is traditional of WP YouTube Lyte announcements, here’s a small video to celebrate the new release; Intergalactic Lovers, a Belgian band, playing “Delay” live.

Last night I finished version 0.7.0 of WP YouTube Lyte. The bump in version number (0.6.5 to 0.7.0) is because of a new feature: the ability to embed YouTube as audio-only player, as seen on Pitchfork. Because after all, as great a source for music discovery as YouTube can be, you really don’t want to force your visitors to watch yet another clumsy fan-made slideshow while they’re listening to your latest musical crush, do you?

Embedding YouTube as an audio-only player is dead-simple; add an ‘a’ instead of a ‘v’ to the YouTube link and you’re good to go!

httpa://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFjgv1MO724

becomes this audio-only embedded YouTube with Dorian Concept’s “Her Tears Taste Like Pears”;