Embedding FLV Files into HTML

There was a need this week to embed a FLV file into an HTML page and we had no experience in directly embedding this kind of content. I’ve embedded YouTube videos before into posts using Windows Live Writer or the embed code that YouTube provides. But actually hosting the file and finding the right embed for this kind of file and the server that is hosting the site was a challenge.

I found this great download that is super small and wraps the Adobe Media Player on the page using javascript. It is from longtailvideo.com and it’s called the JW FLV Media Player. After downloading the code, installing is just as simple as playing the contents of a folder on the server. The embed code is provided on the site:

SponsoredTweets - The New Paid Post

Remember the good old days when you could setup a blog, get a decent page rank from Google, and sell paid posts daily to earn a monthly income. Google started penalizing paid posts by reducing the page rank for blogs that routinely posted them thus causing the practice to almost completely end.

One of the main companies to provide paid posts now has a service where you can get paid to tweet on Twitter.com about a contest or a product and be paid by the advertiser. The service is available at SponsoredTweets.com. Reports by some of the more popular celebrities on Twitter are very good and the limited use I have had as been worthwhile. Some may not feel Twitter is an appropriate place to run paid ads and therefore decline the membership offer.

If you have a Twitter account that is older than 120 days and have more that 200 followers, then you can begin earning money right away. When an offer arrives you can decline the offer if you so choose. And you can specify during sign-up if you want to write all tweets or if you will allow the advertiser to write a tweet. All paid tweets have a disclosure that it is paid, to not run a foul of the FTC. I am an affiliate of the service myself and encourage you to give it a try.

GET STARTED TODAY!

Getting the Current URL in Asp.Net

We had the need within a custom asp.Net control this week to obtain the current URL, compare it to a value, and take action if the values matched. I found online some quick and easy code to determine the URL of the page the control is loading on and the function to take action was developed rather quickly thereafter.

Here is the basic code to get the URL:

Request.Url.ToString()

And using a combination of the Mid function and the Instr function, we are able to match values regardless of the environment the code is running in:

If Mid(strLinkURL, InStr(strLinkURL, "Pages")) = Mid(Request.Url.ToString(), 

InStr(Request.Url.ToString(), "Pages")) Then

       strReturn = "" & strLinkText & ""

Else

       strReturn = "" 
& strLinkText & ""

End If