Freezzo.com

I have spend the last week setting up a new VPS host at Linode. This site and my youtube video playlist site, http://www.jamzee.com, are both currently running on the new host. Everything has been great so far and this will give me more control in the future!

If you are interested in joining Linode, check out my referral link.

I have made a bunch of new updates to jamzee. They are as follows:

• Added ability to search for YouTube videos by the URL from youtube.
• Updated searching functionality to be more friendly and intuitive. You can preview videos and search for more videos on the fly.
• Added ability to sort playlists videos.
• Freshened up the main page some.

I have also been playing with working on an official myspace application, although receiving some resistance from myspace regarding the fact that the jamzee site searching through youtube. Hopefully we can work this out with them.

While this isn’t a ruby on rails specific issue, I do tend to do this a lot, and never thought twice about it, until it starts bugging the crap out of me.
The issue is that you have a link that is used to do some type of javascript, instead of linking. So you add an onclick event, but you need something to link to. I usually put in a # sign:

<a href="#" onclick="dosomething();">Do Something</a>

<%= link_to 'Do Something', '#', :onclick=>'dosomething()' %>

This is great, except that it jumps you to the top of the page. Very annoying. Here is the solution:

<a href="#nogo" onclick="dosomething();">Do Something</a>

<%= link_to 'Do Something', '#nogo', :onclick=>'dosomething()' %>

Notice I added “nogo” to my #. This will help prevent from jumping to the top of the page. You can of course use any text you want there.

Based on the recent update to YouTube and the ability to request an mp4 version of the videos on there server, I was able to add the ability on Jamzee to download an iTunes file that you can import into iTunes. Now you can create and listen to your YouTube playlist, created on Jamzee, right on iTunes.

While I am not here to share the process to retrieve these files, you can get some great information here:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html 

I am still in the process to figure out a nice way to allow those Jamzee playlists to be exported to an iPod. If anyone has any ideas about that, I would love to listen!