Credit for the htaccess tweak goes to this guy.

          16151 Puritas Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44135     •      Ph. (216) 651-6700     •     sales@emi-inc.com                                                        Copyright 2011 EMI, Inc

No, I am not kidding.

And a touch of PHP to the functions file:

Take this example that we came upon the other day. Mind you, this wasn’t built by some guy using FrontPage 97. This code comes directly from an e-commmerce site built for a multibillion dollar company. We didn’t even have to use anything exotic to fix the code; we used the same tool used by the supposed pros who wrote the site in the first place.

Anyway, to get down to it: if I’m going to enter the title (let’s call it the 1st level heading) in HTML this is how I’ve been coding it:

<h1>Product Name&trade;</h1>

But it turns out I’m wrong. From working on this client’s site I’ve learned the proper way, and I’m sharing it here for your edification:

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"> <span style="line-height: 150%; color: #404040;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
<strong>Product Name</strong></span></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 150%; font-family: Arial, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">TM</span></span></p>

For those keeping score, Product Name is wrapped in three span tags and a strong tag. The trademark is created by wrapping TM in two spans; one to push the text above the baseline, and one to make it small.

Please make a note of it. I expect to see this trend sweep the net by July. You can thank me by sending a 10 pound Excedrin for this headache.

The reason it takes forever for videos to start playing in Flowshield is because of an encoding issue. Some encoders place all the metadata at the end of a video file. I can’t think of any logical reason to do that, but it’s something that has to be dealt with since videos won’t start playing until the metadata has been read. That means that the entire video has to be downloaded before it’ll play. Since that’s pretty much the antithesis to streaming, it’s really, really irritating. Here’s what Rapid Crush, makers of S3Flowshield, had to say:

The slow start is not an S3FlowShield or FlowPlayer issue. It is an encoding and Adobe Flash issue. In order for the flash player to start playing the video before it is fully downloaded, the metadata (information about the video) must be placed at the start of the file. Unfortunately, some encoders place this data at the end of the file instead, so the player cannot start playing the video until the entire file is downloaded and the metadata can be read. You can see more information and how to fix the files at these URLs:

http://chirale.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/video-on-flash-doesnt-buffer-maybe-a-flv-and-mp4-issue/

http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/pseudostreaming.html#prepare

http://flowplayer.org/forum/2/12909

The information and proposed fixes on those sites above can get quite technical. Fortunately, there is a free and easy to use utility to fix the files that can be found here:

http://renaun.com/blog/2007/08/22/234/

I used the tool linked at the bottom and it worked a treat. A video that was taking 47.5 seconds to preload before the fix now takes just shy of 5 seconds to start playing. I can live with that.

And since one never knows whether things will continue to live on the intertubes, I’m preserving it here for posterity: QTIndexSwapper

Note that before we can write a function that addresses the custom post type, we have to add another function that makes that possible. We’re going to add this to our standardized functions file (which I’ll write about some other time).