So you have got your self one of our streaming packages, now how do you make this avalible to users?

Embedding your stream into a web page, or creating an online player is a very good idea. During this example i will be using one of our clients, Swindon 105.5′s online player as an example.

So firstly, its always good to give your users choice as to the player, and there for the plug-in they use to listen to your stream. It is important to remember that just because you prefer using Windows Media Player for example that everyone will have that plug-in installed for their chosen browser, there are many players so give them a choice, on Swindon 105.5′s online player when you first open the player you are given the choice of Windows Media Player or Quick-Time this option is then saved in a cookie. Which then makes further user experience much better, as repeat users (which for online radio and broadcasting in general is important) can just click and listen to your station, how they want to.

Now we get to the actual player, but of course with the web we can be much more interactive with the user, and you as a webmaster, and/or a radio station can provide information about what they are listening to, who’s on air and whats next.

As you can see on the right this is the player window, and this webmaster as kept things simple, as they should be. However some radio stations have their players clogged up with all sorts of rubbish and unrelated information where as this is clean, and to the point.

We have an easy switch player link in the corner to change your player preference, there-fore giving the user more choice.

Also we have information about the current program on air, “The Big Weekender”, we can see the show title and the presenters, which helps listeners to know who and what they listen to and form a stronger bond with the presenters and your station.

Quick Plug: You have taken a little look at Swindon 105.5′s online player so take a look at their site and have a listen!

The code:

So far i have briefly looking at what a good player might include, so design aside we will look at the code you need to embed a player into your web-page for them to listen.

So lets take a look:

<object id=”MediaPlayer” height=”45″ classid=”CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95″ standby=”Loading…” type=”application/x-oleobject” codebase=”http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=6,4,7,1112“>
<param name=”filename” value=”listen.m3u”>
<param name=”showcontrols” value=”true”>
<param name=”autostart” value=”true”>
<embed type=”application/x-mplayer2″ src=”listen.m3u” name=”MediaPlayer” height=”45″ width=”300″ showcontrols=”1″ showdisplay=”0″ showstatusbar=”0″></embed></object>

 The above code will embed a Windows Media Player into your webpage, so lets break this down and little and look at the parts which make it up and control how it behaves.

Breaking it down.

So you may have noticed that much of the code seems to do the same job, we have the <object> tag and then we have the <embed> tag within that which seems to duplicate some of the variables. This is because FireFox and Internet Explorer can have problems understanding the code, Internet Explorer likes having the <object> tag where as FireFox (and other browsers) are happy with <embed> for this reason we include both.

codebase:

Codebase which is a attribute in object provides a URL where the exe or plugin can be downloaded, so if a user does not have Windows Media Player installed this can help them find and install the required plugin.

This is not a required attribute and can be left out if desired.

filename:

This is the location of the file (or stream) you wish to play. You can use the direct source of your stream, which will be something like myradio.com:8000, however many users may wish to use playlist files instead, we will explain more about these and how you can use and build these later.

autostart:

This dictates if the stream/file should automatically play on loading or if the user should click play first.

Generally sounds should not be automatically played on websites as it can be offensive and annouying to users, however because in this context we know the user wants to listen to your stream (after all they have opened your player) it would be advised to set auto start to true.

showcontrols:

This option controls if the controls, the buttons like volume, play, stop etc should be shown to the user.

However note that in most modern browser this (along with many other attriubutes) may be ignored and not take effect.

As i mentioned because of browser differences it is important to try and make the code understandable to all browsers.

Attributes should be included in different ways, within <param> tags:

<param name=”autostart” value=”true” />

And also within the <embed> tag itself:

<embed type=”application/x-mplayer2″ src=”listen.m3u” autostart=”1″></embed>

Quick-Time:

The code for a quick-time player is almost identical to Windows Media Player with small differences most of the parameters/attributes are the same, however obviously there is a difference codebase:

CODEBASE=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab“

You should now be equip with the basic code you need to get your stream on you website or online player, we can go into further detail, but that’s another article.

And of course, we are always happy to help with programming and code writing for our customers, just get in contact for more information.

Please leave comments or questions below.

Getting statistics about your site is always useful and interesting for every type of site, be it personal or an e-commerce money making machine knowing who, how, what, when and even why your visitors decided to take a look at your site. For e-commerce this can be vital and for personal/non-commerce sites its just interesting!

So today we are going to take a look at Google Analytics this is probably the best service for providing easy to read information about how your site is doing, like with Awstats and Webalizer which is provided with XDnet’s cPanel accounts, watch this space for articles about how you can use these to take a look at your site stats soon.

• What browser are your visitors using?
• Check out exactly how many visitors have been looking at your site.
• How fast is visitors connections?
• Look at how people navigate through your site and where they exit.
• How do people find your site? What keywords are they using to get to your site?

These important facts about your site can help you make informed decisions about the direction of your website, find problems users face and fix them – notice users aren’t finding that page you want? which pages make users leave? whats wrong with it? All these questions and more can be answered with the information gathered after just a few months of using analytics tools.

Log Files…

For basic web statistics, you can download your site’s log files. Access is included with all our packages. Log files are simple, they take a note of all page accesses, but the downside is they are not user friendly. There are software available to make them into a more friendly format, but why bother when there are tools which are easy to understand and more importantly use “out of the box”.

Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool, and one of the many great sites which we have and will look into on XDnet, which really can help make your site great.

Small catch, unlike with Awstats and Webalizer which comes with XDnet’s hosting, you will have to do a little more than just activate it in cPanel, you have to add a code snippet to the bottom of every page on your website… which can be a long and tedious process, especially if your site is not template based.

Many people simply do not have the time (or patience) to do this, especially if they are not code litterate, and can end up paying a lot of money for this to be done. However XDnet offers this service for a fraction of the price - Just open a Technical ticket.

Map Overlay:

Now this could be one of the most helpful and interesting features that comes with Google Analytics, and appears to have incredible accuracy most likely because Google is a multi-billion dollar company which can afford the very best Geo-location databases I am sure.

With this tool you can see exactly where visitors come from instantly, but of course that’s not all, you can get even deeper and get close up views of what town or city your users are from, and of course like with colour coding you can easily see which cities have the most visitors, to the right is another screenshot of a website i run. London obviously has is the most visitors which will probably be the case with most sites simply because London is a very big city, but second is Swindon (home of XDnet) and also where the sites organisation is based.

Of course you can break this down even further and take a look at how many visitors you get per day for an individual city and much more.

How users view your site:

You can also check out how your users are viewing your site, find out what browsers they are using, what screen resolution, what colours and so much more.

Google Analytics takes everything you can possibly know about your visitors and makes it into an easy to read, easy to understand and most importantly useful format.

With useful information like user connection speeds, if you find 99% of your visitors are on dial-up, maybe you should think about streamlining your site to be more low-band friendly? And vica versa, as much more likely in today’s market you find all you users are on Broadband (or higher) then maybe you can start thinking more about quality, use a slightly high resolution of images – your users are unlikely to notice a great difference so long as they have a fast Internet connection, but they will notice shiny new images where pixelated pictures used to be, however don’t forget to use caution everyone wants fast websites, and only sites with good, interesting and useful content are worth the wait of loading images.

I feel like I am starting to repeat myself a little so all i can say is, check it out, give it a try!

Seems everyone in the blogosphere has made comment on Google turning 10 years old.

So keeping with tradition Google had a spacial logo for their big day.Google has had an interesting and diverse history as shown in their timeline. 

However i have picked out a few key points below, and want have a small scratch at the surface of what Google has and is doing.

Here comes Google!

On 15th September 1997, the Google name first comes to light, Larry and Sergey decided the original name (BackRub) needed a new name.

After a while they came upon googol, which is a mathematical term for the number 1^100 (1 with 100 zeros after it), as this represents their goal of organising what is an infinite amount of information.

- Just take a look at the original Google homepage! 

And the money starts…

In 1998 Google received its first cheque for $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Co-Founder. This was before the guys had even properly set Google up as an incorporate or even had a Google bank account!

April Fools

Ever since their first joke in 2000 when Google announced MentalPlex, which boldly claimed Google could now read your mind and produce the perfect search results – all you have to do is stare at the swirly circle…

And of course, it didn’t stop with reading your mind! In 2002 Google explained the advanced technology behind how exactly PageRank (or PigeonRank) actually worked… a whole lot of trained pigeons finding you great results.

In 2004 Google went even futher and expanded to yet another location, the Moon and best of all they needed you to staff it. – Lunar Job Offers

Over the years Google has been quite the comedian with instructions on Google Maps which included “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean” (now removed) if you asked for directions from North America to a location in Europe.

Gmail Paper Archive, where Google will print and post your emails and attachment for free and Tisp, the Toilet ISP from 2007 being one of the ones which really makes me laugh as i look back.

More recently (2008) of course there is Virgle, when Virgin and Google team up to take us all to live on Mars… Yes, Mars.

The application form on the site alone can really make you laugh, with questions like I am a world-class expert in – physics, medicine and first aid, engineering or Guitar Hero II.

But thanks to Google now owning YouTube.com they joined in the fun too by bringing a new term in the blogosphere, RickRolling where on April 1st where all featured videos on YouTube instead lead to the Rick Astley music video – Never Gonna Give You Up, i bet the video uploader was thrilled!

The list goes on with each new wakey idea topping the last, and i can honestly say i look forward to April the 1st, just to see what Google might do next.

Reference: Wikipedia on Google’s Hoaxes

I name you Google

No I am not talking about Google Inc, an “avid” Google “enthusiast” Elias Kai decided to name his new bored son Oliver Google Kai.

Google Tops 1 Billion

26th June 2000 Google Index hits 1 Billion pages (URL’s) indexed, and in the beginning of 2006 Google’s Image Search tops 1.1 Billion Images indexed.

What doesn’t Google own?

 Over the past ten years Google has become massive with the acquisition of companies/sites like Blogger.com, YouTube.com (9th October 2006), Keyhole (a digital mapping company), Urchin – a web analytics company which is behind Google Analytics technology,  Writely a web-based word processing app which is the basis for Google Docs (9th March 2006), and this year even google completed their deal with DoubleClick (the online advertising company), JotSpot which was a collaborative wiki platform which has now become Google Sites, dMarc which was a DAB advertising company and so many more, Google is taking on many different aspects of online markets, but is this good? – Leave a comment, or send us an email with your views.

Googles founders have become very rich men in a relatively short period of time, and have built up a company which is now one of if not the largest online companies in the world, with ever expanding resources and developments, such as the newly released Google Chrome browser, which Google has made to try and improve all browsers to make the web a better place, with its (currently) unique V8 Javascript engine and interesting architecture they are transforming (and controlling?) our lives, with search, adverts, email online video with YouTube and a whole lot more available from Google, will the small guys be able to hold out much longer? 

Google is doing and has done so much for technology, and it shows what billions of dollars can achieve, but I, as always, am interested in your views on Google what do you like/dislike?

Take a look at:

 - http://www.google.co.uk/tenthbirthday/

If you’re anything like me, you will most likely need to check how a design looks in multiple browsers several times a day – Let’s face it, if a website is ugly in a client’s browser there very unlikely to purchase your product. Here are some funky and free services which makes cross browser testing a problem of the past.

IE NetRenderer – One of my favourite services, mainly because the rendering is real-time (so not waiting about) however (as the name suggests) the only browser family it renders is IE.

Browsershots – They have a lot of browsers running on several Operating Systems and loads of options (such as if you want flash/JavaScript enabled) though it can take up to 30 minutes to receive your screenshot.

On any website it is always important to ensure all your links, be they internal or external are active and functioning, something which is often overlooked.

A great tool i discovered is Dead-Links.com this great little tool is simple and easy to use, will show most dead links within a few minutes it crawled every page of XDnet, including the expansive knowledgebase and every page of this blog.

So Check it out and check yoursite out. – Dead-Links.com