Monday, November 24, 2008

Embed Audio with a Flash Player

Here are instructions to embed audio files in your website or blog using flash players available from 3rd parties. Please note the content of this post was taken from here.

1. Google Reader MP3 Player

Google Reader has an inbuilt MP3 player that is pretty much the same as Gmail player but it also works on non-Google websites. This player has volume controls, no Google branding and it auto-detects the duration of the music file so your readers know how long the song will last. To use this MP3 player on your website or blog, copy-paste the following code and replace the MP3_FILE_URL with the link to your MP3 file:


2. Yahoo! MP3 Player

If you think normal is boring, check this out. Yahoo! offer a code generator (Easy Listener) to help you create a Flash based MP3 player that matches your website color theme and layout. Though this Easy Listener MP3 player requires you to pass the address of the web page that contains the MP3 file(s), you can directly pass the MP3 link and it will work just fine. Supports auto play and you can decide where the meta data associated with the MP3 file should be displayed:

3. Yahoo! Media Player

If you maintain an MP3 blog or run a podcast and regularly link to MP3 files, it makes little sense to embed a separate Flash player with every MP3 file. I would therefore recommend using the Yahoo! Media Player that auto-detects links to MP3 files in your web pages and creates an embedded player for each link. All you have to do is insert the following link in your blog template and all MP3 hyperlinks will be converted into inline MP3 players. This also has the shuffle feature and visitors can easily skip to any song in the playlist.

4. Odeo MP3 Player

Odeo offers a pretty impressive MP3 player (see example) that works perfect in web pages as well as RSS readers but a small issue is that Odeo Player requires you to type the exact duration of the song in the embed code. You can skip this step but then the progress bar won’t reflect the true status when you play the song. And there are no volume controls. To use Odeo MP3 player in your website, add the following code replacing MP3_FILE_URL and DURATION with relevant values:

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Out of Office Assistant and External Domains

One of the features in Exchange Server is Outlook Web Access (OWA).  This will allow a user to access his entire mailbox from a web browser.  When logged into OWA, under options, there is a settings called Out of Office Assistant.  The user also has the option to include a note which will serve as the body of the auto-reply message to the sender. By default, auto-reply messages are only delivered to mailboxes within the exchange domain.  If an outside user sends an email to the Exchange user with Out of Office Assistant enabled, the auto-reply will not be delivered.  You need to click a couple of check boxes within the Exchange System Manager as detailed here. When I did this, I had already enabled the Out of Office Assistant, and the auto-reply messages were not getting delivered.  What I did was after enabling those 2 checkboxes and restarted the necessary services, I disabled (saved) and then re-enabled the Out of Office Assistant.  That did the trick - the auto-reply was delivered.