I just recently finished up a Firefox Extension for the social video site Flixya. Extensions are all written in JavaScript and a sort of XML called XUL. Most of the framework was already written for me though, so I just hacked together the bits that worked with my code and nixed some of the old stuff.

Basically the extension grabs some relevant data like tags, the title, etc., from a video hosted on a number of online video sites like Veoh or YouTube. It then fills that text into the extension’s interface so user’s can edit or add to the provided information. Finally it posts all of the information to the user’s Flixya account where other users can view and comment on each other’s videos. The idea of using an extension like this is to streamline the video submitting process, and it works quite well.

Grabbing the text from all the various sites took a while and was the most difficult part of the process. Some sites like Veoh are coded in XHTML so they use CSS for presentation and a minimal amount of actual markup. This makes parsing a page much easier with either XPath or grabbing elements with the JavaScript getElementById() function. Other sites like LiveVideo use tables almost exclusively which makes finding a unique part of the HTML rather difficult and sometimes near impossible since the code around the desired text is so similar to other undesired text.

But the resulting extension works very well with a number of online video sites and allows easy posting to Flixya.

Flixya Firefox Video Publisher 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.