I cannot tell you how giddy I am right now. I have been through the ringer trying to embed videos, create photo galleries, post videos, make buttons, side bar video thumbnails … It’s always a hassle, especially since I’m not a whizz at flash. I used Widgetbox.com for quite a few JS widgets for my revver videos, 2.0 mashups on my old blogspot blog. And since moving to WordPress, I’ve relied on the plethora of WP plug-ins. But more often than not, they don’t work, or do what I want them to do. I’ve always wanted a really clean, simple, and functional image gallery. And the Flicker Albums plug-in ain’t cutting it.
But at 2am this eve, Techcrunch brought Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash into my world. I’ve been playing with it for about 30 minutes and it is dead easy to use, especially if you have a PS background. You can create a video album, audio player or a music playlist, and a image slideshow in seconds that the lovely Sprout coding monkey will publish to most social net sites i.e., Facebook, Myspace, blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, page flakes, etc.
To test the new site, I made my first “Sprout”: An image slideshow of some shots I took at my first Wedding shoot. It took me less than 15 mins to create and customize my sprout. All I had to do was import my flickr photos and Sprout did the rest. There are controllers at the bottom for pause/play and fwd/back. I was also able to add a hyperlink to my flicker album at the bottom. (Takes a few seconds to load)
David
January 31, 2008 at 7:08 AMI’m always looking for something to perhaps replace my mashup of Lytebox – I’ll give it a whirl – thanks for the tip.
Duane Storey
January 31, 2008 at 8:48 AMCool.. I just found out about the FLV flash player the other day. It’s pretty sweet too and has plugins for most of the major blogging platforms.
Mitchell
January 31, 2008 at 2:01 PMSweet! ~ This is perfect for something I’m working on right now. And I thought I’d have to stick with Flickr randomly choosing pictures to display.
Mostly Lisa
February 1, 2008 at 7:52 AM@David — I’ve been looking for the same thing. My video revver widget overwrites all lightbox functions. i had originally planned for all my gallery images to use lightbox, but this might be another option.
@Duane — just took a peak at the FLV player. does look pretty sweet. have you found it useful thus far? and do you have an example of it on your blog?
@Mitchell — Sprout works really well with flickr. and the flickr album plug-in sidebar widget for WP slows down your site load time enormously! Lame.
Duane Storey
February 1, 2008 at 1:07 PMHey, one of my last posts (duanestorey.com/vancouver-blogger) I think I used it. Also, if you go over to matthewgood.org, it’s all set up to use flash for all the media there. What’s nice about it is that you can put in playlists and retheme it slightly. I’m pretty impressed so far. Plus to put it in a blog post you just do something like [flv someurl width=x height=y] and it does the right thing (once you have the plugin of course).
If you use flickr and wordpress, you can try out the crossroads plugin on my blog (I wrote it last year). It integrates automatically with lightbox, highslide hs and greybox, so you can pick and choose in the admin panel.