About an hour ago I received an e-mail telling me that a new beta version of Tubular was released. I was inclined to check this version out as soon as possible because they were talking about how they have been rewriting the video component to use Perian rather than the flash YouTube player. This change was going to fix several issues when it came to video playback.

This new method of video playback was also supposed to fix the issue of crashing Tubular when you were attempting to play a video that was rated for adult viewing only. When you are on YouTube it will prompt you to say yes that you want to continue viewing but in Tubular it would just cause problems. I have yet to see any issues with the new player aside from the obvious. You have to completely load the video before you can start watching it. If you are attempting to watch a rather large video this can take quite a bit of time. I hate to wait!

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If you run a blog you might have though about starting a blog email mailing list. Maybe you want to keep your visitors informed on a monthly basis what you have posted on your site. Maybe you want to start up a list where you send out tutorials or how-to’s. There is a website I found today called Zookoda.com that will allow you to do just that. You can start up mailing lists, where you can customize how the email looks 100%. You can also set the confirm and thank you pages to be pages on your site.

If all you would like to do is notify your readers about the new content on your site, you can setup broadcasts that will automatically go out at a set interval. It will notify all of the users in the list about the content you have added since the last broadcast. This is nice but I really do not see too many people taking advantage of that over RSS. The one part I do love however is the ability to have a mailing list FREE of cost. That’s right Zookoda is a 100% free site to use. I also love the ability to 100% customize how the email will look because I would want it to look similar to my site’s theme rather than some canned look.

Keep your eyes open on this site, I am going to start up a few mailing lists, one for Monthly PHP Tips and another for Monthly Mac Tips. If the response is good enough I will start up a more frequent mailing list that will offer much more than a tip

Preparing for the new job I have been taking some time to look into the Google Maps API.  I must say that they make it VERY easy to do the basics such as plotting some addresses on the maps.  They even offer a geo-coding service now so you can just send it the address and it will tell you the latitude and longitude.  This is very nice because most other services on the net charge for this data.

I have started messing around with it and one thing that I found to be really useful is a Java-Script utility called Clusterer, this utility will allow you to plot all of your points on the map however it will consolidate them into clusters if you will. If you would like to see this in action you can check out the demo they have setup.  The large purple balloons are the clusters, when you zoom in the clusters will break into the individual points.

The task at hand will be to plot all of the conference attendee’s onto a map, the issue is that there could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of addresses plotted on the map.  When you get this many balloons on the map it really looks cluttered.  I found this clustering solution and have yet to look into the marker manager that Google offers in their API.  I am waiting for the book I ordered to get here.  I bought the book Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax: From Novice to Professional, yes it’s a long title but the reviews are good.  The book is due to be here today and since I am having teeth pulled on Monday I will have plenty of time to read.  Once I am better I will make a post on here reviewing the book.