Since BlogEngine finally got its extensions section up and running on the project’s home page, I put my Mp3 Player extension up there. Also I’ve been pointed on a small glitch this player has – in IE you have to click once to activate it and only after second click it will play. Not a big deal and I did not pay a lot of attention to it, mostly because pretty much every flash player I used so far has this same problem (see the picture). After short investigation I found out that reason Microsoft can’t fix this glitch is a legal one – there is a dispute over a patent going on. But MS (and Flash people) do provide works around “click to activate” problem, most of which comes down to writing “object” tag by JavaSript rather than embedding it directly into HTML code. Can be done in variety of ways for different situations and I think I found one that will work in my case. Needs a bit more testing, but looks like it should work just fine.

So I went back to Player extension and decided to add a few more features while implementing the activation thing. Firstly, I’ve added URL encoding to make sure it works in old browsers. Then I fixed building path string so it happily takes any "http://" URL along with simple "file.mp3" for the local files. Now you should be able to play any publicly available .mp3 file in the universe, and you can still use short names for local files – best of two worlds!

Another improvement is ability to play multiple files. After new release you’ll be able to add the whole play list to the single player (just separate them by commas):

It is a good basis for podcasting support (enclosures etc.). I’m thinking about tackling more podcasting features in the future.

On a totally separate note: how did we come to live in the world where two crappiest applications on my machine are iTunes and FireFox? It saddens me; I used to love them both :(