New extension for BlogEngine.net
Ok, I'm not much of a blogger, but I did try several blog engines on Microsoft platform and beyond before settling my mind on BlgogEngine.net. I like it a lot for simplicity and elegancy of the code base. May be I'm an old school, but I do prefer applications which code I can comprehend in it's (almost) entirety - it gives me (false) sense of security. The other thing that I like about it is support for extensibility - so you can make that simple elegant code base bloated with tons of stuff that you can package so that it pretends to be an "extension". One problem though is that BlogEngine is relatively new player and there are not too many extensions yet present. So I decided to fix it a bit…
Jokes aside, one thing that BlogEngine is missing is multimedia support. Sure, it's not a core feature and it does belong somewhere in plug-ins directory. And I really needed audio support for one of my projects. After some looking around I found that there quiet a few free flash players you can use in HTML pages (may be Microsoft will come up with knocking-your-socks-off free SilverLight player some day and it will take over the world?). By far, the most popular and slim in-line player I came across is the one used in WordPress blogs. I decided that this is the best candidate for adoption and wrote a little wrapper around this flash player to hook it up with BlogEngine. Extension that I resourcefully named "mp3player" you can download here. There are also some instructions on how to install and use it, and all code is available for you to use and change at will. I intend to maintain and enhance it over the time so any feedback on bugs/issues or suggestions for improvement are greatly appreciated.
Below is an example what it looks like – most likely you’ve already familiar with the picture, which is another advantage of using this particular player. Just click an arrow to test it:
