biotext.org.uk

The website is now live for Penhayl Cottage, a self-catering holiday cottage in Cornwall, run by my family. I’m not much of a web designer, but thankfully there’s a lot of free tools around these days that make it easy for an amateur to do a decent-looking job.

The layout was based on a free stylesheet from Free CSS which a great resource for the design-impaired like me. The image gallery on the right side uses a neat Javascript library called Lightbox2.

The Google Map doesn’t use any fancy techniques like their Javascript API or anything. It’s just embedded in an iframe. This page was very useful in getting the URL parameters right for the marker and the zoom level.

The Flash video player is a very flexible open-source app called Flowplayer, and I used ffmpeg to convert the original MPEGs into FLVs to play in it.

I used the oldish version of iMovie that came with my Mac to compose the video clips into a single long movie for the downloadable versions, and to export the H.264 m4v version for the iPhone, although apparently there’s other tools like iSquint that can also do this. Incidentally, iMovie is a bit weird about file formats — it wouldn’t open the mpeg files which came from the original DV camera but arrived on a CD-ROM. It will happily open the same format if you plug the camera in directly, but the camera was in Cornwall and I’m in London. Thanks Apple. Fortunately, this thread explains how you can fool it into thinking a disk image containing the files is actually a plugged-in device.

I also used ffmpeg to transcode the m4v back into an mpeg-1. The results aren’t especially pretty but it will play on most players out there, and anyway, this is just a backup plan for non-Flash-users.

Andrew.