Integrating Plyr into your own website

Background

I needed to integrate a new HTML5 Media Player into Galaxie Blog for several reasons. I was using the Kendo UI HTML5 Media Player as it was integrated with the themes that I developed for Galaxie Blog, however, it is not part of the Kendo Core open source distribution, and required other Galaxie Blog owners to have a Kendo UI license.

It was my goal to integrate a new HTML player that was open source. I had thought to use Kendo's media player if the blog owner had a license, however, after integrating Plyr, I determined that Plyr offers quite a bit more functionality than the Kendo Media Player, and changed the default media player to Plyr- even if the blog owner had their own Kendo commercial license.

Why Plyr?

Plyr is a simple, lightweight, accessible and customizable HTML5 media and audio player. It supports HTML Video, Audio, YouTube and Vimeo. It has support for video captions in multiple languages, and has add revenue capabilities. What also excited me is that I could cast my videos to my own TV. Plyr also supports air play, and I wanted to be able to view the video's that I took on my own TV.

How to integrate Plyr into your own website or blog

Integrating Plyr is relatively trivial. I will show you the steps that I used to integrate Plyr into Galaxie Blog. This is meant as a general how to document, if you run into problems or want more information, see the full documentation on the Plyr GitHub site

1. Clone or download Plyr at https://github.com/sampotts/plyr
2. Upload all of the files found in the dist folder to your own site

Once the files have been uploaded, you will need to open the index document of your site and edit a few lines of code

Load the javascript and css files in the head portion of your document like so:

Find the portion of the page where you would like the video to be displayed, and copy and paste the code below into your own webpage. Pay attention to the crossorigin argument. You need to remove the crossorigin argument if your video is hosted on your own site. If the video is hosted elsewhere, such as the plyr cdn site, you'll need to put the crossorigin argument back into the code.

If you have different sized videos, let's say one with 720p and 1080p, put both of the sources in there. The Plyr library will dynamically choose the most appropriate video size that can be rendered on your site. Of course, you can also put in one video source.

Video captions are supported and are optional.

Finally, put the following script at the very end of your code. You need to do this if you need to have more than one video on your page. If you only have one video on your page, the script will not cause any errors, so I advise you to put this at the end of your page.

This article was meant to quickly convey how to put a basic Plyr Media Player on your own web page. You'll definitely want to check out the Plyr GitHub website for more information.

If you want to see how the video looks on Galaxie Blog, see Plyr, a HTML5 media player, is incorporated into Galaxie Blog

In our next article, we'll see how we can share our video to both Facebook and Twitter

Thanks for reading!

Plyr, a HTML5 media player, will be incorporated into the next Galaxie Blog version

Plyr, an open source HTML5 media player, is now the default media player in Galaxie Blog. Plyer will automatically render video or audio when Galaxie Blog finds supported content. To improve page performance, Galaxie Blog will also lazy load the media for you. Plyr is a simple, lightweight, accessible and customizable HTML5 media and audio player. It supports HTML Video, Audio, YouTube and Vimeo. It has support for video captions in multiple langauges, and has add revenue capabilities. For a full list of features, see the Plyr site at https://github.com/sampotts/plyr

If you have a Kendo UI license, you can optionally use the Kendo HTML 5 media player, however, the Kendo Media player is not as functional as Plyr, and it is not open source.

In this last post in this series, I will provide to links to some social image sharing validator tools and provide a few tips and tricks that I learned along the way.

After creating the proper social media images and fine tuning the social media meta tags that are required, you can validate how each site will display your page using the tools below.

Facebook Sharing Debugger

The Facebook Sharing Debugger will validate your og meta tags and scrape the social media image. It's relatively straightforward to use. Just enter in the URL of the page that you want to validate, and the debugger will scrape your page and show you if any errors were made. When you first enter the URL, it will take several seconds to generate the page, and if this page was not shared before, it will prompt you to fetch new information. Click on the button to fetch new information, and the debugger will list out data along with error information.

The debugger will not immediately generate the Facebook sharing preview as it is crawling your page in the background, wait several minutes and refresh the page, and the image preview should be displayed. If you have errors indicating that you have missing tags, you can ignore these, as long as you have all of the essential tags.

If you don't like the look of the images, you can make some changes, but come back here and regenerate the preview on the pages that you have shared the URL to.

If you're using Galaxie Blog, I have a utility tool in /common/utilities/cfimage.cfm that will allow you to reprocess the images quickly. For non Galaxie Blog users, I have provided instructions below, and I placed the utility script on Git hub.

Twitter Card Validator

The Twitter Card Validator is a bit easier to use, and it responds faster than the Facebook Sharing Debugger. Like Facebook, all that you need is to input your URL. After entering the URL, Twitters tool should immediately display your page preview. However, it is not easy to change the appearance of the preview after it has been made. I'll show you some tricks to re-create the preview.

How to Regenerate a Twitter Preview

Twitter will cache your preview once the page has been shared, or a Twitter Card Preview has been made. However, it can be quite problematic to refresh the cache once made. I learned a few tricks and will show you a bullet proof way to change your preview if you have to make any changes.

Go to the Twitter Open Graph meta tags in your page. Append something unique on the twitter:image tag like so. If you're using ColdFusion you can simply create a UUID. Other languages have the same capabilities. All you need to do is make sure that the URL is unique.

Once you have made the URL to the image unique, Twitter thinks that you have changed the image entirely, and will clear the cache and refresh the preview.

Note: you'll have to get a Facebook and Twitter Developer Account to use these tools.

Creating Social Media Images

I have put a cfimage.cfm template on GitHub for you to generate Social Media Images. I use this to generate social media images for my older posts. The usage is pretty simple. Upload the cfimage file to your server. then drop the original image in a enclosures folder, and create two new folders within the enclosures folder named twitter and facebook. In the socialMediaImagePath variable, put in the full image path for the type of image that you want to create. Go to the URL of your cfimage.cfm template with a browser, and the images will be saved underneath the '/enclosures/facebook' or '/enclosures/twitter' folders.

Other Social Media Validators

There are other tools for validation for different media platforms, such as Twitters Post Inspector, and Pinterest Rich Pin's Validator that I will cover at a different time.

Happy Coding!

How to make the perfect social media sharing image - part 5 Essential Meta Tags

Sharing your content on social media can have dramatic results at driving more traffic to your site. In my own experience, sharing my own content can drive 50% more traffic to the site. Along with adding the properly sized images, we need to make use of the correct meta tags. I have made several passes at improving the logic that Galaxie Blog uses to auto-generate the tags, and will share my experience with you. If you are using Galaxie Blog, the auto-generation of these tags is done for you.

Each social media site has it's own rules for generating the meta tags. Facebook prefers open graph tags, Twitter can use the open graph tags, but it has a slew of it's own proprietary tags, and Google +, LinkedIn, and Pinterest prefer schema markup tags, which I will not cover here.

Open Graph Tags

The following open graph tags are essential for Facebook

<meta property="og:image" content="URL to the social sharing image.">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="The site name (ie Galaxy Blog). " />
<meta property="og:url" content="The URL to the article" />
<meta property="og:title" content=" Must be 25 characters or less, especially for mobile" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Should be up to two sentences long, but under 30 characters for decent mobile rendering" />

The og:image:height and og:image:width tags are helpful, but not necessary. Facebook will correctly determine the proper image size as long as you stay within the Facebook recommendations.

Essential Twitter Tags

In the next article, I will go over some useful validation tools and share some tips and tricks with that I found.

After the last entry, I wanted to show you the social media images that were created by ColdFusion. Each of these images match the exact recommended size and the ratio aspect that are recommended by the various social media platforms. I'll show you the actual images that were created, and how the social media platform displayed the images after I shared the previous article.

The images

The first image to the left is the original image that was uploaded. This is a picture of my dog, Toby, a super-smart, 13 y.o. bundle of energy running in the snow. The second image, in the middle, is the Facebook social media image, and the image to the right is the Twitter social media image. All of the social media images are copies of the original.

Galaxie Blog will automatically take the image that you want to post, and create Facebook and Twitter social media images that are sized per the social media's recommendations. The Facebook social media image is 1200 pixels wide, and 630 in height. Twitter is similar, but just a hair shorter. They are 1200 pixels wide, and 628 pixels in height.

How the page renders on social media sites

Below are the social media sites render the page when it is shared. The images below are actual screen shot's of the last post I shared in part 3 of this series. Again, the image to the left is the original. The middle image is how Facebook presents the site, and the image to the right is how Twitter displays the share.

Both Facebook and Twitter will take the images that were created by Galaxie Blog, and resize them into their own format. As long as the images either meet the maximum or minimum dimensions as they do here, the site presentation of the share will look good.

Note: this approach works for Slack and LinkedIn sites, but this is outside of the narrow Facebook and Twitter scope that I wanted to blog about.

Next up in this series, how to properly use the meta tags for social media sharing.

In this post, I will share how I implemented logic to have Galaxie Blog automatically create social media sharing images for you when uploading an image for a given post.

Background

When a Galaxie Blog owner creates a post using the administrative interface, there is an option to upload an enclosure by clicking a Choose File button at the end of the add entry page. The interface is simple, when the Choose File button is clicked, it opens up a file browser and the user selects the image that they want to be displayed at the top of the post.

In this post, the picture above is an abstract image that is 2200 pixels wide, and 1760 pixels in height. However, the social media images that the code below produces from this image will have different sizes that are optimized for both Facebook and Twitter. Galaxie Blog has always created a responsive image that automatically adjusts itself to fit on any modern device, however, I have now implemented logic that will manipulate the selected image and create both Facebook and Twitter social media images as well. Here is my approach...

Usage

To use this to create and save social media images, all that you need to do is invoke the createSocialMediaImages function below. It takes three arguments, the URL of the image that you want to perform operations on, the social media platform, and optionally, the Social Media Image Type. If the social media type argument is left blank (which is what I use in Galaxie Blog), the function will automatically determine the size and the proper aspect ratio. Here is the production code for Galaxie Blog that is working right now:

Logic Walkthrough

I am assuming that if you're reading this, you're someone with the technical skills that can read this and try it out, so I'll jump right in to briefly cover the core logic of this approach. For the sake of clarity, I will only cover how the logic creates Facebook social media images. Most of the logic for the other platforms are the same, and I'll provide the full code at the end of the article.

Once the blog image is selected by the blog owner, Galaxie Blog will first get the width and height of the uploaded enclosure image that was just uploaded.

First, we will double check the images again to make sure that the uploaded image has a larger size than the social media sharing image that we will create. If the uploaded image is larger, we'll set the width and height to match the larger image type. If the uploaded image is smaller than the largest recommended size, we will use the minimum size recommended by the social media platform, and we may set a pre-crop variable to true if necessary. We'll cover this logic next.

Resizing a copy of the original uploaded image

Next we'll check to see if the original image is twice as wide as the targetted social media size. If it is, or if the preCrop variable was set in the previous switch statements, we will create a copy of the original image, and then resize the new image. The code below illustrates this. I removed all of the code other than the Facebook code.

Maintaining the aspect ratio using our nifty ColdFusion ratio calculator function

One of the most critical requirements or this is having the ability to resize images while maintaining the targeted aspect ratio. I could not find a ColdFusion function that did this, so I had to built my own. If you play around with manipulating images and aspect ratios, this type of function should belong in your own toolbox.

Our ratioCalculator function below takes 3 arguments. The aspectRatioWidth and aspectRatioHeight arguments should match the recommended width and height of our targetted social media image that are indicated in the prior post. For the large Facebook Shared Image, the ratio aspect is 1200 pixels wide, and 630 pixels in height. We'll go ahead and plug these values in for the first two arguments as this is the aspect ratio that we want to keep, no matter what size we eventually resize the image to. The third argument is the newWidth argument. Here, the newWidth argument will either be: the original width of the uploaded image: or, the new width when we resized the image in the step above when the size of the uploaded image was twice the width of the recommended Facebook image size.

The ratio calculator function will take these three values, and return the height that is needed to maintain the original aspect ratio. To get the new height of the image, all that we need to specify is the recommended width and height, provided by the social media platform, and the new width that we want to resize an image to be. The new width argument can be smaller, or larger, than the aspect ratio size. No matter what you plug in for the new width, the aspect ratio will be maintained.

Cropping the images

The code has two cropping functions, centerCrop, and horizontalCrop. The centerCrop function is used when we have a landscape image, and the horizontalCrop function is used when using a portrait image.

The centerCrop function takes five arguments, we need to specify the full path of the image, or the variable of the image if we are creating a new image using the newImage ColdFusion function. The original width and original height arguments using the social media recommended size. Here, we are using the large Facebook size of 1200 for the originalWidth, and 630 for the originalHeight. The fourth argument, width, is either the width of the uploaded image, or the width of the newly resized image, and finally, new height, which is provided by the ratioCalculator function that we just covered above. This function will crop the image from the center.

The horizontalCrop, used when we are uploading a portrait image, leaves the width intact, but crops the top and the bottom of the picture equally. This function takes three arguments, the imagePath (or the variable name of the new image when we use the imageNew ColdFusion function), the original height of the uploaded image, and the new height. I am using our ratioCalculator function to provide the new height again while maintaining the original aspect ratio recommended by the social media platform. Again, this example uses the large Facebook size of 1200 for the originalWidth, and 630 for the originalHeight.

This is a rather long and complex post. In my next post, I'll provide some concise examples of social media images that this function creates.

Get the code

The code is published as a git hub repository. This component will also become a part of Galaxie Blog in the next release.

Further Reading

Some of the logic in the center crop function was taken from Raymond Camden's article at https://www.raymondcamden.com/2010/02/03/Cropping-to-the-center-of-an-image