Steven Ng

I recently had to work with Akamai Secure Flash Sreaming for on-demand videos and wanted to share some notes on how we got this to work.

You’ll need 2 zip files from Akamai:

1. Akamai Flash Media Kit
2. Akamai Secure Token Generator

Inside the Akmai Flash Media Kit you will have to open CS3SampleOnDemand.fla in Flash and edit the ActionScript. First declare a constant for the token:

CONNECTION_AUTH_PARAMS=”THEVALUEFROMYOURFLASHVARS_TOKEN”;

Then you will pass the autorization token to the Akamai object like this:

ak.authParams = CONNECTION_AUTH_PARAMS;

I also have a DLL with using the Type D Authentication from Akamai, please email me if you need it.

Sometimes some projects visually hide the SharePoint navigation links so I wanted to list some here because I can never remember them:

More to come…

It’s a small change, but I always forget how to do this so I’m blogging it! Locate the siteMapPath control in the Master Page and add a PathSeperator attribute shown in the example below:

<asp:SiteMapPath ID="siteMapPath" Runat="server" SiteMapProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="false" SkipLinkText="" NodeStyle-CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" PathSeparator=" / "/>

I’ve currently been working with some technologies like Sitecore, Akamai (actually I take that back, Akamai has decent tech resources) and Prospero which have great company sites but lack public online technical documentation and support. I’ve tried searching for groups and wikis which are unavailable or not very active. Unfortunately these technologies are not as popular as jQuery, Umbraco or even Ruby on Rails so i’m desperate to post about this on my blog in hopes to get more help and info for these technologies from others.

Please help! If you’re using Prospero or Sitecore, please share your experiences on development or integration at the following groups: ProsperoTechnologies and Sitecore - Yahoo group or setup a Tech Wiki?

For companies that want to use Google’s search on their websites, they can purchase a Google Mini Search Appliance starting at $1995. Google gives you many ways to integrate this into your site, but in this post I will explain the fastest way for a developer.

Okay let’s begin! One day your boss tells you he just bought a Google Mini (or two) and wants you to make it work with your existing website. “make it work” is a real-world project requirement for those of you who haven’t been blessed being a cubicle slave yet.

First step is to obviously log into your Google Mini which can be reached by an IP address. Once inside the Mini you will create an collection and name it something descriptive like “stevenng_mainsite”. Start off by clicking on Crawl and Index from the left menu. Then go to Crawl URLs In the first sections Start Crawling from the Following URLs: add the full URLs from your website you want to crawl like this “http://www.stevenng.net”. Next under Follow and Crawl Only URLs with the Following Patterns: add the matching URL pattern to crawl like this “stevenng.net/”. In the last section, enter patterns for itesm you DON’T want called.

You can select to schedule crawls or do a continous crawl, I won’t cover configuration and setup much in this tutorial as this post is geared more towards developers.

In the Serving section under Front Ends you have the option to modify some XSL to display the search results for your website. The XSL can be modified using Page Layout Helper which is a wizard like tool or if you want a more customized search results page then you can edit the XSLT stylesheet yourself. The XSLT file is commented very well which helps if you’re not too comfortable modifying XSLT.

Now that everything is fine and dandy on your Google Mini appliance, it’s time to tackle your website. So you know you have to create a Form with a text input and submit button for starters. You will aslo need to pass the following hidden form variables, see below for a sample snippet:

<form method="get" action="google.stevenng.net/search">
        <input type="text" name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value=""/>
        <input type="submit" name="btnG" value="Google Search"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="site" value="stevenng_mainsite"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="client" value="stevenng_resultpage"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="proxystylesheet" value="stevenng_resultpage"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="output" value="xml_no_dtd"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="num" value="10"/>
</form>

The site should be the collection you want to search, client and proxystylesheet is the name of your Frontend setup in the Google mini.