The Easy way to get audio, video, podcasts and photos posted to your blog

Jeff Meade at the Irish Philly Blog is my favorite kind of client— he's funny, personable, and once I've done a few basic things he digs in and learns how to go further on his own. Then he emails me about what's he's learned and I get to pass it on to you! Jeff totally deserves an AHA award for setting up some of the coolest video, audio and photo pages I've seen on TypePad.

I got acquainted with Jeff when he hired me to do a couple quick hacks like putting an ad space over the banner and setting up the code for a BlogAds strip in the sidebar. But the real fun began when he asked me to incorporate an Amazon aStore into the blog. He'd already designed the store to match the colors of the blog but was frustrated because the store was too wide to fit between the sidebars. He asked me to go in and create a page that hold the aStore without clipping off part of the display. There's at least two ways to do that… You can edit the template that generates TypePad Pages to drop the sidebars and display as a one column layout, or you can create a copy of the index template with a single column layout and paste the new content into the template where the posts would normally display. I favor the second option because that way if you have Pages that you want to display your sidebars on, you can, while the custom index page gives you a one column layout for the pages where that's not appropriate. Of course, to make that work, you need to edit the CSS so that "layout-one-column" is the proper width of your existing blog (the default width for one column blogs is 500px).

So I fixed up the aStore index template so that it looked just the way Jeff wanted it. The next day, I got an email with the subject line "You've created a monster" and this link. Jeff had looked at the template and figured out how to do a really nice videos page using Youtube's Custom Player widget. Moments later, another email arrived with a link to a page he'd created to showcase photos from his Flickr account using a customizable embedded player from Flickr Anywhere. Very nice. Then another email this morning showing off (quite rightly) the Irish Philly Audio Podcast Page. Jeff used HipCast to archive the audio clips and embedded a feed player from Big Contact.

The only thing he needs now to really make these pages shine is a menu at the top of the blog that makes them easy to find… or perhaps some good navigation graphics in the sidebar. I'm sure either he or I will be adding that soon. In the mean time, I'm glad he pointed out the embedded players to me because they're perfect for another job I'm working on right now. Thanks, Jeff! You rock, (in a very Céilí sort of way)!