Web Development

Third Party Headache

November 12, 2008 If we’ve ever met or exchanged emails, there’s a good chance your immediate reaction was not: “Now,that guy likes underground hip-hop.” Well, it’s time to take the vinyl out of the crates. Not only do I listen to underground hip-hop, I co-founded the underground hip-hop website ArtofRhyme.com in 2001.

Our most popular sections are New Joints and AOR Radio, both of which allow people to listen to new and often exclusive music. We didn’t want to write our own audio player so we decided to go with a popular third-party tool called Wimpy Player. It’s an Adobe Flash-based web app that worked well for us for a couple of years...until last week. Reports of users who upgraded to Flash 10 had their player begin to fail doing its one job: PLAY.

Having a hip-hop website without music is like having a photography portfolio with no pictures.
We can control everything that we developed in our site, but when two third-party tools, Flash and Wimpy decide to break, we’re at a loss.
 

Picture 1 - AOR Radio, notice the DEMO text :-(

We were stuck dropping (luckily only)$89.99  for Wimpy’s newest version in a kneejerk approach to make sure our most important feature still works. You’ll also notice that there’s a big annoying DEMO label staring people in the face until we have time to apply the latest licenses. Luckily, we’re an underground hip-hop website so our users aren’t very picky about DEMO labels - as long as they can hear new music.

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