A couple of people have emailed me, complaining that my Flickr widget does not work on wordpress.com blogs. As it turns out (I didn’t know this because I host all my blogs myself), Automattic blocks a number of HTML tags, including every single one that could be (ab)used to display Flash movies. There’s a workaround that might work, but that’s far from ideal.

So how about Facebook, MySpace, TypePad and all the other things I don’t personally use? Has anyone tried adding my widget to any of these, or anywhere else of interest? Please leave a comment if you have and report whether it worked or not. I know that it works fine on Blogger, and I’ve just submited the widget to Hyves.nl, which is Holland’s biggest social network, to be considered for inclusion.

Flash sucks. There, I’ve said it. Or to be more precise, using Flash in a web page sucks. Just about everyone has the plugin, but actually embedding a movie into a web page isn’t quite as easy as it could be. There are a number of options, all of which have pros and cons. And in most cases you’ll need to pass parameters to your little RIA and/or have it communicate with the outside world too, adding to the complexity.

About 90% of the email I get about WP-Cumulus is from people where the movie isn’t displaying as it should. In most cases, this is caused by relatively minor markup errors in their blog. I find it hard to explain why Flash can sometimes break if you forget to close a single tag.
More About WP-Cumulus 1.20′s compatibility mode