More enhancements - Single Sign On and others

There were lots of support emails today around archive.org outages, I had to push through a number of uploads as an archive admin but they all seem to have finished now.

I also put in major updates for single signon. There's still lots of testing needed, but the main components are up and running on the production systems. The end result is that people should be able to cleanly login or out once to access all of our systems. Soon we hope to extend this to include SpinXpress.com in a way similar to how we handle archive.org accounts (we actually, like to do better than that, but that will take some time until we have implemented OpenID - coming in Drupal 6!).

There are also a number of small fixes. For example, I found the wmv autoplay bug and fixed that. As reported earlier, I added and documented 1pixelout support. I fixed lots of missing media nodes. There is now a re-sync with archive link on media pages that allows updating our page from archive. As I'm cleaning up, i'm running into all kinds of database oddities that I am correcting; for example, last night i discovered that about 1000 records had no media type. Generally things like this lead to fixes in our metadata parsers and then I re-sync. I'm trying to track down the tag issues as I'm doing this.

I have started to contribute back to drupal community in the form of code fixes and additions to their "embedded media module". In particular, I am adding new support for ourmedia.org and archive.org and have fixed some issues related to their existing blip.tv module. The end result of this is that Drupal sites with this module (e.g., politicalvideo.org, the onion, etc) can paste in archive or ourmedia urls and the module will generate the proper code to display the Flash version of the file from archive.org. See http://LADrupal.org/blog for examples.

(image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/289573734/)