14 May 2011

Restoring a whaleback steamer

A 3-minute video shows the work being done by a group of 50 volunteers, restoring a 19th-century Great Lakes shipping vessel.
The Meteor is the world's last whaleback steamer -- not counting the shipwrecked ruins that litter the bottom of Lake Superior. Starting in the late 1880s, a 44-boat armada of the strange-looking freighters and barges with pig-nosed snouts hauled Great Lakes iron ore, grain, sand, gravel, fuel and even ferried cars from Detroit...

The 366-foot, 2,500-ton boat was hauled out of Lake Superior in the 1970s and beached on Barkers Island, where it's open to the public for summer tours starting this weekend...

"History wasn't much fun back in high school, but when you grow up, you realize just how important something like this is...."
The full story is at the StarTribune.

Update:  The video was apparently autostarting for some readers of this blog, so I've moved it to below the fold:


6 comments:

  1. This video is autostarting in my browser. Please make it stop.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't see a "preloadVideo" or a "VideoPlayBack" in the code. Those are the only things I would know to remove. Here's the code inside the iframe part -

    fromeborder="0" height="400" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://widget.newsinc.com/single.html?WID=2&VID=23415039&freewheel=90086&sitesection=mstlifestfrt_lif" width="630">

    Any suggestions, anyone?

    ReplyDelete
  3. If all else fails, you can always resort to linking to the video instead of embedding it.

    Or, as a compromise, you can embed the video below the fold. The most important thing is preventing autoplay on the front page where the browser is trying to load everything else as well and the offending video must be scrolled down and hunted for. Preventing autoplay when showing only the single post is preferred, but not as big a deal.

    I know it's not your policy to use a fold - you prefer the front page to show each blog post in its entirity - but preventing autoplay is a good enough reason to make an exception.

    (Personally, I don't understand why browsers don't give the user more control in this area; surely it would be simple enough to maintain e.g. a blacklist of script commands that cannot be executed unless a button has been pressed on the page.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I actually don't know how to put things below a fold; I guess I need to read up on it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Can't help you in Blogger, but it ought to be a trivial thing in any blogging platform. In Wordpress, the toolbar on the post composition page includes a button to insert the fold at the current cursor location.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I figured out how to put it after a "jump break" - does that solve the problem?

    ReplyDelete

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