People who embed videos on the web frequently tell their readers to fast forward to a specific point to get to the "good stuff", for example here.

It’s dumb that readers have to do that manually.  If Flash video players were slightly smarter, the author could create an easy-to-type hyperlink that would cause the embedded video to skip to a specific section of the video and start playing.

For example, an embedded player could note that you had navigated to the anchor "#youtube-6-30" and automatically skip to a point 6 minutes and 30 seconds into the video.

Power users ought to be able to create their own "virtual edit" of a video by specifying a sequence of time segments to play back.  A blogger might create their selection of highlights from the presidential debate to accompany their post, for example, without having to actually re-encode the video. 

I can also imagine authoring tools on sites like YouTube that would make it easy to create your own virtual edit.

Even with such tools, however, I think it’s valuable to have a simple, typeable convention for hyperlinking into the midde of a video as described earlier.

I was surprised to find that most out-of-the-box configurations for Rails and Apache are not set up to allow the browser to cache static resources like Javascript and images. This leads to slower page load times and bad looking rendering.

On Apache, this is very easy to fix using mod_expires.  I simply added the two highlighted lines below to our site configuration file in conf.d.  The Rails helpers like image_tag automatically appends a timestamp to the resource URLs, so updated versions of the resources will correctly be fetched by the browser even when an older version is cached.

<Directory "/var/www/example/public">
  Options FollowSymLinks
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  ExpiresActive on
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"
</Directory>

As Alan notes, we just rolled out another round of Mergelab updates;  here are the main things we fixed and improved for this release.

1. We made it easier to add people to your news feed:

• You can now import people from Yahoo and Hotmail as well as Gmail. 
• You can also add a person manually– if you paste in an email signature or other freeform text, the site will automatically extract email addresses and web links for that person.  These will be used to discover news items about that person.
• You can subscribe to news about a person from a shared feed.

2. We added an RSS feed of Mergelab updates. Now you can view news about your friends on your portal of choice.