Why is my programming starting to look like a card from Grandma?

I've typed so many X's and O's in the past day my eyeballs are swimming. I'll post more about it later. It seems like I'm spending most of my time now pretending to understand x?l. I miss the days of

10 Print "Hello, World"
20 Goto 10

Short version is that I've finally got my weekly topics for the 2009 Organizational Push working. Since it doesn't look like my employer will really be able to make money this year, we're going to try to get everyone a little more organized. Every week I'll be publishing a new "topic", which will really just be little more than some tips and (usually) a brief video about a certain way of getting more organized. "Bite Sized Information" has been my motto the past two months.

All of this stuff will be published with Sharepoint. I've got a pretty standard List that will contain an entry for each topic; I really didn't want to create a new web part page for each item to display related links and the embedded video, though. But I've had a heck of a time figuring out how to modify dispform.aspx to include custom content. I got part way a while ago, figuring out how to modify the form (or modify a copy--I'm too smart to modify the original...well, I am now :) ) to include a web part zone. With that I can do a data view web part to display related links and other list items.

The tough part was the video--I wanted to embed it, while still having the embedded player load the video from the "Video URL" column of the particular list item. After spending about 6 hours pouring over a related Sharepoint Developer Blog Entry by Greg Chan, I figured it out. I can now embed a player and have it use the video file referenced in the list item. That means I can just format one page, rather than 48.

Next post I'll share how it works. It'll be a biggy.