Over the last few weeks I’ve been working hard at getting the technology in place for the launch of our site and channels. In order to do that several things are required – an understanding of which channels we currently have the resources to launch, blogs over on Blogger for each, and hashtags for each on Twitter.
Basically, the structure of NapierTV’s production system is as follows:
Each channel has a hashtag on Twitter, a blog on Blogger and then has videos which can appear on the podcast.
Working from the bottom to the top, I’ll try to explain a little about each technology and how we’re bolting them together to form something that’s (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts.
Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to post short (140 character) messages. These can be public messages to the world in general, messages directed at specific other users, or messages about a given topic.
The third option is what we’re interested in. By creating a tag word for a channel we allow users to post messages about that channel or directed to others interested in the channel. These tag words are called “hashtags” and are identified by the hash symbol (#) that precedes them. For example, the tag for the ENTV production channel (and ENTV stuff in general) is simply #entv.
A blog (a contraction of the term "weblog") is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
Hopefully that answers that adequately.
So, each channel has its own blog which updates as frequently as is feasible and covers a variety of things related to the subject matter of the channel.
Lastly, there’s the videos released by NapierTV. Our show is a video podcast and will be released weekly if all goes to plan. Some of you may not know what a podcast is, or might only have a vague idea, so let’s see if Wikipedia can help us out again:
Video podcast is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures.
Each week our podcast will consist of different videos released by our channels, cut together to form a whole show.
That’s the individual components covered, now to explain a little bit about how they’re used together. If you’re not interested in a bit of techy stuff, now would be the time to skip to the last section!
Warning – Techy content below!
Twitter updates are very immediate and through the magic of RSS and a server that updates very frequently it’s possible to update a site rather more frequently than we would be able to otherwise. It also allows us to push the envelope in terms of any university society that we know of as we allow immediate involvement by anyone, member or not, with our activities.
Unfortunately the tech to easily aggregate hashtagged tweets simply didn’t exist in any usable form that we could find. Perhaps it is out there somewhere but despite much searching we couldn’t find any scripts or widgets to do what we wanted. With the help of Michael Maclean (mgdm on #lugradio) for the PHP and an old friend of mine, Anthony Sennett, for the javascript, I was able to get two working widgets together.
The first is the PHP aggregator on our main site which supports the output of any number of tweets and has caching support. If you’re on the site right now, you’ll see it to the right of this blog post and as you can see it outputs the tweet’s description, author (with a link to their Twitter page) and the number of minutes since the last post.
The second is the javascript version, which should be in the sidebar on the right if you’re reading this on Blogger. It needs a bit of work but is in a working condition. It currently creates a cache but is unable to read from it and fails if a tweet contains linebreaks. We’re/I’m still working on that one although any help is very much appreciated.
Blogger
Our blogs are on Blogger but are aggregated on our main site using FeedBurner’s Buzzboost technology. We also use several of their other syndication options to attempt to make our content as easy for you to reach as possible. I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy and like to have content delivered on my terms. Hopefully the setup we’ve created allows for that.
Video
Our video content has traditionally been published online on BlipTV and YouTube. We intend to continue this way, although we may choose a replacement for BlipTV in the long run if a better (free) alternative presents itself.
The planned formats for release are pretty much the same as they were for the Napier Subculture Podcast:
- A medium quality flash version
- A high quality version in something like Xvid or H264
- A high quality version in Ogg Theora
- A medium quality version for iPods released on iTunes
There may be some tweaks and we may start releasing HD content, depending on our budget allocation for the coming year. If there’s a format you’d like us to release in, let us know and I’ll see what I can arrange.
That’s the techy stuff out of the way – You can look now!
So, how does our new site affect you ?
Well, firstly it means you can get involved with the society and the show just by posting a message on twitter.
Listening to a new album that you really like? Post a tweet with the #rocktv tag!
Blogging whilst listening to "Manso Manso" by Sara Tavares. Very chilled. Nice.#rocktv
via Flamekebab moments ago
There we go, I just added that to The Rock’s channel page – it’s that easy.
Secondly, it means that if you see something on the show and want to know more you can head over to the channel and see a bit more detail. There’s plenty that goes on when we film, at least most of the time, so we try to make sure we record it. It also means that if you like a channel, you can see some of the other content we put up. The channels aren’t just about the podcast!
Finally, it means if you liked what you saw on the show you can see more footage on the channel. We always have to cut down what we film to get it to fit on the show. This way you can see more of the good stuff if it catches your interest!
That’s all from me for now! It’s worth bearing in mind that most blog entries won’t be anywhere near this long, so you won’t have to worry about information overload – this was an exception!
-Ben
Executive Producer
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1 comments:
It all seems good to me
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