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| | YoTube - Big YouTube Gathering In Philadelphia | | | Thursday, June 26, 2008 (6:19 PM)
(I'm feeling cheerful) | | In two weeks I will be driving to Philadelphia for the big YouTube gathering. Many of my favorite vloggers will be there including lots of people I've never met like Michael Buckley, TheMightyThor, xgogobeanx, etc. I have a hotel room booked because I plan to stay overnight on Saturday and leave Sunday evening. That way I can attend the after party and spend some time site seeing.
I'm currently reading the book "The Philadelphia Inquirer's Walking Tours Of Historic Philadelphia" for ideas on what to see while I am in Philly. | | | 134 Views | 0  Thumbs Up | 0 Comments |  |
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| | YouComment - A Fancy Video Comment Reader | | | Thursday, May 1, 2008 (4:22 PM)
(I'm feeling accomplished) | | I have added another page to my collection of “value added services” for vloggers. This one is an improvement over the YouTube comment system. You can find it on my web site at: http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/YouComment.aspx
The comment system is an important part of YouTube’s social networking features which also include video responses, private messages, bulletins, and channel comments. A video which receives a lot of comments will appear on the most discussed list. However, there have been many complaints about the YouTube comment system. The biggest problem is that comments can disappear because YouTube replicates their database and it does not always remain in sync. They also have not done much with the comment system.
I prefer the LiveVideo comment system because it places a small thumbnail of the user profile image next to each comment. This makes it easier to identify the participants in the conversation. YouTube currently only shows the username of the person making the comment.
Since there are so many trolls and miscreants on YouTube, it is frequently necessary to check out a user’s profile when they leave a nasty comment. This can be pretty time consuming and gives them a channel view count they may not deserve. So I used the alt text and title tag attributes to show some user profile information which appears when you mouse over the user profile image (see screen shot below). Such tool tips are an easy way to supply more information without cluttering up the screen. Unfortunately many web sites don’t take advantage of tool tips and surfers may not know to look for them.
I wanted to make this tool visually appealing so I added a speech balloon around the comments. This is another graphic design element that you can find on many other web sites. This was accomplished using Cascading Style Sheet rules to apply background images to blockquote tags.
The programming for YouComment was quite difficult. First I had to figure out how to nest comments which are replies to previous comments. The logical way to do this was to use nested unordered lists. The YouTube API returns the comment data as XML so the nested unordered lists had to match the structure of nested XML nodes. However, the YouTube API does not actually nest replies under their associated comments. There is merely an id number pointing to the previous comment. I had to re-organize the XML nodes to give them the structure that I required.
Looking up the user profile information for each comment was proving to be a time consuming operation and it was frequently redundant if the same user left multiple comments on the video. Therefore I created a hash table to store the unique user profile information and only made web requests when the user could not be found in the hash table. This has improved the web page’s performance but it still cannot handle a video with more than a hundred comments. After that you’ll find the browser acting flaky because it is using too much memory. I may need to add pagination to reduce the number of comments appearing at one time.
Most people view the comments on a video to see the replies to their comment. It can be difficult to find your comment in a page with hundreds of comments. Computer savvy users know how to use the Ctrl + F shortcut to find text on a web page. I wanted a way to highlight your comments so I added the option to store your YouTube username in a cookie. The cookie can then be used to remember your username between visits and highlight your matching comments with a yellow background.
I’m very proud of this programming exercise and I plan to use it myself. I spend a lot of time reading comments that have been left on videos. Since I’ll be using this regularly, you can be sure that I will promptly fix any bugs and make improvements if it proves to be hard to use.
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| | Pownce Public Notes List Flake | | | Wednesday, April 30, 2008 (7:57 PM)
(I'm feeling accomplished) | | I’ve been busy with the Pageflake developers API and the YouTube API. The Pageflakes documentation is not very good so I had to figure out how to display the loading bar without using their showProgress() method that I can’t get to work. Then I had to find a way to get the refresh button to work with JSON data feeds. I think that only works with RSS feeds by default. I also found a way to give myself some credit in the Settings and how to save a setting. I created a Pownce flake and a Stickam flake which I’m using on my Pageflakes pages. My Pownce pageflake has been approved and may soon appear in their widget catalog.
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| | Custom Pageflake | | | Saturday, April 19, 2008 (7:10 PM)
(I'm feeling accomplished) | | Argent009 pointed out to me that LiveVideo has already added a tab called LiveStart to show how Pageflakes will be integrated into LiveVideo. I don't know if LiveVideo will open their platform to third-party developers the way Facebook has for applications, but I've finally created a custom pageflake. It took me most of the day but I've created a countdown timer for the YouTube gathering in Philadlephia.
If you have a Pageflakes account you can add this pageflake to a page by going to the developers page at http://www.pageflakes.com/developers and entering the web address to my page in the Test your flake textbox. The flake URL is http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/YoTube.aspx Please note that this page will error if you try to open it directly in your browser. It will only work when used as a pageflake because it relies on their framework. | | | | 152 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | Export YouTube Favorites To Excel | | | Thursday, April 17, 2008 (7:16 PM)
(I'm feeling accomplished) | | Tonight I uploaded a new web page to my web site that allows you to back up your YouTube Favorites to Excel:
http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/FavBackUp.aspx
You should back up your YouTube account information because you never know when they will delete your account without warning or explanation. If your account is suspended or deleted you will lose everything including your favorites and you may not be able to find your favorited videos again.
You will probably find that you have backed up fewer videos than are reported on YouTube. I think this is because many videos may have been removed and this is not reflected in their favorites count.
All my web application does is use the YouTube developer's API to get the feed data. You could do the same yourself but it would be in a complicated XML format and not very readable. I think most people would rather have it in an Excel spreadsheet. If you do not have Microsoft Office then you can download Open Office for free.
This is just another idea for a "value added service" that I thought I'd implement. I'll probably add pages to back up other things in your YouTube account and then think about other types of services. | | | | 129 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | YouCloud - YouTube Video Tag Clouds | | | Monday, April 14, 2008 (5:18 PM)
(I'm feeling accomplished) | | I've begun to put my web application skills to work on some personal projects instead of client projects. Since I'm heavily into online video and the vlogging community I want to do something in that online space. I have a few ideas for some "value added" services that I could provide. My first online service is based on Tweet Clouds, a web site that generates tag clouds based on Twitter posts. Actually, I've had this idea for quite some time but was not motivated to implement it until I saw some online buzz for Twitter tag clouds.
I did some online research and could not find anyone offering to create tag clouds based on the tags that vloggers use for their videos. So I've created an ASP.NET 2.0 web application named YouCloud. YouCloud is a simple form that only requires you to enter a YouTube username. It will gather the video tags for every video by that user and generate a tag cloud. If you mouse over a word in the tag cloud you will see a tooltip showing how many videos were tagged with that word. If you click on the word you will be taken to YouTube and shown the search results for that keyword.
I don't expect to win any awards with this simple web application but it should not tax my web hosting company's web server. I don't see why anyone would be terribly interested in this service unless they are curious about what tags a popular vlogger uses to promote his videos. Some vloggers try to cheat the system by using inaccurate tags.
I've placed a Google AdSense video unit and an Amazon Honor System donation button on YouCloud to see if I can generate any revenue. I suspect I can make more money doing billable client work than this entrepreneurial crap.
I can apply the same concept to generate tag clouds for other Web 2.0 sites like Flickr or LiveVideo. I do have another idea for a YouTube service. The next thing I will be working on is a back up utility which will generate an Excel spreadsheet of your Favorite Videos. This will be useful if YouTube deletes your account and you lose all your favorites.
Today I learned that Live Universe, the company that owns LiveVideo, has purchased Pageflakes, the mashup web site based on ASP.NET 2.0 technology. This is an interesting development because it could mean that LiveVideo may get some more mashup features to create the ultimate social networking web site. | | | | 161 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | Preparing For The YoTube Gathering In Philadelphia | | | Sunday, April 13, 2008 (8:21 AM)
(I'm feeling cheerful) | | I've bought two books to prepare for the YouTube Philadelphia gathering on July 12th, 2008 (aka YoTube). I don't think this event needs a lot of preparation but I may want to visit Philadelphia more often so it seems worthwhile to do some research. I do plan to shoot a lot of video while in Philadelphia so it would be useful to know where the tourist sights are. Philadelphia is one of the cities that has been extensively photographed for the Google Streets View so I'll be able to virtually walk the streets to familiarize myself with several downtown neighborhoods.
The first book I'm reading is "On The Make: The Hustle Of Urban Nightlife" by David Grazian. This is an ethnographic study of the Philadelphia nightlife establishments; i.e. restaurants, nightclubs, cocktail lounges, and bars. It mentions many amusingly named hotspots like Swanky Bubbles (my favorite name), Tangerine, Bleu Martini, Buddakan, etc. This is the perfect book if you want the inside dope on the Philadelphia nightlife. It also serves to make Philadelphia seem like an exciting destination and provides some context for the modern scene. I'm not sure if it covers the theaters, cabarets, and performance spaces that I'm interested in.
For the historical context I bought the book "Walking Tours Of Historic Philadelphia" by Edward Colimore of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Since the gathering will be held in Independence Park, this book will probably be more useful to me because it describes all the tourist attractions you can walk to in that area. | | | | 159 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | AJAX Portfolio | | | Sunday, February 24, 2008 (12:47 PM)
(I'm feeling accomplished) | | I have added a new AJAX portfolio section to my web site at: http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/ajax.html. This makes public most of the JSON work I've been doing for the past month or so. You'll find search forms for Flickr, eBay, Technocrati, and ISBN numbers by book title. I also have many pages for video site listings including LiveVideo. Since these small web applications are built entirely from client-side JavaScript you can use them as widgets if you like although I don't think LiveVideo allows JavaScript.
I recently discovered the built-in JSON Viewer in Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper. I did not realize this tool included a JSON Viewer because it is well hidden. To find it you need to enable logging, then highlight a log entry that corresponds with a JSON request. Click the Show Details... link in the right menu. Then click the Response Content tab as shown below and select JSON as the Viewer. I added this to my notes because it would be hard to find again.
As you can see, I was checking out the JSON web service that DotNetKicks provides. They are using Jayrock for the Microsoft .NET Framework.
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| | Video.Show | | | Monday, February 18, 2008 (8:23 PM)
(I'm feeling chipper) | |
Today I got Video.Show installed on my local web server. Here you can see one of my videos has been uploaded to the Silverlight Streaming server and is streamed to a video player running on my server. Now I have my own private video sharing site to play around with!
There are some serious limitations to this technology. I was only able to upload a 20 MB video and the video buffering is terrible. However it is an open source project and I have all the source code so I can customize it to suit my tastes. It should be useful for learning how Silverlight streaming video works. I'll also learn how to customize a Silverlight video player. I'm using a trial version of Microsoft Expression Encoder. I can't seem to find an online store to buy it. I did use it to encode a Flash video file FLV to a Windows Media Video file WMV which plays on my Pocket PC so it is good for that. | | | | 186 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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