Magic Web Fairies

Went to lunch with Myroslav Opry, Robert Nagel (Houston) and Jonah who’s last name I can’t spell. We ate Indian buffet and Myroslav was traumatized. He’s having trouble finding things he would consider edible. Where can you get chicken soup around here? He’ll eat that without experiencing abject terror I think.

I whined more about stats and audios at Myroslav who has got to be tired of that by now. Discussion revolved around podcasting, travel, food, newsmastering, and most interestingly of displaying RSS feeds in Plone pages (a source of personal pain) .

I was of course late for Nate’s talk so didn’t have a plug for the stupid Dell with the crappy battery so had to actually WRITE DOWN my notes. Meaning that this one may be even less coherent that usual because my handwriting has been illegible for years now. Sorry Nate.

1:30 Multimedia and Podcasting with Plone

Nate Aune

Melodeo will deliver audio to mobile phones. (How cool is that? Is this a service. I need to look at this.)

Podcasting is growing significantly (he had lots of stats and I wrote none of them down. Must get presentation later.)

Plone OoB

• File content type is no good for audio files – no metadata
• RSS is only 1.0

ATAudio and qRSS2Syndication helped quite a bit.

Actually I’d like to plug qRSS2Syndication here as we did use it with great success ATAudio pains not withstanding.

Nate mentioned TalkBMC on the success story slide. (Had to tell him afterword that we ran screaming away from ATAudio. I really really hope to find a little bit of time to talk with him further about our woes over this one. Maybe it will help on the new product they are working on.)

He showed a screenshot of TalkBMC’s front page and mentioned in passing about how all the audio sites in his examples had very customized skins. (Oh the pain. Poor Wald at QuintaGroup.)

With Zope 3 they are finding that they can make the multimedia products more extensible and more usable. Zope 3 enables:

• Plone should be smart enough to detect if file type is audio or video
• Should be able to plug in media formats
• Components can be reused outside of plone

Latest product is Plone4ArtistsAudio and the alpha has just been released. Do not deploy on production sites.

New product uses python ID3 library parcer to extract metadata. (The example looks way better than ATAudio looks.)

Edit will allow you to edit ID3 data & will write back to file. (Looks like it’s full ID3v2 support now.)

They’ve adapted a folder content type for a nicer display. Select Activate Media to get a “track listing” view. (Looks OK – could be fleshed out a bit.)

Question about m4a feature support. Answer – Not

yet in this new product.

Question about the id3v2 problems of ATAudio. Answer – They have been resolved in Plone4ArtistsAudio.

You can create podcasts in smart folders so you can set critera and pull them together from different parts of the sites. Again you’d choose activate media to give this a nice view. (hmmm… how can we use this for EL?)

RSS2 in use for this product is using basesyndication from Zope3. Does not support iTunes metadata but that will be included. Quills also uses basesyndication from Zope3.

Question: Can you add description to the podcast? Answer: Not yet but you will be able to in the final product.

A bit on the challenges of large files. (I wrote a page of notes on this which I’m hesitant to type in because of the horrible flash backs it induces. Oh well.)

• Upload through browser is sketchy (hahahaha! Scott are you laughing yet? Falling out of your chair? Cursing the universe? yeah. )
• ZODB is not designed to store large files. (Although the rumor is that zope 2.11 will have BLOB support. How good will this really be?)

Recommendations for uploading

FTP (hahahahahaa! oh you’re killing me)

WebDEV (buggy in IE and on Macs)

Various other suggestions of which Tramline which bypasses Zope & uses Apache sounded familiar and may be what QG did for us to tide us over until we got our MP3 distributor.

Why storing media on an actual File Server is Good For You

• Avoid ZODB bloat
• Expose to third party steaming software
• Easier to backup or move
• Transcode video files

The improvement proposale at Plone.org is PLIP #154.

Roadmap for the products is at plone4artists.org

New product should not create new content types but should use existing Plone content types and just be smarter.

They’re working on Plone4ArtistsLink which identifies remote services lik egoogle, odeo, youtube. (I’m actually pretty interested in keeping an eye on this.)

Also thinking about community feedback products around commenting, rating and tagging.

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I could rant but I won’t. Need caffeine.