v-v-video

Never been a huge video fan, I'd rather look at stills, but am trying out the flickr video features vs YouTube just to see what it's like. Have uploaded the same video to each site - don't laugh, its really really old!

This one is a flickr video:


And this is YouTube:


First impressions:

• flickr was really fast to 'process' the video. YouTube took aaaages
• Private videos can't be embedded from YouTube, but can from flickr. I don't really want to have this live on YouTube, but oh well.
• neither had any hassle with the encoding, but it is a stock standard avi from a digi cam, so wouldn't really expect any hassles anyway
• YouTube has the option of picking a different 'still' for the video. Flickr just shows the first frame which if you had a movie that started with a fade in, wouldn't be great (tho I've only tried two uploads, must create one with a fade in and see what happens. Still waiting to be able to select a still for YouTube tho, will check back later and see if they've given me any options yet (I might just be dense tho!)
  
• flickr video is limited to 90 seconds - this is part of their video philosophy rather than a technical limitation
• I like the annotation features in YouTube, nothing similar in flickr
  

Other than that, they both seem pretty similar.

feed me

I find it weird that none of the stock photography sites I contribute to provide either daily digest emails of sales, or rss feeds to track sales.

K has written me a html scraper in ruby that spits out a rss feed for shutterstock, but I don't think I'll ask him to go through the pain of doing any more sites! Can't see why this would be such a big problem for the sites to implement.

daily dilbert

The Dilbert site finally has its own RSS feed... only a few years late guys!
Go subscribe here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip

Slightly missing the point?

I've just got annoyed about a rss feed I read regularly via google reader.

The rss feed link goes off to an ad page, before redirecting to the actual permalink. As much as this annoys me at home, I just put up with it. However, when reading from work, the ad page is blocked by the internet filter, so I can't get to the permalink via the rss reader, and have to go to the site directly.

There are two WTF's with this:
One, the feed is for articles posted by one of the most prominet user interface usability 'experts' in the field. Two, the rss feeds from his site never contain ANY content, just the title, so we're forced to go to his site to read the article... which rather defeats the purpose of using a rss feed!

My suggestions:
- Remove the ad redirect page. Put the ads in your feed, or on the site, so those of us stuck behind a firewall with content blocking can still get there from the feed.
- Put some content in the feed. IE in Blogger (and probably most rss engines/blogging engines) there is the option to show only a short synopis version of the post, or cut off at 200 characters etc. Enough content to get people interested, but still get them to go to the permalink.

Who's got the right stats?

So I've been running a little competition between Google Analytics and Feedburner's Site Stats functionality to see who reports the better stats on my blog.

The stats are relatively similar, but yesterday showed a difference of 5 visits (which for my teeny readership) is quite a difference. I guess to really work it out who's the most accurate, I need to go trawl the apache logs to see what's really hitting the domain.

I suppose if one or the other sites tracking javascript is too slow to load, they might miss the 'hit', whereas at least the Apache logs are faithful to the end, tho pretty ugly to read :) And for free tracking services, they do both offer a lot of value.

Creating easy web galleries with Lightbox2

I've been doing a bit of work the last few days on redesigning and actually adding some content to my business website. Part of the website includes some galleries - photography, and also a portfolio of web design and other work I've done.

Rather than embed flash or run something dynamic, I've gone down the static HTML pages route (the most dynamic bit is the server side includes!), and for galleries, I'm using Lightbox2 to generate the 'large' views as overlays on top of the current page. It works really well with my dark 'granite' (as I'm calling it) theme, and kind of mimics the 'lights out' functionality seen in Photoshop LightRoom.

Have a look at it in action on my 'Places' gallery (architecture and various landscapes).

Not going down the dynamic gallery route is causing me a bit of grief, having to type in all those image links, but I could spend months coding something up, which would probably annoy me even more :)

If you've interested in finding out more, have a look at the Lightbox2 site, and check out their examples.

O-HAI to you too Flickr!

Just signed on to flickr to be greeted in lolspeak. Very cute :)

who's been lookin at my flickr huh?

Flickr launched Flickr Stats today for viewing stats on your flickr photostream.
I 'enabled' it this afternoon, and it was up and runnign when I got home.

Pretty interesting - I've had over 29,000 hits on my flickr images! Hard to imagine really.
And seeing the daily hit trends is interesting - posted an image in the strobist pool, and my views really shot up - not just the for posted image either.

More interesting tho - my most viewed image of Luke McAllister (not even a good shot!) from the All Blacks world cup semi final in Cardiff has stayed really constant since it was posted. Strange, no? Wouldn't really think too many people would be viewing it, but hey what do I know!

Thumbs up on the interface too - nice and easy to interpret.

lolcats

just checkin out some lolcats on icanhascheezeburger.com and came across these fellas. lol!



proof that the internet is just for pics of lolcats :)

I gave in...

finally created a facebook profile.
not sure I like it yet... seems to be YASS (yet another social site). Guess I'll give it a while to sink in :)

Named and Shamed...

Today is British Gas - aspx stack traces in their Central Heating insurance app.

A number of wtf's here:

1. The most obvious - their app is broked :)
2. Should have a custom 500 error page instead of a nasty stack trace
3. They are using a crazy mix of cgi, jsp, java and aspx (check out the url on the home page: http://www.house.co.uk/cgi-bin/house/house/jsp/app/viewHomePageAction?BV_SessionID...)

Their site is back up again now. But then the layout on the 'HomeCare' page is a bit of a shocker... has a semi-liquid borders which resize the main part of the page to the browser width, but then static width content inside that, so gets chopped off.

I could go on for years finding faults in major companies websites :) And I probably will!

flickr forcing users to switch to a yahoo id

flickr is one of my favourite web apps in the world, but they've totally p***ed me off today by sending an email saying I HAVE to switch to a yahoo id signin by 15th March.

This is really annoying - I've always used my email address as my flickr login - dead easy to remember! Because I've never had a yahoo account, all the id's that are good for my name are gone, and I can't use my email address either. So I'll have to get some random thing that I'll never remember. As an old skool user of flikr that's had a pro account for ages, I'm grumpy. Hope you're listening flickr/yahoo!

So now I have google logins, yahoo logins, microsoft logins, all my logins at work and home, webmail logins, yadda yadda yadda. The list is getting REALLY long. Doesn't really matter on my personal laptop, where I don't mind firefox storing my logins, but anytime I'm away from that I have to try remember my logon. And if my laptop dies I'm stuffed again... have to go around every site and get my logins sent/reset. Huge usability issue!

If only everyone would implement an open identity type of solution, where I can log in with my one open identity username/password, and logging into the seperate sites is taken care of in the background.

Grrrr.. I can only see this getting worse and worse in the future as more and more stuff goes online. And I can't see my memory getting much better in the future!