The age of video on the Web is here! Both content creators and users have high expectations and you may become caught in the middle. Learn how to create an accessible media interface that will allow your institution to deliver high quality Flash video with closed captioning, convey a consistent design across your Web presence, and remain easy to maintain even after your “small” project is unexpectedly scaled to include hundreds of videos.

• 2008 Presentation slides
• 2008 Overview handout

Downloads to get you started:

• Download:
  • Version 1.0 (basic, a good place to start)
  • Version 1.1 (recently used in production)
  • Version 1.2 (adds full screen, link to transcript)
    
• Examples:
  • View the basic and production versions
  • dfxp.xml caption file
  • smil.xml file

Other Resources:

• Creating Captions
  • NCAM/Media Access Generator (MAGpie)
• ActionScript3 Documentation:
  • Using the FLVPlayback component
  • FLVPlayback component details
  • FLVPlaybacCaptioning component details
    
  • UILoader component details
  • Using a SMIL file
  • Handling events
• Community MX
  • Flash Video: Why the Other Players Don’t Get It By Robert Reinhardt
  • The Working with SMIL Series by Robert Reinhardt (You will need to be a member)
• GoToAndPlay.Net
  • Learn about the trouble we had with our streaming provider (and how it was fixed)
• SWFObject
  • Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script

So you have some feeds and want browsers to be able to find them using autodiscovery.

The problem

Unfortunatly, you have static pages and would have to update each one to add the <link> tag. At PCC, we have a site composed of tens-of-thousands of pages. Some are static, some are dynamic applications we can alter, some are closed vendor products.

The solution

Like I said - we have many different types of pages. However, they all use the same JavaScript library!

JS is really good at inserting content into the page. We use the jQuery library, so adding a feed is as easy as:


/* add feed autofind! */
$("head").append('<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News Releases | Portland Community College" href="http://www.pcc.edu/about/feeds/news/" />');

We can now add/remove feeds at a later date without opening every page on the site. If desired, the script could check the URL and only display the feed on appropriate pages, but for now lets put them everywhere.

Final Thoughts

I looked around the web, but didn’t see much discussion on this meathod. It seems to work in all modern browsers, but let me know if you find any problems.

Mike Culver from Amazon web services came to speak to the PDXRIA group. In his own words:

“I’m a Web services evangelist with Amazon Web Services. My day job–and my night and weekend passion–is working with developers to talk about life in a post Web 2.0 world” (more…)

“HighEdWeb is an organization of Web professionals working at institutions of higher education. We design, develop, manage and map the futures of higher education Web sites.”

Each year, the organization puts on a conference where web professionals from colleges around the country gather to learn, discuss and network. I had the opportunity to attend in 2006 and had a great time. Afterwards, I thought about how to contribute and ended up submitting two proposals for 2007. Both were accepted. There will be an hour long session called “The accessible video interface” and a poster presentation called “Pattern Matching: An Introduction to Regular Expressions“. (more…)

The web team started getting requests to post pages of images. Maintaining photo galleries Flikr style seemed a bit odd for an education site. How usefully would a separate page of random images be for a prospective Mathematics student? However, I do understand that there are times where a single, static image is not enough. So I created a simple slide show interface.

(more…)

Don Albrecht - U of Rochester Medical Center

Polling was so good, that I decided to stick around for the next propeller hat presentation on SGV. Scaler vector graphics, in my opinion are the next step in web presentation. This W3C backed open-source implementation of Flash is created through XLM and play well with both CSS and JavaScript. However, like most good things, microsoft has been slow to implement the standard.

He showed a great graphical example of Edward Tuff’s sparklines created with SVG. Even more examples could have been good- some of the crowd began to nod off after 20 minutes of XML.