News // AgencyND

The Problem with Web Video

2009-10-25T09:47:00-04:00

Video is a big deal. YouTube represents the second most popular search engine in the world. 61% of young adults have watched television shows or movies online.

As popular as this is, posting your own video online is not as easy as you’d imagine. Here are the usual steps:

Get your video to an computer format (as opposed to DVD, VHS tape, etc).

This is tough enough to start with. DVDs are designed to prevent copying, so this usually requires special software. Check out LifeHacker’s post on DVD ripping tools for some ideas on how to get started. VHS or Beta tapes are even worse… this requires special equipment.

Convert your video to the right computer format (depends on delivery method).

It isn’t good enough to have just any movie file. You have to get it to the right format for however you’re going to deliver the file. A Windows Media Streaming server will require a particular WMV format. Embedded Flash video would require an FLV format. Some of the ripping tools (such as HandBrake) can also convert formats.

Use the right settings.

Want a large video with very high quality? A smaller, quicker download? These are controlled via video and audio bit rates, compression rates, etc. Fortunately, there are usually preset options with the conversion software. In the end, I believe this mostly trial and error to get the outcome you need.

Host the file somewhere.

Once you’ve converted the file, it has to live somewhere online. Typically, this falls in two categories: progressive download (PD) or streaming. PD means you’re downloading the entire file and it plays only as much as it has downloaded. This is the easiest route, because you can put the file anywhere web-accessible, just like you might put a PDF or an HTML file. At Notre Dame, you could post to your NetFile/www folder and it can do the trick.

Streaming, however, lets you jump ahead to any part of the video and it will begin playing from that spot. This might be a better option for longer videos, where viewers may want to skip to a later section. The difficulty of streaming is that it requires a special server – and this usually costs something. Notre Dame has a few streaming options available, via OIT and OPAC.

Embed the Video on an HTML page.

If all this work wasn’t complicated enough, now you have to figure out how to get your video embedded. Let’s assume you’re using progressive download and have two main options: Windows Media/Quicktime, or Flash video. Windows Media is a WMV file, and Quicktime is a MOV file. These have special snippets of code and require that your viewers have Windows Media or Quicktime on their computers. For this last reason, I prefer Flash video – it has the greatest likelihood that your visitors will have it installed.

Unfortunately, Flash is even tougher to embed. This requires creating a Flash player and saving it as an SWF file. Then you have to embed the SWF file on the HTML page.

Sounds easy, right?

The trouble with video is that it takes expertise, software, and sometimes equipment that you probably don’t have (and don’t want to mess with). So we look to easier ways to get videos online.

One option is to start a YouTube account, upload the video file (it accepts many formats) and let YouTube do the hard work for you. This has its own set of problems, though, especially in the limits YouTube sets for how long the videos can be, lack of control over quality, and the fact that your video will present other video suggestions to your users as well. You can check out Google Video, Vimeo, and Viddler for some alternatives with varying features, control, and ease of use.

At Notre Dame, we have a couple of hands-off options as well. They’re not as fast and easy as YouTube, but we have more control over quality and publishing. OIT’s Video Streaming service offers Windows Media streaming. AgencyND has produced the Video Channel, which takes the Flash video route (and also does streaming). Either way, this requires getting your video to OIT or OPAC and they take it from there. It usually takes a few days, but once it’s up the hard part is done. The Video Channel even offers an HTML snippet to embed any video on a webpage.

How could this be even easier?

I’d love to create a service as easy as YouTube’s, where ND users can upload a video file, select a few options, and have an easy embed option provided. University of California San Francisco has a embedding service that does some of this, for instance.

There are some logistical concerns (who can post, what kind of content can be posted, who is overseeing these, who is paying for the hosting, etc.) but they could be resolved. As usual, this comes down to resources. Still, I believe this would be a serious cost savings for the University through increased efficiency and decreased cost of software/hardware/outsourcing expenses. And by lowering the barrier to getting video online, we can be even more effective in our communications.

Conductor 1.4.3 - The IA Edition

2009-10-07T16:11:00-04:00

Not to be confused with the great state of Iowa, the IA edition refers to Information Architecture

Conductor’s Fickle Mood of Late

For the past few days, Conductor has been experiencing a dramatic and marked slowdown. It has been particularly vexing, as no changes to the system had recently been made. With some sleuthing, we found that one of the Admin pages was causing the problem. As we saw it, there were two problems:

Improper Information Architecture
Slow Queries

Improper Information Architecture

The goal of Conductor is to enable our partners to administer their own content. However, with great content comes great responsibility…on our part. In our detective work, we discovered that a large number of sub-pages were being appended to a given page; which in turn resulted in slow query. In addition to the slow query, the resulting information architecture was becoming unwieldy for our partner’s audience (not our partner but the audience our partner is trying to reach and serve). So we rounded up the wagons, and spoke with our partner, seeking to guide them to a better audience experience.

Slow Queries

The defect of the slow query was only discovered as a result of the improper information architecture. Once found, the fix was relatively easy to create, test, and verify. As a result, everyone will now benefit from the elimination of the slow query, not just those that have lots of sub-pages.

Other Changes

Fixed IE8 scrolling issue while editing pages
Begin caching news items
Site creation automation – when a site is created, users and roles can be immediately assigned.
Added ability of site administrators to manually clear the cache of news, pages, and events

Conductor 1.4.2 - Further Lessons

2009-09-29T11:06:00-04:00

Its the 2009 – 2010 school year at Notre Dame, and even Conductor is paying attention in class and learning a few things. Today we see the launch of a couple of features to make Conductor use a little better.

Page Editing

Page’s get just a little bit smarter. Conductor will now ask you to verify if you are leaving a page without first saving it.

News Imports

News Imports is a new feature that enables you to import published News & Information articles. Once imported, you are free to edit them. And if the article is updated by News & Information, you will receive an email notification so you can make any corrections to your article.

Conductor v1.4.0 - The Back to School Edition

2009-08-21T09:14:00-04:00

Fall is here; The Notre Dame Band is on the prowl; And Conductor is continuing its self improvement.

In version 1.4.0, we have a handful of changes:

Removed page caching for sites in development.
Added a new right to allow a user to Manage Information Architecture
Set permalinks to convert & to – and remove any trailing -
Speed improvement for looking up redirects
Speed improvements for retrieving Google Analytics
When pages are re-ordered, the cache is now cleared
Add “search_terms” to meta search results so we can show the user the filter they selected
For Liquid Page drop, added
Added a convenience link on admin page view to so link to associated tempalte
Added more database indexes to improve rendering times in admin
Do not allow “news” as a newly created page’s permalink
Fixed dashboard stats for sites that only have a single page

New Resource: General Information for Mailing

2009-08-06T13:45:00-04:00

For those who utilize print mailing for communication we’ve posted a guide detailing information and resources for mailing using the U.S. Postal Service in our Resources and Downloads section. This includes requirements for presorted mail and weight limits for various services to help determine the most cost and time effective solution for your mailing needs.

Conductor v1.3.9 - Minor Course Correction

2009-08-05T06:00:00-04:00

Conductor v1.3.8 saw the update of the underlying framework. Considering the scope of the update, things went smoothly. There were, however, two underlying problems that have since been corrected.

Problem the First: Liquid templates

During our testing, liquid templates appeared to work just fine. However, upon deployment, we quickly discovered a situation that didn’t work as well.

The above code parsed in Conductor v1.3.6, but not v1.3.7. To fix this, we forked a copy of the liquid library, and applied a patch and now use our liquid library as the source for Conductor. The goal is for us to not use our own library, but until our fix is accepted by the original library owner, we have a working solution. This is all thanks to the distributed source control of git and Github. If you are curious about git, another great source is Pro Git, a free online book that provides a lot of useful, well formatted information.

Problem the Second (and perhaps last): Google Analytics

A lot of Conductor sites make use of Google Analytics. If the site is in development, or just launched, there usually isn’t any Google Analytics information. During our last deploy, we found a case where the Conductor Dashboard was throwing an error because of a lack of Analytics information. So a quick patch later, and we patched up that issue.

Opportunity the First: Automated Site Crawls

With this launch, we have created an API to get a list of live Conductor sites; With this list in hand, and a web-crawler, we are going to add an automated tool to help verify that links on newly deployed, and existing sites, are all working.

ND Video Channel Now Allows Video Embedding

2009-07-28T12:00:00-04:00

Ever since the launch of the Notre Dame Video Channel, one of the most requested features has been the ability to allow embedding on other sites. We are pleased to announce that this feature is now available.

There are two ways to embed code for a video. The first is by clicking on the video as if to play it. Below the video is a toolbar with an embed icon (shown below). When you click on this icon, an interface will open, allowing you to choose from three different sizes. Choose the size that will work best for your site; then simply copy and paste the code into your page.

The second method is to open the video as before and, under the NOW PLAYING column on the right of the video, find the EMBED section. Click on the size you need for your site and then copy and paste that code into your page.

If you’re using the video embedding feature, or if you have questions or comments about the feature, let us know.

Conductor v1.3.8 - The Dashboard Edition

2009-07-23T08:00:00-04:00

Version 1.3.8 of Conductor (available Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:30pm) has three updates worth noting: changes to the Dashboard, a new html to Textile utility, and a big update to the underlying code.

Dashboard Changes

A number of new reports have been added to the Conductor Dashboard.

The first new report is “Recently Updated Pages”. This report will list the Title, User and Date of the most recently updated pages on your site.

The remaining five reports will only be available to customers with Google Analytics accounts that are accessible by AgencyND.

Conductor News – Here you will see the latest and greatest posts to the Conductor section of the AgencyND blog.
Top Sources – These are the sites that are linking to you, and how many visits they’ve sent your way in the past month.
Search Terms – This report shows the top search terms used by your visitors that ultimately lead them to your site.
Monthly traffic – Shows you how many visits you’ve had each month over the past year.
Daily traffic – Shows you how many visits you’ve had each day over the past month

HTML to Textile conversion

If you’ve ever had to convert existing html content to Textile (Conductor’s default markup syntax), you know how time intensive the process can be. This release includes a tool to make this process much easier. When you’re editing a page, you will notice a link for “Textile Converter” to the top and right of the content entry box. This will open an area where you can paste in some html, hit a button and get the content returned to you formatted in Textile. You can then copy/paste this content wherever you need it.

Ruby on Rails Update

This release of Conductor marks a move from Ruby on Rails 2.1.0 to the most recent 2.3.3. This change required a lot of updating to the underlying libraries of Conductor, including a large rewrite of the tests. If you’re curious, you can read the release notes for Rails 2.2 and Rails 2.3.

Under the hood of Conductor v1.3.7

2009-07-02T06:10:00-04:00

Under the Hood of v1.3.7

Improved LDAP authentication

In reviewing the LDAP authentication changes of v1.3.3, I wanted to quantify the performance improvements. To do this, I used the Benchmark library. The speed increase came by returning only one field in the LDAP query.

Added Database Indexes

Version 1.3.6 saw the inclusion of a database index to restore the response time of news pages. Curious about what other indexes might be missing, I set out on a quest to find what might be missing. For the most part, the Conductor database has a solid set of indexes; There were a few low impact indexes that were missing, so I went ahead and added them. These indexes will theoretically improve performances on the Admin side.

Custom robots.txt

Robots.txt lets the search engine know where it should not go. With v1.3.7, the site administrator can customize the robots.txt to more fine tune the settings as per http://www.robotstxt.org/.

Secure Cookies

The HTTP Cookie now incorporates the secure flag. In Rails, this is very straightforward:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base session :session_secure => true end

Markup Tweak

As I’ve been learning Conductor and working with it’s ins and outs, I noticed that the metadata listing for assets, news, and events looked off. A quick inspection revealed that the metadata sections were miss tagged; a quick fix later and the visual display of Conductor’s Admin was been improved.

—Jeremy

Conductor v1.3.7

2009-07-02T06:08:00-04:00

Conductor v1.3.7

Version 1.3.7 Conductor incorporates a handful of minor tweaks. First, we have decreased the login time by 20%; a minor tweak that improves the experience of Conductor. Second, we have added the ability for a site admin to customize the robots.txt file so an admin can more explicitly guide search engines in the process of indexing each Conductor site. Last is a minor security update that continues to improve the already robust security model of Conductor.

— Jeremy

Taking the Ball and Running with It

2009-06-26T09:55:00-04:00

Having recently started work at AgencyND, I have stepped into working on a Content Management System (CMS) that was built in house. I have jumped right in and started enhancing our CMS, largely due to the fact that the CMS is built using Rails, a framework that I’ve been working with for 3 1/2 years. Another tremendous boon for our CMS is the wonderful community at Github. Rails is built on Ruby and has a tremendous community of libraries in the form of gems). Some gems are better than others; Some gems work for their given use case, but need some attention to work for our case. Thankfully, in an open-source community, I am able to make the changes that I need; Enter the fork.

Forking a git-based repository that is hosted on Github is ridiculously easy. In essence I make a copy of the other person’s repository and make the changes that I need. If needs be, I can leave it at that; however, that sells my update short. Via Github, I can notify the original owner that I have some changes that they can pull from me. They can choose to ignore me, or review my changes and see if they are worth incorporating into their code-base.

There are lots of decisions that go into whether or not to accept and incorporate my changes. First, does the change dramatically affect the API of the code. This is a deal breaker. If the original gem only accepts squares, then I better not change the API to only accept circles. Second, does the change come with a test suite? This is also a deal breaker. Being a huge proponent of automated testing, if I were to see a patch that didn’t include a test (or multiple tests), I’d say “no thank you”. Third, and this is perhaps the biggest one, does the change make sense? Do I personally know what these changes are doing? If I’m accepting the change, it’d be a good idea to know what is coming in.

— Jeremy

Conductor v1.3.1 to v1.3.6

2009-06-26T09:53:00-04:00

As a followup to Chas’s post regarding conductor news, I am here to report the enhancements that have been deployed.

One thing that may have gone unnoticed is the caching of some pages of Conductor. The purpose of the caching is to reduce the load time for webpages, and thus improve a visitor’s experience. We are looking at rolling out caching of other aspects of Conductor to further improve this experience. We have also brought caching to the Admin Dashboard, thus reducing the load time when you first login to Conductor.

In addition we have tweaked how Conductor interacts with search engines. First, we have added a robots.txt file to make sure that single news stories are not indexed multiple times. In a future release of Conductor, you will be able to customize your robots.txt file.

Another search related tweak is that we are making sure that search engines don’t attempt to index too far into the future in regards to upcoming events. Since Conductor dynamically generates event listing pages for a given date, search engines were more than happy to follow the “Next Year” link to infinity and beyond. But no more. Conductor stops at 2039.

We have completed several other “under the hood changes”, with a focus of providing a richer and more powerful administrative experience.

— Jeremy

Under the hood of Conductor v1.3.2 to v1.3.6

2009-06-26T09:53:00-04:00

v1.3.2

Liquid Documentation

Behind the scenes, Conductor leverages extensive use of Liquid Templates. Liquid by itself does very little without further customization in the form of Drops and Filters. Keeping track of these Drops and Filters can be an onerous task, not to mention the fact that they should be automatically tested. These tests are loosely of the form “Here is the input, now verify the output.” What I have done is harnessed these tests to automatically generate liquid documentation for all Filters and Drops. The documentation is intended for someone that is willing to get in and get dirty, it most definitely won’t win any pretty or “easily digestible” awards (though I must say, Erik did a great job of making the end result look clean).

The wonderful part of the documentation is that during our source control checkin if the system detects a change in a filter or drop, all of the liquid documentation is regenerated. Take a peak here.

Liquid error: private method `sub' called for nil:NilClass

This is for our designers and honestly it’s for me as well; you can ask that the item’s excerpt automatically include the “Read More” link. You can review the documentation here.

Page Caching

Pages have always been built on the fly and returned as needed. Now, once a page is built and served to the requester, the contents of the page are stored; From that point on Apache can retrieve and serve the page. This ultimately bypasses the Rails server and leads to quicker response times. It should be noted that if anything on the site changes, the entire site’s cache is destroyed. Likewise at the last stroke of midnight, the cache is also destroyed. This is a good thing. Besides, the cache will be restored as the page’s are accessed.

Other changes

We updated the News and Events controller to handle years before 1901. Instead of returning a 500 HTTP status error, they now return a 404 HTTP status.

In addition, we modified the global robots.txt to disallow /news/archives and /news/categories thus preventing a single story from indexing 3 or more times.

v1.3.3

I noticed that logging into Conductor appeared to take a bit of time. As it turns out, multiple connections were being created during one authentication attempt. This was removed, and will see an even better tweak in v1.3.7.

v1.3.4

Auto-Version Incrementation via Production Deploy

This one has me giddy. Now, when we deploy a change for Conductor, our system automatically tags our source control repository, and prompts for the new version number.

Other Changes, part 2

Updated the News and Events controller to handle years after 2039. Instead of returning a 500 HTTP status error, they now return a 404 HTTP status.

v1.3.5

Latest News and News feeds omit private category items

Now, if you categorize a news item in a non-public category, it will not show up in the news feed nor in the latest_news liquid drops. Note, if a news item has two categories, and one is public and the other not public, then the news item will be in the news feed.

Other Changes

To err is human, and I proved my humanity on this one. I was tweaking excerpts and introduced a bug into the wild. It was found rather quickly, and patched and deployed quickly as well. In addition, with the advent of caching in v1.3.2, we needed to make sure that when a template was changed that the cache was destroyed as well.

v1.3.6

Hot on the trail of v1.3.5 came v1.3.6; Version 1.3.6 added a database index to restore the rendering speed of each Conductor site’s news list (i.e. http://newsinfo.nd.edu/news). The slowness came was a result of altering the news listing to omit news articles that had one or more categories all of which were non-public. This is a case where my local environment did not have the same volume of data as the live environment; Thus the difference between an indexed table and non-indexed table was barely noticeable.

What this has helped me think about is a need for benchmark tests to see how scenario 1 compares against scenario 2. In this case how does the site respond with the changes from 1.3.4 to 1.3.5 to 1.3.6. With these benchmark scenarios, I would’ve been able see that something just wasn’t right with the changes in 1.3.5.

v1.not.really.conductor.but.related.to.it

Last week, Erik quietly upgraded the version of Ruby that Conductor uses. There are some performance improvements; Equally important the upgrade paves the way for further enhancements.

Going Forward

In the future, we will be adding a performance test suite so we can measure and see the impact of our changes. Already, as a result of a simple benchmark test, I can tell you that v1.3.7 will see a ~20% decrease in authentication time (that’s a good thing) versus the v1.3.6 authentication. The performance test suite will allow us to see the impact of caching news and events, which is also on the list. We are presently testing an upgrade to Conductor’s underlying Rails framework, so perhaps v1.3.7 or maybe a bit later. All of this is very exciting as look at how we can best serve those who’s Internet presence is powered by Conductor.

— Jeremy

Conductor News!

2009-06-25T12:38:01-04:00

As you may have noticed, Conductor has seen a few enhancements lately. Last month, I emailed all of our Conductor users regarding the upgrade to the dashboard. Rather than cloud everyone’s inbox with emails, we’ve decided to post updates here. If you like, you can always subscribe to these messages by email or in your feed reader.

Many people have asked lately about the future of web content management on campus. Conductor is just one piece of the overall pie – some groups have obtained their own wCMS packages and others continue to use Adobe Contribute.

We are working with OIT to assess and select a web content management system to provide on an institutional level. We’re early in the project, but we have taken steps to help expedite the process and hope to have an update available later this summer.

Meanwhile, Conductor still supports over 70 websites including many high-profile groups. In short, Conductor isn’t going away any time soon.

We have many upgrades planned for Conductor, so keep watching this space for news.

Hired! Jeremy Friesen, Web Developer

2009-06-25T12:38:01-04:00

If you’re going to post a job opening, you should also post when it’s filled.

In May 2009, we hired Jeremy Friesen as a web developer for AgencyND. His programming experience and engineering approach bring a much-needed perspective on many of our projects. In the few weeks he’s been with us, he’s already helped implement a wide range of new features in Conductor to make it faster, more stable, and more functional.

Jeremy comes to us from Light Sky Design Studio in Goshen, Indiana. He has been a member of the South Bend Ruby Group since its early days, and has contributed to numerous open source projects. He blogs at http://jeremyf.github.com/.

Position Available: Web Developer

2009-03-24T16:34:01-04:00

The University of Notre Dame, one of the nation’s top 20 institutions of higher learning, is accepting applications for a Web Developer in AgencyND ( http://agency.nd.edu/ ) responsible for programming web sites according to established web standards and University methodologies. The Web Developer manages technical leadership during projects with both internal team members and clients, establishes development plans, and advises on all facets of the development process. This requires hands-on coding and programming of both front-end (CSS, XHTML) and back-end (database, interactive) web sites and web applications.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree required. Must have 3 – 5 years experience with Web Development and Interactive / Database Development. Must have 2 years experience with Project/Technical Team Leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

Advanced working knowledge of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, interactive application development. Strong interpersonal skills. Strong web programming experience with languages and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Python. Experience with mobile application development, accessibility, and social media a plus.

Application Instructions

Please apply online at http://ND.jobs to Job # 09102. For additional information about working at the University of Notre Dame and various benefits available to employees, please visit http://hr.nd.edu/employment/working_at_nd.shtml.

The University of Notre Dame is committed to diversity in its staff, faculty, and student body. As such, we strongly encourage applications from members of minority groups, women, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and others who will enhance our community.

The University of Notre Dame is an EEO/AA employer.

Hired! Amy Bladow, Project Manager

2009-02-05T17:13:01-05:00

AgencyND is proud to announce the newest addition to its staff. Amy Bladow joined AgencyND as a project manager on January 5, 2009. In her new role with us, Amy is responsible for scheduling our resources, ensuring our clients’ projects are kept on time, and assisting in project estimates. With a meticulous attention to detail and in-depth knowledge of the print industry, we are privileged to have Amy become part of our team. Prior to joining Agency ND, Amy spent with 13 years with Mossberg & Company Inc where she handled customer service and internal marketing.

Meet Amy and the rest of our team >

News? What kind of news?

2009-02-04T12:52:01-05:00

With our new website, we’ve included a News section that will feature three areas:

Announcements

This is all about us. There’s something helpful about knowing what’s happening with the people you work with. So feel free to peek in from time to time. Read Announcements >

Projects

We pour ourselves into our projects, so we can’t help but show off. Here, we’ll write about marketing campaigns, website launches, and anything else that might make us look good. Read Projects >

Blog

Communications is a big deal – and we have a lot of experience we’d love to share. So we’re opening the gates to let our staff write about what they’re passionate about and what might be interesting to folks across campus. We’ll post helpful tips and industry insights while trying to keep the 20,000-word rants to a minimum. Read our Blog >