Feed F*ck: Why Can’t We Have It Both Ways?
Originally uploaded by hummingcrow
My friend Michael Verdi has been producing talkbot.tv, a talk show hosted by his Second Life avatar, who happens to be a cocky robot with attitude. The show looks kickass on the web site, a beautiful show player, uncluttered, ready to rock your screen.
But subscribe to it in a reader? Then every episode description is:
“This div will be replaced”
Then a bunch of player parameters
Then the link to the episode mp4
and FINALLY the actual episode description
(click the small image above to see the larger version on Flickr)
So this breaks the performance in iTunes, AppleTV environment, Google reader (any reader), and Boxee.
This isn’t meant as a criticism of Verdi, who has done an amazing job of distributing video online for years now, and who has lead the way figuring out how to do it, and teaching everyone else how to do it. Verdi is a freaking rock star.
This is meant as a shout out to content management system producers, and programmers, and scripters, and web developers, and yes, videobloggers. We still need an easier way to get our shows out, and have them look good in the myriad environments where they might be accessed. And I don’t want to hear it from everyone who’s all enthused about the <video> element that “works” only in certain browsers that 95% of Internet users haven’t adopted yet. Because the reality is that we’re a long way from seeing how support for the <video> element is going to shake down to the masses. I want a solution now.
We need a way to hide the flash information from environments that need to play the MP4 so users can just see the episode information already. It would be nice if that could happen with a WordPress plugin. This is one of the complaints I had about the vPIP plugin, and it’s why I never adopted it for this site, and why I won’t use it in the future. Podpress had this more or less covered, but it’s pretty bloated. I’m on the search for a plugin that works, or a combination of plugin plus hacking the plugin that works.
If you have any good advice, I sure could use it. Light it up in the comments.
Subscribe with iTunes
I think a big part of the problem is WordPress. It’s designed for blogging. So there is this giant text box called “the post” and all of that info gets dumped into it and then dumped into the RSS feed. That’s why I’ve been working with Drupal lately. With Drupal you create fields of info that you want to store and decide what goes into the RSS feed. I haven’t actually gotten that far yet (it’s pretty complicated) but soon I should.
Uh oh, the Drupal evangelists came over instead of the HTML5 video tag evangelists.
Can anyone show me a Drupal site delivering video that works nicely both in the web page and in these other environments? I want to see that. I guess Verdi will have to build it first. Show me the screencast of this drag and drop feed builder. I don’t want to wait two years while I master Drupal in order to update my website. And what happens to my existing posts, does Drupal have an importer that will handle my WordPress database? Drupal’s a nice word, it’s fun to say, but, Jen, I don’t see it as a one-word solution for NOW – though I’ll change my mind in a heartbeat when someone shows me a Drupal videoblog feed that works in a browser and in a feed reader and didn’t take the videoblogger two years to learn to do it. Anyone got that link? Because I haven’t found it on my own. And I’ve been looking.
I agree, Verdi, WordPress as-is doesn’t cut it, and is part of the problem. But Sull’s right, there are ways to shape up the WordPress RSS feed. I think it’s just that plugin developers have ignored them. And that’s just it, Sull, I haven’t seen anyone come out with a way to combine custom fields in RSS automatically.
Well what I’ve learned over the last four and a half years is that if you want things a certain way you’re just going to have to learn how to do it yourself or wait (or pay) for someone else. The more I mess with WP the more I see how it’s really designed to be an awesome blogging machine but not really anything else. Drupal is designed to be an an anything-you-want machine but that power comes with a steep learning curve (just like any piece of powerful software).
The tried but true easy way to do it is to just use blogger or wordpress and put a simple link to a single video file in a post, run that through feedburner and bingo, you’re done. If you want fancier solutions they come at price. I haven’t seen any way around the problem of customization = more complexity.
all this talk scares me….I am going to just hide back in my cave and wait for the end of the world and then when there are only about 20 of us left, we won’t have to worry about HTML, Drupal, WP or blogger….of course all the food will radioactive and we will probably all by cyclops and have 4 arms, so who cares?….
I have no idea why I wrote what I did above, I guess to illustrate how little I understand all this stuff…..or I could have just been in a smart ass mood and felt like being a, well….smart ass?….
you can decide…
I completely agree, the price you pay for customization is learning curve or cash. I’ve put in a lot of effort on the learning curve bit. Not with Drupal, but still. I’m sort of whistling in the dark here – I’m saying we should have been able to figure it out by now, myself included.
I’m redesigning my site this summer one way or another. It will probably be in WordPress and I will put the effort into getting my feeds to work the way I want. You’re working at learning Drupal. Heading into fall, we should have two working solutions, no? With two different CMS. And that’s better than telling everyone it’s time to switch to another CMS.
I’m not so much Drupal-resistant as I’m just not wanting to learn a whole new freaking system until I can see that someone else has been able to make it do what I want to make it do. I want to see that it can be done before I commit to the learning curve.
So far I have friends telling me it can be done, but I haven’t seen it actually working. I want to see it.
Yeah, Jen, actually there’s a fellow who wrote the Podcasting WP plugin during a Google Summer of Code, it’s *almost* everything I want from a video display plugin for WordPress. Of course, just like with other plugin developers we’ve worked with, this one is pressed for time. He’s been open to my suggestions, but not always able to implement them quickly, and a lot of other people are making suggestions too.
As to the other plugins, I *have* looked, and I think there are viable substitutions out there, and my thought was to proof them this summer. Show in a Box should be “here are all the different ways to do this stuff, pick the one that works for you.” So we should show how to with Drupal and how to with WordPress and how to with the next awesome thing that comes along.
I appreciate the quick Drupal-glossary! Thanks! And thanks for the link as well.
Heath! Don’t despair. Your WordPress site works fine for now. If and when you need to change it, you’ll make it happen, and you’ll have help.
with drupal, if you upload the video file as the first file attachment (ie attach it to your post), it goes into the rss feed without needing to make views etc. this is straight out of the box functionality – no need to build views/CCK content types etc (which are easier than they sound!)
I don’t use this as I host the video elsewhere. what I do is just add the embed code and select ‘html full’ as the Input Format for the post (I keep most posts defaulting to Filtered HTML for other people)
& I don’t really worry about the rss for my videos’ distribution (though I use rss for the content distribution a lot – but most of those don’t have video, only my blog does). but if u want to see that working I can show you pretty quickly. I’m on drupal6 though. prior to the new views/CCK (when I was on previous versions) I prob would have used one of the media modules to handle the video with rss – so I could paste the link from hosted-elsewhere-videos.
I’ve been using drupal since 2003 and it’s great – gets better with each release.
Cheryl if you want to try something on my site, feel free. I can show u through it if u like.
(I haven’t changed the ‘theme’ of the site so it’s not pretty – some drupal sites are pretty these days. so don’t look at that part. it’s more of a data entry site for me)
does undergrowth site do what you’re after?
I think they’re still on drupal5 (with custom theme)
http://undergrowth.org/motion_pixels is their video page
they use it well for community & pdf book distribution
or NZ Audio Foundation : http://www.audiofoundation.org.nz
- they keep a library or NZ experimental sound art works – it’s drupal with some custom modules (to link artists/labels/releases etc). I think the podcast audio section is CCK/views – I could check with the dev how he ended up doing it
(I helped with prototype sites for these to show them how drupal could help them but they built these final sites themselves)
if this helps
or ABCpool : http://pool.org.au/explore/works
this is one of the media sites from ABC with assistance from some of the sydney universities – it’s drupal also. going from the fields in the projects section I’d say it’s CCK/views. they only seem to send the post title in rss though so perhaps not a good example. (they use ‘groups’ well though)
Hi Kath, I didn’t know you are a Drupal resource. I won’t be ready for a couple of weeks but would love to take you up on your offer – I’d like to see Drupal 6.
I checked the undergrowth.org video feed here:
http://undergrowth.org/taxonomy/term/31/0/feed
At least in iTunes it says the feed has no episodes with media that iTunes can play, so they definitely have not set things up the way I’m looking to find. Same thing with pool.org.au – iTunes says there are no playable episodes.
Also, I looked at the podcast feed for audiofoundation.org.nz, here:
http://www.audiofoundation.org.nz/all_audio/feed
There’s nothing in it!
So thus far I’m not seeing what I’m hoping for. The Mustardseed Media Video Podcast Jen linked to is much closer – they have actual episode descriptions at least. But still no episode thumbnails or podcast image. Nevertheless, theirs is much better than what comes out of WordPress when you use a Flash player to display your video.
ok cool. just let me know.
in meantime I’ll have a play and see how the itunes feeds work and see which drupal method might work for that. (haven’t used them – I tend to use google reader but never have time to check them anyway)
I need to work this out for another site/project I’m doing anyway so it’ll be good practice. the best thing about drupal that I like is that I don’t need to touch the code. (I did in the early days but haven’t needed to lately & found upgrades tended to lose things anyway)
Hmm… is it maybe just a shockwave/flash issue? I get what you get when I subscribe to talkbot in itunes, but michae’s michaelverdi feed doesn’t do that – you get the video descriptions (same with my own video feed).
Also – in google reader, when Verdi posts a new video, and I click on it in google reader (the verdi or the talkbot feeds), it bounces me to a new tab to watch the video.
When I click on one of my own videos in Google reader, it plays it within google reader.
I’m using WordPress (wordpress thesis theme and the show in a box theme for my two blogs)… both work the same way for me.
What’s the difference? Am I missing something much more video/techie here? If so, I might have to go hide out with Heath
Hi David, it’s not just a shockwave/flash issue – it’s just that WordPress puts everything that goes in the “Write Post” box into your feed by default. And vPIP or other plugins that embed video include themselves in that area. @kmog made the suggestion on Twitter that what we need to do is change the WordPress RSS, modify it so that it doesn’t pick up the “Write Post” field at all, and have it use the Excerpt field for example. I tried that once, but that made it stop picking up my media file. I think I just need to find the right settings for my feed so that I can make the web page include the fancy flash player and the RSS feed just include the media file. It should be do-able, I just need to make the time to delve in and learn it.
Mmm maybe I am missing something but i put my post’s text part into the Exerpt field in WP and that is what gets picked up by Itunes, Zune marketplace, Miro, etc and it plays fine….at least it plays in the Zune market place fine….I think….Cheryl does my feed play in your Itunes?….
Cheryl – ah. Fun times! So in my case, I let feedburner do that stuff for me, perhaps? I know I haven’t edited the wordpress version of my rss feed…
But agreed – this needs to be easy for people wanting to watch our videos … or they’ll go elsewhere. Then who’d watch my silly videos?
Heath, your feed does play in my iTunes. The last time I tried this experiment was on an older version of WordPress & vPIP – no doubt improvements have been made. I take it you are always putting a short description of your videoblog post in the Excerpt field when you publish? Also, what did you start doing differently in 2009? The last post I get in your feed is dated 12/5/08. Nothing published in 2009 shows up. This is with your QuickTime feed and you can confirm it on Feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/batmangeek_quicktime
That’s the other thing, David, I think Feedburner is really cool, but it can only spit back out what you give it. If you don’t go in there and set an image for your podcast then feed readers usually just take a thumbnail from your most recent video, or they use a generic icon. I would like WordPress to send my feed out with a consistent icon and have Feedburner pick that up, but I’m not sure that would work (with Feedburner’s setup).
For a long time I didn’t use Feedburner because PodPress made such a nice, iTunes-compatible feed for me. Then I had an incident where my web host upgraded PodPress for me – that may have broken some functionality of PodPress, or it may have been one of the WordPress upgrades, or even one of the PodPress upgrades, and I decided to go ahead and use feedburner instead because I felt like I can no longer count on PodPress.
But I miss the enhanced feed it used to make, for sure. It was the best one because it worked properly in the most delivery/viewing environments. That’s what I would like to recreate.
this is a repost due to an previous error.
—————-
this is the wp custom field + rss feed mod conversation i was referring to:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/message/55322
and my relevant post:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/message/56528
waybackmachine has my example blog post archived if interested:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071223213752/http://www.vastmachine.com/blog/
it’s been over 2 years and its interesting that you bring this up and the fact that not much or any progress has been made really.
another thought…. some of you mention how long it has taken to properly learn and use drupal or wp… you could also put attention on learning about php and xml and mix your own custom solutions with whatever blog or cms software you prefer to use. the irony is, it is probably more difficult to figure out how to make a module or plugin than it is to just whip up a companion solution with some basic coding. not nec friendly to the wp or drupal dev community when you do that but sometimes its ok to not give a shit about that and just get it working without all the rules and developer etiquette.
regarding drupal…. i started using it in 2004 and then really got into it when i was on the ourmedia.org launch team. i stopped using drupal at some point but i had a drupal site up for tinkering last year and it was a great improvement frfrom previous versions. i’ll take a look at it again soon.
wordpress didnt excite me much and though i was somewhat involved with the show in a box group, i expressed how drupal and other tools/solutions should be included and not just wordpress.
over the winter, i had tried this other cms called concrete5. looked promising but didnt have time to get too involved with it. i still prefer to write my own web apps and i also am just floating by with twitter, tumblr and a bliptv account.
cheers.
Agreed, Sull. I’m ordering up the Head First PHP book for summer, to get me started. I tried to learn it from other books and/or online tutorials a couple years ago and it just didn’t take. It can’t be that hard; maybe I have a mental block. I hope to break through it eventually.
And I agree with you that tools besides WordPress should be included with Show in a Box. I know I was one of the people saying I wanted to just get it working in WordPress before I had to learn other CMS systems. But all that means is, I didn’t want to be responsible for learning multiple CMS and making tutorials about it. If anyone wants to learn another system and make tutorials about it, I’m all for that! So I’m really glad that Verdi and Jen have gotten into Drupal, and I’ll be even more glad when/if they make time to share what they have learned in tutorial form. And meanwhile, when I learn anything new, I’ll be trying to document that in tutorial form and share it.
Thanks for the links especially, since I don’t think I was around for all the original discussion, but I’ll definitely go back and read up in case there’s anything in there that causes an AHA moment.
Hmmm, I am not sure why the quicktime feed is not updating…but If you subscribe to my “main” feed which is the “site” feed you should be fine. I did just start using an mp4 feed at the begining of this year, so I could use the JW flash player. Maybe that has got something to do with it…I should be able to fix that though. Thanks for letting me know.
And yea, I actually just cut and paste whatever I put into my “post” box from WP into the exerpt box and it seems to work fine…although I have not updated WP in a bit for my main site, so there may be something wiggy with a newer version of WP. I have been mulling over completely rehauling my site as well, just using the blip showplayer and using custom fields in WP. Mainly because I think multiple feeds/formats are no longer needed, with flash playing mp4 and the Iphone, etc….mp4 just seems the way to go…
Another screencast about views stuff — this one is specifically about podcasting and making a feed with Views. It’s from last year, so he’s using alpha modules that are not in real release (much later versions).
http://www.mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode19
It’s super techy, because it’s assuming you know Drupal… but once you get about 4 mins in, he starts showing what’s up.
I watched that video last night, Jen, & had absolutely no idea what he was talking about the entire time. Maybe I can go back to it after using Drupal for awhile. But for now, he may as well have been telling jokes in Chinese (I don’t speak Chinese).