Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

Robin Good, rich media guru, analyst, and commentator, talks about some of his 2006 predictions for online video. He boldly states that 2006 will be the year of video on the internet. With all the consumer driven interest in web video, fueled in large part by the recently released video iPod and the addition of video blogs to the iTunes music service, I have to agree. It is an exciting time to be introducing tools that make it easy to publish and manage audio/video content on the web.

I posted a podcast a while back on a speech I had given at a recent event on Entrepreneurship, called the Rocket Pitch event. I’m about to post another podcast and an iPresent presentation on a recent conference I attended. It got me thinking about the previous podcast and I wanted to double check that my RSS feed included a proper link to the mp3 file using the RSS enclosure tag. When I checked the feed this is all I saw. Notice that there is no enclosure tag for this entry. A quick check of the Wordpress docs on Podcasting says that by simply creating an absolute URI to an MP3 file like this: <a href=”http://example.com/my-podcast.mp3″>My podcast</a> will automatically generate the correct RSS feed for you. But this isn’t working for my setup which is WP1.5.2. I did some digging around in the Wordpress forums and saw that others had experienced the same problem. There seemed to be several different workarounds such as using custom fields or verifying directory permissions or editing certain php files - there just didn’t seem to be a definitive solution.

I decided to take a quick spin throught the source. I did a recursive seach for “enclosure”, and found the function rss_enclosure() in the file feed-functions.php. A “custom_field” array seemed to be populated with values that are parsed into 3 pieces. These items are used to generate a proper enclosure tag with the attributes “url”, “length”, and “type”. So, I figured I’d give it a shot and add a custom field to the post. A custom field can be created at the bottom of a post in the “Advanced” section. I added a custom fiield with a new key named “enclosure”. Then I added 3 values for this new key (per the RSS spec), each on a separate line like this:

http://www.ipresent.net/media/RocketPitch.mp3
3568245
audio/mpeg

I republished and viewed my feed URL - and sure enough, an enclosure tag. This probably isn’t the best solution, as I must now create a custom field for each podcast I do, but it’s a reasonable workaround.

If you are using Wordpress and are podcasting, hopefully this tidbit will help.

Long time no post, but I wanted to put this out. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been gathering lots of feedback from people - some really great stuff has come out of these discussions. It is so important to just get out there and talk to people about your business and your ideas. The insight you gain truly helps to mold the product into what it needs to be. Based on the feedback, I’ve decided to cut out three features for the v1.0 release of iPresent Producer.

• SCORM and AICC support: SCORM and AICC are the leading e-Learning technical standards that define methods for creating shareable and reusable e-learning elements such as courses, quizzes, and other instructional materials. This was a feature I was initially developing for the Higher Educational market, where Learning Management and Course Management Systems are prevalent. In speaking with quite a few Babson professors it seems this requirment is just not deemed critical, particularly for a first release.
• Screen capture to video: This feature allows you to create “screencasts”, or videos of the computer desktop while narrating audio. This allows you to create software demos or even step by step “how to” tutorials explaining how to perform certain functions within a piece of software or website. The users I spoke with seemed far more eager to use the audio with synchronized slides, podcasting and video webcast creation features as opposed to the screen capture capabilities.
• Quiz and survey authoring: Since we will not have iPresent Online up and running by the time we release v1.0 of iPresent Producer, it just doesn’t make sense to offer this feature initially. These features go hand in hand with viewing user reports to see how your viewers faired on a quiz or to view survey results. Since iPresent Producer v1.0 will be a stand-alone tool without iPresent Online integration (and therefore no back-end database yet), it just didn’t make sense.

Anyhow, I think this was the right decision as it will help me to focus on the most critical features first. I am putting together a detailed Features page for the website along with screenshots that will clearly show what iPresent Producer will be able to do. Stay tuned.