As part of the XPages.TV redesign I wanted the ability to play a pre-roll ad at some point. Well you need to test that so I figured I needed an “ad” to play with.
This ad ran a little long so I won’t be using it on the site, but still, maybe you’ll get a kick out of it.
In this show I go over my new OpenNTF contribution – The XPages Media Library. This demo is basically a how to use and setup the application.
This morning I upgraded the XPages.TV site to a new codebase that is more of an actual application then the single XPage the old site was.
Last night I made my first ever contribution to OpenNTF by contributing this code. I call it XPages Media Library. This is a full application I’ve been working on for a while. The purpose of the app is to be able to present Videos and Audio Media to users and make it easy to find and consume content. I’ve wanted to make improvements for a LONG time.
While my focus is on XPages.TV, it’s designed to be able to host multiple “shows/categories” with multiple authors and contributors. So for example this could be used for an internal corporate training library where media files are separated by application or even department.
For the heart of this app I’ve used the Projekktor player as it seems to me to be the best video project out there. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of them the last 18 months. 🙂 Projekktor carries a pretty nice GPL 3 license so that’s what the project is as I couldn’t use Apache.
Projekktor is an HTML5 based player with a flash fall back. A key to me is that the videos should play perfectly on most mobile devices, especially iOS devices.
I’ve not included any documentation just yet, I’ll be doing a NotesIn9 on using this very shortly.
There are still a couple of bugs I am working out, especially with the gravatars, and it’s FAR from feature complete so I hope to have updates coming somewhat regularly.
XPages.TV contains a “Feedback” button where you can leave a message for me if you have any problems with the site or videos playing. Please let me know if you have any problems.
Thanks!
By now most people know that lotuslearns.com – no I won’t link to it – is copying blog posts under the misguided banner that they are somehow saving the people of Africa bandwidth. While I painfully remember the days of modems, I just don’t see how that’s possible as the the site contains things like graphics and ads… It even has a score of “C” if you use YSLOW. Not something that seems optimized for modem connections.
The best thing for a modem user I think would be to get a feed reader and INDIVIDUALLY subscribe to the blogs of interest. That could be done my finding sites of interest from PlanetLotus.org or Chris Miller maintains an OPML feed
Since I don’t write many technical blogs any more, my content is a little different. This site is embedded some of my videos from Youtube. While I wish there were some text to go with the video mentioning and linking to my site, I guess embedding videos are a little different then copying an article’s content. That’s so much worse.
Interestingly, I typically dual post the NotesIn9 shows.. The first to my sites, and the second to YouTube. The last several shows I’ve not put on YouTube. It started out as laziness, but it’s a pain in the butt, and once no one complained I just kinda stopped it for now. I’m not sure what to do going forward. Sure I want to be on YouTube for searching, but so few of my videos get played over there I’m not sure it’s worth it. I’ll never use them as my primary host because I want better control of the content and presentation. But I guess now I’m off topic. 🙂
I honestly don’t want to spend any more time on this subject as it’s already distracted me from some work I’m doing to BETTER the community. I’m more focused right now on building up XPages.TV and improving NotesIn9.com and creating shows. I think those efforts would be a bigger benefit to the community then just maintaining a youTube channel. I fear that some bloggers might get upset enough to stop blogging. What a shame that would be.
I’ll just end with a comment that I posted on the site in question. Just in case it’s not approved by the moderator. This was responding to her post justifying her actions.
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RSS Feeds are consent for an INDIVIDUAL to consume the information in the manner that they want. This could be preferred offline reader or even mobile application. They are NOT a consent for a website to consume and then republish the content of the articles in their entirety.
The better solution, if you want to continue to do this might be for you to MANUALLY post SUMMARIES and LINKS to articles that you find might be of value to the people you deal with.
That’s what PlanetLotus does, and it’s worked pretty well for that site. You ARE STEALING this content by republishing it word for word.
I just wanted to point out a really cool thing that Stephan Wissel did. He blogged today with instructions for easily download all of my NotesIn9 shows to your hard drive.
So you can already download and use all my shows offline via iTunes which isn’t to difficult to do. But this should allow you to just do a generic “Get All” and load them onto the device of your choice.
I will add that another great way to learn XPages is Matt White’s XPages101.net site. If you like NotesIn9 his stuff is so much better technically. Though I think I try to get a few more jokes in from time to time. 🙂 And guess what, if you’re a subscriber you can download Matt’s videos as well and take them with you as needed! Score!!
I think NotesIn9 is closing in on 7-8 hours worth of training videos, I’m sure Matt has the same. Hmm.. Wonder if we could fill up an iPad between us. haha
Tomorrow I’m going to Las Vegas with friends for a little vacation. I had planned to queue up 2 more shows to finish up the NotesIn9 100,000 video celebration. I wanted to make tomorrow the first ever double feature day. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen.
Apparently I was a little over active this month and the bad news is I’m now up against my 800MB storage quota and the next show doesn’t fit. That’s never happened before. I don’t think I ever saw it hit red before. The good news is it’s a rolling 30 days, so hopefully some space will free up by the time I get back. The bad news is that it’s Vegas and I might not know who I am when/if I get back. 🙂
Anyway – stay tuned. A great show coming from John Jardin on using XPages with JDBC and Relational Databases. There’s also an amazing brand new surprise contributor on deck as well.
The new XPages Cheatsheet, “XPages: Social Tools”, that was launched at Lotusphere has been added to XPagesCheatSheet.com and is available for immediate download. This sheet, focuses on integrating your XPages applications with social sites, like Connections, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
It joins the original XPages Cheatsheet which is geared more for the pure beginner starting out with XPages Development.
Both documents are available in 2 PDF versions. The original 11×17 version that gets printed for Lotusphere and a version that is sized for 8.5 x 11 that can be printed at home.
XPagesCheatSheet.com is also the home of online demos that have been featured on the NotesIn9.com screencast. A Demo database and a Fake names Data database is also available for download.
A complete list of NotesIn9 videos, including the award winning XPages Jumpstart video can be found at XPages.TV.
Note: I know the boxes aren’t lining up right. I hate CSS. I’ll fix it as soon as I can. Also, the “Fancy Type ahead” demo has been temporally removed because I broke it. I’ll fix that also soon.
I’m very happy to announce that after the amazing success of last years XPages Cheatsheet, there will be a brand new CheatSheet for this year!
This year’s sheet is titled “XPages: Social Tools” and is intended to be a starting point on how to connect your XPages Apps to Social Services like LotusLive, DropBox, Twitter, FaceBook, IBM Connections, IBM SameTime and the IBM Social Business Toolkit.
This document would not have been possible without the effort of IBMers Dan O’Connor, Niklas Heildoff and Phil Riand. They literally pulled togerther all the content and “all” I had to do was the formatting. I really hope this proves helpful to people who want to integrate their apps with these social services.
I have learned that the original XPages Cheatsheet will return for Lotusphere. I did send IBM a new version with a couple of VERY MINOR updates that people had sent to me. So even if you have the old one feel free to pick the new one up to get those changes. But again 99% of it is the same.
I assume that both cheatsheets will be available at the Lotus Technical Information booth. They might make it into the back of some of the sessions again. I’m not speaking this year so I’m not really certain about that. They might end up in the Labs also since they were last year.
On or after Lotusphere I’ll be adding the “XPages: Social Tools” sheet to XPagesCheatSheet.com, which is the website that I use to host the downloadable versions as well as the Demo database that I use for most of the NotesIn9.com videos. So you will be able to get it even if you don’t attend the conference.
I hope everyone likes them. If you’re coming to Lotusphere safe travels and I hope to see you!
IBM and Rockteam, a really great business partner, are having a holiday lunch at Ruth’s Chris in Philadelphia on Wednesday. The restaurant is right next to King of Prussia in case anyone (like me) needs to get some holiday shopping done afterwards.
UPDATE: Actually the restaraunt is the center city location. Whoops! Well there’s shopping downtown also I hear! 🙂
I’ll be there. Hope to see others there as well!
That other day I was looking at some stats for my NotesIn9 show – “Introduction to XPages“.
I thought it might be interesting to share the stats just of this 1 episode in an attempt to show the interest in XPages, at least from my tiny corner of the Internet – notesin9.com / XPages.TV. I picked this show because it’s kinda like a “Jumpstart”. Very intro level for people getting started.
Of course it’s not a TRUE picture of XPages Interest. There are probably lots of XPages devs that never found this video… these aren’t necessarily “Unique” users, and the numbers from the cross posts on YouTube / XPages.Info aren’t included…. but given all that, I think it’s good sign to see such strong demand for such a basic show on XPages. And of course I want to thank every body for watching the show!
