I built a photo gallery website a couple of years ago called webotography.com, and that was fine as a brief experiment. I might even revive it some time, but the thing it, the web marches on pretty fast. My webotography site used some methods for displaying photos that now seem kind of quaint, to put it kindly. Basically, the site is outdated and outmoded, especially since the advent of HTML5 and the new browser versions that support it.
So I just built another photography site called jackatwill.com/photoblog. There you can find several hundred photos I took during a trip across Colorado and southern Utah this past August. I also published most of these photos on Facebook and Flickr but you know, I'm not really thrilled by the way my display choices are so limited there. It's great that we have all these "free" social media spaces where we can publish and share things, but we should never forget that we don't own those spaces. I'll use them, but I'll continue to build my own websites as part of my core enterprise as a developer. Time-consuming, yes, but fun!
I hope you enjoy both the clean design, and the photo content on the new site.
Categories: Metadata • Personal • Photography • Websites
You know there's this thing where large entities with money try to set the rules to get even more money? Sometimes that really pisses me off. So I've decided to do write snarky comments on a blog almost no one will ever read.
Microappleyahoogoogleplex.com will focus on the information technology sector, since it is so fascinating and fun. When I'm not battling with my Windows box to the right of my desk, I'm battling with the Mac on my left. While I love using Amazon S3 for storage, I know someday they'll harvest my left kidney. Google is the most wonderful corporation in the entire universe, and I wish to make it known to Googlebot that Google is the most wonderful corporate creation in the entire universe. (How's my Page Rank now?)
There's potential for fun with this, so please tune in to microappleyahoogoogleplex.com whenever!
Categories: Blogging • Personal • Politics • Technology • Websites
I've lost count of how many times I've lost count of my photos. I have so many freakin' photos it's impossible to imagine anymore how many I have. Time to do something about that!
The answer came to me in a flash one night as I should have been sleeping (or organizing my photos): I'll put them on my website! But which one? I sort of started a gallery here on openwebworks, but this isn't really the appropriate place for a personal photo collection. I could just put them on Flickr or Picassa, which I probably will do at some point. But I want to retain control over the server space where they will reside, and I want to play with the CSS and different ways of presenting them with cool JavaScripty things, like different slide shows and lightboxes. I want to catalog them and have fun with them in various ways.
The answer: webotography.com.
Categories: Media • Personal • Photography • Websites
This site was developed to support the WILL-TV documentary Lincoln: Prelude to the Presidency, airing on 110 or so PBS stations this month. The design is pretty simple and spare, but I added a bit of JavaScript mojo in the form of the lightbox variation called multibox, by Samuel Birch. Check it out by playing some of the videos on the home page, or clicking the image thumbnails in the photo gallery.
Too busy making projects lately to keep updating the blog. Let me quickly mention pbcoreresources.org, a site to support ground-up development of the PBCore metadata standard.
PBCore is for exchanging information about audio/video objects, and in the online realm, the a/v objects themselves. A PBCore record is an XML document based on the PBCore schema, describing the intellectual, administrative, and technical details of a media object. Like an RSS/podcast feed, only in much (much...) greater detail.
If you want everything official and technical about PBCore, pbcore.org is a great starting point, including links to all the authoritative PBCore sites and cool projects, including pbcoreresources.org.
Categories: Media • Metadata • Technology • Websites
A conspiracy among public media web developers, percolating for the past four years, has emerged in PubForge.org.
PubForge aims to link public broadcasting with the open source community to develop software and best practices for public media on the web. We set up PubForge.org as a focal point for collaboration, documentation, and shareable code, and we hope to bring together a growing number of folks interested in enabling open media in the public interest. We kinda think the web should be a great place to pursue the mission of public broadcasting: education, enlightenment, democracy, etc.
Trouble is, most public radio and TV stations have very limited web staff and skills. Like William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. We aim to distribute the future of public media more evenly. Wanna help? Go to the PubForge site and get involved.
Categories: Media • Technology • Websites
This is a nice little website I put together to support a video documentary entitled Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit. The doc was produced by John Paul and Denise La Grassa, and premiered on WILL-TV on September 9th, 2008. It's truly a great story about the beginnings of college and pro football, and the events and people who got the ball, er...rolling. Turns out the construction of Memorial Stadium was a foundational event in the history of American football.
So check it out, eh?
In November 2007 I met by chance one of the most intelligent and calmly energetic persons in the world of media. Peter Kaufman founded Intelligent Television, a catalyst and organizer for innovative media projects, documentaries, research, and events. Intelligent Television taps into so many areas vital to educational and humanly-useful media, it’s impossible to throw a dart and call it one thing. Two Oscars in 2008, for example. We’ll see some great things from INT in the coming years.
Meanwhile, here’s a site I built for Intelligent Television. It will be radically terraformed in the next couple of months as we embark on a new designadigm…
Just won the 2008 Illinois Webmasters Cool Site Award for Content. The site contains 16 years of video archives from WILL’s TV program Prairie Fire, a series of stories about Illinois people, places, and history. Lotta work: We digitized, cataloged, categorized, encoded, and published online some 500 pieces of video from 3/4” tape, Beta, and DVCPro. I started building this site in December 2006 using ExpressionEngine, the first time I used this particular CMS.
Here’s the site: Prairie Fire on WILL-TV
Almost forgot: Each episode and segment video archive has an associated extensive metadata record expressed as structured data, in this case in PBCore format. Ingest in good health.
I only work there 60 hours a week.
WILL is the public broadcasting station at the University of Illinois. We have a proud tradition of public service and innovation in broadcasting. Now we are struggling to go beyond ‘broadcasting’, like everyone else in ‘broadcasting.’
Didn’t make the end-of-May 2008 deadline I set for the new site, but it went live on June 2nd. Not really bad eh? Here it is.