prototypen.com 0.5b - radio, beamaz, bugs & optimization

Things have progressed a lot from 0.2 even though only part is visible to the untrained eye.
For one there is the radioPrototypen subsite now fully functional and compared to the rest of the site this is also the only site that has already long lasting content in it already. Its all a lot more complicated then it might look as this part required extremely heavy customization and the addition of two hand made modules. For one I wanted a different approach to the design as the radio is a bit more rough and spontaneous then the other sections - this is reflected in the logo that has the appearance of an unfinished drawing sprayed onto a wall crumbling off. That required a lot of stretching of the CSS (the visual part of webdesign) classes that were available. The cool thing if you make a website right CSS is the only thing you need to touch when you want to make a new design around old content (or in this case content types which generate the content). This part was a full success as the design principles set forth in the beginning of the design process hold up very well.
Yet for the radio show itself a new content type had to be developed from scratch - one that would hold and display/play the media files associated with the podcast and all additional metadata like who was guest/host of the podcasts a tagging system, the links that go with each show, the info text & a preview picture. This show should be as inclusive as possible when it comes to people watching/listening to it on different systems - there is a lot of care taken to make it playable on a wide arrangement of systems. The preferred platform by us is Quicktime as this is the production platform and also the platform that makes it the easiest to play with the player that gave podcasting the name. There is a fallback to Flash for those not having Quicktime installed on their computers and if that fails you can still download an MP4 enhanced podcast version and an MP3 version. Also of course we added an automatic RSS feed (our old one was edited by hand each time we made a new podcast - very labour intensive) for the enhanced MPG4 version and due to popular demand another one for the audio only MP3 version. These are special Podcast RSS feeds that can be added and read by applications that can use these - iTunes for example.
A big thing in our podcast are the links we provide as additional reading material to what we talk about and while have been doing the show for over a year we figured we need some way to organize all these links as they represent value to other people seeking knowledge. So a big part of the radio website circles around the aggregation and presentation of the links used. This also represented the first time the site would get ajax/ahah enabled - meaning the dynamic loading of content. Until this point there was no facility in place to deal with automatic content loading and displaying. At this point it was also clear that the comment system needed to get dynamic - at least for the links as they are dynamically loaded going to another page to add a comment was not very feasible as this would have required reloading the link content. The side effect of this was that the whole site can now enjoy dynamic comments that do not reload the page when adding a new comment. The comment system still needs some tweaking when it comes to spam protection - so if you post a comment and its not displayed immediately it means it hangs in the spam queue but be assured that your comment is being noticed by us hanging there and we will be trying to publish it as soon as possible - we expect to have a comment system that instant publishes without spam once we have tweaked everything to our liking. The radio site as it stands is the first subsite which is going to reach 1.0final status very soon. There is only one problem left needing ironing out and that is the fast-start of the podcasts (meaning your click on the podcast on the webpage and it starts playing pretty much instantly without needing to wait until the whole thing has downloaded). This problem is a bit out of our scope as the application we are using to produce this podcast needs to add this capability - its in the process and will likely be resolved soon.
Another addition that fed off the radio website and the general subdesign of the site was the proto.beamaz site which fused the prototypenlogo and interface design with the original proto.beamaz logo with black background as this part of the site will see very very little actual text but lots of visual goodness - especially lots of videos (we will never use a black background for pages that are high on text content as this is too hard to read). Also the beamaz site will house the sleeping vjblog at its entry page - for that the podcast content type was reused and also the work on the radio rss feeds enables that site to have an rss feed that can be subscribed and played in iTunes or similar. All video on this site will be in h.264 mpg4 format which currently represents the most open and most widely used format on all platforms. The player plugin for the vjblog is again mainly quicktime but as a fallback there is also the flash player - as the flash player has a small bug that needs ironing out the flash playback capability is turned off - expect this to be working once this has reached 1.0 (again its the player app with the bug not the website code and again it has to do with fastloading).
The protobeamaz site has another main feature and that is its overarching bigger projects - for that it reuses the projects content type from the vfx section.

The beamaz site development showed that put everything in one basket even with the diverse interests of the connected endeavors will help in the long term as the individual part are feeding off each other each adding features to the whole site which all other subsections benefit from - the argument becomes even bigger when there is actual content on the site that feeds of each other as well allowing us to aggregate and creatively reuse our own stuff throughout the site but also on the outside - very exciting things to come.

At one point it also became clear that we need storage space for all the media content we are about to publish and our local ISP friends from bytecamp are not quite ready to give us unlimited storage space just yet and the other options are too administration heavy and expensive (getting our own nonshared server for example). First we thought about going with the new Amazon S3 storage space option from Amazon but not having a fixed monthly rate for the bandwidth didn´t let us sleep very well and after already implementing the pipeline for the S3 option we decided to pull it out again and instead found a very very good extremely fast hosting service in the US that has unlimited bandwidth and storage for a very very low price. Since we did not want to move the whole site to the US (who would?) we decided to get another domain that will just host our media content. So if you see that our content comes from protobits.com - thats also us no worry.

The next steps until we reach 1.0 final -> the addition of a couple of more proto.modules. The next one to follow will most likely be the proto.lab. That is our laboratory room that is kindly donated to us by our local town and will be the hub for all research things we are getting into. That goes right along with mogreens aka Stephans subsite with its own gallery and blog - all things that are already there - just need a design idea.
At that time there will be a lot more meaningful content in the sites that are already online - that will also stress test the system as a whole.
Then next comes the Green Bean Faction our live documentation of sustainable small scale agriculture (a blog, a gallery and a store - so again all modules are in place - just needs a logo). And quite possibly also before 1.0 comes PingTV - the video podcast. Not to be mistaken with the vj podcast in the protobeamaz site this will actually be a moderated video podcast and together with a comic subsite which comes together with that will mark a big departure on how to present documentary content and fuse fiction with reality and will be the building block on which the media production side of prototypen will operate in the future - so the place where it all comes together and starts making sense.
If we reach 1.0 before March 2009 there will be a lot of very happy and very busy people around these parts…
Until then please test test test and post problems in the comments - no comment will be missed and problems be adressed.

Oh and those internet exploder people trying to see the site - it might work better now then before - but who knows - we are not going to test this. Get a real browser like Safari or Firefox you will be a much happier person and your computer won´t suffer from the plague.