[TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

The Blue Alliance will again be traveling to Manchester, NH to cover the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition LIVE. Once again, we will be bringing you up-to-the-minute and behind-the-scenes video, photos, and news. To get an idea for what this is like, check out our 2008 and 2007 coverage.

Bookmark thebluealliance.net/kickoff09, and be sure to check back on the evening before Kickoff, when our live coverage begins.

A general information thread exists for people to discuss the announcement of our live coverage.

The purpose of this thread is to request comments from the community about the technical implementation of The Blue Alliance's liveblogging web site. Last year's site can be visited at thebluealliance.net/kickoff08. The goal for this year is to improve upon this site, offering more flexibilty and an easier time for the community to learn and discuss as the Kickoff progresses.

To this extent, we have created a Google Code project for the TBA Liveblogging Site. Please visit the project, download the code, and see what you think about our implementation of features and general content for the site.

Planned Minimum Features:

• iGoogle-like modular interface
• Flickr Photos
• Vimeo Videos
• Twitter Posts
• uStream.tv Module if we can get live streaming on site
• Meebo chat room
• Links to:
  • NASA TV feeds
  • Chief Delphi threads

So lend a thought or a keyboard and let's make this site really awesome :)

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

I think we are going to end up borrowing heavily from a jQuery based tutorial on NETTUTS. You can see it in action here.

I'm just keeping my notes in public. :-)

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

If you can get those minimum features, especially stocked with observations that Joe Six Pack* in Middle of Nowhere, GA, can't pick up from the NASA telecast, you'll be sitting on a gold mine.

*That six pack is of Mountain Dew. Any other interpretation is your own mind.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Going from the previous Gameday experiences, I would lightly suggest trying to find an alternative, if possible. I know there probably aren't too many others or Meebo is easiest, though.

EDIT: I've been playing around with YChat recently. It's a PHP script. I can't seem to find the site again, but when I do, I'll post it. Actually, taking a closer look, I don't think it'd give the same functionality as a Meebo room. I'll still look for others, though.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Why would you lean away from Meebo? What aspects of it did you find don't work well?

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Check out current progress at http://www.thebluealliance.net/kickoff09/beta/

Next up is figuring out why Firefox doesn't like 100% width embedded objects. Chrome is playing with them fine, but Firefox and IE users make up a much larger majority. If anyone has any experience with this, tips appreciated :)

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Just checking in, Safari 4 Developer Preview works with that site. Missing a plugin for the Nasa Webcast but I expected that.

I doubt you can do much but the meebo widget just doesn't seem intuitive. (See attached) The scroll bars look too small to me and having the user list on top seems like it will make things difficult if people are talking back and forth quickly.

Have you given thought to how you are doing the twitter functionality? Depending on what sort of setup you have on your server there is a php library for getting tweets. (http://blog.slawcup.com/2007/04/full...ibrary-ver-01/) It doesnt support searching but it does support direct messaging and replies, perhaps having an FRCKickoff twitter user we respond to and have those on a 30 second updating feed.

Great Job by the way.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

What resolution is your screen? The meebo widget scales strangely with different screen resolutions. I will have to investigate how it looks at popular resolutions.

Screen width vs. widget width may turn out to be the most difficult problem with this design.

With regard to Twitter, last year we had our own custom PHP script that scraped the @thebluealliance account, which seemed to be good enough. Maybe this year we will get a little fancier, but we were generally using it as a "read-only" medium and not responding to anyone who tweeted at us. Twitter has seen a lot of growth in the last year though, so it is likely that significantly more FIRSTers use it now than a year ago.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

The site opened a full screen video -- presumably NASA TV -- and the only way to make that video disappear was to close the tab for that site. There was no way for me to otherwise manipulate the video -- couldn't get out of full screen, change volume, pause; anything like that.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

1440 x 900 but the browser window was only 1000 x 700. Once I expanded my browser window my issues more or less went away. Would it be possible to have the meebo widget across the whole bottom of the screen?

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

What version of what browser under what operating system are you using? I will try to figure out what is causing the issue.

Thanks!

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Firefox 3.0.5, Windows XP Media Center Edition, SP2. The video is opening up a new Firefox window titled "VLC (hardware YUV overlay DirectX output)".

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

It sounds like Firefox is using VLC to handle the stream instead of Windows Media Player. I will see if I can figure out what's going on in your case, but you're running a non-standard configuration.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Using FF3 on XP SP3 with WMP 10, I don't see the NASA video. I hear it, and when I right-click the general area of the video, I can go to the fullscreen mode with video.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Now defaults to 2 column layout with option for 3 column layout.

Twitter updates added. Twitter and Flickr modules auto-refresh every two minutes.

I am not sure how to best address all of the Windows Media problems that people are having. There isn't much I can do about browser plugins, and NASA doesn't offer a Flash Video stream as far as I can tell, which would be the most cross-browser-compatible.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

You can probably do a little detection script and link to Flip4Mac for OS X streaming.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Slight suggestion, then. Can those buttons under the video be used to change the stream within the box, instead of linking to the media directly?

I don't know how feasible that is within 4 days, but that would basically solve the issue, as one of those protocols are sure to work on someone's computers.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

I'll investigate alternative media players, but it might be BYO because plugins are weird.

I've taken the site out of the /beta/ directory and put in in www.thebluealliance.net/kickoff09/, so we're basically almost entirely ready to rock. :)

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Very nice, works well in Firefox 3.1 Beta for Mac with the exception of the flickr widget. In the top left corner there is a box that says yes and no which goes away as soon as I move the widget around, once moved the flickr widget works fine.

Tested in Safari 3.1.2 and it works there as well.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

FYI...guessing it's something with my setup, but the kickoff page crashes IE under the following config:
-Vista Home Premium SP2 Beta
-IE 7.0.6002.16497
-Media Player 11.0.6002.16497

Safari 3.1.2 for Windows also locks up when asking about the Media Player plugin...

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

I can't get the hi-res stream from nasa to work in any media player.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Twitter error:

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

Thanks, I think I've fixed it but I'll keep an eye out.

I will check that the stream still exists, I just took the URLs from last year and assumed they didn't change.

It seems that the Windows Media Stream of NASA TV is giving everyone the most headaches. :-x. Maybe I can find a friendlier stream somewhere.

Re: [TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development
 

We have been integrating meebo chatrooms for a few different websites and its been easy to handle. The one disadvantage is spambots surfing looking for meebo rooms and posting spam advertisements. I have not figured out how to hide meebo from spam bots.