[TBA]: Kickoff 2009 Liveblogging Site Development

[Greg Marra]

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

[Greg Marra]

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. :-)

[Billfred]

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.

[synth3tk]

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.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

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.

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

[Greg Marra]

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

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

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

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.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

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.

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.

[Madison]

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.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

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.

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?

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Madison

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.

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

Thanks!

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

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

Thanks!

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)".

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Madison

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)".

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.

[synth3tk]

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.

[Greg Marra]

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.