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.
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:
[LIST]
NASA TV feeds
Chief Delphi threads
[/LIST]
So lend a thought or a keyboard and let’s make this site really awesome
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.
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: [strike]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.[/strike] 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.
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-twitter-php-library-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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
