pyvideo status: March 20th, 2012

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

Status

I launched pyvideo.org on March 10th. That was 10 days ago. In those 10 days, I fixed a bunch of issues, screwed up the site a couple of times, got dozens of emails many with encouragement and feature requests, talked to Craig with Universal Subtitles, and watched Google Analytics with some amazement. It's been a really wild 10 days.

I think overall the experience was a successful one, but there were a series of failures most of which were because I wasn't ready to go live when I went live, but I had really run out of time. Lack of feeds, media urls, easy ways to fix data, crummy experience on iPads and Android tablets, ... The list is longish. So it goes.

Of all the successes, I'm the happiest for the following:

  • The site had 100,000 or so visitors. That roughly means that PyCon 2012 reached 98,000 more people than it otherwise would have. That means that 98,000 more people heard about programming practices, robots, outreach, libraries, applications, case studies and all the other things we learned at PyCon. That's a big win.

    Thank you to the PyCon conference crew! You run a damn good conference.

  • I got dozens of emails. Many with encouragement, some with feature requests, some with data fixing requests, and some pointing out issues with the site. I think it's awesome that so many people took the time to email me feedback to make this resource better.

  • There are 8 forks on Github of richard. Further, I've had the pleasure to add two new people to the AUTHORS file and look forward to adding a third very soon. Thank you to Reiner, David and Alejandro!

    I work on richard and pyvideo in my spare time. I think this software is useful for other conferences and other groups which is why I made it Free Software and kept it separate from pyvideo. I can't possibly do everything I want to do with it, so I spent time writing documentation to ease the barriers to entry for new contributors. I feel really good about the work I did.

I've spent the last few days writing bug reports for things that need to be fixed, fixing some, fixing some data, and working on feeds. I haven't spent a ton of time on feeds, yet. I really hope to finish it soon, though.

If you're interested in helping out, I sure could use you! Testing, documenting, fixing the layout of some of the pages, implementing new features, fixing project infrastructure---there are a lot of different kinds of things you could help out with.

Issue trackers are here:

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.