pyvideo status: November 24th, 2013

What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related conference and user-group videos on the Internet. 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

Lot of stuff has happened since the last status report, but there are four things of note:

1. Sheila is now a co-admin of pyvideo.org. She has been for a couple of months. I need to update the site to reflect this.

   I'm really psyched about this. It's a ton of work and I'm just not managing it well. Splitting the work should make it more manageable.

2. Back in July, Sheila poked me about a tweet Jesse wrote suggesting Rackspace was interested in sponsoring Open Source projects. She contacted Jesse and set everything up.

   I'm psyched that Rackspace agreed to sponsor pyvideo.org by providing free hosting. Several months later, I moved pyvideo.org from where it was before to a vm at Rackspace.

   I'm really excited about this! It makes a bunch of problems that I was trying to figure out what to do about go away.

   Thank you, Rackspace!

   I need to update the site to reflect this.

3. Sheila discovered that blip.tv was expiring a bunch of accounts that held conference videos and that those videos would go away. She and I scrambled to download all the files from blip and move them to Rackspace cloudfiles. It's about 600 videos and around 250gb of data.

   In the process of doing that, we saved videos for DjangoCon EU 2010, DjangoCon EU 2011 and PyGotham 2012. I added these to pyvideo.org today. These videos have pages that are stubs with no metadata. I've got that in my queue of things to fix.

   Also, the thumbnails for all the videos on blip.tv are on my laptop which isn't very helpful. I need to move those and update the videos in pyvideo.org.

   As a side note, if we didn't have hosting from Rackspace, we'd have been totally screwed. Thank you, Jesse Noller and Rackspace!

4. I've been working on the richard codebase fixing architectural problems, reducing the complexities and trying to clean it up so it's in a better state. That work is almost done. When it is, I'll update pyvideo.org with the new site. At this rate, I think I can finish the work this year, but that assumes there aren't any more emergencies.

5. I've been thinking about how to build a better communication channel for pyvideo.org so people can more easily follow what's going on so they can act on things they're interested in.

   pyvideo.org has a "site news" section. It's a pain in the ass to use and it's not syndicated anywhere and it's likely no one sees it.

   Blogging status reports like this on my blog is better, but I don't think my blog is very widely read. Making my blog more widely-read seems like a lot of work and I'm not sure I can do it effectively anyhow.

   So I've decided to ditch the "site news" section of pyvideo.org and switch to Twitter. I started a @PyvideoOrg account.

   I'll tweet site updates, calls for help and newly posted conferences. I'm tossing around tweeting new videos when they get posted, but videos tend to get posted in huge batches and getting > 40 tweets all at once is a total drag. I'll have to think about that some more.

   Follow @PyvideoOrg if you're interested! Also, feel free to tweet at that account.

   I need to update the site to reflect this.

Also, in my life things are pretty nuts. I have a new kid and juggling everything was impossible for a while. I think that should easy up now and I can spend more time on pyvideo.org going forward.

That's the state of things!

Also, thank you thank you thank you thank you Rackspace!