pyvideo status: April 9th, 2015

Thursday April 9, 2015, 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 It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with.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 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.

This is the latest status report for all things happening on the site.

Status

It's been about a year since my last status report. The last year was tough for a bunch of reasons I don't want to go into. On top of that, I was pretty burned out and I had a ton of other stuff I needed to do. So I didn't do much with pyvideo for a long time.

However, we had a lot of help from other people. Sheila Miguez took over adminning the site and added a bunch of conferences. Paul Collins did a ton of work fixing technical debt issues and cleaning up richard codebase. Trey Hunner got richard working with Python 3. Spencer Herzberg, Magnun Leno, Reiner Gerecke, Wes Turner, Benjamin Bertrand, and Burak Guven fixed a bunch of bugs, added new functionality and cleaned up documentation.

I started to get back to things mid-March. I started with the ansible work that Sheila did and tweaked it so we could use it to deploy pyvideo. Then I redid all the infrastructure, updated richard to Django 1.7, fixed a bunch of django-browserid related issues, nixed some code and did some other cleanup. Then I had a few days left before PyCon US 2015 and I decided to throw together a rough playlist implementation.

Playlists are something Sheila and I have talked about for a while. It's great that pyvideo is an index of videos, but until now there's been no good way of collecting a subset of videos you think are interesting to watch later. There's been no good way of curating a group of videos and then sharing that list with other people. Perhaps you want to help people learn Flask. Perhaps you want to share videos about debugging in Python. Perhaps you want to collect videos related to a class you're teaching. Perhaps you want everyone to experience Erik Rose: Man of Mystery.

I landed a rough implementation of playlists today. It's not perfect; it's missing some key things. I wrote up some issues in the richard issue tracker for features that should get implemented to make it really useful. Even without some of those things, it's useful today.

Want to try it out?

Now you can go to any video page on the site and add that video to your playlists.

All playlists are public. You can share the url of your playlists with other people.

Next step is to implement some of the other features listed in the richard issue tracker. If there are other things you want to see or you bump into problems, toss an issue in the tracker.

I hope you find it helpful!

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.