progosk, 14. March 2006, 01:42
Antcast: videos.antville now available as video podcast.
i'm happy to announce i've come up with a way to podcast antville. don't expect perfection - for two main reasons: 1. collaborative input will always be varied (not all posts include direct/deep links), 2. it's not an antville-native solution.
but for a ready&loaded fix of cool music videos, this should do just fine...

here's the feed link:
feeds.feedburner.com

three and a half ways to use this feed:
1. in Democracy,
2. in FireAnt,
3. in Firefox, as a live rss bookmark.

another way would have been in iTunes, but that only picks up the mov's and the mpg's. so that's only worth half.

what sayeth the 'ville? (and kris?)
         
a recommendation or three:

- when posting, always put the "best" links first: the feed picks up the first media item.
- always consider alerting the original host of the media that your post will link to (in view of the traffic they'll likely receive)
- please always try to include a direct/deep link
         
My recommendation (Mac/OSX) is to use Democracy. It's doesn't have as many neato tools as Fireant, but its interface has the basics. Fireant is also a little unwieldy, and it ain't open source, unlike Democracy.

Meanwhile you may want to check Telemusicvision's - rss feed. Good quality (and good) vids they've transferred themselves.
         
i was just thinking "mhm, s that really making sense?" when the serverload went up and made the site unreachable (maximum thread count reached), so this is probably a bloody good thing, especially for our friends in the us (i suppose it s us peak time when the server goes down, right?) as the feedburner-rss should remain available.

so thanx, prog!
the link should go into the box to the left, no?

i had not expected the site to be that popular …

(thx for the democracy tip, will check that out)
         
- antville popularity: can anyone please decrypt the arcane alexa terminology? "daily pageviews per million". per million what? also: alexa is based on sample behaviour culled from people who've agreed to install the alexa toolbar - no idea how representative it is, really...

- antcast link in the box on the right: kris seemed ok with the idea of this richer feed. not sure though, since it isn't native stuff, that he'll add it there. (it would be the right place, i guess...)
         
prog, alexa's terminology and numerology remains a mystery to me, too. my ideas is to compare sites, but still, what s the result going to tell us? loads of traffic here, so much is for sure.
(do they collect stats on the antville server?)
         
The terminology refers to a fraction of pageviews out of the 1,000,000 total possible. It's actually a simple division to get the overall percentage of relative popularity within the Alexa universe from this number.

This value should be accurate within (x) percentage points, depending on the size of the cross-section. You would have to compare the Alexa user demographic and sample size to global useage stats to find out the value of (x).

This is the same concept that TV ratings systems use.
         
antcast info:

- it does not pick up swf, flv or mp4's as media enclosures, so you don't get those in fireant or democracy (only in firefox)
- fireant shows you the full posted text including links (in order to jump to the post+comments page, for example) - but it lacks thumbnails for each post
- democracy has thumbnails, but shows long text only partially. (it's also loading some posts double for now, no idea why.)

so, as i said, a long way from perfect. i'd love to hear if anybody finds the feed useful, and/or what their idea of an ideal feed (and feed app) would be.
         
also: antcast will be off and on, these are early days - consider this as a test phase.
         
progo: i'm a geek, so i love rss, i am using both rss's now (with sage within ff), let's see which one is better. the feedburner version is lagging a bit behind, yet its more stable & has more items, whereas the in-house version is more on time. let's just play around with these two.
thx!
         
the antcast had a 24-hour outage, but it's back now. (it's currently dependent on an external server, we're working on in-houseing it.)

the native antville rss strips out images and media links, so it's ok to keep you updated on new posts, but not much else; the antcast is a full video podcast, since it contains images and media enclosures (though unfortunately not for all media formats).

the current antcast is a "screenscrape", so it's not internally generated. hopefully someday kris will find the time to upgrade/hack antville's own rss to include the elements necessary for podcasting.

meantime, please keep up the feedback!
         
uh-oh. we've been waxy'd...
         
way cool ;) that might imply a slight increase of traffic, i gather …