We just opened the SideStream Media site as a public beta. The new site is built on WordPress MU which allows us to easily have a lot of sub sites under one install and login. I know this isn’t what it was built for but it does the job perfectly. The Podcast site is based off a theme called Options by Justin Tadlock and the Blog is based on Prologue by Automattic. We are still working on the WordPress sections which will be for WordPress theme development. So far the only known bug is an issue with the top site wide nav on the podcasts page not working in IE7 and FireFox 2 but that should be worked out soon. Check out the site and let us know what you think.
04.08Vidcasts
For SideStream Media, we will be dealing with vidcasts along with podcast. This creates an interesting new challenge since vidcasts come in such a large variety of format and codecs, while the majority of podcasts come in just mp3 and maybe offer an enhanced aac feed as well. Usually I will just edit the podcasts in a variety of programs and then encode it in iTunes. The benefit of this is that it will make the file name nice and add good ID3 tags. But iTunes doesn’t work as well for videos. When I import audio files it will change the names and put them in organized folders for you, but with video it just dumps everything in 1 folder and doesn’t rename then, even when you change the ID3 tags with iTunes. So what I am asking is, does anyone know of a good program that support multiple codecs ( at least h.264 ) and will allow me to add ID3 tags and rename files to be user friendly?
One of the things Ben and I want to do on the SideStream Media website is allow for category specific CSS files. The reason we want to do this is so we can move all of our podcasts to one site and still make each podcast’s page look a little different. Revision 3 does this with it’s show pages, http://revision3.com/tekzilla/ and http://revision3.com/systm/ as 2 examples. The way we solved this issue was by calling on a .css file based on either what category page you were on or what category the post you are viewing is in. The code for this is :
<? if (is_category()) { ?>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<? bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/<?php single_cat_title(); ?>.css” type=”text/css” />
<? } elseif (is_single()) {?>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<? bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat)
{echo $cat->cat_name. ”;} ?>
.css” type=”text/css” />
<? } ?>
This code should go right after the link to you main CSS file. Once you have done this you just need to create CSS files in your themes folder by the same name as the category, and for most servers this will be case sensitive. You can see this code in action on some of the categories on this site. If you have any questions or know of a better way to do this please let me know.