Hammocks youtube playlist on website

Handmade Hammocks is still an Actinic ecommerce site so presents its own environment of challenges for maintenance work. Most recently the feature has been updated to dynamically show Actinic content pages in the navigation menu.

This means the client can update content more easily using the Actinic UI without having to edit template files in dreamweaver.

Similarly the embedded video on the website homepage has now been updated to show the Hammocks Youtube playlist by adding the embed code to the Actinic home page template, removing the need to manually edit the template file in e.g. Dreamweaver (or your preferred code editor of choice)

Here's a quick how-to:

1. Create a youtube playlist

Log in to your youtube account
Click on 'my videos' and look for 'playlists' in the left-hand menu
Click on '+ new'
Give the playlist a title, description and some tags, then save.

2. Add videos to youtube playlist

Your list of uploaded videos should show with checkboxes beside them
Check the boxes of the videos you want to appear in your playlist and choose 'add videos'
At the top of your video list, click the 'add to' button and select the new playlist from the list.

3. Embed youtube playlist on website

Click on 'playlist' on the left-hand menu, this will list your playlist(s)
Click on your playlist title
Above your playlist, click on the 'share' button
Copy and paste the code for a straight link to playlist
OR
Click on 'embed' to customise the size, privacy and HD/https options a bit (seems to be a minimum player width of 200px)

4. Paste generated code into the right place.

5. Look at what you've done just to check it's worked ok before doing the next thing on your list

DVD transcoding

A client provided a DVD of some video footage to submit to the Youtube channel that accompanies the website, but extracting and processing the video wasn't as straightforward as first imagined.

 Throw away the PC and use Handbrake (0.9.4) for the Mac OS X and they put it best...

There's an old proverb in the video encoding world: "Speed, size, quality: pick two." It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.

It was a straightforward, quick (relatively) and easy to use resource which prompted a VLC update to make sure everything worked out ok. Lots of default presets for output devices and purposes but allows a codec-minded transcoder to tweak as required.

Bit of a cocktail message theme going on suggesting that alcohol and computers do mix. Callisti disagrees.

NextGen Gallery again

The existing Comlongon Castle website image gallery module was struggling to cope with the volume of images so it was time to employ a Wordpress installation with the renowned NextGen gallery plug-in to help organise the photos into themed galleries (AJAX pagination) with slideshow and piclens options.

This is to be achieved using an alternative Comlongon Castle domain as a sort of mirror to the main site so that web visitors can switch between the two resources, with each resource being able to provide either text content and documents, or images.

By extension, this could also be applied to video content - at the moment the Comlongon YouTube channel is in it's infancy but this is the ideal resource to host video content that links back to the main 'outcome' site, where web visitors can complete goals such as make contact or use the wedding calculator to generate a guideline wedding quote.

Itsh a compromizhe

This has been on the back-burner for a while. Initially the site was transferred into Callisti's website hosting service toward the end of last year. The vision was to develop a Dr Martens focussed ecommerce site as these products seemed to perform well online, while reducing the in-shop administrative burden of monitoring and updating hundreds or thousands of products.

The site was developed for Christmas 2009 but hit a snag with Dr Martens (who advised against the particular design and domain name we'd settled on.) So what we have done is used a Zen Cart ecommerce engine to replace the previous incarnation of CubeCart and merged the first new build structure into the existing Outdoor Spirit design.

The outdoor-spirit.co.uk has a domain history which can be used and is also familiar to existing customers. More subsidiary work is being done to build around the Outdoor Spirit brand using content channels such as Youtube, a Blog presence, and other linked entities to help promote and review products and provide relevant outdoor activity feedback to help inform website visitors.

Other initiatives such as the Gap Year travel kit have helped package outdoor equipment into one stop shop kits that offer savings to customers and ease of in-shop administration.