Found out what was eating our chickens. Add this to the list of things we’ve seen in our yard.
Category: General
Sideways Video – A Rant on Aspect Ratio
Television has set the standard of common resolutions and aspect ratios for years, but not everything seems as smooth as it should. For one as we are becoming increasingly more web-centric in our distribution models why are we sticking by these ancient limitations of size and shape. Isn’t there something inherently more flexible with the web? Let’s challenge those norms and create something new with video.
Why do we have 16:9 aspect ratio TV sets but most computer monitors are 16:10? TV and computers both migrated toward widescreen layouts around the same time, but why such a subtle difference?
Another funny think about resolutions and the web is that there is no consistency. Take a look at this chart showing common resolutions of visitors to this site:
Some common Laptop resolutions and old school 4:3? How about netbooks? iPhones and Blackberries add even more diversity.
I was sitting at a gas station the other night with my Flip and shot this, sideways. Why not? What I was trying to capture was better suited for a more portrait-like frame and it felt almost natural to hold the camcoorder like a small digital camera. Not to mention I can display a higher resolution video in the confines of the 450px column width on this site.
I’d like to see more creative uses of video, like this. What do you think? Is this just crazy talk?
A Side of Lent
Part of my job is developing a web strategy for the division of Mission & Ministry at SLU. Recently we completed a project that pivoted around a site for the Lenten activities on campus this year. On short notice we got something up and running using Google Sites and I was able to train a few non-web folk to keep it up-to-date.
They kept the site running for all of Lent with over 5,000 visitors and daily updates. The project was a success and something that I’m proud of.
As it was nearing it’s end I started studying the analytics and noticed a trend. It quickly became apparent that the length of time on the site was exceptionally long due to the type of content being written. The average time on site was over four and a half minutes. Longer than any other site I’ve maintained.
I thought to myself, “Wow, these daily reflections would be about a page and a half if printed.”
And in fact I was correct.
Interested in brushing up my InDesign skills* I looked into self-publishing options and found Lulu.
Learning a bit about how to format my document, page numeration, margins and all the other fun elements of layout I created a 91 page soft cover edition of the Lent website. All 45 daily reflections seperated by the approprate weekly reflections. The end of the book even contains a list of all the Lenten pledeges that users submitted to the website.
I printed off 4 of these at about $6 a pop. Having enjoyed the professionalism and dedication during this project I gave them as gifts to the key members involved. I think they all liked them – as much as I did while creating it.
*The last time I used InDesign it was called Pagemaker. 🙂
Tweetie ‘Unauthorized. Could not authenticate you.’
I saw this message earlier today after trying to get Tweetie to work on my home Mac. I was able to setup multiple accounts with ease at work, but for the life of me could not figure out why I was getting this error message. I tried retyping my account details multiple times, each time making sure to type my password as slowly and precisely as possible.
After an apropos search on Twitter about the error I came across this tweet.
rbieber: @frumpa thats odd. This time I entered the password first (where focus defaults) and then username and authenticated fine. Bug?
A quick test confirmed that the order in which you enter your credentials for secondary accounts is a bug. It appears you need to enter your password first and then your username.
If this doesn’t make any sense, see the video below.
[qt:http://clkoerner.com/videos/tweetie-bug.mov http://clkoerner.com/videos/tweetie-bug-poster.mov 490 470]
I should mention despite this small bug I’m enjoying Tweetie very much and am sure the developers will remedy this. Most likely right after I hit the Publish button.
Update: Well pretty close, atebits updated Tweetie today to 1.0.2, which fixes this problem.
CMS
Very abstract.