Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Add a video to your website

There are essentially 2 ways to add a video to your Spiral website
  1. Upload your video to a video service website like YouTube or Vimeo.
  2. Hosting on your website. Send us the video file and we will add it to your site. 

Using YouTube

With your video recorded and edited it's a simple process to upload it to YouTube, there is help on the YouTube website to explain how to do this. Once it's uploaded YouTube will provide you with a code snippet that you can include in your website and the video will look like it is part of your site. The beauty of this method is that YouTube takes care of the conversion to a suitable web format and enables it to be viewed on PC's and Mac's. Your website visitors can watch your video with no extra software and bandwidth is free for you.

Hosting on your website

To include a video on your website and have it hosted on our server you will need to send us the video as the file will be too big to upload through the asset manager. 

Until now there has not been a standard for showing video or movies on a web page. Most videos were shown through a plug-in (like Flash) but different browsers may have had different plug-ins. To watch the video you needed to have the plug-in or to download it to your computer. Using HTML5 we are now able to embed a video in a webpage. Currently there are 3 supported video formats for the HTML5 video element. They are MP4, WebM and Ogg. Older browsers dont support HTML5. This table shows current browser support for the 3 video formats.
The real issue is the HTML5 video element is not supported by Internet Explorer 8 or earlier. 

Remember in New Zealand all our hosting providers charge for overseas traffic. If your video is popular overseas and watched by many then you will rack-up overseas traffic and may be charged extra for it.

Summary

For us in New Zealand YouTube provides a quick, simple, professional and low-cost way to include video on our websites. This is our recommended method.



Saturday, July 13, 2013

Moving out, moving on

Today we moved the "big" stuff from our office to the lockup down the road. With plenty of boxes to fill we will be kept busy for another week with packing and actual work before we move completely on Friday.

Its been 5 crazy weeks that started with looking about for a smaller office in Petone (one of our favourite places). With only 2 or 3 of us in the office most days our 123 sq metres was silly. I told our lovely landlord we wouldn't be renewing our lease later in the year and on the same day, entirely unconnected, our neighbour came over looking for more office space. One thing led to another, they really wanted more space in July, we agreed they could move in on the 20th of July.

Yes, I looked around for office space once we had decided to move, but not too hard I admit because over the past few months I've been working at home a couple of days a week and loving it. Our team already has 2 Kiwi's working remotely, one in the Hawkes Bay and another in the UK. The switch from running a partial-cloud office to a full-cloud office didn't seem such a big step, after-all  the cloud is our natural environment.

We are using Dropbox, Highrise, Basecamp, Skype and will add a Voip phone system this week, hopefully customers will get the same or better service from us. We may find a little office to suit or we may continue to work from home. Over the next few months we'll let you know how we get on.