May 2006

Those who frequent The Druid Network’s forums, will know that I’m currently looking into facilitating an on-line TV channel (distributed video podcast feed) hosting homegrown programming from the druid/pagan/anyone interested community. I’ve got a development web-site up and running, and we’re currently participating in some technical testing.

The technology itself is quite simple, it’s a merging of two technologies, RSS/XML feeds, and ad-hoc BitTorrent  Peer-2-Peer networking. Torrents are seeded by content hosts (be it a video, or an audio show), the RSS/XML feed advertises the available torrents, so users do not have to manually check for new available content. Users simply subscribe to the feed (using Democracy or iTunes, or any other compatible program) and then jump on the torrents… Downloading, and sharing in making the content available.

Ok, science part over… In production, it will be simple, I promise :)

technorati tags: druid.tv, tdn, druid, network, xml, rss, feed, bittorrent, democracy, itunes

For those that know the DruidWiki, and it’s coding roots, you’ll know that it’s a MoinMoin 1.3.5 base install with some code whipped from the DavisWiki project (which was a fork of MoinMoin), and piled back into MoinMoin.

Now that MoinMoin are at 1.5.x, I’ve been holding off an upgrade. Partly because it’s a case of finding the time to roll the changes back into 1.5.x. Mostly it’s because, I plain don’t like the aesthetics or path of 1.5.x. I know, does that make me shallow?

So what to do, how do we increase the services and performance that the DruidWiki can offer, and keep the site bubbling and full of energy, easier to navigate, less of a technical challenge to our users? Luckily the folks at DavisWiki are going to release a new project encompassing their new code-base. It’s called Sycamore, and you can see a test site here.

For my part, I’m going to be documenting our entire migration experience, as well as having some input onto the creation of a MoinMoin migration script. 

technorati tags: daviswiki, moinmoin, druidwiki, sycamore

Podcasting and Video Podcasting are not exactly new inventions, but tieing these forms of syndicated material with BitTorrent is a fairly new realisation. Finally, content creators can now publish content without paying through the nose for premium bandwidth usage.

Democracy is a feed aggregator (and player) for Video Podcasts, but with support for BitTorrent techonology, so viewers, help other viewers. The more popular your channel, the more bandwidth to cope with additional viewers.

The Get Democracy site are also hosting the Broadcast Machine, which is the PHP code you’ll need to host a Video Podcast feed on your site, along with additional BitTorrent options like one-step publishing and if you’ve got the stones for it, optional BitTorrent server-seeding.

All of the code is also, a 100% open-source GPL’d love-fest.

On a more personal note, I’m currently investigating the feasability of maintaining a Video Podcast channel (using this technology) for the Druid community, however, so far there’s very little need or support. So, it’s not looking like it’s a resource the community would need at this point in time… Also, JimJeroo of UKNova.com fame has also asked me to host a feed for him, stay tuned, it’s sure to be fun! 

technorati tags: democracy, video, podcast, bittorrent, jimjeroo, gpl, broadcast, uknova