The next Websitetology seminars will be held, Friday Oct 12, 2007

It will be held at the Park Hills Crossing Clubhouse in Fairborn.

If you are wondering if you should take this seminar: http://websitetology.com/?p=91

Sign up for it here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=247

Youtube is definitely the 1000 pound gorilla in hosting online video, but there are other options. The main reason to go with other options is video quality. When YouTube recompresses your video, sometimes it can go to fuzz. This should improve now it’s all H.264 instead of Flash video, but, in the meantime- consider some of these options- all allow you to embed your video in a blog.

• Blip.tv
• Viddler.com
• Screencast.com
• revver.com
• google video (which may soon just be youtube since Google bought YouTube)

There are others- you can find some excellent indepth info here: Online Video Hosting

The main decision you have to make is how “findable” do you want your video to be? ALmost everyone looking for video will tend to go to the best known sites. YouTube has the biggest audience, and if you have something viral- you want it there (although it probably will end up there if it’s truly destined for greatness).

If you just want others to be able to link to it- any site will do.

The last issue is how you embed it in your site. We use a plugin called WPVideo to embed social media site video. There are other plugins out there- you can always trust Lorelle to write about a subject like video embedding plugins in depth- and of course she has: Video, Music, Podcasts, Audio, and Multi-media WordPress plugins.

We’ve also tried uploading our video to our server- and then watching the bandwidth suck out of our server, we’re still scratching our head why we ever went this route (other than some of our video was put up before YouTube existed).

Happy video posting!

The WordPress development team has a new schedule for releases- one major version every 3 months is the goal. Today, WordPress 2.3 is supposed to be realeased and there is a very good post at Technosailor about the 10 things you need to know.

I’m most excited about Plugin version notifications. If there has been one bane to our developers existence, it’s been broken WP updates- because a plugin isn’t updated- causing us to go through the trial and error check. Now WP will let us know when plugins are updated- solving this very real problem. The Tagging function is cool- but this is useful.

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.3
Update Notifications

Update notifications have been a long requested feature of WordPress and thankfully in this release, it’s been delivered – not once, but twice. Now WordPress can alert you when a new version of WordPress is available as well as new plugin versions.

There are 9 other cool things he talks about- and we’ll have some info on 2.3 as well- once the final release is out. We’ve updated all of our WP installs on our server to use Fantastico for updates- so as soon as it hit’s fantastico’s server- we’ll be able to update with one click.