As you may know, a bunch of the crew have acquired iPhones since they have become available in Canada. The web browser on the iPhone is the best in any handheld device by far, but it does have some limitations. Most notably, it lacks flash capability and is quite finicky about what kind of videos it plays online. This means that it cannot play videos straight off the main loadingreadyrun site. The trick is that the videos that revver hosts for us are actually iPhone compatible, but they just have to be served in a special way.

I have made a special, iPhone optimized version of the site at http://iphone.loadingreadyrun.com. There you can browse and search the entire LRR video archive (the ones that are Revverized, anyway) or listen to any of our LRRcasts. For both videos and LRRcasts, tapping on the thumbnail or name will play the video and tapping on the little arrow with take you to that item’s info page with credits, views, description, etc.

As always, let me know if there are any glitches.

So, one of the unintended concequences of the pagination in the archives of the LRR 5.5 layout is that you can no longer just use the built-in Ctrl-F page search to find a specific video. Going back to the old all-on-one-page archives is not really an option (with ~400 videos, each with their own thumbnail, the archive page was over a meg). To get around this limitation, I have added an archive search field to all of the video and lrrcast archive pages. All the usual boolean search stuff should work (+must include, “complete phrase”, – must not include, etc). At the moment, only the Title and Description fields are indexed, but hopefully we will be adding some sort of tagging system in the future.

As always, let me know in the comments or by email is anything is acting wierd.

In case anyone cares, I have just updated our blog to WordPress 2.6. You guys probably won’t notice much difference, but it should make it easier to keep the blog up to date. Also we can now do live updates from our iphones!

With pictures!

Like I’m doing right now!

So, this started out as a reply to a question on the forums, but I realized that it might actually be informative for our audience at large. If there is interest, I might do a separate write up about the software that powers LRR.

Hosting
LoadingReadyRun is currently, and has been since the beginning, hosted by HostforWeb.com. Over the years we have had to upgrade from their budget $4.95/month shared package to the VPS we are currently on. Our hosting has not been without hiccups, but on the whole they have worked quite well. It would be cool to be using a local host, but Canadian hosts (at least locally) are way more expensive then their US counterparts. I believe HostforWeb is based in Chicago.

These days LRR pushes about 400GB of bandwidth/month consisting mostly of plain html/images, the podcasts and really old, non-revver videos. In actual fact, since we switched to Revver for videos, our main issue has been with processor usage, rather then bandwidth. When Talk like a Pirate got huge, we got taken offline because we were using 100% of the CPU time on our server and preventing everyone else from loading. Oops. As of the 5.1 update to the site design, we use lots of caching to speed up the site and reduce load on CPU.

Videos
We used to host everything ourselves (LRR started before youtube), but that gets old fast when you get the kind of traffic spikes we do. All the really old, archived videos are still hosted from our server, but everything in the past couple of years is served from Revver.

We originally went with Revver to host our videos because of the whole rev-share thing, but as a happy coincidence, they also happen to be one of the best video hosts period. They encode all videos in both flash and quicktime (which is needed for older computers) and their flash player is very customizable to match your site layout.

On top of that, Revver has, from what I have seen, the most complete API interface of any video host. Not only can you query their database for videos based on any criteria you want, but you can actually build an entire white-label video sharing site using their infrastructure. As an example, The Iron Stomach Challenge website is built entirely using their API and doesn’t actually have any database of its own (other then the forum).

The only thing to remember about Revver is that, because of the ads, everything you put up has to go through an approval process to make sure you are not using copyright material. You shouldn’t be doing this anyway, so I don’t really consider this a problem.

LRRcast
The LRRcasts are just totally normal mp3 files hosted on our server. It is possible that we might move to an external hosting service for them at some point in the future, but so far things have been ok.

Domain
Since the beginning, our main domains have been registered through DirectNic, who happen to be based in New Orleans. Did you notice that when Hurricane Katrina hit and New Orleans was flooded, LRR didn’t go offline with a “Cannot find host” error? That’s because the DirectNic crew never left. They kept their servers running with backup generators and defended their expensive equipment with guns from looters. For that kind of dedication, I’ll let them host my $15/year domain name.

So, we were having a little spam problem in the comments here (~3000 spam comments in the last week). I believe it is now resolved, but if one of your comments was accidentally deleted by the new spam filter, I apologize.

-Paul