A friend told me that sometimes you just have to ship the box! But it’s hard, we often look at the box, and think we can get more stuff in the box…or we can decorate the box a little more…sometimes we just want to hang onto the box.

Well…the box was taken to FedEX and shipped. The new LifeChurch.tv site shipped! We still have a lot of work to do, tons of tickets open in Unfuddled….so we will be shipping out a lot of little boxes in next few days and weeks. Can I tell you how much I do not like multiple browsers! The world would be a better place without Internet Explorer.

Enjoy the box!

I just logged in to see how our “encoding” was going for this weekend and here is what I saw.

Holy smokes. 18 files are in the encoder to be processed. Wow! That is going to take a while. We are using the Episode Engine Pro product from Telestream. It is fiber channel connected to the Apple XSAN and works like a charm. If you were wondering, here is what the 18 files are for:

Video Podcast 320×180 mp4 (Message)
VOD Flash Video 640×360 (Message)
DVD Video mpeg2 (Message)
Audio Podcast mp3 (Message)
VOD Flash Audio mp3 (Message)
VOD Flash Video 416×232 (Message)
DVD Audio AIFF (Message)
Video Podcast [AppleTV] mp4 720×406 (Message)
TVTonic Video Podcast WMV 720×408 (Message)
Video Podcast 320×180 mp4 (OKC Worship)
VOD Flash Video 640×360 (OKC Worship)
DVD Video mpeg2 (OKC Worship)
Audio Podcast mp3 (OKC Worship)
VOD Flash Audio mp3 (OKC Worship)
VOD Flash Video 416×232 (OKC Worship)
DVD Audio AIFF (OKC Worship)
Video Podcast [AppleTV] mp4 720×406 (OKC Worship)
TVTonic Video Podcast WMV 720×408 (OKC Worship)

There are a few files not in there…all the HD files. Due to crazy load, and turn around time, we will drop those into the encoder tomorrow and let them process like crazy. Soon, the Episode Engine will be running most of the time…what does that mean? Simple, more great and free content to give away!!!! So there ya go…not sure your care.

I have been getting a ton of questions about what the digerati team uses for developing, computers, etc. So here is a list as they came to my mind of what is in our tool belt.

Digerati Developer Tools:
Mac System (Mac Pro or iMac)
Leopard
Coda – a wonderful editor
Safari – greatest browser
Firefox w/Firebug
iTunes – need great music
Cyberduck – FTP tool
NovaMind – mind mapping
iChat
Photoshop
Terminal

Web Tools
Basecamp – great project management
Trac / Subversion – manage your code!
MediaTemple Hosting – grid hosting
Softlayer.com – dedicated hosting

Thats all I can think of. If you have anymore specific questions let me know in the comments.

So, now that team digerati is a CodeIgniter dev shop, it is time to land the plane on a javascript framework. I feel like I need to go on record and remind most of you that when it comes to all this code stuff, framework talk, and blah, blah…I am clueless. I can learn lingo, dig in a little and learn more, but at the end of the day I listen to the experts. So, if I had to make a decision I would look at the logo and then look at the websites and make the decision.

Lets take a look…shall we?

MooTools

jQuery

Eh, personally, I am not a big fan of the MooTools logo. Don’t really like the font or the little wrench. jQuery on the other hand is clean, fresh and I like the colors. I vote jQuery!

Ok, jQuery 1 – MooTools 0.

So now lets look at their sites.

Typically I am a fan of the clean, lighter design…but I have to say that MooTools.net in my opinion hands down is a much better design, layout and overall site. However, I am not a fan of the .net vs .com; but…in an overwhelming landslide, MooTools.net site is much better than jQuery.com.

MooTools 1 – jQuery 1 – the tie breaker goes to MooTools because their site kicked jQuery’s butt.

Ok, by now I really hope you have picked up on my sarcasm and everything you have just read is a total joke. We (I) am not evaluating MooTools vs. jQuery by their logo and their website…but it would really make things a lot easier. We are however evaluating both. Reading a lot of websites, and paying a lot of attention to who uses what. And yes, there are many others out there, but we have already narrowed the field to these two.

This is the week to land the plane on this, so if you have an opinion, I would love to hear it. I have realized that MooTools has a much bigger following outside of the US…I kinda like that. Anyway, drop me a line or a comment.

Back in September and October we spent a lot of time looking for a CMS that would be the end all be all solution for LifeChurch.tv. We did not find the end all be all, because it does not exist, but we did land on Expression Engine. You can learn more about that here.

Well, we moved from EE to CodeIgniter. Don’t get me wrong, everything that I wrote about EE is still correct…I personally think EE rocks, and is a wonderful CMS! But, there were some challenges that came with it. Let me list out a few reasons why we moved to CodeIgniter. But before that, let me say that they are both built by the same guys at EllisLab.

First, CodeIgniter is NOT a CMS. CodeIgniter is a PHP Framework. Actually:

“CodeIgniter is an Open Source Web Application Framework that helps you write kick-ass PHP programs.” – CodeIgniter.com

So basically we are building our own CMS with CodeIgniter. And I know…I know, you are asking why, why are you building your own? I asked the SAME question…

Why did we move from EE to CodeIgniter?

1) More flexibility. EE is very flexible, but because EE is a CMS and has a lot of functions built in…we found that to be a little limiting and made it a little challenging to get exactly what we wanted quickly.

2) Faster development. At the end of the day, our developers felt like we could land the plane faster with CodeIgniter. Even though it is only a Framework, the team came together and agreed that we would be FASTER with CI.

3) A Framework! CodeIgniter has become our standard development Framework. We expect that 75% of the digerati web development projects will be built on CI. The 25% will be the very small, and very big and hairy projects (YouVersion, etc). Who knows, it might handle up great on the big hairy projects…

4) FREE. CodeIgniter is free. And you know we love that! We still plan on giving all our code and tools away. With how CI is structured, we think it still will be easy to give our stuff away.

We really liked EE as a CMS, but we really love CI as a Framework. We plan on launching version 1 of LifeChurch.tv Feb 1st, so you will see some of the new CI code then. Watch out world, here we come!

The new 720p HD podcast is now live on iTunes. We still have a little tweaking to do with the encode and some interlacing issues, but we are very close. A major graphic overhaul will be coming soon to our iTunes profile.

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