I have brought Spacevidcast.com online in a rough form. Only the very basic functions are there right now and I have yet to get simple things like navigation in place, but it is still neat to see.
Even if the site is not fully online should Endeavour launch on March 11th as scheduled I will be covering it live. The site is not required for live coverage, but it sure would be nice.
There are two really neat things on the site:
1 – The search box is an AJAX search that will show results in real-time as you type.
2 – The code is all W3C compliant. COOL!
Bluefox is super picky about his designs (as any good designer is) and wants to change the stars in the upper left. When I spliced the image apart to turn it in to HTML I had to create a repeating element for the stars. He doesn’t like this, and I tend to agree. It’s very subtle but once you see it the repeating pattern will annoy the heck out of anyone.
I like how clean the site ended up being. I also like that with the 750 pixel wide white area (710 usable) I can add a 640×360 video that I shot in HD and not have to pop up another window. The problem is, like I mentioned earlier, I have no navigation on the page yet. If I want to keep the ability to have 640×360 videos I’ll need to figure something out with navigation that is horizontal.
Next steps are to fix that repeating star element, add navigation back in, clean up the footer, test with a UStream.tv video window and chat box side by side (it will be tight), get some cacheing installed, SEO/SEM optimize the site and finally find a way to distribute the vidcasts in their own RSS feed. Sounds like a lot but once the nav is in place the rest should come quickly.