Site Updates 2017/2/14

A few updates today.

• The site went down a couple times in the past day or so. That should be fixed now.
• androjen pointed out an issue with some weird text sizing in articles. There was some styling that got pasted into some articles (and almost certainly some transcripts as well). I've made an update so saving an article will strip any of that weird formatting. I haven't applied this to transcripts (yet?) but it's there for articles.
• Added a bunch of progress tracking stuff to collab transcripts. It'll now tell you how many sections are complete, incomplete, and how many there are total. It also has a visual indicator / progress bar type thing for that same info. I've been spending so much time transcribing these lately, having this info visible seemed like it'd be helpful.
• The preview box when selecting a collab section is updated. It no longer displays HTML tags. It's also scrollable now. This was needed so you could check the prevoius and next section to see where a section needed to start/stop.
• Oh also there's some crazy error with the spellchecker. Somehow correcting a misspelling replaced the entire transcript with just the replacement text, repeated something like 100,000 times. That briefly catapulted me top the #1 top transcriber, which was fun until I realized why. Anyway, uh, I have no idea what caused this issue. I added some code to try to prevent it in the future, and I checked to make sure it's only happened that one time, but I'm not trying to fix it anymore than that for now.

I'm also considering setting up account(s) on the server so other users can access the codebase. If anyone's interested in that, let me know (here or PM). I'm not sure yet how comfortable I am letting people edit the code, but at least for now giving the ability to see the code or the database might be interesting/useful for someone.

Random Updates 2017/2/7

I haven't been adding back any new features lately. Instead I've been sucked into trying to get DH&J transcribed. It's a massive task. It's gonna take a while.

In the process of doing that, though, I was experimenting with way to auto-transcribe videos. There's one fun way that involves playing a video (or podcast), routing your computer's audio-out into its mic-in (a simpler process than it seems), and letting Google Docs transcribe for you. It almost works well. Like, it sucks for podcasts so I definitely can't use it for DH&J (and definitely not for HFS, sadly). But if anyone runs into a video that meets certain conditions (the most important being that it only has one speaker), then this could be pretty helpful. You get one giant sentence, which requires a lot of cleaning up, but it's otherwise pretty accurate. Plus it's free, which is always nice. If anyone's curious about this, I can go into my detail about how to pull it off.

Also Nerdcon: Nerdfighteria is coming up. Post here or message me if you're planning on attending and want to have some kind of mini-meetup. I'm not sure if any transcribers other than myself or runalovegood will actually be there, so a meetup doesn't exactly require a lot of planning. But hey, may as well mention it now.

I know there's a backlog of dev I still need to do on the new site, but things seem pretty good at the moment. Let me know if there's anything big that you think would be good to bring back, that I may have forgotten about or am neglecting. Since I've taken a bit of a break from that to transcribe DH&J, there may well be important things that have slipped my mind.

Site Update 2017/2/1

I spent a lot of time today enhancing the Auto Format button. That was an adventure. So many things went wrong. But I think it's working now, and this is what it does:

• As before, removes YT Transcript timestamps from each line.
• As before, re-paragraphs the entire transcript. First paragraph is 1 sentence. Second paragraph is 2 sentences. Every subsequent paragraph is 3 sentences.
• It now correctly takes headers (===== hi =====) into account. It'll put those on their own line.
• It now handles conversation-style transcripts. If you prefix a line with "Hank:" or "J:" or anything like that, it knows to start a new paragraph there. It will then stop paragraphing the transcript unless it hits something like a section header. So all text spoken by that speaker should be grouped into one paragraph.
• It only does that if the prefix starts with a capital letter. So "Hank: I like fruits" would get formatted as a conversation, whereas "These are my favorite fruits: bananas, kiwi, melon" would be formatted normally.

Let me know if you notice any issues with it, or have suggestions for other ways to improve it.

I've added the new podcast (Holy Fucking Science). It's uploaded to both YouTube and SoundCloud -- I went with the YT version since it has video. It is, however, listed as a podcast in the nav.

I'm unsure what to do with the name, though. In general I'm against censoring things, but since the site is used so much by teachers/schools/students, it's something that needs to be considered. The name isn't nearly as controversial as some of the Sexplanations videos would be, but you need to navigate to Sexplanations to see any of those, whereas HFS's name has no choice but to be right there in the nav.

All in all, it's a bit of harmless censorship I hope, but let me know if you're ardently opposed.

Site Updates 2017/1/29

I didn't post one of these yesterday, but things did happen, so they'll be included here.

• Fixed a bug with transcripts getting unmarked as complete after you save them.
• Fixed a bug with incomplete transcripts getting shown as complete.
• Make the search page roughly 10x faster.
• Fixed an issue with auto-locking transcripts (the feature so users don't edit the same one at the same time).
• Added a basic auto-save function. It auto-saves every... 15-20 seconds I think? These are stored as drafts: they don't get saved like when you hit Save, and they don't create a transcript history record. Any user can see if there's a draft transcript, and can load it into the editor. Drafts older than 12 hours will be deleted each morning, so they don't stick around for very long. Drafts are also removed when you (or any other user) hits Save for that transcript. Any of this is editable if it needs to be changed at some point.
• I started the process of manually going through every transcript (esp. the old ones), finding unformatted transcripts, and hitting the auto-format button.

What would be people's interest in any of the following?

• Proofread page: Make each misspelling block collapsible. Possibly make them collapsed by default, or always have one opened and the rest collapsed? In that case, it could also auto-navigate (when you correct one, it auto opens the next one).
• Transcripts: Autosave. The collab pages already kind of autosave. I've been debating whether to add an autosave to the main edit page, or maybe like a temp/draft autosave.
• Search: Introduce a fuzzy/inexact search. The current search is an exact search: it looks for what you entered, exactly as you entered it. I could change that, or I could have them both and you could choose which to search by. In that case, also comment on which option you think is better as the default.

These are all things that I feel could be good ideas, but I go back-and-forth on whether they're actually better than what's already there.

Site Update 2017/1/27

Another day of mostly small changes.

• Added timeframe options to the Top Transcribers list on the homepage. At this point that section pretty much replaces the Top Transcribers page I had on the old site.
• I've added a few more pages to the Admin section, but they're mostly informational.
• Went ahead and made merelylittleme an admin because it's fun to make people admins without their knowledge.
• Verified that captions are getting correctly sync'd from YouTube. I don't think it was broken before, but I needed one of the admin pages so I could verify that it was doing stuff.
• Added caption-related views to the Channel pages. You can now view which videos are captioned, not captioned, or transcribed-but-not-captioned. These options are hidden on SoundCloud channels, by the way. One of the advantages of the site rewrite is that these views are much much easier to create, so if there's a type of video list you think would be good to add, let me know.
• I made a few back-end changes to make the search more efficient, but didn't have a whole lot of luck there.
• Renamed the Miscellaneous channels, so there aren't two channels with the same name anymore. They're now "misc videos" and "misc podcasts."

Site update 2017/1/25

Two big (but not particularly exciting) features are working again.

• Forgot Password. It's always so tedious to code these things, I'd put it off until now. But I needed it working before any sort of launch announcement. Whenever the site gets an influx of visitors (e.g. from a Hank/John mention), we tend to get users who've been gone for so long they've forgotten their passwords. So I needed to have that working.
• Calendar View. I'm unsure if this feature is ever used seriously. I think it's cool to have, and it was pretty quick to migrate the code from the old site, so I went ahead and did it.

This is a good opportunity to start taking requests, by the way. I think most of the site is stable, so if there's a particular feature you'd really like added (or brought back), I can start looking at those.

Site Update 2017/1/26

First off, if you've previously subscribed to video notifications, check your preferences. There was a bug that could reset the channels you were subscribed to.

Changes from today:

• As mentioned, fixed a bug with the preferences page. Apparently the new site uses a comma-delimited list where the old site used a semicolon-delimited list, and I didn't realize it was breaking things until now. If you've saved your preferences since the launch, you probably need to re-subscribe to channel notifications.
• I think I fixed the issue with links in discussion email notifications.
• Admins can now activate, deactivate, and delete Credits from the admin page. They can also set an associated Article again.
• Articles with an associated Credit now have a Media tab that displays their videos.
• Credits with associated Articles will now link to that article on the Video Info tab of a vid.
• Remember that feature on the old site that never worked quite right, but was supposed to prevent two people from editing the same transcript at the same time? I've re-implemented that. I hope it works better this time.
• Technically Suggestion notifications work now? No one's subscribed to them except me (check your pref page) but whatever. It's there. Also it's only coded to notify top-level suggestions and not comments.

Is anyone still experiencing issues with transcript editing, collab editing,  fixing misspellings, or searching? These are probably the top 4 features that I want working as well as possible, so I'm checking if I've forgotten any bugs people have mentioned or if new bugs have popped up.

Site updates 2017/1/24

A few updates that were made today...

• If you haven't been following the posts from earlier today, generating Collaborative transcripts has been fixed. New admin functions have been added to manually generate a collab, and to disable all active collabs for a video.
• Fixed an issue where new YouTube videos weren't displaying a YouTube link on the info tab.
• Fixed the Top Transcribers on the homepage. It'd been displaying the top for all time. It now displays the past 90 days. Still need to add options to view different timeframes.
• Added a link to the Suggestions page. I put it on the page footer. There's probably a better location that I'll move it to sometime, but at least it's somewhere for now.
• Got Channel and Article search results up. They've been tabs on the Search Results page since launch, but haven't included results until now.
• Added two search filters: type (YouTube or SoundCloud) and channel. This filters the search results you're looking at, as opposed to performing a new search.
• Search results are redesigned slightly. Video thumbnails are back, page size is dropped to 5, and there's no longer a "More" link to show more text matches.

I think that's everything for today, except the tuatara.