Blog VidzBigger

While the downloads page still boasts 3000 downloads in the first six weeks, we have now passed 10,000 downloads with 14,074 Downloads to Date. The downloads page boasts the 14,000 video views in the first six weeks, however we now have over 463,223 videos with 671,880 video views. 42 People have registered for accounts on this blog so far. These accounts will eventually provide a means to access other features. Since its recent inception over 21,252 Ads mostly for Amazon product results have been automatically generated for unique phrases receiving at least 320,884 ad impressions and nearly a thousand clicks (however, zero orders shipped). In the time since this blog was started, there have been 589 drafts and posts.

VidzBigger was originally uploaded to userscripts.org Feb 3, 2009 thats about 0 years 10 months 2 weeks 4 days 22 hours 17 minutes ago according to My Scripts @ UserScripts.org. Development started long before that, as far back as August 2008, however while the idea struck me some point before that, developing it to the point where I would be comfortable releasing it public-ally took some time, I tried to integrate as many features as possible since it was unlikely that users would find other smaller scripts that did every possible function they wanted on youtube that I would have to test for compatibility with, it seemed like a far easier solution to integrate all the features I thought anyone using a YouTube plugin might want and maintain them myself and with the help of the community I managed to find and implement most of the features I thought people would want. The fundamental core feature of VidzBigger is the use of Fixed Position Flash Video to provide a means to access all content on the page intuitively as it’s meant to be accessed without loosing the video from the screen. Implementing this meant performing some Gymnastics with the video and between the video and page content that it would fit at a wide variety of viewing conditions. Google themselves rather quickly capitalized on this idea for their own Video Search Results page (after I had tried to implement their page in VidzBigger, they went and did it themselves, and did a great job of it I might add…). Others have followed suit with their own Fixed Position solutions.

The concept of keeping something on the screen at all times is an old one, that has been traditionally performed using a timeout on a css Position Absolute (or Relative) element, by constantly updating the position. The effect is often flashy and imperfect. Since I learned about CSS I knew there were two other types: Static and Fixed. I waited years and years for the position Fixed attribute to come available to Internet Explorer so that I could actually use it in the web page designs I would dream up. It seemed like it would never happen. Whenever I wanted a navigation bar that would slide down to always stay on the screen, I would resort to JavaScript and position Absolute because it was the most compatible solution. It always gave rather poor performance in anything but IE, and never worked well with flash. I long knew simply making the desired DIV position Fixed worked perfectly in Mozilla, and was in fact the only solution worth implementing.

It flowed naturally from that that if I were to implement flash video to stay on the screen all the time, instead of using the other approaches of a mini-div scroll box with a height set (that would need to be updated) and overflow:auto (this feature is actually somewhat available in VidzBigger, called Scroll Columns Independent) (or worse yet, the frames approach) that the possibilities would be far more limitless to stick with the ONE scrollbar that was on the page ANYWAY and render the video using Position Fixed. I had seemingly discovered what Position Fixed was invented for in the first place! The feature has quickly ballooned into a very popular way to display Advertising, and many clever people have implemented ways to have these elements work into the page flow consistently and according to the amount of scrolling, and how the object collides with other page elements during scroll.

I’m quite happy with the popularity and how well accepted the plugin and concept has been overall. We’ve developed several great communities of users providing us with a great deal of videos. I’ve enjoyed the stream of new videos on the homepage tremendously, I try to watch every one, and many of them have some meaning or impact on my life, it’s a sign of the times.

So overall this has been a great opportunity that was just waiting around for someone to implement it to further illustrate how best to use it. I’m not sure who invented position Fixed or added it to the CSS specification, or made sure that it was implemented in the best web browsers around, but I’m sure glad it was there and that it finally gained enough acceptance to be a viable and fast performing solution that seems like the only and best way to view content and actually read things along with watching Videos in the periphery. While the concept of being able to view both is an old one implemented in nearly every Google Video Search results page that went public, the means with which this necessary feature is implemented has changed drastically as CSS Position Fixed has finally come into the main stream with its slow adoption into more recent versions of IE. Perhaps Google had all along intended to implement Fixed Position Video, and had actually tried before but gave up because of slow performance or poor support across browsers, and had some secret preliminary mock ups that pre-date the evolution of VidzBigger. Since there has been video people have wanted to watch it in the background, after-all. Finally sometime during 2009 they realized that now was the time (or as good a time as any) to move into a more modern approach to displaying content meant to stay on the screen in conjunction with scrolling content, and released the revolutionary video search results that have been gracing our desktops ever since. The content performs like a physical object capable of bouncing off either the header or footer of the site as it scrolls up or down, always staying in view, without any redundant scroll bars. This concept is becoming pervasive throughout the web today.

So a semi-lifelong dream of position Fixed finally being a usable alternative seems to be beyond it’s end, this feature will still require a lot of optimization and support as we move to more complex web interfaces with even more elements demanding this type of feature and reactivity. Perhaps eventually this type of functionality of behaving like an object interacting with page scroll will be merged into CSS itself which is probably where it belonged all along, which I’d tend to think of as a float-y responding to the top and bottom edges of the screen and certain elements that are set to “clear” above or below it which would serve to push it into scrolling like a normal object, which could then detect if it went off screen (+ or -) and adjust its contents accordingly, most ideally by implementing some hierarchy specific CSS class rules on the fly, but more readily through some traditional approach.

So while VidzBigger has yet to make ANY money…. has it had the intended effect? It’s hard to really quantify or judge for certain, but there has certainly been a great deal of progress over the last year and I’m happy with the developments that have arisen. It’s hard not to wish for compensation. Its harder still to know exactly what part I played in all of it. As far as I know VidzBigger was a fairly unique solution to a very specific problem of video, however the type of problem and solution of Fixed position had been around before that in the internet advertising industry, I don’t think anyone else thought to apply it to video first and that it would be such a great enhancement to the viewer’s user experience, not just to sell a product in someones advertising. So while there are still many unknown factors, it feels the best to consider myself a part of that revolution which I keep noticing more and more signs of adoption as I look around the web. As a social commentary I think its a shame how quickly and easily people steal ideas, but one could jokingly rephrase that swapping shame for “amazing” and steal with “share” and suddenly its a positive assessment regardless of how flawed the actual implementation has become. No one wants to pay for anything they aren’t forced to or could get away with taking as a gift, however, is it just me or do all gifts come with the hidden implication of reciprocity? If so I’d much rather think about it before than after, because it really depends how the actual people of the society feel at the end of the day, whether or not they feel like donating or not, and its very difficult in this world to maintain your own sense of self worth and value to the point where you actually feel that your donation will make a difference, and that’s ultimately sad that bug conglomerates desensitize everyone into a state of in-existence as a person merely a reflection of their corporate media upbringing. You have my personal assurance that it, will if you invest in what has brought you gains before, there is an increased chance that the same will happen for you again, beyond that there is much chaos to be mindful of, and to always remember many short term gains come back to haunt you as the consequences pile up, it’s always in your environment. If you invest in me I will do everything in my power to make sure that ever cent of that money goes towards bringing you new features and innovations that you want.

I’m somewhat excited about what 2010 has to bring. I think that it could be a really great year for us, especially if I get enough resources to put enough time into other plans in addition to VidzBigger as it stands today.

The Amazon implementation is exciting and while its not innovation per say it might eventually work out to make some sort of income, which would help me bother you a lot less. Unfortunately it hasn’t really panned out yet. I’ll keep people up to date on the totals when and if there ever are any. While I don’t really support the business model entirely on account of the method of shipping being largely outdated, its hard to transport anything these days without being stuck relying on some historic industries. My notion is that if you are going to be ordering something online from Amazon anyway, you might as well do it through my Footer Search Box (found on most pages at the bottom) and share a few cents. I would ESPECIALLY appreciate someone using that search box to make a large order for a specific expensive product, which they would have made anyway. It’s a great way to get something back for your purchase! The price will be the same either way. I think the link is all you need. Thanks Mom!

Perhaps the best goal I can make is to bring VidzBigger to other platforms and expand (or corrupt, lol) our user base although I would hopefully make things categorizable so that you can truly benefit from other users of similar interests outside the scope of interest in Firefox and Greasemonkey alone. If you haven’t tried the suggest feature on the homepage yet I recommend giving it a shot, it tells you at the bottom of the page how many video views that you have which are used to attempt to make better selections. You should get better recommendations the more views you have because its recommends based on other popular videos that were viewed by people with video interests that align with yours. Once cevat with views on VidzBigger is that it counts one view as soon as the page loads, and doesn’t bother recording if you stayed to watch the video or not, so there could always be a few odd videos in there to wonder about.

If anyone is interested in testing out the Beta version of the new Google Chrome Extension version of VidzBigger send me a message from the contact page and I’ll send you a link. It’s NOT in the extensions gallery yet… for good reasons. Once all the details are taken care of I’ll try to get it up there. It’s got quite a few never-before-merged features including @runat document-start that takes nearly all the pain out of initialization. There is a lot more I was hoping to have for you this year, and I’m not sure if its going to work out in time or not, but any help you can provide testing will certainly help with time. Ideally testers will have one of two types of systems: Exceedingly slow or Exceedingly fast. [UPDATED 1/5/10: VidzBigger for Google Chrome Released!

So that’s it! My year in review. Glad that’s over with. There were some good parts, and many pitiful parts, but there has been some return on investment however minimal, VidzBigger as a website probably won’t die any time soon, whether I do or not with many thanks to GoDaddy’s free hosting and domain auto renewal for depleting my bank account. Please report to me anything that you do that “ought” to pay me and I will make sure that it does (those scurvy bastards are everywhere)! If I manage to get all the right people and all the right features then we ought to be able to continue indefinitely but its far from there yet. Please consider one of the best ways to support the site is to buy Advertising space… since in case you hadn’t noticed, When you view a Video, we can show your Ad on YouTube to all of the VidzBigger user base! Did you see those numbers earlier? That could be a LOT of impressions… Cheers!

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