Storyteller Update #5: Video integration
Here's the latest update on the development of Storyteller, our longform theme for Newscoop. We've been following its development progress in a series of blogposts. You can read about them all here, here, here and here.
One of the major challenges with designing and building a media-heavy web application is that sometimes there is too much of a good thing. In our case, that good thing is video. Right now, we're hitting some of the default server setting limits. What this means for the end user is that it appears as though the website never completely loads the content and they might be left waiting for a video that's just not going to come. To rectify this, we're matching browsers to compatible video file encoding formats and asynchronously loading media when it is needed.
The first part of this solution reduces the amount of calls necessary by half and the latter should mean that the load on the server, while still the same overall, doesn't 'choke' on large amounts of requests at once. We're also working on a more general method of detecting where a reader is on the page to reduce the amount of code needed to trigger events. In theory, this should marginally increase the overall speed.
Next week, we begin building our very first article in our own longform delivery platform. It's equal parts exciting and terrifying. As we all know, requirements change and grow when code starts being used by people other than the developers who made it. Stay tuned!