We proceed in the past month to do some AB Testing to the main page of ASSYST and also took some time to look into the traffic statistics of the website. From the users navigation patters we found which where the most looked sections of ASSYST. Because of that we’ve now done a minor changes to the main page and navigation menus to help our users to find stuff faster.
The ASSYST Newsletter as been growing for the past 12 months at a steady pace. The edition sent today, the first of 2011, was sent to a little over 1500 recipients! Thank you all that are interested in Complex Systems and Happy New Year.
We had some server glitches this morning that required tech intervention. We hope everything will be back to normal soon.
During the weekend we made a small overhaul to the assyst website, mainly focused in getting a more speedy website and also removing some bugs from the code that sneaked in when doing the fast sprint development cycles. The main speed gains are noticeable in the main webpage of assyst but other pages got speed improvements as well.
The videos of several interesting researchers very interested in Complex Systems and the multi-disciplinary approach of complexity, networks and geosimulations are presented online for download.
Found the solution of using a double box to track the keynote speaker and the slides a bit weak as you end up losing readability in the slides pane and the movement of the speaker distracts constantly.
The option of allowing the videos to be downloaded as podcasts from iTunes is also interesting.
Today we went through a small batch of updates to the Assyst Website. Mainly cosmetic things but also some things changed in the silently. One of the things is that we’re removing the java applets from the front page.
Can you spot the other differences?
With this year recording of almost all sessions we needed some sort of expedite protocol to edit and export the videos. For the Standard definition the process goes like this:
Use ffmpeg to convert clip to DV-Pal
Import clip into Final Cut Pro
Set clip to Anamorphic format
Prepare timeline(TL) with: INTRO-CLIP-OUTRO
Edit Clips’ audio in Izotope RX to correct
Replace Clips’ Audio Track (Wave) in TL
Trim Video
Adjust Colors of Video track
Normalize Audio
Add Transitions
Export to Quicktime
Use Compressor and QMaster to prepare for Web
There is a lot of processing, sometimes some things are even a bit different as the clips need some special attention.
The first talks are already edited and we hope to have the entire ECCS’10 conference online by the end of October.
European Conference on Complex Systems 2010
During the ECCS’10 Conference ASSYST, together with ECCS’10 and ISCTE streamed Live the plenary sessions. This has been a challenge as we didn’t knew how would the server cope with the requests. In the end everything went fine and I think this might be a good solution for future conferences.
Following a series of “small” improvements we added a small twitter button to the right of the website. This means that you can easily follow us in the most popular microblogging platform on the Web.
Today we rolled out some small changes in the main page of the assyst complexity website. The changes are very small but allow for a more fluid reading, with a better structured information.
We hope to improve it in the near future with new features. In the meanwhile can you spot the changes?
