Monday Morning Video Inspirations
Here are a few videos I’ve watched last week – ones that are interesting, well produced, thought provoking or inspirational.
Jack Daniel’s Does Letterpress from Aggrodesign on Vimeo.
Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo.
TL/DR: A few videos about handmade design work and a few dubstep videos.
I fed WordPress too much and it got a bellyache
I fed WordPress too much and it got a belly ache.
Each year, we do a “donor honor roll,” or a listing of all the people who gave money to my University in the past year. We’ve transitioned it from a print publication, sometimes inserted as part of our alumni magazine, to a stand-alone web-based site.
Basically, it’s a ton of text broken into pages based on giving levels. Some of the pages are rather short – like those that gave over $50,000. The longest list, unsurprisingly, was our list of people who gave under $1,000. It was near 30,000 words long – which is a LOT of text in one WordPress page.
As a donor to this University (and in the under $1k group), I was able to find myself using WordPress’s built-in search tool. When I went to the full list page, it was blank. Well, our header, sidebars and footer was there, but the actual page content, the stuff being pulled by the the_content() tag, was missing.
It was in the database, but WordPress wasn’t actually displaying it on the page. At all.
After some poking, I discovered that it was too much data for PHP to do any functions/plugin actions on it before it was displayed. I didn’t really want to break it into multiple pages, so I Googled around and found other people having similar problems with very long pages and posts.
The solution: change some PHP settings to up certain buffer sizes. The lines I used were this:
/** Trick for long posts */
ini_set('pcre.recursion_limit',20000000);
ini_set('pcre.backtrack_limit',10000000);
Those two lines, placed in either your php.ini file or your wp-config.php file, give PHP a bit more space and power to process large amounts of text and make sure there’s enough room to do all the processing on a post that WordPress has to do.
We host our sites on a dedicated machine, so I’m not sure what, if any, effect this will have on WordPress sites hosted on a shared server. Otherwise, I’d recommend breaking them into multiple pages or posts.
Pro Tip: Turn Off Related Videos When You Embed from YouTube
We as higher ed web people have many choices when it comes to embedding videos on our sites. More and more, we’re turning to YouTube to host these videos for us.
For the most part, I’m fine with that. We don’t have to worry about bandwidth and storage, we get decent analytics and get the added bonus of YouTube users stumbling across our videos.
That being said, I’m seeing a trend lately that’s been bothering me – and it’s one that can potentially make our institutions look bad.
People – when you’re embedding a video from YouTube, for the love of crackers turn off “Show related videos.” It’s a simple checkbox. It looks like this:
Checking that box can save you quite a bit of embarrassment. Case in point:
Georgetown University is about to launch a major capital campaign. It’s an amazing video – it’s beautifully shot, beautifully edited and is just really compelling. Here it is:
I guarantee you that video was not cheap to produce. I was watching it on their campaign site, where it was embedded, and was really engrossed in it. I was good until it ended and the YouTube player showed me related videos that it thought was relevant to the launch of Georgetown’s capital campaign. Front and center: one showing off the fact that rapper Wiz Khalifa spends $10,000 a month on weed.
I’m serious. Here’s what it looked like:
I can pretty surely say that Georgetown doesn’t want to promote Wiz Khalifa’s drug habit. I’m sure it doesn’t fit in with their mission (the embalming process video that also shows up is a bit creepy too.) I’m sure they don’t want people to leave their campaign site and videos confused why they’re linking to drug videos.
For something that’s critical to a university, such as a campaign video, I would probably host the video on my own, or use JW Player to grab it from YouTube directly.
If you can’t do that, and have to use a YouTube embed, you really should turn off the related videos. Don’t play poker with your career.
Update: Looks like it was oversight and is on its way to being fixed.
