During the last few months we (I and Alexey Kovyrin) have been working on a major Best Tech Videos site platform update. If you have not seen it before — it is time to take a look at it because really soon everything will change. I don’t mean that site idea would change (you would be able to find there the best tech videos), but usability, information availability and many small but useful things will be changed for good.

So, what are these major changes? First of all, design of the site has been changed and, I think, it is much better now. Here are some examples of the first page, login page and videos list page as they look on the test server now:

Video Authors (producers) could manually post their own videos on the server now. To make some video available to site visitors and users (onlooker), it have to be approved by one of the site’s moderators (instructor) or by some other author. Video posting page will look like following:

One more really great feature — now you could compose your own videos RSS-feed using some of the site’s feeds for tags and categories. You could simply choose tags and categories you like and get your own RSS feed with the best videos from your point of view.

Besides of view changes, we have decided to add some ‘sociality’ to the service, so now you could vote for videos you like, add videos to your favorite videos list and discuss videos with your fellow BTV users. Of course, you and your friends could get your favorite videos list RSS-feed.

By the way, I want to emphasize a bit on a technologies. Current version of the site was based on WordPress engine with some set of custom plugins. New version has been created from scratch using Ruby on Rails and now we have pretty flexible basement for further service development. So, if you have any ideas how to make the service better — your suggestions are really welcome.

And now I want to disclose some of our stats. As of today, you can find on our site 754 high-quality (custom filtered) videos in 100 categories which are more than 385 hours of video content! This collection grows every day. So, stay tuned — we will announce final release of the services soon.

Part 1. Ruby on Rails vs Java

Part 2. Ruby on Rails vs PHP

Part 3. Ruby on Rails vs PHP — Organization

Part 4. Ruby on Rails vs PHP — Changing Database

From Rails Envy.

This site is interesting for me because I really like to see smarty people and listen their thoughts. Project is just started therefor video collection is not so large as I want, but it grows every day. I found interesting screencasts about AJAX, Web 2.0 and others here.

So, If you like to attend technical conferences and watch conference sessions on video, if you like idea of screencasts, etc, then this site is for you! Welcome to Best Tech Videos you’ll be impressed by amount of hi-quality and useful videos on the Net.

Our Subservient Programmer was created using Visual Studio Express — C#, Visual Basic and Visual Web Developer flavors. When the application is idling, you can see the programmer working at his computer. After entering a command phrase, such as “test”, the programmer will be shown doing your bidding. Once the programmer has completed the task, he will resume working at the computer as he was before and allow you to enter another command.

I like following commands:

Hint: you can install ClickOnce Application to get command suggestions.

And now several screenshots will be shown.