Viddler

If you’re like me, you’ve always wondered why the undead have such little prominence in the web development world. Thankfully, Envy Labs has put together Rails for Zombies, the perfect way for both the living and non-living to learn Ruby on Rails (a popular web framework) together. Best of all, they’re using Viddler to do it! Thanks to our Javascript API, you can easily fast forward to the parts of the tutorials that you want to watch, skipping the stuff you already know. Once you finish watching the videos, you can even write code directly in your browser—no installation necessary!

So, even though Halloween may have already come and gone, if you’re looking for a great way to get into web development, definitely give Rails for Zombies a try.

Second only to our Flash player the Viddler API is the most-used feature of our platform. It is also one of the oldest.

Our API has gotten a lot of mileage over the last few years. We’ve used it to build many new sections of our site, new products, and even upcoming, brand-new video players. Our customers have used it to build incredible applications, websites and entire businesses. Our API is extremely important to us as well as our customers.

That is why we’ve given it a serious overhaul, and you can start using version 2 today.

Now open to the public is version 2 of our API. What is new? The entire thing. Not only is this API much quicker and has been rebuilt from the ground up to be even more stable – it is also much easier to use, fits in with modern-day workflows and has more options than version 1.

With the help of Billy D, our resident videographer, we’ve put together a quick video discussion between Kyle Slattery and myself simply chatting about the new API and some of its benefits.

There are also several new features that are exposed in version 2 that were not available in version 1. Playlists, which I will allow Kyle to describe in an upcoming blog post, Subscribing to Viddler users, Favorites, Ad options, and much more.

Version 2 also boasts two new response types for every method. In addition to XML we now return both JSON and PHP. We hope this will make it much easier to fit into your current applications without the need for any added parsing. Parsing is crap. We think.

I’m going to keep this announcement pretty generic as over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing some tutorials, tips and features of our new API to help everyone get up to speed. Until then, have a look around our new API doc (which is still being edited on a daily basis to make it even more robust) and let us know if you have any questions!

We’re barely half-way through November 2nd and already many NaNoWriMo participants are busting through word counts like tomorrow is Judgment Day. Dun dun dun!

Since 2007 Viddler has been the official place for Nano vloggers to post their videos, share their ideas, and show their progress.

Here’s the official welcome message from the NaNoWriMo HQ:

Of course, this year we have our regulars back and in force; motivating everyone to keep on writing. One such person is Viddler veteran Jason (friend him up). He has some really good motivation this year that I think will get you all writing many, many words!

There’s also some Nano veterans which are newcomers to the Nano video scene. Be sure to friend them up! Here’s a video intro from NaNoWriMo user ‘BreezyShrugged’:

If you’re writing your own NaNoWriMo novel this month, then be sure to join in the vlog group to stay motivated and share your progress.

Be sure to visit nanowrimo.org and follow @NaNoWriMo for official updates.

Remember: If you’d like to suggest a video for a feature on the Viddler blog and front page, then please send me a message, link it up in our forums, or just comment on this post.