Everybody needs to take a YouTube break every once and a while. It’s like the sunny patch on the kitchen floor of the internet. It’s not always clean, most of the time there’s a cat there and this really isn’t the best analogy. Anyway. As much as we all love YouTube, no one really wants to spend all their time there, do they?
Starting last week, we’ve added our own internal video browser where you can easily browse all of our video content without ever leaving the SparkFun site, and, since we’re still using YouTube’s API, you can still share and embed with impunity.
Now you can gaze upon the visage of Rob from the comfort of your own SparkFun homepage!
Browse by your favorite recurring SparkFun features, watch chronologically, search by description or, like I do, watch this bearded gentleman fall down over and over. Enjoy the show!
The man, the myth, the legend: Sr. Videographer Gregg Barclay in his natural habitat.
Not gonna lie, I watched that bearded gentleman fall down dozens of times. That's some good stuff right there ;)
I was kind of hoping that the room was entirely surrounded with red Sparkfun boxes. Like a cool fort you'd climb into that we'd make as kids.
Love this new feature! Much easier than scrolling through page after page of old posts. It makes it real easy to catch up on the old "According to Pete" episodes. Nice job!
I've got a suggestion: Sometimes when watching a video this way, it would be nice to read the original article or the comments. When you select a video thumbnail, and the actual video appears at the top, it would be great if it included a link to the original post. Kind of like the "n Comments | Continue Reading" links after the summaries of old posts on the main page.
This strikes me as a really good idea, but we'd have to model some kind of association between blog posts and YouTube videos, so it might not happen any time soon.
Oh, I see... This is a front end browsing data from YouTube. I was assuming it was scouring your blog files and extracting videos, which would make the links easy. But working backwards like this seems like it would be a pain to link them up. For each video found, it would have to search through the blog looking for a match. Bummer.
Yeah, exactly. We could stick IDs in a table somewhere, but it'd be a certain amount of work, and I'm not sure how much payoff there'd be for it.
About time you guys added this, although the former clumsy arrangement of videos always caused me to stumble onto other neat content on the site.
What! You mean to tell me that that is not a real "wall of red boxes" behind you every week! Oh, the humanity! My hopes and dreams dashed against the rocks for the whole world to laugh at! But no, seriously, I actually thought you like glued a bunch of boxes together is some far off dark corner of the warehouse and that is where you made the videos. I need some chocolate milk, maybe a little Guinness mixed in. Oh, wait. I don't work at a cool place like Sparkfun where I have a keg waiting for me down the hall. Drat!
I mean, it's pretty much a wall covered in red boxes. I don't think there'd be anything stopping anyone from building a freestanding wall except that someone would probably be like "why is there a box wall here I need to do my job here".
I used to have a server shipping box fort around my desk. I came in one morning and it had been disappeared. I'm still bitter about this years later.
Robert - I know they are real boxes, I was referring to the fact that they don't go all the way down to the floor. Yes, I realize it shall never be seen on the camera, but when we see only a certain view of things we have to make certain assumptions of the rest of the world and is it oh so earth shattering when a breakthrough is made and we find out our assumptions were wrong. Brennen - I know EXACTLY how you feel. Where I work we go through a LOT of electrical tape, did I mention a LOT? Well over the course of 3 or 4 years I would take every piece of tape I peeled up and wrap it in a ball. It finally got big enough that I was able to use it as a "stress ball" of sorts and it wasn't too much longer that I had it compacted and dense enough to knock holes in thin plywood when you threw it against it. Came to work one day and someone had thrown it away. I can only imagine that by now it would be the size of a basketball and might be able to bust through a wall. Oh well. I'm not bitter about it or anything. Really, I'm not. Seriously, I'm over it. No hard feelings. Now, about that Guinness, no chocolate milk needed now.
It's amazing it's still "alive," considering how much it's been through. I'm still not sure who set it on fire.
I'm pretty sure that was the time Nate had a Fresnel lens out in the parking lot.
it IS a wall of boxes. click the top image and look closely. you can see them sticking out from the wall. they're not glued, but they're tacked in place. it's real red boxes, I assure you.
Man, when I saw the look on his face, I automatically thought is was a caption contest!
That's just the way my face looks all the time.
I can confirm this.
I thought this was going to be an announcement that you guys had wrote (or switched) to one of those things where you can host your own videos. :(
This is something where we're probably going to continue leaning on third-party services for the foreseeable future. YouTube does what it does pretty well, offers a ton of exposure, and seems like it'd be an expensive wheel for us to reinvent.
Yea, I know, but one would've thought the same(an expensive wheel) about a few other things you guys have made :)
Undeniable. Ya gotta prioritize those somewhere, though.