As many of our users may have noticed last week we were publishing much more videos on the site. With this postings increase we’ve introduced a set of new video series on the site you may want to watch:

• Ruby Plus (Ruby, Ruby on Rails)
• sd.rb podcast (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Web Services)
• Adobe Photoshop Quicktips (Design, Photoshop)
• dnrTV (.NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Studio)
• InfoQ (Videos about everything related to software development)
• Learn Excel with MrExcel (Microsoft Excel)
• DimeCasts.NET (.NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Studio)
• WDTV (Design, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop)
• GitCasts (git source control system)
• Becoming a Jedi (Jetbrains ReSharper)

Check out these series - they are really interesting!

P.S. If you feel overwhelmed by such a big number of new items in our main RSS feed, you can signup/login anytime and create your own RSS feed to make sure you’ll see only most interesting (for you) content in your RSS reader.

Hello, all! Happy New Year!

It’s been a while since we’ve rolled out some interesting features on BTV and I think it’s time to do it. So, today we’ve rolled out new minor release of BTV site with quite a few changes, which were annoying us and our users. Here is some short summary:

• Custom user feeds are fixed now (yes - shame on us - they were broken). They’re updated live now so sign up, create your own feed and watch new videos only on topics you like!
• Video posting made a bit simpler now - permalinks are not required anymore, few bugs in posting were fixed, tags are made unique automagically and some other interesting stuff was added.
• We’ve added ‘rippers’ feature - it you’re site owner and would like your videos to be posted on BTV but don’t like an idea of going and posting your videos manually, ping us (in comments or by email) and we’ll give you an ability to post your videos on our site in one click - ripper code will take all required info and links from your site automatically!
• Many small problems with feed manager, custom feeds and video posting were fixed.

So, stay tuned and let’s make BTV better - we’re waiting for your comments!

From now on main BTV feed will be mixed with BTV blog feed so all subscribers would be able to read all news just along with new videos announcements.

Many thanks to Yahoo for their great Yahoo Pipes service!

Do you like to eat tasty food? Do you like to cook? Or, maybe, your wife, girlfriend or mother likes to cook? Then you definitely need to take a look at new site started by the team of creators of the “Best Tech Videos”. Welcome to the “Best Cooking Videos” site! Here you can find tons of high-quality videos about cooking, free lessons from professional chefs, interviews and much more. Really soon we’ll release more features like favorite videos bookmarking, videos filtering and even posting your own videos!

Join us today - subscribe to our RSS feed or simply visit us from time to time to get more interesting information on cooking!

After the new site engine release many people asked us, how they can use new site now if they used to simply browse old site from start page looking for new videos and not using our RSS feeds. They missed old blog-like view with new videos added to the top of the main page.

Today we released new version of the site where you can use “Recent Videos” link on the top of the pages and browse all videos page by page.

If you want us to add something else to the site or change something, just ask and we’ll try to do what we can.

It’s been a long time since last news about BTV development, but it really worth it! Now I want to spoil some of coming changes with this site…First of all, we’ve started development of completely new BTV engine with completely different ideology than this site has now. Thanks to great tools (Ruby on Rails) and my friend Dmytro Shteflyuk we’ve already implemented most of new functionality planned for initial release and going to roll out new release really soon (looks like it’ll take 2-3 weeks because of high load of project developers). So, what you’ll get in new release?

First of all, we’re going to ’socialize’ this site - all of our reader would be able to register here and get highly customizable interface along with really cool feature - customizable RSS feeds. You’ll be able to select just what you like to read here on site and in your RSS readers and engine would show you all newly posted videos in categories/tags/etc you’ve asked it to show. Along with customization, you’ll be able to save videos you loved on this site to your favorite videos list and watch them again when you want.

Next ’social’ feature would be user groups - it will be neat idea of grouping users with similar interests and sharing great videos between them. Every user group will get its own start page and RSS feed, so you’be able to add this feed to your personal page and watch videos your fellow users like to watch.

Of course, we’re going to add voting for videos to let you, our users, to vote for videos you like and share your impressions with other site users. Later we’ll be able to suggest you new cool videos to watch based on your favorites and positive votes.

And last but not least for the first release would be maybe of the most valuable features of new BTV - user-generated content. Service users and video author would be able to post here videos they saw somewhere and share their experience with their friends and other people who like to watch Best Tech Videos. To keep high level of quality of our service, we’ve invented set of rules and user levels that will guarantee only the best videos will be posted here.

If you’re an author of one screencast or even big screencasts site owner, you’ll be able to register here and we’ll give you set of really cool tools for videos sharing to post your new videos here. Of course we’ll help you to import your old videos here to help you to drive more traffic to your site and to share your knowledge with constantly growing userbase of this service.

So, as you can see, we’ve prepared lots of new features for first release of new completely redone BTV. So, stay tuned and we promise - you’ll be impressed with new service! If you want to participate in closed beta testing phase of new service development (both as author or as generic user), drop me a line on beta at bestechvideos dot com or leave comment here.

New year is already here and we have new features! First great feature we’ve implemented for our users is RSS Feeds for Categories and Tags.

If you want to use these features, simply go to category or tag page and:

1. Use your browser’s feeds auto-discovery feature (RSS icon in address bar in Firefox and IE7)
2. Or simply scroll page down and you’ll find RSS feeds links in Syndication section on the Right sidebar.

Stay tuned - we’re going to roll our many new features soon.

Many people asked along last few days about my plans related to further BTV development, new features, bugs fixing, etc, etc… So, I decided to summarize all my thoughts about how to develop BTV and what we should do with it now. If you have some suggestions or ideas not mentioned below, do not hesitate to post them here in comments or send them to me by e-mail or IMs.

So, here are my thoughts (not ordered):

• New design (light, pastel colors, logo, SE-optimized layout)
• Video embedding option
  • Ask authors about embedding to prevent copyright complaints.
  • Two options: Embedding remote videos or recoding and playing from BTV.
• Many authors for site
  • Pre/Post moderation
  • Aggregation of content from RSS feeds and/or from ripping modules
  • Hosting of screencasts video
    • What resolution?
    • What format?
    • For free or only for premium users?
    • Embedded ads?
• RSS
  • Feeds for each category (already there)
  • Feeds for each tag and set of tags (like php+mysql)

Thats it. If you have any suggestions, please leave comments here or drop me a line. Thanks all my readers for attention.