Tag Archives: Apple Developer Connection

Leopard Wiki Server: Creating Custom Themes

The Wiki component in Leopard Server is designed to be ready to run and use for all your workgroup needs, but for those who need to customize the look and feel of their Wiki environment may find a new article on creating custom themes helpful:

From the article:

Wiki Server, a part of Mac OS X Leopard Server, provides this wiki functionality to all users with access to the server. Individual groups can tap into Wiki Server to create their own wikis and customize the look and feel of the wiki to suit both their content and audience. By creating their own personal wiki theme, Wiki users can apply their own style and identity to the wiki, in addition to supplying their own content.

Read: ADC—Leopard Wiki Server: Creating Custom Themes

Podcast Producer: Scheduling Podcasts

A new article in my series on getting the most out of Podcast Producer is now available, this time looking at a solution involving iCal and the command-line elements of Podcast Producer that can automate the process of recording.

This can be particularly useful if you have cameras set up in various classrooms or offices and have set times for different presentations. You can set the presentations to be automatically recorded, and use the information within the iCal event to set the data about the podcast itself. Using the system in article you can control your entire podcast process by creating new events within iCal.

If you work with podcasts on an ongoing basis, scheduling for the recording and publishing of your podcasts is critical. From an audience perspective, you want to have a regular stream of content to keep people interested in your podcasts. You also want to make sure that you are making the best use of your presenters by giving them the time and flexibility to create a podcast at a time that suits their schedule and yours.

Instead of explicitly recording a podcast and having the information submitted into the system, why not schedule podcasts recordings to take place automatically according to your organizational needs? For example, within a school or university you may have regular class sessions that you want to record and publish as a podcast.

The article demonstrates how to use AppleScript in combination with iCal to automate the recording of podcasts from cameras without having to manually create each recording. The solution will simplify the scheduling of recordings to create a suitable event within iCal and then uses iCal and Podcast Producer handle all of the complexities of the recording process.

Read: Podcast Producer: Scheduling Podcasts

Podcast Producer: Publishing to YouTube

My new article at the Apple Developer Connection is now available.

When creating podcasts you dont always want to publish to one of the blogs or wiki services on your Leopard Server, or to iTunes. How about posting to YouTube?

From the intro:

YouTube has created a whole new generation of users who like to view video over the Internet, whether at their computer, their laptop or when using their iPhone. With Podcast Producer, you have many workflows available to you on your Mac OS X Server, but you can also customize workflows and publish content directly to YouTube. Follow along to build a custom workflow that will take an existing video podcast through Podcast Producer and post the content directly onto YouTube.

The solution involves a custom application using the YouTube Java kit that submits a converted podcast content to your YouTube account.

Read: Podcast Producer: Publishing to YouTube

Podcast Producer: Using the Command Line

The next article in my series on using Podcast Producer is now available.

Podcast Producer: Using the Command Line looks at the different command-line tools that are available for interacting with the Podcast Producer system.

The Server Administrator, and other tools, provide a powerful graphical user interface (GUI) to Podcast Producer. Sometimes, however, you may only be able to interact with the server over a secure shell (SSH) connection remotely using the command line. This allows you, for instance, to control Podcast Producer from halfway around the world.

This article, the third in a series, is aimed at Podcast Producer administrators. We will examine four command line tools available for controlling and monitoring Podcast Producer.

Read Podcast Producer: Using the Command Line

Podcast Producer: Writing Actions

The second article in my Podcast Producer series is now available on Apple Developer Connection.

Podcast Producer: Writing Actions discusses the actions that make up the processing of podcasts sent to Podcast Producer into the final formats and associated blog posts, emails and other material that publishes the podcast out to the world.

From the introduction:

In order to write effective actions for Podcast Producer, you must understand the different properties that are executed from the command line. Individually, actions are discrete operations, but when chained together they provide a powerful processing environment so that the output from one action is compatible with the input of the next action within the process.

In this article, designed for Podcast Producer administrators developing their own workflows, you will learn about how to write and execute actions. Armed with this knowledge, you can easily develop your own actions to build different workflows. You will also learn about how to ensure that your actions are flexible and executable within the Xgrid environment and how to manage execution and resources during processing.

Read: Podcast Producer: Writing Actions