Upcoming Changes

Mediacast 2.3.0 will be released on September 18, 2008. A brief outage is expected during the 60minute outage window, which starts at 8:30 am PDT.

New features and improvements:

• New header & search element
• New UI tabbed design
• Overhaul of media details view
• New recently popular listing on the front page now shows most popular entries in the last 24 hours
• Added "Share" feature that displays, various links and embed snippets for media
• UI Element for User tag cloud
• Enable comments for contributions (with email notification for content owners)
• Login for external users so that they can post comments
• Add user friendly names for media
• Support preview for QuickTime movies
• Major improvements to cache expiration
• Major overhaul of the application infrastructure code (JRuby upgrade, Goldspike plugin was replaced with jruby-rack, custom file download code was replace with grizzly-sendfile filter)
• Enhanced application documentation/help wiki
• Experimental xml reports for content contributors, the format might change in the future
• Many other minor enhancements and ui tweaks

Bug fixes:

• Player confused if user defines permalink w/o extension
• SWF files should now be played properly (without the flash player)
• Fixed issue with decrementing media count for users when media is deleted
• Downloads no longer fail if the download url ends with /
• Ordering of items in the tag cloud should be case insensitive
• Many other minor bugfixes

Upcoming Changes

Mediacast 2.3.0 September 11, 2008 8:30AM PT: Less than 60 minute outage expected

• Hardware upgrade
• Database upgrade

Recent Changes

Mediacast 2.2.1 April 22, 2008

• Fix for the broken download counter (including restoring the missed counts)
• Activated download throttling for misbehaving clients
• A few back-end refinements that do not affect users

Mediacast 2.2.0 March 27, 2008

• Provide a search mechanism
• List files by tag for individual users (e.g. http://mediacast.sun.com/users/pkasper/tags/Solaris)
• Update framework: JRuby 1.1 & Rails 2.0.2
• Track download attempt & successful downloads #s
• Option set for a media file to download or open the file in the browser by default
• Bug fix: IE displays two lines with >> in the menu
• Robot.txt: Define so only media detail pages gets indexed by google and other search engines
• Updated Omniture Javascript
• Many other enhancements

Mediacast 2.1.0: February 27, 2008

• Addition of an audio/video player (supports .mp3, .m4a & .flv - support of other formats may be addressed later)
• Newly added files now require at least one tag
• Addition of metadata and better title to Media Detail view
• Support of user RSS feeds
• Support of an image preview for files <10MB
• Prompt existing users without an screen name to select one (choose wisely, screen names are immutable)
• Bug Fix: Session timeout breaks upload when users input is invalid (reported by Cindy Church)

Mediacast 2.0.2: February 4, 2008

• Fix for the HTTP HEAD problem (reported by Alexis)
• Enabled Omniture for metrics gathering
• Changed the "Name" field label on the upload page to "Filename"
• CrazyEgg script: Temporary click tracking usability study. We'll post the final results in this wiki space.

Mediacast 2.0.1: January 25, 2008

• Critical bug fixes to address intermittent upload errors
• Fixed problems with downloading podcasts
• Refined wording: "Add a Media" changed to "Add Media"

Mediacast 2.0: January 17, 2008

• Rewritten on JRuby on Rails and deployed on SJSAS 9.1u1 (aka Glassfish v2)
• Phase I of a new design
• Integration with employees Sun Online Accounts: Use your official Sun email address & LDAP password to gain write access
• Support of screen name instead of user name
• Support of longer descriptions
• Support of file modification