Open Sourcing Catalyst Backstage

This year we tried an experiment called Catalyst Backstage to enhance the Catalyst experience during the conference Oct 8-10. It was a central hub that allowed a behind-the-scenes peek into the event and provided a way for not only a new level of interaction with Catalyst, but a way for those who couldn’t attend the event to follow some of what was happening as well.

It was a bigger success than we could have hoped for - with over 4000 additional people getting to take part in Catalyst in addition to the over 12,000 leaders who were in Atlanta for the event!

We built the site from the ground up using some great code/technologies that are out there. It took many weeks of work, and as we worked through all of the kinks I decided it would be a complete waste to keep what we learned to ourselves.

So, without further ado, here’s how we did it - including some code samples to help you get started. All the base code we used is open source (except for the main blogging engine), in addition to what we added on top (our own). Feel free to take it, make it better and then share it back! Help us make it better - we’ll be continuing to improve Catalyst Backstage for future events.

MAIN BLOG
Anne’s blog entries were powered off of the same content management system (CMS) we use for CatalystSpace and the other GiANT sites - Expression Engine. It is the most powerful and flexible CMS I’ve ever used. Because we are running multiple sites off the same build, we use the Commercial version with the Multi-Site Manager Add-On. Their free Core version is very powerful, though, if you don’t need some of the more advanced features. It’s actually the version running this blog.

USTREAM.TV
uStream gives you the ability (for free) to stream live video from your computer. It works with any iSight or webcam camera, although we used a higher end SD DV camera connected to a MacBook Pro via Firewire. uStream is very easy to use and allows easy, one-button recording of any live feeds. We did have some trouble with reliability (we lost several recordings for some reason). Because of this we’ll probably try using Mogulus or some other streaming provider for the next event.

VIDEOS PAST
The past videos links were a simple form built/running off of Expression Engine which allowed Anne to share the recorded uStream video links as well as Vimeo videos she uploaded from her Flip camera.

CHAT ROOM
The 24/7 chat room was powered via Meebo.com’s free “Rooms.” These worked great and have actually allowed us to have some chat history to look back to as we evaluate things post-conference.

BLOGGER BUZZ
Our blogger buzz consolidated feed utilized Google Blog Search’s RSS feeds for search results. We had to keep tweaking the actual search terms we used as we began getting some blog spam in the midst of the real posts. This is the main one we used, though: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=enandscoring=dandq=catalyst+conference+-burtonandie=utf-8andnum=10 (FYI - Burton is a group which hosts an annual tech conference called “Catalyst” each year).

Once you get the search you want to feed from, you can grab the RSS version under “Subscribe” in the sidebar on the search results screen. You’ll want the “RSS” link.

For both the Blogger Buzz and Twitter Buzz feeds, we utilized an RSS parser called MagpieRSS. It takes XML-based RSS feeds and parses them into PHP (the server-side language we run most of our sites on). MagpieRSS is open source, so you can download and use it for free.

Here’s a code sample of you can download/use that will show you how it works (right-click and choose “Save As”):

• TwitterGrab.php

TWITTER BUZZ
Our Twitter Buzz and Anne’s Twitter feeds are also powered using MagpieRSS. The RSS feeds are pulled from Twitter’s own Search tool (formerly Summarize). It allows you to grab Twitter buzz based on a hashtag, keyword(s), username and more. We pulled Anne’s using her @flowerdust handle. We pulled the Twitter buzz one using the official #catalyst08 hashtag.

Here again, using a hashtag has allowed us to pull a history of chatter surrounding the event post-conference.

SOME THINGS WE DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR

• Auto-refreshing feeds using AJAX. We would have liked to do something like Twitter’s Election 2008 channel
• Auto-archiving as we pull feeds in. Originally we had planned on grabbing feeds before we displayed them and having them update hourly text files on the server. This way we could have a hard copy for later review. We can do the same thing manually post-conference, but this would have been a nice time-saver.

WHAT WOULD YOU ADD?
Drop me a comment and let me know:

1. What functionality would you liked to have seen on Catalyst Backstage that we didn’t have?
2. Enhancements you would like to see to the functionality we did have
3. Enhancements/improvements you would like to contribute - grab the code and improve it! We’d love to see what you can do!

Posted 10.20.2008

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