millsworks

When I finally opened the Ruffus The Dog web site to the public I knew it wasn’t really finished – nothing ever is.

There are always changes, tweaks and inevitable corrections to be made as any site grows and gets road-tested by those who arrive first at the gates. There were some issues with bandwidth and file size for the videos – they tended to choke, stutter and endlessly buffer, thus degrading the viewing experience. I’ve made a few changes in that regard so it’s a smaller file size that plays on the web while still providing a broadcast quality version for download.

Here’s the Robin Hood episode:

I suspect I may have to do some re-encoding to get the data rate just right so it all plays to my satisfaction.

There are also download links now for the episodes (in a variety of formats) so the shows can be viewed freely on other devices. I wish that functionality was built right into the player but since it’s not I need to provide it for each post on the site. Fair enough.

Eventually there will be more outlets for the full episodes – YouTube, Vimeo etc. – and I’ll likely use a service like TubeMogul to make placement of the files easier. Right now I’m content to do everything by hand so I can get a better grip on the formats, file sizes and general layout before attempting to automate the process. One step at a time.

There are also new badges which link to the Twitter and Facebook pages for Ruffus.

Overall I’m not completely satisfied with the graphic layout of the site – I want to keep playing with some ideas – but it was important to finally get it out there for everyone else to see, otherwise I’d be fiddling with it for an eternity. First thing is to make sure all the basic bells and whistles work with a minimum of fuss and bther – then I can do more work on making it pretty.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting two more episodes: Ruffus & Hyde and our own version of The Frog Prince. After that it will be one new show each week – usually on a Tuesday.

Once I get into a comfortable routine of posting episodes I can concentrate on more Behind-The-Scenes material and the writing of the Storybooks.

Cheers.

P. S. I won’t be offering many caveats for the shows themselves – there’s a lot of good shit in Ruffus The Dog – but I feel obliged to mention that the late Karen Ohland, one of our key puppet builders, absolutely despised the Little Jane puppet and kept asking if we could re-shoot the entire episode just so we could change that character.

Never happened – sorry, Karen