Every Rails programmer out there should have heard about Railscasts. It’s a great blog that every monday posts a new short screencast about some topic related to Ruby on Rails programming. It can be about features of the upcoming or just released new version of Rails, about how to integrate other services and softwares with Rails, about hot plugins and gems that can be really useful, or anything related that you can think of. It’s been running for over three years and keeps its content amazingly up to date. The credits go for Ryan Bates.
But you probably haven’t heard of ASCIIcasts, which is a text version of the original blog, including a transcript of Ryan’s voice from the original video, along with key code samples and screenshots of the main features explained. Think of it as a textual equivalent of the screencast. It can serve various purposes, including being search friendly (you can make a full text search on Ryan’s spoken words), but also for people like me with a slow connection, it can help me have a glimpse of any episode before actually downloading it, maybe even sparing me the effort and bandwidth. If any of these or other reasons are good for you, or even for the sake of it, take a look as ASCIIcasts. You’ll love it almost as much as the original.
yes, this is a great service.
It also makes clear that video is often not the appropriate media to transport information. It’s much faster to get an overview over this kind of conten if it’s in text form.
thx for the post
Hi Marc,
Video is great. I suffer for not being able to easily access all the (ever increasing) video content on the web, because of my limited bandwidth. But as you say, even when you have the possibility to rapidly access all this, sometimes having a text-based search-friendly version of the content is great to quickly find what you need. This specially true with learning videos such as programming screencasts and railscasts in particular. I have found myself going back and revisiting some of its episodes, and having a text version to search on is great.
thanks for your comments, they are very welcome!