The online forms for contributing and maintaining videos are not completed yet, nor are the pages that will display videos to the users. The display page is currently under development and will soon be followed by the video contribution/maintenance system. I would like to launch this new feature soonish with a bunch of content to make it immediately useful.

The attached Excel 2003 spreadsheet will be useful for performing mass imports of videos.

Here's a brief explanation of the columns:

VideoKey: Just ignore it. I'll need it to perform the import.

VideoSource: At this point, I am only planning on supporting YouTube.com videos. If you feel there is a need to support other websites (MetaCafe, whatever), bring it up in the forum. Any videos that belong to TwistyPuzzles.com will be archived offline and uploaded to YouTube using my YouTube account for streaming on TwistyPuzzles.com.

VideoType: Select one of the options in the drop down. It's possible to add new options, but we should talk about it in the forum first.

VideoID: Each YouTube video has this. It's an 11-character string found in the URL following the characters "v=". In this case of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE5BVoscphk, the VideoID is yE5BVoscphk. (Geez, it's so strange seeing that video again. I was about 60lbs heavier back then... most of it on my face, it seems! Heh!)

Title: Usually the YouTube title shown on the top left of the YouTube video page, but edit if required to improve it's readability and usefulness to our users.

Description: Usually the full YouTube description shown on the top right of the YouTube video page, but edit if required to improve it's readability and usefulness to our users.

PuzzleKeys: If the VideoType is "Specific Puzzle", populate this field with the puzzle key or puzzle keys of that specific puzzle. Each item in the puzzle database has this unique numeric key. You can find the key by browsing to the puzzle's page (example: Rainbow Cube). Look for the characters "pkey=" in the URL of the page (visible in your browser's address bar). The set of 1 to 4 numbers after the equals sign is the PuzzleKey. In the case of the Rainbow Cube, it's 35.

Duration: The video's duration in seconds. 7:02 = 7*60+2 = 422.

AccountName: The account name of the person who is hosting the video on YouTube.

Contributor: Your name.

Sandy