Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.
martymcgui.re — Recently posted about his IWC NYC hack day project - showing subtitle and caption tracks for audio files in the browser by marking them up as a video element. Showed off his new personal site, a note-taking and planning site with an audience of one. It lives on his laptop and on a protected Tor hidden service so it can be read from his phone. Also been working on porting his podcast website to Hugo, learning how fragile his micropub server is about mapping URLs to flat files on the server.
bouhmad.com — Started a new job recently, so been working to find time to work on his new site. Wrote an outline and a list of resources about what the site will be about and what content will be on it. Hoping to publish in the next two weeks!
maryreisenwitz.com — Our venue host for the evening! Been writing a lot of stuff and working to organize it. Outlining story points for a narrative piece, consists of lots of dream pieces, which she has been logging for a few years. Been organizing those in Google Keep, cataloging and tagging them by time. Found it really interesting to look over her dream notes for this time past year. Also finding searching incredibly useful. "When did I dream about a horse? There are two dreams!"
rhearamakrishnan.com — Has a set of projects she wants to finish before updating her website. One of them is a podcast that will require lots of collaborative elements, so been planning that.
angelosresu.me — Has been on the job search and realized he needed a website. It's currently a programming demo of a CAD app that uses Paper.js and supports boolean operations over primitives.
Other things:
We talked about aligning audio/video content and content in a web page, like this course on O'Reilly. Would be useful for DHF's learning system courses. Could also be fun to have This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition show previews of the pages being discussed as they are being discussed.
We discussed capturing notes with the lowest friction tools then moving them into more useful/durable systems later.
We talked about podcasting tools. Dedicated recorders for in-the-field recording, Audacity for editing.
We talked about the recent announcement from Adafruit's founder/owner/engineer ladyada finding herself locked out of her Facebook account with no apparently recourse. This led to general discussion of silos and monopolies, systems that are secretly bad for you because they stalk you or share you or your contacts' data, systems that are directly bad for you like Candy Crush and other addictive apps.
Talked about some decentralized systems, like MaidSafe (decentralized p2p filestore, incentivized w/ a cryptocurrency), and Beaker's new decentralized Twitter-alike Rotonde (decentralized p2p websites, host it yourself or pay someone to mirror).
Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! Look for the announcement soon!
After the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, each episode of the podcast also featured a brief ~1 minute interview with one of the participants there. As a way of highlighting these interviews outside the podcast itself, I became interested in the idea of "audiograms" – videos that are primarily audio content for sharing on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I wrote up my first steps into audiograms using WNYC's audiogram generator.
While these audiograms were able to show visually interesting dynamic elements like waveforms or graphic equalizer data, I thought it would be more interesting to include subtitles from the interviews in the videos. I learned that Facebook supports captions in a common format called SRT. However, Twitter's video offerings have no support for captions.
Thankfully, I discovered the BBC's open source fork of audiogram, which supports subtitles and captioning, including the ability to "bake in" subtitles by encoding the words directly into the video frames. It also relies heavily on BBC web infrastructure, and required quite a bit of hacking up to work with what I had available.
The BBC Audiogram captioning interface.
In the end, my process looked like this:
Export the audio of the ~1 minute interview to an mp3.
Type up a text transcript of the audio. Using VLC's playback controls and turning the speed down to 0.33 made this pretty easy.
Use a "forced alignment" tool called gentle to create a big JSON data file containing all the utterances and their timestamps.
Use the jq command line tool to munge that JSON data into a format that my hacked-up version of the BBC audiogram generator can understand.
Use the BBC audiogram generator to edit the timings and word groupings for the subtitles and generate the final video.
Bonus: the BBC audiogram generator can output subtitles in SRT format - but if I've already "baked them in" this feels redundant.
You can see an early example here. I liked these posts and found them easy to post to my site as well as Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, etc. Over time I evolved them a bit to include more info about the interviewee. Here's a later example.
One thing that has stuck with me is the idea that Facebook could be displaying these subtitles, if only I was exporting them in the SRT format. Additionally, I had done some research into subtitles for HTML5 video with WebVTT and the <track> element and wondered if it could work for audio content with some "tricks".
TL;DR - Browsers will show captions for audio if you pretend it is a video
Let's skip to the end and see what we're talking about. I wanted to make a version of my podcast where the entire ~10 minutes could be listened to along with timed subtitles, without creating a 10-minute long video. And I did!
How does it work? Well, browsers aren't actually too picky about the data types of the <source> elements inside. You can absolutely give them an audio source.
Add in a poster attribute to the <video> element, and you can give the appearance of a "real" video.
And finally, add in the <source> element with your subtitle track and you are good to go.
The relevant source for my example post looks something like this:
Use the <track> element for your captions/subtitles/etc.
But is that the whole story? Sadly, no.
Creating Subtitles/Captions in WebVTT Format
In some ways, This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition is perfectly suited for automated captioning. In order to keep it short, I spend a good amount of time summarizing the newsletter into a concise script, which I read almost verbatim. I typically end up including the transcript when I post the podcast, hidden inside a <details> element.
This script can be fed into gentle, along with the audio, to find all the alignments - but then I have a bunch of JSON data that is not particularly useful to the browser or even Facebook's player.
Thankfully, as I mentioned above, the BBC audiogram generator can output a Facebook-flavored SRT file, and that is pretty close.
00:00:02,24 --> 00:00:04,77
While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit,
00:00:04,84 --> 00:00:07,07
I sat down with some of the
participants to ask:
Into this:
WEBVTT
00:00:02.240 --> 00:00:04.770
While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit,
00:00:04.840 --> 00:00:07.070
I sat down with some of the
participants to ask:
Yep. When stripped down to the minimum, the only real differences in these formats is the time format. Decimals delimit subsecond time offsets (instead of commas), and three digits of precision instead of two. Ha!
The Future
If you've been following the podcast, you may have noticed that I have not started doing this for every episode.
The primary reason is that the BBC audiogram tool becomes verrrrry sluggish when working with a 10-minute long transcript. Editing the timings for my test post took the better part of an hour before I had an SRT file I was happy with. I think I could streamline the process by editing the existing text transcript into "caption-sized" chunks, and write a bit of code that will use the pre-chunked text file and the word-timings from gentle to directly create SRT and WebVTT files.
Additionally, I'd like to make these tools more widely available to other folks. My current workflow to get gentle's output into the BBC audiogram tool is an ugly hack, but I believe I could make it as "easy" as making sure that gentle is running in the background when you run the audiogram generator.
Beyond the technical aspects, I am excited about this as a way to add extra visual interest to, and potentially increase listener comprehension for, these short audio posts. There are folks doing lots of interesting things with audio, such as the folks at Gretta, who are doing "live transcripts" with a sort of dual navigation mode where you can click on a paragraph to jump the audio around and click on the audio timeline and the transcript highlights the right spot. Here's an example of what I mean.
I don't know what I'll end up doing with this next, but I'm interested in feedback! Let me know what you think!
“In practice, inspiring and satisfying pieces of content are dead ends for user actions. Thoughtful pieces of content that take twenty minutes to read get one vote in the time it takes for pretty pictures and amusing memes to get dozens.”
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.
martymcgui.re — Went to IndieWebCamp NYC last weekend! Had a really great time (that he really needs to write up). Figured out how to show closed captions / subtitles on audio content (and needs to write that up). Recently decided that Jekyll was slowing him down too much and decided to jump to Hugo. First steps there - use a sacrificial website to learn on that is much simpler, in this case the We Have to Ask Podcast. Also showed off Rob Weychert's website as one that impressed him from IWC NYC due to the really nice typography, spacing, layout.
djfalcon23.github.io — Added a new slideshow feature. Can now show a model slideshow of past projects. In true HWC fashion, he pushed this feature live during the demo. Will be adding similar modal displays for PDF documents and videos.
lizboren.art — Been changing her art portfolio site. It's hosted on ArtStation which has a pretty affordable "pro" level with good editing tools. She's been happy with it for now. Slightly more problematic is that her .art domain was registered on her behalf by her school and now she doesn't know how to get access to manage it. We tried to use the WHOIS info to track down who to contact at the controlling registrar.
jonathanprozzi.net — Been working on a site for work at Digital Harbor Foundation. They are relaunching blueprint.digitalharbor.org educator resource portal. They've been working on a clear structured landing page for people that are not registered for it, as well as cleaning up navigation for users who are registered. It's a WordPress site and they've been moving their content into "Sensei", a WordPress add-on for education content from WooCommerce.
Other things:
We talked about doing design research and taking inspiration from sites that are similar to what you're working on.
Talked about the different approaches needed when working on content and structure versus working on making something attractive.
Went around talking about pet peeves about the web: bad graphic design, not having an obvious login button, sites that use social logins (e.g. GitHub or Twitter) when they don't work, crucial interactions in modals that aren't clickable on mobile, surveillance and adware crap.
Talked about the recent "alternative to ads" where the page runs a JavaScript bitcoin miner, and how wasteful this is in terms of energy vs. coins earned. Maybe all machines need mining ASICs? Talked about other alternatives like Brave and Flattr, compulsory licensing models and Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, paywalls, paying for things with Bitcoin in general, money as an abstract concept.
