« video codecs and solutions desired | Life in the 1500s history lesson »
Weekly conference calling via MP3
By admin | March 12, 2007
This is the first of what will probably be several posts related to the topic of improving effectiveness and efficiency in getting recorded teleconference calls to subscribers on a weekly basis. I decided to post information related to a project I am working on, in hopes of getting insight and useful information from others, so that together we can come up with an efficient and effective method to deliver teleconference MP3 files online.
The Beginning
I have a friend that does a weekly phone conference with a group of paid subscribers. A few years ago the company that provided their teleconference services began offering to record the conference calls in MP3 format. This was great news for my friend since now their teleconference subscribers were not locked into listening during the one hour window that calling into the live conference call required. Subscribers could now go online and access the weekly call in MP3 format, a bonus for many since they were frequently unable to participate in the live conference.
I have been helping my friend make the recorded MP3 calls available to subscribers for several years now. We recently moved their web account over to a new server and also switched to their site to Wordpress (was Mambo CMS). We are facing some decisions as how to best move forward in a way that will provide the fastest and most efficient service for all parties involved.
The Goal
My goal is to reduce the number of steps taken in getting a weekly recorded conference call to a subscriber.
Current Steps Involved
Monday morning at 10 a.m. the one-hour conference call is recorded with a live participating audience. The data center that provides the teleconference services saves the call file to an MP3 in a month-date-client.mp3 format, resulting in a file that would be saved as follows for Monday, March 12… 0312client.mp3.
The saved file gets e-mailed to my friends web site administrators e-mail inbox.
The web site administrator has been doing the following week after week…
- Checks e-mail early Monday afternoon
- Saves the 0312client.mp3 attachment locally
- Starts an FTP client so he can upload the file
- On server-side, renames the last week’s WeeklyCall.mp3 to 0305WeeklyCall.mp3
- Uploads 0312client.mp3 file to server-side FTP directory
- Renames 0312client.mp3 to WeeklyCall.mp3
On the old server, the MP3 files lived in a directory that was password-protected with .htaccess so that nonpaid subscribers would not be downloading the files. On the client-side (www) the file name was always the same — WeeklyCall.mp3 — that way static links offered from the web site or via e-mail would result in the most recent file being accessed.
End users typically access the MP3 file via the Web, Windows media player, WinAmp audio player, or some other similar interface. In all cases, they were prompted for a username and password before being able to download the file.
To keep things simple, the .htaccess username always stayed the same. For example, “subscriber” was a username that would allow all users to download the most recent file. The password however, would change on a monthly basis, for both the live teleconference, and the online download. The dial in teleconference required a six digit password, followed by the # sign. Each time the password is changed for the dial in teleconference, all subscribed users are sent an e-mail notifying them of the new password.
Changing of passwords has created some problems for both the live calls and the recorded calls. Changing passwords is necessary since some subscribers don’t continue paying monthly and it wouldn’t be fair to regular subscribers, if others could listen to the calls (either live or recorded) for free.
As stated earlier, my goal is to reduce the steps it takes to deliver an effective and efficient weekly teleconference program via MP3. A specific problem I have noticed is that when a staff member at my friend’s office decides to change the password they have to…
- contact the call center and request a new password
- e-mail all of their subscribed clients with the new password
After the Web administrator receives the same e-mail the clients are getting, he logs into the web site via an admin panel, and changes the password protection on the directory where the files are stored. Problems experienced include:
- subscribed clients not getting their e-mail (or not reading their e-mail)
- clients getting their e-mail (particularly new clients) and attempting to use the new password before the administrator has changed it
There are also some issues specific to Wordpress…
My friend is using the mod rewrite rules in Wordpress, resulting in a permalink structure.
The mod rewrite information found in the root .htaccess file no longer allows my friend to store recorded MP3 files in the way they did before.
Here was the old www format…
http://www.clientconferencecallwebsite.com/paidsubscribers/WeeklyCall.mp3
One could enter that hyperlink into Windows media player, Winamp, Internet Explorer, a Firefox browser (or others) and be prompted with the username and password information so that they could then download the file.
With the Wordpress permalink structure (I’ll include .htaccess info below) the server would be looking for the following directory…
http://www.clientconferencecallwebsite.com/wp-content/paidsubscribers/WeeklyCall.mp3
Here is the standard .htaccess file content used for creating permalinks…
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
To keep the same format on the client-side, one solution I had would be to add a line to the beginning of the .htaccess file as follows…
RedirectMatch permanent ^/paidsubscribers/WeeklyCall.mp3$ http://www.clientconferencecallwebsite.com/wp-content/paidsubscribers/WeeklyCall.mp3
That way users could continue accessing the files like they always have. I have a feeling we’ll be revamping pretty much everything though in an effort to shorten the steps involved and improve efficiency.
Some of the steps that I believe can be changed or removed include:
Teleconference call center to Web administrator
- Create a script that triggers saving the MP3 file attachment to an FTP folder when e-mail is received on the server from the call center
- Create a unique FTP account for the call center and have them directly upload the current file to the FTP server (this may not be an option as they are busy enough)
I’m already getting some ideas after writing this and I’ll begin addressing those in another post. Feel free to comment if you have suggestions and/or questions.
Topics: Efficiency |