Promote YouTourney Case Study and Insert Images

Ah, thank you very much Alex! I had misinterpreted the other articles I read on the subject and thought that actually scheduling the front page post was the last step. My apologies. This has now been added to the schedule.

Thanks!

Okay, great - thanks, George! Much appreciated.

As you said, it's definitely not time sensitive. I put May 12 just as an estimate for when I thought it might be ready - but "whenever's convenient" would have been more accurate (that is, if it's deemed good enough for the front page).

Hi George, I've attached the files again here. For your reference, I think the current sources for the image tags in the case study should be accurate.

Thanks!

Excellent - thanks for taking the time to review the article, add the images, and make those edits. I like your suggestion - what do you think of the following, to be appended to the introduction after the first paragraph?

The idea for YouTourney came from the observation that the use of video competitions is growing both as a form of entertainment and as a commercial marketing tool. Furthermore, these competitions have largely been organized in one of two ways: (1) manually - in which the contest creator manually gathers entrants, and perhaps even decides the outcome (this is a common occurrence on YouTube, for example) - or (2) through custom solutions, such as the widely known Doritos "Crash the Superbowl" contest. YouTourney improves the efficiency of both of these methods by providing an out-of-the-box video contest solution for everyday users and businesses alike. For individuals such as YouTube content creators, YouTourney provides an easy way to set up a fun competition and solicit feedback from their viewership. For businesses, YouTourney provides the tools to effectively leverage video contests as a marketing strategy, engaging their customers while promoting their brand. YouTourney has a variety of potential applications, from pure entertainment value, to talent scouting through popular-vote competitions (think online American Idol), to marketing for commercial businesses.

I've designed sites before using systems such as Drupal and WordPress, as well as fully customized PHP and J2EE solutions, and I've dabbled with Symfony a bit as well. I decided on Drupal for this project because I believe it has the best combination of user-contributed modules and flexibility for customization. I find the repository of contributed modules for Drupal to be large and varied, and the modules themselves are generally well written and, just as importantly, well maintained. Moreover, Drupal's hook and theme systems make it easy to add custom functionality and style to the site. YouTourney's implementation required many existing components as well as a large amount of customization; Drupal proved to be the best solution, as it provided many of the building blocks for the site pre-packaged, and when necessary a solid foundation and all the tools needed to forge new features.

YouTourney was conceived, designed, and developed by Chris Mavricos.

Also, I'd like to suggest a further edit, under "User Interaction > Social Media Connections". In re-reading my own article, I think the following (in bold) is poorly worded, confusing, and generally unnecessary:

More interestingly, YouTourney also allows users to link their YouTourney accounts to their YouTube accounts. By authenticating and then associating YouTube user names with YouTourney users, video nominations on YouTourney can be linked to their owners on YouTourney, as well as on YouTube.

For example, let's say Bob has an account on YouTourney, BobTourney, and an account on YouTube and BobTube. If Bob, or any other user, submits a video on YouTourney, there's no way to determine BobTube's identity on YouTourney, or even if BobTube uses YouTourney. If Bob links his two accounts, then when a video from BobTube is submitted to YouTourney, the system will find that BobTourney is the YouTourney account linked to the video. This allows Bob to receive "credit" for the video on YouTourney, as well as receive notifications when his videos are nominated by other users. This UserConnect functionality utilizes OAuth as much as possible.

I suggest we take out the highlighted section and reword the second to last sentence so that we simply have:

More interestingly, YouTourney also allows users to link their YouTourney accounts to their YouTube accounts. By authenticating and then associating YouTube user names with YouTourney users, video nominations on YouTourney can be linked to their owners on YouTourney, as well as on YouTube. This allows content creators to receive "credit" for their videos on YouTourney, as well as receive notifications when their videos are nominated by other users. This UserConnect functionality utilizes OAuth as much as possible.

I think the original paragraph I wrote was a bit of a mess, and that this works better.

Thanks!

Okay, thanks for your work on this in any event, George. Much appreciated.

If other site maintainers are reading this case study, is there something that's holding you back from giving your approval? I'd be happy to rework it if you think it's missing something that would make it front-page worthy. If the content simply isn't up to snuff, please let me know what the problems are so I can avoid them next time around. I put a lot of work into putting this together, and I'd at least like to learn from my mistakes! :)

Thanks!

Chris