Building a (Virtual) Events Site

1

StreamYard

I originally signed up for Streamyard because the streaming options in Crowdcast v1's built in streaming were very limited. This has since improved enormously, but Streamyard has a number of other features that make it useful to me. The ability to do multi-streams is helpful as we've started streaming to both YouTube and Crowdcast at the same time. The customizable displays and branding are useful too. I'm sure I could do all this via OBS but I've often found it difficult and the benefit of Streamyard is that it makes it incredibly easy. I've also almost never had any technical issues with guests or screen sharing despite years of use and hundreds of guests.

#Live Streaming #Video Streaming #SaaS 21 social mentions

2

Otter Voice Notes

Otter isn't entirely designed for what I use it for, which is to generate transcripts of sessions that are then posted to the site. It's really intended for transcribing work meetings live. It does not have a way (that I am aware of) to hook into Streamyard or Crowdcast, so I use it very manually. I download the audio from Streamyard of each event (it can handle video but audio-only makes the whole process faster to upload and transcribe).

#Productivity #Transcription #Audio Transcription 232 social mentions

3

Netlify

The site is deployed to Netlify. There's really nothing special to share about that since Netlify makes the deployment super easy. A quirk of Hugo on Netlify means that I do need to specify the Hugo version as an environment variable but otherwise the deployment just works. One specific requirement of my site is to override the default Hugo build method to include the -F or --buildFuture flag because my events are future dated and, by default, Hugo ignores them. This flag means it will build items with dates in the future. I do also use some additional Netlify services, which I'll discuss.

#Cloud Computing #CDN #Content Distribution 104 social mentions

4

Mailjet

MailJet is a recent addition to the site. Mailing lists can get very expensive. In fact, the mailing list was by far the single most expensive item on this list but Mailjet helped with that. I started with Mailchimp, but they made pricing changes that made it incredibly expensive (for example, charging you for folks you can't communicate with because they unsubscribed). I then went to ActiveCampaign, which I used for years. As my mailing list grew though, the price became unsustainable for me. It includes a ton of automation and CRM-type features that I never used anyway.

#Transactional Email #Email Delivery #Email Marketing 4 social mentions

5

Hugo

The site has been built with the Hugo static site generator since day one. Back in 2017, when I was originally building the site, I was a big fan of Hugo for its flexibility and speed. Hugo, which is built in Go, is known for extremely fast build times (for example, my 1200+ pages generate in about 7 seconds). This wasn't important when I built it, but it has been beneficial as the site grew large. And, while a lot has changed in the web development framework world since 2017, Hugo still does what I need it to.

#Static Site Generators #Blogging #Blogging Platform 353 social mentions