Tread Heavily

CoverItLive is the liveblogging platform/software that I used to stream, record, and publish updates and photos during the birth of our fourth child. You can see the end result in this post: Liveblogging Baby #4. I promised a review of the software and interface, and here it is. I apologize that it took me this long to finish.

Back Story

You can read the other posts surrounding the birth, but I wanted to repeat a few things about the circumstances surrounding why I chose to use CoverItLive. I first heard about the site on Twitter a few weeks before when someone posted the link, asking if anyone has ever used their service before. I followed the link and poked around the site, not really sure how I could use it. This was before I got the idea of liveblogging at the hospital. On my way out, I bookmarked it in FireFox so I could find it again when or if I needed it.

The next week, when I finally decided (and got permission) to do the live blog, I figured CoverItLive would be a good backup if my idea for using Utterz turned out to be a bad one. I didn’t want to tie myself to the computer if I could help it, and I figured calling into the Utterz line would be a great way to do it.

When the time finally came to get going to the hospital, I made a couple of Utterz posts and we headed downtown to Crawford Long. When we got settled in, I found out that the Utterz recorded fine on the Utterz site, but they weren’t posting to my blog correctly. I panicked until I remembered that I had a backup!

That’s how I came to choose the software. My first choice failed and it was too late to find something else. I had a wife who was short on patience and long on pain, so I hoped it would only take me a few seconds to get things going.

Registration and Setup

On their website, they promise that you will be up and running in under 2 minutes. They were absolutely right. I signed up, followed their simple instructions and dropped the iframe code into a new blog post. As soon as I published it, I was able to see the live update happening. To test it out, I had two windows open; one for my blog, and the other running CoverItLive.

Liveblogging

• The interface is easy to use and the controls are laid out in a way that makes sense. The few things I had trouble with were answered with a quick hover over the help icon that sits on each of the headers in the accordion menu.
• When you are doing your blogging, you write in the space below the viewing window and comments are added in real-time to the right side of the window.
• You can approve comments on the spot, let them sit for a while, or reject the comments completely.
• You have the ability to upload all sorts of media files and keep them around until you need to send them out. When I used it, I only sent images, but it looks like you can send video and audio files as well. There is a media manager built-in that was very easy to use. Once something was uploaded, you double-clicked on it to insert it into your stream.
• There is a search section that allows you to search the web, then drag and drop images you find into your stream. This feature works, but the controls are very clunky. The click and drag does fine, but if you are like me, you use tab browsing instead of multiple windows.
• You can also insert YouTube videos by drag-and-drop, or by entering the embedding code.
• We did test out the polling feature, and I really liked how this worked. You can enter a question and a few answers and send it out to your viewers. The window stays at the bottom of the viewer until you close it. I like how it showed the different responses in different colors.
• During the session, I lost internet access for a few minutes. I thought we were going to lose everything! Luckily, since the ’show’ was running through CoverItLive, I was able to pop back in really quickly.
• BUG: Oh, there was one thing I found. I put up a ‘We’ll be back’ message for 30 minutes. When I came back and set it to 60 minutes, it somehow changed to 500 minutes and started counting down from there. It didn’t make much difference, but it might have been confusing until I caught it.
• Once I was finished with the blog, all I had to do was end it the session and publish. The software converted the live blog to a replay blog so viewers could go back through and read things as they happened.

After the Fact

• With the blog published, you can log back into your CoverItLive account and review your blog from the console. There, you can edit your posts or remove any comments that you let slip through.
• You can also save your blog locally by copying and saving the HTML. I didn’t try this, but it seems pretty straight forward.
• One of my favorite features that you can use both during and after the live blog is the statistic tool. You can see how many people are viewing the live blog, how many people have seen it from the beginning, and how many people viewed the replay. This is a great feature.

Summary and Suggestions

Bottom line: CoverItLive is a great liveblogging platform. The controls are easy to use and you can feel safe using it, even during the one of the most important times of your life. I trusted it to work while I recorded what was happening during the birth of my child, and I am certainly glad I did.

I encourage anyone who might need this sort of thing to go now and try it out. If you get stuck, they even have video tutorials that can get you through sticky situations.

Not everything was totally roses and sunshine, so here are a few suggestions I have for the development team:

• Some of the pop-up windows don’t have closing controls. When you edit your blog, you have to navigate away to close it.
• Comments could be handled differently. It is tough when you are in the middle of something to review what others are saying.
• Some of the viewers complained about the sound effects. There should be a way for viewers to mute, or for the admin to mute what they send.

That’s all I have for now. You can be certain that this isn’t the last time I am going to use CoverItLive! One of the neatest things about the experience was that the guy who runs the company found out about our night and even dropped in to watch. That’s great customer service!