Today I took it upon myself to create a simple hosted version of this script that would allow any the user of any jailbroken iPhone to easily transfer their Qik videos to 12seconds without having to setup the script. I’ve named my hosted version of this script Syndiqik and the following is a short tutorial on how to transfer your latest Qik video to 12seconds.

Step 1: Open Qik and record a new video, making sure your video does not exceed 20 seconds. (Keep in mind that although Syndiqik will send videos running up to 20 seconds over to 12seconds.tv, only the first 12 seconds will be displayed.)

Step 2: Visit your 12seconds.tv home page and make note of your 12seconds.tv mobile email address. This address should be on the right hand side of the page if you are logged in. (You will only need to enter this email address once so have the page open or jot it down. You’ll also need to know your Qik username.)

Step 3: On your iPhone, visit http://syndiqik.com. You should see a page that has two inputs. One for your Qik username, and another for your 12Seconds.tv mobile email address. Fill out these two fields and tap the “Get My Bookmark” button at the bottom. You will be redirected to your personal Syndiqik URL which you’ll be able to use to send your latest video from Qik to 12seconds.tv.

Step 4: While on your personal Syndiqik URL (you should see a notice with a green background at the bottom), click the bookmark button on your iPhone’s browser (the + symbol at the bottom), and either bookmark, or add a link to your home screen for quick access.

Step 5: The video status on screen should state the time in seconds of your latest Qik video and if it is under 20 seconds, will inform you that the video is ready to transfer. All that’s left to do now is name your video and tap the “Send Video” button at the bottom. If all goes well you should receive a notice that your video was sent successfully.

That’s all there is too it! Just visit your Syndiqik bookmark each time you’re ready to transfer a Qik video and you’ll just have to name the video and hit send. Hopefully this will help you post many more videos to 12seconds.tv much more frequently. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me on Twitter or email me at thompson [dot] kevind [at] gmail.com.

I’ve taken a few days now to revise the script, and although it’s still a work in progess, I wanted to post a quick how to guide on installing and using the Qik to 12seconds script (which I’m currently calling Syndiqik).

Note: I’m assuming your web server supports PHP and MySQL, and if you plan on using this script with your iPhone, you’ve already jailbroken your iPhone and have Qik installed.

UPDATE: Shortly after I released this script, I setup a hosted version which should be much easier to use and requires very little setup. You can see the hosted version here.

Step 1: Download the latest version of Syndiqik.zip

Step 2: Unzip Syndiqik.zip and open index.php

Step 3: Enter All Configuration Variables:

• Qik Username
• 12seconds.tv Mobile Email (Found on your 12seconds.tv home page in the bottom right)
• Your Email Address
• Local Server Address
• Database Username
• Database Password
• Database Name
• Table in database to store sent videos (to avoid sending duplicates).

Step 4: Upload all three files to a new folder on your web server.

At this point your ready to try out the script. Open up Qik and record a test video. Right now the script is setup to only transfer videos that are 20 seconds or less (keeping in mind 12seconds will only show the first *gasp* 12 seconds of your video). After you’ve recorded a test video, navigate to the folder on your web server where you uploaded the three files earlier and you should see the following screen (bottom right).

Now all that’s left to do is name your video and click “Send Video” and within about 1-2 minutes it should show up on your 12seconds.tv account.

I’ll probably be updating the script over the next few days and I’m working on building in integration with a few other services. Your best bet for catching updates to the script are to follow me on twitter. If you run into any trouble with the script, feel free to comment here, contact me on twitter or email me at thompson [dot] kevind [at] gmail.com.

Update: I completely forgot to give credit to S.C. Chen’s Simple HTML DOM Parser for PHP. This is basically a selector engine like you would find in JavaScript frameworks like jQuery or prototype, but for PHP. This library allows me to quickly and easily grab the link to the flv files off of the Qik profile pages.

The first issue I’m running into is that although I’ve grown fairly compfortable typing using the iPhone’s vertical on screen keyboard, I’d much prefer the horizontal counterpart (which I’ve only seen in the browser so far). The second problem plaguing me is related to typing in a mobile device in general. I’m catching myself ommitting punctuation, and when I want to correct the ommission or I do remember to add the punctuation, it takes several key presses and at least one alternate screen to enter the punctuation. These aren’t major flaws, and I think they are certainly acceptable given the trade off is the ability to write a full featured article on a mobile device.

While I enjoy the conveniance of being able to write entire posts from my phone, I imagine the most practical use is for either correcting errors on or updating an existing post, or liveblogging.

Initially, I was planning to work with an MVC framework, more specifically CakePHP, which I had seen used to build a custom blog platform by Jonathan Snook. I began building a simple structure in CakePHP, all the while researching alternative frameworks. I eventually came to a point where I felt that CakePHP was trying to introduce a bit too much of its “automagic” functionality and I didn’t have control over certain aspects of my web application (Looking back now I imagine that this was probably due to my lack of experience with CakePHP. If I had taken the time to dig around I’m sure I could have circumvented or integrated CakePHP into whatever it was I was trying to accomplish).

Before dropping MVC frameworks entirely, I researched a few others, namely CodeIgniter, Zend, and Symfony. While I liked the simplicity and flexibility of CodeIgniter, I ultimately decided that using an MVC framework for this project was going to take significantly longer than I intended to get a site up and running and I figured it was time to start looking into pre-packaged solutions. I went through several of the major players including Wordpress, Textpattern, and MovableType, and while researching these, I caught wind of ExpressionEngine via Marc Amos’s mention on Twitter. I decided to give ExpressionEngine a try since there seemed to be quite a bit of praise from the freelance developer/designer community and in my mind it was the underdog (ExpressionEngine is also developed by the same company that’s behind CodeIgniter, EllisLab).

My first installation of ExpressionEngine went very smoothly, and I didn’t hit a single snag until I needed to decide how to structure my data groups, or “weblogs” in ExpressionEngine lingo. There ended up being a bit of a learning curve with ExpressionEngine, and I needed to adapt to a new tag system, but once I started to pick it up it turned out to be an amazing web application. The one problem I had with ExpressionEngine was that all templates had to be entered via the web interface. Of course they could be edited elsewhere then copied and pasted, but it really broke my natural workflow. I like being able to work directly with the code in an editor such as TextMate, then hit a few hotkeys and have the changes live on the site. There really didn’t seem to be any other major drawbacks with ExpressionEngine, but I just didn’t feel comfortable managing my own site with it (If I were setting up a site for someone else, I think ExpressionEngine would make a great content management system).

At this point, several months had passed and I had nothing but a blank white page for a website. I needed something that was quick and simple to setup, used familiar technology, and wouldn’t get in my way if I wanted to tweak or customize it. That’s when I finally settled on Wordpress. I had toyed around with Wordpress in the past and setup blogs for friends and family, so I knew I could have it up and running in minutes. I searched for a theme to act as a placeholder, found “itheme”, and decided that would be my starting point.

I’m still not 100% sure that Wordpress is the best or most efficient solution for what I want to accomplish, and I’m sure before too long I’ll write a “Wordpress vs. ExpressionEngine vs. Whatever” post, but for the time being, Wordpress is allowing me to build, blog, and slowly expand on my portfolio site without complication.