About theBestArts.com

theBestArts.com website has two primary goals:

• Introduce our viewers to our favorite professional performers - usually through great music, dance and musical theatre DVDs that we recommend for purchase or rent
• Promote young artists - the next generation - to our viewers

We do not advertise on our website or our YouTube channels.

About Us

The website is designed and maintained by Kevin Ireland. Kevin and his partner of 22 years, Steve, live in Atlanta, GA. You can learn more about us, our dog Laszlo, and our cats Panama and Leia on our personal website. We present a number of personal videos on this site.

About the website

The website is designed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5. The menus and page design are all specified in a single master page that acts as a template for the rest of the site. The page design is 100% CSS; no tables are used.

Generating the video pages

95% of the videos displayed on the site are hosted on YouTube. Each page on the site can display up to 50 videos from a YouTube playlist. All of the video content is controlled by the playlists. If videos are added, deleted or reordered in a playlist, the website reflects those changes immediately.

A custom control accesses the YouTube API to capture detailed information about each video in a playlist. A user control is placed on every "video" page to display a video window, image thumbnails for each video, and video statistics. The user control includes several javascript functions to launch the appropriate video when an image thumbnail is clicked.

The code required on each page to display the video window and the image thumbnails is a simple one-line call to the user control, specifying the appropriate YouTube PlaylistID. As a result, a new page can be added with only a few minutes work. If a change is ever needed to the video layout, it is made in the user control and immediately applied to every video page in the site.

The only disadvantage to this design is that there is no easy way to pass a video description that includes single quotes, double quotes and carriage returns to a javascript function. As a result, these characters are all removed from each description. Eventually, I hope to take the time to fix this but it's not a high priority.

Non YouTube videos

For videos that aren't available in YouTube, we generate pages using the Truveo AJAX API. Truveo is a service that indexes all of the major video hosts on the Internet. Truveo allows access to videos, titles and descriptions but not to service-specific features like view statistics or ratings.

Contact Us

We'd love to hear from you. Please let us know what you like - or don't like - about the website or our YouTube channels. We also welcome suggestions for new pages - or additions to existing pages.

The best way to reach us is by sending a message on our BestArts YouTube channel.