Podcasting and wordpress

I'm re-treading my steps from four years ago.

I started looking online for how to set up a podcast feed and kept coming up dry, until I cracked open this blog. My blog. The work my past self did might actually pay off for the future!

I'm trying to set up a podcast for my job, and they use wordpress to manage their stuff, so here's a handy link to podcasting info on wordpress:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting

It looks like, if I want to use Feedburner for that stuff, I'll have to set up a test podcast and see if it works.

Also in the muck and mire: I've got to figure out how to set up a "group iTunes" whatever that is. (Basically we want an iTunes account that many people can log into. The only way I can think of to do that is to create an iTunes account as a person whose name is the name of my workplace.)

_brain dumped_

1/4 of a Master's Degree

Today marks the effective end of 1/4 of my Master's Program.
I say "effective" because tomorrow is technically when everything's due- projects, papers, modules, blood samples.
But I've got everything done and submitted to my satisfaction.

Here are some thoughts about his semester I've learned.

The first thing that pops into my head isn't deep or insightful at all. It's a matter of managing your time and resources and getting your time-rhythm all synced up. I found out that half-semester classes are just not doable for me.

I'm in the college of education and they like to have mini-semester classes where they are accelerated over 8 weeks instead of 16.

I was taking 2 regular graduate level classes that lasted the entire 16 weeks, and then hit the midpoint, Spring Break (where I did tons of exciting things), and had to deal with a sped-up class. So after I'd gotten into the groove of bouncing happily back and forth between 2 classes (and full-time work), I get hit with another class.

This made it especially hard on me because one of my regular classes was a philosophy of education course that was fairly reading-intensive and we had to write "serious" academic papers several times.

The academic writing was already a shift of gears for me because it'd been so long since I'd had a writing course. I graduated a handful of years ago with my bachelor's and had some paper writing to do then, and after that I took some community college classes which were mostly science based like chemistry and physics and anatomy. Put that in addition to the 8 week short class at the end of the semester, and it was stressful to say the least.

Going along with why it was stressful, I think I've determined that I have an attention span problem. Maybe it's because I'm not used to being put in the school situation or maybe it's because my working environment at home (messy room) isn't the greatest. But I need to give myself less distractions when I work or hopefully find a good computer lab on campus to spend some time in.

Grad school is also about networking, I think. And as much as I hate that word and the jargon-y slimey business connotation that goes along with it, it is good to meet people and talk to the people in your classes about things. They'll have insights about the projects you're working on, your teachers, and hopefully a graduate assistantship or TA position.

Also, a friend introduced me to hefeweisen beer this semester. I'm a casual drinker and I can't have more than one or two in one sitting. But unfiltered wheat beer is delicious. A Blue Moon with an orange slice is great. Highly reccommended. For those of you who don't like the bitter hoppy-type beers, you might try one of these. Leinenkugel makes a good sunshine wheat beer that is really smooth and has a slight citrusy taste.

Also, even though I'm broke, I realized that it is sometimes helpful to take time off of work to spend time working on projects due for school. You can concentrate better and not feel the complete pressure of the ever-ticking clock saying that you must-must-must finish before 9pm so that you can wake up and go to work on time.

I think it was a good finish to the semester. I'm taking 9 credits over the summer, so hopefully it will go as smoothly as this past semester.

Now I need to not get bored for the 2 weeks in between classes. I will probably spend some time bike riding and playing a game or two.

Podcast Episode- The Good and Bad

In this episode : Is technology inherently good or inherently bad?
Listen in to get a quick philosophy fix.

Podcast Episode: The Music

This episode is about the music in my podcasts. It's inspirational.

Podcast Episode 3 - French Press

This episode is about coffee. Something every grad student knows about.

Video Podcasting Update

Well, I figured out what I was doing wrong on Blogger.
You know where I found the answer at?

Blogger.

I love the new trend of websites to have faqs and blogs.
(A blog about blogging within the blog's website here on Blogger. It's very... miniature russian doll-esque, isn't it? Or very Charlie Kaufman.)

In any case, the solution to my whole puzzle was that I was over-thinking the problem. I was trying to alter code myself and get this thing to work, where Blogger had the solution built in for about a year and a half or so.

Go to this page.

This guy who wrote the post (Also named Pete, but not me.) says:
"To turn on enclosure links, just go to Settings > Formatting and set the “Show Link fields” option to “Yes.” This will add the enclosure link fields to your post editor. From there, just paste in the URLs of your recorded media, and your blog will instantly become a podcast."

I think it's pretty straight forward.

I tried out his fix (Hesitantly, because a million different things were going through my head. I'd already thought there would be some restriction from my college's website that they had allotted for me or that I'd messed up the code on the RSS or that the converter I used to switch the WMV to MP4 was glitchy and hated blogger and on and on...)
And a few minutes after I tried the fix, my posts showed up on iTunes!

Wow! Happy days.
I didn't have to shell any money out to contact psychics or to bribe my classmates or anything. (Which is good, because as I've said before, I'm monetarily challenged.)

Oh, and if you want to use that media conversion tool to convert WMV to MP4, it's located at www.media-convert.com
It looks kind of sketchy, but it works fine.

Anyway, happy podcasting to all of you.

Now i'm off to philosophy class and a discussion of Old Dead Dudes.

Audio Editing

Brief thoughts about audio editing for the novice podcaster.

Introductory Episode

Introductory episode of my podcast, about me, education, and technology.

Podcasting again

Now, let's say you've got your podcasts recorded. They're sitting on your computer and you want to get them out there.

Well I'm not the big advertising guru (yet) but I do know how to get things on iTunes. Some things.

A couple of things-
First, you'll want to create a blog on your favorite blog site. I'm going to say, just start a blog here on Blogger.com because it's easy and it's been around forever.

Once you've posted a bit, go to Feedburner.com and set everything up there. I'm not going to walk step by step through it, because feedburner does a pretty good job of that.

One of the trickier (and possibly pricey parts) of podcasting is finding where the heck to put your files.

You need to have your mp3s or movie files on the web somewhere in order for iTunes to grab them and give them to people.

I've used the site that my school gave me, which is meager, but it's cheap, and as I've said before, I'm poor, so it works for me.

On feedburner you'll have an RSS feed. Go to iTunes and click on the "store" portion. Click on "podcasts" and scroll down. You'll see the "upload a podcast" button on the bottom left of the page.

It'll ask you for your url for the podcast. Use the RSS feed url from feedburner. It's not just the regular blogger website.

Now, if you have an iTunes account and you've purchased music from them before, everthing will go smoothly.

However, if you're like me, and DON'T have an iTunes account, you might be a little surprised as I was. I had to give iTunes my billing information in order to just upload my podcast to them.

Well, I had a bit of an incentive to do so because it was part of my class to have my podcast going, but still, it came as a bit of a surprise.

So if you're wondering, "Do I need to give my credit card info to iTunes to start my own podcast and have it listed on iTunes?" The answer, for now, is unequivocally, "Yes you sure do."

Problems I'm still having with podcasting:
I'm able to get the iTunes store to recognize my podcast and it picks up my audio episodes, which I post on my blog as links. I learned that in the html code you have to include this little bit when you're posting the link to where your actual mp3 is located at:

Sample code: a href="http://myschoolthing.edu/PDZ/examplepodcastthing.mp3" rel="enclosure"

The part at the end in italics is the part I had to add in order for iTunes to see that I had something for it to grab onto.

HOWEVER-
I'm still having troubles making iTunes recognize that I have a movie episode ready to post. They're simply not showing up on my subscription feed. So either I'm still doing somethign wrong, or the tech gods and goddesses have set me up for a Greek Tragedy.


So if anyone has any ideas about why iTunes can't seem to grab my movie, then please morse code or psychically contact me somehow.

Keepin' the record.

My second hurdle after coming up with a topic was: "How in the blue blazes do I record this thing?"

Well, I figured out what not to do.
My thinking was this: I'm broke, as mentioned before. So I don't have a ton of cash to throw away on an expensive audio recorder.

I do have my awesome sansa clip mp3 player that I use every freakin' day. I use it in the car, I plug it into my speakers at work and use it for the radio, so I can listen to NPR. When I'm sick of NPR I switch to listening to the random assortment of Mp3s I have stored on there.

What it also has is a nifty microphone. So, I figured I would test it out and I interviewed a friend about what she thinks about technology and education. She's a sixth and seventh grade teacher. She hates being interviewed.
So that didn't make for the most lively of topics, but also- while that Sansa Mp3 player is good for small Norm McDonald-style notes to yourself, it's not good audio for recording a podcast.

So for the time being, I'm stuck with my cheap $10 computer microphone until I can get something more portable.

But still- we've got to figure out how to record this thing.
You can check out my podcast to see the episode I made about audio editing software that's available.

Watch it quick because technology changes faster than I change my mind about where I want to eat. Moe's? Chipotle? Subway?

Something to say.

My first hurdle with podcasting:

I've got a few podcasts almost done. I just need to put the finishing touches on them.
For someone who'd never done podcasting before, it was the small elements that added to the frustration of it all.

The first one was:
Something to say.
There's some very specific podcasts and blogs out there. Like entire podcasts about Food or Transformers or Comic Books.
I'd even say if you're someone like Jeff Jarvis, even though you write about anything and everything, it's still pretty specific because you've already made a name for yourself, so it's specific in that it's about the codified and name-brand version of 'You'.

That left me puzzling. What do I have to say?
Friends have called me opinionated. Ranty, even. But I think part of that comes with the fact that I'm interested in far too many things. My rants are merely what comes out of me when I encounter a situation that I have no frame of reference to. If I were mechanically inclined (I'm not), that would be my form of dismantalling something to see how it works.

In any case, what to write about? Well, I figured I'd write about my situation. Because it's the thing I can talk with the most authority about.

Being a Grad student in Educational Technology. Oh, and being broke.

First hurdle accomplished. Even though there's tons of things out there I think I'd like, I have to decide on something.

So, if you're trying to decide on a podcast, hopefully you can do better than I did. Maybe you live in Mayberry and you're the town's expert on geology, then you can fill reams and reams of paper with your insights on that.
I'm not so lucky.

I'm a grad student in a college town, which means I'm a fish swimming in a sea of fishes. That's me.