Category: General

dscn1709

Originally uploaded by RichPav.

It’s not the one from the podcast. This was taken two years ago.

teeth

Originally uploaded by noahstone.

Go look at the most interesting Flickr photos for today. Check back again tomorrow and they’ll be completely different but just as mesmerizing. It’s like going to a bookstore and browsing through the best picture calendars.

For the life of me, I can’t do this. I wonder what that means.

My bunions are tingling. Every time that happens, a podcast spews forth from deep inside me. Kinda like that movie Alien.

For some reason Apple will accept podcast submissions only from people who have a valid iTunes store account. What that means is if you don’t own a credit card issued in a country in which the iTunes Store is available, you can’t submit.

Could someone please submit Herro Flom Japan’s RSS? A friend of mine in the US did it for me the day after iTunes 4.9 came out but I’m still not showing up. Maybe it got lost.

This one too. This guy from Australia is in the same boat.
http://ozpodcaster.libsyn.com/rss

(Thank you Kevin!)

Are there people out there who wouldn’t mind giving international podcasters a hand? All you have to do is paste their URLs into the form in the iTunes podcast directory. I’d like to set up a mailing list where people willing to help would subscribe, and podcasters from iTunes-less countries could send a request to the ML with their URL. You paste the URL, reply to the request e-mail, CC to the requester, done. Problem solved, podcasters happy, listeners have access to more content, world peace breaks out, I get a Nobel Prize, Angelina Jolie dumps Brad, and all those who helped get to hear the podcast of Angie and I consummating our wedding vows.

I don’t remember where I first heard this, but I remind myself all the time.

20% of people will love whatever you do. Another 20% will hate whatever you do. The remaining 60% can go either way.

There’s no actor, musician, artist, poet, author, politician or any other well-known person who is universially loved by everyone. The only way to avoid criticism is to never attempt to do anything meaningful with your life.

I’m sure there are lots of people who want to start their own podcast but a little voice in their head says, “But what if people think I suck and they hate me?” There is no “if.” Once your audience outgrows your circle of friends and family, someone out there is going to tell you just how bloody awful they think you are. And the bigger you get, the louder they get. That’s the way it goes. You just have to get used to it.

Adam Duritz, the lead singer of the Counting Crows, once had a kid walk up to him on the street and tell him, “Man, you suck.” Adam was so affected by it that he couldn’t write or perform for over a year.

In my life, I’ve been that kid and I’ve been Adam. This here podcast is my way of learning to be someone else. It’s good practice. I recommend it highly.

A few people have asked me how to get video clips to show up in iTunes just like podcasts do. There’s no real trick to it.

Actually, there is one trick for subscribers. To see the video in iTunes, you need to select “Show Artwork” from the Edit menu. The video plays in a wee little area in the bottom left corner. Click on it to play it in a larger separate window.

For pod/videocasters, create your video in some format that QuickTime can play back. I highly recommend you use 3ivx to encode your videos. This is what Rocketboom is using and their videos are incredibly sharp and smooth yet the file sizes are reasonable. (And Amanda Congdon has such big, beautiful…ah…eyes.) At $20 for the encoding software, it’s a steal. And make sure your sound quality is good. Crappy sound makes the video seem crappy too.

Then, all you need to do is enclose the video file in your RSS file exactly the same way you normally do it with your MP3 file. My blog here runs on WordPress. When I write a post containing a link to a media file, WordPress automatically generates the RSS file with an enclosure tag. If you have a web server that runs Apache, PHP and MySQL, WordPress is a breeze to install.

If you’re looking for a web host to run WordPress, Dreamhost is utterly amazing. I pay less than $8 a month, for a hosting plan chocked full of more stuff than I could list here. What they offer for such a low price is insane. Something new is that for every week you’re with them, they increase your disk quota by 20MB and bandwidth by 1GB. I currently get 141GB bandwidth per month (I use about 50GB) and 2820 MB of disk space. And if you sign up through the link here, a friend of mine in the US who’s out of work and going through some bad times gets the commission.