It’s been another week without posts, mainly because I was working on moving Mum’s blog over to a self-hosted platform and transferring her from Blogger to WordPress. The main reason was her love of podcasting - while there are a lot of services out there that offer free podcast hosting, such as Evoca, they have limited numbers of minutes available. Mum has filled up several free accounts, so we needed to move her to a permanent home.
After doing a bit of research, and seeing the WordPress plugin that Grandad has been using, I decided that a move to WordPress was going to be in order if this was all to work. Luckily, the latest version of WordPress (2.2) has be written to cope with the import from ‘New’ Blogger accounts, so the transfer was pretty painless in the end.
I’ve selected a nice summery clean theme for Mum, which her visitors seem to like, but she’s not so sure herself. Still, since there are so many themes available out there, it will be easy to switch her over to another one if she changes her mind. The new Widgets area in the latest install makes it easy to rearrange the Sidebar info, be that over the one or two sidebars that you have in your chosen theme.
Mum’s using Audacity to record her Podcasts, and I’ve provided her with a bunch of tutorials so that hopefully she will take the next step and be able to edit her recordings if it’s needed. At the moment her podcasts (while interesting) are straight read-throughs of blog posts. I like this, as it adds feeling and additional elements to the post and you feel like it’s a memory being told just for you.
The podcasts are then being exported as mp3 files and loaded to my hosting account. There’s a great little plugin for WordPress that I found called simply ‘Audio Player’ that allows the mp3 to be called with a simple tag. I wanted to keep things simple for Mum and have as few steps in the process as possible, especially since I only had a few hours to teach her the new method. She seems to be quite comfortable with it and we’ve had a few podcasts already this week.
Not one to be outdone by his mother-in-law, George spent yesterday evening playing with his theme and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. He’s made a few changes, mainly to his sidebars, but has had some issues that he’s been unable to resolve, which mean that sometimes the sidebars appear and sometimes not. Hopefully as he posts some more, NOT using the Rich Text Editor, these will resolve themselves.
