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.
Ah! So it’s all my fault.
Actually it’s the other way around. Your Mum got me interested in doing my own little podcasts, and I used Evoca, but found their time limit a bit restrictive. So I went and found Audacity and the Wordpress plugin.
I like the new design, bit I miss elements of the old – the quirky cartoon in the corner and the other frilly bits. The new house needs decorating!
Audacity is great, but there is quite a steep learning curve. But once you get the hang of mixing and fading tracks, the sky is the limit. We expect great things
And I also miss that captchya [or whateveryoucallit] like a hole in the head!
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 9:15 am.
Hell, if I try hard enough I’m sure I can blame anything on you!!
Evoca was very restrictive – 60 mins gets you about 5/6 of mum’s podcasts and then it’s done…
I must see if I can retrieve some of the bits of the old blogger theme, but I want to be careful as I’m not too confident at modifying the php code behind the themes – there’s a lot of guesswork at times!
Mum’s usually OK when she gets a chance to study things in her own time, so I’m confident she’ll be working out Audacity soon – my only problem is that I know nothing about audio stuff – that’s George’s area!
And I’m delighted that the captcha is gone, it was a pain in the neck! Let’s just hope that Akismet keeps doing it’s good job.
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 9:24 am.
“Let’s just hope that Akismet keeps doing it’s good job”
Throw in ‘Bad Behaviour’ as well. That cut my spam from a flood to a trickle. Askimet only has to be cleaned out occasionally now.
As for blaming everything on me – most people do. I’m used to it.
What we need now is some kind of Skype recording software, so that we can all ring each other and do a conversational podcast, like the one I’ve been doing in the States. Get Granny and Grannymar together and broadcast the result!!
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:32 am.
You, Granny & Grannymar together? The world will never be the same again!
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:36 am.
Last October, I was chatting to Michele about his blogging. I mused that I might try it for the laugh. His response?
“Don’t do it. The world would never be the same again!”
That’s why I started.
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:39 am.
Huh! Talking about me behind my back. Again!!!
It feels a bit like ‘Does she take sugar’!
I am not dead YET!
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:39 am.
“Don’t do it. The world would never be the same again!�
And the world isn’t the same anymore. It’s a happier place as we read your droll words…
And hell, we all love to annoy Michele!!
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:44 am.
Aw shucks! Thanks
Michele is just there to be annoyed.
BTW, does your Mum take sugar?
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:46 am.
One level teaspoon in a cup of coffee, filled to the brim, no milk.
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 10:57 am.
But that leaves no room for the whiskey?
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 11:11 am.
Elly,
Your mother sounds great – as always! I know I asked you before about making the podcasts available for download – but I can’t remember what your answer was. If you do make them available that way, and enclosed in the RSS feed I’m sure Grannymar will reach a wider audience. As I mentioned before, I never listen to podcasts on my computer. I find it too distracting while I work, and when I’m not working I like to get out and about. I listen to podcasts like I used to listen to radio. In the car, in the kitchen, out walking etc.
You might be interested in the Podpress plugin. It uses the same kind of player as the one you’ve installed, but it also supports RSS and allows you to configure the iTunes information.
all the best,
Conn
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 2:12 pm.
Hey Conn, they should be available as downloads via her new RSS feed – showing up for me in Google Reader anyway…
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 2:54 pm.
Hi Elly, is it this feed? http://www.grannymar.com/blog/?feed=rss2
The feed does contain a link to the MP3, and that appears in Google Reader. But there is no enclosure tag – so it can’t be downloaded automatically by podcatchers such as iTunes.
The good news is, it should be easy to fix. There may be something in WP – or in the plugin setting you can tweak, but the easiest way to make a podcast-with-enclosures feed would be to put it through Feedburner. Feedburner’s SmartCast service will pick up on the first media file linked in each post and create an enclosure tagin the the output feed. (I already tried it and it works!
)
Really looking forward to hearing these on my iPod!
Regards,
Conn
Posted on July 29, 2007 at 6:43 pm.