Cocktail Confessions

First of all, I’d like to thank all of my friends who have so far visited my page and took the time to download or listen to my first trial episode and provide either words of encouragment and some helpful feedback.  Personally, I’ve been both excited and frustrated with this experience. 

The positive part is the feeling that I am indeed learning something new, and get to enjoy messing around with the technology and flexing a little bit more of my creativity.  For those that think I have ADHD, well maybe I do, and this is just another outlet for my sometimes idle mind.  I do have a lot of great friends and stories and I only get more excited when I think of future episodes when one of you is sitting across from me on the mic, sharing a beer, and just shooting the breeze.

The frustrating parts is the amount of work leading up to this and the continual tweak and modifications.  I really didn’t realize how much goes into a podcast, let alone oen that garners others people interest and word of mouth.  If you think about it, there are many components in the production of a blog: style, hosting services, various software applications, plug-ins, editing, feeds, post production, transfer and exportings of files, ID tagging, audio conversions, etc.  It can be really difficult when you discover than ‘current’ manuals are hard to find, and many things that appear to be compatible actually aren’t. 

You have a vision of how things are supposed to look and work on paper or in your head, but in actuality it doesn’t always pan out.  I’ve run across obsolete plug-ins, technical hurdles, vague or non-exsitant instructions, false data capturing and statistics, and more passwords and logins than I can shake a stick at.  To illustrate, despite how ‘easy’ various white papers say how easy it is to podcast, here are the various components I work with just to get this far:  GoDaddy as my hosting site, WordPress as my main blogging software, Audacity as my audio capture and editing device, FeedBurner along with Google accounts to provide an enhanced RSS feed, BluBrry as an embedded flash player and download tool.  That doesn’t even incorporate the various plug-ins: wordpress statististics for data capture, Social to share posts on social networking sites, and a few others.  Each time you install one, you need to make sure that it not only looks right on teh main page, but that it is compatible and actually works as described.  Easier said than done.  There were plenty of installs, just to rip it back out and look for a comparable alternative and I’m sure there will be more of that in the future as well. 

But for now, it looks as if I have the main gist of everything working properly.  The last two major hurdles, which so far appear to be the most daunting to date is the ability to learn MP3 ID tagging, not just for Windows (that’s easy), but the scripting/coding for iTunes.  Once that is done, then it will be submitting the appropriate feed to both Microsoft Zune and iTunes to have them be approved and available for everyone to subscribe from there.  The good news is I did a prelim test last night with iTunes, and it did indeed detect my feed and registered my episode (sans artwork and proper tags, but it is there in its raw format).

So on to the other stuff:  I added the first episode to the ‘Podcast‘ page.  This is where all epsiodes will reside via a download link without all the show notes, links, pictures, etc.  Think of it as the one-stop-shop for past episodes.  I also added another page, ‘Patrons‘  in which over time will be populated with a few lines of guest biographies and headshot pictures….just so you can put a face/name to the voices you may hear.

Whew, that was a mouthful.  Now hopefully from here on out, I’ll get to the fun stuff and leave the majority of this techo crap and geek speak behind. 

Now, let’s look forward to the next episode, so stock the fridge with some cold ones.